The Language of Baklava

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  Outside, the night air is still filled with snow, though now it hangs above the earth in a sparkling curtain. Our breath curls in thick white rings from our mouths and we march in circles, banging on saucepans and hollering a hillbilly version of “Auld Lang Syne.”

  Besides us, there is no one and nothing outside. Just a few windows still gleam with light on the lonely country lane. The snow starts to thicken again; it turns the night a pale burgundy color. Our thin, chill-stripped voices rise and quaver together, throats raw from the cold and shouting, lost in the blanketing layers of air. The stars snap at us, and I can look and look until it feels as if I’m falling up and out into the whirling snow, dissolving into sky. Then I glance back at the house and see Hanna framed by the kitchen window. She stands close enough to the glass that her breath makes a circle of steam. Her palms float on the window like two pink starfish.

  “What a grown-up,” Jess hisses in my ear.

  Two months from now, we will learn that Hanna is pregnant and has run away with her high school sweetheart, leaving behind a room full of rag dolls and drawings of horses and a single application to Swarthmore College, still in its original envelope. Aunt Jean will be bedridden with fury, her skin glowing and damp. She will shower Uncle Abdelhafiz with wild, inventive curses that impress both Bud and Uncle Hal and demand that he hunt them down and bring back the girl. Privately, Uncle Abdelhafiz will tell my father it is too too too late. “She left forever ago.” And privately, Bud will muse that Abdelhafiz appears to be almost relieved about it all.

  But on this night, plush with snow and a tropical darkness, we don’t know anything.

  Hanna waves, and I pretend not to see her.

  It is so late, it has snowed us into a dream. A thin wind whistles through the fluff trim on my hood. I turn around and lift my arms to steady myself.

  From out of the muffled, snow-packed blackness, a single ancient car comes grumbling toward us.

  “What is that?” Jess asks in a puff of steam. “I thought the roads were closed.”

  We are all standing and blinking. No one says anything, but everyone glances at me.

  “Maybe we should go in,” Ed murmurs.

  I gape at the encroaching black form. Did I summon this? A line of glacial sweat rises on the back of my neck. “No, wait—keep singing— don’t look at him!” I murmur, thrilled and only a little bit frightened, half believing that I invented this, the unknown man who comes from the dark.

  The car slows and then crawls beside us as we march along the side of the road. My clanging pot and straining voice are not enough to cover the thumping in my chest. The driver rolls down his window then, but he doesn’t speak and I can’t quite bring myself to look at him. All I see from the corner of my eye is a sharp form bent over a steering wheel. I think I can hear the tinny, canned sound of his car radio turned low, but this seems too sentimental a sound for a killer, so I ignore the radio and the astringent tang of alcohol wafting from his windows. We continue like this—singing and marching, the car rolling—for a few long minutes. Then the window goes up and he pulls away.

  Jess whirls back. “Did you see that?” Her eyes are lit with exhilaration.

  My breath lunges in and out of me as if I’d been running through the snowfields. We stand and watch in a pious silence as the car dissolves into the churning snow.

  Suddenly we notice that the air has gotten too cold to breathe and our eyes are sugared over with frost. Ed proposes another round of marching, but Suzy starts to drift toward the house and I follow her. One by one, we stomp up the stairs and drop our thawing mittens and boots, gloves and hats, jackets and scarves all over the bathroom floor. From far away, rising from hidden rooms, we hear the adults’ voices, laughing and languorous as an ancient river. My cousins, sisters, and I crawl onto my aunt and uncle’s vast, perfumed bed, lay our heads on the bottomless pillows, and surrender.

  Beyond the windows above the bed, the American night glows with the cold, with the shininess of time and its passage. The dawn is still hours away.

  SEVEN

  Magloubeh and the Great Diplomat

  The cousins are coming over! Also various aunties, uncles, maybe some surprise friends, and all I know is we’ve got to get the house ready. Yella, yella, yella, imshee. That means “Let’s go!” Uncle Hal always arrives early. We’ve got to vacuum, straighten up, run around. The refrigerator is already open, which means make the mezza! Mezza is appetizers, noshes, little snacks beforehand. It’s roasted peanuts in the bowls, sliced cucumbers and tomatoes sprinkled with coarse salt. Sliced salty white cheese and seeded, braided cheese broken into long, loopy pieces. Hummus is whipped in the blender, then decanted with a dash of olive oil across the top. Loaves of Arabic bread. A bowl of olives.

  They arrive like mad. Everyone’s in the living room and kitchen and everywhere, drinking, crazy laughing, and the air has turned Arabic, a few degrees warmer. And, oh no, the air smells of eggplant and cauliflower, it’s magloubeh—a dish of rice, meat, and vegetables. I am devastated when I smell it. This is, officially, my most dreaded of all meals in the world. Bud fries the slices of cauliflower so they release a strong, vaguely burnt, bitter scent. The limp slices are then laid out on paper towels to absorb the grassy, fried olive oil. Whenever that smell soaks the air, I know I’ll come downstairs to see my father forking up the spitting-hot slices of vegetables, and I’ll walk away from this scene feeling martyred and at the mercy of the terrible, sulfur-smoky cauliflower, the bitter, unrewarding eggplant. I used to hate magloubeh, but Gram instructed me to never say “hate,” so I don’t much care for it instead.

  I say to Bud, as I always do, knowing beforehand that there’s no point to saying anything, “You know, I don’t care for magloubeh. At all.”

  He nods without looking at me and starts singing a jaunty jingle, “She doesn’t care about magloubeh! Oh, she doesn’t care about magloubeh!”

  I walk back out. A stake through my heart.

  “START THE PARTY” HUMMUS

  Puree all the ingredients to a thick, creamy consistency. Adjust texture by adding small amounts of water.

  Serve in a wide, flat bowl with a streak of olive oil on top, along with a basket of warm pita bread for dipping. Black olives, sliced tomatoes, or radishes make a nice dippable garnish.

  The room gets crowded and the noise gets louder. Sometimes there’s the TV carrying on in the background because there’s a war going on. It’s America and Vietnam, and the family can’t stop watching it. The uncles and cousins want to understand what kind of country this is that they’re trying to make lives in.

  Our special guest star, Uncle Jack, appears. Uncle Jack is usually arriving from someplace else. He’s a teaching fellow at Cornell, but he works in politics, as the family says in a hushed, respectful way. He will grow up to be a member of the king’s cabinet, one of the drafters of the famously hopeful or unhopeful (depending on who’s asked) peace accords between Palestine and Israel, a global diplomat interviewed regularly on the evening news. He’s lived in Tennessee with a pet spider monkey, he has traveled all over the world, and he knows how to whittle tiny goggle-eyed animals out of tree limbs with his penknife. Once, he said, he was driving through the desert and a bullet shot through one of his windows and out the other, hissing just past his chin. He just kept driving. Gram says that he is an “instigator” and troublemaker because he’s smart and also because he’s “bent that way.” I know she likes him because when his name comes up, she’ll crack a sneaky, slanted grin and call him “the great diplomat” in a way that makes me think she doesn’t think he’s all that great. She says he thinks he has all the answers. She says, “That man wants to make peace? That man is the exact opposite of peace.” He’s sitting on the couch with his “tic,” the tic that makes it look as if he’s winking at you, until you wink back and he says, “No, that’s just my tic.” Then he goes on winking. He says something provocative about Uncle Jimmy, attributes it to Uncle Hal, and then sits back while Unc
le Jimmy and Uncle Hal jump into a fight.

  My father is standing in the living room because any second now they’re all going to start fighting and that is one of Bud’s specialties. Their voices press together and climb, and the argument starts. What is it about? I only half understand. Even though it’s just been a year or two since we’ve returned to America, it’s already too long away from Arabic. English is clear as a glass mirror, and Arabic is the silver inside the glass—hidden and essential. The languages show me different things. I hear words I know by heart—war, soldiers, the English, the Israelis, and more, words like mishakkel: problems, craziness, turmoil. The voices grow louder, they leap into flames. My father, my uncle, and my adult cousins are all shouting as loud as they can. I can see the pulse in my father’s throat.

  My father is vivid and dashing; he has an imposing black mustache and a happy, wild look on his face. I wonder if he misses the excitement of his military life, his teenage life of before America. I’ve seen photographs of him flexing his muscles, standing rigid on looming desert rocks. In America, he has handguns and fanciful silver daggers that he keeps tucked into cases, hidden in secret spots. There is a blue dagger tattooed on his biceps. There are no uniforms or jets for him anymore, and the only war is the one on TV in the living room. He’s not an instigator like Uncle Jack or a shrewd businessman like Uncle Danny; he’s too earnest, too literal, and too excitable. He cares far too much about everything; he believes in huge, impossible things like fairness, honor, and respect. It will take him years and years to learn how to laugh at himself.

  The voices have filled the house, leaping and crackling like a forest fire. They will consume the furniture, the house, the air itself, until it’s all burned away, smoldering cinders and just a scorch mark on the ground. Some of my older uncles settle back on the couches, resting, meditatively sipping their drinks. But then some of my young-men cousins sit forward, brows furrowed, elbows on knees, and the argument surges back to life.

  “The problem,” Cousin Yahia grumbles, “is the damn British. If the damn British hadn’t come in and turned the natural order of everything around in all these countries, then things would run better.” Cousin Yahia is a graduate student in postcolonial studies at Syracuse University, and he has a great deal to say much of the time.

  “Oh, really,” says Uncle Jack in his snappy, quick-witted voice. “And just what sort of ‘natural order’ would you be referring to? The natural order where everyone drives like a maniac and shoots off guns at parties? Why, just the other day, Ghassan was telling me how much he loves his gun!”

  Bud sits up. “When did I say that?” He looks alert and confused. “There’s nothing wrong with guns!” he declares.

  “You see that?” says Uncle Jack “This is what I’m talking about. This is why there will never be real democracy in the Middle East.”

  “The damn British are the ones who sold us all the guns in the first place,” says Uncle Danny.

  “I got my gun from my father!” declares Bud.

  “The damn British will give you a gun, and while you’re standing around shooting it off, they’ll be taking over your house and selling it to the neighbors. If that’s democracy, then they can keep their damn democracy,” says Cousin Yahia.

  “Okay, but actually that’s not democracy,” Cousin Hayder comments.

  “Nobody gets my house!” Bud hollers. His face tightens and glows. He looks wild and frightening, but when I sit up in alarm he smiles and says, “Go wash your hands, Ya Ba, dinner’s ready.”

  They call this dish magloubeh, which means “upside down,” because of the way you invert the pot, so the layers of rice, onions, eggplant, cauliflower, and lamb are all reversed from their positions in the pot. Some cooks make it so the ingredients slip out neat as an upside-down cake, like a terrine or timbale.

  Magloubeh is one of the dishes that people think might actually have originated somewhere within the region of Jordan. Before Jordan was created in around 1921 by the French and British and an assorted tribunal of other European men who liked to say they owned it, it was loosely and unattractively called Transjordan. It also had other names and owners before that. There were Assyrians, Nabataeans, Romans, Alexander the so-called Great, Persians, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Crusaders, Mamluks, Turks . . . you can’t imagine the comings and goings! All of them stomping over the broadbrowed Jordan Valley and announcing: This is mine. But Bud says through all those name changes and political deals and horse trading, there was always this same bunch of Bedouins living there in their goat-hair tents with their wars and their loud arguments and their big mustaches and their music and their prayers and their night stars over the white desert floor and their big pots of upside down.

  In the dining room, the fight simmers on even after dinner has appeared on its steaming tray. “In this country, the Arabs are seen only through the lens of politics,” Cousin Yahia complains. “The TV says we’re oil sheikhs or fundamentalists or terrorists or all three at once. It’s all stereotypes! We have no charm or texture! When do we get to have homes and parties and jokes and children? We need a strong, national identity! We’re held hostage by ideology, by things like Hollywood and politics and Palestine.”

  “Just like now this dinner party is being held hostage by Yahia’s speech,” Uncle Jack says.

  Cousin Yahia sits sulking in his straight-backed chair. Last year, his parents, who lived in Jerusalem, vacationed in Jordan for a month and returned to find their home had been requisitioned by a family of Israeli settlers. I hear the same words around the table all the time, rising out of the Arabic: Engleesee, Amerkee, Israeelee.

  When Uncle Jack sees the magloubeh, he laughs and says, “Here it is, our national identity!” He stands and says to Yahia, “You want the Arabs to transcend politics? Then pay a little attention to the culture.” He salutes the magloubeh and starts singing, “My country, ’tis of thee.” Gram slaps the table, stands up, huffs something about no respect, and leaves the room. But the children join in the singing because, well, we know the words. I put my hand over my heart the way the nuns taught me to do for the Pledge of Allegiance, though I don’t know why we’re singing to the magloubeh. The cousins join in, then everyone does, clanking forks and knives in time to the song. “Land-of-the-pilgrim’s-pride! From-ev-ver-rer-ry-moun-tain-side, let-free-dom-ring!”

  When we’re done, my uncles call to Gram and coax her to the doorway, saying the magloubeh won’t taste good without her. Uncle Jack gets up, bows, kisses her hand, and calls her his delightful tulip. She glares and swats at him and says, “You,” and flounces back down at the table.

  We eat, and I do my utmost to avoid the eggplant and the cauliflower, and maybe even the rice and the lamb, which tastes of eggplant and cauliflower. I push the pieces around in a stealthy fashion. The table undergoes its balkanization—women on one side, men on the other—the children forming a private island, remote from the world of grown-ups and their dreary talk. I don’t know what my sisters and cousins and I ever talk about, I only know that we can’t stop laughing. We watch the adults eat, and we laugh some more. We’re not there for the food so much as for the pure electricity of one another’s presence: We could subsist on chewing gum and whistling and running in the fields. We’re all elbows and faces, big eyes and teeth, holding our forks and knives like shovels.

  Suddenly Tammy, one of the American aunties, bursts out, “This is not right! It’s not right for you to be saying such things over dinner! You even make fun of our patriotism. What will the children learn? All they ever hear from you men is fighting and more fighting. Can’t we have some peace?” She pushes the straw-colored hair back from her face, her skin damp and raw pink as if she’s been bent over a stove all evening. For a moment, all the men are subdued, blinking with wonder.

  Gram sniffs. She’s not all that impressed with Aunt Tammy. “Flibbertigibbet,” she mutters.

  Then Uncle Jack looks at me and says, “Diana, didn’t you hear? I believe your aunti
e would like you to give her the peas.” And there goes his tic. I sputter and make desperate owl eyes at my cousin Jess, who kicks me under the table. We break out laughing, and it is as bad and funny as wetting our pants. My grandmother—who sits like an international peacekeeping security force between the world of adults and children—turns her dignified head and gives me the evil eye over the rice bowl. She leans over and puts another scoop of magloubeh on my plate.

  On this particular day, as on so many other days I can think of, the women melt back into the kitchen afterward to do the dishes and gossip. Meanwhile, the men—overfull, overtaxed, with their new, oversize American bodies—lumber into the living room and spread out, everywhere but on the furniture, and fall right asleep, taking up every inch of floor space. There is no way to tell their sleeping forms apart. Great bellies rising, they look innocent and slack as sea animals on rocks.

  Their breathing-snoring lifts and falls, gentle as a hidden spring, and again the living room is transformed. Monica, Suzy, Jess, Ed, and I wander through a great house of sleep—you can feel it on all sides, buoyant and rippling. Jess is fourteen and actively looking for interesting trouble, and Ed and I, a couple of years younger, are essentially at her command. Seven-year-old Monica is a good sport but fundamentally law-abiding. At eight, Suzy keeps her own counsel, careful and painstaking in all things. We creep through the living room, tiptoeing past the slumbering uncles, peering around as if at a gallery of archaeological artifacts.

  We stop at our favorite, Uncle Jack the instigator, flat on his stomach and face on the living room floor. We stare at him, wait for him to awaken and start winking or singing or provoking a fight, anything. After a while, Jess says that we are going to play something called A Journey Through Uncle Jack’s Body. We squat over him with small plastic toy soldiers that we allow to hover just above his inert form. We start at the heels, and at the rise of his calves we spot enemy forces as they charge down the hillside of his posterior. Oh no! We whisper, “Watch out for the damn British!” We beat them back, but it’s all-out war by the time we reach his lower back. The soldiers clash in the air just over his spine. The Zionists appear at the crest of his shoulders, but a spirit of mutual understanding and compromise settles in around his neck, and our armies spread picnic blankets on the back of his head and sit together, eating magloubeh.