The Language of Baklava

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  Cousin Jess directs everything, assigning and reassigning roles according to her whims.

  “Here, okay, now you be the Israeli, ’kay?” Jess gives her brother the dashing upright plastic soldier who holds a big machine gun. “He stays over here, by this ear. Now, Diana, you be the Palestinian, ’kay?” She gives me the soldier with the face we melted half-off last summer with a magnifying glass. “You stay by this ear on the other side and just look really scared.”

  Afterward, my grandmother comes hunting for us and asks what in God’s name we’re up to, playing so quietly by ourselves. I tell her we were playing A Journey Through Uncle Jack’s Body. Her eyes widen and her whole face seems to flatten, then she catches her lower lip in her teeth. “Oh, you were, were you? And did he give you permission? No, I imagine not!” she says in her arch voice. But beneath her stern expression I see what might be suppressed laughter. “Well, then . . .” She turns away and walks to the door. It takes her a moment, then she says, “Well, so much for the great diplomat.”

  DIPLOMATIC MAGLOUBEH

  If you really want to make the children happy, add pieces

  of chicken and substitute sliced carrot for the eggplant.

  In a heavy saucepan, heat all but a few teaspoons of the oil. Add the onions and sauté until soft and browned. Add the meat and cook, stirring, until evenly browned. Add the spices and broth and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to low, cover, and simmer for 1 hour, until the meat is tender.

  Prepare the fried eggplant and cauliflower and set aside on paper towels.

  Coat the bottom of a large cooking pot with the remaining olive oil. Arrange the meat in an even layer in the pot, cover with the eggplant, spread the rice over the eggplant, and spread the cauliflower over the rice. Pour the broth from the cooked meat over everything. Cover the pot and simmer about 40 minutes, until the rice is tender.

  Meanwhile, sauté the pine nuts in the butter until lightly browned.

  When the meat and rice are done cooking, invert the pot carefully over a serving platter and pour out the ingredients (this recipe will yield a looser, unstructured version, not a layered timbale). Top the meat with the pine nuts. This dish is very good served with yogurt and a cucumber tahini salad. It makes excellent leftovers, too.

  SERVES 6.

  EIGHT

  Country Life

  Bud comes home one day and plonks his keys on the brass table by the door. Then he sits across from us—next to the TV that is filled with our dramatic soap opera—and makes an announcement: We’re moving back to Jordan. He decided on the drive home from work.

  Of course, this is an announcement that has been in the air for years. Behind workdays, picnics and outings, and evenings in front of the TV, there is Bud’s feeling that this is all temporary, that we will be leaving America to return to our “true country” any day now. He tells us so whenever we sit down to eat: “In Jordan, we’re going to get a big enough table so the company can sit in the kitchen with us!” Sometimes he’ll turn angry and frustrated if anyone questions his big Jordan plans; it’s easy to bruise his dignity. He can talk himself into a snit just by following one stream in his consciousness to the next, until he remembers something somebody said last week or last month or ten years ago that might possibly have hurt his feelings. He’ll be off, stomping upstairs and threatening to go back home, “where they really love me.” And we won’t be sure if he means to take us along at all.

  By this point, we have lived in Syracuse for several years, consuming American culture, TV, music, and especially its lavish, oily fast foods—fried fish burgers, fried chicken, and quart-size ice-milk Fribbles from Friendly’s restaurant. Bud is fed up with decadent American culture, tedious, anonymous jobs, and most especially with seeing his children grow into stranger-Americans right before his eyes—dressing like them, talking like them, acting like them!

  I don’t react when he makes his announcement. I’ve heard this plan so many times, it doesn’t seem like a real possibility anymore. It’s more like a refrain to a country-western song: Someday I’ll see my old home again.

  But something is different this time. In the ensuing months, while I try to ignore Bud’s excitement, everything is sold: the furniture, dishes, the house. My friends, led by Sally Holmes, throw me a surprise going-away party just before school lets out for the summer. They present me with a five-pound album swollen with Polaroids and handmade glitter-dusted cards and personally inscribed farewell poetry surrounded by curlicues of glued-on yarn. The one from Jamie Faraday reads, “I had a friend / She went away / And now I am crying / Tears of icicles.” We have moved to Jordan before, but this isn’t the same—this time I’m twelve, I have friends, clothes, opinions. And my opinion is: I don’t want to move to Jordan.

  At the party, my friends keep asking, “Where are you going again?” They gaze at me as if I’m shipping out to the western front.

  Jamie Faraday puts her hand on my knee; her eyes are big and refracted with tears. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” She swipes at her shining cylinder of bangs, and they break into pieces. The thought comes to me that she must have willed me out of existence many times already.

  Sally Holmes’s mother ladles up crystal punch glasses of pink Kool-Aid and pineapple juice for all the girls. Even though this is something I’ve learned to enjoy, today I can’t drink it. It tastes of sugar, stone, and chemicals—the way everything did when I first returned to the States. That fiery reentry comes back to me, the memory of having to re-create myself at seven, at nine, and now again.

  It hasn’t been easy for me to construct this American self. I’ve had to observe closely. I have finally acquired hip-hugger jeans and a long shag haircut, in the posthippie fallout look of the seventies. I lie awake at night, trying to imagine Jordan. I retain vivid impressions worked into my body, sharp and inexorable—the whiteness of the streets, the stone houses, the running children. These tokens have always been within me: the scent of mint in my parents’ garden, the intricate birdsong, the seeded crust of the bread, and the taste of dried yogurt steeped in olive oil. All of it returns in my dreams. But when I deliberately try to reimagine it, it turns to dust. Two years older than me, my friend Hisham will be almost fifteen by now, but in my imagination he’s frozen into a bony, wide-smiling, smart-guy ten-year-old. I’ve lost my sense of Jordan. If we move back there, I don’t know what I’ll be any longer.

  But nobody asks for the children’s opinion. Bud’s eyes are focused on an invisible, interior point—the repository of his childhood, the place of innocence and wholeness, a brushstroke of cedar and its lingering perfume.

  “When we go back to Jordan,” he says, sliding butter-fried eggs onto our plates, “we’re going to see the family again. Won’t that be great?”

  My shoulders slump, heavy and sullen with all the things I’m not allowed to say, like I thought we were the family! Bud is content now, but that mood is volatile and delicate. To question this decision is to risk his quick temper.

  “When we go back to Jordan,” Bud continues, stacking piles of toasted pita bread, “we’ll have fresh apricot juice and fresh bread. When I was a boy, we made the dough every day and took it to be baked at the bakery every night. It’s the only way to eat bread. You’ll see your friends Mrs. Haddadin and Hisham, and you’ll speak Arabic again. Won’t that be great?”

  I pick up the bread, put it down. I don’t answer.

  LOST CHILDHOOD PITA BREAD

  In a mixing bowl, sprinkle the yeast into warm water, then stir in the sugar and salt. Let sit for a few minutes, until bubbly.

  Place the flour in a large mixing bowl, add the yeast mixture and oil, then combine by hand. Scrape the dough onto a floured surface and knead for about 1⁄2 hour, until smooth. Add small amounts of flour if the dough becomes sticky. Form the dough into small, palm-size balls, knead each ball a little, then cover the balls with a towel and let rise until double in size, about 1 hour.

  On a floured surface
, flatten each ball until about 1⁄2 inch thick. Cover and let them rise again, about 1 hour.

  Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Place the flattened balls onto the baking surface (see note).

  Bake for 3 to 6 minutes. Watch them very carefully, as they burn quickly.

  Let cool on racks. To store, wrap airtight and freeze.

  SPECIAL NOTE: The trick to getting the pita bread to puff up and form the hollow pocket inside is to bake them on a heavy preheated surface. Regular baking sheets usually aren’t thick enough. A pizza stone works well if you have one. In a pinch you can even use a heavy, oven-safe sauté pan. Whichever you use, it must be preheated to the oven temperature before you cook the dough.

  MAKES ABOUT 10 LOAVES.

  We finish the school year and pack our remaining belongings into three big steamer trunks to be shipped overseas. If Mom harbors any secret mutinies in her heart, I don’t know about them. My father’s longing for Jordan is at the center of his identity, which places it at the center of their marriage. Perhaps she believes she must choose between Bud and America. Or perhaps after a few years of suburbia, she really is ready for the adventure. In either case, I have no recollection of my mother resisting the move: She sells the furniture as stoically as she gave away her wedding dress to the nun’s charity the last time we moved to Jordan.

  At the end of May, Bud flies to Jordan ahead of us to figure out, once again, who we are, where we will live, and what our lives will look like. As our departure date gets closer, I start to lose the feeling in my hands and feet. Life is a sluggish dream as I fold clothes and empty the drawers. I can’t stand the taste of food, everything catches in my throat, my skin is too sensitive, and my clothes scratch. I stop eating, sleeping, speaking.

  Mrs. Manarelli comes over one day, and she and my mother have a whisper-conversation at the kitchen table about leaving me in the States to live with the Manarellis. I eavesdrop with dreadful hope, biting my nails down to the quick. I imagine sleeping in the lavender-scented guest bedroom, listening to Marco’s Monkees 45s through the wall, learning how to knead airy sweet loaves of bread dusted with rosemary. But I know it’s impossible. My sisters and I are chief among Bud’s reasons for moving back to Jordan. And I feel guilty for this, as if becoming American is a weak-minded decision I’ve made. A better girl would have embraced the Saturday morning Arabic lessons in the old church basement downtown, would have cheerfully made all the Arabic foods and Arabic coffees her father wanted. I believe that if only I had willed myself more fully Arab in America, all this dislocation might have been averted.

  Bud has been away for over a month, and I enter a dull state of lethargy. The panic has subsided into a sort of mute day-drifting through the house. I float, haunting my own life.

  Mom resigns her teaching position. Some people come and take our curtains away. We have our tickets, and we leave the day after tomorrow. And just when the house is completely empty, the new buyers plotting out where to put their tomato garden, we receive a surprise cablegram from Jordan: SENDING BACK TRUNKS COMING HOME.

  I stand beside my mother, heart stuttering. We reread the scrap of paper about twenty times, both of us holding a corner. “What does it mean?” I ask.

  She stares at it. “I do not know.”

  It means we’re not moving to Jordan. Bud comes back. He doesn’t want to discuss it. His jaw is set and his eyes have a fierce new light in them, the look of someone who’s been shaken awake.

  I am swept by relief so powerful that I stand in my empty bedroom doorway gripping the door frame as I feel my knees tremble.

  But, oh. This is awkward. We’ve said good-bye to everyone, sold the house and everything we own. Now what?

  We learn that by some crazy, lucky, last minute chance, the art teacher at Mom’s former school happens to be spending her summer break and the following school year on leave in London, and we can stay in her place. The five of us pack into her tiny one-bedroom apartment across from the Lakeshore Drive-In, behind O’Connell’s Grill. It turns out this is my dream home—everywhere are screens of beads instead of doors, purple-tasseled pillows, pink velour drapes, hot pink shag carpeting, brass elephant incense burners, Buddha statues, and blacklight posters; I am particularly obsessed with the ultrasaturated Maxfield Parrish and audacious Aubrey Beardsley drawings. I sigh and swan-neck around in front of the posters, entranced by the sizzling colors and intimate lines. What’s more, the apartment complex has a grand blue slab of pool that we spend the pallid upstate summer in. At night, my sisters and I make our beds on the furry couches in the living room and I doze off while staring at the artwork, the pulsing forms emerging in my sleep.

  Bud can’t cook in the funny little galley kitchen with the feathered dream-catchers dangling over the stove and the naked Gaia incense burners in the window. He says being in this apartment is like having a fit. So we live on cold tabbouleh salad that Bud keeps stocked in the fridge and fine, greasy onion burgers and curly fries at O’Connell’s Grill. Monica, Suzy, and I spin on the stools up front and chat with the gravel-voiced drinkers who slouch over the bar all afternoon. Mom and Bud have murmuring conferences in one of the vinyl booths in back.

  Bud has looked vaguely different ever since he returned from Jordan. He lost some weight while he was overseas, and the long, serious slant of his jaw has surfaced. The first flecks of gray dash his sideburns, and he has a new way of gazing into people’s eyes. Sometimes it’s a little scary to look at him now: He looks back too long, as if he will devour you. I start to flinch at his touch. Mom whispers that he was “very disappointed” in Jordan.

  We also have a new family ritual that Bud calls “going for a drive.” This entails hours of circling neighborhoods in our Rambler, peering at endless neighborhoods. Families wandering over their fleecy lawns, kids working Big Wheels, men in Bermuda shorts spraying rainbows from the garden hose, all of them stare back at our car. They exude a bland, impassive silence. I believe that if we ever actually rolled to a stop, someone would call the police.

  Bud says, “How about this one . . . Evergreen Terrace, how does that sound?” as we turn the corner into another nearly identical cul-de-sac.

  “Dad, what are we even doing?” I ask, grouchy about being dragged away from the pool. “Are we really looking for a place to live or are we just fooling around or what?”

  “Ooh, just looking, looking all around,” he says in his airy way. “Don’t you like to see what’s out there?”

  “Yeah, whatever.” I tilt my forehead against the window. One neighborhood pours into the next, seemingly without end or reason. Where does it all lead? Where is the center of all these courts and terraces and cul-de-sacs? My parents no longer have jobs, a house, neighbors. My sisters and I no longer have a school district. We came uprooted that easily. Our Rambler is our home. My throat and eyes burn; something is ignited inside me. I look around the car and survey the backs of their heads: How will I ever take care of all these people?

  Late in July, after weeks and weeks of looking around, we set out on what I assume will be another aimless drive. We leave the suburban neighborhoods and drive until the tree-lined lots taper away and we pass acres of yellow-parched weeds. There is nothing but telephone poles, empty roads, and the rolling hills of New York State. Finally we turn off the road and rumble up a long, gravel-popping country driveway. The house is set back among acres of chiming crickets, its long windows sparkling in a plush velvet night, the moon burning over its right shoulder. “Do you like it?” Bud asks us, grinning crazily. He nods as if agreeing with something somebody had said and announces, “That’s good, ’cause I already bought it!”

  The house is a chunky, modern redwood with traces of Frank Lloyd Wright in the wood-framed rows of windows. The bedrooms are all downstairs, which we are told is a “Californian design.” A deck lines the upper half of the house and gives us a view of trees and the long, single road that stretches from us to everyplace else. This house is only twenty miles away from our previous
house, but we may as well have moved to Jordan. I can no longer bike to see my friends. I can no longer walk anywhere except down a scalded, shoulderless strip of country road. I wander around the house half-dazed. The countryside feels vast and fabulous, depressing, inspiring, and inescapable: utterly isolated. All around us are waving, pollen-cloudy acres of fields, crickets, streams, maples, lilacs, blue spruces, and cicadas. There’s a scary little convenience store way down the long country road at the intersection with the county highway, and a gas station across the street from that. Up the hill there’s a public water-works building, and that’s it.

  Euclid is silence and sun spots fried into the carpet and watching the country road for the kids who burn down the gravel on their banana-seat bikes, grime thick as war paint on their faces, their hair slack and unwashed. The boys skid vulture circles and pop wheelies in front of our house of girls. Bud forbids us to go outside and look at them— which my baby sister, Monica, frequently does anyway; she has trouble keeping track of what’s forbidden. So I just watch them from my bedroom window.

  One day, just a week after we move in, I hear voices outside. I run to the window to see Monica standing in the front yard, chatting with a gang of four boys circling on bikes in the big empty road. They never actually stop, just tilt into their lazy orbit, a vapor of dust hanging over them. Their faces are raw with dirt, and their bikes make screeching noises with every pedal push. Seven-year-old Monica is standing with her hands on her hips, busy telling them everything in the world. I slide open the stiff, wood-framed window and listen to her explaining that the word Bud has pasted in huge red letters on the mailbox is our last name. She tells them the ages of herself and her sisters, the national origins of our parents, their occupations, and a long story about how we’d just sold everything we owned and almost moved to Jordan but then our father changed his mind and moved us here instead.