Bud is a great talker in our family of mostly listeners. He soliloquizes on the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, beginning with the Bible; delivers a dissertation on free will versus destiny; and offers several exhortations addressing the nature of animals, the difference between men and women, and the meaning of the universe. He tells endless jokes and instructional stories starring his favorite classic Arab character—Jeha the joker. (Jeha borrows his neighbor’s pot. A week later he returns it with a second smaller pot and says, “While it was staying with me, your pot gave birth to a baby pot!” The neighbor laughs to himself at Jeha’s stupidity but accepts the second pot with pleasure. When Jeha returns a day later to borrow the neighbor’s expensive brass table, the man is delighted to loan it out. Several weeks pass with no sign of Jeha, so the neighbor decides to inquire about his table and the prospect of some new table progeny. Tearfully, Jeha says to his neighbor, “I’m so sorry, I have some terrible news, my friend. While your table was visiting with me, it caught a terrible cold and died.” At this, the neighbor grows furious and says, “What sort of idiot would believe that a table catches cold?” And Jeha retorts, “What sort of idiot believes that pots can give birth!”)
There are also the family narratives, hair-raising tales of Bud running semiwild across Jordan with his tribe of seven (or so) brothers. We hear about our grandfather’s dissolute generosity; our grandmother’s miraculous home library; the day Bud’s brother tried to carry a pig home and his occasionally Muslim father balanced his rifle on the sill of his bedroom window and started firing at his naughty son; the day Bud snuck out to a wedding party without permission and when he came home later that evening his father chased him across the flat rooftops, the sound of their footsteps echoing into the alleys; the time Bud snuck out to witness a public hanging and the weeks of deep-sea nightmares he suffered from afterward.
After we eat, when the kitchen windows glint black with night, Bud rolls away from his plate and begins telling stories of childhood, unimaginable lifetimes ago—fifteen, even twenty years back.
One of our favorites—meaning Bud’s favorite—is the story of how his parents came together. He sits at the table, sipping his little cup of coffee, the tiny handle requiring that he bunch his large fingers together in a delicate way. He wipes at his mustache, once, twice, so we know he wants to tell a long story. Finally, he sits back and rests his little cup on his stomach and begins:
“When my father, Saleh, was sixteen or seventeen or eighteen, he was in a caravan with his father and uncles, going across Amman to Palestine. They used to do like that in those days—three hundred camels and horses and all that, full of wheat and barley and sesame. As-Salt was the only city back then, and it took weeks to cross over.”
“Why wasn’t he in school?” Monica asks, concerned.
He frowns and turns his coffee a little bit, adjusting the rim to exactly the right position. “I think he didn’t like school very much. No, in fact, not at all. None of those brothers did. Their parents sent them to boarding schools in Damascus, in Syria, because there weren’t any schools in Jordan. Always they used to run away immediately. They would come right back to Jordan. Sometimes they would make it back home before their father got back and be sitting there in the kitchen, waiting for their beating. Anyway!
“One day, when the caravan came into Palestine, Saleh came across a girls’ high school. He and his brothers were all hanging around there, looking at the pretty girls. They weren’t used to girls. And there was one he liked specially. That was Anissa Zurub, your grandmother. And he and his father and uncles went to her family and asked for her hand in marriage. Only they turned them down! Why? Because your grandmother was educated, brilliant, and perfect, she was going to go to college. She was a sophisticated city girl from Jerusalem. Her father was an Angelic minister.”
“Anglican,” Mom says.
“Right. And Saleh was just a country bumpkin—a Bedouin! What did he know about the world? Nothing! He was a rough boy with calluses up one side of his body and down the other. Handsome as a black horse, he had a big mustache like I don’t know what, and a smile to drive you out of your mind. But education? None! Okay, so of course, Anissa turned down his courtship. She said no, so he had to go home. Fine. So some time goes by, not very much, and the Turks start to prosecute the Arabs all over the Middle East.”
“Persecute,” Mom says.
“Right. The Turks were after the Christians especially, so the Zurub family had to flee across the border. They ran to Jordan, to As-Salt, the only city. And who owned the best, biggest, oldest house in As-Salt? That’s right, the Abu-Jabers! Do you know the Abu-Jabers are responsible for kicking the king out of As-Salt, so the royalty moved the capital of Jordan to Amman? But that’s a story for another day. Anyway.
“When the Zurub family got to the Abu-Jaber house, my father, Saleh the handsome bumpkin, was there, ready to fall in love with her again. And so he did that. What happened was Saleh’s parents died— some say that the Turks poisoned him—my grandfather Freyeh and his brothers Farah and Farhan—all of them died—maybe by Turks poisoning the well, but also maybe by the typhoid. That is also a possibility. They say the typhoid came and took half of Jordan, you know. If the Turks didn’t get you, the typhoid did—”
“Also another story,” Mom says.
“Right. So after the parents died, Saleh’s oldest sister, Fathee’yeh, she just started matching everybody up. She put together her brothers with some various wives to get those boys out of her hair. And she married Saleh to Anissa, which is how such a smart city girl came to be married to a bumpkin!”
“But did she want to get married to him?” I ask my father. “Were they in love?”
He smiles and leans back in another direction in his seat. “Ya Ba, history is a funny thing. It’s a funny, funny thing. And so is love. That’s another funny thing, like history. They’re practically the same! I rather to think that she did. I rather to believe in a happy kind of an ending. But who really knows any of it except for Saleh and Anissa, and now they’re both gone, God rest their souls. But at least they got married. The end. But you know what’s interesting? Aunt Fathee’yeh herself never got married. She was a tough owl, that one, they say she was the true governor of As-Salt, not exactly elected, but you know how that goes. . . .”
Patiently, privately, Mom collects and washes the dishes and Bud keeps my sisters and me at the table with talking. He requires an audience. He leans his elbows on the linoleum table and unravels family history. We get glimmerings of both the sorts of hardships and wealth they grew up with. We get inklings of his cultural values— what a “good girl” behaves like and the ethical responsibilities of children. And we get a full overview on his life plan for himself and for us, which is to buy a restaurant, for us girls to marry our second cousins and have babies, and for these babies to dance around his knees.
He tells of hot, slouchy summers in the fields, a canvas sack full of soft white powder slung around his neck. He and his friends walked between the planted rows and scooped up the powder in their hands to fling over the crops. What was the powder? “Something for the bugs, maybe. We were supposed to tie our scarves over our mouths, but that was too hot.” And the powder was so silky and fine, like the elegant French talc his mother bought in Jerusalem, perfect to dig fingers into, the fine grains sparkling under their nails. So pretty, some of the children couldn’t resist tasting it. And if it made their fingertips bleed or their tongues blister and their mouths taste of ashes, well, that wasn’t so bad.
Another story: Bud’s father, Saleh. His personality roared inside of him like a furnace. He needed to have people nearby, to feed them, get them drunk on alcohol and spiraling laughter, to shelter them when they passed out. He used to invite passing strangers into their house, where they would empty the larder with gluttonous feasting. This so infuriated my grandmother that she’d have to sit on one of her many children’s beds, grab her knees, and cry out, “That man! That terrible man!” Once
, my grandfather—already feeling mellow and sentimental from araq, his signature liquor—passed one of the English guards on the road near his house and invited him and his platoon over for a party. To my grandfather’s delighted surprise, the man accepted. For an entire day before the British arrived, the whole village had to butcher lambs, pluck chickens, and lug bags of rice, onions, and tomatoes to the house. The intense cooking steamed up every room in their house, wilting all the pages in my grandmother’s library—which was a frivolous and vaguely ominous place, to my grandfather’s way of thinking, anyway. That night the soldiers came resplendent in their regal uniforms, thronging the little rubble road through Yehdoudeh like a parade down a cow path, hungry and sharp stepping, their English voices bright as spears. At various times during the course of the three long days and nights that the soldiers stayed, my father heard the sound of his mother’s voice, coming from her library, keening, “That man! That terrible man!”
Another book of stories: King Hussein days. Somewhere in his dreamy, elastic past, Bud was friends with the king of Jordan. When he was a boy, Bud’s family lived in the same hillside neighborhood as the king’s family, and Bud and his brothers used to play pickup soccer games with the young, soon-to-be king and his brothers. When he grew up, Bud flew a plane in the king’s air force, and he became one of the king’s fencing partners. And then there was the rice. As part of his military duty, Bud and his chum Mo Kadeem worked in the king’s imperial kitchens. No cooking, though; instead, he and Mo sorted rice, lentils, and frekeh (cracked wheat) for hours each week, painstakingly sifting through bushels of grains, flicking out all the tiny bits of stone and grit by hand. These lentils and rice would be used to make great pans of the delicious, simple dish mjeddrah.
“It was as-shugal al-majnoon,” Bud explains. The work of the crazy man. “Because you go crazy when you do it.”
Didn’t that upset you, we ask, working as a lowly kitchen helper? You, a fencer of kings, a pilot of kings, a black-eyed young man with a gleaming, perfumed mustache?
He smiles vaguely; his head lists to one side. “Maybe I liked it. I don’t know. It was important work. We kept the king’s rice clean! Besides, my father always told me I didn’t have the brains to do anything else. He said I should stick to the kitchen because I shouldn’t be trusted with a weapon.”
Because you had a short temper?
“Because I might accidentally kill myself. He used to knock on my head—” Bud makes a rapping gesture at his temple. “He’d say, ‘What’s in there? Rocks!’ ” He snickers and looks down.
Dad, that’s terrible!
We can hardly imagine it. What sort of father would say such things about his beloved child? Not the sort of father that Bud is. We can barely imagine it. It’s not true, it isn’t! we cry, and grab his arms, to pull him up and away from the place of such memories.
But he just shakes his head and says, “It’s okay. Mo Kadeem, now, he was the one with all the brains. He had a big, handsome head, like Cary Grant, and he was a genius, smarter than Ibn Battuta. Mo Kadeem was going to Australia someday. He saw in a movie or a book or something that the women there are seven feet high, with arms like swans and hair like lemon trees. He used to say he was going to Australia to get himself such a woman, with skin like an apple, and build a house on top of the world like the Taj Mahal. He used to talk about it all the time, his big-time plans, while we washed all that rice and lentils.”
And what did you want to do, Dad?
He smiles his smile full of white, even teeth—not a single cavity. “I wanted to be the one who made the mjeddrah.”
Whatever happened to Mo Kadeem?
“Mo Kadeem! I wish I knew. I think he must be king of Australia by now,” he says in an injured, wistful way. He looks so far off that we try to see what he is looking at—but of course, nothing is actually there.
BUD’S ROYAL MJEDDRAH
Clean the lentils carefully, and everyone will love you.
In a mixing bowl, combine the lentils and rice; set aside. In a saucepan, fry the onion and garlic in olive oil until golden brown. Add a little of the cooking liquid from the lentils, then mix in the bouillon, cumin, salt and pepper to taste. Stir the onion mixture into the lentils and rice. Serve with yogurt blended with half a peeled, chopped cucumber and a small bunch of chopped fresh mint.
MAKES 4 TO 6 SERVINGS.
ELEVEN
Immigrants’ Kids
In high school, all my friends have euphonious, polysyllabic names: Olga Basilovich, Sonja Soyenka, Yorunda Nogatu, Mahaleani Lahiri. We take as many classes as possible together, and I can still recall the teachers’ despair as they are nearly undone by calling attendance, the look of panic that comes over them after picking up the class roster and stumbling horribly through “Diana Abu-Jaber,” only to confront “Mahaleani Lahiri.” Our lunch bags open and the scent of garlic, fried onions, and tomato sauce rolls out—pierogi, pelmeni, doro wat, teriyaki, kielbasas, stir-fries, borscht . . . I become famous for my lunch bags full of garlic-roasted lamb and stuffed grape leaves.
The American girls in my classes are on diets. I first learn about this trend from my friend Kimberly, who is already so narrow and featureless that her skinny jeans barely cling to her hips. She irons her long hair, so there’s always a whiff of scorched hair wafting around her shoulders, detectable even over the heady doses of Coty’s musk perfume. For weeks at a time she goes on diets where she will live on two avocados a day. And my friends Janie and Kendra are permanently hungry. Everything smells delicious to them. The sight of trays loaded with cafeteria food brings a wanton longing into their faces. But they allow themselves just the barest crumbs: Kendra consumes only diet sodas and the crusts of sandwiches; Janice eats soda crackers and half jars of baby-food applesauce. Usually midlunch one or the other will sniff and glare at her food, there will be a pause like a moment of grieving, and then she’ll quickly stand and throw away her minuscule portion, just a few bites taken.
But after school, the two of them will buy big, freezer-frosted tubs of fudge ripple ice cream and devour it with soup spoons while sitting on cement dividers in the middle school parking lot next door. Kendra still fits into her clothes from fifth grade, and even though she’s fifteen, Janie brags that she hasn’t gotten her period yet. Both of them watch with prim, impassive expressions as my other friends and I eat our lunches. Then Kendra sniffs and balances her chin on her knuckles and gazes across the gray-tiled cafeteria as if she is looking across the ocean, saying with great disdain and perhaps a smidgen of curiosity, “I don’t understand how you can so not care.”
My immigrant-kid friends are not on diets. Most of us have parents from countries where a certain lushness is considered alluring in a woman. We’ve grown up in houses redolent with the foods of other places. We cook experimentally at one another’s houses, though it’s hard to get the others to come out to my remote address since none of us can drive yet. When we do try to cook at my house, my father hovers over our shoulders, sniffing and offering a stream of helpful advice, occasionally prying the spoons from our hands or dashing in extra garlic or pepper.
Olga Basilovich’s father is an elderly, gentle, diminutive man from Russia. Olga tells me that when he was a young man, he and his family were shipped to the concentration camps. I have spent entire nights weeping over Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, and I peer closely at Mr. Basilovich the first couple of times I meet him, searching for a sign of his dreadful experience. But his smile is benign and uncomplicated; in conversation, his eyes automatically flutter to the floor. I learn in regular installments from Olga that he escaped the camps and crossed Europe on foot, enduring dramatic perils— towering barbed-wire fences, vicious dogs, gunshots, starvation, and mountaintop exposure. He made his way to America, and once there, he began to try to kill himself.
The first attempt was just after he’d acquired his PhD in molecular biology and had his first university position. He swallowed poison and was thwarted by hi
s wife, who’d come home early and found him curled on the floor. The second time happened not long after Olga was born and involved an at-home hanging, again discovered too soon by his wife.
Our friend Sonja tells me these American suicide stories, not Olga, who is furtive and somewhat prickly. There seem to be invisible quills that lift from her and hold the rest of us at bay. Even though she and I are close, there are things that Olga can’t talk about, so her oldest friend, Sonja, tells me. Sonja, of Russian-Catholic descent with a stolid, pragmatic view of the world, is impatient with Olga’s evasive-ness and Mr. Basilovich’s repeated suicide attempts.
Sonja and I linger over the gleaming sinks in the girls’ restroom at school as she tells me stories about her friend’s father. “Can you imagine?” she whispers. “He walked through whole towns where everyone was totally gone!”
An image of a naked, scorched place called “Europe” opens in my mind: The trees look burnt and stripped as candlewicks. The air is a stirring, sulfurous yellow.
“So creepy.”
“But really . . .” Sonja frowns, and her full mouth turns down, her Russian brow-bone high and imperial. “He behaves so irresponsibly! All this suicide! He has children, for heaven’s sakes.”
I try pulling my hair smooth, give up, and let it sproing back. “Maybe he’s haunted,” I suggest. I think about Olga’s own narrow, downturned mouth, her shining, already disappointed eyes, and wonder how much of her father she may have inherited. She has his olive skin and inwardly bent gaze: Among our group of friends, she is the most moody and intriguing.
Sonja flicks back her glossy hair in a single swoop. “Haunted. Sure, he’s Russian, he’s Jewish. But all of our fathers are haunted. Big deal.”
Mr. Basilovich is so quiet and retiring, I scarcely know what his voice sounds like. Then one day when I am visiting Olga, he comes into the kitchen, where the two of us are hanging on the refrigerator door. As if resuming a conversation that had just been interrupted, he walks right up to me and says impatiently, wiping at his tiny mustache, “The cabbages! What about the cabbages?”
The Language of Baklava Page 17