The Language of Baklava

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  I gape at him. This is the most he’s said to me through all the bottomless afternoons Olga and I have spent together lounging on their living room floor, awash in a glaze of television reruns. I wonder if this sort of outburst is an effect of his particular brand of insanity, resulting from having walked alone through burnt, abandoned cities. Annoyance flickers over Olga’s face: She is easily maddened by her father. She has told me that when he wanders sleepless through their house at night, she too lies awake, mentally wandering after him through dark rooms.

  “He’s talking about the stuffed cabbage that your dad made last week,” Olga says, sighing.

  I rack my brain—Olga did come over for dinner, and Bud always sends people home with food, but I have no memory of what we’d eaten. Mr. Basilovich glances at me expectantly. “Was it okay?” I ask.

  “Was it okay? Was it okay?” His voice rises, eyebrows jutting. He looks offended.

  “I gave him some of the cabbages. He hasn’t talked about anything else all week,” Olga groans.

  “They are beautiful,” he says in his Eastern European accent that always strikes me as both ironic and wistful. Each of my friends has parents who grew up speaking different languages from our own, parents who are all too emotional or colorful for comfort. Our fathers ignore or argue with the TV; they sit in Bermuda shorts and black socks at the kitchen table and tell us too much about who they were. They’re given to blurting out intense things, like Bud, who will suddenly, ominously observe, “If I live, I live; if I die, I die,” or his more succinctly tragic favorite, “ I can’t take it.”

  Mr. Basilovich’s American wife ghosts around the corner, glancing at him. She is part companion and part keeper. A sort of continual alertness flows in an unbreaking current beneath her skin, with at least one part of her gaze always fixed on her sensitive husband. She quit her own job in order to drive Mr. Basilovich directly to and from work and to bring him his lunches. She watches his face as he falls asleep and wakes him if he falls too far.

  “The skin of your father’s cooked cabbage is like a flower,” he goes on, making a poem of cabbage, wrapped up in a meal that I don’t remember eating. His hands sculpt a soft form in the air as if he is describing a woman’s body.

  “Yeah, my dad says cooked cabbage should be like a lady’s skin,” I say, then catch myself, distressed that I’ve actually quoted Bud.

  But Mr. Basilovich is pleased by these thoughts of a kindred spirit. “Yes, of course, like the softest skin. The butter, how it works through the cabbage leaves! And the taste of lamb comes next”—he looks delicately at his wife—“like a kiss.”

  Olga looks away, embarrassed by her father, who has gone in one moment from intellectual and aloof to too sensual and nakedly emotional. “Dad, come on, don’t talk about food like that,” she says, and folds her arms. “It’s just food.”

  Mr. Basilovich breaks off and stares at their kitchen table, smoothing one palm over its surface, back and forth, a bare trace of a smile on his face. “Yes,” he says, “just food.” He is different from my father, but I recognize something in him. He never seems to be entirely in the room. His gaze is forever wafting over shoulders and seeking out doorways; he is only partially present.

  Mr. Basilovich decides that as an emissary of my father, I must taste the Russian-Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish version of stuffed cabbages, which he calls golubtsi. To Olga’s astonishment, her scholarly father ties on his wife’s apron and rattles through the cupboards, mumbling to himself in one of his other languages; she has never seen him cook before. We watch him through the doorway—me; Stasia, the younger sister; Olga; and her mother—as Mr. Basilovich chops, heats, and stirs, efficient and brisk as a scientist. Olga glances at her mother anxiously.

  Twelve-year-old Stasia leans against the refrigerator and nips at the edges of her cuticles, then sighs and fluffs her big Farrah Fawcett hair. “Let’s get out of here,” she says. The three of us move to her bedroom to listen to music. Olga and Stasia discuss the aggravating weirdness of their father—the mournful, wordless songs he sings in the shower, the drawer full of old, crackling foreign money and photographs of frowning women, with their black eyes and high, slanted cheekbones. “Who are they?” Stasia asks us in annoyance. “He won’t tell.”

  “No, he’ll never tell,” Olga says.

  Somewhere in the midst of the David Bowie album, an aroma starts to bloom around us.

  We wander back to the kitchen doorway in time to see Mr. Basilovich pulling a pan out of the oven. It’s layered with velvety, glistening packets of cabbage filled with minced beef and carrot. He carefully transfers the cabbages to a platter with a serving spoon, gives us each a fork but no plate, then stands beside the dish, eyes modestly downturned. Olga spears a piece of cabbage and takes a bite. “Oh!” she says. She touches the base of her throat and smiles at her father. “It’s wonderful.”

  Stasia, who has been skeptical, takes a small bite, then another. She blinks and blinks. “Oh, wow,” she says.

  I slide my fork through the cabbage. It’s soft and mellow and evaporates in my mouth, the pork and carrot mildly evanesced, exquisitely intertwined.

  “Is it good?” he asks me, and smiles. “Is it good?”

  Not long after the day of the ephemeral cabbage, my friend Sonja calls. Olga has told her that their father hasn’t left his bed or stopped crying for a week. “Can you imagine?” she says. “Olga says he’s been crying in his sleep—his pillows are all soaked.” No matter how hard his wife has tried to shake him from his crying dreams, she cannot do it. After two weeks of crying, Mr. Basilovich is hospitalized.

  He is kept under sedation for a week. Every day, Olga rushes back to his hospital room right after school, bringing him novels and chocolates, any little treat she can dream up to try to entice her father back to life. “He looks at me,” Olga reports from the hospital phone. “He even tries to smile. But it’s like it’s hurting him.” There is a long pause where I can hear the slip of her breath, the texture of the telephone silence. “His eyes look burned.”

  A few days later, I get a call from Sonja. I am in the kitchen. My father has just slid a tray of lamb-stuffed cabbages out of the oven for me to bring to my friend’s father in the hospital. Sonja tells me that the previous night, just when he seemed to be getting a bit better, joking with the nurses, eating a bite of tuna casserole, Mr. Basilovich had been left unattended for a stray moment between the ongoing visits of friends and family and nurses. He got out of bed, scuffed on his slippers, walked to his sixth-story hospital window, slid it open, and jumped.

  “So he finally wins,” Sonja says to me in her patient, furious way. “He finally gets what he’s wanted all this time.”

  On the morning of the funeral for Mr. Basilovich, I wake near dawn. I lay out the gray dress I will wear to the service; it drifts like a shadow over my bed. It’s early, and I feel restless and edgy. I walk out to the upstairs deck and sit with my back against the wall, still in pajamas, watching the sun glossing over the fields. The night before was cool and wet, and the dawn is coming up warm, twisting arabesques of steam over the road. I have lost myself in studying the ghostly patterns and nurturing a mild sadness under my ribs, when there is a commotion of wings. A white, round pigeon settles on the corner of the deck railing, not more than a foot or so away from me, close enough that I can hear the quiet purring clicks in its throat, the tick of its claws as it turns on the rail.

  I hold still, barely breathing, and stare at the bird. It comes so close that I think it will climb up my arm. It turns its profile to me, watching for a long moment with its unblinking eye. Then the wings scatter, flashing it into the clouds. I watch it disappear into the whitening sky and think, for some reason, to wave after it. It is not until some years later that I learn that golubsti, the name of Mr. Basilovich’s stuffed cabbages, refers to their plump round shape and means, literally, “pigeon.”

  “IN HONOR OF MR. BASILOVICH” CABBAGE ROLLS

  In a medium bowl, c
ombine all the stuffing ingredients.

  Rinse and remove the leaves from the cabbage. Blanch the leaves in 2 or 3 batches in boiling water until slightly soft; drain. Trim out stem ends and set aside. Place about 1 tablespoon of the stuffing at the bottom of each leaf, roll once, fold in the sides, then finish rolling.

  Place the stem ends and coarsely chopped leftover cabbage leaves on the bottom of a 4-quart pot. Place the lamb over the cabbage pieces and scatter half of the garlic cloves over this. Place the cabbage rolls over the lamb and scatter the remaining garlic cloves among the rolls. Stir together the sauce ingredients and pour over all. Bring to a boil, and then simmer for 2 hours. Turn out onto a platter or tray.

  The cabbage rolls are very good served with plain yogurt and a salad.

  SERVES ABOUT 6.

  TWELVE

  Restaurant of Our Dreams

  One day I wake up and there’s that crazy old energy in the house again. Bud is excited, amplified, larger than life. He sings at us from the kitchen, “Oh, who wants a nice egg or three?” Improvising as he goes, “a nice egg, not an ugly one, not a grumpy one, not a low-down mean and miserable one.” His grin cracks his face, then he laughs quietly, sneakily, nodding and inviting us to join this insider joke, whatever it is. Mom just smiles and rolls her eyes as though she knows what the joke is and it’s pretty corny and she’s not telling. All afternoon there are long, animated phone conversations in Arabic. Later these are followed by middle-of-the-night calls from overseas.

  The next morning, Monica and Suzy congregate on my bed, staring with their serious eyes. I loll back, sighing, and say, “It’s one of two things: We are either moving back to Jordan again or . . . it’s another restaurant.”

  Bud’s earlier efforts were more tentative, an ambitious dreaming out loud: “I’ve got to run a place of my own.” Various friends and relatives chimed in, egging him on: “Sure, Gus, that’d be great. We’ll help out!”

  At least that’s the way the process is described to me when I get older. On two, three, or maybe more prior occasions, Bud has picked out a restaurant for sale, called meetings with his affluent cronies, and lined up investors, only to have them back out at the eleventh hour, the deals dribbling apart just before they sign the lease. I imagine their crises of faith: Well, it was fun to talk about, but . . . talk is just talk, and what does Gus really know about running a business?

  These are all dispatches from the adult world, however, a place I know remarkably little about. I catch only shreds of family gossip and retain little of that. When I eventually move out on my own into the world, my family history is forever coming as a shock: the secret medical conditions, the broken marriages, the police reports, the cousin who finagled having a blank diploma folder handed to him at his college graduation ceremony so his parents wouldn’t know he hadn’t been to a class in years.

  This time, Bud tells us, it’s different. The place he plans to buy is perfect, perfect, perfect (excellent location, good foot traffic, high visibility, loyal clientele). A can’t-miss. The owner is selling his treasured restaurant at a clearance price because he and his wife—the head chef—are getting a divorce. Bud is ecstatic as he describes his family utopia: “I will be in back, creating! You and your sisters will be out front, taking the orders and making the customers happy and laughing.” He sits back and studies the ceiling. “It’s going to be running together like this—” He interlaces his fingers. “A perfect running-together machine!” Mom opens her mouth, looks as though she’s forgotten what she was going to say, closes it.

  I scowl. I’m in my second year of junior high, and none of my friends have jobs. I’m not sure what exactly he has in mind for my younger sisters, but he isn’t overly concerned with the child labor laws. “I notice that no one asked the local slaves for their opinions,” I say, pouting.

  Bud looks startled, then bursts into laughter. “Oh ho ho, good one. Like they have slaves in America!”

  Family summits take place. There are more phone calls from Jordan. I learn that Bud still has a parcel or two of inherited land in Jordan that he’s going to sell. This is momentous—a final exchange. It’s the first time I’ve known Bud to be willing to put his new country before his homeland.

  Bud’s excitement over the restaurant is palpable. It will be a real breakthrough, an amazing, modern combination of Arabic and American food, he says. It’s the mixture that I grew up with, the only sort of cooking that makes sense to me. Bud says that first we need to make a field trip and investigate what the “other guys” are offering. At this point in time, the only Arabic restaurant in Syracuse is a little joint called King David up on Marshall Street, the student-clogged thoroughfare on the cusp of Syracuse University. King David is eternally crammed with college kids—Arab and non-Arab alike. It is small and intriguing, filled with Persian carpets and Arabic music, its windows sweaty with condensation. You pass its front door through a fragrant mist of garlic and olive oil. The brother runs the cash register, and the sister is the genius in the kitchen. I adore it there and always order the same thing—a tender falafel sandwich in pita, tabbouleh salad, and sweet apricot nectar to drink.

  One Saturday, Bud and I go “undercover” for lunch at King David, which doesn’t seem to be any different from the way we usually eat lunch there. Bud goes into his routine: He rejects the first two tables we’re shown, and after we’re finally settled he waits for one of the Arab student-waiters to come over and launches into a torrent of Arabic greetings—how are you, how are your parents, you look healthy, may you prosper—as if they’ve been friends all their lives. When they get around to discussing, finally, what we’d like to eat, Bud says, “Oh, you know, nothing, really. Just put me a little of this, a little of that—” And he gestures humbly at the table, suggesting he’d be happy with a crust of stale bread.

  What happens is what always happens. The owner leans out of the kitchen, wipes back her hair, and waves to us. Dishes fill the tabletop, and the waiter brings bottomless baskets of pita bread. We will never be able to finish it all—that’s the point. We are meant to be overwhelmed, stuffed to the gills, groaning. There’s a way to say “a lot” in Arabic, but no way to say “too much.”

  Our waiter is an SU student. Bud quickly ascertains that his name is Waleed, he’s from Lebanon, he’s majoring in engineering, he’s twenty-two years old, and he’s not yet married.

  “Why not?” Bud demands. I tighten my lips and look away. “Life is short and marriage is a pleasure. It’s like food,” Bud says. “Why are you going to drink water when you can drink tea?”

  “But water is the greatest drink of all,” Waleed parries.

  Bud nods and picks up a falafel, examining it as if it’s a fallen apple blossom. “The strongest wisdom is the wisdom of the body.”

  Waleed hugs his serving tray to his chest and says, “But the greatest wisdom is the wisdom of Allah.”

  Waleed bows and goes off to the kitchen to find one more dish to fill the last inch of space on our table. Bud looks after him a moment, then returns his attention to the table. He bites into the falafel, and I know what he is tasting—the deep, smoky, slightly charred warmth, the crumbling outer crust giving way to the tender, mealy, spicy interior. He nods and shakes a thoughtful finger in the air. “When we get our restaurant, Waleed will come to work for us.”

  Waleed brings out two more dishes: succulent tomatoes filled with spiced ground chicken, and dainty, budlike artichokes steamed in lemon and garlic.

  “I can’t take it!” Bud sputters happily, and fans his hand over the filled tabletop to signal that things are out of control. “It’s impossible—there’s no room. Now you’re just going crazy.”

  Waleed tilts a smile in my direction, bringing me to attention. He nudges, nudges, dish lapping dish, until like the miracle of loaves and fishes, what is small is made large: The little space expands until the dishes fit. “In this world, there is always more room,” Waleed says. “Thanks be to God.”

  “You see?�
�� Bud leans in my direction after Waleed has left, indicates all the plates covering the table, lifts his eyebrows. “An engineering student!” He studies the food, nodding with great satisfaction. “Just wait till we have our restaurant.”

  VERY FRIED FALAFELS

  Purée all the ingredients in a food processor. Let the mixture stand for 1 hour. Form the mixture into little patties or balls about the size of walnuts. Deep-fry the falafel in oil until golden brown. Drain on paper towels.

  SERVES 6.

  When we get our restaurant, I know what I’m going to wear. I besiege Mom with questions about my waitressing uniform; she rubs her temples and agrees to anything. She says I can wear red patent-leather boots and a pleated skirt above my knees. My little sisters, it’s decided, will work back in the kitchen, where they won’t be so obvious. Bud says this place has a bar, and right away I imagine low lights twirling with cigarette smoke, the clink of ice in glasses, murmurous laughter, black velvet booths, and luxuriant platters of food. I get interested.

  The plans build. We discuss menus. Bud envisions Arabic-fusion food—though no one calls it that at the time—Arabic, American, and French! Maybe Italian. Why not Italian? Look at Libya! The Italians occupied Libya, and now they’ve got all kinds of pasta in their lentils. Smart Libyans!

  Bud’s outlook brightens. He seems less withered by his long workdays as an administrator in the local hospital, where his main duty is to sit at a big desk listening to a stream of employee complaints. We talk about the restaurant every night at the dinner table. According to Bud, this golden place, no mere restaurant, will be a Shangri-la that finally heals the old wound between East and West. All languages will be spoken here, all religions honored. And the food will be pure and true as the first food, the kind that weighed down golden boughs and shone in the wind.