The Language of Baklava

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  A business of one’s own—at last!

  “You see this bamia?” he says to us, holding up a chunk of okra stewed in tomato on his fork. “Americans are nervous with bamia because they fear the slime. You know how to take away the slime?”

  My sisters and I shake our heads.

  “You have to boil it good first and then you fry it! And sometimes you reverse it. How many people you think know about that?”

  We marvel. Not many. Hardly anybody.

  “When we get our restaurant,” he says, and eats his bite of okra, “it will be full of secrets like this.”

  Mom moves around the edge of the kitchen table, a stack of dirty dishes in her hands, an expression on her face as though she’s trying to decipher some inscription on the kitchen cabinets. But it’s too old, unknown, and the dishes are muttering to her. She doesn’t say anything.

  There are weeks and then months of debates, schemes, and outlines. The phone rings at all hours. You never know when you’ll lift the receiver to the hiss of the overseas connection. Incredibly, Bud’s relatives seem to be convinced by his business plan this time. Several have even promised to buy shares in the place. Who could fail to be moved by Bud’s exultant rhapsodizing? His voice bounces; he seems to give off a hum.

  After much negotiation with lawyers, real estate agents, and the gloomy owner, whose disconcerting gaze lingers on Bud long after conversation has ceased, they work out the last details and agree on a signing date. To celebrate on the night before he is due to go in and sign the lease, Bud prepares a grand dinner starring a golden chicken msukhan. This is the traditional Palestinian dish, which owes its ravishing succulence to a few simple ingredients—chicken, onions, and so much olive oil that the chicken is nearly poached in it, turning its flesh soft and amber as a silk purse.

  “Do you see this chicken, girls?” he asks as we break off tender bites with our forks. “Do you know what it’s saying to us?”

  No, what, Dad?

  “It’s saying, ‘I am more delicious than anything. People will come from everywhere to taste me. I am the queen of all!’ ” He sighs and gazes fondly at the queen. “Only here in America can such a thing as this happen,” he says. “I used to be crazy—back in the days when I wanted to go back to Jordan. I was like a baby who only wants to be with his mother. But now!” He shakes a finger. “A person grows up, he looks around, he sees with his eyes . . . and his head . . . and his feet. You see with every part.”

  “What do you see, Dad?”

  He flares his open hand to encompass the entire kitchen. “You see America the beautiful. It’s right here. And it’s telling you: Come here, open a restaurant, be who you are. America is like Mo Kadeem, it knows what it wants and it says to go get it. I have been crazy to want to go back home. You know what Jordan says to me? It says, Be who I tell you to be!”

  The day of the signing arrives bright and fresh. I’m brimming with excitement. Mom props her elbows on the kitchen table, composed and watchful, part of her suspended. This is Bud’s restaurant, but she will own it, too, help pay for it and run it. We are all characters in my father’s restaurant dream.

  It’s a Friday and Bud promises he will take us to see the place this weekend. First he and Mom are driving to the restaurant after work to sign the paperwork. “We’ll be home before six, and then, you know what—Cosmo’s pizza!” he says, his voice lifted with glee. “This is the last time I won’t have to cook for a living.” My sisters and I wait around the house in a state of nervous exhaustion, wrung out with anticipation.

  We watch Dark Shadows on TV; the floating severed head is on the loose again. But we talk through the whole show, lounging all over the big half-moon couch in the living room, our bodies slack, as if it’s too much work to even hold ourselves upright. “What do you think it’s gonna be like?” one of us says for the eighth or ninth time, hands strumming the cushions. “Is it gonna be great or is Dad crazy?”

  The light changes, and reflections from the fields in our big windows drift over the TV screen. We run out of questions and stare at Electric Company, Wild Wild West, The Brady Bunch. When the evening news comes and goes, we start to stare at the windows. The long twilight sifts like hookah smoke into the house. Where are they?

  It’s nighttime when Mom and Bud get back. The car rolls impossibly slowly up the driveway. We sit up, then wait, motionless, listening to the crunch of tires on gravel, the pop and ping of tiny stones under the car. Our parents come in slowly, their footsteps deliberate, as if there is too much gravity in the air. They fumble with the keys at the door. We sit there, listening. Bud is too quiet. He always has something to say. Whether he’s happy or sad, cooking, shaving, or driving, he’s always talking about something. But tonight he doesn’t say a word, just goes straight upstairs to bed.

  Without his dinner.

  Mom sits at the kitchen table with us and rubs her forehead with her fingers for a while, and then she says, “I had a feeling about this, right from the start.”

  We lean in. “What happened?”

  She shakes her head as if she’d like to cross out all the past weeks and months of big hopes. She explains that the restaurant had been very successful, but once the owner’s chef-wife left him for their produce supplier, he no longer had the heart to run his business. He wanted to do away with painful reminders of what they’d had together, and he priced the restaurant cheaply just to move it along. Bud liked the inky blue backdrop of this story, the folds of passion and betrayal, which made the place feel more exciting and elusive. But passion, Mom knew, does not necessarily provide the optimum conditions for business transactions. Apparently, after months of separation, word got down to the wife in her love nest in Florida that the restaurant was being sold. And it seems she’d had a change of heart. She’d taken the next flight back to Syracuse and reclaimed her husband, their home, and their restaurant. Which is only to be expected when you consider that, whatever it is, knowing that someone else wants something always makes that thing more alluring.

  When Mom and Bud had walked into the restaurant, the owner, whom they’d known to be chronically melancholy, his chest sunken and neck curled, now met them chin first, his arm wrapped around a slim blond woman in a lilac pantsuit, his wife. He refused to hand over the keys. He beamed and shook his head. “Sorry,” he said over and over, grinning hugely. “No sale, no sale. We changed our minds.”

  At first Bud also laughed, as if it were all a huge merry, Candid Camera–style prank. He’s kidding, right? That’s how these crazy Americans are! But the owner just kept grinning until Bud became distraught, flushed, eyes stunned with panic. He shook, he demanded, he shouted. He threw a fork across the dining room. He grabbed one of the tables as though he were going to run out the door with it. He was outraged, incredulous, but he had no words for any of it. In the old country, he might have known what to say—called upon his brothers and uncles, made threats, called for retribution—but here nothing was clear. He knew none of the American language of lawyers and court and lawsuits. That was only what people said on TV. All he knew was that, here and now, at the very moment of grasping it, his life’s dream had turned to dust in his hands.

  “I don’t believe it,” I say to Mom, my forearms flat on the table. “Can they do that?”

  Mom shrugs. “I don’t know. I guess they did.”

  “But—but—” My hands tighten and my ears buzz. The kitchen looks woozy and soft. I hadn’t expected this. I’m surprised by how disappointed I feel. “But it isn’t fair!”

  She turns her steady blue eyes to me. This is the way she holds to things, lightly, knowing to let such stuff pass on and through. Neither Bud nor I can do this. We seize up, our insides tightening fiercely around our desires. I stare at the corners of the ceiling as if the answer will be written there, in the rough plaster swirls. Better not to have dreams at all, I think in a surge of bitterness, than to feel this way. Better not to know what could have been. “I could tell as soon as I saw them,” M
om says almost apologetically. “There was just no way.”

  I feel Bud’s presence, turning in their bedroom, sleeping away his broken dreams, lost in the thin gray air of loss and disappointment.

  PERFECTLY TENDER BAMIA

  In a saucepan, heat the oil over moderate heat, add the onions, and sauté until translucent. Add the garlic and okra and stir until the okra is soft. Add the tomatoes and stir a few minutes. Add the broth and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to low, cover, and simmer about 30 minutes. Sprinkle with the lemon juice, cover, and simmer another 10 minutes.

  Serve alongside a golden chicken msukhan or a nice lamb kibbeh.

  SERVES 6.

  THIRTEEN

  The Language of Baklava

  Auntie Aya is in town. You can tell by the way all the uncles and older cousins drive over to the Route 57 Chalet, a mile from my parents’ house. It’s a grim cinder-block motel the color of dust, but she picked it out on the drive in from the airport. “There”—finger to the window—“that’s where I want to stay.” The uncles and cousins come back from her hotel with their once graying mustaches and sideburns miraculously transformed to a gleaming black; they also walk stiffly upright, brittle with pain, their backs arched, arms lifted a few inches, dainty as ballerinas.

  “She does the cupping,” Bud tells us in a lowered voice that edges between pride and embarrassment. This is one of Aya’s great medical specialties. The procedure involves lighting small tapers placed inside little glass cups, which are then inverted over the afflicted body part. The heat of the doused flame creates a suction, raising cruel red welts on the skin. These welts are considered openings, escape passages for dark fevers and spirits to pass through on their way out of the body. Aya’s patients are covered with a rash of circular welts after she treats them, and they’re in so much pain that for a while even the sheerest fiber of a fine Damascene cotton shirt is too much to bear.

  Bud shakes his head and says they’re all totally majnoon— crazy. But then he too goes out and returns with his mustache—until very recently steel gray—now finer, blacker, and shinier than any he’s ever had in his life. “Her medicine, it’s from the real old-time Bedu,” he confides, tugging at his new, improved mustache. Auntie Aya, the family matriarch, has lived alone in the desert for years in her “country retreat,” a lyrical stone-and-marble house that one of her suitors had built for her. She knows the ways of the desert people, the Bedouins—including the magical, beautifying, and medicinal uses of herbs, minerals, and elements.

  Bud has not seen the desert for a long time. He has been living in apartments, town houses, two-family homes, ranch homes, suburban manors with attached garages, and bungalows. He is a modern guy. He senses that the evil eye, and its malevolent force of envy, vengeance, and greed, is not really modern or civilized. But still he keeps the prayer beads draped around his rearview mirror to ward off the evil eye, just in case anyone might be harboring dark or covetous thoughts toward his 1975 Rambler. He refuses to submit to the cupping, but he eats parsley, “to bring money,” and he makes secret gestures with his hand when he thinks someone has looked at him “the wrong way.”

  Bud has many unique treatments that he’s unaware aren’t standard medical procedure all over the States. He removes dust from our eyes by licking them clean, and he rubs a cut clove of garlic over a bee sting, a piece of onion over a mosquito bite.

  Besides my aunt’s exploits with herbs and cosmetics, she is also, like most Bedu, a bit of a bonesetter, an exorcist, and a general practitioner. She works extensively with leeches, specialized teas, and earthy spices that she has ground in her own mortar. She apprenticed under Sitt Arjah, or the Limping Lady, the gifted midwife of Yehdoudeh who delivered Aya and the many little brothers who followed her. My aunt also loves the fall fashions at J. C. Penney and feels strongly that the nails should match the lips and the shoes must, if at all possible, match the purse.

  The first time I ever met Aunt Aya was in Amman when I was eight years old. After a boring lunch with some relatives in a dull, grand house devoid of children, I’d escaped into the kitchen to get some water, expecting to see a maid, and run into Aya instead. She was sitting like an empress at the kitchen table, a burning Pall Mall between her index and middle fingers, the beetle-shelled scarlet nails glimmering. She hadn’t sat with us at lunch, even though this was apparently her house. I realized with a burst of understanding that she was escaping from the relatives as well. She looked me over, her eyes fierce inside thick wings of black eyeliner, lips pointed and lacquered an uncompromising red, hair a shimmering, coal black tower, and skin powdered white.

  I think we stared at each other a full minute before either of us spoke. Auntie Aya finally gestured a little with the cigarette and said, “Go ahead, then, let me see you walk across the room.”

  I had the sense that I was auditioning for the role of a lifetime, and I put everything I had into it. I settled on something between a swoon and a glide, attempting to use every muscle in my body while pretending for some reason to be waving my own smoldering cigarette. When I finally made it across the room this way, I touched the wall like a swimmer and shimmied back to the other side again.

  “Mm-hm, mm-hm,” she said. She took a deep drag on the Pall Mall, her eyes slivering narrow and wet, the cigarette ember glowing. Then came a long, steamy exhale, after which she said, “I see you haven’t a bone in your body.”

  Bud laughs anxiously and averts his eyes when one of his brothers returns from Auntie Aya, but I know that Bud has also consulted her on treatments. One night, I overhear him murmur to his sister over the phone, asking if she ever sees the spirit of their father. Because, he says, he has. He has spotted him wandering through the kitchen at night. He describes the ghost looming over the refrigerator door, as if he would like to peek inside—but how can a ghost open a refrigerator? A fiery thrill runs from my nape through my wrists. He’s afraid that his father is hungry, the same father he fed spoon by spoon during his last days on the earth. Bud asks, Is this possible? If so, what should I feed him? How? I strain to listen, desperate to know the answer, but it’s hard to make out his whispered Arabic. A few days later, I find a small glass full of watery araq beside a small loaf of bread on the window ledge in the dining room.

  This is Auntie’s first visit to this country in years, and she is not used to things. She, my mother, Monica, Suzy, and I patrol the shopping malls, where Aya is upset by fashion offenders—particularly the ones in stretch pants or matching pastel sweat suits. “Now, will you look at that?” she flares up, startling a woman in a tight green sweat suit. “Isn’t that just a shame? Why does she want to squeeze herself into something like a little pork sausage? Why must she do it in that color? Will nothing else satisfy her?”

  Mom steers us quickly into the food court. There, Aya samples my Orange Julius with a parfait spoon, looks astounded, and pronounces it inedible. She rests her chin on her fist and sighs. “In Jordan,” she comments, “not many can afford fashion, so it isn’t such an issue. But in America, where anyone can afford anything, why this?” she laments, gazing at the sea of jeans and sweat suits. “Why?”

  Aunt Aya happens to have arrived at the time of the Long War between me and Bud. This war started sometime after I turned thirteen, around the day that Bud came home early from work, got the mail first, and found a tattletale midterm report enumerating my many crimes in Algebra 1, including talking in class, passing notes, cutting up, failing the first quiz, and general lazy, goon-headed good-for-nothingness. When the school bus pulled up in front of our house that afternoon, I spotted Bud from the bus window. He was standing at the bottom of the driveway, waiting.

  He flapped the white letter in the air as I walked up, ranting that this time I’d done it—I’d really, really done it. He called the parents of one of the girls I’d giggled with throughout algebra and told them that their daughter, Molly, was a “criminal” and a “bad influence” and to keep her away from his daughter. He tore the school le
tter into confetti, threw the pieces into the air, grabbed his hair, and shouted, “That’s it! Finish! No more! I can’t take it!” He was sending me back to Jordan, he couldn’t take one more second of any of it.

  For as long as I’d known him, there were times when my father’s emotions roared and threatened to incinerate him and everyone else in the room. Bud would come home in a bad mood from his latest stressful, impossible job—as a court bailiff, carpet salesman, hospital custodian, department store security guard—go to the upstairs bedroom, and storm around over our heads, cursing and stomping and yelling to himself until he’d yelled it all out. He was trapped, destitute in the American dream. Then he’d come back down to take us out for ice cream. These episodes were like electrical storms, breaking with ferocity and passing swiftly. This wasn’t a problem for me until I hit thirteen. Then it was as if the chemical composition of the air in our house had changed. Something made Bud edgy and frantic and paranoid, and something made me skulk in my room for hours on end.

  Our fights roll like thunder through the house. It’s the way I’m dressed, the late hour I returned home, a bad mark in school. Frequently it will be about something as subtle as a mere glance or my “attitude.”

  “Look at the expression on her!” Bud cries out midfight if I pout or roll my eyes. “Look at the belligerence—it’s written all over her!”

  In the end, the cause of the fight is always the same: the astonishing fact that I’m growing up. Worse, this happens to be going on in America, where to Bud’s mind girls are famous for such stunts. He blames my whole adolescence on the United States and believes that in Jordan the problem would be solved.

  “You say one more word like that,” he threatens, pointing—I may have said a sulky “Fine” in response to his “How was school?”—“and I’m sending you back home to Jordan! You’ll go live with Auntie Aya. She’ll straighten you out a hundred percent.”