The Language of Baklava

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  “I’ll never go back there. You can’t make me,” I retort like a movie tough guy, driven by the same surge of rage as Bud’s. “That isn’t my home. I don’t care what you say. My home is here.”

  “You say this to your father.” Bud’s face glows, his hands rise in the air. “You deny your ancestors and culture and your whole family!”

  “My family isn’t Jordanian,” I throw back at him, the refrain of my adolescence. “My family is American!”

  He opens his mouth, pulls at his hair, squeezes shut his eyes. He runs into the next room, as if trying to escape from me, then suddenly bends, seizes one of the fluted dining room chairs, and flings it across the room so hard that it shatters against the wall.

  I remember the home of certain well-to-do cousins in Amman where the girls were indeed polite, docile, and obedient to their father, treating him more like an official in the house than a family member. These daughters attended the private girls’ school with its coal gray uniforms and regimented, straight-backed rows of chairs. They kept their voices low and discreet, bowed their heads, brought their father slippers, cookies, and books, then scurried away, relieved of duty. There was no joshing, no in-depth reading in the bathroom, no flying off the top stairs, and no father in the kitchen. They weren’t friends, they were employees. But my father sees only the polished, lowered tops of the girls’ heads and the tranquil, limpid air in their house. He doesn’t notice the expression on their faces.

  So every week and then every day, my father and I cross words and burnt colors fly over our faces. The tension between us lowers the ceiling, draws in the walls, makes the floor glow—too hot to walk on. When I come home one day and my auntie is waiting in the kitchen, the blood seems to fall from my head in a sheet. My first thought is that she’s come to take me away. Aunt Aya looks me up and down and up again and says, “ Habeebti, you look like the terrible ghost of the Black Valley.”

  She gestures for me to sit, as if it is I who has once again burst into her kitchen, then she sits across from me at the kitchen table, studying my face closely. She turns my hands over, looks at a lock of my hair, frowns, and asks why I’m so thin and white anyway.

  I chew at the edge of a nail for a second, studying the mica speckles in the linoleum floor. Suddenly I am telling her what, at the time, I think the problem is: that Bud wants to ship me back to Jordan. Because somehow, somewhere along the line, I’ve gone bad. Just because I argue with him relentlessly, it doesn’t mean that some very big part of me isn’t convinced that he must be right. He is, after all, the father.

  Her kohl-lined eyes widen and her scarlet mouth falls open. She is sixty, yet her hair is like polished onyx and her eyes are wine black. Her clothes are bright and tropical, given to drifting on the breeze, and she bedecks herself with armfuls of ringing golden bangles.

  “Oh, that is all dog-headed nonsense,” she says. “Look at you—” She seizes my hand and flaps it in the air. “You’re soft as a fish. What are you going to do in Jordan? What would they do with you?”

  She instructs me to stay right where I am, and then she bustles to the front entryway, comes back with a suitcase, and lays it flat on the kitchen table. She unzips the long, whining zipper and the top flaps back, releasing a pungent puff of dust. Inside the suitcase are dozens of small plastic and paper bags filled with all sorts of dried herbs, shrunken buds, and dark spices. “Lucky that Mr. Customs Man didn’t look in this bag!” she says, chuckling. She sprinkles a few pinches from certain containers into a pan of water and makes me a cup of what she calls “shaking tea.” “For when you need to calm down and figure things out,” she says.

  It’s a tawny brown liquid. I inhale, and a mist fills my sinuses and chest. It mingles with the brown melancholy inside of me. It tastes a bit like bark and earth and tears, yet somehow it’s delicious. It releases particles of sleeplessness and sadness embedded within me. I sigh, my eyes well, my nose runs, my mouth waters. I want more. But Aunt Aya says, “That’s enough,” and puts her hand over mine. She examines the empty cup for some sort of sign, then sighs, clicks her tongue, and puts the cup in the sink.

  SHAKING TEA INFUSION (MODERN VERSION)

  In a saucepan, cover and gently simmer all the ingredients except the nuts for 10 minutes. Strain into a nice mug and garnish with the nuts. Serve with sugar or honey.

  MAKES 1 SERVING.

  “Okay,” she says. “I recommend that we bake.”

  “Fine,” I say, then shock myself by saying, “As long as it isn’t Arabic.”

  She lifts a taut brow.

  I lean forward, perverse and obstinate. There is a fine, nictitating tremor in my right hand. I narrow my eyes and say, “I hate Arabic food!” Then I look away quickly, afraid to see her reaction and frightened of my terrible words. Worse even, it seems at that moment, than saying, “I’m not an Arab.” It is like a rush of cold air after holding in my breath for too long. I am dizzy.

  Auntie Aya sits back down across from me, slaps her hand flat on the linoleum, and says, “Fine, I’m not so impressed. I hate it, too!”

  I stare at her. My breath chugs in my chest. I’d expected—I realize now—to be punished for saying such a thing. But that’s not what is happening. Aya’s face is direct and bold. She tosses back a few strands of hair, then looks at me. “But how do you feel about baklava?”

  Something large and heavy opens its wings and begins to lift from my rib cage. Baklava?

  “The Arabs say baklawa, of course, but the Greeks call it ‘baklava.’ I can’t imagine what the Turks call it. And I don’t know who made it first, but we can call it baklava since we both hate Arabic food.”

  I consider this. “Fine,” I say.

  Aunt Aya’s cooking is so good, they say she can tempt angels out of the trees. It’s too good, some of my aunties say, it’s not natural. For some reason, no one can remember her recipes after she demonstrates her dishes, and she never writes them down. If you write them, Aya says, they lose their power. I have been warned by some of the other family not to eat her food, told that it’s magical, a disruptive force.

  “When you’re old enough to know better,” she says as we skim the liquid butter spoon by spoon, “you’ll teach some man how to cook with you. And you’ll see what happens then,” she says, nodding and lowering her eyelids.

  I stop, my spoon full of pale butter foam. “Why, what happens then?”

  “Ahh,” she says, her lashes sinking over the dark mercury of her eyes. “Ahh.”

  I look at the foam in my spoon before I spill it into the bowl.

  Aunt Aya closes up her practice at the Route 57 Chalet. For a week, she comes to our house every day before my parents get home from work. We spend the afternoons together baking voluptuous pastries from a variety of ethnicities. We don’t actually start with baklava, which she says is too “sensitive” at the moment. Our dough rolls out into cream puffs, layered cakes, tortes, kolaches, cookies. This, she says, is my tutorial in “womanliness,” designed to help me make my womanly way in the world. The freezer is filled with desserts.

  “Marry, don’t marry,” Auntie Aya says as we unfold layers of dough to make an apple strudel. “Just don’t have your babies unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

  “How do I know if it’s necessary?”

  She stops and stares ahead, her hands gloved in flour. “Ask yourself, Do I want a baby or do I want to make a cake? The answer will come to you like bells ringing.” She flickers her fingers in the air by her ear. “For me, almost always, the answer was cake.”

  I am silent as I stare hard at the cup glittering with sugar. This is advice, but it feels more like pressing my ear to the wall. I don’t want her to notice how closely I listen, or she might stop talking. What she says rings inside me like a spoon in a crystal glass. After years of assuming that the purpose of all this cooking and working—the purpose of everything, really—was to produce and grow babies, this is the first intimation I have heard of another way through life. It is
the first time I’ve really understood that my aunt, with her houses filled with friends and siblings and servants and lovers, does not have children of her own.

  “And your father! I know. Nobody can talk to that man. Well, your father does not know everything. He thinks he does, but I’m his older sister and I say no. Jordan is not the place he thinks it is. It won’t save him; it can’t even save itself.” She sprinkles a layer of shaved chocolate into the filling for the cream puffs and adds, “It’s never a bad idea to put a secret in your filling.”

  MONA LISA CREAM PUFFS

  TOPPING

  1 dark chocolate bar

  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Stir together the filling ingredients and put aside to set.

  Bring the water to a boil in a saucepan. Add the butter and boil until melted. Add the flour and salt all at once and stir until it forms a dough, then scrape into a mixing bowl. Add the eggs one by one and beat in with a wooden spoon until smooth.

  Scoop heaping tablespoonfuls onto a cookie sheet. Bake 20 minutes, until lightly brown. Let cool, then split open each pastry into equal halves.

  Spoon the filling onto the bottom half of each pastry, shave the chocolate over the filling, then top with the other half of the pastry. You can also conserve some of the chocolate bar, melt it, and pour this over the top of the cream puff, for those who like a crowning touch.

  MAKES 8 TO 10 CREAM PUFFS.

  “Make sure to boil the attar syrup clear, then add the essence of rose so it will bloom,” she says, stirring the pan of sweet syrup. She leans against the oven and folds her arms. “If you’re going to kiss a boy, try to remember to eat a little parsley first. Also, think of a compliment for his mother. That’s always good.”

  “Never let anyone tell you what to say or feel or think. No exceptions. If you can’t say it out loud, then write it on a piece of paper.”

  She tosses some spices into a dry pan. “Heat up your spice before you add it to the mix so it will have something to say.”

  While clarifying butter, she brings her eye close to the skimming spoon, not missing a sliver of foam, and says, “We clean the butter to remind ourselves of the way our lives should be—light, delicate, and pure.”

  “The thing about cinnamon and ginger—they’re pretty, yes, but they also bite, which is more interesting and can be dangerous.”

  “When a man tells you something, I don’t care what it is, look at his eyes and hands. Don’t worry too much about the words. If you can’t see his eyes or his hands, don’t believe any of it.”

  “High heels are good, but don’t forget how to run.”

  “You can be yourself, whoever that is, like these Americans are always saying. But once in a while, it’s better to be a mirage.”

  “How do you do that?” I ask, beating flour off my hands and apron.

  “Ahh,” says my aunt. “You must allow it to occur.”

  “People say food is a way to remember the past. Never mind about that. Food is a way to forget.”

  She is showing me how to make the phyllo dough that constitutes the foundation of so many Middle Eastern pastries. We work standing over the table, wrapping the dough around long, narrow wooden spindles to press out the exquisitely fine, papery sheets. This part of the process had always been invisible to me. As far as I knew, phyllo originated in waxed paper columns in freezer cribs.

  “Food is not sweetness and families and little flying hearts. Look at this!” she cries, holding up a spindle. “Food is aggravation and too much work and hurting your back and trapping the women inside like slaves.”

  From my hunch over the table, I stare up at her.

  “Food is robbery. Did you know that?” She stands straight, a hand-print of flour at the base of her throat. “Let’s say your country hasn’t existed for very long at all. Just say. Then you announce to the world, yes!” She slaps her chest—another bloom of flour. “My people invented baklava! And there you have it, an instant history, a name.”

  “But—Dad says . . .” I struggle, for once in my life, to remember what he says. “Dad says that everyone invented baklava.” It occurs to me only now to wonder what that means.

  Aunt Aya rolls her eyes. “Your father? He’s the worst of the worst. He thinks he cooks and eats Arabic food, but these walnuts weren’t grown from Jordanian earth and this butter wasn’t made from Jordanian lambs. He is eating the shadow of a memory. He cooks to remember, but the more he eats, the more he forgets.”

  I bite the edge of my lip. Somewhere on the horizon line of consciousness, I sense my ancient loyalty to Bud stir. I hesitate, then test an opinion. “That seems sort of . . . well, dramatic.”

  “Dramatic? You think food isn’t dramatic!” she demands, wheeling on me. “You want drama—how about peace in the Middle East?” She yanks the apron from her waist and flings it at the back of the chair. “Fine, I’ll tell you how to do it. Watch.” She sits down, straightens her forearms on the kitchen table, laces her fingers together, and stares at me, her heavy lids drawn back.

  I wait. I wrap my hands around my waist. “I don’t think I—”

  “Who am I?” she snaps. “I am America, Israel, England! What am I doing?” She waits another long moment, her eyes shining. “I’m shutting up and listening.” She draws the last word out so it hisses through the air. “I am the presidents, the kings, the prime ministers, the highs and the mighties—L-I-S-T-E-N!” She spells the word in the air. “The woman who made the baklava has something to say to you! Voilà. You see? Now what am I doing?” She picks up an imaginary plate, lifts something from it, and takes an invisible bite. Then she closes her eyes and smiles and says, “Mmm . . . that is such delicious Arabic-Jordanian-Lebanese-Palestinian baklawa. Thank you so much for sharing it with us! Please will you come to our home now and have some of our food?” She puts down the plate and brushes imaginary crumbs from her fingers. “So now what did I just do?”

  “You ate some baklawa?”

  She curls her hand as if making a point so essential, it can be held only in the tips of the fingers. “I looked, I tasted, I spoke kindly and truthfully. I invited. You know what else? I keep doing it. I don’t stop if it doesn’t work on the first or the second or the third try. And like that!” She snaps the apron from the chair into the air, leaving a poof of flour like a wish. “There is your peace.”

  One day near the end of her visit, Aunt Aya comes over early before I get home from school and bakes something special. She hoists the big round tray from the oven onto the table. It’s a baklava made with our homemade phyllo. “I asked around,” she says. “There are reports that baklava originated in Anatolia—so we’re safe. It’s still not Arabic.”

  Baklava is her specialty. The layers turn flaky and buttery in the oven, but the real glory of this pastry as interpreted by my aunt is its central core of sweet, mild pistachios that roasts and develops during baking. The whole pastry is then sweetened and perfumed like a baby with an attar dashed with sprinklings of orange blossom and rosewater. When I inhale Auntie Aya’s baklava, I press my hand to my sternum, as if I am smelling something too dear for this world. The scent contains the mysteries of time, loss, and grief, as well as promises of journeys and rebirth. I pick up a piece and taste it. I eat and eat. The baklava is so good, it gives me a new way of tasting Arabic food. It is like a poem about the deeply bred luxuries of Eastern cultures.

  Auntie Aya stands over me, watching me eat; she offers no advice.

  That evening, the last before she returns to Jordan, Aunt Aya eats with us one more time. The family’s conversation is lighter and airier than it has been in months. There’s a froth of laughter in the atmosphere, and not a single topic of debate is broached. When Aunt Aya comes forth with the tray of baklava, newly reheated with just a few tiny pieces missing, everyone sits forward and inhales.

  “My sister the magic maker,” Bud says after eating a piece. He applauds and half rises from his seat to bow. It is magic: How could a pastry so dense with ingredients, s
o rich with nuts, be so light on the tongue?

  I am thinking about Aya’s words—about how a mirage sometimes seems better than reality—when Aunt Aya abruptly pushes her chair from the table. “So, brother, are you enjoying our food?” she asks in a not entirely conversational way. Bud blinks. “Good! Because as you know, eating is a form of listening, and I have something to tell you.” She flattens her hands on the table and says, “If you ever say anything more about sending your daughter back to Jordan to live—oh! I will honestly never speak to you again. In fact, I will just go out that door right now and that will be that.”

  Then she stands and walks toward the door.

  I am in for it now. I look at Bud. Astonished, he blinks again, his last bite of baklava still between his fingers. A deep crease forms between his brows. I think, This is going to make things a hundred thousand times worse for me.

  She stops before the door, turns. “I’m going now!” she says. I’m about to bolt from the room.

  Bud looks across the table, and for a moment, the smoke between us seems to subside. His look is tender, almost shy. It is as if we see each other in a way we’d forgotten or lost track of as I’d gotten older. It is a moment of recognition. And I do not know exactly how it’s come to pass.

  “I would never send my daughter away,” he says.

  Neck rigid and fingertips flared, Aya returns to the table and sits back down.

  “This is such delicious baklawa,” I say to my auntie. “Thank you so much for sharing it with us.”

  “You’re welcome,” she says formally. Then she smiles in a weak, relieved sort of way and pats Bud’s cheeks. He is smiling, pink with pleasure.

  “May I have more now?” Bud asks.

  “Of course you may have more, my sweetest little brother. You may have all that you want. I made it for you.”