The Language of Baklava

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  Local musicians spread out their instruments and play guitar rocking back and forth in a chair or standing, bouncing loose-jointed, singing on the squat platform at the front of the café. Sometimes Timmy’s friends let him come up and accompany them on his tambourine. Some of the musicians are off-key, but a few possess clear, sparkling voices or a tender, refined ability to play guitar. Inside, the radiators hiss and the music arcs along the wooden ribs of the old building and down through rickety floorboards. I sit at a table near the stage and pour a misty stream of sugar from the glass canister into my cappuccino, sweetening it into candy. I love the chocolatyroasted coffees rich and airy with steamed milk, the inverse of my father’s blunt, black Arabic coffee.

  My days of candy and nights of cappuccino, the music and the boyfriend are all my own. There is nothing here that Bud knows about or would approve of. And there is nothing better than being surrounded by this complicated atmosphere of music, old wooden furniture, high, dark windows, and plumes of steam from the cappuccino machine. The night belongs to me alone. It is a creature of my own invention—a new, seductive country.

  My dormitory will be closed for a month during Christmas break. At this point, I’ve made several short visits home and gotten sick. It doesn’t happen on every visit, but it happens enough that I start to anticipate the symptoms almost every evening of every visit: the subcutaneous, creeping sensation of nausea, its rising, unignorable bloom in the gut, the sweating palms and clammy mouth. After weeks of candy, I crave my father’s cooking; I meditate on it during my silent rides back home. But I never know what will happen. I may eat the big welcome-home dinners only to wake in the predawn to throw up again and again. I begin to mourn the food even before I eat it, wondering, Will I keep it down this time?

  It’s a frigid night when I return home for Christmas break—too cold to snow, a startling clarity to the air. I drag my bags into my bedroom and look around wistfully. My parents have had it with driving for miles to get groceries. They’re tired of being shocked awake in the early dawn by gunshots from hunters lost in the backyard. They’ve decided to sell the country home and move into a brick house back in the suburbs that we moved away from five years ago. This will be the last Christmas we spend here. For all my moping about the isolation when I lived here, I’ve grown to love the thought of this house. It’s become a romantic Walden fantasy in my imagination.

  My bedroom is blue from the early winter moon. Through the frost-stenciled window I can hear rushing fir boughs and the creak of icicles tightening. I gaze into the dim mirror above my dresser: chopped hair, shadowy eyes, hollow cheeks. I feel fragile, almost translucent. Suzy has been occupying my room while I’ve been away. I can see her refined touches—some of my old blacklight posters, strawberry candles, and whirling mobiles have been cleared away in favor of a painted parasol, a straw hat, and a lot more light and air. I feel ghostly, not fully returned.

  I sit in the living room before dinner and contemplate the dwarf plastic evergreen blinking on the end table; there’s a lilt of snow sighing past the living room windows. I realize, in this confluence of sweet, brief return and loss, that I think I miss Timmy. I hadn’t expected this. I’d already started cataloging his imperfections before leaving on break. His teeth are small yellow squares, his breath has a fishy cat food edge, and the whole tambourine-playing routine has lost its charm. Over the past several weeks, while he’s stood on-stage, wagging and snapping the tambourine between hand and hip, I’ve fidgeted in the audience, uncertain if my father’s disapproval is enough of a reason to date someone. I’d contemplated breaking up with Timmy before the holidays but had gotten preoccupied with packing. And now, far from the actual Timmy, the idea of Timmy isn’t too bad. It gives me a focal point. Ours has not been a terribly romantic relationship—we’ve barely even kissed—but it is not so much Timmy that I miss as my late nights of music and cappuccino. A month is a long time to be away from my new, barely constructed life. So I give myself to this secret grief. I intend to pine for Timmy, write him agonized letters every night, and regularly sneak him calls, leaning into the rhythm of his breathing.

  But tonight I put aside my longing and wash up for dinner. For my first night back, we’re having chicken fatteh— a layered dish of toasted bread, chicken, onion, spices, and pine nuts covered with a velvety yogurt sauce. It’s so lush and lovely, I eat recklessly, like an amnesiac, with no awareness of anything but the table, the sweet sadness of return, and the moon hanging like a sigh just beyond the long dark fields.

  HOMECOMING FATTEH

  Place the yogurt in a double layer of cheesecloth, tie the ends to the kitchen faucet, and let drain into the sink for about 1 hour, until thickened.

  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Place the chicken in a bakingdish and drizzle with 3 tablespoons of the olive oil and the lemonjuice. Mix the spices in a small dish and sprinkle over the chicken;surround it with the onion pieces. Cover the chicken with foil andbake for 1 hour. Remove the foil and let the chicken brown in theoven for 5 minutes.

  Meanwhile, cook the rice in the chicken broth.

  Fry the pieces of pita bread in the remaining oil until crisp and brown.

  Stir the crushed garlic into the thickened yogurt. Line a baking dish with the fried bread and place the cooked rice on the bread. Cut the chicken into pieces and lay them on the rice, then cover the chicken, rice, and bread with the garlic yogurt. Sprinkle the parsley and pine nuts over the top and serve.

  MAKES 4 SERVINGS.

  During the meal, Bud decides it’s time to evaluate what all this American schooling has made of me. He gives me big spoonfuls of fatteh, insists that I take more broccoli, and heaps the rice onto my plate. Then he sits in his spot opposite me, frowns, and says, “Ya Ba, now tell me again. Say it slow. What is your major?”

  I look at my sisters. They’ve become even better allies since I’ve been away at college, funnier, smarter, and more entertaining than when I was at home. On the verge of starting high school, Suzy has grown poised and graceful, her dark, regal eyes watchful. Monica is still in junior high. She’s charged up, too wired to gain an ounce of weight, a wise-guy grin on her lips. They squint snake eyes at Bud, but he doesn’t notice. Suzy tries to deflect him by saying, “Can we just eat? She’ll tell you later—the broccoli’s getting cold!”

  Bud waves his fork at me. “She can chew and talk.”

  I huff and fan myself as if it’s all too much for me to think about. “I hardly just finished my first semester. I barely know where the dining hall is, much less what my major will be.” I scoop up a big forkful of fat teh and say, “Hey, Dad, this is fantastic—I could eat this whole tray!”

  He points his fork at me. “Okay, okay, sure, but what do you think your major is going to be?”

  Bud didn’t go to college—how does he even know about majors? I feel harried, and finally I blurt out, “Well then, I guess English, probably.” Then I bite the inside of my mouth. I focus all my powers of concentration on trying to spear a pine nut with my fork.

  Bud inhales deeply through his nose. This was not the correct answer. The correct answer is medicine, law, maybe engineering. He has always told me to make my own money and to have a trade. Not to depend on a man for anything. Now he shakes his head as if he’s trying to clear it. He says, “English? You already speak English!”

  “English literature,” Mom says.

  He squints at this, then says, “I knew that.” He glares at the table. “And I don’t think I like it.”

  Foolishly, I sigh.

  He draws his head back. “Are you telling me that English literature is a trade? Are you telling me that it’s going to give you food and a house? Why don’t you just run out in the streets and start drinking and smoking cigars and going around with strange men while you’re at it?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?” I cry.

  “What’s anything got to do with anything!” he retorts. His eyes are so wide, they look peeled. He shoves back his
chair, the rubber stoppers on the legs making a terrible shriek against the linoleum. He jabs one finger against his temple. “You think I don’t remember anything, but I remember everything!” And with that he storms from the room.

  That night I’m awakened by roiling nausea. Over the following three and a half weeks of vacation, I have several more terrible bouts with vomiting. I sweat and shudder over the toilet, nose running, the bitter shock of bile burning my mouth and sinuses. While I’m home on break, I read a magazine article that suggests that people store specialized and symbolic sorts of pain in different body parts—tight chest, throbbing head, achy back—each limb betraying something about the condition of our lives. If this is so, then there is nothing more uncannily, ineffably wrong than the condition of nausea. There is no part of me that can stand apart and watch it happen. I turn inside out, my body physically rejecting the food. A rejection of something more powerful than food.

  Bud doesn’t ask any more questions about my major during that break, but now my visit feels less a truce than a standoff. Bud and I sit silently in the living room together. He naps or falls into trances under the newspaper, but I sense that he is still monitoring me, his gaze edging over the top of the paper, appraising me. I stare at the TV and train my thoughts on missing my boyfriend. Then, in my peripheral vision, I’ll see the edge of the newspaper go limp and I’ll snap to attention, saying, “What.”

  Bud’s face goes slack and innocent. “What—what?” he says. Then, indignant, “What!”

  When I sense that Bud is about to start asking questions about college, my intentions, my trade, or anything remotely related to such topics, I flee to my room, fed up and misunderstood, aching to be back at school, wishing away the few remaining days of my vacation. I begin another florid, top-secret love letter to Timmy, “Being away from you is ABSOLUTE AGONY,” and follow that with, “Here at home, the lunatic is running the asylum. . . .” The letters are all complaints. I stash them in my suitcase, thinking I will give them to Timmy once we’re reunited. As it turns out, I will never do so. When I next actually lay eyes on him at school, I will be so stunned by the difference between my memory of Timmy and the reality of Timmy that I’ll feel a little surge of rage, as if he’d deliberately tricked me, and end things there and then.

  One night, not long before I’m to return to school, I wake in the early morning night. I am instinctively clenched, my mouth clamped shut, anticipating the nausea that usually wakes me at such an hour. But that’s not it. I gradually sense a pale lavender light pulsing through my bedroom curtains. I sit up, curious and oddly hopeful, and swing my feet out of bed. The colored air makes me feel buoyant and soft, as if I’m floating to the window. Outside, the immense country night is ribboned with eerie streaks; unearthly tones rise like smoke signals from the horizon. What am I seeing? I don’t know how long I stand there, looking. The light makes a photographic negative of the world—blackening the snowfields and rinsing open the night so it looks pure and violet, like moonlit sand—and this seems to have the effect of dissolving time itself, turning it one-dimensional, slight as breath.

  I’ve read about moments in books where the author says that while one is contemplating the physical world, a sort of veil is lifted and there is a glimpse of the infinite. For me it’s the reverse. The light roots me to the floor, the window, the snow-shaking, windy sky. It pulls me immediately and irresistibly into the senses, the physical world, and I feel a startling cellular jolt of exquisite love and connection to the people who lie asleep in the purple lights and in all the sleepy, snowbound houses around us. It is like a benediction. I sense the distances between places, the country house and suburbs, even between America and Jordan, start to disintegrate. Geography turns liquid. There is something in us connecting every person to every other person.

  After some time, the lights diffuse and I turn away from the windows. I realize that I am very hungry. Instead of returning to bed, I go upstairs, cross the night canyon of the living room, and head into the kitchen, where the refrigerator waits for me, humming.

  The white door gives with a kiss of suction. Its glass shelves are crowded with the leftovers from our big meals. There are bowls of stuffed grape leaves, roasted chicken with garlic, and lamb kibbeh. But I see what I want tucked in back in a plain white soup bowl— yogurt lebeneh. It is the simplest dish in the world: yogurt that’s been drained and thickened so it’s mild and rich as cream. You eat it with a little salt and a drizzle of good olive oil on top, and you scoop it up with a loaf of warmed pita bread. I sit alone at the kitchen table in the afterglow of the spotlit winter night and dip pieces of bread into a dish of lebeneh.

  Tonight, this is the purest food in the world. Mother’s milk. It is the sort of food that can’t be replaced by anything else.

  For my remaining time at home, I sleep the nights from beginning to end. The nausea has stopped as mysteriously as it started. I sleep soundly and dreamlessly, and I wake with a good taste in my mouth.

  SEVENTEEN

  A New World

  After graduating from college, I take lots of small jobs—waiting tables, cooking chili, eggs, steak, and hash browns over spattering grills, or wheeling office chairs around a variety of cloud-carpeted offices, carrying manila folders in both arms. I try marrying a sweet boy from my writing class—I can’t see any other way of leaving my parents’ home. But I can’t be married with much success, it seems, because during my twenties so much of me still belongs to my parents. And also because I’d grown up in confinement and now there is no part of me that can bear anything like more confinement. I don’t feel married at all, not one bit, even though I do enjoy eating lunch with the boy. So one day after washing the dishes, I sigh and say, “Yeah, I’m gonna take off now.” He and I split up in a very friendly, sociable sort of way. Not until much later—beyond the ending point of this very book—do I own enough of myself to know how to marry for the good, pure sake of marriage and not for the sake of running off.

  The one thing I’d taught myself in my childhood confinement is the thing that stays with me through college, work, and marriage, and that is to write. I learned that no one can stop me or make me tell the story any differently from the precise, exact, ruthless way I want to tell it.

  I publish two poems in my senior year of college, and I remember the pure, physical pleasure of seeing my voice caught and pressed into print for the first time. I’m nervous about showing the poems to my parents because, of course, even with the validation and liberation of publishing, the next new fear is waiting for me around the corner. What if nobody likes it? What if they’re angry or hurt or upset by what I’ve written? But at least I have the one good fortune of an immigrant’s child—to write in a language my father doesn’t read fluently. Bud says he loves the poems.

  I give up on all the little jobs and go to graduate school, trying to find the trail that will take me to a writing life. I try to learn how to write by sinking myself into reading. My attic apartment is so full of novels, I have to go out onto the little balcony to read them. And I do, one by one, closely, painstakingly, examining the unconscious elements of style as closely as an apprentice observing a watchmaker or blacksmith, studying her masters. Not long before I graduate, my parents go on a vacation to Hawaii. First, Bud wanders away from a group tour because he believes he hears “the voice of the earth” calling to him ecstatically. He falls behind the walking group (Mom is up ahead, socializing with the others), then scales a fence, climbs over a few ridges and hills, and finally comes upon a small impoverished village where he spends the day eating barbecued chicken, drinking beer, and chatting with his new best friends in the world. When Mom finally realizes that Bud is missing, the group has to spend the rest of the day and part of the night searching for him.

  The second thing that happens is that Mom comes home with a present she’s bought for me in Hawaii: a necklace of deep azure beads sparked with white flecks, lapis, in honor of my completed dissertation—a collection of short st
ories I’ve titled Lapis Lazuli. We sit on the edge of my couch in my rickety, cramped graduate student apartment and she drapes the exquisite beads over my head. The necklace is like a dash of light, by far the nicest thing in the whole apartment. I feel anointed, recognized in the deepest possible way. We laugh over the story of Bud and “the voice of the earth.” I know that she is telling me—as she has in her subtle ways over the years—that I shall be a writer.

  When my first novel, Arabian Jazz, is published six years later, my parents attend my readings in Syracuse and bring their friends. They laugh at the funny parts and look sad at the sad parts and applaud wildly, sitting in the front row with five copies each stacked on their laps. Mom tells me it is great, just great, great! When the question-and-answer session begins, Bud waves his arm from side to side. After I call on him—“Yes, Dad?”—he stands and turns to the audience.

  “I just want you all to know that’s my daughter.” He points at me, in case they might’ve missed me standing there at the podium. “And I don’t know where she got all these ideas in this book, but she really did!”