The Language of Baklava

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  Then he invites the audience over to his house for dinner.

  Each event is one piece in the path of claiming myself. As I begin to teach and publish, I begin to own a little more of my own story. I buy a car, move to the West Coast. Bud watches me with pride but also something like confusion: I am at the microphone, I am holding the pen—this is not the way he would tell the story! And maybe there is a little sadness there as well—the sadness that comes from watching something new grow out of your hands, knowing that to let it grow you have to open your hands.

  “INV ITE THE AUDIENCE” TOMATO CHICKEN MENSAF

  A crowd-pleasing variation on classic lamb (or goat) mensaf.

  Place the chicken in a large cooking pot and add water to cover. Simmer for 20 minutes, skimming off the fat.

  Place the tomatoes, cinnamon, salt, and pepper in the pot with the chicken and simmer for 30 minutes.

  In a small frying pan, sauté the onions in the olive oil until tender. Add the onions to the chicken and continue to simmer.

  Simmer the rice in the chicken broth until the liquid is absorbed, about 20 minutes.

  Sauté the pine nuts in the butter until they are lightly brown and fragrant.

  Place the pieces of bread over a large serving dish. Spread the cooked rice over the bread. Place the chicken on the rice and pour half of the onions and tomato sauce over this; save the other half in a serving dish. Top with the sautéed pine nuts.

  Some people who can’t get enough of a good thing also add a few extra pats of butter here and there before, and even after, serving.

  MAKES 4 SERVINGS.

  EIGHTEEN

  The Best Cook in the Family

  It takes twenty years for me to get back to Jordan. After college and graduate school, there is debt, travel, debt, teaching, debt, and work and debt and work—so much that I lose sight of myself. I have published a novel, but my life doesn’t exactly crack open, the angels don’t pour down. There is still debt and work. After nine years of teaching, I decide to apply for a Fulbright fellowship to live in Amman, Jordan. I write in my application that I want to do research for a new novel. But after I drop it in the mailbox, I walk away with a dull, chilled, grayish sensation in my stomach. I don’t entirely understand why I’ve written this proposal. When I receive the grant, instead of plotting my novel, I start wondering what on earth I’m going to do with myself in Amman.

  My sense of connection to Jordan has been winnowed down by time, my memory of the place gone soft and silvery as a piece of drift-wood. My Jordanian relatives continue to move in and out of America—virtually all of Bud’s brothers have moved back to Jordan over the years—and Bud continues to talk about Jordan as if we’ve just left it. But I no longer catch traces of its scent or the rushing sense of its light in the summer. I’m an American, with only a few lingering suggestions of another place in my nature: I stuff the teapot with fresh mint; I use obscure aphorisms to illustrate points; sometimes I invite too many people over for dinner—more guests than there are chairs to seat them. I want people to come without invitation, walk in the door and lean over the counter while they inhale the garlic, and eat too much at dinner.

  My flight to Jordan goes in two legs: America to Britain is filled with people in business dress and a smattering of tourists. At Heath-row, it takes me some time to locate the gate for the flight to Amman. It turns out to be at the end of a long, crowded corridor filled with tourists from Spain and Portugal. As I get closer, I notice what I think is a marching band in black uniforms milling around the Jetway. Not until I’m almost at the gate do I realize I’m actually looking at a group of women in hejjab—the long black veil that covers the hair and circles the face. I step back into the busy concourse, staring at the women in the gate; my hands feel cold and slick. That is when I first understand that I’m really going to Jordan. I remember passing the dark, liquid forms of veiled women in the streets of Amman. Some of them had slots in their veils for the eyes; occasionally there were some whose faces were entirely covered, elusive as living shadows.

  On the flight, I’m mildly disappointed to be seated next to a businessman who disappears into his newspaper and a mist of lemony cologne. I’d love to talk to somebody about just about anything. We stop in Beirut to let some passengers disembark. There’s a layover, but we aren’t allowed to get off the plane, just invited to stand and stretch. I go to the door of the plane and look out into the glowing Lebanese sky. There are several languorous soldiers with iridescent automatic weapons tilted against their shoulders, standing at the foot of the stairs—guarding us or guarding Lebanon, I’m not sure which. The physical fact of those oiled, insectlike weapons disturbs the air and causes an instant physical contraction. I shrink away from the luxurious blue sky, back into the cave of the plane.

  During the same stop, some of my fellow passengers consult compasses and unfurl their prayer rugs in the central aisle of the plane. The businessman beside me takes the pages of the newspaper he’d been studying and lays them out on the floor. They pray there in the middle of everything.

  After growing up with Bud’s idea that Jordan is our truest, essential home, a part of me has come to believe it. My grant proposal describes a novel that I will write about characters undergoing ambitious self-excavation, recovery, and reconciliation as they move between countries. It is set in both America and the Middle East, and it is meant to draw together my own deep cultural ambivalences—to try to look right at the conundrum of being Arab-American. Arab and American. But what I think is a project proposal is really the crude outline for the process I want for myself. Sometimes it’s too intimidating to look at things directly, to think, Now for the first time I will go to live in Jordan, I will choose it freely, and I will see if this place has anything at all to do with me. The airplane door thunks shut for the last leg of the trip. As the plane taxis down the runway, the fear that perhaps I don’t belong in Jordan at all begins to fill me, overtaking my knees, my hands, my breath. It tightens like a net. I try to breathe deeply. There’s the sound of rustling papers. A woman across the aisle unwraps an elaborate portable meal of lamb, onions, squash. I inhale the scent of rice with fried nuts and cinnamon and feel calmer.

  The pilot comes on the intercom and announces in French, Arabic, and English that for our takeoff out of Beirut the lights must be extinguished. The aisle lights, the overhead lights, the little private reading lights all go out. I hear passengers exchanging theories about why this is done. Their voices seem like confidences in the dark. One passenger says it’s simply easier for navigation at night, but another says it’s so bored, armed teenagers—or freedom fighters—on the ground won’t be tempted to shoot at the planes. There is pitch-blackness as we roar down the runway, and when we lift off, I feel invisible, lighter than the unlit air, rising into the night, a transparent blackness.

  Just before I left for Jordan, my mother unearthed an old family photograph. It shows a lineup of devil-eyed, dusty-skinny, scaly-kneed boys. My father is down toward the smaller end of the range. There were too many rough little boys to count—how could my grandmother keep track of them all?

  “You know, there’s a streak of insanity in the Abu-Jaber family,” Mom said. Her voice was strained when we first discussed the trip: I would go off for a year in another country. And not just any country, of course, but the place that pulled at the seams of their marriage, the very fabric of our family life.

  She ran her fingers along the edge of the old photographs. These were the tiny black-and-white snapshots, trimmed in wavy white borders, of Bud’s before life, the place where even Mom could not go. In them, he posed Tarzan style, sylph skinny, on the rocks at Ma’in, a Jordanian hot springs. The mist in the air and the gray tones of the little photographs made everything look smoky and prehistoric. Dad scampered over the boulders, shouting, “Flash Gordon—hooray!” Or he pointed his finger fencing style, scratching out the mark of Zorro in the air—his other hand held back and skyward as if for balance. In another pile
, Mom’s old snapshots showed her sitting neatly in white knee socks and a Brownie uniform, bangs combed demurely over her forehead, trimmed straight above the eyebrows. Her pale eyes were sweet, luminous, and innocent—still blissfully unaware of the leaping Zorro on the other side of the world.

  My mother is the voice of sanity in our family—for which I love her beyond all reckoning. She has always held the same job as a reading teacher, she wears soft, unfussy clothes and shoes, keeps her hair cropped close, relies on a firm, brick-colored lipstick. But on that day, just a week before my departure, she tucked the photographs back in the envelope—such a slim container for a legacy. She sighed and tapped the edge of the envelope. She would have liked to tell me not to go, I realized, but she also wouldn’t let herself do it. She wasn’t like her own mother, who insisted on her own way even when she knew it was impossible. Mom knew that I needed to do this and that she couldn’t follow me. The TV news program swirled with startling images of the Middle East: angry men holding guns, frightened women scurrying under beetle black veils. There was this to consider, and then there was also the fact that it seemed nothing short of a miracle that Bud was still managing to live in America, that his homesickness hadn’t torn him—and us—to pieces.

  As we sat there, contemplating the envelope of photos, I wished Mom would tell me not to go.

  She frowned at the envelope as if she were concentrating very hard. I bit the inside of my lower lip. If she had told me not to go, would that have stopped me? Very possibly. Instead, she finally shook her head and said, “You’d better pack some fancy clothes—they love dressing up for dinner over there.”

  My family is full of snappy dressers, big dreamers, holy fools, drug addicts, riot starters, layabouts, poets, con men, gurus, murderers, gamblers, diplomats, tyrants, professors, vicious gossips, magicians, toughs, snobs, petty thieves, big crooks, rich guys, mesmerists, gigolos, and fancy idiots.

  The women wear too much makeup and jewelry, their heels are too high, they have too much hair, and they flaunt their beauty like a torch, even after it’s burnt out and fallen to cinders. The men lie and charm and steal—especially from one another. The Abu-Jaber women run away from their men, deer-wild, into the night.

  There’s very little in the way of middle management in this family, very little domestication, serenity, or respectability.

  What’s more, they’re proud of it.

  I don’t know if these attributes are just a reflection of all families or more particularly of the Abu-Jabers. Because, let’s face it, they can also be party starters, big spenders, yarn spinners, magnetic, and plain exciting. Arabs and Americans alike can’t quite seem to resist their spell, can’t help but get tangled up with them, fall for their schemes, defend their outrages, adopt their illegitimate children, bail them out of jail, and listen to their sob stories.

  When I get to Jordan, that same bunch of shifty-eyed, crook-grinning uncles is there, three times as big as those skinny boys used to be, their faces pure reflections of years of wisecracking, drinking, and self-destructing. Some of them lived in the States long enough to have three careers and raise their children to adulthood, but one by one the brothers all were eventually called back, as if drawn by the very essence of blood. And now they call me back as well. Americans never think I look Middle Eastern, but in Jordan, the people who know my family say, “Oh yes, I can tell you’re an Abu-Jaber.”

  If I ask how they can tell, they roll their eyes, chuckle wryly, and say, Well, you have that thing, the way you laugh and walk and that way you have.

  I ask my Jordanian friend Mai what that means and she says, “You know, it’s that crazy Abu-Jaber way. You’re all like that!”

  Two things take place as soon as I get to Amman. The first is that my American friends are seized with curiosity about this place that I have gone off to, and one after another, they schedule visits. The other thing is that every day there is the tinny ring of my little telephone on the kitchen wall and then the rumbly, accented voices of my many uncles, calling me to their tables. Uncle Jack is having a dinner party at their city house, but Uncle Hal wants a party at his house in the country. Uncle Frankie proposes a small meal at their place near the embassy, but Uncle Danny wants a big feast at his desert retreat. When, in addition to all the other invitations, I accept an early invitation to Uncle Rafiq’s house, a controversy arises, as Uncle Rafiq is not a true uncle, but the son of my grandfather’s brother. As such, he is considered something of an outlander, a meddlesome pot stirrer, and—I’m informed by an auntie—I should have waited several more months to go to his house if I was going to insist on seeing him at all.

  After an elaborate, multicourse meal at his palatial home on a street lined with soughing trees, Rafiq takes me aside and tells me that my grandfather was “single-handedly responsible for the downfall of the Abu-Jaber family.” He doesn’t elaborate on this statement, but he does grin and abruptly wander off alone into another drawing room, as if he has finally delivered the message he’s held in his pocket for sixty years.

  My uncles’ dinners are massive, and each one takes up half a day. One must arrive early for the mezza course. The style of the mezza reflects the personality of the host. At some homes, there are special breads and dips made sumptuous with olive oil, fried nuts, fresh herbs, and so on. At other places, like my Uncle Hal’s big country house, it’s roasted nuts, olives, fresh whole tomatoes, cheeses and cucumbers, and a knife. Always there is araq.

  So much food. It’s hard to imagine how much food there is. This is a country crowded with Palestinian refugees who were pushed along with parents and grandparents across the border, where so many people are hungry, where there are demonstrations in the street when the price of bread rises by a few pennies. Food is one of the primary values in Jordan. The country isn’t wealthy enough to pretend it doesn’t matter or to imagine that dieting and slenderness are signs of beauty and virtue. There are stories in Jordan about men placing an anklet around their new wife’s slim ankle with the expectation that if she’s happy, she will fatten during the marriage until the anklet is tight. Eating her way into captivity, Gram says tartly when she hears this story.

  According to my father, when he was a child, he and his brothers would gang around the dinner table until his mother and sister would appear with a platter of chicken at the head of the table and pass it into a sea of boys’ hands.

  “By the time it got down to me and the other little brothers, we’d be lucky to get a wing or a back,” Bud said.

  In my uncles’ houses, they lean over me while I eat and cry out in despair, “Is that all you’re having? Are you shy? Shall I help you?” They lift handfuls of food to my lips, urging me, “Min eedi, ” or pile heaps of rice and chunks of meat onto my plate. For every bite I take, they add three spoonfuls. I learn to eat very slowly.

  I come back to my rented apartment after each of these events angry with myself for losing another day and vowing to get more work done tomorrow. I stare hard at the telephone when it rings. I’m supposed to be working on my novel, but within a few weeks of arrival, I realize that I’m not even trying. I avoid the stack of loose, smudgy pages. The phone jangles with invitations. If I don’t answer, people stand on the lawn in front of my apartment building and shout up to my third-floor window or come upstairs and rattle my doorknob, calling to me to let them in. After the meals, the uncles call again and demand, “What do you think? Do I make the best eggplant? Was it better than Uncle Jack’s eggplant? Who is the best cook in this family?”

  And I say, “You, Uncle, you’re the best cook in the family!”

  Most of the uncles are good cooks. But there is one bad cook: Bachelor-Uncle Omar, who is actually my father’s cousin. They call him “Bachelor Omar” because he was turned down for marriage approximately twelve times, each time after he’d cooked for his bride-to-be. His technique isn’t bad, but his ingredients are terrible. While he has many charms and talents, my bachelor-uncle is cheap— brilliantly, relentless
ly, stunningly cheap. His refrigerator, like my grandmother’s refrigerator in New Jersey, is packed full of oozing, aging food. He will buy the gristliest, yellowest, most unchewable lamb, then cook and serve generous quantities of it. He’s quite well-off, he has advanced degrees in mathematics and architecture, he’s entertaining and warm, but he will serve you festering meat.

  I invite Uncle Omar out for dinners. He refuses loudly, adamantly, trumpeting that restaurants are for sissies, dandies, and fancy idiots. He says, “Why should we go out to these ridiculous places when there is food a hundred times better at home!”

  About a month after arriving in Jordan, I receive my first visitor from America—my single, pretty friend Tess. Bachelor-Uncle calls right away. “I want you both to come to dinner tonight. What does your friend look like?”

  “But—” I cannot come up with a convincing dodge under pressure. I stammer and sweat and avoid looking at my reflection in the edge of the china cabinet mirror. “She—she—just got here!”

  Tess looks up from the jumble of clothes spilling out of the suitcase onto her bed, tosses her heavy yellow hair over one shoulder, and waves at the phone.

  “Then she is hungry!”

  I reluctantly convey the invitation to Tess, and she is delighted. I warn her that the evening might be a little nonconformist, but this pleases her. She is twenty-four years old, on her first overseas vacation, and she says she wants to have experiences. “I’m ready to see the real Jordan,” she says earnestly.

  Bachelor-Uncle begins courting Tess immediately. He whisks her sweater from her shoulders as soon as we walk in, tosses it on a distant piece of furniture, and begins lecturing on art, philosophy, and his theories of class and economics. Tess nods, stunned into silence. His home is spacious yet formal, full of serious drawing rooms and tall, straight-backed chairs. But he takes us right into the kitchen, which is literally steaming with oven heat, and seats us at the kitchen table. The glass cabinet doors are beaded with condensation. “You know why people are poor?” he says, rummaging through his refrigerator. “Because they give away their possessions.”