The Language of Baklava

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  “Well, now,” Tess ventures. “I mean, I can’t imagine that poor people—”

  “It’s true!” my uncle insists. “They do! They throw away perfectly good furniture and dishes! They get rid of all their clothes! Look at this—” He plucks at his paisley shirt with the cat-face buttons. “I found this at a Goodwill in New Jersey twelve years ago. Still like new!”

  Before dinner is served, Bachelor-Uncle announces that there will be a brief musical recital. He leads us into a shadowy room that is Victorian in its arch expansiveness. It is lined with shelves of moldering books, its corners filled with battered musical instruments. He seats us side by side on a starchy, unforgiving chaise and sits directly opposite us on a wooden stool. After picking up a bow, he accompanies himself on cello, swaying back into the sawing bow, singing a dirgelike melody that seems to dip ever deeper with each dark chord: “Do not forsake me, oh, my da-a-a-arling—” These seem to be the only words to the song, which he sings in a grim voice, over and over again. Then he stands and bows. Just as I’m about to stand, he moves to the piano. Tess clasps her hands together, not quite applauding, more as if she’s trying to grab hold of something. “You’re so talented!”

  He nods, then puts one hand to his chest, lowers his head, and looks up at her. “Why, yes, I really am.”

  After a few more renditions of the same song on a few more grieving instruments, it is time to eat. He has cooked all day, he says. He returns us to the linoleum kitchen table, drags open the oven door, and pulls out a big, sumptuous tray of chicken msukhan, which I eye with a cautious optimism. He positions the tray and holds up a big carving knife like a conquering hero, but then he cries out and goes back to the fridge. From the deep of the deeps of the frost-crusted box, he unearths a decrepit chunk of roasted beef that’s been stewing, forgotten in some sort of brine for so long that it looks like a huge dill pickle. He carves it into three hearty chunks and places one on each of our plates. “Now what about that?” he asks, nodding as we gaze upon the glistening hunks. “Can’t have you saying I let you walk away from here hungry, now, can I?”

  I do a sort of Morse code signal to Tess with lowered eyelids and raised eyebrows. As soon as Bachelor-Uncle goes off to the pantry, wondering where he put that case of orange soda he found by the side of the road, I pluck the pickled beef from all our plates and scrape it into the garbage, camouflaging it under some sodden lettuce leaves. When my uncle returns, he stops in his tracks, dumbfounded to see that the roast has vanished.

  I say, “We liked the roast so much, we ate yours as well.”

  He smiles broadly, beatifically. He leans toward Tess, dips his head to one side, and says tenderly, “And do you know that last week one of my neighbors was hounding me to throw it away? He thought it was too old!”

  The next morning, Bachelor-Uncle will call and ask to speak to his “future wife.” My fingers ice up, my chest stiffens; I will hear the tiny expectant lilt of his breath as he waits. I will hand the phone to Tess as she smiles a bright, surprised smile, and when she puts the receiver to her ear, I will watch her eyes blink wide and her porcelain skin turn mulberry red. “I—I’m so honored,” she will say. “But I—I—I—we just met!” She will stare at me like someone drowning, and when I take the phone from her, he will be gone.

  But tonight, all is calm. After the meal, we sit out on the veranda and meditate on the white cup of the crescent moon. The desert landscape around us is clean as a tabletop. The call to prayers sifts through the powdery air, making us quiet and softhearted. My uncle recites romantic poetry from the Bedouin poets, then nods as if he’s told us a secret. He leans forward, elbows on knees, gazing at us dreamily, and says, “Okay, now tell me, honestly, which of us uncles is the best cook?”

  CHICKEN MSUKHAN FOR RICHER OR POORER

  *Sumac is a popular spice in Middle Eastern cuisine; it has a pleasantly sour flavor and may be sprinkled over grilled meats and salads.

  Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

  In a large baking dish, arrange the chicken pieces and drizzle 1⁄2 cup of the olive oil over all. Bake for 30 minutes.

  In a medium frying pan, sauté the pine nuts in 2 tablespoons of the olive oil over medium heat until lightly brown. Scoop out the nuts with a slotted spoon and set aside. Mix the chopped onion with the salt and sumac, place in the pan used for the nuts, and sauté in the remaining 1 tablespoon of olive oil until the onions are translucent.

  Split open the pita bread and line a baking dish with the insides up. Cover the bread with half of the onion mixture. Place the baked chicken pieces over this. Cover with the rest of the onion mixture and heat under the broiler for 5 to 10 minutes. Sprinkle the pine nuts over the top.

  Serve with yogurt, rice, and salad.

  MAKES 6 SERVINGS.

  I’ve been living and not-working in Jordan for five months. I have all but given up on my writing. When I’d begun the novel in the States, I’d set large swaths of the story in the Middle East. Back then it was an imaginary, literary sort of setting, full of abstract gestures, airless and scentless. Now I am swamped by smells and sounds. The dust of Amman shines in my morning windows in twenty different colors and tastes of clay and salt, and I wake to the sound of car horns, crying door-to-door knife sharpeners, flat bells, the disgruntled blat of goats wandering across the backyard. The call to prayers floods the same windows at night and patterns arabesques in my sleep. Jordan towers over me, dashing metaphors and plot out of my head. The neglected novel is barely a little spot of guilt in the back of my mind.

  One morning, I get a call from my uncle Nazeem. I don’t know him very well, in part because he wasn’t among the younger generation of brothers, including my father, who had gone off to America to seek their fortunes. He stayed behind on the land, accumulating his fortune very efficiently, and he almost never traveled anywhere. So his English is fairly haphazard. He knows a lot of English words, just not necessarily in any particular order, his sentences veering into and out of meaning like a drunk driver trying to find the road. I’m on alert when I hear his voice on the phone early one morning, saying, “Diana? Is you?”

  “Yes—uh, Uncle Nazeem?”

  “Is time.”

  “It’s—?”

  “You come to lunch, inside of my house, it is today, it is the time.” Click.

  It happens that my friend Audrey is visiting at the time—the fifth American friend in as many months. In preparation for lunch, Audrey and I change out of jeans. Jordanian high society is a dress-up culture. The women wear full complements of makeup, designer dresses, and feathery gabardine slacks from Italy. The men wear creamy silk ties and fine, tropical-weight wool suits. Since Nazeem is one of the richest and toniest of the uncles, his parties are showy and extravagant. Audrey and I do our best, working from our easygoing American wardrobes.

  Even so, when we arrive, we’re still taken aback by the women who look as though they’re dressed for the Academy Awards with their sequined lapels and slinky skirts and gleaming high heels. The men wear primrose boutonnieres.

  Audrey, a university administrator who is very aware of correct appearances, is upset. She swipes at the skirt of her plain cotton sundress. “I didn’t know this was a special occasion!” she says. “Why didn’t you warn me?”

  But the occasion is lunch.

  Covering the banquet table is a vast mezza course, as intricate and complex as a tiled mosaic. My cousin Habeeb, an aspiring filmmaker, videotapes the food while murmuring an intense narrative description: “Here we have the charming baby aubergines dipped in seven spices and fried with egg and sweetbreads—a soft yet unsentimental dish. Oh, look over there! Honey-and-pine-nut tarts, straight from the hand of the creator. . . .” There are glittering bits of meats, dips, and vegetables prepared with audacious, artistic streaks of olive oil as fresh and more intensely flavored than any classical sauce. There are tiny, jewel-like eggplants, tomatoes darker than rubies, and onions sweeter than milk. Audrey sighs and eats and sighs.

/>   She sits straight up in her chair when I warn her that these are only the appetizers. “There’s more?” she says. She looks at me sideways, trying to see if I’m joking.

  I’d forgotten to warn her about “hospitality.” Hospitality to the Jordanians is more than a virtue; it’s a sacrament and exaltation. It’s risky to compliment anyone here on anything—their shirt, for example—as they’re apt to push it on you in the middle of a dinner party. One of my American friends has an entire man’s suit, three inches too short and two inches too wide—hanging in his bedroom closet owing to a carelessly offered compliment to one of my Jordanian relatives. I instruct Audrey to eat slowly, as I have learned to, to lean away from the plate, to chew each morsel as though your life depends on it, letting entire minutes go by in animated conversation before turning your attention to the next bite. If you don’t empty your plate, it can’t be refilled so quickly. Audrey tries to follow my lead. But despite her propriety and caution, she also has satiny chestnut hair, sleepy eyes, and pillowy lips. There is something accidentally seductive about her slow chewing. The uncles are all entranced watching her eat. Poor Audrey is repeatedly given more lamb chops, the uncles stretching over the table with big silver spoons to tip fresh dollops of stuffed squash onto her plate. They ignore her pleas to stop. “Well! With us she is flirt,” Uncle Nazeem says with great satisfaction, fanning himself with his napkin.

  Like all my uncles, Uncle Nazeem is a flirt. He’s also a dandy; he preens and gazes into mirrors. His natty Italian suits always include a vest, pocket watch, and silk handkerchief. He combs his white hair with intense focus, smoothing both palms straight back along the sides of his head. In my family, Arab hair that’s curly or kinky is frowned upon. So hair is carefully and frequently combed, pomaded, perfumed, tugged, and monitored. Uncle Nazeem always has one hand floating at the side of his head as if to keep his scalp on alert.

  At dinner, Uncle Nazeem sits with his brothers at one end of the long table while my aunties and the children sit at the other. Audrey and I have gotten stranded across from each other, guest-of-honor style, in the midst of the uncles. Audrey is seated between the two biggest flirts, Uncle Nazeem and Bachelor-Uncle, who vie for her attention by fighting over the serving spoon. She tries to distract them by attempting actual conversation.

  “This is incredible food!” she exclaims to Uncle Nazeem, who puffs up to twice his size. His wife, the actual cook, is too far away to hear the compliment.

  “Aha, you think this is good?” says Bachelor-Uncle, rising to the challenge. “You’ll come to my house tomorrow!”

  “Ha, eat and learn,” Uncle Nazeem rejoins.

  “But this squash,” Audrey persists bravely, “this stuffed squash is especially wonderful.”

  “Oh ho, she likes the stuffed squash!” Uncle Jack, the great diplomat, announces to the table, his voice melting with innuendo. “We haven’t seen anyone like that around here for a while.” My uncles flicker to attention, turning toward Audrey with renewed interest.

  Audrey shoots me the look of someone who isn’t sure if the ground has just moved. I would like to be able to lean across the table and tell her that in certain quarters, the Arabic word for squash is also slang for certain female anatomy. But the table is as wide as a river, and every noise ricochets off the marble floors and crystal chandeliers. Instead I try to muster what I imagine might be a pleasant, relaxed smile and chirp, “Audrey loves all sorts of Arabic cooking, like shish kabob and falafel and, um . . .”

  “Oh, really? And stuffed squash?” That’s Uncle Jack again.

  “Yes, yes . . .” Audrey soldiers on. “Did he stuff the squash himself ?”

  I bite my lips.

  “Oh, my God,” says Uncle Jack. “Are you kidding? Nazeem is an amazing stuffer of squash.”

  “Yes,” Bachelor-Uncle joins in, choking on his own laughter. “He’s a grade-A squash stuffer.”

  Audrey’s face is beet red, confounded; she can’t figure it out. “You mean he makes a lot of stuffed squash?”

  The uncles are wheezing and twisting with laughter. Bachelor-Uncle’s face gleams. “Are you kidding? He’s stuffed hundreds of squashes, probably thousands!”

  “Big, little!”

  “Old, young, shriveled, cute!”

  Tears are streaming down their faces; they pound the table so the dishes jump. “All decent squashes run in fear when they see Nazeem coming!”

  “We bow down to his awesome squash-stuffing power!” Bachelor-Uncle screams. Then he crashes out of his chair to the ground and the whole room shakes. He’s laughing so hard, I think he’s going to burst a purplish vein glistening in his forehead.

  Uncle Nazeem’s Egyptian housekeeper, Antonia, bursts through the kitchen door. She is so old that her back is nearly parallel to the floor and her face is scrawled over with deep, soft wrinkles. She sizes up the situation, then slaps the top of Bachelor-Uncle’s head, and he gasps laughter right back into his lungs. Still facing the floor, she unleashes a torrent of Arabic invective. I can’t understand a single word. All I know is that all my uncles are suddenly sitting straight in their chairs, facing ahead, a few of them wiping away tears, but no one is so much as smiling. Antonia slams back through the same door, and we’re not served a single bite more for lunch.

  INNUENDO SQUASH

  *The mengara is a special coring tool for scooping out the insides of squashes, cucumbers, and the like.

  In a medium bowl, combine all the filling ingredients and set aside.

  Trim off the squash stems. Cut 1 inch off the tops of the squashes and save for later.

  Scoop out the inside of each squash with a serrated spoon or mengara,* being careful not to cut through the squash. Dispose of the inside and wash again.

  Fill the squashes loosely halfway up. Close the top of the squash with the squash tops cut to fit. Make sure tops are tightly closed so the rice mixture will not come out.

  In a medium cooking pot, place the filled squashes, add the tomato purée and the garlic, then cover and boil for 5 to 10 minutes. Lower the heat and simmer for another 45 minutes.

  MAKES 4 SERVINGS.

  NINETEEN

  House of Crying

  Great-Uncle Jimmy is the richest of all. His wealth is like a golden drapery tossed over everything. The sweeping steps to his front door are made of a veined pearlescent marble, the air in his house smells like water, and he seems to have trained green parrots to laugh in his trees and flame-colored songbirds to sing in his windows. Smooth Damascene robes and brilliant white Egyptian cottons sheathe his wattled, alligatory neck. I note with interest that the older and wealthier he gets, the more he resembles a lizard. His thyroidal eyes bulge, his gray lips jut, and his hair gleams, stroked back in long, oiled shards like a reptilian crest.

  Bud called me from the States to tell me not to accept Jimmy’s invitation. He has refused to speak to his uncle in over ten years, although Great-Uncle Jimmy appears to be unaware of this fact. Despite Bud’s ambivalences and ongoing feuds with certain family members, he still likes most of his relatives. Jimmy is one of the few relations my father still holds a grudge against; even the delicate patina of distance and time can’t soften it. When I ask Bud why he feels this way, he squints and tucks in his chin, as if there is something before him that he can’t bring into focus. Then he says, slowly, “He makes me upset.” I do know that Jimmy’s personality has always seemed remote. I feel his eyes glaze past me at get-togethers, consigning me to a generic category: one of “the kids.” I assume that Jimmy is just another problem uncle, too rich for his own good. After he bought his first hamburger franchise, he officially changed his name from Jamil to Jimmy, a name he wears as jauntily as the brass-colored toupee he sometimes affects, perched at a rakish angle on top of his silver hair, beret style. “There is something wrong in that house,” Bud tells me tersely, our transatlantic connection hissing as if ocean waves are actually lapping over the cable.

  “What is it?” I press the receiver again
st my head so hard that my ear hurts. I stare at the cover of the Amman phone book, filled with its weird Anglicized spellings of Arabic names. “Why don’t you want us to go?”

  Audrey sits slumped back in one of my straight chrome chairs, her eyes unfocused. She was ready to cut her vacation short following the lunch at Uncle Nazeem’s house, but after a nice trip to the ruins at Petra, she has regained some of her good humor.

  Bud lowers his voice so I can barely distinguish it from the ocean hiss: “If you have to go—” His voice sinks back into the static.

  “What? Dad—I can’t—”

  “Don’t eat the food!”

  It’s evident that a battalion of Sri Lankan maids is running Jimmy and Auntie Selma’s house, along with their beleaguered Egyptian “houseboy,” Roni, a seventy-two-year-old man whom they shout for and order around all day.

  “Now you will see what real Jordanian cooking is about,” Uncle Jimmy assures us, tipping his highball glass in our direction. “Prepare yourselves.” Then he bellows for Roni to refill our drinks. The sinewy, crinkly man comes in, his face as remote as if he’s spent his life gazing just beyond the shoulder of the Sphinx. Audrey and I smile at him, trying to express gratitude and to distance ourselves from Jimmy, but Roni doesn’t register anyone besides his employers. He is barefoot, downcast, and hunched. Where Jimmy is puffed up, Roni is hollowed out; where Jimmy is glacial and cold-blooded, Roni is parched and birdlike.

  Jimmy and Selma usher us into their mahogany-paneled dining room, which is outfitted with five-tiered crystal chandeliers and table linens that glow like moonlight. Each china plate is flanked by heavy silver flatware. Four settings huddle together at the center of a long, icy glide of table. Audrey and I sit, timidly sneaking our chairs into the table. We gaze at the emptiness around us, the high, bright ceilings. Apparently we are the only ones invited.