The Language of Baklava

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  Jimmy might be mythically wealthy, but he is miserly. And unlike Bachelor-Uncle, he does not compensate with other forms of charm or generosity. Roni brings out the mezza, which turns out to be a single tomato cut into quarters, a sliced cucumber, a minute plate of coarse salt, and a tiny pitcher of clear olive oil. He places the food at the center of the table, and instantly the table looks emptier. Audrey glances at me, doubtless wondering if this is another of my uncles’ little inside jokes.

  Aunt Selma picks up her fork and knife, and we follow suit. The utensils feel leaden, as if weighted to trick you into thinking that you’re eating something. The knife handle rolls and swells, a full, sensuous shape in the hand. That’s the most gratifying part of the meal. The tomato is watery and, for some reason, peeled, while the cucumber is warty and bad natured. Aunt Selma proceeds to dissect her portion of the produce into perfect little cubes, like a conceptual chef. Then I notice that Uncle Jimmy has balanced a still-smoking cigarette on his plate and seized his tomato quarter in his fist, as if to do battle with it. But his muscles are palsied; his hand shakes and weaves from side to side, the skinless tomato practically puréed in his hand. He drops the mess on his plate and returns to his highball.

  I begin to sense that we’d better eat our vegetables because there might not be much more to this dinner. I pick up my fork and turn to Audrey, but before I can give her any kind of signal, a terrible noise surges from the next room. It is a cry of inexpressible pain, grief, and dread. It is uncanny, quavering, and sustained, like something from an Edgar Allan Poe story or from the next world altogether. It rises and falls, operatic, made of both a sob and a scream. Audrey’s gleaming, labial fork crashes into her plate. Each and every hair on my body stands up. I stop my knife halfway through the cucumber, paralyzed, and for a surreal, hallucinatory moment, the cry seems as powerful and insistent as if it emanated from the walls of the room itself. Then Aunt Selma looks over at Audrey.

  “Please mind the china,” she scolds. “It’s very expensive!”

  Audrey gapes at me. The sound has only now started to fall off its crescendo and fade. Then, from the same depths, another high-pitched sob rises up in the wake of the first, this one even louder and more outraged. My gut response kicks in. I think the cry came from the servant, who’s finally gone over the edge. I blurt out, “Roni!” But when Roni appears in the doorway, he looks confused and out of sorts, annoyed that the foreigner girl is shouting for him—doesn’t he have enough bosses? Then another dreadful shriek blazes up from behind him. The screamer is in the kitchen.

  Roni vanishes back through the kitchen doorway, which glows pale orange. I look at this light, and slowly a memory begins to coalesce. There are rumors about a disabled grandchild that some of my cousins were talking about one day at lunch. Supposedly, one of Selma and Jimmy’s grown children had left their disabled child locked in a room and slipped a note under the neighbor’s door: “We’re going to Europe. Please check on the baby.” According to the gossip, the child had screamed alone in his room for two days before the grandparents found out and rescued him. My cousins said that Jimmy and Selma now kept this child shut up in a back room, protected from nosy intruders but isolated from the world, like a changeling hunched in a dungeon. Roni and the Sri Lankan servants fed and clothed him, but it was doubtful anyone ever really spoke to him. “But what is there to say?” my cousin Miriam had asked. “He speaks in screams.”

  Yet another quavering cry splits the air. I attempt telepathic eye signaling with Audrey, trying silently to convey: Don’t panic: They keep their grandchild locked up and we’re supposed to pretend he doesn’t exist.

  While Selma and Jimmy continue discussing the significance of certain fluctuations in the weather—hard rain is a bad sign, soft rain is a good sign—the dreadful screams continue. I even begin to notice a range of nuances—some screams sound like terror, some like frustration, and some like questions. Through it all, Selma and Jimmy pass the salt, complain about the price of food, dissect their two chicken kabobs. If the screams get louder, they raise their voices. Audrey and I don’t say a word.

  Gradually, the cries modulate themselves so it’s as if someone is standing in the next room, participating in our conversation through a series of nonverbal, strangulated commentaries. Even Audrey and I rejoin the conversation, telling my aunt and uncle about our day in the old souk. We pause for a particularly loud shriek, then debate which stands sold the best falafels. I start to feel so relaxed about the whole situation that at one point I dare to nod toward the kitchen door and say in a light, joshing voice, “Someone sounds hungry!”

  There is the most infinitesimal pause in Selma’s eating, a minute recoil, as if I’d just belched at the table. No one responds.

  As if taking pity on me, Roni chooses to emerge at that moment with a plate of tiny, tender fetayer. These savory turnovers are often stuffed with spinach and onion and baked into a delicate golden bread. Usually they are big enough to fill up my hand, and I can make a meal out of one, or perhaps two if I’m very hungry. But the fetayer that Roni puts before us—four on an engraved silver platter—are bite-size canapés that give us just the merest taste of green vegetable and flaky crust. Then, in a moment, this small mercy is gone as well.

  After our repast of two diminutive chicken kabobs, two dollops of yogurt, and two steamed zucchini quarters each, Roni clears away the dishes and returns with a plate of jaw-breaking, fillings-yanking, elderly butterscotch chewies.

  “We know you Americans like your treats!” Selma scolds, chuckling.

  As Audrey and I are eager to exit the House of Screaming and go get something to eat, we put a couple of chewies in our pockets, where they will ooze all over the linings, and we begin issuing little sighs of contentment and regret. Oh, my goodness, where has the time gone? My great-aunt and great-uncle sit back, twiddling tooth-picks and scowling. Clearly, we haven’t been dismissed yet, and they’ve got something they’d like to say.

  Jimmy rolls forward and touches the table. “The reason we invited you here,” he announces, “is because of the rumors.”

  “The rumors about us,” Aunt Selma adds.

  I put down my napkin with interest, thinking, We’ll at least find out what’s going on here.

  “Oh yes, we know everyone’s talking about it,” Auntie Selma says, examining her French manicure. “You don’t have to deny it.”

  “Well, I might have heard something,” I mumble. Audrey’s eyes flick up to mine as if to scold me for failing to warn her.

  Uncle Jimmy slaps the table. “What are they saying! Who is talking?”

  As I recall, it was a few of their own children who warned me about the situation. Not wanting to be a snitch, I try to look innocent and absentminded. I study the wrappers of the nefarious butterscotches, which bear the image of a child in bloomers chasing a hoop with a stick.

  “It doesn’t matter who says what,” Selma breaks in. “The fact is— they’re all talking, even the foreigners now,” she adds, indicating us. “So we’ll tell you what really happened.”

  “We treated that girl like a goddamned princess!” Uncle Jimmy roars, one knobby finger stirring the air.

  I almost say that I thought it was a boy, but Auntie Selma is already waving him down. “Begin at the beginning, Jimmy. Everybody knows that life is like hell for these girls in Sri Lanka—”

  Sri Lanka?

  “They’re no better than slaves there,” Uncle Jimmy announces. “They load them into buses and ship them to Jordan, where at least it’s a thousand times better if someone catches them.”

  “He means, you know . . .” Aunt Selma waves one beringed hand around, her long nails gleaming. “Like, adopts them.”

  They adopted this child?

  “We got her from the agency,” Auntie Selma says. “You know, they lock the girls in all night with the rats and the bugs, they beat them up with clubs and barely feed them anything. Horrible.”

  What sort of adoption agency is this?


  “That last girl, I tell you”—Uncle Jimmy leans forward conspiratorially—“she stole.”

  “And she lied and she skipped half the dusting and she sneaked food out of the cupboards! She ate our food.”

  “She was always showing her legs to me,” Uncle Jimmy says in a lowered voice. “She left the bedroom door open a tiny crack always.”

  Selma pauses, looks at Jimmy, then continues. “Anyway, so we threw her out and went back to the agency and got a new one.”

  Through my eddies of confusion, comprehension finally breaks through. We are talking not about the screamer in the kitchen, but about a maid.

  “This time we think, Okay, we treat this new one extra-double-special. We save her from the horrible slave agency—”

  “They beat them every day there, you know, at the slave agency,” Aunt Selma interjects. “I saw it. There are cockroaches absolutely every which where.”

  “We gave this one her own room, her own bed, Selma gives her one of her own dresses, we treated her like a son-of-a-bitch princess!” Uncle Jimmy’s lips are white and distended, and his hooded eyes widen. “We treated her like Miss America.”

  “They say this one can cook good, so we even put her in the kitchen, where it’s nicer. But the food she makes isn’t natural food—”

  “No eggplant, no lamb, no stuffed squash.”

  “She makes food with rice, grass, peanuts, crazy spices. So many spices! Red sauces—who knows what it is—”

  “A mess.”

  “So after just two weeks, this new girl, she’s crying all the time— oh, she’s tired, oh, she’s hungry, oh, she misses her little baby—”

  “Her baby?” Audrey asks in a small, horror-struck voice.

  Aunt Selma pokes up her narrow shoulders. “Who knows with these girls? That’s how they are there. They have a million and two babies a day, they leave them everywhere—just drop them down and walk away like nothing!”

  “Who can keep track?” Uncle Jimmy asks.

  “Oh! She is trouble, this one. Always running around, talking to the other slave agency girls in the neighborhood—”

  “She tempts Roni with her legs, I seen it,” Uncle Jimmy says.

  “She is always giving him and the ba—everybody—leftover food and treats, always going where she isn’t supposed to go!” Selma adds with a sudden ferocity, grabbing the table edge. “This girl, she upsets every single thing in this house. We start to think she is even going to steal things. . . .”

  “I hear her talking to the little one all day, all night,” Uncle Jimmy muses. “Why? What is she saying? Neither of them speaks the human language. . . .”

  “Talking to who?” I ask in a dwindling voice.

  “To nobody, never mind!” Selma snaps at Jimmy, then me. She presses her hand to her chest, lifts her head, and closes her eyes, as if swallowing something bitter. “Okay. Anyway. Things get so bad, I can barely stand the aggravation,” she says. “Now I’ve got this headache all the time that the new maid is going to run out—”

  “So we lock her in the bedroom!” Uncle Jimmy says.

  “Tch! No.” Aunt Selma’s eyes roll. “Just when she’s not working!”

  At that moment, Roni emerges from the kitchen and approaches us at his excruciating pace. Stony silence falls over the table. He carefully picks up each plate, eyes downcast. Neither Jimmy nor Selma stirs, but they follow his every movement with their eyes. When I attempt to hand my plate to him, he doesn’t take it but simply waits, motionless, until I return it to the table. Then he picks it up. The screaming has abated to a low, rhythmic gurgle, and when I peek at Roni, I notice that he seems to nod very slightly in time to the sound, as if it is playing inside his head like a metronome. Then he wafts out of the room.

  Aunt Selma sighs and rolls her eyes again as soon as Roni returns to the kitchen, as if his very presence summarizes the whole problem. “Okay, so—maybe three, four days go by after we start locking her in, and one morning something funny happens.”

  “I always check on her at night, just when she’s asleep,” Jimmy says. “She always has all her clothes on. Why? She always has the door closed!”

  Aunt Selma looks at him, then takes a breath. “Right. So this morning we’re waiting downstairs for our coffee, and where is the girl now? No coffee! No girl! We call for Roni, because it is his job to unlock her, no problems that way—he only speaks Arabic and she speaks English.”

  “And some other language,” Uncle Jimmy says.

  “No chance for them to cook up with some big ideas together— God knows what. The ways servants like to cook things up, you would not believe. Anyway, Roni comes in and tells us—no girl! She’s not in her room, not anywhere.” Now Aunt Selma’s eyes are startled wide, as if she is reliving the shock right then and there. Her hand waves before her face.

  “We run through the house!”

  “I looked in her bedroom!”

  “In the living room! The bathroom! The study!”

  “Finally . . .” Aunt Selma tilts her head toward the kitchen. “Roni calls out: ‘Mistress, master, come quick, the girl is in the street!’ Oh, my God.” Aunt Selma grabs her chest, the cords in her throat tight as violin strings.

  “We didn’t notice her window was open,” Uncle Jimmy explains.

  The outcome of the story is that the girl jumped out the window and was lying crumpled but still alive in the street. I imagine that she was trying to escape my great-aunt and great-uncle either by running away or by killing herself—which I could certainly sympathize with. But Aunt Selma has a different interpretation of things.

  “She planned to break her leg,” she says, ticking her nails on the butter-knife blade.

  “To shame us,” Uncle Jimmy says.

  “She thinks that we’ll feel sorry for her with her crying, crying, crying. I know the way these servant girls work with their plans and their schemes,” Aunt Selma says. “She thinks we’ll drive her to the doctor and give her all kinds of money to go back to Sri Lanka and her babies. This was her big plan. Oh, I drove her all right.” Aunt Selma smiles slyly, and I see the same yellow-vapor smile reflected on Uncle Jimmy. “When she saw where I was driving her, that’s when she started screaming.”

  “She is pulling the handle. Like she’ll pull it off the door! She tried to jump right out of the car,” Uncle Jimmy says, his hands and shoulders crooked up near his ears. “Always jumping everywhere, that one.”

  “Where did you take her?” I croak, doom rising like a mist from deep inside me.

  “Right back to the slave agency, of course,” Aunt Selma says. “I told them to go ahead and beat her! She was too high in her own mind, not broken down enough. That’s the way these kinds of girls get from these terrible countries, I told the agency man. She thinks she is the only girl in the world with a baby? Well, some babies don’t have mothers !” She dusts off her hands. “And so that’s it.”

  “End of story,” says Uncle Jimmy.

  “Now you know what happened. That’s the entire true story, so you’ll know not to believe all the rumors. Thanks to God we cleared that up.” A beat of doubt passes over her face as she says this. She frowns at the butter knife as if she senses there is something she’s left out, some forgotten word or critical point.

  “But . . . what happened to the girl?” Audrey asks.

  “Who? The maid? Oh, who knows,” Aunt Selma says reproachfully. “These girls, once they get here they always want to go straight back to the jungle.”

  “Like Ta-ra-zan!” Uncle Jimmy volunteers.

  “But they’ve got no money and no people, so they can’t. Now they are in civilization with no way to go home. That is the reality of things. Maybe she will work for some people who aren’t so soft as we are. Then she’ll start to understand things better.”

  There’s an abrupt thud to the conversation, and silence descends, as thick as the cloth covering our table. We sit with our hands in our laps, unable to meet each other’s gazes. No one se
ems to know what to say, so finally I clear my throat and ask, “Who does your cooking now?”

  “We’re back to old Roni,” says Uncle Jimmy. “At least that one doesn’t cry.”

  Now they seem ready, even eager, to dismiss us. A lilt of something like vindication lifts Uncle Jimmy’s chin, his skin tightens across his cheekbones, and his eyes turn filmy. Again, I glimpse something glassy and amphibious that seems to surface from beneath his skin. There is a flat, denatured smile on his face. Uncle Jimmy stretches in his chair and focuses on me for what must be the first time all afternoon. He interlaces his fingers over his belly and says, “So, girl, do you know your father is a real son of a bitch?”

  “Oh, uh-hunh, well . . . well.” I dust off my lap, petrified that this is the start of another story. “That’s interesting.”

  “A real true bastard, that one. I could tell you all sorts of stories there!”

  “Yes, well, thanks for lunch!” I say brightly, and scrape back my chair.

  Audrey and I leave our napkins on the table. As we mumble thanks and farewell, the child imprisoned in the kitchen reawakens from his trance, and an inspired, anguished cry rises through the gloom like a red wing.

  We step backward toward the front door, faster now. I touch the knob and glance back in time to see the kitchen door open just a crack. At first, all I see is Roni standing there silently. He is holding a vegetable peeler, his fingers slipping along the tiny interior lip of a blade. Then, for just an instant, so fleeting that I wonder if I’ve imagined it, from behind Roni’s back peeps another face—exquisitely formed, tear streaked, glowing black eyes, and open full red lips.

  I open the door. Outside, a soft white rain is sifting down like powdered sugar. We leave, I hope forever, this house of crying.

  SPINACH-STUFFED FETAYER FOR THOSE

  IN SEARCH OF HOME