The Language of Baklava

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  The next day, I get a phone call.

  “What’s this I hear?”

  “Uh . . .” My voice wobbles.

  “I couldn’t believe my ears.”

  “Aunt Aya?”

  “I hear your father is buying Frankie’s house for three hundred thousand.”

  Three hundred thousand? “Auntie Aya! I thought you were in the desert.”

  “I was. Does he know it’s infested with centipedes?”

  Centipedes! “Are you coming to town?”

  “And the stench and the garbage at that place—I wouldn’t put a monkey in there.” Her voice snaps shut like a change purse.

  Now I’m nodding, tugging on the phone cord. “And he hasn’t even told my mother!”

  “What? Oh, this is ridiculous! Why doesn’t he have sense by now? Some of the brothers you can trust a little, and some you can even trust a little more. But Frankie . . . ?” Her voice teeters ominously toward some unnamed precipice.

  “I know!”

  She sighs so intensely into the receiver that it’s as if the phone catches fire. On my end, I sigh as well. And I think for a moment that we must be feeling the same thing, wondering what could possibly drive these brothers like this, instigating one another, striking up against one another, rock and flint. Finally, she says, “Okay. Never mind. I will fix it. Don’t let your father go out with any of his brothers. Today I am coming to get him.”

  Auntie Aya arrives wearing an elaborate, silver-embroidered ankle-length blue dress, jingling gold bangles, and silver shoes with heels as long and supple as Bedouin daggers. I can hear Aunt Aya’s jewelry in the hallway before she gets to my door. Bud hears her, too, and it takes him a moment to register what that familiar sound is. His mouth opens and he folds his paper and slowly touches the arms of his chair as if they are talismans. Fattoush looks over lazily from the TV, the screen washed white from the sun. Aunt Aya bats at the door and walks in, calling, “Hello, I am here. I have come out of the desert to see you. Where is my boneless niece? Where is that brother of mine?”

  The sun hits her as she enters, and all the little bits of jewelry and tiny embroidered mirrors on her dress flare with light. Even her black hair, I see, contains a bolt of white that wasn’t there fifteen years ago, glistening from her part all the way down past her shoulders.

  Bud springs out of his chair, then freezes like an escapee in a searchlight. “How wonderful. Aya is here,” he says. He lumbers to her, wraps his arms around her, and for a moment it looks like surrender. But then he straightens and peeps behind her hopefully, saying, “Hal is coming for me any minute now. . . . Yes, I think he’ll be here in a second. Then we can all have breakfast together.”

  Auntie Aya merely smiles and says, “Not today, brother. Today you’re with me, and we’ve got places to go.”

  Fattoush stands, hand extended cautiously. “We haven’t met. I’m Gus’s business partner—”

  But she flicks her nails at him. “No, I’m afraid you stay here today.”

  Fattoush watches them go, his features muddled and wary. He’s been in Jordan nearly a month but is still often disoriented by the people here. Finally, he retires to the study that he’s set up on my dining room table. He says he’s going back to work on his business plan for the restaurant. While I sit a few chairs away in the living room and stare at my unwritten novel, a clicked pen in my hand, he leans over the table, mumbles, and moves sheets of loose-leaf notebook paper around in the dust. He’s shown me these notes several times already this week. Each page is covered with cryptic rhetorical questions and occasional stabs at answers like “Theme? Middle East? Too obvious. Safari food? Too weird? What is safari food? Steak in a pan?” After half an hour or so of arranging these papers and questions into various piles, he touches the back of his hand to his forehead as if checking for a fever. This is the first day since arriving that he hasn’t spent in the company of my uncles; he’s usually eaten two lunches by now. He looks blearily over at me and says that he’s feeling light-headed.

  We walk into town to the Popeye’s Fried Chicken, a white-tiled cubicle of a restaurant, where he orders several sides of coleslaw and French fries; he scrapes out the little mayonnaisy, clear plastic tubs with his fork and smokes a few Marlboros that Uncle Hal left after his last visit to our house. Fattoush casts moony glances at the cashier, a veiled girl with slate eyes, and talks about heartless Stacy back home and the jealousy and remorse she’ll feel when she learns that he’s become a business owner in Jordan. He speculates hopefully that he may have already settled down with Mai when Stacy comes to beg his pardon. When she asks him if she can come back, he’ll be kind but firm. He gnaws at the edges of his bitten-down fingertips . . . but what if she doesn’t want to come back? he ponders. Could that happen? He cuts a dark look at me, as if all women are in cahoots. It’s not entirely clear to Fattoush what women want. His mother said she couldn’t stand being married, and his father said he loved it, both times.

  “My dad, he lives in Maryland with this whole other family he started after me,” Fattoush says, hunched over the table. “It’s like, after he started the second one, the first one didn’t count anymore. I was just supposed to vanish. I can tell his wife doesn’t like having me around too much, either. I make her nervous.”

  I run my fingertips over the tabletop, over sparkling chips of mica suspended in the slick tile. I’d never even thought of Phinny as having a father of his own before.

  “How come there are people like that?”

  I balance my head sideways on one hand. “Like what, Phinny?”

  He looks at me a little wildly. “How come my father never cooked me any eggs?”

  I try to think of something soothing or funny to say, something about how many people can’t cook even the simplest thing. But I don’t say anything.

  On our way out, he holds the door open for me and prompts me gently but firmly, “And please try to remember—my name is no longer Phinny.”

  FATHERLY FRIED EGGS

  In medium frying pan, sauté the vegetables and spices in the olive oil on medium heat, letting the juices dry up a bit. Break the eggs over this mixture, and fry sunny-side up or scramble together, according to taste. Serve with sliced cheese and bread.

  SERVES 2.

  We walk all the way down through the spiraling neighborhoods, past balconies filled with the aroma of tuberose and verbena, past crumbling staircases and screened porches flittering with songbirds. We stroll down to the ancient town center—named after the goddess Amoun, a goddess who really didn’t care what politicians and generals and roaming tribal bands said about her or her fine, rough space. The streets here wind and welter according to the whims of the earth. The place is so old that the pavement is yellow with dust, the sidewalks cracked and intricate as mosaic tiles. People chatter and circle and bargain, tides move through the streets. This place feels like a point of origin—one of the fountainheads where the human community intersects with the earth. Outside of a tiny antique bookshop, I stop and place my hand against the faded storefront. I can just make out the side of Fattoush’s face through the glints in the storefront window as he tries—and fails—to haggle. My head swims a little, and I wonder if it’s possible that certain areas exert an additional gravitational pull. For a moment, I think I have a vivid memory of being eight and standing in this very spot. The faces pour around me, colors of wheat and earth and spice; the sky pulses with something like breath. Finally, Fattoush emerges with his books and my hand falls.

  Fattoush and I amble through the crowds and go nosing along the endless street of crooked shops, their counters piled up with scarves, carpets, prayer beads, brass pots, embroidered dresses, demitasses, chessboards. We bargain and accept tiny glass cups of strong tea and tell the shopkeepers our names and what country we’re from. They smile dazzling smiles, rock forward, and say, “Welcome, welcome!”

  Fattoush buys enamel earrings in the shape of little hands for his mother. His hand hovers over a small
wood-inlaid box. “Stacy might like this.” He glances at me, then lowers his hand. “But I don’t want Mai to be jealous.”

  When we finally walk all the long, hot, uphill way home, Bud is already back, sprawled in Fattoush’s usual spot on the couch. He looks as if Aunt Aya dragged him into an alley and beat him for a few hours. His hair is disheveled, his tie loosened, and his shirt unbuttoned; there are gray circles under his eyes.

  “Dad . . .” I stand at the edge of the couch tentatively. “You okay?”

  “I can’t take it,” he groans, slinging the crook of his elbow over his eyes.

  Fattoush and I pull up chairs and stare at him in dismay.

  Bud drags his arm away from his forehead. “Her auntie—” He points at me and shakes his finger. “She killed me.” He returns his arm to his forehead.

  Speaking through his elbow, Bud describes a day of epic proportions. In her dust-caked Mercedes-Benz, Aya drove him through the sueded hillsides of Amman to look at real estate—building after building, each one brighter, larger, and cheaper than the one before, all of them nicer and less expensive than Frankie’s building. “He wants two, three, four times as much as these other places! And they have kitchens!” Slowly and steadily, through the dust-cracked windows of Aya’s car, comprehension came to Bud. Wide commercial boulevards, flanked by high-rises, legions of shops, restaurants, and offices streamed past the car windows, his consciousness darkened by disillusion. It was apparent in every FOR RENT sign. The way he describes it, his awakening was less of a rising toward light than a weight crushing down, the understanding that he had once again been duped by his brother, that Jordan wasn’t what he thought it was, that his family wasn’t who he thought they were, and that the world wasn’t what it was supposed to be. Frankie, his brother, was willing to openly, brazenly swindle him out of his own retirement savings: What did that say about the universe? There was no point to buying this restaurant to be closer to his family in Jordan, because family didn’t exist—not in the pristine sense that he wanted it to. In the end, they were all just people like everyone else. “None of it is real,” he moans into the crook of his arm. “None.”

  We gaze at him. He looks like the painting of the man on the cover of the Introduction to Existentialism book that I read in intermediate French. I wonder if Aunt Aya intended for her shopping trip to bring on this level of crisis. Where another person might have seen all those cheap, available properties as opportunities, Bud could see in them only his betrayal.

  Aya calls later that afternoon, after Bud has dropped into a flat, comalike sleep on the couch, and says, “Well, I cured him. I cured him of the family.”

  I shift the receiver and look at Bud through the kitchen door. I notice the way his wrist is still flopped loosely across his eyes. He takes long, shuddering breaths. “If he’s cured of something, shouldn’t he be feeling better?” I whisper.

  She laughs her black velvet laugh and says, “Oh no, cures are often worse than the illnesses. In my experience, most cures have to have some poison, too.”

  While this observation has the tang of the truth, I don’t like to hear it, and I ask almost petulantly, “Then why get cured of anything?”

  “That is the question everyone must answer for themselves. My only advice, habeebti, is that you have to take the long view. The poison may not kill you.”

  That night, I wake from a heavy, sumptuous sleep like a diver rising from deep beneath the surface of a black sea. Slender, silver threads of feelings, associations, and images gather mysteriously inside of me. I hunt around in the still-dark for the pen and stack of bare paper I’ve kept by the bedside table since arriving in Jordan. And I write down the details for a new novel as they come to me, light as figments, glints in the nighttime of memory. This novel is set in the United States. And after a few hours of work, I drift off to sleep as if I’d never been awake at all.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Beyond the Land of Duty-Free

  Bud is cutting his visit short, returning to America one week early. And Fattoush is going back with him, two weeks later than his original return date. He doesn’t want to stay on without Bud, and I don’t go to any great lengths to convince him otherwise. The night before they leave, my father hangs on his brothers’ necks at an all-night drinking party they’ve thrown to help him prepare for his long flight the next morning. He seems to have forgotten about being cured of the family.

  “My brothers, my brothers,” he says in between beers, then hugs Uncle Hal and smears his tear-soaked face into his brother’s neck.

  “You are the greatest brother of all,” insists Rich-Uncle Jimmy, leaning on them both and slapping Bud on the back. “You are my favorite brother.”

  All remaining seven brothers crowd one another at the bar, throwing their arms around one another’s shoulders. They feed one another bites of rice from a tray of food set out on the counter. They lift the steaming hot grains on the tips of their fingers and put them right into one another’s mouths. Their reminiscences and jokes are so old and familiar, they barely need to be spoken aloud. They ignore their wives and children and grandchildren. At this moment, they’re the only ones in the world. I gaze at them fondly. This is not the way my sisters and I relate to each other. Our relationship is close, but not nearly as wild or uncontainable—and this is a great relief.

  On the morning of their transoceanic flight, after a total of two hours’ sleep, Bud and Fattoush both lean forward on the hard couch, elbows on knees, wrists and heads dangling, their shoulder blades melted down. There are eggplant-colored shadows under their eyes, their expressions the slack, semishocked faces of insomniacs. Neither of them will eat anything but water and aspirins. I can’t even distract Bud by asking questions about his childhood. He flaps one loose hand and says, “Over. It’s all—allllll over now! I’m never coming back to Jordan again. I’m old and I’m tired, and that’s all I have to say on the subject.”

  But on the taxi ride to the airport, it’s as if the last painful strands stretching from Bud to this place begin to snap. He perks up. He takes off his tie, calls the driver “bud,” and asks where he’s from. When the man glances into the rearview mirror with a wide, handsome smile and says, “Palestine,” Bud chortles, looks out the window at the streaming landscape like a visitor from a faraway place, and murmurs, “That’s beautiful, buddy, just beautiful!”

  The Amman airport is like all airports—full of resonating tiled floors, overlit and echoing as a mausoleum. Fattoush, Bud, and I glide, lost in the corridors. Fattoush looks back over one shoulder. I know he is nurturing a private hope that Mai will have a change of heart, appear at the airport, and take him in her arms. His eyes are sunken, his lips are chapped to shreds. “Why are we leaving?” he asks Bud repeatedly, as if he can’t quite recall the answer. “Why don’t we stay a little longer? Maybe we should try starting another business? It doesn’t have to be a restaurant. We could start a spa!”

  Bud hugs Fattoush’s shoulders with one arm, crumpling him into one armpit. “You are such a fattoush, you fattoush!” he exclaims unhelpfully. Then, “Time to go home.”

  We get past the narrow waiting area and the one fast-food stand, past the security checkpoints, the ticket counter, the customs office, the pat-down station, the passport checker, and the exit-tax taker. Eventually, the airport telescopes backward behind us as we ride the escalator upstairs into a gleaming horizon.

  We are delivered to counters glowing with Swiss watches, spicy French perfumes, and mahogany-sleek Italian shoes—things that are not available in the shops of Amman. A big sign proclaims: DUTY-FREE SHOPS. It’s like entering a neutral little kingdom set somewhere in the Alps. Men and women in chic, fitted Western clothing glide by carrying bottles of Chivas Regal and crystal vases. It is hermetically sealed, staffed by an international conference of lithe young people who carry on conversations in twenty languages.

  There are even glass counters where you can buy Jordanian “crafts”—pastries, embroidered shawls, and
tea cozies like the kind available in the shopping mall in the Abu-Jaber family fortress. But it seems we’ve already left Jordan. It’s impossible to imagine the wild sun glittering just beyond the walls of this airport.

  My father sets off as if into an enchanted forest, hypnotized by the glass counters, buying all the perfumes, bracelets, and scarves he’d forgotten to buy for everyone back in America. Fattoush hangs back, morose and squinting in the bleached lights, his elaborate career and revenge plans shattered.

  During the previous night’s drinking party, while the reality of departure was still just a wisp in the air around him, Fattoush haunted Mai, hovering at her elbow as if awaiting instructions. When she yawned, picked up her coat, and told Fattoush that she’d be seeing him around, he grabbed her fingers with both hands and stopped just short of kneeling before her. He squatted to his heels, and leaning in the direction of the dance floor, he cried, “Please oh pleaseohpleaseohplease . . . don’t leave me.”

  She closed her eyes and asked if he would please let go of her fingers.

  But Fattoush clung to her, pleading in an unintelligible ramble. His eyes were as muddled and wet as a child’s. Finally, Dobby came over, put a kindly hand on his shoulder, and led him away. At the bar, Fattoush hung his head over a syrup-yellow drink.