The Language of Baklava

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  “She’ll never go for you, man,” Dobby said, pitying and annoyed. “It’s nothing personal. But you’ve got to understand—she’s a Muslim and you’re a Christian. She lives with her parents. That’s what the girls do here. Nobody dates here, it just isn’t done. She’ll probably just marry the guy they choose for her.” He turns to me and mutters, “Or not.”

  “That’s insane,” Fattoush said vehemently, eyes blinking hard, lashes spiky with tears. “Why should she do that? It’s her life! Besides, I’m not Christian!”

  Dobby drew up, vaguely exasperated. “All right, then what are you?”

  Fattoush thought about this for a moment. “Well, if I have to be anything . . . then I guess I’m a pagan.”

  Dobby laughed while Fattoush stared at him. Then Dobby stopped and said, “Yeah, okay, but you’re a Christian.”

  There is a little more than an hour remaining before their flight when Bud decides that it is time for them to “nibble on a little something.” The land of duty-free has everything but actual restaurants. Across the corridor from the icy countertops is a pallid, cafeteria-style place where we can slide trays along chrome railings and select from a landslide of cookies sealed in plastic or a trough full of reconstituted eggs. But Bud has a dreamlike memory of eating at an actual restaurant here. We ask one or two of the blond duty-free cashiers, but they don’t seem to know anything about such a place.

  Then Bud spots a Jordanian man in a crisp new skycap uniform sitting in the cafeteria, gazing forlornly into a cup of American-style coffee. The old man’s face, a webbing of wrinkles and eyes so deep-set that you can barely make out the pupils, seems to catch and tighten as Bud speaks to him. “Oh yes,” he says in Arabic. “The restaurant? It’s still there.” Then he gives a set of directions, arcane and elaborate as if to Sinbad’s cave.

  “You pass the restroom with the tarnished door handle—if you get to the one with the shiny handle, turn back! Turn right at the corridor with the strange carpeting, then you have to ride up the narrow escalator . . .”

  We begin walking and quickly forget his directions once we’re outside of duty-free. We find ourselves in a maze of hallways and escalators like details in an Escher painting, depositing us on floors like ledges, with no rooms to enter. Bud insists that he remembers the way, but it seems clear that he does not. Miraculously, we find the narrow escalator at the end of the longest corridor. At the top, we walk down another corridor, this one like the crack in the rock to the entrance of Petra. Finally, a cavernous room opens before us; metal rotating fans stand posted in the corners like potted palms. The place is all but empty. A man with a thin, disappointed mustache and a man in a stained apron sit tilted on stools, elbows on the bar that runs along one wall, their faces propped up toward the TV showing Bedouin soap operas. The only light comes from a bank of windows lining the back wall; these open out on an arid beige emptiness, blowing sand, desiccated fields, a ribbon of highway.

  The place has the dim, after-hours feel of a closed restaurant. But as soon as we appear, vacillating in the doorway and poised to flee, the men spot us and descend from their stools, arms outstretched, crying, “ Ahlan! Ahlan!” as if we are long overdue but eagerly expected relations.

  With great ceremony we are shown to a square linoleum table in the center of the ringing room. Breezes from the fans sweep over our table like trade winds. The man in the apron disappears through a small trapdoor, and the waiter hands us menus that feature an international potpourri: teriyaki, French onion soup, and tortellini. One section, labeled “Everything to make you happy!” could have been lifted from the window of an American diner: steak and eggs, meat loaf, green salads, tomato soup, fried chicken, and spaghetti.

  The mustached man stations himself at our table, shoulders back, his body stiffened with a vaguely military bearing. “Yes, yes, yes, my friends,” he says in English. “What am I about to do for you?” But as he lifts his pad, his expression sharpens and turns skeptical, as if already expecting to be disappointed by our order.

  His glare chases away my hunger. I request just a bowl of Greek egg-and-lemon soup and in so doing seem to confirm something he’d already suspected. Fattoush, who’s been growing more morose all morning, now looks downright funereal. He orders only a cup of coffee. Bud, however, busily points all over the menu, ordering a full-blown American-style breakfast. As he lists scrambled eggs and steak, sliced onions and sautéed mushrooms, fried potatoes and chicken, buttered toast and fresh orange juice, the waiter undergoes a metamorphosis. His brows tick closer together, his eyes rake my father, his mouth goes taut, his little mustache bristles. Finally, he can contain himself no longer and bursts out: “Ghassan Abu-Jaber!”

  Bud lowers the menu and cranes his head toward the waiter. The waiter leans in close to my father. I can see Bud’s eyes focusing, reading the man’s face as if it is a tablet of ancient runes; his eyebrows lower, his lips move silently, everything in him is drawn into concentration, and finally he breathes a name: “Mo Kadeem.”

  The man he used to wash the rice and lentils with in the king’s air force.

  “It’s me!” says Mo Kadeem. His face is splendid with a long, crooked smile. He spreads his arms wide and Bud lurches to his feet, knocking over his chair, and the two men swing this way and that in a staggering embrace.

  “Mo Kadeem!”

  They rub tears from their faces, but more pop into their eyes. Bud keeps grabbing the man’s shoulders, checking his solidity. They drag their chairs together and sit pressed closed like boys, holding each other’s arms. The room rings like a vault, and I can hear little blips of echoes behind all the questions they ask each other in English and Arabic. “Where have you been all this time? Where did you go? Did you see the world? Did you get married? How many babies?”

  Mo laughs but also shakes his head with a heavy downward dip. “What a crazy time. Now I live with my mother. But after the air force, I went to Australia. I tried to ask girls to go out, but they wouldn’t talk to me. I went to Venezuela, Bangkok, Canada. You would not believe where I’ve been!” More of the heavy head shake. “And after two years of traveling, I realized I didn’t like it,” he says. “Here I was, twenty-three years old, I thought I was free as can be—I thought I didn’t need anything. But every single morning when I woke up in Sweden or Mexico, the first thing I thought of was my mother’s teapot on the kitchen table. Every night I fell asleep smelling the sweetness of the lemon tree outside my window. I was like one of the pine trees planted in the Jordan Valley. As soon as you take it away from its home, it dries right up.” He pauses, curling his fingers under his chin and scratching his throat in a careful, thoughtful way as he studies my father. A crease forms in the space between his eyebrows. “When you came in here . . . I thought you were an American.”

  Bud’s chest rises and his face gleams. “Well,” he says mildly, a bit modestly, “I am.”

  A whole new galaxy of suns, moons, stars, and songbirds pops out of the air and starts to orbit my head. My ears seem to be picking up frequencies from Mars. I look at Bud from three different angles. Finally, I take one of the lacy-edged paper doilies and write: “Today my father said he was an American.” I date it and fold it into my purse.

  Mo Kadeem is also staring at him. “In all that time, all those lentils, you never said you wanted to go to America, you never said anything about traveling anywhere.”

  We watch him studying Bud’s face. We can see the way he takes it in, the fact that Bud went away to a new place and never actually came back. That Bud has had, in some way, the life that Mo had been meant to have. Bud is the first to look away, his face modest, and even a little embarrassed—as if he has been caught with something that did not belong to him.

  “I know,” Bud admits. “I never meant to go. It just turned out that way. Although I did marry a nice, tall wife,” he says, smiling shyly at the tabletop. “I’m going to see her soon!” he announces, as if this has just occurred to him.

  “You were
always the lucky one,” Mo says peevishly. “I always thought you knew exactly who you were. I was jealous of that, in fact. I think maybe that’s even why I came back to Jordan.”

  “No, I didn’t know anything,” Bud protests.

  Mo straightens then. He takes another long, fierce matador’s look at Bud while we all hold our breath. Is he cursing us? Wishing he’d never returned to Jordan? Finally he bows and glides away without a word.

  “I think he’s upset,” Bud murmers. We debate in whispers whether or not he’s going to come back.

  After several minutes of discussing Mo and then several more minutes of discussing ways to sneak out, we see the trapdoor in the back of the restaurant open and Mo emerges carrying a full tray: Nothing on it is what we ordered. There are thick slices of halloumi cheese wedged between freshly grilled sausages, hummus enriched with nuggets of fried lamb, dates stuffed with almonds, sfeeha pastries plump with ground chicken and onion, broiled kabobs, roasted fish in tahini sauce, tomatoes stuffed with beef and rice, and, of course, gallons of sweet mint tea. As he carries it to us across the empty restaurant, a space as big as a dance floor, he shouts: “How do you expect to fly to other worlds without a real breakfast?”

  My father runs over and grabs dishes off the tray, insisting: Mo has to eat with us! We pull up a chair, then another, because the chef in his white apron has appeared, peeking demurely from the kitchen door, then moving to the table.

  Bud compliments him on his wonderful food, and the chef blushes, lowering his head. He tells us in Arabic, “This is the usual breakfast for the staff.” Suddenly Mo swings his ferocious glare on Fattoush, who draws back in his chair. “What kind coffee you want? Americano or gahweh?”

  Fattoush stammers before collecting himself: “May I please have some gahweh, sir?”

  Mo smiles but doesn’t stand up, as if Fattoush just passed a test. He looks us over. “So these are your big American children?”

  Bud looks vaguely in our direction, busy piling his plate with sfeehas. “That’s right.”

  Fattoush beams, a sweet red flush rising from his neck. He ducks his head toward his plate, which is almost empty.

  Mo rolls forward and claps Bud on the shoulder. “Do you remember, my friend? Up to our armpits in lentils?”

  “And what about frekeh?”

  “And crying, crying, with all those onions.”

  “Peeling, washing, chopping, soaking . . .” Bud’s voice rises and falls, as if he is singing a small, brokenhearted song.

  “These English,” Mo says in a lowered voice, gesturing to the empty room. “They don’t eat food, they don’t know what food is. They think food is French fries.” He says this with a thin-lipped bitterness as he imitates someone daintily consuming a pile of fries. “They come in here, and what do they want? Fish and chips, tea and scones, lamb and mint jelly! What is mint jelly? They take over the whole menu with these terrible things, just like they take over the whole world.”

  We are all relieved there aren’t any English eating French fries in the room: They are all still safely down below in the land of duty-free. The restaurant remains uncolonized for the moment, an oasis of intimacy. Beyond the dusty windows is voluptuous sunlight, beige, arid earth, and the smell of wild honey. But inside we huddle, happily, familiarly—five of us eating together at the center of a lost room as wide as the desert, a ceiling as high as the sun.

  MO KADEEM’S ROASTED FISH IN TAHINI SAUCE

  For impressing that certain someone.

  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Place the fish in a baking dish and dot the fish all over with the butter. Sprinkle with the lemon juice, garlic, salt, pepper, and parsley. Bake for 15 minutes, or until barely done.

  Sauté the sliced onion in 1 tablespoon of olive oil until translucent and set aside.

  In a saucepan, stir together the sauce ingredients and simmer over low heat, about 10 minutes. Adjust the seasonings and add a little water for a creamy consistency.

  Remove the baking dish from the oven. Spread the onion slices over the fish, then pour the tahini sauce over this. Bake at 350 degrees for another 20 to 30 minutes. Top with the pine nuts and serve with garnishes of lemon wedges.

  MAKES 4 TO 6 SERVINGS.

  TWENTY-THREE

  HTML

  When I finally return to the States a few months later, I’m certain that I am ready to be home again. I’ve missed America for a year, craved its glowing supermarkets and orderly drivers, its plush movie theaters and its bookstores and rivers and curbs and everything in its sense of imminence—the feeling of expectation, the urgency of rain-slicked city nights as traffic picks up and someone is going somewhere all the time.

  But when I return, I discover that I am once again a child, lying mute in a blank motel room and straining for the old smells and sounds of my lost Jordanian neighborhood. After a year of lethally silent soap operas and stately Jordanian newscasts, American sitcom laugh tracks sound jarring and surreal to me. I am disturbed by the billboards radiant with images of people eating and drinking like Vikings, advertising “All You Can Eat.” By cars the size of small houses. And in the evening when the traffic packs into a rush-hour snarl, no friends gather on my front lawn, wanting to come up and drink tea or drag me out in the night to see what we can see. I miss them terribly.

  I get lost. I am set loose in a wilderness. Jordan has torn me open, and inside this opening are pictures of light and dust-scrubbed air and flowering jasmine. I have trouble sleeping or focusing; people frown as if there is something slightly off-kilter on my face. A friend who has moved frequently between Yemen and America meets me at a Turkish café and, over the demitasses of dense black coffee, tells me that I am suffering from culture shock, that it is a sort of soul-sickness, that it will subside. But I can’t imagine that I will ever be whole again.

  And I feel so impossibly alone—as if I am the first and only person ever to be unmoored between countries. So I perversely do things to make myself feel even more isolated. I resign from my university position in Eugene. I move to Portland, into a minuscule apartment; I take it for its wall of sliding glass looking toward the Willamette River and for its little kitchen, tight and shiny as a ship’s galley. I cook all the dishes that I ate in Jordan, the simple Bedouin flavors—meat, oil, and fire; like Bud, I am trying to live in the taste of things.

  I’d published Arabian Jazz not long before I’d left for Jordan, and while I was overseas, people read my novel and began to have opinions about it. When I return to America, there is mail waiting for me (not everyone has e-mail yet). College students send me their papers analyzing my characters; there are several generous, heartfelt newspaper reviews; a man in Romania sends me a slender gold ring; people from many different cultural backgrounds—Italian, Russian, Chinese, African—tell me that they come from a family just like the one in the book. I learn that there are Greek, Polish, French, and Dutch versions of my characters—living counterparts; their American-born children write in to tell me this. A newspaper announces that Arabian Jazz is the first mainstream novel about the Arab-American experience.

  I don’t know if this is actually true, but the claim alone seems to convey a great weight of responsibility, because I also start to hear from readers that I think of as “the Betrayed.” These are the Arab-American immigrants and scholars and young people who complain that I haven’t written their story. One girl protests angrily that her father wasn’t nearly as fun or easygoing as the father in my book. An academic publishes a scathing review of Arabian Jazz with numbered paragraphs, each enumerating the many “errors” of my novel, taking issue with everything from the type of videocassette a character brings from Jordan to the fact that one of the characters—a Greek Orthodox bishop—is described as having crumbs in his beard. An anonymous person slides a letter under my office door that demands I stop writing “depressing things” about the Arabs and instead write about “happy, uplifting Arab things.” One woman writes: “Do your parents know you wrote this book? Nau
ghty, naughty girl!” It seems that a great lament rises up from the Arab-American world and rings in the living room: the sense of being unfairly cast, unrepresented, their unique stories and voices (aside from only the most extreme, violent, and sensational) unheard and ignored. In retrospect, I think that this lament was already in the air, but by publishing a novel, I just happened to provide a name and an address to mail it to. I am their disappointing American child—the one who didn’t speak Arabic, who didn’t sound or dress or behave in any way as an Arab is supposed to. And I understand why so many readers felt so betrayed, alone in America, where the only media images of Arabs are bomb throwers and other lunatics. But at the time, I too feel shipwrecked— cut off from family, home, and even the idea of a cultural community—the one people I’d hoped would provide me with some sense of connection and acceptance.

  That fall, I start teaching at Portland State University. After classes, I read the latest letters from my readers—the accusations and questions, demands and congratulations. Then I try to clear my head of voices. I walk to the International Market—an import store filled with bars of olive oil soaps, barrels of spices, packages of dried noodles. I buy bags of Zataar, cumin, and sumac, sometimes to cook with, sometimes just to have their comforting scent circulating in my apartment.

  So I am alone, alone, alone. But, as I said before, I am also guilty of perversely doing whatever I can to amplify that state, to feel it all the more keenly, so perhaps there is also something delicious and unspeakable in the pain of that aloneness. Perhaps I enjoy feeling judged, criticized, and deeply misunderstood. Perhaps that feeling is also a bit like home.

  Since I have nothing better to do than work, I take an extra job through a private college teaching a creative writing class on the Internet. When the school asks if I know how to write HTML, I say brightly, Oh yes, a little! I have actually never heard of HTML. When the school discovers that I don’t even understand how to fill out the registration form for their software, they kindly decide to assign a tutor to me. On our first meeting in my school office, the tutor tries to explain a few basic principles of computer language—as I stare at him with an increasingly desperate expression. He finally gives up.