The Language of Baklava

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  My tutor’s name is Scott; he is young and dark eyed, and I can’t help but notice that this tutor of mine has a way of looking at me, at times, with great patience, fondness, and delight and other times with attentiveness, steadiness, and certainty. I’m noticing too much, I tell myself, a bad habit of mine. This is just his natural expression. Still, it is disorienting to have someone sitting next to you looking at you in this way, so I can’t look back at him too much when we work on the computer together, the cursor blinking between the two of us like a private symbol.

  While we work, I learn something that I had already suspected—I am not very good at all at computer language. Scott fills out the registration form for me, as I sit there shaking and simpering. Then he simply takes over. I slump back in my office chair and dictate the class lectures to him. As we make our way through the term, however, for some reason, we need to have more and more meetings, not fewer. My tutor adds increasingly elaborate images, sounds, and graphics to the class Web site; it becomes a multimedia event. We start to meet in cafés, and we talk more about our lives than we ever do about HTML. I tell him about Bud and his love of cooking. Scott tells me about the restaurants he’s worked in and the time he’d offered a dessert of flourless chocolate torte to Julia Child in a swanky Boston restaurant. She complained about his description, scolding in her flutey voice, “Why call it flourless when all tortes are flourless?”

  Then we have a meeting at his apartment, which turns out to be even smaller, and much tidier, than mine. It looks like the inside of a Hemingway story. The walls are covered with nautical charts and boat diagrams. There’s also a mounted pair of antique snowshoes, a stuffed pheasant that his grandfather hunted, and a table beside the computer that is covered with fly-fishing and fly-tying accoutrements. I touch a gracefully arched piece of bamboo mounted on another wall. “Is this—a fishing pole?”

  “A fishing rod,” he says, smiling. He produces a tray of cheeses, crackers, and sliced fruits artfully fanned across a white plate. “I thought we could snack while we work.” He places the tray of food in front of the computer, so it will be difficult to read the keyboard, and it finally occurs to me that all these meetings weren’t only about learning to speak computer.

  The first time we kiss (and this takes months and months to get to— months and months of private lessons and extra meetings, Scott appearing in the hall outside my office, taking my writing classes, forever finding some esoteric bit of computerese that I need to learn, inviting me over for “extra help”), it almost seems to happen accidentally. One second we are sitting on the couch, talking about whether or not the Internet class should have its own logo, the next we are kissing. I stand up out of our embrace and tell my tutor— who is startled, waiting motionlessly for me to return to the couch— that I am going for a stroll. And I go outside on an endless walk. It is raining, of course, as the air of Portland always seems impregnated with rain. The afternoon rain at first is restrained, powdering over the buildings, then it comes down hard. I walk close to the buildings and there’s a deep quaking inside of me; I’m warm from walking, but tremors run along my arms and legs. Perhaps I’m trying to return to aloneness, my unknownness. How can I give up such surety? It’s the only thing I know anymore; it is the house I’ve lived in for so long.

  I walk all over the city for almost two hours. I’m soaked, stunned with fear. Finally, I return to stand outside my tutor’s apartment building, looking up at the rectangle of light where his window is—a patch of light thrown like a white handkerchief down to the lawn. I can’t go in. I can see this very clearly. How can I go back there?

  Interestingly enough, however, I don’t want to return to my apartment with its little ship’s galley of a kitchen, either. But I have to go somewhere, I’m getting drenched. So I go to the International Market. I start scooping up little cellophane bags of amber-colored spices, some fresh pita bread, braided cheese, a small glass jug of olive oil, a pomegranate, little plastic containers of hummus, my favorite Arabic bean dip—ful mudammas— and a small bunch of oranges.

  With a plastic bag of groceries in either hand, I walk across the park blocks that bisect downtown Portland, under the tall trees that wag their leaves free every autumn so the air fills with leaf storms. I cut between dank, dripping campus buildings, step over quick streams of curb runoff, inhale the tang of diesel rising from the nearby highway, the steam of decayed leaves, mulch, and dirt, and just the faintest whiff of something green piercing the soil.

  I hesitate for just a moment this time at the lighted lobby of his building, then swing open the front glass door a bit too forcefully and wince, worried that I’ve cracked it, but no. The elevator rumbles and shakes, and I drip a damp ring on the forest green carpet, and when I get to Scott’s floor, he is already leaning in the door, as if he’s been waiting there since I left. He has a big white towel that he rubs over my hair. He’d seen me standing outside in the rain; he says he was worried that I would never come back again. I go into the bathroom and change into some clothes he’s given me: a soft cotton shirt and a pair of jeans that droop from my hips. My feet are cold, so he puts a pair of clean socks in the oven before I put them on. And when I come out of the bathroom, I see that he’s opened the bags of food, placed each item on its own small plate or bowl. “Was this right?” he asks. “I wasn’t sure if you were saving this for later, but you were gone so long—I thought you must be hungry.” His voice fades a bit; he is looking at my getup, laughing, taking my inventory. He looks at me a moment longer and says, “You have green eyes.”

  I feel not captured, but saved—given safe harbor from the raining, unknown world beyond the windows. I sit cross-legged on the floor beside the steamer trunk he uses as a table and show him how you tear the bread with your hands, how you dip the bread in oil, like this, you see. I tell him, There is a place I want to take you to someday, an amazing country, a beautiful history of mine. But for now we sit on the floor and share a loaf of bread.

  FUL FOR LOVE

  In a saucepan, combine the fava beans, garlic, 1 tablespoon of the oil, salt, and pepper. Simmer over low heat about 10 minutes, then remove from the heat. Add the lemon juice and remaining oil and mash into the beans with a fork.

  Garnish with the onion and parsley. Ful is also nice topped with some chopped tomato. Serve with pita bread.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The First Meal

  Finally, Bud gets his restaurant.

  He comes back from Jordan, announces to himself for the hundredth or thousandth or millionth time that he really and truly lives in this country, this Amerikee, this beauty, place of lost radio songs, unknowable glances, cold blue lakes, of work not family, of facing forward not back, of solitude not tribes, of lightness not weight, and he goes out and he finds the place.

  It comes to him through a friend of a cousin of a guy at work, so the purchase—as he explains it later—seems both like a business transaction and like fate. The difference this time is that he asks Mom for her opinion of the place. She looks at it, sees past the destiny, checks the books, and says yes.

  Actually, it’s not so much a restaurant as a driving range, a long green lawn where golfers go to prop up their tees and practice their swings. There is also a miniature golf course and a batting cage—so the whole thing comprises a “family fun center,” Bud explains to me—there’s even a big sign out front that says so. He points to it: BUD’S FAMILY FUN CENTER. Attached to all this is a little hut with a window where Bud is constantly giving children free tokens to the batting cages and gossiping with his customers and friends and passersby. Inside the hut, beside the window, is a nice big grill, a deep fryer, a blender, and a freezer. This is my father’s restaurant. The heart and soul of Bud’s Family Fun Center, serving rows of burgers, sizzling French fries, blistering hot dogs, and grilled cheese sandwiches.

  These basic foods recall my father’s first meal in America, not at the railing of a ship, but at a table in Cosmo’s Malt Shop—a daily regime of
hamburger and Coke—that began all his other American meals.

  Bud grills the burgers, adds a little chopped onion, toasts the buns just so. He leans into the grill, singing his unique version of the songs on the radio. My youngest sister, Monica, comes in with her husband and their baby and helps scoop ice cream. My mother dispenses tees and tokens to customers. Friends from my parents’ square-dancing club sit forward in the metal folding chairs, drinking coffee, elbows on their knees, and talk about one another. In the end, the type of food doesn’t matter so much to Bud; it’s cooking it and feeding people and watching them eat, keeping them alive in the desert of the world—that is all he really cares about.

  My parents have a videotape that the golf pro made of a series of instructional sessions he gave my father to help him analyze his swing and chart his progression. Bud feels it’s not enough to cook his chili dogs and grilled cheese sandwiches. The owner of a Family Fun Center should know how to golf. So once a week, he pops a new tape into the VCR player and studies the grainy, silent black-and-white film.

  Lesson One: Bud swings. Wildly. Crookedly. The ball dribbles off to one side. Bud grins and shrugs. Watches the ball. Shrugs. It’s all in fun!

  Lesson Five: Same swing. Same outcome.

  Lesson Ten: No change.

  Lesson Eleven: Bud scowls furtively at the camera. Evidently the pro is telling him something he doesn’t want to hear. The pro comes on camera, keeps his head down, demonstrates a modified swing. Bud tries to imitate this swing, jerks his head back, and reproduces exactly his own original swing.

  Lesson Twelve: Palsied swing. Pro tries to come on camera. Bud glares at him. He backs off.

  Lesson Thirteen: Bud shouts a few words at the camera. No swing.

  Lesson Fourteen: Bud hurls down club, shakes fist at camera while shouting things, face turns very dark. Storming toward camera. Earthquake effect. Sudden veering off camera.

  End of film.

  After two profitable summers, Bud turns the business over to Monica and her husband. Turns out, after a lifetime of pining for a restaurant of his own, well, this isn’t it. He says it’s because it makes him tired. He wipes his hand over his face, looks up at the sky, and says, “I can’t take it.” At the Fun Center, he was surrounded by people in a way he never had been before—openly, constantly, publicly. It exhausted him. With his instinct to serve, to cook, to talk, to welcome, he had no way to ever close his doors, no way to ever say no. Though it was filled with Americans, the shack resembled an overcrowded, talk-heavy Jordanian coffeehouse. But Bud is no longer— not entirely—Jordanian.

  My father and his brothers fly back and forth, back and forth, whisking over the oceans and continents. They live their lives in the air, in the ether of in-between, the borderlands. Whenever they see one another, they cook, they scoop the warm rice up in the curve of their palms, bring it to their fingertips, and sometimes they feed one another, hand to mouth, in this greatest of intimacies.

  Bud has American grandchildren now from both his younger daughters—babies who’ve stupefied him with love and pleasure. The youngest one, Jake, adores my father with a wild, free-hearted, clear passion. He and his brother come over every day. Not yet two years old, he cries out: “Jiddo! Jiddo! Grandpa!” before my mother has a chance to open their front door. He rushes in, straight to my father, urgent yet shy; he climbs into Bud’s big, square lap, presses his nose to my father’s, his milky fingers on either side of Bud’s big, round head, and croons, “Jiddo, happy.” It’s hard to say if this is a question, assertion, or metaphysical analysis. His conversations tend to go this way—lists of objects or feelings he finds interesting: “Cow, car, table, spoon?” went a recent phone conversation. “Dog, house, truck!” And somewhere in this, I hear traces, like words overheard through a closed door, of my childhood conversation on the desert floor with a group of Bedouin women.

  But now, for Bud, Jake has his special word, and that word is “happy.” Bud laughs and says, “Yes, Jake, Jiddo happy.”

  Jake grins deliriously and says, “Jiddo, eat!”

  And I wonder if it is this, the children, that can ever anchor any place enough to make it a home. Once we are grown, we are no longer so porous, our identities don’t connect with a place as much as they do when we grow up with a place and the places, in turn, grow into us.

  I have recently come to understand something about myself, which is that I am—as my uncle Hilal might say—a hopeless case. Even if I had somehow, down the line, brought myself to have babies and to stay in my hometown in a house with an easy, wide-hipped porch, none of that would have made any difference to the sleepless part of me. Like a second, invisible body, I sit up out of my sleep at night, wander across the room, stop beside a darkened window, and dream my way through the glass. It is more than looking: the elements of darkness and distance release my mind like a dash of sugar on the surface of hot water. In the distances between stars, it seems there is no flavor or scent (although I think I might detect the purple black glisten of an eggplant skin within the night air, the slyest reminder of how the forms of life and the physical world are infinite and everywhere). Come back, I want to say to my second self, there is tea and mint here, there is sugar, there is dark bread and oil. I must have these things near me: children, hometown, fresh bread, long conversations, animals; I must bring them very near. The second self draws close, like a wild bird, easy to startle away: It owns nothing, and it wants nothing, only to see, to taste, and to describe. It is the wilderness of the interior, the ungoverned consciousness of writing.

  We grow into the curve of what we know; for me, that was my family’s rootlessness and my father’s control and scrutiny—movement and confinement. I am as surely a Bedouin as anyone who has traveled in a desert caravan. A reluctant Bedouin—I miss and I long for every place, every country, I have ever lived—and frequently even the places my friends and my family have lived and talked about as well—and I never want to leave any of these places. I want to cry out, to protest: Why must there be only one home! Surely there is no one as bad, as heartbroken, as hopeless at saying good-bye as I am. The fruits and vegetables, the dishes and the music and the light and the trees of all these places have grown into me, drawing me away. And so I go. Into the world, away.

  Acknowledgments

  Many people have helped me with this book, helped me think about how to write it, how to feel about it, and how to cook for it. For sustained literary, culinary, and emotional wisdom, personal and professional, I thank my friends Anjali Singh, Joy Harris, Stephanie Abou, Alexia Paul, Amber Hoover, Leah Heifferon, and Michiko Clark.

  I offer gratitude to a number of friends in Jordan, for helping me to see its hidden beauties and richness, including Alain McNamara, Kathy Sullivan, Bo Haroutunian, Claudio Cimino, Fouad and Jeanine Abu-Shaykh, and especially my dear friend Aida Dabbass, who is greatly missed.

  For insight and support, for shared meals, for shared labor, and for all the good talking that goes with it, thanks to my writing group, Chelsea Cain, Whitney Otto, Cynthia Whitcomb, and Karen Karbo.

  For brilliant friendship, guidance, and thrilling eating explorations: Alane Salierno Mason, Lorraine Mercer, Bette Sinclair, and Ellen Kanner.

  For the great cooks in my life, my glorious grandmother Grace, my fabulous aunts and uncles both in America and Jordan, and the chefs of Portland, Oregon, who’ve taught me by their brilliant example, especially Hoda Khouri, Mirna Attar, and Philippe Boulot.

  For shared trouble, running away, hollering through the woods, in-depth food experiments, taking risks, and bottomless friendship, for our childhood, Pam Jaber, Tariq Abu-Jaber, Suzanne Abu-Jaber, and Monica App.

  For painstaking, middle-of-the-night recipe recitations, grocery store breakdowns, and all manner of culinary adventures and triumphs, and for being my models of social generosity and all-around good times, my parents, Pat and Gus.

  For rawhide chewing with gusto and unbridled dinnertime enthusiasm, Yogi.

  And most of
all, for my best, most patient, and truest reader, taster, and friend, Scotty.

  To all the great chefs in my life—of food and of experience—I offer my thanks. I am grateful to everyone who has stood at the stove or pulled up a chair to the dinner table beside me.

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, MARCH 2006

  Copyright © 2005 by Diana Abu-Jaber

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks

  of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:

  Abu-Jaber, Diana.

  The language of Baklava / Diana Abu-Jaber.

  p. cm.

  1. Cookery, Middle Eastern. 2. Jordan—Cookery. I. Title.

  TX725.M628A.5956—dc22 2004056828

  eISBN : 978-0-307-42883-7

  www.anchorbooks.com

  www.randomhouse.com

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