When they get to the chess shop she leaves him sitting by himself at the table that Narak points to, and goes to sit across the street, on one of the broad, hospitable, rose-tinted stone stoops that descend down to the pavement from the elegant old brownstones. She watches Naguib al-Khalili as he sits at a table in front of the shop in his grey suit, clutching one of his manuscripts and scribbling furiously. She smiles at him and he smiles back, but she doesn’t approach him because she knows that he’s always desperate for someone to talk to in Arabic – and then there’s no stopping him, the same old monologue that leaves her exhausted: how he came to America from a village near Nablus and opened his store, The Groom’s Sweets, in 1955; how he covered the walls in pictures of his old village and how the store became famous for its old-school rose-water sherbet and Nabulsi kunafa stuffed with cheese and its small round honey cakes. Every morning the local Arab workers flocked to The Groom’s Sweets to buy the cakes that tasted of home and an obscure longing that they struggled to understand.
After decades of gruelling work, Naguib al-Khalili now spent most of his time at his friend Narak’s shop. He decided to retire when his nephew arrived in his turn in Brooklyn and gradually took over the bakery. His nephew is a tall, thin young man called Ziyad. He always dresses in black from head to toe and wears a Palestinian kufiya around his neck. Ziyad came to America to study film-making, but the real world got the better of him and he began to work full-time in the bakery with his uncle, ordering the sheets of dried apricot and making the fig pastries stuffed with pistachio exactly according to their original recipes because the customers would have nothing else. The customers come back again and again for a fleeting taste of their childhood. The Nabulsi kunafa is stuffed with real halloumi cheese and the amount of honey in the baklava is always just right. The lady fingers are delicate and crunchy, the red-rose sherbet smells of mountain flowers, and the bitter orange jam might have been aged in your own grandfather’s basement, God rest his soul, whatever his name was. Everything reminds them of the smells and tastes of sweet and distant places and times.
Memory thrives on details – details that al-Khalili safeguarded and preserved, and now Ziyad too: flexible, cunning details like the crispiness of a single square of sweet kunafa. Ziyad washes his hands of the day’s fatigue and tries not to think about his increasingly unlikely dreams. He watches movies with his uncle in the evening – classics or blockbusters – or they go to the theatre or an art gallery. Al-Khalili will laugh and say to Ziyad, ‘The boy’s turned out just like his uncle – an artist by God, my son! What else but the love of art brought us here from our country? Your uncle Narak adored painting and playing the violin, and I used to think I was the prophet Gibran or Mikhail Nu’ayma and that I would write all the poems that Ibn Zaydan himself, God rest his soul, never managed to write. But exile is a son of a bitch, Ziyad, and in the end it only gives you what you’ve got coming to you anyway.’
Ziyad hangs his head. He tries to understand but all he can think about is the film that he dreams of making: a film about Brooklyn’s Arab-American community and the domestic problems they face. Like his uncle, Ziyad adores T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. He knows Lorca’s poems about Harlem and the Brooklyn Bridge by heart. He is always busy gathering material for his film and planning the scenes that are supposed to take place on the bridge’s pedestrian walkway; always thinking about things like funding and shooting and auditioning actors and actresses. He jots down ideas and observations in a small notebook that he keeps in his pocket as he sits behind the counter in The Groom’s Sweets. The bakery is a good place to study the different types of Arab immigrants. He considers it to be the source of his inspiration. Naguib al-Khalili loves to boast about this cultured nephew who has filled his life with novelty. Ziyad and his Armenian friend are all he has left in the world.
Both Narak and Naguib used to teach at the Scientific Renaissance Secondary School. Later, they travelled across the world together. They still take pleasure in sitting and reminiscing about those long-ago days. They remember the crowds of Palestinian refugees spread out on the grass in the meadows of Baalbek and endlessly discussing how they would return to their villages once the war was over. When one of the men said he didn’t think they would be able to go back till at least a year or two after the end of the war (this was in 1948), the others jumped in with long encomiums on the Arab armies that would surely win the war in a matter of days. They were so certain that the war would end quickly that some of them had even fed their chickens and cows as usual just before fleeing their homes. Many years passed while the men fought over their predictions. Naguib al-Khalili grew up and Narak turned into a handsome young man who loved to paint and play the violin. He dreamt of going to Egypt and watching the great Naguib al-Rihani in The Education of Girls at Cinema Rivoli on Imad al-Din Street. The two friends went to Egypt together, then decided to travel even further. Narak started looking for passage on a ship to New Jersey, where his cousins lived. Naguib was also becoming more and more convinced that the return to his village in the Galilee might take longer than he had hoped and that it would be better to work while he waited. So they boarded a boat together in Cyprus and set sail for the land dreamt of by intrepid explorers.
Narak joined his cousins in the grocery business and Naguib took a job as a baker in the shop that now bears the name The Groom’s Sweets. Al-Khalili saved every penny he earned so that he could go back and get married in his village once he had rebuilt his father’s house, which would no doubt need a lot of repairs after the war. The war lasted for a long time and Naguib forgot all about marriage and the return. His main concern now was to put aside enough money to cover his father’s living expenses back in Baalbek and his sister’s too. She had stayed on in the village of Sahmata, adamant that she would never leave her country. Naguib fretted about money and worked like a dog, work that never seemed to end, except when life had finally passed him by and the dreams he had slaved to realise had evaporated into thin air. People who knew him said that he lived an ascetic life, never changing his dull grey trousers and his red checked shirt except on very rare occasions. He didn’t smoke and didn’t eat much, nor was he in the habit of indulging in games like dominoes or dice in the Arab cafés. He didn’t like hanging around in coiffeuses and usually went to bed early, though once in a while he liked to smoke a water pipe because he believed that it strengthened the memory and cleaned out the intestines. Naguib’s voice was always pitched low and he steered clear of the dictionary of curses that revolved around mothers and sisters by lowering his head and keeping to himself. He was never known to laugh out loud and, according to many of his oldest friends, he was still a virgin, having never known a woman, having never known anything but the longing to return.
In the old photos from Baalbek during the war, Narak and Naguib sit side by side in the meadow, Narak holding his violin and Naguib looking young and handsome with his pitch-black eyes and gentle, regular features. His hair is slicked back in a Clark Gable cut and he wears a spotless white shirt open at the collar, a stylish blue jacket tailored at a shop in the La’aziya Building in Beirut slung over his shoulder. The memories faded away one by one as the years passed, and so did the dream of return, the only thing remaining of his identity proclaimed in a sheaf of old papers stamped ‘Palestinian refugee, place of residence: Baalbek, Lebanon’. Now there was no question of going back. Now he complains of life in general, and that America is nothing but a big lie. He has developed endless theories about how New York is like a giant meat grinder, its rusted gears immediately tossed in the garbage. He believes that people are not as free here as Americans like to claim – money and survival form the axis on which everything turns. ‘What kind of life is it that forces you to bow down to a customer just because he hands you a few pennies? Maybe you dream of buying a house or raising children, but you’re sure to end your days paying off the mortgage and the college loans, and you might even die before you manage
it.’ His words usually collide with the opinions of Mr Muhammad, the waiter in the Arabian Nights coffee shop, who doesn’t like this kind of talk, and says so: ‘If you’re not happy here, why don’t you leave, brother? No one is forcing you to live in the land of the invaders, Abu Zayd!’
The new arrivals mostly agree with Mr Muhammad. They needle Naguib wickedly because his endless homilies and the self-pity in his eyes bore them. The younger ones make no allowances for his age and experience and the decades of hard work that have worn him out. He usually answers their comments in a gentle, sad voice. ‘Boys, if any of you knows of a place for me back home, I wish he’d send me off on the first ship.’ So they let him be and the young men avoid sitting with him so as not to have to listen to his talk about the city’s heartlessness and inhumanity, the number of vagrants and homeless people that wander its streets, the old people in the parks neglected by children who have no time for anything but making money. He can often be heard wondering aloud about the kind of city that could produce all this human misery, this city that people call the apple of the world; a fortress of tyranny and slavery, just like all those other cities of old that had crumbled into dust.
There is no longer any place for him in the coffee shops of Bay Ridge because no one likes having him around; his talk depresses and irritates them. So he has chosen this corner of Park Slope, far from Bay Ridge and its Arab neighbourhoods. He sits at Narak’s chess table and eagerly follows the movements of the marvellous stone pieces, Snow White and Hercules and the Japanese Chu Shogi wedges. His childlike delight in these games draws him like a magnet to the shop day after day. But most of all he enjoys the company of his quiet Armenian friend, who is often busy fiddling with his musical instruments – the oud or the violin. Layla Murad’s voice wafts through the genial Armenian’s shop and feelings of peace and contentment flutter in the folds of their shared silence. Together, they recall the hoopoes of Nablus or that species of fig bird that they used to call the parson because of its crown of black feathers.
Naguib al-Khalili graduated with a degree in Arabic. In those days, Arabic teachers were given an extra stipend and the money allowed him to complete his studies at the High Institute of Teachers in the neighbourhood of Dokki in Egypt. He and his friend Narak went to Egypt in the early 1950s and they shared an apartment on Nawal Street in Dokki for two years. On the return journey from Port Said to Beirut via Cyprus they saw the ships, and from that day on they dreamt of crossing the oceans and seas. Finally, one day they did just that and never came back.
Al-Khalili has always been enamoured of poetry and literature and film and so he never wonders at his nephew Ziyad’s passion for making movies. He says to him in the Egyptian accent that he never entirely lost, ‘You’re a natural, just like your uncle.’ Ziyad – who catches glimpses of the family’s artistic future lurking behind the sacks of flour and sugar in the stockroom of The Groom’s Sweets – smiles, and his uncle pats his hand affectionately. These days al-Khalili is busy with what he likes to call his life’s work: a linguistic study of the most common errors in Arabic composition. He adores grammar, almost as much as he adores Layla Murad’s voice and Charlie Chaplin movies.
He was famous for his ability to solve any problem related to parsing and declension, and when he was a young man everyone said that he was sure to make a good teacher one day. Naguib al-Khalili was a great admirer of the prominent Egyptian philologist Hasan Zaza. Zaza had studied classical philology in France and was proficient in more than twenty languages. He was a Jew, and the story goes that when his professor at the Sorbonne insisted that a Jew could not live safely in Egypt, Hasan Zaza – who was about to defend his dissertation proposal at the time – replied, ‘Come with me to Egypt and you’ll see for yourself. You can walk around the streets wearing your yarmulke and people will greet you as “Khawaga Sednaoui” or “Khawaga Luca” and treat you with the utmost respect.’ Naguib al-Khalili dreamt of following in the footsteps of this Egyptian professor whose life story he knew by heart. He had a lot of other dreams too but he had ended up as a baker with a talent for making Nabulsi pastries. He considered this job to be the art of shaping the nostalgia that tugged at the heart strings of the Lebanese and Syrians and Palestinians who lived at the edges of Brooklyn.
Al-Khalili has held on to a small part of his faded dreams in the form of an old black school bag that he still carries with him everywhere. No one has a clue why he has carried it around all these years, or exactly what it contains, and the strange black bag only adds to his reputation as an old eccentric. Even his old friend Narak often wonders why he holds on to all those ancient books, books with titles like Shards of Gold in the Explanation of the Language of the Arabs and Sibawayh’s Grammar and Ibn Malik’s Alfiya. There is even an original manuscript written out in his own hand called A Summary of Foreign and Loan Words in the Arabic Language, with his name, Naguib al-Khalili, inscribed in a ponderous Kufic script under the title. Every morning he comes to sit at the table in front of Narak’s chess shop and takes out his books. He will go over some complicated grammatical rules so as not to forget them, or repeat a few lines of poetry to sound out their metre, and he can often be heard cursing the exile that has made him forget the rules that govern the negative and the possessive construct. Narak sits inside watching his friend as he works away at his manuscript on grammatical mistakes. Al-Khalili’s usually soft voice rises a couple of notches as he calls out to ask his friend about an obscure point of classical declension. Narak, who used to be an art teacher not a language teacher, isn’t much interested in the rules of grammar. His dreams lie elsewhere. But, as everyone knows, the ship that sets sail for the east may well be driven by the wind in the opposite direction. Narak’s business is on the point of collapse: customers are few and far between, as whimsical chess pieces aren’t so much in demand any more. These days nobody cares about those exquisite, miniature works of art lovingly hand-sculpted by craftsmen like himself. Narak is convinced that New York has become a city inhabited by people just passing through, people who don’t give a damn about art, or one-of-a-kind chess pieces. Even the number of tourists has dwindled, the winters are getting colder every year, and the warehouses are overflowing with unsold stock. Narak grieves at his son’s refusal to take over the shop. The boy has begun to suggest all kinds of schemes for starting another business there. Sons wait patiently for their parents to die so they can follow their own dreams, and that’s the way of the world. The thought makes Narak, who knows and loves every single piece in his shop, terribly sad. The way of the world is never fair.
*
Hend sits on a stoop across the street from the shop. Ziyad passes by, just as he does every evening, and says hello. Hend likes the sound of his deep, mellow voice. She likes his youthful, clean-shaven features, his nicely groomed hair, his dark, stylish clothes, and the smell of his skin. Hend likes Ziyad, but when he passes by she pretends to be busy writing something or other. Sometimes he sits down next to her and she wishes she could confess to him that she really isn’t writing anything at all, that she’s just pretending. She wishes she could tell him that her notebook is full of poems that she’s collected, poems she wishes she had written herself. Instead she lowers her eyes and reads to him (‘Come, my darling, I am the lush hyacinth soon to be plucked by autumn . . . take me between your hands and hold me close, covering my face with kisses’). He asks who the author is and she tells him that it’s a verse from a poem by a Pashtun poetess, a woman just like her. Ziyad is oblivious of her hint. His mind is forever on the film he’s going to make. He tells her about how Quentin Tarantino, one of his favourite directors, used to work in a store just like him. True, the store was a video store – but in the end it was a store. Tarantino obviously used the opportunity to study people and watch movies and talk to his friends about cinema. Then he became a star. ‘That’s America for you,’ says Ziyad, ‘a land of miracles.’ Suddenly he asks her, ‘Have you seen Pulp Fiction?’ She has no idea what he’s talking abo
ut, so he repeats the question in Arabic and he even translates the title. She hasn’t seen it, she tells him. She wants Ziyad to understand that they are interested in the same things, that she loves movies too (though she prefers Egyptian ones from the fifties), and that she especially likes the kind of movies that are about married couples and jilted wives. Ziyad leaves quickly before she can read the rest of her poems to him, poems she’s collected for him.
Hend gazes blankly towards the park frequented by old people, unserviceable people who now spend their days sipping therapeutic drinks and nibbling on sandwiches alone on empty benches. They look for a spot in the sunshine and gingerly sit down, trying hard to ignore the aches and pains of rheumatism, of loneliness and old age. They contemplate that small paradise surrounded by gigantic trees coming to life again after a long, cold winter – a cruel place in spite of its beauty for those coming to the end of their long journey. If the weather is fine, they sit and gaze at the many-coloured cherry and mulberry trees, the chestnuts and oaks, while people jog around the park and young mothers with strollers congregate to spend the morning playing with their children. Hend watches her son in the chess shop from across the street.
Brooklyn Heights Page 15