The Language of Baklava (11 page)

They laugh and chatter, and their bodies relax into the murmurous air—it reminds me of the
debkeh
dance—the ring of interlaced participants, arms around shoulders, the movement dissolving into sound like sugar into milk. I sit among the women, my body filled with the charged scent of the bread, the lilt of their voices. I am understanding more and more of what they are saying, and it finally dawns on me that they’re speaking Arabic—a stiff, bookish sort of Arabic, the kind in our school texts—classical Arabic—from hundreds of years ago, the verbs and pronouns more timeworn than “thee” and “thou.”

One of the women points her tattooed chin at me. “What does she eat?” she asks Munira.

“I like
jameed,
” I pipe up. “And
ka’k
and
Zataar.
And also chewing gum and hot chocolate at the big hotel.”

The women all stop what they’re doing and stare at me. The crone hoots. “She speaks!” she says in her crackling voice.

Munira smiles a modest little smile. “A bit,” she says.

“But why does she speak like that?” the first woman says. “Like a cat eating a bone.”

Munira shrugs. “They all talk like that in the city.”

“Come on, child,” the crone urges me. “Say more!” They swivel back toward me.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t born with the ability to think on the spot. I open my mouth, take a deep breath, and blurt out, “Bread! Table! Mouse!”

The women bleat with laughter and the crone doubles over, almost toppling onto the heated rock. I glow with this unexpected triumph. “Milk, moon, tree! Feet, water, lizard! Bus, neighbor, napkin!” I gesticulate a little for emphasis.

They echo my words in confirmation, one of them crying, “God is great!”

The crone reaches over and pats Munira’s knee. “What a bizarre child,” she says, and wipes her eyes. “Truly God is great.”

At the main open tent, the men are seated like the women, but on cushions. Their ring is large and wide open so every man is included and equal—no one sits behind or in front of anyone—unlike the women’s crowded, unruly circles. The men’s ring is more intense, charged with debate and dramatic storytelling requiring hands to be flashed through the air, voices to leap. Bud leans into the conversation. He is more than happy—he looks bigger, wilder, louder, truer— as if some vital piece of him that I never knew existed has been returned to him.

Seated next to my father at the top of the circle is my great-granduncle, the sheikh, a tall, graceful man with a white waterfall of a beard that covers the front of his immaculate white robe. His old, noble nose is big, round, and important, and while he doesn’t say much, his eyes pull at you with all sorts of magical powers. It’s immediately clear to me why Bud would bring his questions to this man. When we arrived the sheikh kissed my father four times on each cheek, rumpled his hair, and asked if Mom was one of Bud’s daughters. The women bring the sheikh his tea first, and a young boy stands at his right side, languorously waving a fan.

I gaze over the ring of women’s heads as I watch my father talking. Then I notice my mother loitering at the edge of the women’s ring, holding my sisters’ hands. Her expression is hard to read through the hot, watering air, but her head is lowered, moody and wary. I catch, in that glimpse, what profoundly different planets my parents are from, how improbable it is that they are joined together. And I sense a deep weirdness about my own existence in the world. How could these two people have ever found each other? How could I have ever come to be?

A baby goat is killed discreetly and somehow silently, behind a tent. Mom stupefies me by grabbing the back of my shirt and saying that this is something I don’t need to watch. A few hours later, it takes three strong, stringy men to upend the immense cooking pot onto a serving platter big enough to hold Monica. People gather around to watch the great pouring of the
mensaf.
The meat, rice, bread, and sauce mingle, satiny as a risotto. Its aroma streams through the air, thick and liquid; the air sparkles with it. The silver tray nearly covers the table, and we stand in a circle, pressing against the edge. The men and the women eat separately, but because we are special guests, they invite us to eat with the men. It’s so crowded that we must stand sideways, with one hand—the right—turned toward the food. The tent is a goat-hair canvas staked to long poles covering our heads but open on the sides so the wind pours through and works the canvas like a bellows. The moment feels charged and fabulous, like the opening seconds of a play, and everyone presses close. The old sheikh nods and says, “
Sahtain,
sahtain, alhumdullilah.
” (“To your health, thanks be to God.”) And so we start.

Mensaf
is to be eaten hot-hot, as soon as it emerges from the heat. The whole first month we lived in Jordan, my mouth and tongue stung and I was constantly sucking air through my teeth, until I finally understood that I had to let the food cool off a little.
Mensaf
is also to be eaten with the hands—as the Bedu eat everything: You dip your fingers into the mixture, and the rice is hot and wet on your skin. You scoop up a bit of food in the palm of your hand, palm it gingerly so it is round and soft, an impromptu dumpling, then push it into your mouth with your thumb and forefinger. This is all done quickly, cheerfully; everyone eats from their own private section of the tray, yet there is a good deal of rearranging of the meat so the choicest pieces are arrayed in front of the guests. There is an intricate blend of aromas in the air: I smell onions and nutty rice, as well as the rich field-and-dust scent of the cotton robe on the man standing in front of me, and mingled with all of this is a teasing thread of spices—ginger, nutmeg, pepper.

The goat melts into the rice melts into the sauce, and I cannot separate the eating from the food itself. The steam from the food dampens my face. The Bedouin men all take turns carefully feeding the little foreign girls, our skin pale and shiny as soap, our eyes round as coins. Monica compliantly accepts everything offered—which will turn out to be too much, later on. But for now, she lolls on a woman’s lap while a man squats before her, tenderly offering her morsels as if she were a baby bird. There is so much food that it seems limitless: No one will ever go hungry.

After the dinner come platters of fruit—oranges, lemons, figs, pomelos, grapes, bananas, dates,
eskidinias—
or loquats. The men unsheathe short, pointed daggers from their sashes—stashed beside their longer curling swords—and peel the fruit so its sweet incense fills the air. The food has released them from their need to debate great topics. Now they are in the mood to recite poetry and sing. The men and women seem to recall the pleasures of each other’s company, and they intermingle, the men offering the women peeled fruit. Two men sing dreamily about longing and the impossible necessity of love beside a fragrant wood fire, while a woman draws a bow over the stark single string of her
rebab
. The crone nestles her long bony body against the sheikh’s long bony body, and he gazes at her and runs his fingertips along the side of her lined cheek.

Munira sits beside me on the ground, picking out the intricate pomegranate seeds to feed to me. And I wait, content and expectant, as if I’d been born to have someone sit beside me and painstakingly feed me. I love the crunch and sweet, winy squirt of the little seeds and resolve to eat many more pomegranates in my life.

Munira strokes my hair back behind my ears and says, now in the city Arabic, “Wouldn’t you like to stay here with me forever?”

I feel as if I’m drifting backward into the ground, as if my drowsiness is drifting up from the earth. “Yes,” I say. “I’d love that.”

“You could be my little girl. I would feed and dress you beautifully.” Her hand sweeps over my head. I’m lying down, gazing into the sky—it’s still light out, but I can already see the moon. “Your mother has the other little girls, and she can have even more. But I have none and I don’t have a man to give me any!”

“Why don’t you get a man?”

“I’m much too old now, it’s too late.” Her voice is hazy and far away.

“How old are you?”

“Almost thirty, I think.”

I consider this. “I would be your little girl,” I murmur.

“Besides, this is where you belong.” She draws one finger along my face. “You’re a wind baby.”

“Am I a Bedouin?”

“The Bedu were here first,” she says as if she doesn’t hear me. She looks up at the emerging stars, and I admire her angular profile, her skin tanned as old leather. “We were here before any of this city nonsense, before any of these crazies from Europe or anybody.”

I nod dreamily, imagining the Bedouins at the beginning of time.

“We know things that no one else does.” She puts her hand over my wrist, and the matter is settled. “I’ll teach you everything, just wait.”

I nod again, surrendering to the hand.

I doze a bit, the scents of the day ribboning through my sleep. When I wake, there’s a soft woven blanket wrapped around me. The sun has set and the moon is pointed and stark in the cold new air. I roll over to one side and see a group of men strolling together toward the open desert. I hear the sheikh and my father’s voices. I think, Bud must be asking his question.

Then they’re laughing; they’re holding something up over their heads, and there are vivid cracks of light. They’re shooting off their guns. Is this an answer?

Munira is asleep beside me: The firelight is soft on her face—I’ve never seen her sleep before—the map of wrinkles is blurred, and her face is younger and smoother, as if in a fairy tale. One of her hands rests on the edge of my shirt. I sit up and watch her sleep for a while before, somewhat regretfully, I get up and go in search of my mother and sisters. I find them sitting in the crook of a log before another fire, my sisters asleep, my mother gazing sternly into the flames. “You ready to go?” she asks, her voice crisp. Her face is painted with the golden light; she is as beautiful as the sun behind the mountains. “I think it’s time.”

A broad-winged bird flies low over our heads under the moon. Its call is spicy and low. If I had stayed by Munira’s fire for one more moment, I might never have left at all.

The car is full of sleep: Bud is the only one awake, driving. But the reflected starlight slips over my eyelids and into my dreams. Finally I sit up inside our dark, shared chamber. My mother’s head tilts as she dozes, her hand resting lightly on my father’s leg. There’s a white Bedouin scarf loose on his shoulders, and he smells like sumac, thyme, and fields.

“Dad, Dad,” I whisper to him, “did you ask your question?”

He doesn’t respond right away. Then he seems to nod faintly. He sighs and says, “Did you know . . .” His voice trails off as if he is distracted by his own thoughts, then picks up again. “Did you know that your grandfather’s eyesight was so good he could see the eye of a bird flying by? And that your great-granduncle can smell the water hidden underground? And your uncle Ramzi—they say he can hear an earthquake before it starts shaking.”

Aha, Bud is in one of those moods. I’ve seen it before—where he sits up in the dark and gazes out the window at whatever it is he sees. It’s something I puzzle over until the night I catch myself doing the same thing.

“I’ve already forgotten everything,” he says, his fingers slipping over the notches in the steering wheel as if over a string of prayer beads. “I forgot how good the food tastes under a tent. And the wind smell in the valley.”

I think of the big blowing tent and the hot
mensaf
and how purely good everything tasted after a day in the open air. Then for some reason I imagine Uncle Ramzi, this man alone in his cave, murmuring with the earth, its deep voice telling him all sorts of things about the stars and moon. Something snags in my chest, the tiniest barb, as if I am catching Bud’s mood. I can see the city lights just beginning to glow on the horizon, their diffuse rosy haze. I wonder if we will ever spend time among the Bedouins again. Deeper down, from beneath that question, emerges a larger, more formless question, something about whether people have to decide exactly who they are and where exactly their home is. Do we have to know who we are once and for all? How many lives are we allowed? But it’s too strange and somehow a little frightening to ask anything like this.

Easier instead to slide back down on the seat, into the gentle scent of Munira’s clothing, close my eyes, and pretend to fall fast asleep.

BEDOUIN MENSAF LEBEN

Lamb is substituted for goat here, in deference to what is
stocked in American grocery stores.

*
Shrak
is a very fine, thin bread available in some specialty food stores.