The Language of Baklava (19 page)

Their drowsy, hypnotic complaints go on and on. My mod green plastic wristwatch reports it’s a disappointing one a.m.

Mom flees the room of complaints in order to prepare the dessert. She and Aunt Rachel turn the oven up to full blast
—knaffea
should be served piping hot. Then they try to clear a bigger space on the kitchen table for the immense silver tray. This is challenging because for the past twenty or thirty years, Aunt Rachel has been writing something called “the great American novel.” It towers in great foot-high stacks of manuscript pages all over the table and the floor around the table, so if you eat there, you’ve got to put your plate on a pile of pages. Mom says that Rachel won’t let anyone read it until she’s done, so it has assumed an air of mystery. When you look closer, though, it turns out that the pages are mostly typed correspondence she sends to various newspaper editors sharing her insights, opinions, and idle ruminations on the issues of the day. There is a letter on top of one stack concerning the sorry state of the geopolitics of Southeast Asia.

Hanna and Jean walk around the stacks of pages with their faces tight and their hands drawn in. “I see you’re still working on that book of yours, Rachel,” Aunt Jean says. “Still the same one, right?”

This comment is bothersome and nasty, like a hairy sweater. Auntie Rachel barely seems to hear it, though; her mind is on higher things. She is wonderful to discuss life and literature with. She tells me that Samuel Beckett was a gangster and Joyce a pervert and that no one can really enjoy Henry James until they’re forty-five. She says that Flannery O’Connor is a mad genius, Hemingway is much better than you’d think, and two years of college is almost enough to civilize most people. She’s against suicide but has observed that, in contrast, murder makes sense. She says that dinner is a moral imperative and dessert is its own reward.

One time she shows me a novel by a popular writer and tells me that he’s a big, bald-faced liar.

“But—I thought that he wrote fiction,” I say, confused by the literary distinctions.

“The difference between fiction and lying,” she says irritably, “is the difference between imagination and laziness.”

She tells me all sorts of things and never seems to notice that she’s talking to an eleven-year-old. I am passionately devoted to her.

Aunt Rachel removes the
knaffea
from the oven and places it on its sumptuous tray; the shredded phyllo dough is crisp and brown, crackling with hot, rose-scented syrup. Nestled within, like a naughty secret, is the melting layer of sweet cheese. The pastry is freshly hot, the only way to eat it, really, with its miraculous study in contrasts— the running cheese hidden within crisp, crackling layers of baked phyllo and the distinctive, brocaded complexities of flavors. It’s so hot that it steams in your mouth, and at first you eat it with just the tips of your teeth. Then the layers of crisp and sweet and soft intermingle, a series of surprises. It is so rich and dense that you can eat only a little bit, and then it is over and the
knaffea
is just a pleasant memory—like a lovely dream that you forget a few seconds after you wake. But for a few seconds, you knew you were eating
knaffea.

Aunt Rachel, an American like my mother, learned to make
knaffea
as a young bride during her correspondence with her husband’s Palestinian mother, Anissa. My grandmother was said to have been intellectual and bookish, as well as an expert maker of
knaffea
and other pastries. When Anissa was made to leave her home in Jerusalem and went to live with my Jordanian-Bedouin grandfather in his remote desert place, she dreamed up a new home for herself in her books. My father, who never took to formal education himself, looked upon his mother’s library as a pilgrim might have looked upon the icons in a cathedral. He knew this was something to revere. And years later, Aunt Rachel, who never really took to cooking, looked upon Anissa’s recipes in much the same way.

My grandmother was only forty-eight when she died, not long before my mother married Bud. She had borne innumerable children—some say seventeen, some say only nine. She died while most of her sons were far away in America, before they had a chance to see her once more. Now the
knaffea
calms Bud and Uncle Hal down. It makes them remember their mother, and they forget again about being surrounded by Americans.

Uncle Hal goes back to the living room, gets out his one-stringed
rebab
and bow, and sits on the couch beside Bud, drawing forth the
rebab
’s rickety, stirring music. Together, they sing “Ridi Ha” in their soulful voices. The brothers lean against each other, gaze at the ceiling, and sing as if the song has been written just for them, a song for the time between late night and early morning, when life is filled with uncertainties and boundaries have gone blurry.

In the kitchen, Hanna and Jean ignore the music; they are holding their plates and forks in midair. They look disoriented and out of sorts. Hanna, who has just taken a bite, bleats at her mother, “But your
knaffea
isn’t this good!” as if she has duped her.

Jean’s features seem to elongate; she stares at her fork. Finally she sniffs, “I think it’s too sweet.” I look away, embarrassed for her—we all know that’s a lie. Then she adds, “I suppose this is why you’ll never finish your book, Rachel. You spend your time fooling around in the kitchen.”

And then the room is holding its breath. The night expands and the kitchen ceiling lifts and the taste of the
knaffea
lingers in memory like a musical phrase. Like the wounded look in my auntie’s eyes. The moment passes quickly, so almost no one sees what has occurred, neither the suspended moment of time nor the hurtful exchange at the kitchen table. There is a nearly imperceptible quickening in the atmosphere. But then my mother stands beside Rachel protectively, gathering dishes with a deliberate rattle; a cool efficiency settles over us like a compress.

MAD GENIUS
KNAFFEA

*
Kadayif
dough is a kind of shredded phyllo dough, similar in spirit to shredded wheat; it is available in specialty food stores.

†
Alawi
is a mild sweet cheese available in import food stores.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. In a mixing bowl, cut and fluff
¹
⁄2 pound of the knaffea dough with your hands. Add half of the melted butter and mix until the dough strands are evenly coated. Spread evenly in lightly buttered 17 × 13-inch baking pan.

Spread
alawi
over the
kadayif
in the pan.

Cut and fluff the remaining
¹
⁄2 pound knaffea dough in the bowl. Add the remaining melted butter and mix with your hands until the strands are evenly coated. Spread the dough over the top of the cheese layer, pressing down firmly to form an even surface. Place on the lowest oven rack and bake until golden, about 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, prepare the syrup. Combine the sugar and water in a pan and boil for about 10 minutes. Take the pan off the heat and add the lemon juice, rosewater, or orange blossom water. Refrigerate while the
knaffea
is baking. As soon as the
knaffea
is removed from the oven, pour the cold syrup evenly over the pastry. Cut into squares to serve.

MAKES 24 TO 30 SERVINGS.

My eyeballs feel dry and tight, as if they are stuck in the wrong sockets. I turn to Jess. “I don’t feel tired yet at all,” I say, wired. “Do you?”

Her eyes look slotted. “Ha. I’m wide awake.”

Monica is asleep with her head on the kitchen table. Suzy is sternly watching Aunt Jean as if she will be making out a report on her later.

Aunt Rachel’s rooster clock on the wall above the stove holds its drumsticks up over its head. I stare out the window at the blue-smeared stars; I think, This is what two in the morning looks like on the North Pole.

The children who are still awake leave the grown-ups to their past. We retire to the library, sling skinny arms around each other’s necks, and instigate several hundred more rounds of “Auld Lang Syne”— each of us with his or her own unique interpretation—until Hanna comes in and says we sound like a bunch of demented gorillas, then goes back out. We discuss this and decide that we’ll sound better with musical accompaniment. Ignoring the prim upright piano backed against the wall, we rummage through the kitchen cupboards for pots and pans and large, club-size spoons. We pound the pots in time with our song and make such a fierce racket that the adults yell and grab their heads and suggest that it’s time to take it outside. So we pull on our jackets and mittens and boots. We run past Hanna, who folds her arms over her chest and says, “Thank God! You were giving me a headache,” just like someone’s mother.

Outside, the night air is still filled with snow, though now it hangs above the earth in a sparkling curtain. Our breath curls in thick white rings from our mouths and we march in circles, banging on saucepans and hollering a hillbilly version of “Auld Lang Syne.”

Besides us, there is no one and nothing outside. Just a few windows still gleam with light on the lonely country lane. The snow starts to thicken again; it turns the night a pale burgundy color. Our thin, chill-stripped voices rise and quaver together, throats raw from the cold and shouting, lost in the blanketing layers of air. The stars snap at us, and I can look and look until it feels as if I’m falling up and out into the whirling snow, dissolving into sky. Then I glance back at the house and see Hanna framed by the kitchen window. She stands close enough to the glass that her breath makes a circle of steam. Her palms float on the window like two pink starfish.

“What a grown-up,” Jess hisses in my ear.

Two months from now, we will learn that Hanna is pregnant and has run away with her high school sweetheart, leaving behind a room full of rag dolls and drawings of horses and a single application to Swarthmore College, still in its original envelope. Aunt Jean will be bedridden with fury, her skin glowing and damp. She will shower Uncle Abdelhafiz with wild, inventive curses that impress both Bud and Uncle Hal and demand that he hunt them down and bring back the girl. Privately, Uncle Abdelhafiz will tell my father it is too too too late. “She left forever ago.” And privately, Bud will muse that Abdelhafiz appears to be almost relieved about it all.

But on this night, plush with snow and a tropical darkness, we don’t know anything.

Hanna waves, and I pretend not to see her.

It is so late, it has snowed us into a dream. A thin wind whistles through the fluff trim on my hood. I turn around and lift my arms to steady myself.

From out of the muffled, snow-packed blackness, a single ancient car comes grumbling toward us.

“What is that?” Jess asks in a puff of steam. “I thought the roads were closed.”

We are all standing and blinking. No one says anything, but everyone glances at me.

“Maybe we should go in,” Ed murmurs.

I gape at the encroaching black form. Did I summon this? A line of glacial sweat rises on the back of my neck. “No, wait—keep singing— don’t look at him!” I murmur, thrilled and only a little bit frightened, half believing that I invented this, the unknown man who comes from the dark.

The car slows and then crawls beside us as we march along the side of the road. My clanging pot and straining voice are not enough to cover the thumping in my chest. The driver rolls down his window then, but he doesn’t speak and I can’t quite bring myself to look at him. All I see from the corner of my eye is a sharp form bent over a steering wheel. I think I can hear the tinny, canned sound of his car radio turned low, but this seems too sentimental a sound for a killer, so I ignore the radio and the astringent tang of alcohol wafting from his windows. We continue like this—singing and marching, the car rolling—for a few long minutes. Then the window goes up and he pulls away.

Jess whirls back. “Did you see that?” Her eyes are lit with exhilaration.

My breath lunges in and out of me as if I’d been running through the snowfields. We stand and watch in a pious silence as the car dissolves into the churning snow.

Suddenly we notice that the air has gotten too cold to breathe and our eyes are sugared over with frost. Ed proposes another round of marching, but Suzy starts to drift toward the house and I follow her. One by one, we stomp up the stairs and drop our thawing mittens and boots, gloves and hats, jackets and scarves all over the bathroom floor. From far away, rising from hidden rooms, we hear the adults’ voices, laughing and languorous as an ancient river. My cousins, sisters, and I crawl onto my aunt and uncle’s vast, perfumed bed, lay our heads on the bottomless pillows, and surrender.