The Language of Baklava (24 page)

An enchanting opening dish, this dip or spread is good for when you
want everyone to quit running around and come to the table.

Combine all the ingredients, except for the parsley, in a food processor or blender. Purée until smooth.

Spoon the
muhammara
into small bowls and garnish with the chopped parsley. Cover and chill until ready to serve. Before serving, top with drizzle of olive oil and serve with warm pita bread. This dish is also nice spread with
lebeneh
(see page 229)
.

TEN

Stories, Stories

Bud is a great talker in our family of mostly listeners. He soliloquizes on the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, beginning with the Bible; delivers a dissertation on free will versus destiny; and offers several exhortations addressing the nature of animals, the difference between men and women, and the meaning of the universe. He tells endless jokes and instructional stories starring his favorite classic Arab character—Jeha the joker. (Jeha borrows his neighbor’s pot. A week later he returns it with a second smaller pot and says, “While it was staying with me, your pot gave birth to a baby pot!” The neighbor laughs to himself at Jeha’s stupidity but accepts the second pot with pleasure. When Jeha returns a day later to borrow the neighbor’s expensive brass table, the man is delighted to loan it out. Several weeks pass with no sign of Jeha, so the neighbor decides to inquire about his table and the prospect of some new table progeny. Tearfully, Jeha says to his neighbor, “I’m so sorry, I have some terrible news, my friend. While your table was visiting with me, it caught a terrible cold and died.” At this, the neighbor grows furious and says, “What sort of idiot would believe that a table catches cold?” And Jeha retorts, “What sort of idiot believes that pots can give birth!”)

There are also the family narratives, hair-raising tales of Bud running semiwild across Jordan with his tribe of seven (or so) brothers. We hear about our grandfather’s dissolute generosity; our grandmother’s miraculous home library; the day Bud’s brother tried to carry a pig home and his occasionally Muslim father balanced his rifle on the sill of his bedroom window and started firing at his naughty son; the day Bud snuck out to a wedding party without permission and when he came home later that evening his father chased him across the flat rooftops, the sound of their footsteps echoing into the alleys; the time Bud snuck out to witness a public hanging and the weeks of deep-sea nightmares he suffered from afterward.

After we eat, when the kitchen windows glint black with night, Bud rolls away from his plate and begins telling stories of childhood, unimaginable lifetimes ago—fifteen, even twenty years back.

One of our favorites—meaning Bud’s favorite—is the story of how his parents came together. He sits at the table, sipping his little cup of coffee, the tiny handle requiring that he bunch his large fingers together in a delicate way. He wipes at his mustache, once, twice, so we know he wants to tell a long story. Finally, he sits back and rests his little cup on his stomach and begins:

“When my father, Saleh, was sixteen or seventeen or eighteen, he was in a caravan with his father and uncles, going across Amman to Palestine. They used to do like that in those days—three hundred camels and horses and all that, full of wheat and barley and sesame. As-Salt was the only city back then, and it took weeks to cross over.”

“Why wasn’t he in school?” Monica asks, concerned.

He frowns and turns his coffee a little bit, adjusting the rim to exactly the right position. “I think he didn’t like school very much. No, in fact, not at all. None of those brothers did. Their parents sent them to boarding schools in Damascus, in Syria, because there weren’t any schools in Jordan. Always they used to run away immediately. They would come right back to Jordan. Sometimes they would make it back home before their father got back and be sitting there in the kitchen, waiting for their beating. Anyway!

“One day, when the caravan came into Palestine, Saleh came across a girls’ high school. He and his brothers were all hanging around there, looking at the pretty girls. They weren’t used to girls. And there was one he liked specially. That was Anissa Zurub, your grandmother. And he and his father and uncles went to her family and asked for her hand in marriage. Only they turned them down! Why? Because your grandmother was educated, brilliant, and perfect, she was going to go to college. She was a sophisticated city girl from Jerusalem. Her father was an Angelic minister.”

“Anglican,” Mom says.

“Right. And Saleh was just a country bumpkin—a Bedouin! What did he know about the world? Nothing! He was a rough boy with calluses up one side of his body and down the other. Handsome as a black horse, he had a big mustache like I don’t know what, and a smile to drive you out of your mind. But education? None! Okay, so of course, Anissa turned down his courtship. She said no, so he had to go home. Fine. So some time goes by, not very much, and the Turks start to prosecute the Arabs all over the Middle East.”

“Persecute,” Mom says.

“Right. The Turks were after the Christians especially, so the Zurub family had to flee across the border. They ran to Jordan, to As-Salt, the only city. And who owned the best, biggest, oldest house in As-Salt? That’s right, the Abu-Jabers! Do you know the Abu-Jabers are responsible for kicking the king out of As-Salt, so the royalty moved the capital of Jordan to Amman? But that’s a story for another day. Anyway.

“When the Zurub family got to the Abu-Jaber house, my father, Saleh the handsome bumpkin, was there, ready to fall in love with her again. And so he did that. What happened was Saleh’s parents died— some say that the Turks poisoned him—my grandfather Freyeh and his brothers Farah and Farhan—all of them died—maybe by Turks poisoning the well, but also maybe by the typhoid. That is also a possibility. They say the typhoid came and took half of Jordan, you know. If the Turks didn’t get you, the typhoid did—”

“Also another story,” Mom says.

“Right. So after the parents died, Saleh’s oldest sister, Fathee’yeh, she just started matching everybody up. She put together her brothers with some various wives to get those boys out of her hair. And she married Saleh to Anissa, which is how such a smart city girl came to be married to a bumpkin!”

“But did she want to get married to him?” I ask my father. “Were they in love?”

He smiles and leans back in another direction in his seat. “Ya Ba, history is a funny thing. It’s a funny, funny thing. And so is love. That’s another funny thing, like history. They’re practically the same! I rather to think that she did. I rather to believe in a happy kind of an ending. But who really knows any of it except for Saleh and Anissa, and now they’re both gone, God rest their souls. But at least they got married. The end. But you know what’s interesting? Aunt Fathee’yeh herself never got married. She was a tough owl, that one, they say she was the true governor of As-Salt, not exactly elected, but you know how that goes. . . .”

Patiently, privately, Mom collects and washes the dishes and Bud keeps my sisters and me at the table with talking. He requires an audience. He leans his elbows on the linoleum table and unravels family history. We get glimmerings of both the sorts of hardships and wealth they grew up with. We get inklings of his cultural values— what a “good girl” behaves like and the ethical responsibilities of children. And we get a full overview on his life plan for himself and for us, which is to buy a restaurant, for us girls to marry our second cousins and have babies, and for these babies to dance around his knees.

He tells of hot, slouchy summers in the fields, a canvas sack full of soft white powder slung around his neck. He and his friends walked between the planted rows and scooped up the powder in their hands to fling over the crops. What was the powder? “Something for the bugs, maybe. We were supposed to tie our scarves over our mouths, but that was too hot.” And the powder was so silky and fine, like the elegant French talc his mother bought in Jerusalem, perfect to dig fingers into, the fine grains sparkling under their nails. So pretty, some of the children couldn’t resist tasting it. And if it made their fingertips bleed or their tongues blister and their mouths taste of ashes, well, that wasn’t so bad.

Another story: Bud’s father, Saleh. His personality roared inside of him like a furnace. He needed to have people nearby, to feed them, get them drunk on alcohol and spiraling laughter, to shelter them when they passed out. He used to invite passing strangers into their house, where they would empty the larder with gluttonous feasting. This so infuriated my grandmother that she’d have to sit on one of her many children’s beds, grab her knees, and cry out, “That man! That terrible man!” Once, my grandfather—already feeling mellow and sentimental from
araq,
his signature liquor—passed one of the English guards on the road near his house and invited him and his platoon over for a party. To my grandfather’s delighted surprise, the man accepted. For an entire day before the British arrived, the whole village had to butcher lambs, pluck chickens, and lug bags of rice, onions, and tomatoes to the house. The intense cooking steamed up every room in their house, wilting all the pages in my grandmother’s library—which was a frivolous and vaguely ominous place, to my grandfather’s way of thinking, anyway. That night the soldiers came resplendent in their regal uniforms, thronging the little rubble road through Yehdoudeh like a parade down a cow path, hungry and sharp stepping, their English voices bright as spears. At various times during the course of the three long days and nights that the soldiers stayed, my father heard the sound of his mother’s voice, coming from her library, keening, “That man! That terrible man!”

Another book of stories: King Hussein days. Somewhere in his dreamy, elastic past, Bud was friends with the king of Jordan. When he was a boy, Bud’s family lived in the same hillside neighborhood as the king’s family, and Bud and his brothers used to play pickup soccer games with the young, soon-to-be king and his brothers. When he grew up, Bud flew a plane in the king’s air force, and he became one of the king’s fencing partners. And then there was the rice. As part of his military duty, Bud and his chum Mo Kadeem worked in the king’s imperial kitchens. No cooking, though; instead, he and Mo sorted rice, lentils, and
frekeh
(cracked wheat) for hours each week, painstakingly sifting through bushels of grains, flicking out all the tiny bits of stone and grit by hand. These lentils and rice would be used to make great pans of the delicious, simple dish
mjeddrah.

“It was
as-shugal al-majnoon,
” Bud explains. The work of the crazy man. “Because you go crazy when you do it.”

Didn’t that upset you, we ask, working as a lowly kitchen helper? You, a fencer of kings, a pilot of kings, a black-eyed young man with a gleaming, perfumed mustache?

He smiles vaguely; his head lists to one side. “Maybe I liked it. I don’t know. It was important work. We kept the king’s rice clean! Besides, my father always told me I didn’t have the brains to do anything else. He said I should stick to the kitchen because I shouldn’t be trusted with a weapon.”

Because you had a short temper?

“Because I might accidentally kill myself. He used to knock on my head—” Bud makes a rapping gesture at his temple. “He’d say, ‘What’s in there? Rocks!’ ” He snickers and looks down.

Dad, that’s terrible!

We can hardly imagine it. What sort of father would say such things about his beloved child? Not the sort of father that Bud is. We can barely imagine it. It’s not true, it isn’t! we cry, and grab his arms, to pull him up and away from the place of such memories.

But he just shakes his head and says, “It’s okay. Mo Kadeem, now, he was the one with all the brains. He had a big, handsome head, like Cary Grant, and he was a genius, smarter than Ibn Battuta. Mo Kadeem was going to Australia someday. He saw in a movie or a book or something that the women there are seven feet high, with arms like swans and hair like lemon trees. He used to say he was going to Australia to get himself such a woman, with skin like an apple, and build a house on top of the world like the Taj Mahal. He used to talk about it all the time, his big-time plans, while we washed all that rice and lentils.”

And what did you want to do, Dad?

He smiles his smile full of white, even teeth—not a single cavity. “I wanted to be the one who made the
mjeddrah.
”

Whatever happened to Mo Kadeem?