The Language of Baklava (25 page)

“Mo Kadeem! I wish I knew. I think he must be king of Australia by now,” he says in an injured, wistful way. He looks so far off that we try to see what he is looking at—but of course, nothing is actually there.

BUD’S ROYAL MJEDDRAH

Clean the lentils carefully, and everyone will love you.

In a mixing bowl, combine the lentils and rice; set aside. In a saucepan, fry the onion and garlic in olive oil until golden brown. Add a little of the cooking liquid from the lentils, then mix in the bouillon, cumin, salt and pepper to taste. Stir the onion mixture into the lentils and rice. Serve with yogurt blended with half a peeled, chopped cucumber and a small bunch of chopped fresh mint.

MAKES 4 TO 6 SERVINGS.

ELEVEN

Immigrants’ Kids

In high school, all my friends have euphonious, polysyllabic names: Olga Basilovich, Sonja Soyenka, Yorunda Nogatu, Mahaleani Lahiri. We take as many classes as possible together, and I can still recall the teachers’ despair as they are nearly undone by calling attendance, the look of panic that comes over them after picking up the class roster and stumbling horribly through “Diana Abu-Jaber,” only to confront “Mahaleani Lahiri.” Our lunch bags open and the scent of garlic, fried onions, and tomato sauce rolls out—pierogi,
pelmeni, doro wat,
teriyaki, kielbasas, stir-fries, borscht . . . I become famous for my lunch bags full of garlic-roasted lamb and stuffed grape leaves.

The American girls in my classes are on diets. I first learn about this trend from my friend Kimberly, who is already so narrow and featureless that her skinny jeans barely cling to her hips. She irons her long hair, so there’s always a whiff of scorched hair wafting around her shoulders, detectable even over the heady doses of Coty’s musk perfume. For weeks at a time she goes on diets where she will live on two avocados a day. And my friends Janie and Kendra are permanently hungry. Everything smells delicious to them. The sight of trays loaded with cafeteria food brings a wanton longing into their faces. But they allow themselves just the barest crumbs: Kendra consumes only diet sodas and the crusts of sandwiches; Janice eats soda crackers and half jars of baby-food applesauce. Usually midlunch one or the other will sniff and glare at her food, there will be a pause like a moment of grieving, and then she’ll quickly stand and throw away her minuscule portion, just a few bites taken.

But after school, the two of them will buy big, freezer-frosted tubs of fudge ripple ice cream and devour it with soup spoons while sitting on cement dividers in the middle school parking lot next door. Kendra still fits into her clothes from fifth grade, and even though she’s fifteen, Janie brags that she hasn’t gotten her period yet. Both of them watch with prim, impassive expressions as my other friends and I eat our lunches. Then Kendra sniffs and balances her chin on her knuckles and gazes across the gray-tiled cafeteria as if she is looking across the ocean, saying with great disdain and perhaps a smidgen of curiosity, “I don’t understand how you can so
not care.
”

My immigrant-kid friends are not on diets. Most of us have parents from countries where a certain lushness is considered alluring in a woman. We’ve grown up in houses redolent with the foods of other places. We cook experimentally at one another’s houses, though it’s hard to get the others to come out to my remote address since none of us can drive yet. When we do try to cook at my house, my father hovers over our shoulders, sniffing and offering a stream of helpful advice, occasionally prying the spoons from our hands or dashing in extra garlic or pepper.

Olga Basilovich’s father is an elderly, gentle, diminutive man from Russia. Olga tells me that when he was a young man, he and his family were shipped to the concentration camps. I have spent entire nights weeping over
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl,
and I peer closely at Mr. Basilovich the first couple of times I meet him, searching for a sign of his dreadful experience. But his smile is benign and uncomplicated; in conversation, his eyes automatically flutter to the floor. I learn in regular installments from Olga that he escaped the camps and crossed Europe on foot, enduring dramatic perils— towering barbed-wire fences, vicious dogs, gunshots, starvation, and mountaintop exposure. He made his way to America, and once there, he began to try to kill himself.

The first attempt was just after he’d acquired his PhD in molecular biology and had his first university position. He swallowed poison and was thwarted by his wife, who’d come home early and found him curled on the floor. The second time happened not long after Olga was born and involved an at-home hanging, again discovered too soon by his wife.

Our friend Sonja tells me these American suicide stories, not Olga, who is furtive and somewhat prickly. There seem to be invisible quills that lift from her and hold the rest of us at bay. Even though she and I are close, there are things that Olga can’t talk about, so her oldest friend, Sonja, tells me. Sonja, of Russian-Catholic descent with a stolid, pragmatic view of the world, is impatient with Olga’s evasive-ness and Mr. Basilovich’s repeated suicide attempts.

Sonja and I linger over the gleaming sinks in the girls’ restroom at school as she tells me stories about her friend’s father. “Can you imagine?” she whispers. “He walked through whole towns where everyone was totally gone!”

An image of a naked, scorched place called “Europe” opens in my mind: The trees look burnt and stripped as candlewicks. The air is a stirring, sulfurous yellow.

“So creepy.”

“But really . . .” Sonja frowns, and her full mouth turns down, her Russian brow-bone high and imperial. “He behaves so irresponsibly! All this suicide! He has children, for heaven’s sakes.”

I try pulling my hair smooth, give up, and let it
sproing
back. “Maybe he’s haunted,” I suggest. I think about Olga’s own narrow, downturned mouth, her shining, already disappointed eyes, and wonder how much of her father she may have inherited. She has his olive skin and inwardly bent gaze: Among our group of friends, she is the most moody and intriguing.

Sonja flicks back her glossy hair in a single swoop. “Haunted. Sure, he’s Russian, he’s Jewish. But all of our fathers are haunted. Big deal.”

Mr. Basilovich is so quiet and retiring, I scarcely know what his voice sounds like. Then one day when I am visiting Olga, he comes into the kitchen, where the two of us are hanging on the refrigerator door. As if resuming a conversation that had just been interrupted, he walks right up to me and says impatiently, wiping at his tiny mustache, “The cabbages! What about the cabbages?”

I gape at him. This is the most he’s said to me through all the bottomless afternoons Olga and I have spent together lounging on their living room floor, awash in a glaze of television reruns. I wonder if this sort of outburst is an effect of his particular brand of insanity, resulting from having walked alone through burnt, abandoned cities. Annoyance flickers over Olga’s face: She is easily maddened by her father. She has told me that when he wanders sleepless through their house at night, she too lies awake, mentally wandering after him through dark rooms.

“He’s talking about the stuffed cabbage that your dad made last week,” Olga says, sighing.

I rack my brain—Olga did come over for dinner, and Bud always sends people home with food, but I have no memory of what we’d eaten. Mr. Basilovich glances at me expectantly. “Was it okay?” I ask.

“Was it okay? Was it okay?” His voice rises, eyebrows jutting. He looks offended.

“I gave him some of the cabbages. He hasn’t talked about anything else all week,” Olga groans.

“They are beautiful,” he says in his Eastern European accent that always strikes me as both ironic and wistful. Each of my friends has parents who grew up speaking different languages from our own, parents who are all too emotional or colorful for comfort. Our fathers ignore or argue with the TV; they sit in Bermuda shorts and black socks at the kitchen table and tell us too much about who they were. They’re given to blurting out intense things, like Bud, who will suddenly, ominously observe, “If I live, I live; if I die, I die,” or his more succinctly tragic favorite, “
I
can’t take it.
”

Mr. Basilovich’s American wife ghosts around the corner, glancing at him. She is part companion and part keeper. A sort of continual alertness flows in an unbreaking current beneath her skin, with at least one part of her gaze always fixed on her sensitive husband. She quit her own job in order to drive Mr. Basilovich directly to and from work and to bring him his lunches. She watches his face as he falls asleep and wakes him if he falls too far.

“The skin of your father’s cooked cabbage is like a flower,” he goes on, making a poem of cabbage, wrapped up in a meal that I don’t remember eating. His hands sculpt a soft form in the air as if he is describing a woman’s body.

“Yeah, my dad says cooked cabbage should be like a lady’s skin,” I say, then catch myself, distressed that I’ve actually quoted Bud.

But Mr. Basilovich is pleased by these thoughts of a kindred spirit. “Yes, of course, like the softest skin. The butter, how it works through the cabbage leaves! And the taste of lamb comes next”—he looks delicately at his wife—“like a kiss.”

Olga looks away, embarrassed by her father, who has gone in one moment from intellectual and aloof to too sensual and nakedly emotional. “Dad, come on, don’t talk about food like that,” she says, and folds her arms. “It’s just food.”

Mr. Basilovich breaks off and stares at their kitchen table, smoothing one palm over its surface, back and forth, a bare trace of a smile on his face. “Yes,” he says, “just food.” He is different from my father, but I recognize something in him. He never seems to be entirely in the room. His gaze is forever wafting over shoulders and seeking out doorways; he is only partially present.

Mr. Basilovich decides that as an emissary of my father, I must taste the Russian-Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish version of stuffed cabbages, which he calls
golubtsi.
To Olga’s astonishment, her scholarly father ties on his wife’s apron and rattles through the cupboards, mumbling to himself in one of his other languages; she has never seen him cook before. We watch him through the doorway—me; Stasia, the younger sister; Olga; and her mother—as Mr. Basilovich chops, heats, and stirs, efficient and brisk as a scientist. Olga glances at her mother anxiously.

Twelve-year-old Stasia leans against the refrigerator and nips at the edges of her cuticles, then sighs and fluffs her big Farrah Fawcett hair. “Let’s get out of here,” she says. The three of us move to her bedroom to listen to music. Olga and Stasia discuss the aggravating weirdness of their father—the mournful, wordless songs he sings in the shower, the drawer full of old, crackling foreign money and photographs of frowning women, with their black eyes and high, slanted cheekbones. “Who are they?” Stasia asks us in annoyance. “He won’t tell.”

“No, he’ll never tell,” Olga says.

Somewhere in the midst of the David Bowie album, an aroma starts to bloom around us.

We wander back to the kitchen doorway in time to see Mr. Basilovich pulling a pan out of the oven. It’s layered with velvety, glistening packets of cabbage filled with minced beef and carrot. He carefully transfers the cabbages to a platter with a serving spoon, gives us each a fork but no plate, then stands beside the dish, eyes modestly downturned. Olga spears a piece of cabbage and takes a bite. “Oh!” she says. She touches the base of her throat and smiles at her father. “It’s wonderful.”

Stasia, who has been skeptical, takes a small bite, then another. She blinks and blinks. “Oh, wow,” she says.

I slide my fork through the cabbage. It’s soft and mellow and evaporates in my mouth, the pork and carrot mildly evanesced, exquisitely intertwined.

“Is it good?” he asks me, and smiles. “Is it good?”

Not long after the day of the ephemeral cabbage, my friend Sonja calls. Olga has told her that their father hasn’t left his bed or stopped crying for a week. “Can you imagine?” she says. “Olga says he’s been crying in his sleep—his pillows are all soaked.” No matter how hard his wife has tried to shake him from his crying dreams, she cannot do it. After two weeks of crying, Mr. Basilovich is hospitalized.

He is kept under sedation for a week. Every day, Olga rushes back to his hospital room right after school, bringing him novels and chocolates, any little treat she can dream up to try to entice her father back to life. “He looks at me,” Olga reports from the hospital phone. “He even tries to smile. But it’s like it’s hurting him.” There is a long pause where I can hear the slip of her breath, the texture of the telephone silence. “His eyes look burned.”