The Language of Baklava (29 page)

I consider this. “Fine,” I say.

Aunt Aya’s cooking is so good, they say she can tempt angels out of the trees. It’s too good, some of my aunties say, it’s not natural. For some reason, no one can remember her recipes after she demonstrates her dishes, and she never writes them down. If you write them, Aya says, they lose their power. I have been warned by some of the other family not to eat her food, told that it’s magical, a disruptive force.

“When you’re old enough to know better,” she says as we skim the liquid butter spoon by spoon, “you’ll teach some man how to cook with you. And you’ll see what happens then,” she says, nodding and lowering her eyelids.

I stop, my spoon full of pale butter foam. “Why, what happens then?”

“Ahh,” she says, her lashes sinking over the dark mercury of her eyes. “Ahh.”

I look at the foam in my spoon before I spill it into the bowl.

Aunt Aya closes up her practice at the Route 57 Chalet. For a week, she comes to our house every day before my parents get home from work. We spend the afternoons together baking voluptuous pastries from a variety of ethnicities. We don’t actually start with baklava, which she says is too “sensitive” at the moment. Our dough rolls out into cream puffs, layered cakes, tortes,
kolaches,
cookies. This, she says, is my tutorial in “womanliness,” designed to help me make my womanly way in the world. The freezer is filled with desserts.

“Marry, don’t marry,” Auntie Aya says as we unfold layers of dough to make an apple strudel. “Just don’t have your babies unless it’s
absolutely necessary.
”

“How do I know if it’s necessary?”

She stops and stares ahead, her hands gloved in flour. “Ask yourself, Do I want a baby or do I want to make a cake? The answer will come to you like bells ringing.” She flickers her fingers in the air by her ear. “For me, almost always, the answer was
cake.
”

I am silent as I stare hard at the cup glittering with sugar. This is advice, but it feels more like pressing my ear to the wall. I don’t want her to notice how closely I listen, or she might stop talking. What she says rings inside me like a spoon in a crystal glass. After years of assuming that the purpose of all this cooking and working—the purpose of everything, really—was to produce and grow babies, this is the first intimation I have heard of another way through life. It is the first time I’ve really understood that my aunt, with her houses filled with friends and siblings and servants and lovers, does not have children of her own.

“And your father! I know. Nobody can talk to that man. Well, your father does not know everything. He thinks he does, but I’m his older sister and I say no. Jordan is not the place he thinks it is. It won’t save him; it can’t even save itself.” She sprinkles a layer of shaved chocolate into the filling for the cream puffs and adds, “It’s never a bad idea to put a secret in your filling.”

MONA LISA CREAM PUFFS

TOPPING

1 dark chocolate bar

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Stir together the filling ingredients and put aside to set.

Bring the water to a boil in a saucepan. Add the butter and boil until melted. Add the flour and salt all at once and stir until it forms a dough, then scrape into a mixing bowl. Add the eggs one by one and beat in with a wooden spoon until smooth.

Scoop heaping tablespoonfuls onto a cookie sheet. Bake 20 minutes, until lightly brown. Let cool, then split open each pastry into equal halves.

Spoon the filling onto the bottom half of each pastry, shave the chocolate over the filling, then top with the other half of the pastry. You can also conserve some of the chocolate bar, melt it, and pour this over the top of the cream puff, for those who like a crowning touch.

MAKES 8 TO 10 CREAM PUFFS.

“Make sure to boil the attar syrup clear, then add the essence of rose so it will bloom,” she says, stirring the pan of sweet syrup. She leans against the oven and folds her arms. “If you’re going to kiss a boy, try to remember to eat a little parsley first. Also, think of a compliment for his mother. That’s always good.”

“Never let anyone tell you what to say or feel or think. No exceptions. If you can’t say it out loud, then write it on a piece of paper.”

She tosses some spices into a dry pan. “Heat up your spice before you add it to the mix so it will have something to say.”

While clarifying butter, she brings her eye close to the skimming spoon, not missing a sliver of foam, and says, “We clean the butter to remind ourselves of the way our lives should be—light, delicate, and pure.”

“The thing about cinnamon and ginger—they’re pretty, yes, but they also bite, which is more interesting and can be dangerous.”

“When a man tells you something, I don’t care what it is, look at his eyes and hands. Don’t worry too much about the words. If you can’t see his eyes or his hands, don’t believe any of it.”

“High heels are good, but don’t forget how to run.”

“You can be yourself, whoever that is, like these Americans are always saying. But once in a while, it’s better to be a mirage.”

“How do you do that?” I ask, beating flour off my hands and apron.

“Ahh,” says my aunt. “You must allow it to occur.”

“People say food is a way to remember the past. Never mind about that. Food is a way to forget.”

She is showing me how to make the phyllo dough that constitutes the foundation of so many Middle Eastern pastries. We work standing over the table, wrapping the dough around long, narrow wooden spindles to press out the exquisitely fine, papery sheets. This part of the process had always been invisible to me. As far as I knew, phyllo originated in waxed paper columns in freezer cribs.

“Food is not sweetness and families and little flying hearts. Look at this!” she cries, holding up a spindle. “Food is aggravation and too much work and hurting your back and trapping the women inside like slaves.”

From my hunch over the table, I stare up at her.

“Food is robbery. Did you know that?” She stands straight, a hand-print of flour at the base of her throat. “Let’s say your country hasn’t existed for very long at all. Just say. Then you announce to the world, yes!” She slaps her chest—another bloom of flour. “My people invented baklava! And there you have it, an instant history, a name.”

“But—Dad says . . .” I struggle, for once in my life, to remember what he says. “Dad says that everyone invented baklava.” It occurs to me only now to wonder what that means.

Aunt Aya rolls her eyes. “Your
father
? He’s the worst of the worst. He thinks he cooks and eats Arabic food, but these walnuts weren’t grown from Jordanian earth and this butter wasn’t made from Jordanian lambs. He is eating the shadow of a memory. He cooks to remember, but the more he eats, the more he forgets.”

I bite the edge of my lip. Somewhere on the horizon line of consciousness, I sense my ancient loyalty to Bud stir. I hesitate, then test an opinion. “That seems sort of . . . well, dramatic.”

“Dramatic? You think food isn’t dramatic!” she demands, wheeling on me. “You want drama—how about peace in the Middle East?” She yanks the apron from her waist and flings it at the back of the chair. “Fine, I’ll tell you how to do it. Watch.” She sits down, straightens her forearms on the kitchen table, laces her fingers together, and stares at me, her heavy lids drawn back.

I wait. I wrap my hands around my waist. “I don’t think I—”

“Who am I?” she snaps. “I am America, Israel, England! What am I doing?” She waits another long moment, her eyes shining. “I’m shutting up and
listening.
” She draws the last word out so it hisses through the air. “I am the presidents, the kings, the prime ministers, the highs and the mighties—L-I-S-T-E-N!” She spells the word in the air. “The woman who made the baklava has something to say to you! Voilà. You see? Now what am I doing?” She picks up an imaginary plate, lifts something from it, and takes an invisible bite. Then she closes her eyes and smiles and says, “Mmm . . . that is such delicious Arabic-Jordanian-Lebanese-Palestinian
baklawa.
Thank you so much for sharing it with us! Please will you come to our home now and have some of our food?” She puts down the plate and brushes imaginary crumbs from her fingers. “So now what did I just do?”

“You ate some
baklawa
?”

She curls her hand as if making a point so essential, it can be held only in the tips of the fingers. “I looked, I tasted, I spoke kindly and truthfully. I invited. You know what else? I keep doing it. I don’t stop if it doesn’t work on the first or the second or the third try. And like that!” She snaps the apron from the chair into the air, leaving a poof of flour like a wish. “There is your peace.”

One day near the end of her visit, Aunt Aya comes over early before I get home from school and bakes something special. She hoists the big round tray from the oven onto the table. It’s a baklava made with our homemade phyllo. “I asked around,” she says. “There are reports that baklava originated in Anatolia—so we’re safe. It’s still not Arabic.”

Baklava is her specialty. The layers turn flaky and buttery in the oven, but the real glory of this pastry as interpreted by my aunt is its central core of sweet, mild pistachios that roasts and develops during baking. The whole pastry is then sweetened and perfumed like a baby with an attar dashed with sprinklings of orange blossom and rosewater. When I inhale Auntie Aya’s baklava, I press my hand to my sternum, as if I am smelling something too dear for this world. The scent contains the mysteries of time, loss, and grief, as well as promises of journeys and rebirth. I pick up a piece and taste it. I eat and eat. The baklava is so good, it gives me a new way of tasting Arabic food. It is like a poem about the deeply bred luxuries of Eastern cultures.

Auntie Aya stands over me, watching me eat; she offers no advice.

That evening, the last before she returns to Jordan, Aunt Aya eats with us one more time. The family’s conversation is lighter and airier than it has been in months. There’s a froth of laughter in the atmosphere, and not a single topic of debate is broached. When Aunt Aya comes forth with the tray of baklava, newly reheated with just a few tiny pieces missing, everyone sits forward and inhales.

“My sister the magic maker,” Bud says after eating a piece. He applauds and half rises from his seat to bow. It is magic: How could a pastry so dense with ingredients, so rich with nuts, be so light on the tongue?

I am thinking about Aya’s words—about how a mirage sometimes seems better than reality—when Aunt Aya abruptly pushes her chair from the table. “So, brother, are you enjoying our food?” she asks in a not entirely conversational way. Bud blinks. “Good! Because as you know, eating is a form of listening, and I have something to tell you.” She flattens her hands on the table and says, “If you ever say anything more about sending your daughter back to Jordan to live—oh! I will honestly never speak to you again. In fact, I will just go out that door right now and that will be that.”

Then she stands and walks toward the door.

I am in for it now. I look at Bud. Astonished, he blinks again, his last bite of baklava still between his fingers. A deep crease forms between his brows. I think, This is going to make things a hundred thousand times worse for me.

She stops before the door, turns. “I’m going now!” she says. I’m about to bolt from the room.

Bud looks across the table, and for a moment, the smoke between us seems to subside. His look is tender, almost shy. It is as if we see each other in a way we’d forgotten or lost track of as I’d gotten older. It is a moment of recognition. And I do not know exactly how it’s come to pass.