The Language of Baklava (38 page)

Like all my uncles, Uncle Nazeem is a flirt. He’s also a dandy; he preens and gazes into mirrors. His natty Italian suits always include a vest, pocket watch, and silk handkerchief. He combs his white hair with intense focus, smoothing both palms straight back along the sides of his head. In my family, Arab hair that’s curly or kinky is frowned upon. So hair is carefully and frequently combed, pomaded, perfumed, tugged, and monitored. Uncle Nazeem always has one hand floating at the side of his head as if to keep his scalp on alert.

At dinner, Uncle Nazeem sits with his brothers at one end of the long table while my aunties and the children sit at the other. Audrey and I have gotten stranded across from each other, guest-of-honor style, in the midst of the uncles. Audrey is seated between the two biggest flirts, Uncle Nazeem and Bachelor-Uncle, who vie for her attention by fighting over the serving spoon. She tries to distract them by attempting actual conversation.

“This is incredible food!” she exclaims to Uncle Nazeem, who puffs up to twice his size. His wife, the actual cook, is too far away to hear the compliment.

“Aha, you think this is good?” says Bachelor-Uncle, rising to the challenge. “You’ll come to my house tomorrow!”

“Ha, eat and learn,” Uncle Nazeem rejoins.

“But this squash,” Audrey persists bravely, “this stuffed squash is especially wonderful.”

“Oh ho, she likes the stuffed squash!” Uncle Jack, the great diplomat, announces to the table, his voice melting with innuendo. “We haven’t seen anyone like that around here for a while.” My uncles flicker to attention, turning toward Audrey with renewed interest.

Audrey shoots me the look of someone who isn’t sure if the ground has just moved. I would like to be able to lean across the table and tell her that in certain quarters, the Arabic word for squash is also slang for certain female anatomy. But the table is as wide as a river, and every noise ricochets off the marble floors and crystal chandeliers. Instead I try to muster what I imagine might be a pleasant, relaxed smile and chirp, “Audrey loves all sorts of Arabic cooking, like shish kabob and falafel and, um . . .”

“Oh, really? And stuffed squash?” That’s Uncle Jack again.

“Yes, yes . . .” Audrey soldiers on. “Did he stuff the squash himself ?”

I bite my lips.

“Oh, my God,” says Uncle Jack. “Are you kidding? Nazeem is an amazing stuffer of squash.”

“Yes,” Bachelor-Uncle joins in, choking on his own laughter. “He’s a grade-A squash stuffer.”

Audrey’s face is beet red, confounded; she can’t figure it out. “You mean he makes a lot of stuffed squash?”

The uncles are wheezing and twisting with laughter. Bachelor-Uncle’s face gleams. “Are you kidding? He’s stuffed hundreds of squashes, probably thousands!”

“Big, little!”

“Old, young, shriveled, cute!”

Tears are streaming down their faces; they pound the table so the dishes jump. “All decent squashes run in fear when they see Nazeem coming!”

“We bow down to his awesome squash-stuffing power!” Bachelor-Uncle screams. Then he crashes out of his chair to the ground and the whole room shakes. He’s laughing so hard, I think he’s going to burst a purplish vein glistening in his forehead.

Uncle Nazeem’s Egyptian housekeeper, Antonia, bursts through the kitchen door. She is so old that her back is nearly parallel to the floor and her face is scrawled over with deep, soft wrinkles. She sizes up the situation, then slaps the top of Bachelor-Uncle’s head, and he gasps laughter right back into his lungs. Still facing the floor, she unleashes a torrent of Arabic invective. I can’t understand a single word. All I know is that all my uncles are suddenly sitting straight in their chairs, facing ahead, a few of them wiping away tears, but no one is so much as smiling. Antonia slams back through the same door, and we’re not served a single bite more for lunch.

INNUENDO SQUASH

*The
mengara
is a special coring tool for scooping out the insides of squashes, cucumbers, and the like.

In a medium bowl, combine all the filling ingredients and set aside.

Trim off the squash stems. Cut 1 inch off the tops of the squashes and save for later.

Scoop out the inside of each squash with a serrated spoon or
mengara,
* being careful not to cut through the squash. Dispose of the inside and wash again.

Fill the squashes loosely halfway up. Close the top of the squash with the squash tops cut to fit. Make sure tops are tightly closed so the rice mixture will not come out.

In a medium cooking pot, place the filled squashes, add the tomato purée and the garlic, then cover and boil for 5 to 10 minutes. Lower the heat and simmer for another 45 minutes.

MAKES 4 SERVINGS.

NINETEEN

House of Crying

Great-Uncle Jimmy is the richest of all. His wealth is like a golden drapery tossed over everything. The sweeping steps to his front door are made of a veined pearlescent marble, the air in his house smells like water, and he seems to have trained green parrots to laugh in his trees and flame-colored songbirds to sing in his windows. Smooth Damascene robes and brilliant white Egyptian cottons sheathe his wattled, alligatory neck. I note with interest that the older and wealthier he gets, the more he resembles a lizard. His thyroidal eyes bulge, his gray lips jut, and his hair gleams, stroked back in long, oiled shards like a reptilian crest.

Bud called me from the States to tell me not to accept Jimmy’s invitation. He has refused to speak to his uncle in over ten years, although Great-Uncle Jimmy appears to be unaware of this fact. Despite Bud’s ambivalences and ongoing feuds with certain family members, he still likes most of his relatives. Jimmy is one of the few relations my father still holds a grudge against; even the delicate patina of distance and time can’t soften it. When I ask Bud why he feels this way, he squints and tucks in his chin, as if there is something before him that he can’t bring into focus. Then he says, slowly, “He makes me upset.” I do know that Jimmy’s personality has always seemed remote. I feel his eyes glaze past me at get-togethers, consigning me to a generic category: one of “the kids.” I assume that Jimmy is just another problem uncle, too rich for his own good. After he bought his first hamburger franchise, he officially changed his name from Jamil to Jimmy, a name he wears as jauntily as the brass-colored toupee he sometimes affects, perched at a rakish angle on top of his silver hair, beret style. “There is something wrong in that house,” Bud tells me tersely, our transatlantic connection hissing as if ocean waves are actually lapping over the cable.

“What is it?” I press the receiver against my head so hard that my ear hurts. I stare at the cover of the Amman phone book, filled with its weird Anglicized spellings of Arabic names. “Why don’t you want us to go?”

Audrey sits slumped back in one of my straight chrome chairs, her eyes unfocused. She was ready to cut her vacation short following the lunch at Uncle Nazeem’s house, but after a nice trip to the ruins at Petra, she has regained some of her good humor.

Bud lowers his voice so I can barely distinguish it from the ocean hiss: “If you have to go—” His voice sinks back into the static.

“What? Dad—I can’t—”

“Don’t eat the food!”

It’s evident that a battalion of Sri Lankan maids is running Jimmy and Auntie Selma’s house, along with their beleaguered Egyptian “houseboy,” Roni, a seventy-two-year-old man whom they shout for and order around all day.

“Now you will see what real Jordanian cooking is about,” Uncle Jimmy assures us, tipping his highball glass in our direction. “Prepare yourselves.” Then he bellows for Roni to refill our drinks. The sinewy, crinkly man comes in, his face as remote as if he’s spent his life gazing just beyond the shoulder of the Sphinx. Audrey and I smile at him, trying to express gratitude and to distance ourselves from Jimmy, but Roni doesn’t register anyone besides his employers. He is barefoot, downcast, and hunched. Where Jimmy is puffed up, Roni is hollowed out; where Jimmy is glacial and cold-blooded, Roni is parched and birdlike.

Jimmy and Selma usher us into their mahogany-paneled dining room, which is outfitted with five-tiered crystal chandeliers and table linens that glow like moonlight. Each china plate is flanked by heavy silver flatware. Four settings huddle together at the center of a long, icy glide of table. Audrey and I sit, timidly sneaking our chairs into the table. We gaze at the emptiness around us, the high, bright ceilings. Apparently we are the only ones invited.

Jimmy might be mythically wealthy, but he is miserly. And unlike Bachelor-Uncle, he does not compensate with other forms of charm or generosity. Roni brings out the mezza, which turns out to be a single tomato cut into quarters, a sliced cucumber, a minute plate of coarse salt, and a tiny pitcher of clear olive oil. He places the food at the center of the table, and instantly the table looks emptier. Audrey glances at me, doubtless wondering if this is another of my uncles’ little inside jokes.

Aunt Selma picks up her fork and knife, and we follow suit. The utensils feel leaden, as if weighted to trick you into thinking that you’re eating something. The knife handle rolls and swells, a full, sensuous shape in the hand. That’s the most gratifying part of the meal. The tomato is watery and, for some reason, peeled, while the cucumber is warty and bad natured. Aunt Selma proceeds to dissect her portion of the produce into perfect little cubes, like a conceptual chef. Then I notice that Uncle Jimmy has balanced a still-smoking cigarette on his plate and seized his tomato quarter in his fist, as if to do battle with it. But his muscles are palsied; his hand shakes and weaves from side to side, the skinless tomato practically puréed in his hand. He drops the mess on his plate and returns to his highball.

I begin to sense that we’d better eat our vegetables because there might not be much more to this dinner. I pick up my fork and turn to Audrey, but before I can give her any kind of signal, a terrible noise surges from the next room. It is a cry of inexpressible pain, grief, and dread. It is uncanny, quavering, and sustained, like something from an Edgar Allan Poe story or from the next world altogether. It rises and falls, operatic, made of both a sob and a scream. Audrey’s gleaming, labial fork crashes into her plate. Each and every hair on my body stands up. I stop my knife halfway through the cucumber, paralyzed, and for a surreal, hallucinatory moment, the cry seems as powerful and insistent as if it emanated from the walls of the room itself. Then Aunt Selma looks over at Audrey.

“Please mind the china,” she scolds. “It’s very expensive!”

Audrey gapes at me. The sound has only now started to fall off its crescendo and fade. Then, from the same depths, another high-pitched sob rises up in the wake of the first, this one even louder and more outraged. My gut response kicks in. I think the cry came from the servant, who’s finally gone over the edge. I blurt out, “Roni!” But when Roni appears in the doorway, he looks confused and out of sorts, annoyed that the foreigner girl is shouting for him—doesn’t he have enough bosses? Then another dreadful shriek blazes up from behind him. The screamer is in the kitchen.

Roni vanishes back through the kitchen doorway, which glows pale orange. I look at this light, and slowly a memory begins to coalesce. There are rumors about a disabled grandchild that some of my cousins were talking about one day at lunch. Supposedly, one of Selma and Jimmy’s grown children had left their disabled child locked in a room and slipped a note under the neighbor’s door: “We’re going to Europe. Please check on the baby.” According to the gossip, the child had screamed alone in his room for two days before the grandparents found out and rescued him. My cousins said that Jimmy and Selma now kept this child shut up in a back room, protected from nosy intruders but isolated from the world, like a changeling hunched in a dungeon. Roni and the Sri Lankan servants fed and clothed him, but it was doubtful anyone ever really spoke to him. “But what is there to say?” my cousin Miriam had asked. “He speaks in screams.”

Yet another quavering cry splits the air. I attempt telepathic eye signaling with Audrey, trying silently to convey:
Don’t panic: They
keep their grandchild locked up and we’re supposed to pretend he doesn’t
exist.

While Selma and Jimmy continue discussing the significance of certain fluctuations in the weather—hard rain is a bad sign, soft rain is a good sign—the dreadful screams continue. I even begin to notice a range of nuances—some screams sound like terror, some like frustration, and some like questions. Through it all, Selma and Jimmy pass the salt, complain about the price of food, dissect their two chicken kabobs. If the screams get louder, they raise their voices. Audrey and I don’t say a word.