The Language of Baklava (40 page)

I open the door. Outside, a soft white rain is sifting down like powdered sugar. We leave, I hope forever, this house of crying.

SPINACH-STUFFED FETAYER FOR THOSE
IN SEARCH OF HOME
A nice snack to take on your journey.

In a large bowl, stir the yeast into the water, add the sugar, and let sit for a few minutes. Stir in the salt and oil, then add the flour in small batches, continuing until the dough isn’t sticky. Turn onto a floured board and knead until the dough is smooth and elastic, about 10 minutes. Place the dough in a large greased bowl and cover it with a towel. Let the dough rise in a warm kitchen for about 1 hour; the dough should double in size. Punch it down and let it rise again, about 30 minutes.

Next, prepare the filling. In a medium frying pan, sauté the spinach, onions, 3 tablespoons of the olive oil, salt and pepper, lemon juice, pine nuts, and sumac on medium heat. Remove from the heat and set aside. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Pinch off small handfuls of the dough, shape and roll it out so that each piece is a 5 × 5-inch square, about
¹
⁄4 inch thick. Each square of dough should be 5 inches long by 5 inches wide when rolled out.

Working quickly, place about 2 tablespoons of the filling inside one corner of the dough square and fold the opposite corner over this so the dough forms a triangle. Pinch the ends together, sealing in the spinach mixture. Brush the remaining olive oil over the top of each
fetayer.
Bake on a greased tray for about 15 to 20 minutes; the dough should be browned.

MAKES ABOUT 12 FETAYER.

TWENTY

Once upon a Time

A string of sea green beads swings wildly from the rearview mirror as the cab takes a sharp left. All the windows are wide open and the air roaring in from outside is hot as a hair dryer, so loud that I can barely hear the Jordanian rap music blasting from the radio.

Beside me in the backseat, clapping his hands and attempting unsuccessfully to sing along, is my father. Turned to watch him over one shoulder, elbow slung back over the front seat, is my young friend Phineas. Both of them are visiting from America. I’d worried when I realized that they’d planned their visits to Jordan on overlapping dates. Bud would certainly disapprove of a single man staying with me, if only just a friend. Even though I’m thirty-four, my father still calls every week to ask what time I got home the night before, how much money I’ve saved, and what I’ve eaten for dinner. But over his years in America, Bud has mellowed on the topics of tradition, honor, and shame, affecting a certain indifference to the whole subject area. Besides, it’s almost impossible to read anything treacherous or seductive into Phinny. He’s twenty-six years old, but the back of his head looks twelve; translucent, cherry-colored ears fan from his head and, in front, his smile is big and easy, his top lip curling up toward his nose. He is smart, lost, excitable, and sensitive to the point of skinlessness—just the sort of person Bud is always drawn to.

I’ve known Phinny since he was fourteen years old. When I was a graduate student at Binghamton, he and his mother moved into the apartment next door to mine. Phinny discovered that if he came over with armloads of his favorite ear-scraping experimental music, I would let him play his tapes, sometimes until three a.m., while he slumped, shoulders practically resting on the seat of the armchair, and stared at the ceiling, going over the details of his girlfriend trouble. Even after I moved to take a teaching job in a new city and learned to lock my doors, he continued to send me new tapes every month, along with scrolls of letters detailing in a back-slanting, minute penmanship his latest encounters with heartache.

With no other information than each other’s names, Phinny and Bud still managed to find each other at the gate in JFK. They sat together on the flight from New York to Amman, where, Phinny tells me later, Bud spent the first two hours giving Phinny his life story, leaving Phinny very little space to give Bud details about the last girl who ruined everything. After this, Bud pushed back his seat and snored openmouthed for a few hours, then woke and strolled up and down the center aisle, chatting gaily with the other passengers and letting folks know he was going to visit his daughter. And oh, did they happen to realize that his daughter—a
doctora—
is a
Fulbright
scholar
? “Oh no? Well, she is! A few more husbands than she needs, and even with all that no babies. But who knows, maybe there’s still time,
inshallah,
stubborn like a mule-head, but cute like her sisters, the youngest is still unmarried, by the way.”

Bud’s plans are to visit me and his extended family. Phinny’s goals are a bit more abstract. He’d called me from the States just a week earlier, voice wobbling as he sketched the essentials of his latest breakup. When I’d carelessly suggested he distract himself with a visit to Jordan, he’d said, “Hey, okay!” and by that evening had charged an airline ticket on his mother’s credit card. Now the cab is taking the three of us directly from the airport to Uncle Danny’s house. He and his wife live in a simple, chic country house flanked by open-air, three-quarter rooms with partially crumbled, whitewashed walls dating from the Roman occupation. There are soft stone floors and a slick, glassed-in patio that overlooks this lushest, blackest, most ancient of Jordanian nights. It has been nearly ten years since my father’s last visit to Jordan, and his brothers can’t wait for him to unpack—he must be brought straight from the airport to the table. Franco, Uncle Danny’s tawny, almond-faced Romanian servant, comes to open the gate for our taxi. We drive up the meandering gravel path with Franco running barefoot behind the car. The land is cleared and bustling with fruit trees and flowering bushes, acres of velvety landscaping reaching deep into countryside, bisected by a sleeve of road. The wind bends the soft branches and enriches the night with the scent of jasmine and orange blossoms.

Tonight everyone is here. My father is the prodigal one, the long-lost American brother, everyone’s current favorite. His brothers and uncles and cousins have made a point of complaining about him and telling me unflattering stories about him all year—about his short temper, inflated pride, goofiness, and loose ways with money—as if he is some sort of wacky character in a book I’ve never read before. Now his elderly older brothers laugh and clap his round face between their hands as if he is six years old. Tears run down the creases in their faces, and they kiss him loudly, over and over, on both cheeks. Many of them haven’t seen him in ten years. “You look so old!” his brothers howl. They lift his arms and turn him around, checking every line, pointing out his gray temples. But he’s been following the healthy American lifestyle—eating fresh foods, exercising, occasionally showing restraint. His brothers, who roast in the desert sun, steep in the cigarette smoke that fills every public space, eat too much, and drink more, are the ones who look decades older. Their bug eyes bulge, bloodshot and permanently forlorn, but they’re used to one another’s faces. They remember my fifty-nine-year-old father as he last appeared on visits ten or twenty or forty years ago.

My aunties complain that he’s terribly, frighteningly thin— though he’s probably forty pounds overweight. Aunt Yusra cries for Franco to bring the mezza. Hurry! Hurry! as if he is about to vanish.

“Ghassan, you son of a bitch,” Uncle Hal says ferociously. “Look at you! What the hell have you done? What the hell have you done to me? How can you be so goddamn old? What has that American done to you?”

“That American” is my mother, whom no one will refer to by name, as if doing so will incur the wrath of her evil eye. Mom has this fearsome reputation because, out of all the brothers who immigrated to America, Bud is the only one to have actually stayed on. So Mom, teacher of third graders, is acknowledged to be a sort of diabolical mastermind, which seems to make more sense to them than imagining that there might be something inside of Bud himself keeping him in that lost place that is not-home.

There’s time for a few more complaints about my father’s age before Franco appears with a big tray of mezza, which he fans across the picnic table with plates and paring knives. The brothers sit at their places, expectant and distracted as birds. Uncle Frankie starts drumming on the table with his fingers, and they launch into a bawdy song about the prophet Muhammad and a variety of fruits and vegetables. They sing with gusto, clapping and improvising a new vegetable with each refrain, which isn’t that difficult since the song is the Arabic version of “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” The song is also another dig at my father, since they consider his boyhood conversion from Syrian Orthodox to Islam another one of his screwball childhood misbehaviors. But Bud is in an undentable good mood. He is the happiest I’ve seen him in years, as he’s kissed and stroked, teased and fawned over. He claps and sings along, and when Phinny asks him to explain the lyrics, he purses his lips into a little drawstring smile and says, “It’s something about salad!” and then kisses Phinny on top of his head.

Dishes are passed. The hummus goes around, the bread, the olive oil, the stuffed tomatoes, the candied walnuts, the wavy strands of unbraided cheese, plates of tiny grilled lamb chops and chicken yellow with turmeric. But then the aunties start murmuring: Their heads swivel, their eyes cut down to narrow, evaluative glances; then they turn back, heads inclined into more murmuring. It’s been noted that the foreigner-boy, Phineas, who’s been sitting slanted back in his chair, brightly observing everything, is not eating all of the food the uncles heaped on his plate. Instead, he has been asking Bud about the contents of each item and ignoring every dish containing meat.

The relatives don’t know what to make of this extraordinary behavior. A murk of Arabic and English muttering subsumes the table. Everyone cranes around to observe for themselves and report to the person next to them.

“He’s not eating—this Phin-Phan—” Aunt Jasmine shreds the odd, un-Arabic confluence of syllables in Phineas’s name. “Phanaman doesn’t like the food?”

Phinny opens his mouth, but Uncle Jack says, “Phanamian is skipping the meat part, you see?” He picks up Phinny’s plate and displays it to the table. “He is a little backward, I think.”

Bud takes the plate from his brother and gently repositions it at the middle of the table like a centerpiece. “Phoneos is allll right! He’s my friend, Phanny.” He thumps Phinny a few times, and Phinny falls forward and then eases back, face hopeful.

As if making a suggestion, Phinny says, “Phin-e-as.”

“Phoney,” Bud echoes, nodding.

Uncle Danny holds up his knobby, great-knuckled fingers. “If this little boy doesn’t eat his meat, he won’t be able to produce babies.”

A couple of the uncles agree on this point. Bachelor-Uncle says, “For sure he won’t enjoy the part that comes before having babies.”

Phinny looks disoriented and glassy-eyed; he has been sipping a glass of white
araq
that was placed in his hand as soon as we arrived at the house. The uncles refill it with every few sips that he takes, and now his eyes look a bit loose in their sockets and his face is a mottled coral color. As he drinks he looks younger; his skin takes on a faint translucence. I haven’t heard him say much of anything since our arrival. Suddenly I’m worried. “Phinny? You feeling okay?”

He waves me away. “No, I ’joy making babies,” he says, raising his glass. A number of the uncles automatically raise theirs. Phinny’s glass dips and swings as if he is conducting a marching band. “Meat’s murder. I make babies, not war.” Some of the glasses clink, an accidental toast.