The Language of Baklava (6 page)

She brings me books from her school all the time, and I will proudly tell anyone, whether they ask me or not, “My mother is a reading teacher!”

During the time that Bud is away, Mom cooks: grilled Velveeta sandwiches on Wonder bread; triangles of date-nut bread and cream cheese; meatball sandwiches. Gram, Mom’s mother, considered cooking a form of specialized imprisonment—like ironing—and encouraged Mom to rely on instant, just-add-water ingredients. Without Bud, we are living according to Mom’s rules. In the evenings, I get to stay up late, and we watch more somber, sepia-toned television shows together on my parents’ big bed. Monica and Suzy are unusually cooperative and go to bed peaceably. Bud is somewhere, I don’t know where. Everything is suffused with an air of uncertainty.

COMFORTING GRILLED VELVEETA SANDWICHES

Melt the butter in frying pan. Place the cheese sandwiches in the hot butter. Cover and fry until golden on one side, then turn and fry on the other side. The cheese should be oozing and hot. Cut the sandwiches on the diagonal.

SERVES 2.

After several weeks or more of this suspended animation, Mom says it’s time. Then there are huge smelly suitcases, and hold-your-sisters’hands, and some important and constantly missing items called pats-sports. There’s an airplane ride full of milky, walkable, stirrable clouds, a ride that takes all day and all night. I am incapable of sitting still for much longer than five minutes. I stand in the aisle and push up from the backs of the airplane seats and swing my legs until everyone in a four-aisle radius is openly glaring and clenching their jaws.

We emerge from the plane onto a steaming hot tarmac, wave at all kinds of soldiers holding big guns, pass through long, echoing glassy corridors, and there is Bud—who’s grown a mustache! Then we climb into a funny, old-fashioned car shaped like a cracker box and discover that the streets and buildings here have all turned to white stone and dust. The sidewalks are not like the orderly, straight-line sidewalks of our old neighborhood. Here, they wind around and roam this way and that, as if they’ve decided to go where they pleased.

Our new house is actually a ground-floor flat inside a larger building. There are veined marble floors, cool underfoot in the summer heat, and a deep, moody living room crisscrossed with shadows and draped with silk curtains as long as bridal trains. All the rooms are low ceilinged and rectangular, and it seems to take a long time to get from one end of the room to the other. My sisters and I share one big, echoey room across the hallway from my parents. Directly above us are four more identical flats, stacked up like layers on a cake. Across a little walkway is a matching building; the twin buildings are encircled by a courtyard, and running along the inner courtyard is a garden thick with big, nodding sunflowers, and marigolds, and mint plants, and now it’s my duty to go pick the leaves to steep in the teapot. I’m practically eight, and I know how to do this; my sisters, on the other hand, are two and four and utterly hopeless. There are also furious-looking cats that moan and skulk all over the garden. The night comes at a new time, and the moon looks sideways like a silver cup. There’s so much to look at that for a while I feel that all I can do is stand in one place and stare. One morning, after we’ve been there a few days or weeks, a gang of grinning, dirty-kneed kids pounds on our front door. They cheer when they see me, as if they’ve been searching for me for a long time, and they pull me outside. The gang expands and diminishes like a flock of starlings. We run everywhere and into everything, up stairs and down alleys. I don’t understand anything that they’re saying, but this doesn’t matter because I know how to run.

In a matter of days, I am familiar with the labyrinthine windings of our ancient neighborhood. There are buildings so rickety and narrow that they look as if they’re built on stilts; there are staircases leading into murky darkness that I gape at but refuse to ascend; there are apartments—many apartments—that smell powerfully of babies and dinner all the time. One day my gang of friends takes me to the roof of our building and I discover yet another world of children running around, women gossiping, clotheslines brightly draped and flapping gaily as sails. I lean over the precariously low railing, five stories from the ground, and someone gives me a play shove from behind that swipes the breath from my lungs and makes stars pop in my head. I swing around and lay eyes on Hisham for the very first time. I can tell right away that he is the one I like best of all: He is about my age, small and thin and dark with close-cropped hair, soft, myopic eyes, and full, round, almost feminine lips. Of all the children, his sweet, soft face is the most appealing to me.

My new best friend, Hisham, Hisham’s seven or so younger brothers and sisters, and a varying number of neighborhood children play in the courtyard of my building. No matter what time of day or night I step into the street, one or, more likely, all of them will be out there singing, skipping, throwing things, running. Hisham and I hang on the balustrades of the swinging iron gate of the courtyard railing and ride it shut, the rusted hinges shrieking as it goes. Then we get off, open it, and ride it shut again. Then we play our talking game. Sometimes I go first, sometimes he does, but frequently we go at the same time.

I say, “Idon’tknowwhatyou’resayingbutIwishIknewwhatyouwere sayingIwishsomuchthatyouknewwhatIwassayingreallytrulyIreallydo becauseit’ssoweirdit’sreallycrazybutyoudon’t . . .”

And he is saying, “
Yabaainteesadeekatibessintimajnoonashway
moomkinbazunbessanamishakeedleeanoabensamabafimtwaintee
matfimtkamaamoolaishhathamabafimtculshi . . .
”

It seems we spend whole afternoons in this way, talking and swimming through our private thoughts. In the distance, the calls to prayers from the eight neighboring mosques rise and overlap, quavering through the streets and alleyways. We silently spy on Hamouda the gardener as he washes his hands, face, feet, and neck with the garden hose behind the house. He lays out a few sheets of newspaper and uses that as his rug to pray upon, bowing solemnly in the direction of holy Mecca.

Eventually our talking game starts to change, slowly at first, with meaning creeping in around the edges of what Hisham is saying to me, like a slow burn eating at the edges of a page. And one day, after weeks of running around in the streets, I am speaking Bud’s language. It’s the language we spoke in tiny specks and pieces back home, a confetti language that Bud saved for his brothers or for getting angry or for driving in traffic. Suddenly, all of it is there in my head. (The first complete sentence I learn in Arabic is
Atini nosher
beyda,
“Gimme a dozen eggs,” which the shopkeeper puts loose into a brown paper bag. Then I dutifully run home and deliver up a bag of squashed egg mess.) My mother is the first to notice—she interrupts as I’m chattering with the Bedouin woman who works for us. “Since when do you speak Arabic?” she says to me.

I look at her and I see there is something in her eyes when she says this that I feel in the center of my chest, just under the bone. Instantly, I don’t want those words in my mouth anymore.

The neighbors are more than neighbors. Their apartments spill onto the same central courtyard, and their meals spill into ours. They sit together on low cushions in the courtyard and tease me about my pale skin, kiss my head and cheeks, and read my coffee grounds. They give me bread and baba ghanouj and
jameed,
balls of yogurt that have been cooked, dried, and hardened in the desert sun. Usually, people eat
jameed
only after it has been softened by weeks or months of marinating in olive oil and then smeared on bread. But I discover that it’s challenging and absorbing to gnaw on the hard little unmarinated yogurt rocks. It will keep forever in this form, which is lucky because no one on our street, or anywhere in the neighborhood, seems to have a refrigerator.

But two weeks after we arrive, my mother acquires a refrigerator. It’s a wonder. This was apparently one of her conditions for moving the family from New York. I don’t know where they found it. It takes ten men to drag it from the truck into the kitchen. It is a refrigerator unlike any I’ve ever seen before—big, enameled, sometimes roaring like a jet engine, sometimes moaning like an elderly man. I have to hook both hands around its chrome handle and lean back with my full body weight to get it to open. In Jordan, even I start to marvel at the fact of a refrigerator—I, who used to hang on the fridge door back in New York, just browsing. Now I see it in all its glory.

The refrigerator is roaring. Munira the Bedouin stands beside it at the ironing board, moving her black anvil of an iron over the clean shirts. Every pass takes her whole back. I can see the muscles in her shoulders flexing through her thin white blouse as if she is swimming. Mom sits at the kitchen table, frowning at her needlepoint. I stand at the end of the ironing board, staring at Munira’s intriguing face, bisected by more wrinkles than I could imagine in one place; her too-black eyes glisten as if she is permanently weeping. She talks and talks and talks. I lounge at the ironing board, my arm slung over an unused end, translating whatever she is saying: “Munira says that the food in Jordan is much, much better for us because it’s real food. It sticks with you and doesn’t just evaporate. She says eating American food is like eating dust! She says it’s full of jinns and bad omens—she can tell just by looking at us. She says we’ve been eating nothing but air and bones and flying insects. She says we got here just in time! She says it’s going to take a little while longer for us to recover from being Americans. . . .”

Abruptly Mom puts down her needlepoint, stretches her long arms and legs, and says, “I think I feel like pancakes today.”

My mouth falls open; I’d forgotten about pancakes. In that instant I miss them unbearably and completely. It washes over me, all the foods I forgot I loved: pancakes, ice cream, hamburgers. (Bud takes us out for falafel and says these are Jordanian hamburgers. And even though I’ve eaten falafels back in the States and I know their smoky taste of cumin and sesame, I’m so hungry for the tastes of home that I’m willing to imagine that in Jordan they are transformed. But what a disappointment—they don’t taste like hamburgers at all.) Our breakfasts here are much the same as our breakfasts in America— cheese, bread, hard-boiled eggs, olives, tea. But at the moment there is nothing better than pancakes.

Mom, my sisters, and I all go to the Big Market by ourselves. When we first arrived, Bud always went to the market with us. But lately he is busy, he says, with not finding work in this ridiculous excuse of a country. He drives off in the morning in a suit and tie, to see about another job that he predicts will be an “impossible aggravation.” So it’s just us today, which makes it more exciting than usual. And it is always exciting at the Big Market, much more invigorating than at the P&C back in Syracuse. Here, people are shouting and walking around and gossiping and haggling fiercely. Food and things are stacked in great towers; there is straw and dust all over the floor, canvas walls, empty boxes, burlap sacks, chicks scratching at the floor. You might find anything in the world here—big, swampy barrels of olives, roasted chickpeas that taste dark and musty in your mouth, bread so fresh that it has wilted its paper wrapper, crates full of candied almonds and midnight-rich foil-wrapped chocolates from Syria, hand-cut blocks of olive oil soap, big square sheets of pressed apricot leather wrapped in orange cellophane. The original scent of Jordan is here: sesame, olive, incense, rosewater, orange blossom water, dust, jasmine, thyme.

It takes us such a long time to find anything that the market starts to seem like a dream we are having—nothing looks like what you’d expect. Mom picks up mysterious items from the shelves, smells them, shakes them, looks at me. I stare back at her, concerned. The milk comes in boxes with pictures of comets and TV sets, the butter comes in green foil bricks, some of the loose eggs are streaked with what looks like blood. We gradually uncover the right ingredients: flour, baking powder, milk, eggs. There’s no maple syrup, so, Mom says cheerfully, we will make do with honey. Honey! At this news, I scowl at a baby peeping at me over his mother’s shoulder, and he rolls his eyes in terror.

Back in the States, we made pancakes from a mix in a box that asked for nothing more than water and stirring. So there’s a loose, improvisational quality about today’s project. We take it all home, and the neighbors come and stand in the kitchen and crowd the hallway to watch. There’s a carnival spirit in the air. People are smoking and telling jokes. At twenty-seven, my mother is not yet a relaxed and natural cook like my father. But she’s dedicated and determined; her neck is stiff, the muscles in her back pronounced. And I feel that at this moment we all want pancakes more passionately than we’ve ever wanted anything. Even if it means messing up every bowl and spoon in the kitchen to make them, which for some reason it does.