The Language of Baklava (9 page)

The breath goes out of me in a gust. It waits like an accusation.

She watches me and frowns. “Do you know why he did that?” she asks, very curious. “Why didn’t he take his English toy?”

I shake my head, astounded. I don’t know the answer, not inside my head. But I sense it somehow, the truth prickling, a thing that will take a long, long time for me to bring into words: So I won’t forget him.

Mrs. Haddadin sits, gazing up at me, squinting into my eyes, taking my measure. Mrs. Haddadin, who remembers everything and everyone—even a son she has never had—cannot fathom how deeply, powerfully forgetful I have already become. Though I am only eight, I too have already had to leave behind entire countries and lifetimes. Her eyes are orange inflected and amber, too light for her dark cinnamon skin. She gazes up at me from her chair and I look down: I can almost see the thoughts moving within her lamplike eyes, dark and illuminated as jinns. Perhaps at this moment, now that he has gone, she has forgiven Bennett, just a little. Perhaps, instead, she is wondering about me now, as I sometimes wonder about myself: What sort of person am I? Where are my loyalties? And who will I remember when I grow up?

“FORGET ME NOT” SAMBUSIK COOKIES

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Stir together the butter and sugar. Stir in the milk. Add the flour in small batches and knead by hand until smooth. Roll out the dough to
¹
⁄4 inch thick and cut with a 2-inch cookie cutter. Combine all the filling ingredients and place a good mounded teaspoon of the filling on each round, fold it over, and pinch the edges closed. It’s traditional to then curve the cookie into a half-moon shape.

Bake at 350 degrees for 15 to 20 minutes, until the cookies are lightly browned. Remove the cookies from the oven, let cool, and then sprinkle liberally with confectioner’s sugar.

MAKES ABOUT 35 COOKIES.

I have many favorite people in Jordan: Every morning I run to the boy selling
ka’k—
fluffy loaves of seeded bread rings—from a tray on top of his head. “
Atini
ka’k, minfudluk,
” I say, and give him two fils. He gives me a hot crusty seed-dusted loaf the size of a Christmas wreath, then he goes back to bawling, “
Kaaaaaa’k!
” in the streets. There’s the man whose donkey pulls a wheeled tub full of butter and bobbing roasted ears of corn, and another man who sells hard-boiled eggs and
Zataar,
a spice mix made of thyme, sesame, and sumac. He gives me a free egg, then salutes as if I am a military commander. And then there’s Munira the Bedouin, who dusts and tidies, does our laundry, and keeps her eye on the children. There is something glorious and half-wild about her, with her falcon eyes and gold teeth. Her hands and chin are tattooed with strings of curling designs, and she blackens her lids with so much kohl that they look as if they’re smoking. Sometimes she talks and talks in a freestyle English-Arabic mixture, as if the words have been bottled up inside her from the moment of her birth. Other times she collapses into a sort of pure, solitary silence. I avail myself of these moments to station myself at her side and tell her all my own problems, which are legion.

Early on—before Bud’s language is in my head—I complain bitterly about the confounding trouble I’m having making myself understood and understanding others. Munira calls me
habeebti,
which means “my dearest,” and she assures me that I do indeed know “how to speak” but that I’ve willfully let myself forget and will just have to wait until it comes back to me. She counsels me that as soon as anyone says anything I don’t understand, I should just keep responding with
aish.
Aish
means “what,” and this advice quickly gives me a reputation for being a hard-of-hearing, rather crotchety eight-year-old. Munira also teaches me how to divine the future by tossing some stones against the garden wall and reading the constellations they fall into. I don’t know how we afford to employ Munira and Hamouda with Bud so often out of work. It’s possible we don’t give them anything more than room and board. When I ask where they came from, Bud says they came with the family, that their ancestors have been serving Abu-Jabers for generations, and that, in fact, he had been raised by Munira’s mother, and his father had been raised by her grandmother. Munira tells me she learned to speak English as a little girl because Bud’s mother read fairy tales to her while she helped with her own mother’s embroidery work. Because of this, she knows words like “enchantment” and “mermen” and all about the strange Little Matchstick Girl, but not the English words for house or soap or spoon.

When I think how I initially met Hamouda, it seems to me that he was already in our house, sitting on his bare wooden chair in the storeroom off the kitchen, waiting for us when we arrived from America. He’s slow moving and cheerful and doesn’t understand our jokes: Munira has to tell him everything four times before something in his features catches and his face brightens. Hamouda fixes things around the house for us, prays, gardens, and does odd jobs. He has captivating hazel eyes in a cinder-dark face. Bud says he is Circassian, from the hills of the Caucasus Mountains; pious Muslims, he and his family have lived in Jordan since the reign of Stalin. He has a pronounced limp that he says he got when his horse fell on him for some reason. I love mentally replaying this tragic scene in a swoon of pity and terror: horse falling, Hamouda falling, crying out, leg splintering. Hamouda lets me and my sisters knock on his hard calf through his pants as if we are knocking on a door. Every time he calls out, “Who’s there?” and then grins so we can see he’s missing almost every other tooth in a splendid repeating pattern. Privately I hope that someday he will hike up the pant cuff so we can see this petrified leg, but he never does.

He is a sweet-natured, sensitive man who tells me that the entire world is contained in our courtyard garden and that I never need leave it, because if I remain in this exquisite place, inevitably all things will come to me. He’s given to exclaiming, “
Alhumdullilah!
” (“Thanks be to God!”) as if everything good—from a clear day to a scrap of bread—has fallen down to him straight from heaven. He has the mystical power to whisper soothing things to my baby sister, Monica, that make her simmer down and stop driving her crib around the room. And he is the one who escorts us out to the big traffic circle for ice cream every afternoon, holding our hands tightly as we dart across the busy streets.

I adore both Munira and Hamouda, and I worry about their well-being. Hamouda in particular seems so tiny and fragile to me, I’m forever worrying that he will stumble or be injured by some new peril, another crashing horse, perhaps. It comes to my attention that his and Munira’s daily meals consist almost entirely of our family’s leftovers, and every day I fret over whether or not enough food will be left for them. I make sure to always leave half of my dinner on the plate. On one particularly warm day, Hamouda comes in from gardening blotting his temples with a rag, his skin blotchy and uneven. He looks peaked and his limp is more pronounced than usual. While he is taking his daily nap in the storage room, I decide that we will save him the trouble of escorting us to get ice cream. I know where Bud leaves the ice cream money and the extra house key, so I gather up my little sisters and we take ourselves out.

It’s an easy walk through the lime white streets. After months of running all over the neighborhood with my friends, I already think of these streets as mine. My sisters toddle and bump along, uncomplaining. Even at their tender ages—two and four—they realize it’s more interesting to go for ice cream like this than in the predictable grip of Hamouda’s leathery hand. I have a new little brass bell that Bud bought for me, the kind they drape on goats. I like to wear it around my neck on a piece of string and swing my head back and forth like Frankenstein so I ring with each step and notify the neighborhood of our movements.

We get to the circle where the ice cream vendor is. As with so many things—fruit, pancakes, eggs—the ice cream here, which looks the same and feels the same as American ice cream, tastes nothing like it. It comes only in a striped Neapolitan, which Hamouda refers to as “Napoleon”: The chocolate is thin and flat, the strawberry is berryless, and the vanilla you generally save for last, until there’s just no avoiding it, its resinous, perfumed flavor tasting faintly of rose petals and soap.

But it’s ice cream! So we approach the man at his stand, and he stares over our heads, looking for our usual guardian. He gives us a long, dismayed look and says to me in Arabic, “Where is your keeper?” but I simply stare back, afraid that he will send us away. I hold the coins out flat on my palm, and the transaction takes place. He hands us the soft yellow cones with their cylinders of brownwhitepink ice cream. Then my sisters and I huddle together in the busy center, the ice cream sliding all over our hands and faces; and I’m disappointed all over again with Neapolitan and wish for the hundredth time for chocolate marshmallow.

Inside the big traffic circle, there’s a great deal of commerce and activity. A woman with thick black eyeliner ties up cut flowers in raffia, a man dips falafel balls into vats of spitting oil, another man carves through stacked layers of
shawerma
meat, piling the grilled tips into pita sandwiches. Children—tough, rakish little boys with narrow faces and quick, narrow eyes—stare at us and our abundance of ice cream, and some big girls hold hands and talk, affectionately tilting their heads on each other’s shoulders. I look straight ahead and notice that somehow we crossed an enormously busy street to get inside the circle—cars and taxis careen around us, horns blaring.

It dawns on me that I’m not entirely clear about how we did this or how we will undo this. The cars whir by, blurring the air. A haze of smoke and dust hangs in a ring around us, and a quivering sense of anxiety runs up my arms and down my spine. The tough boys seem to be moving in closer, and the ice cream man is shutting up his stand as if disavowing all responsibility. I see that my youngest sister has lost her ice cream in a gluey mass down the front of her shirt, and though I’ve finished mine, I still taste the awful vanilla in the back of my throat—medicinal, wrong. I reach for my sisters’ sticky hands. Everything is wrong: I hear English-Arabic, French-Arabic— someone is leaning in too close to talk to me, and the makeup around her eyes turns to smoke. The flower lady. Her words come to me as if from far away: “What is your name, little girl?” she asks in English. Then she tries French: “Where do you live?”

I say, “My name is Diana, and we live on the other side of the traffic circle!” But for some reason this comes out in Arabic.

She looks so startled that for a few seconds she doesn’t speak. Eventually she exclaims in Arabic, “You’re Jordanian! How could it be?”

Then, from off in the distance, I hear a familiar voice, and this sound cuts through my imminent panic like a bell in the fog. I look over the bank of cars through the haze to the opposite street, and there is Hamouda. His limp is distinctly more pronounced as he hurries, nearly running toward us, his face contorted and working.

I’m faint with relief and squeeze my sisters’ hands so my middle sister, Suzy, complains. But when Hamouda gets closer, I realize that he’s crying. I’ve seen children cry and I’ve seen a few women cry, but never before a man. I didn’t think that men actually could cry, and even through my panic and shock and relief, I can’t stop staring. He runs directly into the swirl of traffic, and as Jordanian drivers are masters of sudden shocks, their cars part seamlessly as he hobbles across, dodging, swerving, and jumping, patting and pushing hoods as if he is wading through a herd of wild goats. He runs his lopsided run the last steps of the way, and when he reaches us, he calls out, again and again,“
Alhumdullilah!
”