The Language of Baklava Read online

  “Eat it now,” Uncle Hal says. “It’s good right this second.”

  This is one of the secrets of shish kabob: how quickly it dries and hardens on the skewer. Not like a roast leg of lamb or breasts of chicken that fall off the bone when you cook them long and ruthlessly enough. Shish kabob is fierce. It comes charred and crusty outside and pink, almost wet red inside, richly redolent, in its special way, of marrow and pepper. It sizzles in your mouth and tastes faintly of the earth.

  In the midst of all this drama and pageantry, however, I notice that Sami hasn’t left his perch on the far end of the most distant picnic bench. His eyes are glowing as he watches us with both curiosity and aloofness. I pluck a morsel from the plate and run to him while it burns my fingertips. To my mind, this is the best way to show love— to offer food from your own hand. But he only closes his eyes and shakes his head dolefully.

  Because I am six, I am typically the one being fed—I’ve never tried to feed anyone from my own hand like this before. But I’ve never had a cousin like this before. Usually my older Jordanian cousins arrive resplendent in polyester bell-bottom slacks—this being the late sixties—tall and strapping and hungry for America. With big mustaches, huge laughs, wild eyes, and big—very big—plans. Not Sami, though. Earlier that morning, Bud talked about it on the phone with one of his brothers. Sami didn’t even want to come to America. In our family, we assume that everyone is simply dying to come here. It’s like a law of nature: Grow up, go to America. I learn from sitting at the kitchen table, helping Bud poke kabobs onto skewers while he talks on the phone, that Uncle Jimmy sent Sami to America to “cure him” of something or other. When I ask Bud later what Uncle Jimmy wants to cure him of, he thinks about his answer for a while before he decides to say, “Of being a poet.”

  I stand before Sami, watching and admiring him, the lamb cooling in my hand. Finally I say, “What’s a poet?”

  He turns that vivid, astonished look back on me again and says, “I’m not a poet.” He rubs the back of his neck and sighs. Then he murmurs, “I embroider shawls. Would you like me to make you one?”

  I nod vehemently.

  Uncle Hal overhears us. He laughs and shouts, “He’s not a poet! I’m a poet—listen: ‘If white is the color of mourning in Andalusia / It is a most fitting color. . . .’ ”

  “You didn’t write that,” Uncle Danny says, and a new fight percolates among the brothers.

  For some reason, then, Sami changes his mind and takes the piece of meat from my hand. It is cool now, and it won’t be as good, but he eats it anyway, his luminous eyes fixed on me. His features undergo an alteration, as if a transparent veil has lifted from his face. It is the first time I’ve seen him smile. He says quietly, “It’s good.”

  At the end of the day at the beach, about to drive home, we might stop at Ontario Orchards, a big farm produce stand, and buy a bag of fresh cherries, black with sugar. We pass them around during the ride and spit the pits out the windows. Then my sisters and I fall asleep. I’m so deeply asleep when we get home that I hope I’ll get carried in. But lately I’ve grown arms and legs that hang and dangle and might knock over just about anything.

  “EAT IT NOW” SHISH KABOB

  Whisk together the oil, wine, vinegar, garlic, and spices in a large bowl. Add the meat and stir to coat it thoroughly. Cover and refrigerate overnight; turn occasionally.

  Thread the cubes of lamb on skewers, occasionally adding a piece of onion or tomato. Grill over hot coals, turning once. Cook to medium rare and eat while still sizzling.

  SERVES 6.

  The next day is the long, dull blank of Sunday. My mother sits on the couch reading one of her textbooks, studying to become a master. I once asked her: How much college is there? Does it end, or does it go on and on? She told me there’s a bachelor, a master, and a doctor. I reeled at the thought of such infinite education but was most impressed by the idea of becoming a master.

  Today I am aimless and a little bit lost. I drape myself over her long lap and trace invisible animals on her leg. Something is bothering me. I keep thinking about the way my uncles used the word poet as if it meant something different from what it was, as if they might as well have been calling Sami a pencil sharpener or coffee table. I listen to the soft, slow tick of my mother’s pages. Finally I say, “Why does everyone call Sami a poet if he’s not a poet?”

  The pages stop. Mom puts her finger in the book and lowers it, and her cheeks are pink. I’m startled to see what an interesting question this has turned out to be. She doesn’t always answer my questions. I know she hears them because she will lift her eyes from the page (there is always a page to be looked at) and her eyes will go unfocused with thinking. And then sometimes she will remember to answer, but I can’t count on it.

  Finally, Mom sighs and says, “Well, they don’t exactly know what . . . else . . . to call him.”

  “Why? Why do they call him anything besides Sami?”

  “Well, sometimes . . . sometimes . . .” Her voice wavers, and she looks around as if to find the right words somewhere in the living room. “Sometimes . . . some men—they get a little funny.”

  I nod. Uncle Jack, for instance, he’s a scream!

  “The thing is, okay, your cousin Sami—he wasn’t—acting normal—with other men,” she says.

  I frown. I go back to tracing invisible animals. Things have gotten murky. This is a jigsaw puzzle of words. The more Mom talks, the more I sense a difference between the words themselves and what they mean. And gradually, slowly, an image takes shape in my mind— it comes to me quite clearly. I laugh out loud and say, “I know!”

  Mom holds the book up to her chest. “You do?”

  “He’s funny because he embroiders shawls!”

  Mom looks at me a moment longer. Her eyebrows lift. Then they relax. She says, “That’s right.”

  One day, the shish kabob goes a little differently.

  Professor-Uncle Hal and his wife, Writer-Auntie Rachel, and my favorite American-born cousins, rangy, roustabout Jess and Ed, live in a big country house right down the road from Ontario Orchards. Uncle Hal lives in a library filled with leathery historical books, selected for their carved covers and the heft and density of their language: He prefers lengthy books written in very small type. His library is filled with the Ottoman Empire, Boswell, Australian Aboriginals, Oliver Goldsmith, Southeast Asia, and James Fenimore Cooper. Though he teaches international politics, he has a broad, eclectic scope, and his dinnertime stories are as likely to include the details of the Oneida Indians as the intricacies of the medieval Arabs or the war in Vietnam.

  They have chickens and a goat and a water-gray barn that my professor-uncle has filled with things like oil paintings in immense gilt frames, junked toys, battered pots, ancient clothes, unidentifiable tools and broken farming implements, Persian rugs, sacks of grain, silver coins and jewelry, rusted watering cans, abandoned birds’ nests, and so on. It is a place stuffed with all the history in the world, the stories of ten thousand strangers, all living together here with all their separate textures and dusts and smells, along with the musty grain of the hayloft. I am obsessed with the barn and plan to live there someday.

  My cousins are jumping up and down in the driveway as our car pulls up. “There’s something so great,” Ed gasps. “It’s in the barn, come on!” We run to the barn, and as we get close my breath snags in my throat. There, in the open doorway of the barn, stands an ivory-colored lamb with dense fur, a piercing, plangent bleat, flipping ears, and rolling black eyes. I am stricken, paralyzed with love. I want to name him Harry, but Jess says no, this is Lambie, even though Mom and all the aunties are saying don’t do that, that this kind of lamb doesn’t like names. We surround Lambie, admiring him. Cousin Sami arrives and I want to introduce him to Lambie. They remind me of each other because of their gentle eyes and the way they turn away from things, their entrancing skittishness. But Sami pulls his fish-soft hand out of my grip and says no, he doesn’t want to look
at the lamb, and neither should I, for that matter. I find this notion so perverse as to be hilarious, and I run away from him, laughing.

  The children cozy right up to Lambie, hug his hot neck, feed him handfuls of grass that we tear out of the lawn. He breathes his sweet, grassy breath on our faces; there are long canopies of lashes around his eyes. Ed comes running out of the kitchen with some string cheese and leftover spaghetti and meatballs he found in the refrigerator, and we try to feed it to him. Uncle Danny keeps jingling his change and looking around; Uncle Danny doesn’t like a lot of monkey business. He clears his throat and says, “You know what, kids, it’s going to be a while until dinner’s ready. Why doesn’t Auntie Yusra drive you to the ice cream stand?”

  Fantastic! Let’s go! We pile into the Beetles—Auntie Yusra will drive one, Auntie Jasmine will drive the other. Too many children climb in; we spill over one another’s laps. Before we leave, Auntie Jasmine tries to coax Sami into joining us. “It’ll be fun,” she says. “You can help distract the children—teach them some of your poetry.”

  His delicate features contract. “I don’t know any poetry,” he says.

  Auntie Jasmine folds down the Beetle’s canvas convertible top, and we children are astonished to discover that three of us can fit into the pouched pleats of the folded-back top, which bends and sways under our weight. “I’m not positive that’s safe,” Auntie Jasmine says to Auntie Yusra. But they shrug and we set off, the canvas top thumping us wildly.

  On the way there, I have a thought, and the thought is this: We are never. Under any circumstances. Ever. Allowed to have ice cream before dinner.

  I start to formulate this curious and very interesting thought out loud, but right in the middle of my sentence, Auntie Yusra says energetically, “Hey, kids, why don’t I teach you some Arabic drinking songs?” Fantastic! We learn the words to “Ah Ya Zain” (“Oh, You Beauty!”) and “Ridi Ha” (“I Want Her”) and even “Gameel Gamal” (“Beautiful Beauty”), which we belt out, lifting our voices over the rush of wind.

  Rudy’s is a tar-paper shack perched on the gravel lip of Lake Ontario. It leans a bit to the east, and the sticky black roof sits at a drunken angle on top. There’s just a window with an apple-cheeked blond girl waiting in it with her pad of paper and a chewed stub of pencil. This lumpy little place with its ice-crusted freezers produces a lovely, buttery-satin ice cream. And even though we already know what we want, we still all study the lists of flavors, toppings, and novelties chalked onto the blackboard. I agonize over chocolate malts, root beer floats, and tin roof sundaes, but in the end I always get the scoop of vanilla dipped in the chocolate shell. The ice cream softens and slips, and the chocolate shellac stays semi-rigid and glossy, a minor miracle.

  By the time we get back, a curious lethargy hangs over the house. The men are all asleep in the backyard or on the living room floor, and my mother and the aunties are murmuring at the kitchen table. There’s been a change of plans, my mother tells us, we’re not having shish kabob after all, we’re having chicken and stuffed squash for dinner. The kitchen stove is covered with burbling, lid-ticking pans; the air is towel damp and heavy with mystery.

  None of us is really hungry anymore, anyway. We’re dozy and full from the ice cream and the sunshine and the hearty, full-lunged singing. My sisters settle down to nap, and my cousins and I play game after game of Parcheesi on the wool Persian carpet in my uncle’s library. The walls of old brown books seem to mutter and sit up, staring. Somewhere in the middle of the seventh or eighth game, my cousin Jess, who at nine is the oldest and shrewdest of any of us, Jess of the Cleopatra eyes and shining black hair like patent leather— suddenly looks up and says, “Let’s go see Lambie!”

  We clatter down the back steps, calling for the lamb, and we accidentally wake Uncle Jack, who sits up in the grass outside the barn. “Ah . . . oh . . . well, Lambie had to go visit his grandmother,” Uncle Jack says.

  Among our black-eyed, black-haired uncles and father, Diplomat-Uncle Jack was rumored to have somehow had ineffable red hair as a boy. Whenever he acted up, my Palestinian grandmother would put her hands on her hips and say, “That’s the Irish devil in you!” Even though he is the oldest of the brothers in America, he acts like the youngest. He is the clever mishkeljee—the “troublemaker,” with a fondness for stirring things up, spreading rumors, sprouting arguments, then disappearing.

  “Lambie has a grandmother?” my cousin Ed asks skeptically. “Where?”

  “Ah, yes, okay, um . . . she lives in Wisconsin. On a lovely lake filled with swans, in a house with glass doorknobs on every door.”

  “I doubt it,” Ed says, though somewhat less incredulous now. It happens that Jess and Ed have glass doorknobs in their house. And I myself have heard of Wisconsin. I glance at the barn and think I see, moving quick and lithe as a lizard, the long slim arm and leg of Sami disappearing around the corner.

  Dinnertime comes and we eat our chicken and stuffed squash, though the ice cream has dampened our appetites. Everyone does his or her usual. The grown-ups pile our plates with too much food. And there’s the customary struggle with Uncle Hal, who likes to feed the children gaping mouthfuls of food from his own hand. He even tries to feed our mother and our aunties, who roll their eyes and bat his hand away, preferring to eat their own dainty American portions on forks. Uncle Jack offers me some important life advice, which is, he says, to never start drinking before noon or I’ll grow up to be a bum. Auntie Rachel eats all the toasted pine nuts off the rice. Cousin Sami sits trembling with his hands on either side of his plate, eyes closed, not leaving the table. None of the adults seem to be comfortable with looking at him, and no one tries to coax him into eating. Their eyes roam toward him, then veer away; the mere sight of him is like an accusation. Even I can feel it, and I feel terribly guilty, though I don’t know what I’m guilty of. Uncle Hal spears a few stuffed squashes and puts them on my plate. And then something very strange happens: Bud reaches over and plucks the squashes from my plate. I blink and look at him. This is such an oddity, so counter to all I know of my father, that I don’t even have the words to comment on it.

  That evening, after the frozen pound cake has been produced, the coffee brewed with cardamom, the dishes washed; after Auntie Rachel teaches us something in Russian that she says means “Require the children to work”; after the evening news has been watched and discussed, and the children have been quizzed on world geography and political history—I am sitting alone on the slanting back steps with my cousin Jess. We sit listening to the high, white chiming of crickets in the fields when she suddenly says, “We ate Lambie today.”

  I, however, at age six, am already showing a real aptitude for not believing inconvenient truths. “That’s not scientifically possible,” I say, using a phrase I have picked up from Monster Movie Matinee. “Lambie was a lamb,” I state. “We had chicken and squash.”

  Jess stares at me with the direct, remorseless gaze that will carry over into her adulthood and eventually strike fear into the hearts of men. “Squash stuffed with ground lamb,” she says. I gaze at the darkened barn, crammed with its boxes and piles of junk. Never before has it struck me as being quite so empty. I don’t dare to venture any closer.

  When we leave that evening, Bud, as usual, is the first out the door, waiting behind the wheel, the car engine murmuring in the lavender night. The women linger over their farewells. There is no sign of Sami, although as we walk down the long gravel driveway past the barn, I think I hear someone weeping behind the wall of the hayloft.

  This story had to wait twenty years or so for its ending. I was already done with graduate school, already moved away from home, teaching and living on my own in another state. But one day I came home for a visit and something reminded me of that lamb, and I said to my father, “Remember Lambie, the little lamb at Uncle Hal’s house? What really happened to him?”

  Bud shook his head and said exactly what he has so often said over the years, which was, “Ya Ba, where o
n earth did you ever get this memory of yours from? You know, most men won’t like having a wife with such a big memory.”

  Then he fell back into his bottomless recliner—his favorite and most auspicious place for storytelling and philosophizing, and began at the beginning before the beginning:

  On that day, the day of the lamb, Bud and his brothers were all still young men, in their late twenties and early thirties, none of them all that far away from their childhood in Jordan. When they were children, their parents had owned orchards of olive trees, figs, and lemons and fields of corn, thyme, and jasmine, watering holes and greenhouses, herds of horses, goats, and lambs. They drew their silvery drinking water from a well, baked bread in a stone oven, and in the desert nights my father and his eight brothers had liked to sleep under a sky scrawled with stars or inside the billowing goat-hair tents that the Bedouins used.

  Half my father’s brothers stayed in Jordan, but the other half came to America, for education or money or some sense of promise that was the opposite of homesickness. They thought, even after ten or fifteen years away, that they were still the same wiry, tough-skinned wild boys running barefoot through briars and hardscrabble land. When Uncle Hal saw the runty lamb in his neighbor’s fields, he thought of the feather-light springtime in Jordan when the countryside was filled with new lambs and of the scent of freshly grilled meat and the way he and his brothers stood between these two events, birth and food, though they were only boys; so much responsibility for a miraculous, sacred transformation. How could he help himself ? Even though he knew better, even though he told himself not to, Uncle Hal bought the runty lamb from the farmer. Then he called his brothers. Together, they decided they would butcher the lamb the way they used to when they were children and their parents were still alive and nobody knew anything about the bright grocery stores of America or the way meat appeared, bloodless, gleaming with cellophane, stacked in cold rows.