The Language of Baklava Read online

  This was the way it was supposed to happen: Four of the brothers would hold the lamb still, and with one powerful, swift stroke, Crazy-Uncle Frankie would cut its throat. Uncle Frankie was nominated for this unpleasant task by virtue of being the youngest brother in America as well as having the least exciting job (washing school buses) and because none of the brothers wanted to slaughter the lamb after seeing the children cozying up to it. Uncle Jack, it seems, had a change of heart and wanted to return it to the farmer, but Uncle Danny, who didn’t have any children yet, said that was ridiculous and wimpy. And my father, the pragmatic chef, said they were all turning soft and silly. At the time he told me the story, he still wasn’t sure why he had said this: He hadn’t wanted to kill the lamb, either.

  But then they were all saying things they didn’t really want to say as they converged on the knock-kneed lamb. Hal held the lamb on one side, Jack held the other. Danny held the legs. Bud held the head. Frankie unsheathed the big, sharpened knife and held it up with trembling hands. Bud had owned this knife a long time and cut many things with it, but never before a living thing. In that moment, he had no memory of ever having killed a living thing. Was it true? Had they done the slaughtering back in Jordan, or had it been done for them? He started to ask, but then his brother’s eyes bulged, the knife rose, Bud turned away, and Frankie slashed. He made a terrible, ineffective cut, deep enough to make the lamb scream and buck, for blood to course freely, but not deep enough to kill it.

  The lamb was wild. Its head rolled back, and its neck gaped like a bloody smile. The brothers panicked and lost their grip. The lamb kicked in a frenzy; its back hoof cut right through the fabric of Uncle Danny’s pants and gashed his knee. Hal grabbed the knife from Frankie and tried to make a better cut, but he missed and made another shallow cut in its face. The animal bawled and writhed. Jack picked up a rock, wildly attempting to knock it unconscious, but it again lurched out of their grip. Finally, Bud gripped the knife with both fists and, as the lamb stumbled to one side, plunged it straight into its neck.

  Then everything went still. They could hear a bird trill three fragile notes from a nearby tree. The barn walls were covered with blood; the floor was covered with blood; their faces were covered with blood; their arms were covered with blood. And then my father realized that what he’d thought was a bird was the sound of weeping. For a dreadful, unreal moment, he thought it was the lamb. Then he heard Cousin Sami’s voice rise from the hayloft: “I want to go home!”

  Telling the story twenty or so years after the fact, Bud looked a bit gray, his face filmed with distantly recalled panic. He closed his eyes, remembering the way the lamb’s neck strained, its soft, wide-open mouth, its babylike cry. The meat was spoiled, shot through with blood and adrenaline. But Uncle Hal insisted on salvaging a few pieces and ground it up to make stuffing for the squashes. None of them touched any of it.

  “We thought we could still do it,” Bud said. “But we couldn’t.”

  Making shish kabob always reminds the brothers of who they used to be—the heat, the spices, the preparation for cooking, and the rituals for eating were all the same as when they were children, eating at their parents’ big table. But trying to kill the lamb showed them: They were no longer who they thought they were.

  PEACEFUL VEGETARIAN LENTIL SOUP

  Wash the lentils thoroughly, picking out any debris. In a large saucepan, sauté the onion in the olive oil until translucent. Add the remaining ingredients and cook over medium heat for 30 minutes, or until the vegetables are tender.

  SERVES 6.

  TWO

  Hot Lunch

  During the week, my father comes home from work late at night with a Cosmo’s pizza box, a big, floury cheese-and-oil pizza sliding inside, and he eats standing at the kitchen counter, folding each slice in half. He is so late returning from two, three, four jobs— mopping floors, cooking eggs, selling carpets, guarding stores—that to me he’s just a sliding bar of light behind the door, looking in as I’m sleeping; the murmur of voices and the TV in the other room. He is tired, but he’s full of the immigrant’s hopefulness and determination, ready to take any job.

  Bud misses the old country so much, it’s like an ache in his blood. On his days off, he cooks and croons in Arabic to the frying liver and onions songs about missing the one you love. I ask him whom he misses, and he ponders this and says, “I don’t know, I just do.” Then he gazes fondly at the frying liver as if it is singing sweetly back to him. But I don’t understand this yet. I was born into this snowy Syracuse world. I have no inkling of what other worlds are like.

  NOSTALGIC CHICKEN LIVERS

  Melt the butter in a frying pan and sauté the garlic and onions until they are golden. Add the chicken livers and cook for 10 minutes. Bud recommends that you sing softly to the livers as they’re cooking, so you don’t rush. Stir in the lemon juice and simmer for 10 minutes. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve with a nice loaf of warm pita bread.

  SERVES 6.

  One day Bud takes me through the streets to a place where little girls in uniforms are lined up in rows. I’m also wearing a uniform—a green plaid woollen jumper, a badge sewn over the heart with the school’s initials. I have a pencil and a notebook. I can’t get over myself. My father puts me in a line that may or may not be the right line and says he has to leave me now, and I turn and wave to him, panicked but trying to look dignified. Though I don’t say anything, my wave is desperate: Oh, my God, don’t leave me here, what are you, crazy, don’t go! Bud gets back into his VW Bug and watches me from the curb while I stare back at him—the only parent still there.

  Then the nuns take over the world. There are nuns and nuns. They stream from the school building. So many of them: lipless, eyebrow-less, boiled skinless, and swathed in acres of black veils with white bibs. They come with rulers. They herd our raggedy lines into sharp military formations. These women mean business. I have never seen anything like it. It seems that they live in the church, another problem place for me, where you are supposed to wear your hat or kerchief. Right away I start forgetting my hat or kerchief and have to wear a Kleenex bobby-pinned to my head. I have trouble getting up to go to school, so sometimes I go to bed with my uniform on over my PJs to try to save time. But I’m so sleepy in the morning, I forget and go to school still wearing my pajama bottoms under my jumper.

  Gram, my mother’s mother, is Catholic, and she says I will get a better education at Saint Mary’s school than out among “the hoi polloi.” So my parents have decided to send me to this place, in hopes that I can be transformed into one of the charming, docile girls in my classroom who sit quietly with their shining smooth hair and scab-less knees and socks that stay up. This is my first indication that my parents don’t know much about me.

  Fortunately, I am in Sister Paul’s class. Sister Paul is a strapping young woman with a long, oval face beneath her wimple and a special patience for untied shoes or gum in the hair. And unlike Sister Martha, Sister Matthew, or Sister John, she never raises her voice or swats her ruler against her thigh in an ominous way.

  The school cafeteria is in the basement with its network of exposed pipes that runs hissing along the ceiling. It’s a clammy, drafty place where the metal folding chairs are chilled to a jolting tang each morning. The girls try to buffer this by sitting on their hands. But between the straight skirts and kneesocks, there’s always a vulnerable couple of inches of skin, and the shock of sitting in the nuns’ cafeteria is one of our punishments for the sin of being born female. The cafeteria is also my first exposure to truly awful food: Its rotting, industrial stink permeates the room, and I come to think of this smell every time I hear the nuns speak of penance. I see for the first time foods dropped on molded plastic trays, items with names like tapioca, tuna casserole, and rice pudding. These trays all hold a congealed, mealy gray mass that gazes sadly up at the ceiling. Every noon I recoil at the first whiff of the cafeteria. I bring a bagged lunch that my mother writes my name on. It con
tains plastic bags filled with garlicky chicken kabobs, crunchy falafel, or fresh spinach pies. My stomach tilts in sympathy for the children who must eat the cafeteria food. These so-called hot-lunch children seem like another breed—a lost, forlorn tribe.

  In the shadow of the cold war, the nuns enjoy staging air-raid drills, which break up the monotony of the day. They hustle the children into the cafeteria under the metallic hammering of the alarms. We sit at the long white tables while Sister John stands at the front of the room with a handheld microphone. There, she leads us through an interminable recitation of the rosary. I close my eyes and the words blur together. Then one day I notice the residual aromas of tapioca and Spam casserole ripening into this mental haze. “HailMaryfullofgracethelordis . . .” My stomach clenches, my mouth floods with saliva. “Thelordiswiththeeblessed . . .” I try to calm myself, try to block the smell by lowering my head, squeezing my eyes; nothing helps. I put my pen—a tool we’ve recently begun using in first grade— in my mouth. Like my pencil, the pen is corrugated with teeth marks. At that moment, an errant note of tuna surprise wafts from the clattering kitchen, where the cafeteria ladies are ignoring our air raid. My stomach lurches; I bite down. The pen explodes. My mouth is full of bitter blue ink, my hands and white blouse are covered, it’s in my hair, it streams down my jaw.

  I jump up from my seat and cry out, “Uh-oh!”

  My classmates gape, openmouthed, and one tiny girl named Elvira Mickopoulos starts to cry. I for one am astounded by the newly discovered treachery of pens.

  Sister Paul hurries over, takes a good long look at me, then says in a papery voice, “Diana Abu-Jaber,” not needing to add, “all my suspicions have been confirmed.” But then she also charitably congratulates me for speaking right up, and I feel pretty darn satisfied with myself.

  They send me off to the washroom with a girl from third grade to keep a close eye on me. As I leave the room dripping, I hear Sister Anne broadcast to the students: “You see? This is why we have air-raid drills!”

  My hair springs in frizz and coils all over my head: It won’t lie down like the other children’s bright caps. My grandmother has a name for it, which apparently means something like “Crazy Hair” in German. I am a hapless kid. My shirts are covered in food. I lose myself in searching for four-leaf clovers and get left behind when recess ends. I look up from my hunting to find myself sprawled alone in a clover field, a sunny sky full of white, sailing clouds. I get lost on the way to school. I get lost on the way to the washroom. I get lost on the way home from school. I bring home children from other classes and tell my mother that they’ll be living with us now. But in the plus category, I have a friend named Francis, a soft-voiced boy with telescopic glasses, whom I boss around the school yard. I used to have a girl baby doll named Frances, so it never occurred to me that a boy could be named Francis. It seems there’s something wrong and beautiful about it. I enjoy giving him orders. We play a scary game that Francis invented called Mom’s Home! that can take up all afternoon. It consists of me yelling, “I’m home!” and then chasing Francis around the playground, snapping my jump rope at his heels.

  One day I’m once again playing the role of Mom during recess, out in the play yard, which is simply the street in front of the school blocked off from traffic, when I’m stopped by Sister John. She is not my teacher; she is in charge of another classroom of children in the same grade. Sister John is concentrated and diminutive. There’s a line of black hair sprinkled over her upper lip and converging on her jaw-line that makes her vaguely menacing. She wants me to escort Jessica Michaels, another first grader, into the empty classroom, find the girl’s “fainting medicine” in the sister’s desk drawer, and bring it out to the sister.

  We go in and get the medicine, but Jessica wants to take her pills there. She’s adamant. “I know how much to take,” she says with a lofty ennui. “I faint all the time.”

  That strikes me as reasonable, so she goes ahead and swallows her pills. But when we come back out without the medicine, Sister John flies into a fit. “No!” she cries at me. “Nononononono! What if she’d taken too much medicine by accident?” she demands. She screams herself purple—how dangerous, silly, thoughtless I am. She howls, “What if she dies?”

  I am dumbstruck. I gaze after Jessica, who’s already abandoned me and is off jumping rope, making her death seem all the more brutal and senseless. I realize that I’m what my uncle Hal calls a “fancy idiot.” Why did I ever think I could play Mom! My body seizes into a terrified semi-crouch. Perhaps it is the look on my face, or perhaps her passion has simply spent itself, but abruptly Sister John softens. She asks my name, age, height, and address, she asks about my sisters, parents, my cousins, and my grandparents. When I tell her my father is from Jordan, her eyes narrow and I see myself come into focus.

  “The Holy Land,” she breathes. “The river Jordan.” She holds her cross in both hands.

  I don’t say anything, but I’m pretty sure she must have a different place in mind. Bud never mentioned anything about a Holy Land. Despite this, it turns out we are now best friends. She hooks one sharp arm around my shoulders, and since she is tiny and I am already getting tall, there isn’t much difference in our height. We traipse around the play yard linked like this, going nowhere in particular but doing it fast, because, as I discover, Sister John does everything fast. It’s a little off tempo, like a three-legged race, as I rush to keep up with her, but she never lets go of me. This becomes the new game during recess. Francis gazes after me wistfully in the play yard, but I barely have time for a backward glance as we rush past.

  Sister John has me moved to her classroom that day. She rhapsodizes to the class about how my father is from the Holy Land. He’s just like the baby Jesus, she tells them. Can you imagine? she asks them, and points to me. “Diana’s father!” Puzzled, I think of the ceramic baby Jesus in my grandmother’s crèche with his creamy, rosy porcelain face and swirls of blond hair. I’m the teacher’s pet. This is widely acknowledged in class. It means that I can get away with memorizing only half the prayer, that I get to sit at the front of the classroom with Sister John and listen to the other children stumble their way through poorly recalled prayers. “You’re so lucky,” my classmates say to me. Yes, they’re right, I think. For the school’s spring pageant, I am mysteriously elected to be the one to carry the crown of daisies down the aisle and set it upon the pale Virgin Mary statue in the chapel. I glow with privilege and responsibility, holding the fresh white flowers on the tips of my fingers like a sacred relic, walking alone through the center of the church. The other children watch in silence.

  But sometimes I reflect on the days when I could play Mom’s Home! with Francis—when I wasn’t locked in this perpetual three-legged race—and I feel an absence, as if I’d lost track of something important.

  During the spring the air swells up, huge and hot and humid, glowing. There’s often a storm coming in. The late afternoon swirls in the house with shadows, and in the kitchen it smells like onions frying in butter. There have been some changes at home since I’ve started school. For one thing, there’s a new baby in the crib, grumbling, a big, loud complainer. One-year-old Monica has a special way of rocking her crib so it chugs through the room on its wheels like a train engine. And the other baby, my sister Suzy, has been displaced. She’s nearly three, barely able to amble around, but she frequently points to the second baby and says, “Get that kid outta here!” One day she actually pushes the wheeled crib to the head of the tall stairs and is about to give it a good hearty shove—I look up at this, chortling—before our mother sprints out of the bathroom and intervenes.

  Since I’ve acquired my newly elevated status at school, I’ve lost interest in family disputes. I’ve got new concerns. For instance, a small corner of our refrigerator is now reserved for food for Sister John. I have noticed Sister John sitting with the other nuns in the cafeteria, hunched over, picking silently at her horrible food tray. I cull bits of stuffed grape leaves
and diamonds of baklava from family meals to bring to her. Sister John unwraps these various offerings in class and proclaims, “Food from the Holy Land!” She has the students pass the morsels around our classroom to examine, then she reclaims the food and eats it all in front of us while making voluptuous little sounds of appreciation, her lips bright with oil.

  When I brag to my parents about Sister John’s new dining habits, they glance at each other. They decide to invite the sister over and have a good look at her. My father roasts some stuffed eggplant with garlic and rice. She sits with us at the formally dressed-out dining room table, poking her face at everything in the room.

  “So,” Mom says tentatively. Sister John faces her with those rivet eyes. “Diana says you and she have become great friends.”

  “Diana”—she fans the air—“is an angel from heaven.”

  I have the uncanny sense of having left the room. Mom examines her with one eye a little tight, as if to say Are we talking about the same person? But Bud nods approvingly. “Oh ho ho ho,” he says, and heaps Sister John’s plate with slices of dripping garlicky eggplant. He plays Santa Claus at the local hospital each Christmas, and he sometimes slips back into character.

  First Sister John cuts all the food on her plate into a thousand tiny pieces; then she begins eating with her eyes closed. She makes deep, fluttering sounds that seem to emanate from the center of her chest. Her hand floats to her sternum. I have never heard her make these particular sounds before and stare at her openly. She relaxes her mouth mid-chew and releases a sighing exhale. I am enthralled. This is the most openly sensual display I’ve ever seen from an adult, and my mother taps at my fingers to make me look away.