“Aadaab arz,” he had said then, each gentle syllable rolled to an incomprehensible perfection that, for days after, made Malcolm and Leila scamper about the house murmuring “aadaab arz, aadaab arz” to each other while thrusting little hands to their heads until three syllables and one motion became their eternal secret language. Grandmère had brought the man inside instantly. She had Grandpère and Papa lay his thin, long frame on a sitting room sofa, while Maman brushed the ice from his cleft chin and plump eyebrows. But as soon as Grandmère went to the kitchen to make tea, the man sprung up and followed her through the house, running his fingers along the ochre walls. Grandmère was stunned when, after a brief glance around, the man busied himself about shelves and stoves, a flurry of hands and feet, like those of a dancer missing his stage. The Celestinis crowded in front of the pantry door, watching in tremulous anticipation. He stopped suddenly, turned on one heel, approached the huddled family with four even strides, and presented a mug to Grandmère. “I am Muzaffar.” His voice sounded like a quilt. It was the best cup of tea she’d ever had.
Without much of a fuss the Celestinis adopted Muzaffar, initially out of Grandmère’s insistence that humanity had an obligation to protect thin people from winter, and then permanently after Muzaffar’s voluntary assumption of all duties within the kitchen. Against polite protests and the furious batting of his eyelashes, the family forced a salary upon Muzaffar, a monthly wad of bills, half of which he tucked unceremoniously into the back of a kitchen drawer next to the fondue forks, and half he left caught in the springs of the cot he kept in the kitchen. Papa and Maman had felt exceedingly uncomfortable (or at least felt that they should feel exceedingly uncomfortable) at the prospect of a slender brown man toiling for nothing in their home. As Papa explained to Grandmère one evening, peering over the top of his newspaper, the money justified the man’s role in the house. How else could they explain his most bizarre presence?
Though Grandmère accepted her son’s clipped reasoning, she had guiltily entertained fantasies of a man so warm and generous that he would appreciate welcome and shelter with a passion for kitchen work, that relationships need never make economic sense as long as they were dimly poetic. His reluctant acquiescence to a wage cast Muzaffar as her romantically tragic (or even tragically romantic) hero. This veiled dreaminess of Grandmère’s, uncharacteristic for a lady who woke up every morning to ensure that the baggy-eyed Sanitation Department truck picked up all the garbage in front of their stoop, had already infected the entire family. It seemed that Muzaffar’s arrival tickled the Celestinis out of character. In the first weeks, Grandpère began to return from his daily dusk strolls with pots of petunias, which he had Leila and Malcolm balance on the many crumbling windowsills so that pink petals fluttered against the gray face of the house. Grandpère hoped the effect would make their home look like Florence, lavender memories glimmering again in his eyes. Maman dragged the children into the kitchen, where, to Muzaffar’s great bemusement, the three Celestinis proceeded to make guava jelly from a faded family recipe. “Our generation doesn’t make jam anymore!” she berated Papa the next morning. Papa, too consumed by his own fantasies to care for confectionery, spent day and night rearranging and dusting the family’s hoard of books. At least two rooms in each of the town house’s three floors boasted floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall bookshelving, all of which suffered from a severe case of accumulated disorder. He decided to set things straight, whizzing zealously about with a plumed duster and knowledge of the Dewey Decimal System. Suddenly, the poems of Mahmoud Darwish no longer found themselves beside Herodotus, Calvino extracted himself from Sun Tzu, Walcott escaped the clutches of Durkheim. Papa even found the fake book in which Grandpère had intended to stow the Celestini family sapphires but had instead left adrift alongside Brecht (snatching the fake book from her son and glaring at her bemused husband, Grandmère placed the jewels inside the book’s hollow and slipped it innocuously into her study). After twenty-one days, Papa became hopeful. Perhaps if he could order the incomparable insanity of the Celestini bookshelves, reason would even return to the warring world. Humanity, after all, was nothing but a library. Papa finished his work a month later, happily optimistic and blissfully unaware that Malcolm and Leila had switched books around in his wake, sowing the seeds of a new chaos in unknowable whispers, “aadaab arz, aadaab arz.”
Muzaffar was absorbed by the Celestini household through these abrupt impulses, through a family epidemic of mischievous inspiration, and, above all, through the unrivaled superiority of his cooking. Breakfast, packed food for the children’s meals at school, lunch, a light tea for Grandpère and Maman, and dinner. The cycle repeated itself daily, Muzaffar’s tireless work pausing only on Thursdays in the afternoon, and sometimes when it had snowed lightly and slush had yet to fill the gutters. The elder Celestinis insisted he take more breaks, even offered to pay him for time off, but he shrugged them away with a delicate smile and an even more delicate mango mousse. How could the Celestinis complain? Malcolm and Leila never lacked friends throughout elementary school, middle school, and even high school. Students crowded about them during lunch period, hoping for a nibble of sun-dried tomato ravioli or finely spiced merguez. In college, many a steamy night for both Celestini brother and sister began with a dark chocolate torte or several portobello pancakes in a mint sauce, which always arrived at their dorms neatly wrapped in white packaging and including a card that, in elegant letters, read “Aadaab Arz.” Grandmère and Grandpère also benefited from Muzaffar’s food. Despite their steadily advancing age, they never contracted arthritis, hemorrhoids, bladder irregularities, Alzheimer’s, cancer, or even the common cold, though Grandpère still occasionally developed cases of gout—that, he blamed on his ancestors. Like both grandparents, Papa and Maman thrived off their cook; during Muzaffar’s fourteen-year tenure, none of the Celestini adults felt any older. Time thickened and settled about the house like beaten cream in a soufflé.
Muzaffar, too, didn’t grow older. Only his eyebrows evidenced the passage of time. They billowed and turned a quiet silver, two lost rain clouds above the doldrums of his eyes. This graying struck the family as particularly odd, since Muzaffar seemed altogether outside the bounds of history. Each of the Celestinis soon realized that it was pointless inquiring about him. If asked about the land of his birth, or his age, Muzaffar would laugh and later emerge at dinner with a grilled swordfish and declare, “This is where I’m from!” or, after placing a goat cheese tart on the table, clap once: “That, my dears, is the sum of my years.” Likewise, he explained his ethnicity with a chestnut soup, while his childhood was one of eggplants and quails. His family consisted of twenty-four cupcakes; he elaborated his political beliefs in dumplings; and the path that had finally brought him to the Celestinis’ stoop appeared in the burnt trails of roasted tomatoes. Grandmère suspected Muzaffar hid himself in his food so that the Celestinis would digest bits of him every day, only ever knowing the man by his endless flavors. It seemed, to her, a wonderfully appropriate game for their sublime cook to play.
In this way, the Celestinis never saw Muzaffar outside his talent. But he was not what he cooked, or at least, not entirely what he cooked. Every Thursday afternoon, as the Tibetan refugee sung from his throat or Viorel took black-and-white photographs of Leila and her little friends with their jaws set and fists in the air, Muzaffar drifted about the city. When the sun was out, he’d join pickup soccer games in the park at St. Luke’s Place. During every World Cup, these games grew in length and intensity, spilling into the streets after the park closed at dusk. Muzaffar was always the referee. Other Thursdays, he went east to Ludlow Street, where he joined an old Cantonese lady whose earlobes brushed against her shoulders and whose eyes were as still as his. She sat cross-legged on a bench blowing smoke rings from a thin water pipe. He liked letting the smoke out in slow thick streams through his nostrils and would sit there, watching buses and taxis blur until the coals died out. When it rained and only soggy black sha
pes slunk through the streets, Muzaffar ran alongside Alphabet City boys as they sprayed “East Side” on unsuspecting West Village town houses—but he always did steer the boys away from the Celestinis’. No one in the house knew of their cook’s wanderings, none thought Muzaffar capable of anything else. So it was that whenever he traced his way back to his adopted home, past Mariko’s ramshackle stall, through the misty lamplight of Commerce Street till he reached the old stoop and the pink-flowered gray town house, Muzaffar belonged to New York City, not the Celestini kitchen. Etoile the Haitian maid watched him from the ground-floor window of the neighboring town house, watched as he paused before mounting the Celestini stoop, watched in winter as he skimmed ice from the wrought-iron railings with a slender forefinger. Perhaps it was understanding that drew her eyes. She, too, belonged to New York City—more than she did to pots and pans and red-cheeked babies, a vacuum cleaner, or even to the divine smells of Muzaffar’s cooking that spread through the walls of town houses and into her daydreams.
Once they strolled together to the shore of the Hudson, where arm in arm (Etoile was always charmed by Muzaffar’s gallantry) they walked south toward the World Trade Center. She told him about her families, the one here that she coddled, the one there that she missed. He made her watch the seagulls fuss about the stumps of a long-vanished pier. The sun set behind New Jersey, turning the cold river orange. A clutter of yachts bobbed against their moorings. In the wind and spray of the water, they could barely hear the city pulsing behind them. They felt alone, as if the city were but a backdrop for their meandering, a vista built for them. Just imagine, Muzaffar said, looking over the river, just imagine how many people have come here through the years, the centuries, to make this place their own.
She was imagining that on the infamous day New York lost its towers, the day ash fell like snow across the neighborhood, the day Mariko forgave the future and closed her shop, the day before Muzaffar’s last. Fire trucks and ambulances zoomed through the catatonic streets, chasing billowing black clouds. Schools emptied. Hulking office buildings ground to a halt. Lower Manhattan stayed eerily silent, gagged by yellow caution tape and the soot-laden air. The Cantonese lady abandoned her bench, earlobes swinging behind her as she fled to Flushing. Soccer balls lay strewn about St. Luke’s Place like the toys of ghosts. Somewhere, giants began to play with the television and wrinkled white men, staring grimly toward Heaven, decided the fate of language. It seemed to Etoile, beside the ground-floor window, that the neighborhood, the entire city even, was sinking into an alien world of ash, interminably gray and powerfully lonely. She fumbled with the nozzle of her vacuum cleaner, longing to suck away all the soot, longing to return color to her Commerce Street. But in the upstairs playroom, the babies broke into a wail and drew Etoile from her grounded flights of fancy.
In his kitchen, Muzaffar abandoned a promising lunch and slipped like a shadow through the Celestini house. He had made a decision. Expressionless except for his stormy eyebrows, Muzaffar stole into Grandmère’s study, found that book he knew to be a fake, and from its hollow removed the Celestini sapphires, sneaking the storied heirlooms into the pocket of his apron.
The jewels had been taken before. They were first stolen almost two hundred years ago, on the green island of Ceylon, where colonial officers made men slither through the mines in search of stones more precious than their lives. A grizzled jewel-cutter, his eyes turning to milk, slid the sapphires into his underwear and descended from the mountains, through a forest of eucalyptus trees, and came to the port. He sold the stones to a sea captain for enough money to soften a long, jagged life under empire. Tucked within a crate of tea, the sapphires sailed past the hills of Aden, into the bustle and dust of Zanzibar, and round the nose of Africa till they reached the Canaries, when pirates set upon the ship and stripped it of all its cargo. Craving the gleam of Malay pearl, or Indian silver, or even Chinese oranges, the pirates found only crate after crate of tea, which they sold in disgust to a distributor in Cádiz. The sapphires soon crossed through the Pyrenees, looped around Marseille, and tumbled through the Tuscan countryside to Florence, where they emerged quite unexpectedly in Elio Celestini’s morning cup of tea. He jumped from the veranda of the villa, yelling for a larder girl, who, with a quivering hand, pointed out the recently purchased package of Ceylon tea leaves. Years later, Elio would tell his children of how, by God’s infinite grace, the Celestini family had been given jewels as blue and true as their eyes, and that, as long as the sapphires stayed within the family, the Celestinis would be content and have no secrets to keep, and would never forget their history. The sapphires lingered in Florence, leaving in Grandpère’s breast pocket more than a century later when he escaped decline and faded grandeur for Paris and the warm arms of Grandmère. They rented a walk-up in the Marais, and together learned how to dance and how to think. In those days, the sapphires glimmered and spun within the bowels of Grandmère’s record player. But, restless again, the Celestini jewels followed the family to the gray town house on Commerce Street, where they could shelve all their books and put their sapphires finally to rest.
Muzaffar waited a day before taking the sapphires out of his apron. By then, Grandpère had already opened the empty book and found them missing. The Celestinis had skittered about the house, going through the motions of a search for something that could never just be lost, unwilling for the first time in fourteen years to bring themselves to the table and eat. It was only a matter of hours before eyes turned on the cook, sapphire eyes crying both for their broken New York City and for their suddenly missing past. Grandmère’s nose bent viciously as Muzaffar removed the platter of tangerine couscous from the table. “How can you think of food at a time like this?” she hissed. “Is it all you care about?” He said nothing but glided back and forth from the kitchen, untouched dishes in hand, while Grandpère muttered black thoughts in the dark of the foyer bathroom. Maman collapsed in the sitting room, feeding herself spoonful after spoonful of guava jelly as Papa, unable to reach the twins at their dorms, let the television wash over his numb eyes.
Alone in the kitchen, Muzaffar poured the sapphires out onto the countertop. The jewels were each no larger than his thumbnail, uncertain teardrops under the pale kitchen light. He scooped them all into one cupped hand, and with a flick of his wrist, dropped them into an already sizzling pan. Amid onions, red peppers, streams of puréed tomatoes, powdered turmeric, cloves, and a mound of chopped okra, the sapphires tossed and fried. In all their travels, they had never encountered the fervor of a cook possessed, the heat of a man breaking from his adopted home. Muzaffar’s eyebrows twitched with each shake of the pan. He stirred relentlessly, so frantic in his movements that even his eternally still eyes swirled, catching the blue, now brown, now green light of sapphires disappearing into a stir-fry. Then he stopped, apparently satisfied with the thick smell of burnt okra clouding the kitchen. There would be time, later, he knew, for families to eat and forget, to float uninvited from place to place, to speak words no one understood, to love the city with their eyes, even to be a New Yorker and serve nothing, but not now. Not when colors had fled the world and left maids alone, clinging to unspoken odors. With serene and slow bites, he finished the entire pan, and waited for the poison of the Celestinis to spread and preserve lost history in the memory of his food.
THE ASTROLABE
In the spring of 1422, a squadron of two-masted galleys sailed west from Tunis. Past Gibraltar, the Atlantic spread before them, green and cold-blooded, hissing with the threat of serpents. They turned south, shadowing the land, rowing against the wind. Their goal was to round Bojador, the long arm of sand and rock at the end of the known world, beyond which few sailors had ever gone. All seamen told stories about Bojador. There, the water boiled in sudden whirlpools. Those ships that managed to skirt the whirlpools were wrapped in steam and dragged invariably to a bigger drop, the biggest of them all, where the world ocean fell off its even plane and tumbled into space.
The
captain of the squadron was a zealous man who had no patience for the bilge-speak of sailors. He believed that it was possible to weather the winds and make the tip of Bojador, that the world didn’t end there or the sea give way, but that the coast bent back into the continent, arcing east to hotter climes full of gold and salt and slaves. His drummers beat a stern pace. The sails held tight in the rigging and the wind poured through the gunwales. He spoke to his subordinates in intervals, since all talk was drowned by the great creaking rhythm of the oars.
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