Arabian Jazz

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  On the third or fourth day of his visit, his sister took him to a spot by the Jordan River, near sounds of settlement construction and American bulldozers on the neighboring bank. She pointed out a small headstone, engraved with the names of four girls, dating forty-two to forty-seven years past.

  “What is this?” he’d asked Rima, his heart turning to ash, already knowing.

  She told him the story of his infant sisters, buried just after birth, destroyed by their parents’ poverty and despair. The older girls had all known among themselves, had pieced it together, though their parents had tried to act in secret. Matussem himself had been too young to understand; he’d been spared.

  After a moment, Matussem asked, “And Fatima? Did Fatima also know?”

  “As the youngest daughter,” Rima explained, “Fatima was forced to assist. And she’s never told anyone, not even us.” Years after their father and mother had passed away, Rima said, memories began to trouble the daughters, haunting their dreams, until, a year ago, the sisters defied village and family opprobrium and put up the tombstone.

  “We laid the babies to rest,” she said. “You must tell Fatima. It’s over. There’s no one left to protect, nothing to do now but to mourn and reflect. We want her to come back, to visit and see her home and family again. To know that it’s over.”

  Then she showed Matussem another headstone, older and slightly larger than the first, engraved with a single trumpeting angel and the name and death date of his wife.

  “But her grave is in America,” he said, astonished.

  “I know. We had thought she might need a second bed,” Rima said and smiled. “We thought her spirit might have become confused on such a long airplane ride back. So we had a second burial the week after you left. We wanted to give her soul ease.”

  Matussem knelt by the simple marker and touched his fingers to the chiseled hair, the windblown cheeks, the curling lips of the trumpeter. She looked like Jemorah.

  Chapter 37

  THAT SATURDAY MORNING Jem woke to the sound of her sister shouting. Through her bedroom window she saw Melvina pacing back and forth in front of the house. When Jem slid open the window she heard, “What country is this? No! Just answer the question! What country is this?”

  Jem couldn’t see her father, but she heard him clearly. “Melvina, you’re a heartpicker, you heartpicker,” he said.

  “But you’re not even Muslim! Your family is Syrian Orthodox,” Melvie shouted. “The whole neighborhood can see you up there chanting prayers. Someday you’re going to fall off that roof and break your back.”

  An hour later, when Jem walked into the kitchen, she found her father elbow-deep in a vat of shish kebab. “Dad, how many people did you make this for? There’s only going to be five at the barbecue—us, Fatima, and Zaeed.”

  Matussem dredged his arms out of the vat. They glistened with olive oil and spices. “Only way I could figure out how to stir up this mess,” he muttered. Then, “Yeah, okay, well, I thinks maybe I will be hungry. I feel a big hungry coming to get me today.” The shish kebab gleamed like jewels, with bright bits of onions and peppers, ruby tones of meat and tomato.

  They drove out to Fair Haven, up on Lake Ontario, an hour’s drive, through Fulton, Hannibal, and Sterling, the small towns simmering in the late heat. They went down through the valley of trees at the park’s entrance, then up to where they could just see the blue lip of water, its soft breakers rolling toward land.

  Melvina drove while Jem sat up front beside her. Behind them, their father was staring out the window and sighing. He said, “Whenever I see a day like this, I think, okay, now I can die, now that I’ve seen a day like this, it’s all worth it.”

  Melvie sniffed.

  The trees bowed around them, their branches silky and streaming like the costumes of sultans, green and gold and red robes against blue water brocade. It was Labor Day weekend and the park was smudged with smoking hibachis. Children were running everywhere, as Matussem observed, “like maniacs.” A Frisbee bounced off the car and Melvina braked, considered taking action, then drove on.

  “America, oh, beautiful, may shed some grace on ye,” Matussem sang.

  “That’s incorrect,” Melvina said. “Those words are wrong.”

  “I know all the words,” Matussem said. “There are some things, as a father, I know, that you, as a daughter, will never know. I know all the words. Don’t try to bamboozle me, Melvina, you heartpicker.”

  Matussem went through his private versions of “God Save the Queen” and “Oklahoma” while they waited for Melvina to settle on their stopping place. Then he switched to Arabic drinking songs once they’d parked and begun unloading the car. Fatima and Zaeed had been following in the car behind theirs and as soon as Zaeed heard “Aye Ez Zain,” he joined in, clapping his hands, while Matussem beat on the top of a cooler.

  “Oh, now this is delightful,” Melvina said, putting down a pitcher of juice and putting her hands on her hips. “Is it already time to be making a spectacle? My sister here was accepted to one of the most prestigious universities in this entire country and my father and uncle elect to behave like extras out of Barabbas. It makes me tired; it makes me very, very tired.”

  When Jem heard the phrase, “most prestigious universities,” she felt a little current of dread run through her; it was beginning to feel more and more impossible. She started walking, looking around the park, charged with a desire to run loose along the coastline. Instead, however, she swerved directly into Fatima’s path. Eating utensils splayed from her aunt’s hands; her black hair fell forward in a helmet; then the red-tipped fingers curled, and her darkened mouth said, “Jemorah, my darling baby orphan daughter, let us talk about your life.”

  Jem hesitated, then said, “How about a little later, Auntie? I just want to see what that is over there—” and began walking toward the trees.

  This was a new ploy, one Jem doubted would work, but Fatima had seemed tender, even patient, since Matussem’s return. Jem wandered toward the trees, waiting to hear Fatima call after her. Not until she’d nearly been swallowed in the greenery did she distantly hear Fatima shout: “Baby-darling, you have to get married! Time is up!”

  Jem kept moving, wandering past the picnickers into the farther reaches of the park, touching the spiny backs of trees, grainy dirt moving beneath her sandals. She was walking toward the sun’s glossy head, into the still trees around the lake, secret pockets of land, silence in the cup of leaves, gentle as memory. She lay back against a rise where the dirt was sun-steamed, dust sliding into air, and she was caught in her love of the earth, the green slopes and lake-torn stretches of the lap of New York, not far from the Onondagan Nation, from the time when the earth was nameless, or named something she’d never know. The land sang in its true voice, ordinary and beautiful, the rocks and grass and the sun; the voice stole her spirit away. Her father heard the voice, too, as he slipped from the office some afternoons down the fire escape, to cry back to it on his drums.

  She thought of her mother and said in her heart, Please stay near.

  When she returned to their table, the meat and vegetables were grilling, and Fatima was stretched out on a lawn chair, a tanning mirror under her chin. Melvie was showing Matussem and Zaeed how to start a fire with a flint, just in case.

  Jem stood by the picnic table and said, “I’ve decided I don’t want to go back to school. Why should I?”

  “Yeah!” Matussem dropped his flint and stood also. “Yeah, why?”

  Fatima opened her eyes. Jem saw her aunt’s face twinned in the sunning mirror, the first one annoyed, but the second, the face in the mirror, looked softened and more mysterious. Melvie stood, both hands held out as if for balance. “What is this?” she said. “What am I hearing? Is this a mutiny? Tell me now, is this why we drove to the lake? So you could have me walk the plank?” Melvie looked from Matussem back to Jem. “Do you know what they do to mutineers?”

  Zaeed turned one of the shishes. “Anybody hu
ngry?”

  “Hush, Zaeed!” Fatima said. “This is going to be a big fight for us.”

  Melvie stomped; her anger was strong, a whirlwind; she shook her fists in the air. Her arms were glowing in the translucent summer light, her black hair and eyes splendid; she was yelling at the sky, “Why? Why is my every effort trampled, cut down, denigrated?”

  “This is like the Bible,” Fatima murmured.

  “What do you know about it!” Melvie yelled at Fatima.

  It was already too late for Jem to put up a fight. She felt herself slip into sympathy for her sister. She couldn’t help herself. With her golden arms and glistening hair, Melvie looked too frightening to touch, so Jem stood back a little and said, “All right, already. We’ll see.”

  MATUSSEM HAD BROUGHT far too much food to their picnic, and they ended up offering it to anyone who walked by. “Have a shish?” he asked people, holding up a long skewer. Two young men with ponytails and beards who’d been backpacking stopped and sat with them, talking and eating, telling the Ramouds about where they’d hiked and how they’d been living on peanut butter and jelly for the past five days.

  Fatima held aloof, eyeing their long hair, the dusty clothes. She’d told Jem several times that perfectly fine husbands can come out of a good scrubbing, but something else troubled her, something deeper: a sense of danger. It slid like a specter through the dark length of her eyes.

  She lived among Americans, in places they had built, among their people, but despite this she wanted to keep herself, her family, and a few friends apart from the rest. She wanted what the Americans had, but at the same time she would never relax her hold on herself. It was not appropriate to mingle. Americans had the money, but Arabs, ah! They had the food, the culture, the etiquette, the ways of being and seeing and understanding how life was meant to be lived. Her wish, always, no matter what, the sharp wish that cut into her center and had lifted her eyes with hope was that her nieces should marry Arab boys, preferably in the family.

  She refused to speak the whole time the boys sat at their table. At one point, Melvie rapped her knuckles on the table and said to her aunt, “Where are your manners? Make an effort!” Then, after an hour or more of eating their meat and bread, drinking their beer, of conversation, of songs from Matussem and Zaeed, fingers knocking on overturned pots, as they were leaving one boy held back and turned and took them in, one by one, from Matussem to Zaeed, to Jem, to Melvie, finally stopping with Fatima as she returned his level gaze. And he said, “So what are you all anyway? I-talians? Wet-backs?”

  In a place like Fair Haven Park where the trees hung silky drops of leaves, where the air was sweet against the frame of water, Matussem could not believe that a deliberately wrong thing could happen. So he smiled at them openly, putting faith in the sunlight and thick grass where he chose to sit, apart from the table and the blanket, and he said, “We are Arab. From Jordan.”

  There was no reaction from the boy who was merely waiting for his friend. But the other, the one who’d stopped, who had kept looking at Jem throughout his meal with a hawk’s glance, that boy made a strange little yelp. “A-rabs!” he said, his eyes now full of what looked like a twist of amusement and disgust. He turned to the other boy and said, “Arabs, Jesus fucking Christ. And we ate their food.” The other boy grabbed his friend and tugged him away. As they left, Matussem heard them laughing.

  No one said much after the boys had gone. They packed up and left soon after.

  JEM DROVE THEM home, losing track of time, Melvie and Matussem asleep in the backseat. The memory of the hikers fell away from her, fading into the roads, the swaying trees, the brilliance of home. She took the country roads and suddenly around her the grass sparked with rain and the wild weeds were bright as treasure. She didn’t think she would ever live there again. The house looked strange as a shipwreck in a sea of country fields and telephone wires threading Euclid to the rest of the world. It could be, for Matussem, a private home, a place to create his life. But she had recognized, as the hiker turned to face her, the mystery of this hate, something she could crack only by going into it: back to school.

  Jem drove past the fields where she and Melvie once hunted for chicken bones or lay on their backs and scanned the sky. A dream within a dream, the fringe of tall grass and weeds lined the road, rising to crest beyond the flashing red light, then disappearing.

  The sun shower vanished. Just for a moment, everything was sliding along the air, as if the rain had left its traces in the sky like a path, a ladder to Heaven. This was worth studying, she thought, things that were hidden inside the crust of the earth and sky, the things that lay hidden in people: her father’s heart in the drums, her sister’s ministering fingers.

  She would take home with her its finger-scratches of lakes, hills climbing into maple, pine, and mountains. Euclid gave her knowledge of the poorest of the poor, living like a secret pulse inside the country. Peachy Otts, standing in the doorway at the vegetable stand, watching how the earth carried its road up the hill and away from her, bending her head over her book, lips moving over the letters, talking to Melvie about vocational school. Maybe Jem would someday marry a person like Ricky Ellis and spend her life learning about another lifetime. Perhaps not.

  There were pussy willows in the roadside ditch, their small faces brushing the air. This was a road the ghost hitchhiker was supposed to travel: the lovely, lost daughter on the way to the prom who took the sweater of whoever gave her a ride, then left it waiting, neatly folded, on her grave in the morning.

  Chapter 38

  SUNDAY MORNING, FOUR months after the Archbishop’s party, a letter from the Ladies’ Pontifical Committee—on stationery thick and creamy as a slice of cheesecake—was hand-delivered by the paperboy to Fatima’s door. She ran her fingers over the gold-embossed lettering, held the paper up to the light to see the watermark, then wiped at the tears that fell before she’d known they were there, brushing quickly before they dulled the sheen.

  The letter read in ornate calligraphy:

  The Ladies’ Pontifical Committee

  Mrs. D. Hind Abdulaboud Presiding

  Cordially Invites

  Mrs. Fatima Nyoor Hussan Ramoud Mawadi…

  She read the letter out loud, first with a whoop and a kind of war dance, face thrown back to the heavens. Then marching back and forth through the living room, reading to Zaeed, to the cat, to whoever might be listening through the walls, holding the letter in one hand and waving the other to and fro. Once she tired of this, she ran to the kitchen to prepare a big vat of fried cauliflower and rice for her favorite brother and his wonderful, wonderful girls, but on second thought, she decided, even better, she’d buy them a real bakery cake instead.

  She drove to the Thanatoulos Bakery, which had always been her favorite. Thirty years before, the Thanatoulos had provided the cake that welcomed Fatima and her husband to their new country. The bakery’s neighborhood always seemed to have drizzling weather, apartments banked together on a tilting street, as if someone had built it to capture the inconvenience of old Europe without any of its charm. Wet laundry flagged the ropes between the buildings, and children with scraped knees chased balls.

  Fatima could never pick out Mr. and Mrs. Thanatoulos because the bakery was always crowded with small, nut-brown women, hair knotted into kerchiefs, and equally tiny men tucked into aprons, their hair and faces and arms white with flour. Everyone spoke Greek and customers got what they wanted by pointing. Fatima was comfortable there; they lived and communicated in the same way her family in Jordan had, jostling, deliberately following each other around. They screamed at each other in a torrent of words that was their regular tone of voice. Sometimes the children—with their beautiful, nut-roasted skin and gray eyes—would run in from the back and amiably join in the screaming. The place allowed her to visit home without feeling the pain that it had held for her.

  Then one day the Thanatoulos were gone. To Miami Beach, someone said. The name was still on the door
, but a Hispanic family marched around behind the counter. Then a family of Asian-Indians, then one of Albanians, and then Lithuanians. Each of them, except for the Indians, was equally loud and equally possessive of the limited space behind the counter. The Indians only lasted in the bakery about eight months. Even though they were talented with cakes, breads, and all sorts of sweets, Fatima knew they had failed because of the pleasant tones in which they spoke, the sweet way that child yielded to mother who in turn worked serenely with husband. And they spoke English.

  “These not American way,” she told Zaeed after purchasing some of their butter cookies. “Too much smiles and knowing English. I feel they stabbing me with needle-eyes in the back.” She ended up throwing the cookies out after crumbling each one in search of drugs or razors.

  For the past year, Thanatoulos Bakery had been run by an African-American family. Fatima parked her car half up on the curb, just outside the bakery window, along the bricked alley, waited a moment, hand on the ignition, surveying the area, prepared for flight. Was the place any more dangerous, she wondered, with a black family in charge? Apparently not. There was an everlastingness about the street, eternal gloom, cobblestones smoothed pale, children shining like minnows through twilight.