The Language of Baklava

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  Mai eyes Fattoush’s plate, then indignantly snaps in Arabic at Aunt Sandra. Sandra regards us placidly in turn and says, “Oh now, what’s all this fuss about a little taste of lamb?”

  I find Bud standing over a platter of sumac-roasted chicken with Uncle Frankie. They appear to be having some sort of business meeting. I interrupt to point out Fattoush, who is still standing but is now starting to crumple, clutching his stomach. Mai crouches beside him, trying to fan him with a napkin.

  Dobby and Bud half carry, half drag Fattoush outside, where he totters and sways and then vomits weakly down the center of the driveway. Mai watches from a window. Uncle Haroun comes out with a garden hose while Aunt Sandra stands in the doorway. Her neck and shoulders are erect as an empress’s, and her hands are squared on her hips. She is supremely annoyed. “Now what on earth?”

  “I can’t digest meat,” Fattoush says meekly. He is mortified and apologetic and wrings his hands as if begging for mercy. “I haven’t eaten it in fifteen years—I don’t have the enzymes for it.”

  “Oh, God in heaven,” Sandra says, flinging her hands in the air before going back inside.

  Fattoush vomits out the window on the ride home, speckling himself. At one point, he whimpers about disgracing himself in front of Mai, but I say that she likes him far too much to mind a little vomit. I tell him to think of it as a bonding experience. He then spends most of the night moaning on the floor of his room, occasionally crab-walking to the bathroom for more retching. Bud hovers at the bathroom door with mugs of soup, tea, and ginger ale, all of which are waved away by Fattoush’s limp hand.

  I keep vigil with Bud, both of us upright and unblinking at late-night TV, an eye-scalding buzz of ancient westerns that I’ve never heard of.

  “This reminds me of when you and your sisters were the littlest girls,” Bud says as we nibble Fattoush’s broth and crackers. The toilet roars and shudders one wall away.

  “Whenever somebody was sick, your mother and I would sit up just like this, worrying about you.” He gestures toward Fattoush shuffling miserably back to his room. “Do you remember those times?”

  It’s true—there is something about this cave of light in the dark, the glass of ginger ale, the scent of soup, the waiting to get well, that reminds me of childhood and a time when my parents were practically still children themselves. Our lives were something we went into together, in quiet living rooms, waiting up past bedtime.

  “I think Fattoush could use someone to take care of him,” Bud says, his voice low.

  “Do you think this is all in his head?” I ask Bud.

  He shrugs. “Maybe yes, maybe no.”

  “Maybe he could take better care of himself.”

  Bud pooches out his lips. “That sounds like something an American would say.”

  As dawn is turning to a bronze glow in the windows, Bud has fallen asleep in a chair and I’m uncomfortably kinked on the couch. Fattoush appears in the living room entryway. “I think I’m better now.”

  I wake up a little and squint at him in the dimness. He looks as hollowed out as a parenthesis, and his eyes are wells. My voice doesn’t work yet, so I wave at him. He smiles wanly and waves back. He starts to head off to bed, then stops and returns. He sways once, lightly.

  “Phinny?” I boost myself onto my elbows. “Do you need something? Some aspirin? Another blanket?”

  “Well, it’s just . . .” He props himself against the wall and lowers his head as if ducking a ray of light. His forehead wrinkles as he lifts his eyes to mine. “I was just wondering—do you really think Mai likes me?”

  One week later, I come home after a day of errands and find my father and Fattoush sitting around in the living room, the air turgid with the feel of a broken-off conversation. Their faces, as they turn to me, are colored with guilt. Fattoush stands, putting out both hands as if to hold me in place. “Now—okay, don’t get all upset,” he says, measuring his words.

  “What?” I stand still. The breath pools in the bottoms of my lungs, and the TV image freezes. Outside, the birds hold their last notes.

  Bud smiles a wide, unnatural smile. “Hello, Ya Ba,” he says.

  I study his smile. “What happened?”

  “This wasn’t a plan or anything.”

  “Please—just tell me.”

  Bud grins and shakes his head the way he does when it’s someone on the phone he doesn’t want to speak with.

  “What.” My voice goes an octave higher.

  They both look alert now. Fattoush nods and swallows and finally says to me, “Your father—okay . . . he . . . he bought a building today.”

  “He—”

  “See, what did I tell you?” Bud says to Fattoush. Bud bats at an invisible crumb on his sleeve, then looks up with a flash of inspiration. “I bought it for you, honey!”

  I carefully set my bags of groceries on the coffee table, then I drop onto my hard couch. A flume of dust goes up.

  “It’s for the whole family.” Bud sits forward into his excitement, warming up now. “We can all live on the first floor, the restaurant will go on the second floor—”

  “The place was a steal,” Fattoush enthuses. “Two hundred K!”

  “Two hundred thousand dollars!” I white-knuckle the arm of the couch. “Where are you going to get that kind of money?”

  Bud bunches up his lips as if concocting an answer. Finally he says, “I have some retirement money saved, for your information. And who likes to retire, anyway? No one! You know what happens when you retire? You go crazy! For your information, I have a plan. I will make a restaurant that my family can all come and work at! Besides, your mother always has some money hidden somewhere, in the cupboards, under the rug. She loves doing that.”

  “So you told Mom about this?”

  More batting at invisible crumbs. “Not a hundred percent exactly yet.”

  “Diana, listen, listen, this is a totally amazing, awesome, incredible deal,” Fattoush persists. “Frankie’s house is huge. There’s more than enough room for everyone on just the first floor alone—”

  “Or maybe we should put the family on the second floor and the restaurant on—”

  “Okay, wait a minute—” I put out my hand. The sun in the windows, usually so clear and light, seems to thicken and liquefy. “You mean you bought Uncle Frankie’s house?”

  Both of them look at me. Bud rubs his eye with the flat of his palm.

  Among my rascally, troublesome, sly uncles and cousins, Frankie is the most rascally, troublesome, and sly of all. Aside from occasional, half-joking stabs at employment, he has lived most of his life like one of the lilies of the valley, neither toiling nor reaping. He survives by shaving off pieces of the land he inherited and selling them at exorbitant prices. He has also recently invested in a small franchise that embeds holographic images on pendants for necklaces. This business, he tells any potential investor, is a “gold mine.” But for the past decade, he has largely augmented his lifestyle by renting out the floors of his five-story, squared-off house while he and his wife retreat to an ever shrinking space at the center. The house no longer has a kitchen because Frankie tore out the stove and refrigerator to sell to some Bedouins who didn’t have access to electrical outlets. He rented the flat roof of their house to a family that wore bright scarves and gold earrings and cooked over a rooftop campfire. Most recently, he rented his first floor and his fourth floor to two opposing political parties to house their campaign headquarters. The front of the house is draped with two thirty-foot banners proclaiming the names of the two warring factions, and there are constant skirmishes over which banner is to be draped higher than the other. Sometimes both banners hang straight down in parallel tatters. All day long, middle-aged men run out of one or the other campaign headquarters, up and down the steps of the house with bags of takeout food, throwing their garbage wrappings and melon rinds at each other’s doors. The entryway reeks like the dumpster behind a bowling alley, and refuse clutters the staircase.
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  “You bought that building for two hundred thousand dollars,” I say, squinting hard, as if I could bring it into better focus.

  Bud smiles, holds up his hands, smooth and even as a wave. “Ya Ba, let me explain real estate to you. Real estate costs a great deal of money. . . .”

  Fattoush rushes in. “Really, Diana, you don’t know! Frankie says he could get double what he’s asking for this place. Even triple! It’s a gold mine.”

  “So why’s he asking for so little, then?”

  Bud frowns, concentrates, rolls forward in his chair. This is a lesson he wants me to learn: “Because that is what family does. They help each other.”

  “Dad!” I strangle the word in a half scream, then place one hand over my mouth and look up at him. “Dad, it doesn’t matter—you can’t afford it.”

  “What—it’s no problem. I’ve got fifty thousand saved up, your mom’s gotta have the same amount, easy. And then once we sell our house it’s no problem. Of course, it’s not the whole building, but at least—”

  “What do you mean, it’s not the whole building?”

  Bud and Fattoush look at each other. Is that a small glimmer of awareness struggling to emerge? Liver-colored streaks appear in Fattoush’s milky skin. Bud clears his throat. “It doesn’t include the roof,” he mumbles.

  That’s when I go into my bedroom and lock the door. I sit on the bed and examine the intricate swirls in the plaster ceiling and attempt to assess the situation. I think: Bud is about to give away their life savings and house.

  Then the thought comes to me—distantly and quietly, like a person shouting from the horizon—that I am partially to blame here. I put the idea of Jordan back into my father’s head. After Bud had managed to live for several years in relative serenity in America, his daughter moved back to the homeland and stirred everything up again.

  My own fault.

  I rub my hand over the coarse grain of my bedspread. My life has not been uncomfortable here. True, the elderly bed in my furnished apartment is so slept-in that the mattress has a furrow that I roll into every night. True, the landlord has installed a permanent red light fixture in my office, for reasons known only to himself, so my work glows nightly in an angry, accusatory crimson. And true, I cannot walk by myself in the streets of Amman without hearing sweet nothings from strangers like “Hello, you sexy Russian!” and “Meow, meow, Miss Pussycat!”

  But Jordan has turned out to be more familiar, socially lush, and deeply welcoming than I’d ever expected it to be. I knew as soon as the airplane door opened onto the clean desert night, the scents of jasmine, dust, and mint weaving through the air. Through my bedroom window, I can see fluted minarets and domes made incandescent by the sun. The call to prayers lifts from the three closest mosques, coming first in delicate slivers, then rising full throated and silvery as the olive trees that shine along my avenue, calling me back, as if to say Here it is, the place you were meant to be, at last.

  Wouldn’t it be wonderful to run a restaurant in Jordan with my father? For a second I don’t let myself think about money, or my writing, or the practical reasons to do or not do anything—including the fact of who Bud is and who I have turned out to be. Instead, I think about a warm room full of people eating, the air damp and rich with the aromas of roasted garlic and olive oil, braised chicken, stuffed squashes, grape leaves wrapped tenderly around their delicate fillings. I think of all of us together again.

  But then the call to prayers fades back into the cityscape, and I am left staring at the bed that slips every night from one end of the room to the other because the floor is tilted. I am back in my apartment, where I haven’t cooked anything besides scrambled eggs in over a month because the kitchen reeks of sour wood, mold, and insecticide.

  I go to my door and touch its smooth grain. Bud’s and Fattoush’s voices are lowered, discussing how to talk me into seeing how wonderful everything is. I walk out and once again there’s that swoop of silence. I stand in the doorway, staring at their upturned faces. “So, Dad,” I say, “I’d like to speak to you about this.”

  Fattoush dusts off his knees and straightens up. “Fantastic. You know, we were really hoping that once you sort of calmed down and had a chance to—”

  “Dad.” I fix Bud with an X-ray eyeball. “Let’s you and me go get a coffee.”

  “Great, I could use some caffeine.” Fattoush starts walking toward the door.

  I point at him. “Okay—you? Stay here.”

  Fattoush shrinks down on the hard couch. The axis of my gaze shifts to Bud. I wait.

  Just a few blocks away from my apartment is a tidy little café called Babiche that serves French pastries, Italian cappuccinos, and hummus. Both Bud and I already feel depleted by the conversation we haven’t yet had, so we sit quietly at our oversize window table, our fingers trailing over the silly, colorful plastic menu, reading and rereading, both of us distracted and unhappy. We’ve forgotten how to fight with each other. Almost without noticing it, our natures have matured and formed, so that here we now sit, without a way to speak.

  The shop owner watches us, concerned, from her glass pastry case at the front of the store. Bud and I are so obviously struggling and failing to talk about something that she sends over what she feels will best help us in our difficult, metaphysical state. For Bud, that is a steaming pot of dense black Arabic coffee; for me, it’s a long, silver dish of strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate ice cream under a drizzle of hot fudge—a Neapolitan.

  I dip a slim, swan-necked spoon into the ice cream and taste the ripe sweetness of berries, the exotic, resinous twist of vanilla bean, the formal purity of the chocolate. Something sentimental reawakens in my nature and softens my resistance. But when I look at Bud, it seems that the coffee is reviving some unwelcome consciousness in him. He studies my ice cream a bit gloomily, then shakes his head and makes his “no one understands me” gesture, tossing up one hand. He contemplates the procession of chattering teenagers swinging in and out of the glass doors. Then the door to the restaurant ticks open and in comes a big, busy family—babies wallowing in the arms of harried parents, several giddy-grinning children, and a couple of take-charge seniors. They immediately start pushing tables together and rearranging the furniture. I see Bud jealously taking all of this in. Back in the States, he was in the habit of pointing at strangers’ babies and saying to me and my sisters, “There, girls, I would like some of those.”

  But now he is contemplative, sunk in meditation. He turns his saucer slowly, then takes an expansive, dark, philosophical breath and says, “Who knows what anything means in this whole world? Why does the sun rise in the morning, why—”

  “Dad, no.”

  He looks up from the coffee, his eyes flat and plaintive now. “I miss you,” he says. “I miss my girls. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go, everyone running in a million directions. Look at you—back in the States, you live out in the wilderness somewhere—”

  “Portland.”

  “Suzanne in the Deep South—”

  “San Francisco.”

  “And the baby living in that pit of vipers—”

  “New York City.”

  “What kind of a family is that? In Jordan this never would have happened.”

  “Dad—we’re happy. We all like where we live. We’re Amer—” I don’t say it. I turn the spoon in my fingers.

  “I can’t take it, I just—can’t—take it.” He presses down on his heart. “So, yes, I buy a restaurant! Yes, I did it. I buy a restaurant because finally I see that it’s time. Just like I always tried to tell you. Didn’t I try? We can live downstairs and the restaurant will be upstairs. It will be more than jobs—you and your sisters, you’ll all be owners. You’ll all be part of the big family again. You’ll be living here and your babies won’t be foreigners. We can run it together and it will be perfect—don’t you see that?” His expression is so clear, direct, and fierce, I have to look away.

  Instead of speaking, I eat ice cream. Whi
le Bud talks, I take slow, melting spoonfuls, the hot fudge dense and dark with a burnt-sugar edge, the metal spoon cool in my mouth. My father’s words dissolve in a place beneath my throat, a lost, forgotten location I feel only when certain old songs come on the radio.

  I want more than anything to be able to say to my father: Of course, yes, your splendid dream will come true at last. But the cold spoon clicks against my teeth. There are too many things I know for sure: My sisters will not move to Jordan; they have lives of their own now. And I’m not staying on in Jordan once my grant is finished; I miss the States too much. Uncle Frankie’s building doesn’t have a kitchen in it. Bud doesn’t even have the nerve to tell Mom that he bought the building. And we would all end up fighting with one another all the time anyway.

  Bud has forgotten about the rambunctious family sitting a few tables away and is staring at me, as if I am now the one who can grant his wishes. “Don’t you see?” he asks again, as if it is just a matter of changing the expression on my face. “This is our last chance to be a family all together again. That’s all. That’s all I’m saying.” His hands open and then curl shut on the tabletop. He adds in a quiet, desperate voice, “I told Fattoush he could be a manager.”

  I slip the spoon into the muddled remains of ice cream, sweet and sad as a last glance, a blown kiss. The late afternoon light fills the windows. I wait, then tap Bud’s hand and nod. “That’s good, because he needs a job.”

  Some people have a genius for convincing you that their dreams are the deepest, truest, finest of all dreams, even as some part of you knows they’re crazy. Perhaps some people dream better than others. If such a thing could be true, then I’d have to say that Bud is a firstclass, grade-A dreamer. His dreams are elaborate, enduring, and so lovely to look at. They’re the sorts of dreams that could make you angry because you can see how much you might start to want them for yourself, and you know that for some reason, you won’t be able to have them.

  That night, Bud finally gets up the nerve to call Mom. I hardly breathe in the next room, where I am standing over the stove, stirring and staring down into the round black eye of a pot of Arabic coffee. The scent of the coffee and cardamom rises into my face and mingles with the sound of Bud’s voice talking about everything and revealing nothing. He talks about food, restaurants, family, angling in from a hundred directions. Over and over, it seems that I hear him approaching his true topic, only to veer away from it again. “You know, I’ve been thinking about restaurants ever since I got here,” he finally says. A pause, then, “Oh no, nothing special. Just, you know, about restaurants in general, how I like them so much. Is it raining there?” At the end of an hour, he has told her nothing.