The Language of Baklava (18 page)

A picnic in the winter! This is an enigma that preoccupies me for days, overshadowing even Christmas. I lie awake at night, jittery with anticipation, and in the morning I wake from dreams of long picnic tables set with plates full of snow and sunlight, my jaw moving and my tongue curled up with pleasure.

Uncle Hal’s house is thirty miles northwest of us, beside Lake Ontario. On this particular New Year’s Eve, we have to drive through a dense, ghostly blizzard that has started early in the day and just keeps going. We wait to see if it will settle down, and around four in the afternoon there seems to be a lull, the wind falling. But by the time we get three miles down the highway, it turns to pure night and the wind returns, driving snow sideways over the road, then whipping it into solid tunnels, the flakes blurring up over the car’s windshield so there is nothing to see but this spinning-open of whiteness. We roll down the windows and try to look out, but the whole world is perfectly draped in white. We hear on the radio that they’ve closed the highway behind us. The wind nudges at our car’s front end and we drive slower and slower.

For a child in the close captivity of her parents’ car, there is nothing to do in a nighttime lake-effect storm in upstate New York but let go. Let the snow take you into its breathing body, feel the subtle, fish-soft slips and slides of the car in motion, sense the wobbling moments before all that machinery threatens to skid and fly away.

In the backseat, Monica, Suzy, and I hold tight to an oversize silver tray as if it is another steering wheel. It’s a glorious, ceremonial thing, decorated with scrolls and flourishes and outfitted with four little flat feet, purchased in Jordan and transported to America in its own slender suitcase. It is the finest, most auspicious setting for my aunt Rachel’s fabulous
knaffea
pastry. Its weight and heft holds me down and reassures me. It feels like the true center of gravity of the universe.

Eventually the snow trance breaks like a fever and the long, glowing highway tapers into plowed roads at the edge of the town. Uncle Hal and his family live in a rural area that piles plowed heaps of snow ten feet high on either side of the street. We pull up to his house, jelly legged and faint of heart, the iced-over driveway creaking beneath our feet. My sisters and I lug the tray out of the car. Uncle Hal stands in the driveway to greet us. He waves tongs in one hand. Uncle Hal has set up his big kettledrum grill outside, under the icicle eaves of the house. The grill sends a stream of smoke up into the cold-bitten sky. This may well be the greatest meal of all time—ground
kofta
kabobs, shish kabob, beef ribs, and vegetables—all grilled outdoors during a snowstorm.

My parents shake the snow out of their hair and laugh. “What is the point of this?” Bud asks. With a sweep of arms, he’s indicating not only the grill, but the snow, the cold, celebrating New Year’s Eve, the alien lunar landscape.

“I don’t know, brother,” Uncle Hal says. “I do not know.”

“Look at us! What are we doing?” Bud’s black hair is now white and feathery with snow. “What is this, the North Pole? We’re crazy to live here. This place isn’t made for people to live.”

“Ours is not to reason why,” Uncle Hal says, turning pieces of chicken and squirting the coals with extra lighter fluid for good measure. He holds up a leg with his tongs and admires it. “You see this chicken leg? This chicken leg contains the wonders of the world and the seven heavens. Someday I will write a poem about this chicken leg.”

The charred, winy aroma mingles with the sparkling flecks in the air. Uncle Hal grills a row of sheeshes, then stacks them on platters, and the children carry their own plates to the kitchen table. The adults sit away from the children in the dining room, which frees us to eat as wantonly and barbarically as possible. Ed illustrates how he can fill his entire mouth with roasted zucchini. The juices stain our lips, and we slump and make loud caveman groans as we chew. We use pieces of bread to push the meat and fire-scorched vegetables from the skewers onto a big communal platter—or right into our mouths.

The world seems exciting and strange tonight, the well-deep blackness in the window full of tracery, translucent clouds swimming over the moon. After we finish eating, I lean forward and mutter, “Well, I sure hope you appreciate that we’re here tonight.”

My cousins stare at me, waiting for the joke.

“Yeah, well, you know what? We were all nearly slaughtered tonight driving around out there.”

Monica and Suzy exchange bright, startled glances.

“Oh yeah?” Cousin Jess grins broadly. “So what happened?”

I shrug lazily and eat a morsel of lamb
kofta.
“Oh, there’s some sort of psycho killer who just escaped from prison, and he’s out there driving around in the storm in an old beat-up black car, running people off the road and cutting them into little pieces.” I hold up another chunk of lamb
kofta
between my thumb and forefinger. “About this big, I think. They say his teeth are pure gold. We heard about it on the radio. That’s the real reason they closed the roads. Since we’re staying up all night, of course, we’re probably going to run into him at some point, and then God only knows!”

At this point, five-year-old Monica runs wailing to our mother in the other room. I grab my forehead. I have no idea where that story came from or what moved me to tell it, and now I realize it might have been better if I hadn’t. Gram says that I’m a hostage of my imagination. I have trouble teasing apart the worlds of dreams and reality. When I was eight some neighborhood kids told me that their mother wouldn’t allow them to talk to me until I stopped fibbing. I’d been terrorizing them with a daily serialized tale about my work as an undercover agent combating a race of half sheep–half men from Venus. Then they’d be up half the night, howling at every creak in the house.

A familiar voice flares in the kitchen doorway, saying, “You are such a big noodlehead, Diana.” It’s our cousin Hanna, her American mother, Jean, and Hanna’s tiny, mummified father, Abdelhafiz; they live down the street from Uncle Hal and specialize in dinnertime visits. Hanna and Jean are both heaped up with masses of flesh the color and sheen of cottage cheese. The corners of their mouths slant sharply downward, and their hair falls in glossy black ringlets around their faces so they resemble angry Kewpie dolls. Their every glance emanates an air of disapproval. Hanna drags my tearstained sister back into the kitchen, holding her by the wrist. “What sort of idiot tells her little baby sister that there’s a psycho killer on the loose?”

“I don’t know,” I say sullenly.

Aunt Jean says, “Tch,” and waves her hand at us as if to make us all evaporate. She goes off with her husband to join the adults, and Hanna plunks down at our table and pulls the platter of meat under her chin. “What’re you morons eating?” She stuffs some
kofta
in her mouth and grunts. “Ugh, overcooked!”

Hanna is only fifteen, just two years older than Jess, but she refers to us as “the kids” and is forever lecturing us on how none of us will ever amount to anything. Hanna frequently informs people that she plans to attend Swarthmore, the college that her mother’s second cousin attended, which she holds up as the pinnacle of education. She also likes to tell us that in all likelihood none of us juvenile delinquents will ever make it to college at all at the rate we’re going. Even Monica looks annoyed with her. Our hour of eating barbarically is over. It’s practically midnight.

BARBARIC LAMB KOFTA
This is at its most wonderful when barbecued over an outdoor grill.
Not necessarily at the stroke of midnight,
but it adds a certain something.

Mix together all the ingredients with your hands until evenly blended. Shape
¹
⁄4 cup of the lamb mixture around a skewer in an elongated (3- to 4-inch) sausage shape along the length of a skewer. Repeat with the remaining mixture.

Grill the
kofta
over hot coals, turning, for about 5 minutes on each side.

Serve with yogurt blended with 1 teaspoon lemon juice and 1 crushed garlic clove.

SERVES 4.

After dinner, we watch Dick Clark and the ball about to drop in New York City. The moment feels laden with mystery and tension, as if for one second the world has agreed to pay attention to time itself. All the ghostly faces and Victorian figures in the old oil paints that line my uncle’s walls stare at the big, boxy TV. All the books and Persian carpets and even the old piano hold their breath. Finally, absurdly slowly, the big ball slides down its pole. My birthday is close to New Year’s Eve, and I was born on the cusp of a new decade, so when the year turns, I feel that I have aged along with the earth. I am newly eleven, but I am ancient. The lingering scent and smoke of the grill fixes the moment inside of me.

My parents, aunts and uncles, and Hanna all hug and kiss one another, and the children squirm away. My father and uncles exchange a look: another year that they’ve lost to their new country. Then the men groan and bend and collapse backward on the couch. From there they launch into one of their favorite pastimes—complaining.

My father, looking older than usual, drapes one wilted arm over the edge of the couch. Is there gray at his temples? He sighs, squinting at the TV, and holds up one tragic hand. “Who is this man, this Dick Clark?”

“I don’t know,” Uncle Hal says in an equally hollow voice. “I just don’t know.”

“Too many times I think we’ll never get home again,” Great-Uncle Abdelhafiz says. “It’s like we’ve gone
poof.
” He looks around the room unblinking, as if he isn’t sure he’s really there. Tiny Uncle Abdelhafiz has skin the color and grain of petrified wood and liquid, glimmering eyes. His mother was one of my great-grandfather’s two simultaneous African wives, and I often have the sense when looking at him that he wishes he could somehow escape from these two bossy women in charge of him and go back to Senegal.

“So many people disappear,” Bud comments dolefully.

“What about Danny Thomas?” Uncle Hal asks. “What happened to him?”

“Dead,” Uncle Abdelhafiz says. “Nice Lebanese boy.”

“Never mind about Danny Thomas, look what happened to your whole family! Look at young cousin Farouq, Great-Uncle Ziad, Auntie Seena, and Jimmy’s son Jalal,”Aunt Jean cuts in disapprovingly.

“Dead, dead, dead, and in jail,” Uncle Hal says, dusting off his hands. “The police wanted me to come bail Jimmy’s kid out last week, for the third time this year. I said, ‘You guys take him for a while.’ ”

“He’ll never amount to anything,” Hanna puts in, easing her head back on her round neck in a bored, luxurious way. “No future, no nothing.” She rotates her head to view the children. “Most of these Abu-Jabers can’t survive this country. It’s too much for them. They’ve got to have discipline, they’ve got to be watched every second. You should ship them all back!” she says with a regal fling of her hand.

Uncle Abdelhafiz stares at his wife and daughter for a few moments as if he cannot, for the life of him, recollect who they are. “
I
want to go home,” he says in a voice like an echo.

Uncle Hal clicks his head back, chin up. “What home? Show it to me. You’re planning to go home? Just listen to this poem I wrote yesterday on this very subject.” He squares his shoulders and intones: “Lo, the days of yore / When life was full / The sun was hot / And things were not / Such a bore. . . .”

Bud sits with his arms crossed and his eyes closed, nodding in solemn agreement. He opens his eyes to see the children bunched up on the couch across from them. “Americans,” he mutters. “We’re surrounded by Americans.”