The Language of Baklava (37 page)

“By the time it got down to me and the other little brothers, we’d be lucky to get a wing or a back,” Bud said.

In my uncles’ houses, they lean over me while I eat and cry out in despair, “Is that all you’re having? Are you shy? Shall I help you?” They lift handfuls of food to my lips, urging me, “
Min
eedi,
” or pile heaps of rice and chunks of meat onto my plate. For every bite I take, they add three spoonfuls. I learn to eat very slowly.

I come back to my rented apartment after each of these events angry with myself for losing another day and vowing to get more work done tomorrow. I stare hard at the telephone when it rings. I’m supposed to be working on my novel, but within a few weeks of arrival, I realize that I’m not even trying. I avoid the stack of loose, smudgy pages. The phone jangles with invitations. If I don’t answer, people stand on the lawn in front of my apartment building and shout up to my third-floor window or come upstairs and rattle my doorknob, calling to me to let them in. After the meals, the uncles call again and demand, “What do you think? Do I make the best eggplant? Was it better than Uncle Jack’s eggplant? Who is the best cook in this family?”

And I say, “You, Uncle, you’re the best cook in the family!”

Most of the uncles are good cooks. But there is one bad cook: Bachelor-Uncle Omar, who is actually my father’s cousin. They call him “Bachelor Omar” because he was turned down for marriage approximately twelve times, each time after he’d cooked for his bride-to-be. His technique isn’t bad, but his ingredients are terrible. While he has many charms and talents, my bachelor-uncle is cheap— brilliantly, relentlessly, stunningly cheap. His refrigerator, like my grandmother’s refrigerator in New Jersey, is packed full of oozing, aging food. He will buy the gristliest, yellowest, most unchewable lamb, then cook and serve generous quantities of it. He’s quite well-off, he has advanced degrees in mathematics and architecture, he’s entertaining and warm, but he will serve you festering meat.

I invite Uncle Omar out for dinners. He refuses loudly, adamantly, trumpeting that restaurants are for sissies, dandies, and fancy idiots. He says, “Why should we go out to these ridiculous places when there is food a hundred times better at home!”

About a month after arriving in Jordan, I receive my first visitor from America—my single, pretty friend Tess. Bachelor-Uncle calls right away. “I want you both to come to dinner tonight. What does your friend look like?”

“But—” I cannot come up with a convincing dodge under pressure. I stammer and sweat and avoid looking at my reflection in the edge of the china cabinet mirror. “She—she—just got here!”

Tess looks up from the jumble of clothes spilling out of the suitcase onto her bed, tosses her heavy yellow hair over one shoulder, and waves at the phone.

“Then she is hungry!”

I reluctantly convey the invitation to Tess, and she is delighted. I warn her that the evening might be a little nonconformist, but this pleases her. She is twenty-four years old, on her first overseas vacation, and she says she wants to have experiences. “I’m ready to see the real Jordan,” she says earnestly.

Bachelor-Uncle begins courting Tess immediately. He whisks her sweater from her shoulders as soon as we walk in, tosses it on a distant piece of furniture, and begins lecturing on art, philosophy, and his theories of class and economics. Tess nods, stunned into silence. His home is spacious yet formal, full of serious drawing rooms and tall, straight-backed chairs. But he takes us right into the kitchen, which is literally steaming with oven heat, and seats us at the kitchen table. The glass cabinet doors are beaded with condensation. “You know why people are poor?” he says, rummaging through his refrigerator. “Because they give away their possessions.”

“Well, now,” Tess ventures. “I mean, I can’t imagine that
poor
people—
”

“It’s true!” my uncle insists. “They do! They throw away perfectly good furniture and dishes! They get rid of all their clothes! Look at this—” He plucks at his paisley shirt with the cat-face buttons. “I found
this
at a Goodwill in New Jersey twelve years ago. Still like new!”

Before dinner is served, Bachelor-Uncle announces that there will be a brief musical recital. He leads us into a shadowy room that is Victorian in its arch expansiveness. It is lined with shelves of moldering books, its corners filled with battered musical instruments. He seats us side by side on a starchy, unforgiving chaise and sits directly opposite us on a wooden stool. After picking up a bow, he accompanies himself on cello, swaying back into the sawing bow, singing a dirgelike melody that seems to dip ever deeper with each dark chord: “Do not forsake me, oh, my da-a-a-arling—” These seem to be the only words to the song, which he sings in a grim voice, over and over again. Then he stands and bows. Just as I’m about to stand, he moves to the piano. Tess clasps her hands together, not quite applauding, more as if she’s trying to grab hold of something. “You’re so talented!”

He nods, then puts one hand to his chest, lowers his head, and looks up at her. “Why, yes, I really am.”

After a few more renditions of the same song on a few more grieving instruments, it is time to eat. He has cooked all day, he says. He returns us to the linoleum kitchen table, drags open the oven door, and pulls out a big, sumptuous tray of chicken
msukhan,
which I eye with a cautious optimism. He positions the tray and holds up a big carving knife like a conquering hero, but then he cries out and goes back to the fridge. From the deep of the deeps of the frost-crusted box, he unearths a decrepit chunk of roasted beef that’s been stewing, forgotten in some sort of brine for so long that it looks like a huge dill pickle. He carves it into three hearty chunks and places one on each of our plates. “Now what about
that
?” he asks, nodding as we gaze upon the glistening hunks. “Can’t have you saying I let you walk away from here hungry, now, can I?”

I do a sort of Morse code signal to Tess with lowered eyelids and raised eyebrows. As soon as Bachelor-Uncle goes off to the pantry, wondering where he put that case of orange soda he found by the side of the road, I pluck the pickled beef from all our plates and scrape it into the garbage, camouflaging it under some sodden lettuce leaves. When my uncle returns, he stops in his tracks, dumbfounded to see that the roast has vanished.

I say, “We liked the roast so much, we ate yours as well.”

He smiles broadly, beatifically. He leans toward Tess, dips his head to one side, and says tenderly, “And do you know that last week one of my neighbors was hounding me to throw it away? He thought it was too old!”

The next morning, Bachelor-Uncle will call and ask to speak to his “future wife.” My fingers ice up, my chest stiffens; I will hear the tiny expectant lilt of his breath as he waits. I will hand the phone to Tess as she smiles a bright, surprised smile, and when she puts the receiver to her ear, I will watch her eyes blink wide and her porcelain skin turn mulberry red. “I—I’m so honored,” she will say. “But I—I—I—we just met!” She will stare at me like someone drowning, and when I take the phone from her, he will be gone.

But tonight, all is calm. After the meal, we sit out on the veranda and meditate on the white cup of the crescent moon. The desert landscape around us is clean as a tabletop. The call to prayers sifts through the powdery air, making us quiet and softhearted. My uncle recites romantic poetry from the Bedouin poets, then nods as if he’s told us a secret. He leans forward, elbows on knees, gazing at us dreamily, and says, “Okay, now tell me, honestly, which of us uncles is the best cook?”

CHICKEN MSUKHAN FOR RICHER OR POORER

*Sumac is a popular spice in Middle Eastern cuisine; it has a pleasantly sour flavor and may be sprinkled over grilled meats and salads.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

In a large baking dish, arrange the chicken pieces and drizzle
¹
⁄2 cup of the olive oil over all. Bake for 30 minutes.

In a medium frying pan, sauté the pine nuts in 2 tablespoons of the olive oil over medium heat until lightly brown. Scoop out the nuts with a slotted spoon and set aside. Mix the chopped onion with the salt and sumac, place in the pan used for the nuts, and sauté in the remaining 1 tablespoon of olive oil until the onions are translucent.

Split open the pita bread and line a baking dish with the insides up. Cover the bread with half of the onion mixture. Place the baked chicken pieces over this. Cover with the rest of the onion mixture and heat under the broiler for 5 to 10 minutes. Sprinkle the pine nuts over the top.

Serve with yogurt, rice, and salad.

MAKES 6 SERVINGS.

I’ve been living and not-working in Jordan for five months. I have all but given up on my writing. When I’d begun the novel in the States, I’d set large swaths of the story in the Middle East. Back then it was an imaginary, literary sort of setting, full of abstract gestures, airless and scentless. Now I am swamped by smells and sounds. The dust of Amman shines in my morning windows in twenty different colors and tastes of clay and salt, and I wake to the sound of car horns, crying door-to-door knife sharpeners, flat bells, the disgruntled blat of goats wandering across the backyard. The call to prayers floods the same windows at night and patterns arabesques in my sleep. Jordan towers over me, dashing metaphors and plot out of my head. The neglected novel is barely a little spot of guilt in the back of my mind.

One morning, I get a call from my uncle Nazeem. I don’t know him very well, in part because he wasn’t among the younger generation of brothers, including my father, who had gone off to America to seek their fortunes. He stayed behind on the land, accumulating his fortune very efficiently, and he almost never traveled anywhere. So his English is fairly haphazard. He knows a lot of English words, just not necessarily in any particular order, his sentences veering into and out of meaning like a drunk driver trying to find the road. I’m on alert when I hear his voice on the phone early one morning, saying, “Diana? Is you?”

“Yes—uh, Uncle Nazeem?”

“Is time.”

“It’s—?”

“You come to lunch, inside of my house, it is today, it is the time.” Click.

It happens that my friend Audrey is visiting at the time—the fifth American friend in as many months. In preparation for lunch, Audrey and I change out of jeans. Jordanian high society is a dress-up culture. The women wear full complements of makeup, designer dresses, and feathery gabardine slacks from Italy. The men wear creamy silk ties and fine, tropical-weight wool suits. Since Nazeem is one of the richest and toniest of the uncles, his parties are showy and extravagant. Audrey and I do our best, working from our easygoing American wardrobes.

Even so, when we arrive, we’re still taken aback by the women who look as though they’re dressed for the Academy Awards with their sequined lapels and slinky skirts and gleaming high heels. The men wear primrose boutonnieres.

Audrey, a university administrator who is very aware of correct appearances, is upset. She swipes at the skirt of her plain cotton sundress. “I didn’t know this was a special occasion!” she says. “Why didn’t you warn me?”

But the occasion is lunch.

Covering the banquet table is a vast mezza course, as intricate and complex as a tiled mosaic. My cousin Habeeb, an aspiring filmmaker, videotapes the food while murmuring an intense narrative description: “Here we have the charming baby aubergines dipped in seven spices and fried with egg and sweetbreads—a soft yet unsentimental dish. Oh, look over there! Honey-and-pine-nut tarts, straight from the hand of the creator. . . .” There are glittering bits of meats, dips, and vegetables prepared with audacious, artistic streaks of olive oil as fresh and more intensely flavored than any classical sauce. There are tiny, jewel-like eggplants, tomatoes darker than rubies, and onions sweeter than milk. Audrey sighs and eats and sighs.

She sits straight up in her chair when I warn her that these are only the appetizers. “There’s more?” she says. She looks at me sideways, trying to see if I’m joking.

I’d forgotten to warn her about “hospitality.” Hospitality to the Jordanians is more than a virtue; it’s a sacrament and exaltation. It’s risky to compliment anyone here on anything—their shirt, for example—as they’re apt to push it on you in the middle of a dinner party. One of my American friends has an entire man’s suit, three inches too short and two inches too wide—hanging in his bedroom closet owing to a carelessly offered compliment to one of my Jordanian relatives. I instruct Audrey to eat slowly, as I have learned to, to lean away from the plate, to chew each morsel as though your life depends on it, letting entire minutes go by in animated conversation before turning your attention to the next bite. If you don’t empty your plate, it can’t be refilled so quickly. Audrey tries to follow my lead. But despite her propriety and caution, she also has satiny chestnut hair, sleepy eyes, and pillowy lips. There is something accidentally seductive about her slow chewing. The uncles are all entranced watching her eat. Poor Audrey is repeatedly given more lamb chops, the uncles stretching over the table with big silver spoons to tip fresh dollops of stuffed squash onto her plate. They ignore her pleas to stop. “Well! With us she is flirt,” Uncle Nazeem says with great satisfaction, fanning himself with his napkin.