The Language of Baklava (41 page)

“Well, he might enjoy it, but definitely he won’t have sons,” Uncle Danny says as calmly and firmly as if he’s just read up on the topic.

Rich-Uncle Jimmy cracks a slanting smile and says in Arabic, “Maybe we should ask Ghassan about that,” and sneaks a glance at my father.

“Never mind, never mind!” declaims my father, who’s also getting a pink
araq-
bloom across his cheeks. “Fattoush is allll right! He’s perfect. In fact, Fattoush is like a son to me!” He slings an arm around Phinny’s shoulders and neck and drags him in close.

Phinny nestles his glass into the center of his chest and settles inside Bud’s elbow. “Sh’like a fadder t’me,” he says, tipping another sip of
araq
into his mouth.

Fattoush
means “bread salad” in Arabic, and everyone can pronounce Fattoush, so that is Phinny’s name for the rest of his stay. The aunts and uncles begin calling Bud “
Abu-
Fattoush” because
abu
means “father of.” And Bud has always wanted a son. Thirty years ago, we fought over whether my mother was carrying a baby girl or boy. I was four, barely to his waist, shouting up at him, “Girl! Girl! Girl!” He leaned forward and ranted back, “Boy! Boy! Boy!” But that was then, and I’ve had half a glass of
araq
myself and feel muzzy, mellow, and generous about everything. It’s just fine that Bud finds a replacement for me the moment he gets to town. It’s only right, I reason, that Bud should claim an American son for himself, and even better, this may take some pressure off me.

Bud and I are still pals, sure, but he continues to imagine that his discontent comes from the world around him—as do I. Perhaps I inherited this trait from Bud. My mother, the eternal American, knows that we are inescapably responsible for our lives and are the masters of our own futures. She has no chronic need to keep moving, trying on houses, countries, jobs, looking for the perfect fit, at which point everything can finally start. No, with Mom, what you see is what you get, plain and simple. But with Bud the answer is “out there.” There is eternally something he wants me to do, or not to have done at all, and that something flits ephemerally from topic to topic, from my selection in husbands to my choice of careers. Something should have been done differently—if only I would listen! “Listen to what, Dad?” I might ask. Even he doesn’t know, though deep in his consciousness he senses that he used to know what to do and that he told me, but that as usual I wasn’t listening—in fact, I
never listen—
and now we’ve both missed it. Our one chance at getting things right, always floating just out of reach, like trying to look at a dust particle on the surface of the eye. Never mind, he will say, rolling out the broad, satisfying vowels in “never”—never you mind.

FATTOUSH: BREAD SALAD
Which everyone loves and everyone can pronounce.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Sprinkle the cucumber with salt, drain for 30 minutes, and pat dry.

On a cookie sheet, bake the pita pieces, shaking occasionally, 18 to 20 minutes, until crisp.

In a large bowl, whisk the oil, lemon juice, and garlic with salt and pepper to taste. Stir in the bell pepper, tomato, scallions, parsley, mint, cucumber, and pita. Toss with the romaine leaves to combine, and serve.

The moon comes up, emanating a halo of light, and all the grandchildren fall asleep draped over their mothers’ laps. Fattoush lies bonelessly arrayed in a teak chaise longue in the corner, sleeping off his glasses of
araq
. I idly eavesdrop on the brothers’ gossip. It’s easier for them to talk if I don’t understand Arabic, so I try not to register any reactions. I don’t have to pretend much—there is a flux of insider jokes and family history in the room that I will never understand anyway.

“So after his manufacturing business bought out all the competitors, Sami, that damn poet, is suddenly practically everything but a saint by now. . . .”

“For the amount of money he gives the church, he should be a saint and a half.”

“He’s trying to rent his soul back from the devil.”

“Yes, but he wants it at half price.”

“With a free pair of shoes thrown in.”

“He needs them for all his running around at those funny-boy poet bars.”

Someone raises his eyebrows. They twitch their eyes in my direction. “Is she listening?”

“She’s listening, but she doesn’t know what to do with it.”

I listen, but the brothers don’t reveal anything. They lean together as if they are the last true brothers in the known world and are plotting something big. Look, there is Uncle Hal with his soft, round nose, hazel eyes drifting at half-mast, dreaming of the splendid, brutal Ottoman Empire. There is Uncle Jack, with his secret diplomatic smile. There is crazy Uncle Frankie, eyes bloated, jowls drooping, claylike and dull; but when he looks up, his features flicker with light, quick and timid as a sparrow’s.

I can see them individually, but together they make an ineffable algebra, a matrix that I can hardly imagine to be
family.

Here is family: My father has a round, waxy scar like a knothole in one arm from a childhood knife fight with Uncle Frankie. When Bud was away in the Jordanian air force, Uncle Jack sold Bud’s dog. Why? “Just because he could!” says Bud. Uncle Jimmy stole the knife Bud inherited from his father. Bud’s cousin Sulieman set fire to the school-house while Bud and most of his brothers were inside attending class. “But he was only nine,” Bud says, chortling. “So how could you blame him?” There are a million resentments in this room over land, money, and power, epic family grudges that go back decades. There are brothers here whom Bud has cursed, threatened, or thrown punches at, brothers who’ve literally robbed him, brothers he’s refused to see or speak to for years at a time.

And they can’t stop kissing one another, big kisses on the cheeks, head, neck, squeezing one another’s hands. They weep over one another, crying brilliant, poetic tears. In just a couple of weeks, Bud will be furiously cutting his visit short, which happens on every single trip he makes back to Jordan. He will be shaking his hands at the wall and shouting at the ceiling and stomping as though to squash flat the very idea of “family” forever. Even though he never remembers about this part of his visits home, it is essential to his ritual of return.

Tonight he laughs, backhands the tears from his cheeks, and says over and over, voice wobbling, “My brothers, my brothers.”

“Hooray for
Abu-
Fattoush and his son, Fattoush!” Uncle Jack cries out after upending his glass of
araq.

Then he gets everyone to lift their glasses and cry, “Hip, hip, hooray!”

Fattoush snores temperately in his corner.

Fattoush and Bud share my guest room with its matching twin beds. I wake that night to a limpid blue starlight and the sound of Fattoush weeping. Beginning the next morning, he starts writing a series of long, accusatory letters to his faithless girl, Stacy, back in the States. These missives are full of demands and confessions, which he reads to us before sealing them into envelopes. Each night, after they turn out their light, I can still hear his voice fluttering through the bedroom wall, pouring his heart out to my father. I walk past and catch a glimpse of Bud lolling back on the bed, listening with a bemused, fascinated air:
Is this what sons are like? Much more entertaining than
daughters!
Bud takes me aside after one of their sessions. “This Fattoush, he is extreme,” he says approvingly. “He feels everything there is to feel. He reminds me of myself.”

Each night, Fattoush wakes after a few hours of sleep, wanders into the living room, and sprawls on the hard couch that smells like the inside of an old elevator. He watches whatever he can get on Jordanian TV at three-thirty a.m., and we find him asleep there in the morning, static rolling across the TV screen. Then my father makes him a plate of what he calls special wake-up eggs, over easy fried in butter with chili paste, which Fattoush eats propped up on the couch, slightly flushed and damp skinned.

After that, they dress and one or another of my uncles arrives and whisks them off for another roundelay of lunch and visits. Even though I’ve assured him this isn’t necessary, Fattoush appears to have no objection to spending his days in the company of my sixty- and seventy-year-old uncles. I’m exhausted by the parties myself and will usually opt out in order to stay home and stare at the yellowing notes of my unwritten novel.

That’s on the sunny days. But it’s December, the wintry season, when rain and sleet will suddenly plummet from the sky. On such days, the uncles like to be received at my apartment, which they’ve started referring to as “Ghassan’s house.” They wedge themselves into the punitive, hard-seated, chrome-legged chairs that came with the place—twenty-two chairs that my landlord had arranged in a big, tight circle around the perimeter of the living room, the chrome gleaming like a grin—and the one dust-spewing, sprung-shot couch against the wall.

The brothers crowd me out of the living room with their thunder-wheezing laughter, their curling gray worms of cigarette ash, and their wild-horse eyes. I have a few friends who know to come over on these rainy days of uncles. We set up the bootleg version of Monopoly on the dining room table. Fattoush wafts away from the uncles, attracted by the cinnamon skin and topaz eyes of my friend Mai. Mai’s friend Dabir also comes along. Dabir is twenty-four, droll, bored, irritated, and probably gay and likes to be called Dobby. He cradles his chin in his palm and watches, intrigued by Fattoush’s helpless enchantment with Mai. Fattoush pulls out a chair for Mai, scrupulous as a flight attendant, and asks if he can bring her anything. Dobby says, “I’d love a ginger ale.” But Mai just smiles archly and shakes her head, so Fattoush floats down into the seat beside her.

In my apartment, with its windows open to the city soot and desert air, if I don’t dust every morning, the furniture will be shrouded in a gray film by noon. The game board slides around in the tabletop dust that has gathered there since the last dusting a few hours ago. I purchased the Monopoly game at the souk in Aqaba. While the board looks the same, the place names are all Jordanian, switching Amman for Atlantic City, Shmeisani Circle for Reading Railroad, the Cave of Sleepers for Broadway. Dobby translates the community chest cards, which are filled with legalese that seems to have been written by someone playing another game. The cards demand things like “Restitution in three parts of 200 dinars to the offending party for trespass on Abdoun Way,” or “10 dunams of land payable to the Master of the Port of Aqaba.”

Mai, who works in a royalty-funded environmental conservation office, refuses to translate because she says that Monopoly is yet another bourgeois capitalist West-centric scheme. That doesn’t stop her from playing, however. In fact, she uses the game as a method of flirting with Fattoush. Honeying her voice and lowering her lashes, she says, “Mmm, you think you’ve caught me, you devil. I’m not afraid of you,” as she tosses a few funny-money dinars of baksheesh at him.

The tips of Fattoush’s ears turn scarlet. Thrilled and stupefied by the unexpected flirtation, he refuses to take money from her, legal or not. “How could I expect payment from one so lovely?” he asks. “Here, take some houses,” he says, pushing the little game pieces at her.

Dobby pouts and fumes that they’re not playing fair. “Man, this is totally outrageous,” he says in his mellifluous voice. Dobby attended two years of design school in London, which seems to have instilled in him a heightened sense of irony and impatience toward Jordan and his life here. He shoves himself out of the chair, slides through a crack in the uncles’ circle of chairs, snaps up a tan cigarette from one of the packs on my coffee table, and returns already smoking. He clicks his head back in the uncles’ direction. “What are all those fat boys doing in there?” he grumbles. “My God.”

But Fattoush isn’t answering. His chin is propped on his fist as he drifts in a waking dream of Mai.

I am limited to playing in distracted little bouts, perpetually on call to bring my father and his brothers cookies, coffee, nuts, pressed apricots, nougat, seeds, and oranges. The Jordanian rains thunder against my windows and turn them waxy and veined. When it builds into hailstones, I go to the windows and row in the long, oarlike metal poles attached to massive iron shutters. They close out all daylight and some of the wind, and the stones roar against them like the Last Judgment. After the hail, phone lines won’t work and sometimes the electricity all over town goes out. The drivers are transformed as they ease their way beneath dead traffic lights, roll down their windows to wave one another ahead, or offer lifts to soaked pedestrians.