The Language of Baklava (45 page)

“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. While 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.

The next day, I get a phone call.

“What’s this I hear?”

“Uh . . .” My voice wobbles.

“I couldn’t believe my ears.”

“Aunt Aya?”

“I hear your father is buying Frankie’s house for three hundred thousand.”

Three
hundred thousand? “Auntie Aya! I thought you were in the desert.”

“I was. Does he know it’s infested with centipedes?”

Centipedes!
“Are you coming to town?”

“And the stench and the garbage at that place—I wouldn’t put a monkey in there.” Her voice snaps shut like a change purse.

Now I’m nodding, tugging on the phone cord. “And he hasn’t even told my mother!”

“What? Oh, this is ridiculous! Why doesn’t he have sense by now? Some of the brothers you can trust a little, and some you can even trust a little more. But Frankie . . . ?” Her voice teeters ominously toward some unnamed precipice.

“I know!”

She sighs so intensely into the receiver that it’s as if the phone catches fire. On my end, I sigh as well. And I think for a moment that we must be feeling the same thing, wondering what could possibly drive these brothers like this, instigating one another, striking up against one another, rock and flint. Finally, she says, “Okay. Never mind. I will fix it. Don’t let your father go out with any of his brothers. Today I am coming to get him.”

Auntie Aya arrives wearing an elaborate, silver-embroidered ankle-length blue dress, jingling gold bangles, and silver shoes with heels as long and supple as Bedouin daggers. I can hear Aunt Aya’s jewelry in the hallway before she gets to my door. Bud hears her, too, and it takes him a moment to register what that familiar sound is. His mouth opens and he folds his paper and slowly touches the arms of his chair as if they are talismans. Fattoush looks over lazily from the TV, the screen washed white from the sun. Aunt Aya bats at the door and walks in, calling, “Hello, I am here. I have come out of the desert to see you. Where is my boneless niece? Where is that brother of mine?”

The sun hits her as she enters, and all the little bits of jewelry and tiny embroidered mirrors on her dress flare with light. Even her black hair, I see, contains a bolt of white that wasn’t there fifteen years ago, glistening from her part all the way down past her shoulders.

Bud springs out of his chair, then freezes like an escapee in a searchlight. “How wonderful. Aya is here,” he says. He lumbers to her, wraps his arms around her, and for a moment it looks like surrender. But then he straightens and peeps behind her hopefully, saying, “Hal is coming for me any minute now. . . . Yes, I think he’ll be here in a second. Then we can all have breakfast together.”