The Language of Baklava (47 page)

We get past the narrow waiting area and the one fast-food stand, past the security checkpoints, the ticket counter, the customs office, the pat-down station, the passport checker, and the exit-tax taker. Eventually, the airport telescopes backward behind us as we ride the escalator upstairs into a gleaming horizon.

We are delivered to counters glowing with Swiss watches, spicy French perfumes, and mahogany-sleek Italian shoes—things that are not available in the shops of Amman. A big sign proclaims: DUTY-FREE SHOPS. It’s like entering a neutral little kingdom set somewhere in the Alps. Men and women in chic, fitted Western clothing glide by carrying bottles of Chivas Regal and crystal vases. It is hermetically sealed, staffed by an international conference of lithe young people who carry on conversations in twenty languages.

There are even glass counters where you can buy Jordanian “crafts”—pastries, embroidered shawls, and tea cozies like the kind available in the shopping mall in the Abu-Jaber family fortress. But it seems we’ve already left Jordan. It’s impossible to imagine the wild sun glittering just beyond the walls of this airport.

My father sets off as if into an enchanted forest, hypnotized by the glass counters, buying all the perfumes, bracelets, and scarves he’d forgotten to buy for everyone back in America. Fattoush hangs back, morose and squinting in the bleached lights, his elaborate career and revenge plans shattered.

During the previous night’s drinking party, while the reality of departure was still just a wisp in the air around him, Fattoush haunted Mai, hovering at her elbow as if awaiting instructions. When she yawned, picked up her coat, and told Fattoush that she’d be seeing him around, he grabbed her fingers with both hands and stopped just short of kneeling before her. He squatted to his heels, and leaning in the direction of the dance floor, he cried, “Please oh pleaseohpleaseohplease . . . don’t leave me.”

She closed her eyes and asked if he would please let go of her fingers.

But Fattoush clung to her, pleading in an unintelligible ramble. His eyes were as muddled and wet as a child’s. Finally, Dobby came over, put a kindly hand on his shoulder, and led him away. At the bar, Fattoush hung his head over a syrup-yellow drink.

“She’ll never go for you, man,” Dobby said, pitying and annoyed. “It’s nothing personal. But you’ve got to understand—she’s a Muslim and you’re a Christian. She lives with her
parents.
That’s what the girls do here. Nobody
dates
here, it just isn’t done. She’ll probably just marry the guy they choose for her.” He turns to me and mutters, “Or not.”

“That’s insane,” Fattoush said vehemently, eyes blinking hard, lashes spiky with tears. “Why should she do that? It’s her life! Besides, I’m not Christian!”

Dobby drew up, vaguely exasperated. “All right, then what are you?”

Fattoush thought about this for a moment. “Well, if I have to
be
anything . . . then I guess I’m a pagan.”

Dobby laughed while Fattoush stared at him. Then Dobby stopped and said, “Yeah, okay, but you’re a Christian.”

There is a little more than an hour remaining before their flight when Bud decides that it is time for them to “nibble on a little something.” The land of duty-free has everything but actual restaurants. Across the corridor from the icy countertops is a pallid, cafeteria-style place where we can slide trays along chrome railings and select from a landslide of cookies sealed in plastic or a trough full of reconstituted eggs. But Bud has a dreamlike memory of eating at an actual restaurant here. We ask one or two of the blond duty-free cashiers, but they don’t seem to know anything about such a place.

Then Bud spots a Jordanian man in a crisp new skycap uniform sitting in the cafeteria, gazing forlornly into a cup of American-style coffee. The old man’s face, a webbing of wrinkles and eyes so deep-set that you can barely make out the pupils, seems to catch and tighten as Bud speaks to him. “Oh yes,” he says in Arabic. “The restaurant? It’s still there.” Then he gives a set of directions, arcane and elaborate as if to Sinbad’s cave.

“You pass the restroom with the tarnished door handle—if you get to the one with the shiny handle, turn back! Turn right at the corridor with the strange carpeting, then you have to ride up the narrow escalator . . .”

We begin walking and quickly forget his directions once we’re outside of duty-free. We find ourselves in a maze of hallways and escalators like details in an Escher painting, depositing us on floors like ledges, with no rooms to enter. Bud insists that he remembers the way, but it seems clear that he does not. Miraculously, we find the narrow escalator at the end of the longest corridor. At the top, we walk down another corridor, this one like the crack in the rock to the entrance of Petra. Finally, a cavernous room opens before us; metal rotating fans stand posted in the corners like potted palms. The place is all but empty. A man with a thin, disappointed mustache and a man in a stained apron sit tilted on stools, elbows on the bar that runs along one wall, their faces propped up toward the TV showing Bedouin soap operas. The only light comes from a bank of windows lining the back wall; these open out on an arid beige emptiness, blowing sand, desiccated fields, a ribbon of highway.

The place has the dim, after-hours feel of a closed restaurant. But as soon as we appear, vacillating in the doorway and poised to flee, the men spot us and descend from their stools, arms outstretched, crying, “
Ahlan!
Ahlan!
” as if we are long overdue but eagerly expected relations.

With great ceremony we are shown to a square linoleum table in the center of the ringing room. Breezes from the fans sweep over our table like trade winds. The man in the apron disappears through a small trapdoor, and the waiter hands us menus that feature an international potpourri: teriyaki, French onion soup, and tortellini. One section, labeled “Everything to make you happy!” could have been lifted from the window of an American diner: steak and eggs, meat loaf, green salads, tomato soup, fried chicken, and spaghetti.

The mustached man stations himself at our table, shoulders back, his body stiffened with a vaguely military bearing. “Yes, yes, yes, my friends,” he says in English. “What am I about to do for you?” But as he lifts his pad, his expression sharpens and turns skeptical, as if already expecting to be disappointed by our order.

His glare chases away my hunger. I request just a bowl of Greek egg-and-lemon soup and in so doing seem to confirm something he’d already suspected. Fattoush, who’s been growing more morose all morning, now looks downright funereal. He orders only a cup of coffee. Bud, however, busily points all over the menu, ordering a full-blown American-style breakfast. As he lists scrambled eggs and steak, sliced onions and sautéed mushrooms, fried potatoes and chicken, buttered toast and fresh orange juice, the waiter undergoes a metamorphosis. His brows tick closer together, his eyes rake my father, his mouth goes taut, his little mustache bristles. Finally, he can contain himself no longer and bursts out: “Ghassan Abu-Jaber!”

Bud lowers the menu and cranes his head toward the waiter. The waiter leans in close to my father. I can see Bud’s eyes focusing, reading the man’s face as if it is a tablet of ancient runes; his eyebrows lower, his lips move silently, everything in him is drawn into concentration, and finally he breathes a name: “Mo Kadeem.”

The man he used to wash the rice and lentils with in the king’s air force.

“It’s me!” says Mo Kadeem. His face is splendid with a long, crooked smile. He spreads his arms wide and Bud lurches to his feet, knocking over his chair, and the two men swing this way and that in a staggering embrace.

“Mo Kadeem!”

They rub tears from their faces, but more pop into their eyes. Bud keeps grabbing the man’s shoulders, checking his solidity. They drag their chairs together and sit pressed closed like boys, holding each other’s arms. The room rings like a vault, and I can hear little blips of echoes behind all the questions they ask each other in English and Arabic. “Where have you been all this time? Where did you go? Did you see the world? Did you get married? How many babies?”

Mo laughs but also shakes his head with a heavy downward dip. “What a crazy time. Now I live with my mother. But after the air force, I went to Australia. I tried to ask girls to go out, but they wouldn’t talk to me. I went to Venezuela, Bangkok, Canada. You would not believe where I’ve been!” More of the heavy head shake. “And after two years of traveling, I realized I didn’t like it,” he says. “Here I was, twenty-three years old, I thought I was free as can be—I thought I didn’t need anything. But every single morning when I woke up in Sweden or Mexico, the first thing I thought of was my mother’s teapot on the kitchen table. Every night I fell asleep smelling the sweetness of the lemon tree outside my window. I was like one of the pine trees planted in the Jordan Valley. As soon as you take it away from its home, it dries right up.” He pauses, curling his fingers under his chin and scratching his throat in a careful, thoughtful way as he studies my father. A crease forms in the space between his eyebrows. “When you came in here . . . I thought you were an American.”

Bud’s chest rises and his face gleams. “Well,” he says mildly, a bit modestly, “I am.”

A whole new galaxy of suns, moons, stars, and songbirds pops out of the air and starts to orbit my head. My ears seem to be picking up frequencies from Mars. I look at Bud from three different angles. Finally, I take one of the lacy-edged paper doilies and write: “Today my father said he was an American.” I date it and fold it into my purse.

Mo Kadeem is also staring at him. “In all that time, all those lentils, you never said you wanted to go to America, you never said anything about traveling anywhere.”

We watch him studying Bud’s face. We can see the way he takes it in, the fact that Bud went away to a new place and never actually came back. That Bud has had, in some way, the life that Mo had been meant to have. Bud is the first to look away, his face modest, and even a little embarrassed—as if he has been caught with something that did not belong to him.

“I know,” Bud admits. “I never meant to go. It just turned out that way. Although I did marry a nice, tall wife,” he says, smiling shyly at the tabletop. “I’m going to see her soon!” he announces, as if this has just occurred to him.

“You were always the lucky one,” Mo says peevishly. “I always thought you knew exactly who you were. I was jealous of that, in fact. I think maybe that’s even why I came back to Jordan.”

“No, I didn’t know anything,” Bud protests.

Mo straightens then. He takes another long, fierce matador’s look at Bud while we all hold our breath. Is he cursing us? Wishing he’d never returned to Jordan? Finally he bows and glides away without a word.

“I think he’s upset,” Bud murmers. We debate in whispers whether or not he’s going to come back.

After several minutes of discussing Mo and then several more minutes of discussing ways to sneak out, we see the trapdoor in the back of the restaurant open and Mo emerges carrying a full tray: Nothing on it is what we ordered. There are thick slices of
halloumi
cheese wedged between freshly grilled sausages, hummus enriched with nuggets of fried lamb, dates stuffed with almonds,
sfeeha
pastries plump with ground chicken and onion, broiled kabobs, roasted fish in tahini sauce, tomatoes stuffed with beef and rice, and, of course, gallons of sweet mint tea. As he carries it to us across the empty restaurant, a space as big as a dance floor, he shouts: “How do you expect to fly to other worlds without a real breakfast?”

My father runs over and grabs dishes off the tray, insisting: Mo has to eat with us! We pull up a chair, then another, because the chef in his white apron has appeared, peeking demurely from the kitchen door, then moving to the table.

Bud compliments him on his wonderful food, and the chef blushes, lowering his head. He tells us in Arabic, “This is the usual breakfast for the staff.” Suddenly Mo swings his ferocious glare on Fattoush, who draws back in his chair. “What kind coffee you want? Americano or
gahweh
?”

Fattoush stammers before collecting himself: “May I please have some
gahweh,
sir?”

Mo smiles but doesn’t stand up, as if Fattoush just passed a test. He looks us over. “So these are your big American children?”

Bud looks vaguely in our direction, busy piling his plate with
sfeehas.
“That’s right.”

Fattoush beams, a sweet red flush rising from his neck. He ducks his head toward his plate, which is almost empty.

Mo rolls forward and claps Bud on the shoulder. “Do you remember, my friend? Up to our armpits in lentils?”

“And what about
frekeh
?”

“And crying, crying, with all those onions.”

“Peeling, washing, chopping, soaking . . .” Bud’s voice rises and falls, as if he is singing a small, brokenhearted song.

“These English,” Mo says in a lowered voice, gesturing to the empty room. “They don’t eat food, they don’t know what food is. They think food is French fries.” He says this with a thin-lipped bitterness as he imitates someone daintily consuming a pile of fries. “They come in here, and what do they want? Fish and chips, tea and scones, lamb and mint jelly! What is mint jelly? They take over the whole menu with these terrible things, just like they take over the
whole world.
”

We are all relieved there aren’t any English eating French fries in the room: They are all still safely down below in the land of duty-free. The restaurant remains uncolonized for the moment, an oasis of intimacy. Beyond the dusty windows is voluptuous sunlight, beige, arid earth, and the smell of wild honey. But inside we huddle, happily, familiarly—five of us eating together at the center of a lost room as wide as the desert, a ceiling as high as the sun.