The Language of Baklava (48 page)

MO KADEEM’S ROASTED FISH IN TAHINI SAUCE
For impressing that certain someone.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Place the fish in a baking dish and dot the fish all over with the butter. Sprinkle with the lemon juice, garlic, salt, pepper, and parsley. Bake for 15 minutes, or until barely done.

Sauté the sliced onion in 1 tablespoon of olive oil until translucent and set aside.

In a saucepan, stir together the sauce ingredients and simmer over low heat, about 10 minutes. Adjust the seasonings and add a little water for a creamy consistency.

Remove the baking dish from the oven. Spread the onion slices over the fish, then pour the tahini sauce over this. Bake at 350 degrees for another 20 to 30 minutes. Top with the pine nuts and serve with garnishes of lemon wedges.

MAKES 4 TO 6 SERVINGS.

TWENTY-THREE

HTML

When I finally return to the States a few months later, I’m certain that I am ready to be home again. I’ve missed America for a year, craved its glowing supermarkets and orderly drivers, its plush movie theaters and its bookstores and rivers and curbs and everything in its sense of imminence—the feeling of expectation, the urgency of rain-slicked city nights as traffic picks up and someone is going somewhere all the time.

But when I return, I discover that I am once again a child, lying mute in a blank motel room and straining for the old smells and sounds of my lost Jordanian neighborhood. After a year of lethally silent soap operas and stately Jordanian newscasts, American sitcom laugh tracks sound jarring and surreal to me. I am disturbed by the billboards radiant with images of people eating and drinking like Vikings, advertising “All You Can Eat.” By cars the size of small houses. And in the evening when the traffic packs into a rush-hour snarl, no friends gather on my front lawn, wanting to come up and drink tea or drag me out in the night to see what we can see. I miss them terribly.

I get lost. I am set loose in a wilderness. Jordan has torn me open, and inside this opening are pictures of light and dust-scrubbed air and flowering jasmine. I have trouble sleeping or focusing; people frown as if there is something slightly off-kilter on my face. A friend who has moved frequently between Yemen and America meets me at a Turkish café and, over the demitasses of dense black coffee, tells me that I am suffering from culture shock, that it is a sort of soul-sickness, that it will subside. But I can’t imagine that I will ever be whole again.

And I feel so impossibly alone—as if I am the first and only person ever to be unmoored between countries. So I perversely do things to make myself feel even more isolated. I resign from my university position in Eugene. I move to Portland, into a minuscule apartment; I take it for its wall of sliding glass looking toward the Willamette River and for its little kitchen, tight and shiny as a ship’s galley. I cook all the dishes that I ate in Jordan, the simple Bedouin flavors—meat, oil, and fire; like Bud, I am trying to live in the taste of things.

I’d published Arabian Jazz not long before I’d left for Jordan, and while I was overseas, people read my novel and began to have opinions about it. When I return to America, there is mail waiting for me (not everyone has e-mail yet). College students send me their papers analyzing my characters; there are several generous, heartfelt newspaper reviews; a man in Romania sends me a slender gold ring; people from many different cultural backgrounds—Italian, Russian, Chinese, African—tell me that they come from a family just like the one in the book. I learn that there are Greek, Polish, French, and Dutch versions of my characters—living counterparts; their American-born children write in to tell me this. A newspaper announces that Arabian Jazz is the first mainstream novel about the Arab-American experience.

I don’t know if this is actually true, but the claim alone seems to convey a great weight of responsibility, because I also start to hear from readers that I think of as “the Betrayed.” These are the Arab-American immigrants and scholars and young people who complain that I haven’t written their story. One girl protests angrily that her father wasn’t nearly as fun or easygoing as the father in my book. An academic publishes a scathing review of Arabian Jazz with numbered paragraphs, each enumerating the many “errors” of my novel, taking issue with everything from the type of videocassette a character brings from Jordan to the fact that one of the characters—a Greek Orthodox bishop—is described as having crumbs in his beard. An anonymous person slides a letter under my office door that demands I stop writing “depressing things” about the Arabs and instead write about “happy, uplifting Arab things.” One woman writes: “Do your parents know you wrote this book? Naughty, naughty girl!” It seems that a great lament rises up from the Arab-American world and rings in the living room: the sense of being unfairly cast, unrepresented, their unique stories and voices (aside from only the most extreme, violent, and sensational) unheard and ignored. In retrospect, I think that this lament was already in the air, but by publishing a novel, I just happened to provide a name and an address to mail it to. I am their disappointing American child—the one who didn’t speak Arabic, who didn’t sound or dress or behave in any way as an Arab is supposed to. And I understand why so many readers felt so betrayed, alone in America, where the only media images of Arabs are bomb throwers and other lunatics. But at the time, I too feel shipwrecked— cut off from family, home, and even the idea of a cultural community—the one people I’d hoped would provide me with some sense of connection and acceptance.

That fall, I start teaching at Portland State University. After classes, I read the latest letters from my readers—the accusations and questions, demands and congratulations. Then I try to clear my head of voices. I walk to the International Market—an import store filled with bars of olive oil soaps, barrels of spices, packages of dried noodles. I buy bags of
Zataar,
cumin, and sumac, sometimes to cook with, sometimes just to have their comforting scent circulating in my apartment.

So I am alone, alone, alone. But, as I said before, I am also guilty of perversely doing whatever I can to amplify that state, to feel it all the more keenly, so perhaps there is also something delicious and unspeakable in the pain of that aloneness. Perhaps I enjoy feeling judged, criticized, and deeply misunderstood. Perhaps that feeling is also a bit like home.

Since I have nothing better to do than work, I take an extra job through a private college teaching a creative writing class on the Internet. When the school asks if I know how to write HTML, I say brightly, Oh yes, a little! I have actually never heard of HTML. When the school discovers that I don’t even understand how to fill out the registration form for their software, they kindly decide to assign a tutor to me. On our first meeting in my school office, the tutor tries to explain a few basic principles of computer language—as I stare at him with an increasingly desperate expression. He finally gives up.

My tutor’s name is Scott; he is young and dark eyed, and I can’t help but notice that this tutor of mine has a way of looking at me, at times, with great patience, fondness, and delight and other times with attentiveness, steadiness, and certainty. I’m noticing too much, I tell myself, a bad habit of mine. This is just his natural expression. Still, it is disorienting to have someone sitting next to you looking at you in this way, so I can’t look back at him too much when we work on the computer together, the cursor blinking between the two of us like a private symbol.

While we work, I learn something that I had already suspected—I am not very good at all at computer language. Scott fills out the registration form for me, as I sit there shaking and simpering. Then he simply takes over. I slump back in my office chair and dictate the class lectures to him. As we make our way through the term, however, for some reason, we need to have more and more meetings, not fewer. My tutor adds increasingly elaborate images, sounds, and graphics to the class Web site; it becomes a multimedia event. We start to meet in cafés, and we talk more about our lives than we ever do about HTML. I tell him about Bud and his love of cooking. Scott tells me about the restaurants he’s worked in and the time he’d offered a dessert of flourless chocolate torte to Julia Child in a swanky Boston restaurant. She complained about his description, scolding in her flutey voice, “Why call it flourless when
all
tortes are flourless?”

Then we have a meeting at his apartment, which turns out to be even smaller, and much tidier, than mine. It looks like the inside of a Hemingway story. The walls are covered with nautical charts and boat diagrams. There’s also a mounted pair of antique snowshoes, a stuffed pheasant that his grandfather hunted, and a table beside the computer that is covered with fly-fishing and fly-tying accoutrements. I touch a gracefully arched piece of bamboo mounted on another wall. “Is this—a fishing pole?”

“A fishing rod,” he says, smiling. He produces a tray of cheeses, crackers, and sliced fruits artfully fanned across a white plate. “I thought we could snack while we work.” He places the tray of food in front of the computer, so it will be difficult to read the keyboard, and it finally occurs to me that all these meetings weren’t only about learning to speak computer.

The first time we kiss (and this takes months and months to get to— months and months of private lessons and extra meetings, Scott appearing in the hall outside my office, taking my writing classes, forever finding some esoteric bit of computerese that I need to learn, inviting me over for “extra help”), it almost seems to happen accidentally. One second we are sitting on the couch, talking about whether or not the Internet class should have its own logo, the next we are kissing. I stand up out of our embrace and tell my tutor— who is startled, waiting motionlessly for me to return to the couch— that I am going for a stroll. And I go outside on an endless walk. It is raining, of course, as the air of Portland always seems impregnated with rain. The afternoon rain at first is restrained, powdering over the buildings, then it comes down hard. I walk close to the buildings and there’s a deep quaking inside of me; I’m warm from walking, but tremors run along my arms and legs. Perhaps I’m trying to return to aloneness, my unknownness. How can I give up such surety? It’s the only thing I know anymore; it is the house I’ve lived in for so long.

I walk all over the city for almost two hours. I’m soaked, stunned with fear. Finally, I return to stand outside my tutor’s apartment building, looking up at the rectangle of light where his window is—a patch of light thrown like a white handkerchief down to the lawn. I can’t go in. I can see this very clearly. How can I go back there?

Interestingly enough, however, I don’t want to return to my apartment with its little ship’s galley of a kitchen, either. But I have to go somewhere, I’m getting drenched. So I go to the International Market. I start scooping up little cellophane bags of amber-colored spices, some fresh pita bread, braided cheese, a small glass jug of olive oil, a pomegranate, little plastic containers of hummus, my favorite Arabic bean dip
—ful
mudammas—
and a small bunch of oranges.

With a plastic bag of groceries in either hand, I walk across the park blocks that bisect downtown Portland, under the tall trees that wag their leaves free every autumn so the air fills with leaf storms. I cut between dank, dripping campus buildings, step over quick streams of curb runoff, inhale the tang of diesel rising from the nearby highway, the steam of decayed leaves, mulch, and dirt, and just the faintest whiff of something green piercing the soil.

I hesitate for just a moment this time at the lighted lobby of his building, then swing open the front glass door a bit too forcefully and wince, worried that I’ve cracked it, but no. The elevator rumbles and shakes, and I drip a damp ring on the forest green carpet, and when I get to Scott’s floor, he is already leaning in the door, as if he’s been waiting there since I left. He has a big white towel that he rubs over my hair. He’d seen me standing outside in the rain; he says he was worried that I would never come back again. I go into the bathroom and change into some clothes he’s given me: a soft cotton shirt and a pair of jeans that droop from my hips. My feet are cold, so he puts a pair of clean socks in the oven before I put them on. And when I come out of the bathroom, I see that he’s opened the bags of food, placed each item on its own small plate or bowl. “Was this right?” he asks. “I wasn’t sure if you were saving this for later, but you were gone so long—I thought you must be hungry.” His voice fades a bit; he is looking at my getup, laughing, taking my inventory. He looks at me a moment longer and says, “You have green eyes.”