The Language of Baklava (7 page)

We mix and stir, enduring all sorts of unsolicited opinions from the neighborhood spectators—who all seem frankly dubious about today’s undertaking. Munira sits in graven silence at the table, offering neither advice nor assistance yet still somehow emitting an air of wrathful judgment. Mom ignores her, dragging out the black iron pan that starts to smoke on the stove even before she pours in the batter. We watch the pancakes bubble, watch Mom try to pry them loose before they scorch. She piles them up, one curling cake on top of another.

They are strange, these pancakes, not the downy wonders I remember from the box back home. These are dense and chewy and smack of fried butter, wheat, olive oil, and scorched iron. They can’t really taste right anyway without the sugary syrup that we used to squeeze from tall plastic bottles. But it doesn’t matter too much because we call them pancakes and they look a bit like pancakes. I manage to finish half of one. Scowling, Munira watches me eat, her brow heavy over her intense eyes. I offer her a bite from my fork, but she’s used to eating with her hands, so she holds the fork shovel style, eyes the whole apparatus skeptically, then pulls the bite of pancake off the tines with her teeth. All of which, I can tell, she considers a ridiculous waste of time. But as she chews, her brow lifts as if in question, speculation, exploration. I seem to see the flavors of the pancake and honey traveling through her mouth. She swallows loudly and nods and proclaims to the room in Arabic, “Okay, well, now that’s something a Bedouin could eat. That’s something that will stay in your stomach all day.”

“What does she say?” my mother asks, hands on her hips, her arms flour-caked up to the elbows.

“She loves it!” I crow.

The neighbors gather around, wanting to try what they’re calling “burnt American flat food,” sniffing and tasting and asking, inexplicably, for the recipe. And they also bring good bread with sesame seeds and fresh hard-boiled eggs and tomatoes warm from the garden, fragrant mint and tubs of rich yogurt and salty white cheese and olives and pistachios. It’s an excellent pancake breakfast.

Even the chewing gum tastes different. They sell it in knobby gray nuggets, a handful for one fil—about one penny—at the
dukana,
or corner shop. The gum is dry, tacky, and unsweetened and tastes like tree bark, but it’s still gum. So we all stand on the corner, chewing till our jaws ache. Me and Rafat, Talal, Dalia, Rana, Hisham, Nadia, Hussein, Hind, Azzam, Nazri, and Belal. But sometimes a little pile of real bubble gum turns up in the
dukana—
hard, pink, sugary compressions, valuable as gold. I buy it with the fils Bud gives me, then we take turns chewing the one piece, passing it around until the last modicum of sweetness runs out and then chewing it till it turns tacky and stiff. I show them how to blow a bubble, only I don’t know how to do it inside my mouth. I have to use my fingers to press and hold it pasted flat against the outside of my lips, and then I blow and a bubble comes. Almost instantly, as if by magic, Hisham understands how to blow a bubble starting from inside his mouth—the way some kids are born with a special aptitude for math or languages or knowing how to whistle with their fingers—and then there is no getting the gum away from him.

Hisham is barely ten, but he already looks as if he needs a shave. While the other children dart around like sparrows, hunch over, laugh into their hands, stand on one foot, stagger like madmen, there is a stillness and a wholeness about Hisham. The look in his eye suggests that, for him, being a child takes great concentration, self-possession, and presence of mind. He does not—as some American children are encouraged to do—confuse being a child with being an adult. He just takes it all very seriously, so the other children tend naturally to look at Hisham first whenever there is a decision to be made, a high wall to be climbed, or a very dark corridor to be looked into. When I first started tearing around with this gang, I noticed that Hisham watched me with a particular sweetness, a solicitousness, as if somehow it had been given to him to understand how strange and solitary it is to suddenly awaken one morning on the other side of the world. He has an older brother in the Jordanian army whose creased military photo he keeps in his back pocket. Hisham watches me with his heavy-lidded eyes and suggests that he and I might want to get engaged now because he can virtually guarantee that he will grow up to look like his brother. He brings me to their house for lunch, and his mother serves a luxurious buttermilk soup with translucent strips of onion floating in it. When I finish mine, Hisham gives me the rest of his. He and his mother watch dotingly as I gulp it all down.

I am not used to this style of friendship—one without any of the reserve of the American suburbs we just left. The children here know the moment we move in, and they demand my presence. These children don’t own a thing beyond the clothes they are wearing. There is nothing between us but running and shouting. We’re as affectionate with one another as maiden aunts; we walk together, ten or twelve abreast, our arms around one another’s shoulders.

But then one day Bennett appears in the courtyard with his scooter and I forget all about Hisham and the chewing gum. My first months in Jordan are like that—I attach to and detach from various people, toys, and foods willy-nilly. For an entire week, I listen to the same Arabic record,
Music for Belly Dancers,
over and over until Mom says I am literally driving her out of her mind. It’s as if I’ve lost my coordinates and until I can adjust to this new place, I have to take everything in small, intense fragments.

Bennett is a powerful distraction. He is from England, and he has moved into our building. I suppose he has parents, but I see no sign of them. They’re like a legend; he speaks of them, but they never quite materialize. Nor does he seem to have any aunts, uncles, grandparents, or cousins telling him what to do or any troubling little sisters to watch over! His life is a paradise. Bennett has see-through skin and yellow hair that rises and falls like corn silk. Within three minutes of meeting him, I hold my hand over his head. He flinches, but his hair rises magically to tickle the inside of my palm. He wears impossible woolen shorts from God knows where and gray knee socks, and his pinkened knees knock together with every step he takes. It’s very likely that he is the first person I meet in Jordan with eyes the same ocean color as my mother’s. He also possesses an engine-red scooter with two wheels, a steering bar, and a platform to push from or to stand on once you get going. I already know about bicycles, ice skates, sleds, Big Wheels, and roller skates, but I’ve never seen a scooter before, and once I do, I know that it’s just perfect.

Bennett refers to his invisible parents as “Mother and Father,” which sounds as foreign to me as if he were calling them Mr. and Mrs. Bennett. He quotes all sorts of rules from this “Father” pertaining to what he calls “the natives,” as in “Don’t talk to the natives” and “Don’t eat the native food.” At first, Bennett refuses even to leave the courtyard, which he says his invisible parents have confined him to. That leaves us a meager twenty or so feet of marble walkway to roll around. I assure him that the courtyard rule must apply only to England. When he still purses his lips, I yawn in the manner of Munira, who yawns every time a shop owner offers her a special price.

“Oh well,” I say, sighing indolently, “I guess I’ll just go play with my other friends and their scooters.” To my great pleasure, he turns a bright purplish, eggplant color; then he says, “Well, perhaps we could go outside the gates, for a bit.”

For the next week or two, Bennett is my best friend. I forget all about my previous life. As if by some tacit agreement, perhaps in acknowledgment of the superiority of the scooter, Hisham and the others start playing with the rooftop children instead of down in the courtyard. At times I’ll guiltily sense a shadow cast from high overhead. But when I look up, all I see are the carrier pigeons flapping from the cornices or the fluted edge of a drying bed sheet.

Bennett and I ride and ride in the street in front of the courtyard. Sometimes there are cars, sometimes not—we scarcely notice. We trade the scooter back and forth, then we ride together—I crowd in behind Bennett, balancing and hugging his waist for dear life, each of us pushing like crazy with one foot. We crash this way several times, and then after a while we can ride together without crashing, as if we are made to do this. I prefer riding to talking. When Bennett does speak, I feel embarrassed for him, for his withered voice, his lace-doily style of speaking, and the way he barely moves his cherry lips.

His father, he says, works as some sort of horrid diplomat, whatever that is. Bennett’s father and mother give “dreadful, just frightful parties,” he says, at which he is required to wear a suit and tie and to play piano. I learn that even though he says he’s from England, Bennett has never actually been there, not even for a visit. His family has been moving around Jordan for over a year now, and he finds it “unbearable” but much prefers it to Singapore or Guyana. He doesn’t like the weather in Jordan: “It burns,” he says, rubbing his red-tipped ears, the skin ragged and peeling from his nose and cheeks. He doesn’t like the food: It’s dirty. “I only like clotted cream and crumpets or nothing,” he says. And he doesn’t like the Jordanians: “They’re much too loud and hairy.”

Early one morning, a sound wakes me and I discover a little basket filled with sugar-powdered
sambusik
cookies propped on the wide marble windowsill of my room. Underneath the cookies is a small scrap of paper with a heart and a tremulous letter
H
written in pencil—probably the first letter in English Hisham has ever written. I look upon these cookies with nostalgic tenderness, as if it has been years since I’ve seen Hisham.
Sambusik
cookies are among my favorites and a specialty of Hisham’s mother—hers dissolve on the tongue in buttery flakes. I offer one to Bennett, who takes it, inspects it, then replaces it daintily, saying, “I never eat native food. Neither should you.”

I look at him out of the corner of my eye. I’m having trouble with Bennett. No matter how much he swats at himself, there is always a fog of dust on his face and clothes. And he’s forever drinking tall glasses of something he calls “nutritious Horlicks”—both words, every time. It seems to be milk mixed with something musty and leaves a white mustache on his upper lip, which I stare at pitilessly as if it is further proof of something terrible about him.

After three weeks of the scooter, he puts one hand on his hip and one hand on the steering bar and says to me, “So we’re best friends, then?”

I scowl and don’t answer, even as I recognize that this is very bad behavior. I eye the scooter, calculating how much longer I can stand being best friends with Bennett. I no longer want to be nice to him at all. Suddenly I have a question. “What does a crumpet taste like?” I ask in a surly, skeptical voice.

“Oh!” Bennett’s eyes flutter. “They’re lovely! Lovely, lovely things.” Then he sniffs a little, presses the toe of his shoe in the ground, and adds, “Course, they’re not available here.”

“Why not?” I ask, even surlier now. “We can get pancakes here. I know for a fact.”

“Pancakes are entirely different,” Bennett says. Then, as if reciting an inscription on a stone tablet, he says: “One cannot get a proper crumpet in a land like Jordan. Father says. Not now and
not ever.
”

I glare at the scooter, and it occurs to me for the first time that when Bennett talks about native foods, he is talking exactly about the sorts of food my father prepares. A sick, disloyal feeling floats in my center.

After four weeks of Bennett and the scooter, our across-the-courtyard neighbor Mrs. Haddadin stops me as I walk in the front gate. Mrs. Haddadin has a kindly voice and a grieving, ancient expression that makes her look decades older than her forty years. She is Palestinian, but she came to Jordan long ago, when, she says, she and her whole village were driven out by the Israelis.

Mrs. Haddadin says that she was meant to have a son—he would be eighteen by now, and his name would be Herve. He would be in the air force, not yet a captain. She knows this, she says, because she has dreamed it, very vividly, on several occasions. But her destiny was tampered with. The Israelis frightened her so badly that everyone could see the mark of that fear on her and no man would ever marry her. “They smell it on my skin,” she says, pressing the tips of her knobby fingers together, as if she keeps the scent pressed between her fingertips. I inhale deeply but smell only the cardamom pods she arranges on her windowsill, the smudge of turmeric she sifts over her pastries, and the fresh peppermint in her tea. Every morning she brings out a pot and two cups and gives one to me, then she stares into the steam above her cup and sighs two great damp sighs. Later in the afternoon, she will patrol up and down behind our courtyard gate, on the lookout for the moment the Israeli army will come pouring into the streets of Amman. As a result, she sees absolutely everything that happens in the neighborhood.

On this day, she stoops to look in my eyes and says, “Why aren’t you playing with your other friends anymore?”

I mull this over, desperate for a good reason. Finally I have to confess. “They don’t have scooters,” I mumble. She straightens up, her mouth a taut line, her eyes fogged over. I watch her expression, horrified. I ask her in a tiny voice, “Don’t you like Bennett?”

She looks down at me, eyes glittering like dark gems. “That boy is a bitter melon.”

One night after my sisters and I are in bed and the baby cats have ceased their long streaks of crying, my parents come to our room, whispering and nudging each other, their smiles sly and flickering, as if they share a private joke. They shake us out of sleep and say, “C’mon, we’re going to do something!”