The Language of Baklava Read Online Free Page A

of the adults seem to be comfortable with looking at him, and no one tries to coax him into eating. Their eyes roam toward him, then veer away; the mere sight of him is like an accusation. Even I can feel it, and I feel terribly guilty, though I don’t know what I’m guilty of. Uncle Hal spears a few stuffed squashes and puts them on my plate. And then something very strange happens: Bud reaches over and plucks the squashes from my plate. I blink and look at him. This is such an oddity, so counter to all I know of my father, that I don’t even have the words to comment on it.
    That evening, after the frozen pound cake has been produced, the coffee brewed with cardamom, the dishes washed; after Auntie Rachel teaches us something in Russian that she says means “Require the children to work”; after the evening news has been watched and discussed, and the children have been quizzed on world geography and political history—I am sitting alone on the slanting back steps with my cousin Jess. We sit listening to the high, white chiming of crickets in the fields when she suddenly says, “We ate Lambie today.”
    I, however, at age six, am already showing a real aptitude for not believing inconvenient truths. “That’s not scientifically possible,” I say, using a phrase I have picked up from Monster Movie Matinee. “Lambie was a lamb,” I state. “We had chicken and squash.”
    Jess stares at me with the direct, remorseless gaze that will carry over into her adulthood and eventually strike fear into the hearts of men. “Squash stuffed with ground lamb,” she says. I gaze at the darkened barn, crammed with its boxes and piles of junk. Never before has it struck me as being quite so empty. I don’t dare to venture any closer.
    When we leave that evening, Bud, as usual, is the first out the door, waiting behind the wheel, the car engine murmuring in the lavender night. The women linger over their farewells. There is no sign of Sami, although as we walk down the long gravel driveway past the barn, I think I hear someone weeping behind the wall of the hayloft.
    This story had to wait twenty years or so for its ending. I was already done with graduate school, already moved away from home, teaching and living on my own in another state. But one day I came home for a visit and something reminded me of that lamb, and I said to my father, “Remember Lambie, the little lamb at Uncle Hal’s house? What really happened to him?”
    Bud shook his head and said exactly what he has so often said over the years, which was, “Ya Ba, where on earth did you ever get this memory of yours from? You know, most men won’t like having a wife with such a big memory.”
    Then he fell back into his bottomless recliner—his favorite and most auspicious place for storytelling and philosophizing, and began at the beginning before the beginning:
    On that day, the day of the lamb, Bud and his brothers were all still young men, in their late twenties and early thirties, none of them all that far away from their childhood in Jordan. When they were children, their parents had owned orchards of olive trees, figs, and lemons and fields of corn, thyme, and jasmine, watering holes and greenhouses, herds of horses, goats, and lambs. They drew their silvery drinking water from a well, baked bread in a stone oven, and in the desert nights my father and his eight brothers had liked to sleep under a sky scrawled with stars or inside the billowing goat-hair tents that the Bedouins used.
    Half my father’s brothers stayed in Jordan, but the other half came to America, for education or money or some sense of promise that was the opposite of homesickness. They thought, even after ten or fifteen years away, that they were still the same wiry, tough-skinned wild boys running barefoot through briars and hardscrabble land. When Uncle Hal saw the runty lamb in his neighbor’s fields, he thought of the feather-light springtime in Jordan when the countryside was