Free The Language of Baklava by Diana Abu-Jaber

Rafat, Belal and Hisham. They greet me as cordially as if I haven’t been away at all. We spend the day on foot, running along the alleys in our old style. I am set free. At the end of the day, Hisham and I race to my house. I have flying hair, a skinned knee, and grubby nails—I look like every other child in the streets of this neighborhood. Hisham, as usual, gets there first, but then he pulls up short. Bennett is standing just inside the courtyard, still as stone.
    Suddenly the door to a steep place that I didn’t know was inside me has been thrown open. I know I’ve done something wrong, though I can’t put a name to it. “Hi,” I say, guilty and angry.
    Hisham looks as shocked as if Bennett is a statue come to life. He takes a step back and bumps into me.
    “Don’t touch her!” Bennett snaps at him. He shakes a finger at Hisham. “Do you live here? I don’t believe so! This is our courtyard— not your courtyard.” Bennett’s face is a streaked, liverish color, as if he’s just been slapped. He shrieks at Hisham, his voice leaping into the highest registers, his body rigid and doll-like. “I think you’d better get out of here. I think you’d just better get out!”
    Hisham’s mouth opens and closes, as if he can barely get enough air. I grab Hisham’s wrist and am about to suggest we go play in another courtyard, but Hisham turns to me and whispers in Arabic, “Something is wrong with this boy—I’ll go get my mother!”
    “No,” I answer, though I’m frightened of the sharp, thin line of Bennett’s mouth. “I’ll stay here. I’ll talk to him.”
    After Hisham has gone, for a long moment, Bennett doesn’t speak and doesn’t even give the impression of seeing me there. Then quickly he says, “You know, that isn’t proper. It isn’t proper, and it isn’t done. It isn’t done at all.”
    I take hold of the iron spikes of the courtyard railing; they feel cold and rough in my hands. I wish that Hisham hadn’t gone away. “What isn’t?”
    The color starts to subside in his face, and I can see him collecting himself. He purses and unpurses his lips, he crosses his arms in a businesslike fashion. Finally he slits his eyes at me as if admitting to himself, at last, that I really don’t know much of anything. “You don’t belong with them! You know that. You know that. The sort you are belongs with the sort I am. Like belongs with like. Father says. No in-betweens. The world isn’t meant for in-betweens, it isn’t done. You know that.”
    He speaks as if this is a conversation we’ve had countless times and he’s tired of going over it with me. I lean back and swing on the iron railing while he stands like a stake in the ground, glaring just past the top of my head. I’ve started attending a private school run by the French nuns, and what Bennett says reminds me of something the nuns say. We are forbidden to speak Arabic in school because, according to Sister Hélène-Thérèse, “Arabic is the language of animals.” She taps the list of three languages on the blackboard, explaining that English “is the language of mortals” and French, she says with a satiny smile, “is the language of the angels.”
    “No in-betweens.” My voice is a pale vapor.
    “They belong with their own kind. You with me, they with them,” Bennett sums up. “No in-betweens. It’s not allowed.”
    I squint at Bennett; his face is blotted out by the sunset behind his back. I don’t know what these in-betweens are exactly, but I feel sorry for them. They might look like the embroideries of the sad-eyed sheep—the solitary ones, apart from their flock, trapped inside the circle of Munira’s embroidery hoop, stitched eternally apart. I imagine them walking the earth, friendless, lonely, and improper, not allowed, lost somewhere in the embroidered corners between the animals, the mortals, and the angels.
    “How do you know it?” I press. “How do you know that I belong with you?”
    He rolls his