Free The Language of Baklava by Diana Abu-Jaber Page B

Remove the cookies from the oven, let cool, and then sprinkle liberally with confectioner’s sugar.
    MAKES ABOUT 35 COOKIES.
    I have many favorite people in Jordan: Every morning I run to the boy selling ka’k— fluffy loaves of seeded bread rings—from a tray on top of his head. “ Atini ka’k, minfudluk, ” I say, and give him two fils. He gives me a hot crusty seed-dusted loaf the size of a Christmas wreath, then he goes back to bawling, “ Kaaaaaa’k! ” in the streets. There’s the man whose donkey pulls a wheeled tub full of butter and bobbing roasted ears of corn, and another man who sells hard-boiled eggs and Zataar, a spice mix made of thyme, sesame, and sumac. He gives me a free egg, then salutes as if I am a military commander. And then there’s Munira the Bedouin, who dusts and tidies, does our laundry, and keeps her eye on the children. There is something glorious and half-wild about her, with her falcon eyes and gold teeth. Her hands and chin are tattooed with strings of curling designs, and she blackens her lids with so much kohl that they look as if they’re smoking. Sometimes she talks and talks in a freestyle English-Arabic mixture, as if the words have been bottled up inside her from the moment of her birth. Other times she collapses into a sort of pure, solitary silence. I avail myself of these moments to station myself at her side and tell her all my own problems, which are legion.
    Early on—before Bud’s language is in my head—I complain bitterly about the confounding trouble I’m having making myself understood and understanding others. Munira calls me habeebti, which means “my dearest,” and she assures me that I do indeed know “how to speak” but that I’ve willfully let myself forget and will just have to wait until it comes back to me. She counsels me that as soon as anyone says anything I don’t understand, I should just keep responding with aish. Aish means “what,” and this advice quickly gives me a reputation for being a hard-of-hearing, rather crotchety eight-year-old. Munira also teaches me how to divine the future by tossing some stones against the garden wall and reading the constellations they fall into. I don’t know how we afford to employ Munira and Hamouda with Bud so often out of work. It’s possible we don’t give them anything more than room and board. When I ask where they came from, Bud says they came with the family, that their ancestors have been serving Abu-Jabers for generations, and that, in fact, he had been raised by Munira’s mother, and his father had been raised by her grandmother. Munira tells me she learned to speak English as a little girl because Bud’s mother read fairy tales to her while she helped with her own mother’s embroidery work. Because of this, she knows words like “enchantment” and “mermen” and all about the strange Little Matchstick Girl, but not the English words for house or soap or spoon.
    When I think how I initially met Hamouda, it seems to me that he was already in our house, sitting on his bare wooden chair in the storeroom off the kitchen, waiting for us when we arrived from America. He’s slow moving and cheerful and doesn’t understand our jokes: Munira has to tell him everything four times before something in his features catches and his face brightens. Hamouda fixes things around the house for us, prays, gardens, and does odd jobs. He has captivating hazel eyes in a cinder-dark face. Bud says he is Circassian, from the hills of the Caucasus Mountains; pious Muslims, he and his family have lived in Jordan since the reign of Stalin. He has a pronounced limp that he says he got when his horse fell on him for some reason. I love mentally replaying this tragic scene in a swoon of pity and terror: horse falling, Hamouda falling, crying out, leg splintering. Hamouda lets me and my sisters knock on his hard calf through his pants as if we are knocking on a door. Every time he calls out, “Who’s