Authors: Pauls Toutonghi
“They look,” I said, “delicious.”
“They’re perfect,” Banafrit said, offering my mother a chair.
“They’re too small,” Fatima said.
“She’s going to poison us,” Kebi Merit said, turning away and attending to a boiling pot on the stove. “The American hussy is trying to kill Akram. She bought poisoned birds for us at the market.”
“What’s she saying?” my mother asked me.
“She’s saying that you did a great job,” I said. “She’s saying how much she’s looking forward to cooking with you.”
This dish was the centerpiece of the wedding feast. The pigeons were the important part of the meal, obviously, and they needed to be bought fresh on the day of the ceremony. There was an elaborate mythology behind the dish, one that my mother said dated back thousands of years. “The pigeon is a noble bird,” my mom said as she covered up the baskets once again and the other women returned to cooking.
“It’s not just a flying rat?” I said.
She frowned. “Its nobility is in its normalcy.” She’d made
hamam mahshy
for me several times, but always with Cornish game hens. “You will find pigeons in every city in every country,” she said. “They have a subtle flavor. Now let’s pluck them clean.”
“Mom,” I said. “You don’t have to do this. Just because he acts selflessly when I’m sick doesn’t mean that you have to do him this favor.”
“Who says it’s a favor,” she said.
“So you
are
going to poison him,” I said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” my mother said. But she looked warily over at my father’s sisters and Kebi Merit. I knew that Banafrit, at least, spoke good English. If they were listening to our conversation, they gave no indication of it.
“I’m just thankful,” my mother said, “that you have recovered. And I owe that to him, I think. Besides, I want to prove to him—and to them—that I am quite simply the best cook in the world.”
Kebi Merit chose that moment to drop the lid of a pot. It hit the ground hard and spun in broad circles. “Sorry,” she muttered in Arabic.
We sat down and started plucking the pigeons. The first time I did this with my mother, when I was twelve years old, I threw up in the bathroom. I locked myself in and refused to come out for hours, I was so disgusted and depressed. I didn’t eat meat for months. Modern American meat comes packaged and sanitized in the supermarket. It is a flavor and a texture, nothing more. There’s no sense that it was once a living creature, that it had small, creaturely dreams and enjoyed small, creaturely pleasures. Plucking a newly slaughtered bird is a different experience entirely. You get a sense that you are eating a life.
These pigeons were the real deal: They were still warm. Fatima got a huge kettle of water boiling on the stove, and we scalded each of the birds enough to loosen the feathers a bit. Then we started plucking, pulling downward with a smooth, consistent rhythm, pulling out the feathers in big handfuls. These poor birds—birds that had only recently been able to fly, to soar above the ground on their expansive, hollow-boned wings. Plucking them was nothing compared to dressing them. The pigeons were small, so it was less gruesome than dressing a chicken. I will say as little as possible about this process. Well, I’ll say a bit: draining the blood, splitting the chest cavity open like a bypass surgery, cutting through the anus with a fresh knife, and removing the intestines.
I’d never been so conscious of my body as a physical thing, as something that could fail, the way a bridge fails, or a levee fails, or an
electrical circuit ceases to bear current. I was fallible. A single mosquito bite and I’d nearly been reduced to nothingness. I watched my mother slicing into the chest cavity of a pigeon.
“Don’t forget to reserve the giblets,” she said.
“You’re not really going to poison them, right?” I said when we were halfway done with the pigeons. “You know that’s just not an option.”
“Poison them?” my mother said. “Khosi, are you feeling okay?” A sardonic smile haunted the margins of her lips. “You don’t have a fever, but have you taken all your pills today, darling?”
I had. The rainbow of pills that was now my inheritance. It had crept beneath the surface of my skin, in my blood, its seeds more prolific than an Egyptian walking onion. I had a long future of weekly pill containers, of maintenance visits to the family doctor. This was, I had to admit, depressing. There was a time when I would have been overwhelmed by the news Dr. Mdesi had given me. Now I was able to face it, like I could survive it, for sure. It was just a fact—a medical fact. A fact like my mother’s illness was a fact. A fact like the population of Idaho (1,432,860 souls, circa 2008) was a fact.
All five of us were sitting at that big wooden table, preparing the birds for their long, slow braise. Banafrit and Fatima were quiet and reserved.
“It
is
a rare and blessed moment, I will admit,” Kebi Merit said, gesturing with a pigeon in her hand, “when you two aren’t arguing.”
The wedding started surprisingly early. People had been showing up all day. Some of them were there to help set things up, to arrange
furniture and set up the stage for the band. In the ballroom there were some definite preparations occurring. The men, for example, were drinking heavily. They had great decanters of red wine, ornate crystal decanters that they’d filled with Syrian cabernet. All of the immediate family—that is to say, more than thirty cousins—appeared to be in attendance. It was a relief to circulate among these men and women and be essentially anonymous, overhearing pieces of Arabic dialogue, speculation about my father’s reformation and his little-known but wealthy wife.
My mother had finished trussing the pigeons. I could taste them already, the sweet hazelnut flavor of the meat, the buttery texture of the wheat mixing with the acrid taste of the giblets. It was among my favorite meals that she cooked, and I was surprised that she was doing it now—and sharing the recipe with near strangers. I watched my mother constantly adjust her graying hair, tuck strands of it behind her ears as she cooked. There was the
hamam mahshy
and the
tabilch
and the
koftit roz
and the parsleyed eggs and the
koshary
and the eggplant salad. “We’ll just do a simple meal,” my mother had said. “Just a couple of things, a few small dishes.” This didn’t consider the pita bread, towers of pita bread, all of it baking in small loaves on the stone at the bottom of the main oven.
I passed out some appetizers: wedges of Christian-Muslim Cooperation Baklava, grape leaves wrapped around garlic-studded lamb and rice, spicy meat pies. I caught a few people staring at me, clearly wondering who I was: caterer? cousin? cousin who was also a caterer? Someone had a deck of cards. Someone had a laptop. By noon, people were drunk and playing pinochle and backgammon and listening to clips of Fairuz on YouTube. The dial-up connection made the wait
for the download excruciating, in my opinion, but people seemed not to mind.
Kebi Merit kept a running speculation on when the first guests would start to die from the poison. “You’ve used something slow, I see,” she said. “An American poison, I’m sure.”
“What’s she saying?” my mom asked me.
“She thinks your hummus is the best she’s ever tasted,” I said.
“I can’t believe that Akram would make such a terrible error in judgment,” Kebi Merit added.
“And now?” my mother asked.
“She loves the subtlety of the flavors,” I said. “The way the tahini interacts with the garlic.”
“Thank her,” my mother said. “She’s such a nice old lady.”
Before the Mouris arrived, I slipped away from the commotion and went up onto the roof, which was a maze of satellite dishes. The smoggy Cairo skyline was a mix of fading sun and newly illuminated electrical lights. Big buildings sprawled outward from this point. It was hard to imagine any place in the world that wasn’t part of the city. Everything felt proprietary. It felt like it was mine. Airliners banked in from the north, turning like low-skimming gulls, floating in over the continent of Africa, gliding in off the Mediterranean, heading for the distant airport. I looked at the planes and I fastened a space for myself in the Egyptian capital. To this day, the city of Cairo is the city that I call home. I have Natasha’s jar of soil on the bookshelf beside my bed, next to the
Keep ridin!
Evel Knievel bookmark. These objects are the relics of my patron saint. Every night I look at the ground I left behind, the ground through which I tunneled to reach the other side of the earth. It’s how I learned that
inhabiting a place doesn’t require being in that place, necessarily. It lives in you long after you leave it.
On the day of the wedding, the bride’s family arrived in fine formal clothes, clothes that looked suspiciously like they’d been rented at a tuxedo shop in a suburban American mall. More specifically, a suburban American mall in 1994. Teal featured prominently in the cummerbunds. Nearly every dress was ornamented with lace. The bride herself, Agnes Mouri, wore an elaborately ornamented white dress. She crossed the threshold of the house holding a clutch of laurel branches.
It had been quite the process of negotiation for my father—even getting back into Agnes Mouri’s house. After his initial passel of lies, the truth proved even more problematic, which was, I suppose, the fate of liars everywhere. I had no part in the talks, though I was dispatched to the Mouri household once with an overflowing platter of falafel, a special peace envoy sent with alacrity in the moment of crisis.
On the day of the wedding, as soon as she saw me, Agnes Mouri took me by the arm and led me to one side of the room. The other guests were staring at us. She looked at me seriously with her luminescent yellow-brown eyes—and then she wrapped me in her arms.
“My son,” she said, laughing.
“You’re suffocating me,” I said.
“We will start over from today,” she said.
“No,” I said.
Agnes Mouri frowned. “That surprises me,” she said.
“I’m worried that even with my dad’s rehabilitation, you’re in over your head.”
“I’m sorry?” she said. “Over my head?”
“It’s an English idiomatic expression,” I said, “meaning that you’re in great danger.”
“No,” she said. “I know what I’m doing. I’m getting exactly what I hoped for.”
“A recovering addict,” I said.
“Sure,” she said. “But I’ve got my own past, too,
habibi
.”
“It couldn’t be as”—I paused here, searching for the right word—“checkered as my father’s.”
“No, you’re probably right,” Agnes Mouri said. “Look at it this way: If we have children, they will learn about family and love and forgiveness from the voice of experience.”
“That seems a little extreme,” I said. “It seems like a strange experimentation.”
“Not at all,” she said. “Think about this: What if I gave the bracelet to your father in the first place and orchestrated this entire performance.”
“That
would
be impressive,” I said.
“I’m an impressive woman,” Agnes Mouri said.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Did you give it to my dad?”
“Of course not,” she said.
She winked. At least I think it was a wink. It could have been an involuntary twitch. Maybe there was something in her eye.
“Come on,” I said. “No way.”
“
Mishmumkin?
” she said. “Impossible?”
“
Mishmumkin
,” I said. “Impossible.”
My concerns were not entirely allayed. “I keep imagining that you’ll wake up, one day in three years,” I said, “and you’ll discover
that Akram isn’t actually Egyptian. He’s from Mongolia. And he has fled for Ulan Bator, where he plans to retire, and in his old, old age, marry a young heiress.”
Agnes Mouri laughed. She leaned in and glanced over her shoulder at the other guests in the room. “I’ve heard,” she whispered into my ear, “that the weather is nice in Mongolia this time of year.” She smiled.
Before we could say anything else, Aunt Banafrit and Aunt Fatima grabbed her—each holding an arm—and took her deeper into the apartment. I hoped they wouldn’t split her like a wishbone.
There was a Coptic priest. He arrived in a hat that was at least two feet tall; it bobbed above him like the bier in a New Orleans funeral. But this was not a New Orleans funeral. This was an Egyptian wedding. There was the processional, the drumming, the exchange of vows, the dancing, the music, the food, all of it happening in the apartment, on the balcony, the balcony so big you could roller-skate on it. The Mouri family was welcoming, hospitable, warm. If they cared anymore that my father’s ex-wife and son were at the wedding, they didn’t show it.
All throughout the festivities, my father was a small presence. He seemed to fold into himself, to intentionally lessen himself until he was practically not there. I lost track of him again and again, despite the fact that he was the groom, and always it was while he was doing unassuming things. He was standing at the long wooden table and ladling
baba ghannouj
onto a plate; he was having a quiet conversation with Fatima’s husband; he was replacing a candle in the antique silver candelabra in the hallway. Each time I looked away for a moment and then looked back, and he was gone.
At one point, I ducked into the garden behind the house, trying to find a place that might be free of people. The fountain bubbled. The mango trees were tall and leafy, offering their arboreal canopy to a hastily arranged series of benches. I sat down. All around me, vines grew from the branches, dropping to the ground by the dozens, long and bright green.
“Watch for snakes,” said someone from the space behind me. “Be careful.” I recognized my father’s voice.
“Great,” I said without turning around. “The trees have snakes. Just perfect.”
He stood in front of me. “They hang from the branches and look just like the ivy,” he said. “Once I reached to grab a vine, and it had teeth.”
“Poisonous snakes?” I said. I flinched and drew back against the bench.
“Sure,” he said. “Some. But mostly not.” He reached into his shirt pocket, producing the gold and red box of cigarettes. “Dunhill?”