Henna House (10 page)

He drew me close, kissed me on my lips over and over again. Then he laid me back on the mat. Slid his hand through the bosom slit of my dress and slowly, tenderly, brushed past the
maglab
brocade that prevented my exposure. I was embarrassed, for mine were still little buds, not yet sprouted, but when Asaf laid his hands on them, my
nipples stung and swelled, and I wondered in the secret part of my soul if his hands possessed the power to call my womanhood forth.

The day we saw each other's sex was one of the last days that he came to my cave. It was chilly outside, but cozy enough among the blankets of my cave. I had lain a rug on the ground and lit a little lantern. We lay close to its heat. Soon I was naked before him. I was flooded with unfamiliar warmth as Asaf's eyes drank in my brown flesh, my mound, still hairless, a child's conch, tucked in between my legs.

I in turn had to stifle a laugh when he pulled down his pants and lay before me with a sausage between his legs. It reminded me of the
jachnun
my mother served on Sabbath lunch, a brown coil nestled between two hard-boiled eggs, themselves turned brown by the roasting of the stew. Outside, the setting sun was calling to us with its ruby rays. “Go home, go home” it said, but we ignored its warm message. He bent over me, and drew concentric circles on my flat belly, and then lower, and lower still, with his tongue. With each turn of his tongue, I twisted and arched and became a circle myself—a girl moon trapped in the orbit of a wild, unruly pleasure. When it was my turn to minister to him, I bent over my boy husband and took him in my mouth. And for all of those who say that children can't know the love of men and women, I would say—you should wonder what it was that the idols saw. Thankfully, their eyes were made of stone or wood, and they had no mouths from which to spill our secrets.

After that, Asaf stopped coming to see me, and I was lonely again. Years later, he told me that he had known even less about the ways of the world than I did, and was so afraid that he had gotten me with child when we lay together in my cave, that he could neither sleep nor eat and dreamed of fallen angels, which is what people say when their nights are tortured by visions of hell. He told me that the dreams ended only when he swore an oath to Elohim that he would not touch me again until we were married.

When we saw each other in the market or passing in one of the narrow lanes in between the salt market and the Street of Crooked Baskets, we both averted our eyes. When he came to our house for a festive meal, I avoided serving him, begging Yerushalmit to take my place at the table. But also, we spoke without speaking. The way children can speak without words, like they do in the womb before birth, listening to the conversation of angels. Over the humming incantatory swell of synagogue prayers, I
listened as Asaf told me about Jamiya, about how fast he rode her, about her heaving stride, about her wild, earth-colored eyes. When we passed each other in the street, I told him about the conversations I had with the setting sun outside my cave. In my dreams, he told me about travels we would take together. And once, when we were together for a tiny seedling of a moment in the alley beside Auntie Aminah's house (I was delivering eggs, he was on an errand from my father, delivering a pair of children's shoes to a neighbor), he reached out a hand and brushed a piece of hair out of my eyes. Then he put a finger to my thirsty lips, and hushed my many questions before I could even ask them.

And then catastrophe struck. In the early spring of 1928, Uncle Zecharia returned from Sana'a. He came to my father and told him that he and Asaf would be going away together on a long journey. According to my uncle, an old client of his in Cyprus had located him in Sana'a, and asked him to deliver a quantity of
choya nakh
, the Indian roasted seashell essence used as the smoky base of several rare perfumes. “We will join the caravan of Sheik Ibn Messer's stablemaster; he is delivering horses to an illustrious customer outside of Aden and has agreed to let us travel under his protection. We will go with them as far as Aden, and then sail to India. We will spend the spring in Bombay.” Uncle Zecharia cleared his throat, and then continued, “And make the eastward journey in the summer. When I return, I will be a wealthy man, for I will be paid well for this delivery.”

My father protested. “What if Adela becomes a woman in Asaf's absence? The delay of the wedding could put her in danger.”

“Elohim will look over your family and protect you. And anyway, the engagement itself will save little Adela from the Imam. When we return they will be married. That is, if she is a woman, of course. There is still time, Brother, she is just a child.” I blushed at these words, my father and uncle discussing my body. And I burned inside, for I knew that even if I didn't have the breasts or blood to prove it, I was more than ready to be Asaf's wife.

I would like to say that we parted as innocents, but we didn't. The morning they left, Asaf met me in my cave. He drew me to him, and kissed me as a man kisses a woman—not for the first time, but for the tenth time, when shyness and astonishment have given way to hunger. His lips probed mine, burst through, and explored my mouth. Then his hands began to roam over my body. I felt my whole self rise to him, and
I returned the heat of his embrace. When he and his father rode off, I cried so much my throat grew tight, and I had trouble breathing. My mother dragged me into the house and made me stand over a steaming pot of water until I could breathe.

“Ach, girl” she said in a rare show of compassion, as I collapsed heaving into her bosom. “He will send for you in no time, and then you will be his bride, his wife, the mother of his children.” She put a hand under my chin and lifted my wet tearful face. I could tell that she was trying to be kind, but that she was also impatient for me to get on with my chores.

*  *  *

That night I left my world and traveled to the world of strangers. I snuck out of our house and followed the path Asaf had once shown me to Ibn Messer's stables. His billowing tents perched on the littoral slope behind my escarpment. It was Jamiya I was after. I had a ridiculous plan to steal her and ride her south in pursuit of my beloved. So what if I had never ridden before? So what if I didn't know the way? I would do what I must to escape my abandonment. But of course I couldn't even saddle the creature, and ended up crying in a corner of her stall. She was kind to me, a moist, smelly animal-mother, nuzzling my face with her huge, soft, nutty-breathed velvet mouth. Eventually I was found by a stable servant and brought to the sheik himself. Ibn Messer looked at me, his expression half a smile and half a frown. I was a novelty: a dirty, crying Jewish girl.

“What is your story, little one?”

“Asaf, the boy, the Jew, is my husband. And now he is gone. I must find him.”

He raised a skeptical eyebrow, “Really? Your husband?”

“He will be my husband, when I . . . when we . . . mmph . . .” I blushed purple and looked down at my feet.

“But child, no good would come of your giving chase. The boy and his father are gone, you will find another to love.”

My cheeks were on fire. “He is my intended. You see, we were engaged. There is a contract.”

“Little girl, don't cry. There, there.”

“Please, sir,” I said between sniffs, “you must know where they went. You must tell me how to find them, they can't have gotten far.”

Sheik Ibn Messer looked down at me with all the kindness of the ages radiating out of his eyes. He had an attractive face, etched by time, handsome in a way that the people of Qaraah called “hilltop handsome” for it was a quality of beauty that seemed to bring one closer to the sky and farther from the depths of Gehinom. But his eyes were dark. The sadness I saw there told me that the places where our stories met were rocky and steep. Perilous even. The servant returned, and spoke to Ibn Messer in hushed tones.

The sheik turned to me and said, “My dear, you have a friend, he has come for you. Or maybe it is your brother, come to see you safely home?”

I scrunched up my face, and was about to say, “Impossible, I came alone” when Binyamin Bashari came through the tent flap. He wouldn't look either at me or at the sheik in the flickering lamplight, but down at his feet, a deep serious blush on his wolf-muzzle face. It had been a few years since we had played together. And in such a short time, I had forgotten him, the way you can forget the most vivid parts of your childhood. But now I remembered everything. He was my friend. My playmate. He had followed me here. Had he also followed Asaf to my cave? Did he know what we did there together?

“I see you have a good sturdy chaperone, a brave lad, pure of heart, I am sure. But the night is dark. Should I send a servant with you both?”

“No, sir,” I whispered, “we know the way. And if we are seen with anyone our mothers will beat us.”

“I understand, little one. Go, go on your way. May the darkness shield you. And please, forget about your intended. But see to it that your mother finds you another husband soon. As soon as she can. Right? That's a good girl.”

Binyamin silently took my hand. We stole across the dunes and up the escarpment. As we ran, I didn't speak to Binyamin. I didn't say, “Stop following me.” I didn't say, “How did you know where I was?” I didn't say, “I didn't need you this time,” because that would have been a lie. We didn't exchange a single word. And we parted behind my auntie's house, as we had parted a hundred times before when we were very small children, only this time, our journey had taken us farther than we had ever gone, and we were both forever changed for having traversed the nighttime path.

In the morning, when I awoke, I wasn't sure if I had really gone to
the stables of the sheik, or if I had just dreamed I had. Two nights later I had a nightmare. In the morning I half remembered screaming and kicking in the darkness with my father's cool hand on my hot brow, and someone saying, “Sha, sha, little girl,” in a voice that sounded like the sheik's—low and melodious and full of bemused compassion.

*  *  *

The only token my uncle left behind in Qaraah was his tattered deerskin Torah. I took this as a sign that they would one day return, for who would leave an object so precious? It was one of my chores to dust the chest in the upstairs men's salon. I knew where the key was kept, and when no one else was in the house, I took to opening the chest and looking at the cast-off little Torah. Sometimes I brushed my hand on its hard curved case, even though I knew I shouldn't. Once I even dared to take the Torah out of the chest and open it. The panel of text that the Torah was rolled to had cracked words and moldy dark spots over whole passages, but the poor condition didn't bother me. I couldn't read, but I imagined my own portion of holy words. I mouthed a strange, mixed-up parable about a girl, a cave, a boy, and a visitation from a holy angel who did not wrestle with anyone, but instead used his wings as a sheltering canopy under which the children wrestled themselves.

My engagement contract was in the chest as well. I took it out several times and let the Hebrew words wash over me like water. Sometimes I dreamed about the contract. I dreamed that some of the words floated up off the page and formed a wedding canopy over my head and that other words floated up and formed Asaf, a boy made out of letters who stood next to me and married me, as a rabbi also made of words sanctified our union. I thought that I was the only flesh-and-blood creature in the dream, though when Asaf put the ring on my finger, I saw that my hand was also made of words.

*  *  *

I cried for weeks after Asaf and Uncle Zecharia left. My mother scolded me for giving in to such fragile emotions. But she too gave in to her passions.

“Your brother is a dog who sleeps in his own piss,” she slandered Uncle Zecharia. “He is an ass who eats his own shit. How dare he abandon
our daughter?” She ranted and raved at my father, and called my uncle horrible names, and so I knew that she was as perturbed as I was that my cousin and uncle had left Qaraah. In the early summer of 1928, not two months after they left, my mother dressed herself in her best antari, and plodded out of the house.

“Make your father lunch,” she said, “and bring it to him before he dies of starvation.”

I didn't know where she was going, and spent the afternoon doing as I was told. In the market, my father patted my head and shared his stew with me. We dipped lafeh bread in the meaty sauce. He was making a belt for a jambia, and showed me how he embossed the border with little triangles and squares. The stall smelled rich and alive and made me think of Jamiya, for her saddle had the same smell.

On my way home, I walked a wide berth around where the Confiscator and his wife had once found me sprawled with my persimmons. When I got home, my mother was there.

“Well, it's done.”

“What?”

“You are free of that bastard wastrel.”

“What?”

“You are free of Asaf.”

“How could you call him such things?”

“What does it matter what I call him as long as he will never call you wife? Now we can betroth you to another.”

“No.”

“No what?”

“I won't. I refuse to marry anyone but my boy-cousin.”

My mother's face contorted into a mocking grimace. “Refuse all you want. You are not mistress of your fate in this world. Perhaps you will hold the reins of fate in the World to Come.”

I soon found out that my mother had gone to Rabbi Yusef Bar Yerush and paid him a whole Maria Theresa thaler to declare me an “abandoned bride,” and thus no longer bound by the engagement contract my father and Uncle Zecharia had both signed. Of course she wasn't reckless enough to destroy the original document—the one that bound me to Asaf. My parents knew that it would prove crucial if my father were to die before a new groom could be found. In those days parents often commissioned small libraries of legal documents—one
contradicting the other—each ready to be produced in a wink should it be needed to save a child from confiscation.