Henna House (17 page)

The next day was a Friday. My wedding was called for two days hence. That morning, my mother packed up the bread and jelly for me to bring to Mr. Musa, but when I was on the path to Musa's, Hani ran up behind me and grabbed the basket from me. “I will deliver it,” she said with a wink. “You go hide away at your Auntie Aminah's house.”

“I don't understand. Why . . . ?”

“I know you dread it, so I will do it for you. After you are married, there will be nothing that I can do to save you from that house, but today at least, I can relieve you of this errand.”

I relinquished the basket, and watched her walk down the road. Then I turned on my heels and stole away to my auntie's, grateful to Hani that I didn't have to look into Mrs. Musa's sad eyes and see my own reflection there, at least not yet.

*  *  *

A few hours later, after I'd returned home, pretending to have delivered the basket, my brother Ephrim thrust his shaggy head in the door. Ephrim was always the most disheveled of my brothers, and today he looked like a lion with a tangled, overgrown mane. He flared his nostrils, growling, “Where is our father? Tell me Adela, where is he?”

I pointed to the back of the house. My father had not gone to work that day. He hadn't felt well for a few days, and was now sitting behind the house reading scripture wrapped in a blanket. Ephrim went out
and said something. I heard my father make a noise—a cross between a moan and a broken-backed laugh.

My mother joined the men behind the house. Then more of my brothers arrived. Finally, my mother came inside. She reached out, took off my gargush, and ran her hands through my elaborate braids, unraveling them. I felt her thick fingers tugging my hair from the root, but I didn't cry out. When the braids were undone, she said, “Mr. Musa is dead. He was murdered. That poor girl did it—his wife. She stabbed him when he came home for lunch. Then she killed herself too. Her corpse has two black eyes and a broken nose. The babe has already been confiscated. Those black eyes? That broken nose. His last gift to her, I suppose. And his death? Well, that is her gift to you, though what kind of gift it is I don't know, for it will surely open a pit under your feet and you will tumble headlong into confiscation, just like the babe.” To my surprise, she bent down and kissed me on the lips. I laughed when she pulled away, and then she slapped me. I clamped my mouth shut, but I kept laughing. She slapped me again. “Laughter tempts the devil,” she spat through clenched teeth. When my brothers filled the house, I was curled up in a corner, nursing my stinging cheek. Their eyes told me that they pitied me. I was a cat they had kicked many times, but now they were half-sorry I was lame.

*  *  *

That night, my mother and father had their old argument.

“There is no one for Adela to marry.” My mother said the words slowly, as if they took her on a long journey and tired her out.

“We will find someone for her. It is our obligation. We can't give up.” My father sounded defeated.

“Her fate is her own now. If we live forever, perhaps she can do as the dye mistress has done and marry herself.”

I buried my face under my rag pillow and pretended to cry myself to sleep. I cried to please my mother. I wanted her to think that I was crying for myself, and for dead Mrs. Musa and for her confiscated child, and for Asaf, the boy I had already loved and lost through no fault of my own. But the truth was that I was crying out of relief. That night my sleep was restful. I had escaped a terrible bondage. But when I awoke in the morning, the reality of my tenuous situation assailed me. Still, I was grateful that I had escaped marriage to fat old lecherous Mr. Musa.

*  *  *

Mr. Musa was buried the next day. The night after the funeral, I dreamed that I saw his wife. In my dream, she wasn't veiled anymore, and she had no bruises. She was dressed in the antari and gargush of a married woman. She had the same sweet snub nose as her baby and her eyes were laughing. Her cheeks were two high rosy apples. She was traveling on a donkey cart, leaving Qaraah, returning to the western village where she was from, taking her baby away before the Confiscator could sniff him out. “Good-bye, little sister,” she sang in her singsongy village dialect, “good-bye.” I dreamed that I kissed her hand to show her that we were indeed sisters, even though we had never truly shared the brute who had beat her, and pawed me in the dye mistress's yard.

*  *  *

After Mr. Musa's death, I became “a leftover nut,” which is what our people call a girl who has no husband in the offing. My parents gave up finding me another groom. My father's cough grew worse and worse; everyone assumed that he would die, and that the Confiscator would eventually come for me. Only I knew otherwise. Every so often, when I was alone in our house, I took out Aunt Rahel's embroidered satchel, untied the cinch, and sniffed the bitter flakes of root. It didn't smell to me like Eden on the sixth day, but on the day the snake reared his head. It smelled of death, decay, and all manner of miseries. It also smelled of freedom. I knew that taking my own life was against the sacred law of our people, but I also didn't think that anyone would judge me poorly for my actions. After all, what else was there for me to do but take matters into my own hands, if my father should die, leaving me an orphan? I usually took out the satchel after seeing the Confiscator in the market—when he would come to my father's stall to order yet another pair of shoes for his wife. Or I would turn to the satchel after hearing a chilling story of a confiscation from the women at the well. I never saw the Confiscator's wife again, but I often heard her silvery ribbon voice in my head, as she made her plans to steal me for her own.

M
y one regret after Mr. Musa's funeral was that I had not had my Night of Henna, and so my hands and feet were still unadorned. Hani and her mother were always decorated. Before coming to Qaraah, Aunt Rahel had been paid to henna brides and give ordinary women fancy applications, but here in Qaraah, no one would let her touch them, so she cloistered herself with her daughter and performed her rites in private. Their henna usually lasted two to three weeks. But they didn't always rehenna immediately. Sometimes they waited until Aunt Rahel deemed that it was time. I don't know how she decided when to henna, and when to wait—whether she consulted an astrological calendar or just chose the dates at whim. Once they hennaed on the new moon. Once they waited so long that their henna had faded completely, and their hands and feet were blank, like mine.

My sisters-in-law now regularly joined them for their applications. I was sometimes allowed to watch, but not to participate. My mother forbade me from getting so much as a dot of henna from my aunt's stylus.

Other than this, the next period of my life, free of matrimonial prospects, was quietly wonderful. With Mr. Musa out of the way, I was at liberty to tend and stoke the fires of my loyalty to Asaf. I was convinced, despite a complete lack of evidence, that he would return for me. I confided my hopes to Hani, who cheerfully kept me company in my girlhood. I view this time as a temporary reprieve from worry and dread. Hani and I spent most of our time together. By now, I had heard so many stories about her sisters in Aden– about Edna, Hamama, and Nogema—that I felt as if I myself half knew them. But I had heard almost nothing about the two Damari girls who had died, Naama and Asisah. I didn't even know
how
they'd died. No one in the family spoke
about them, especially not in the presence of Aunt Rahel. But that was to change, approximately one month after Mr. Musa's funeral. I was sitting with Hani outside the synagogue in the early evening of a fast day. Our fathers had prayed all day, and our mothers had stayed home cooking for the end of the fast. We had been sent to the synagogue to track when prayers were almost over. Then we were to run home and let our mothers know that it was time to serve the meal. The twins, Marta and Freda Paradesi, were walking by the synagogue, arm in arm. They were two years older than I. Both had recently been married. They leaned together as they walked, and whispered to each other conspiratorially.

“Naama and Asisah were like that,” Hani commented, pointing toward Marta and Freda.

“Identical?”

“They belonged to each other more than they ever belonged to anyone else.”

Freda wore her hair swept up and a freckle by her hairline became visible; otherwise, they were like two sunflower seeds, indistinguishable one from the other. Hani watched them unabashedly, then she hugged her knees and told me a story as elegiac as the prayers of our fathers escaping through the synagogue window.

“When our twins, Naama and Asisah, were little, they were chatty, happy girls,” she began. “I don't remember this much, but my sister Edna says it was so. When they turned ten, they both became sad and quiet. Then they got quieter. Finally, they stopped talking to anyone but each other. Months went by and they had become so quiet it was hard to know they were even there. Sometimes we would bump into them—we younger sisters—and we would be surprised, for we hadn't even known they were in the house. Before either even became a woman, we lost them. My parents saw that they were missing and looked for them everywhere. Three days later, a shepherd found them at the bottom of a wadi surrounded by steep cliffs. There was a path to the cliffs from behind the tannery. Sometimes we would go there, in a group of course, to make bonfires. But we never went close to the edge. Did they fall or jump? I have always been certain that they jumped, holding hands, as they did everything. Edna and Nogema think they fell. Hamama is sure they were pushed, but she is always suspicious and suspects malevolence where there is really only sorrow.

“For a long time after they died, my mother was quiet too. Sometimes we sisters were afraid that she would follow their ghosts up that mountain pass and fall, jump, or push herself in their wake. But when the year was up, she began to talk again, and then even to laugh sometimes. It is because of that tragedy that we were allowed to henna from the time we were little girls. A year after their deaths, my mother gathered us to her. She said, ‘My eldest daughters never wore henna, and now they are dead. The rest of you will wear henna, and you will live forever, won't you?' She kissed each of us and cried down onto our faces, and drew on our skin marks of
beracha
, blessing, and the triple and quadruple diamond protections against devils, demons, and djinn. When I die, I will go to heaven and find Naama and Asisah and I will give them my husband's kisses, his embraces, and my children will be their children too. This is what I dream sometimes, that they are up there waiting for me, and that the bottom of that valley is really just the floor of heaven, or at least, it is one floor, for surely heaven is everywhere, don't you think?”

*  *  *

A few nights after Hani told me about the twins, we women were washing up from dinner. Aunt Rahel pointed to Hani's hands, where the henna had become a faded gray scrim. “Soon we will reapply. Hani, try to dream up a new design. Or we will just improvise. Eh? Like usual.”

Just before the other Damaris left our house, Hani lingered at the door and comforted me.

“Don't fret, Adela.” She took my hand, threading her fingers through mine. “By the next time, I am sure your mother will have a change of heart.”

“And if she doesn't?”

“Then by the next time. There is always a next time. But don't think about it; you will join us and have fun anyway. A henna party is always fun, regardless of whether one gets henna or not.”

“Mmph . . . fun for you maybe. But for me? I am nothing but jealous.”

“Oh, Adela, your time will come, you'll see.” She flung an arm around my shoulders. The coins of my gargush tinkled against her kerchief. She turned and gave me a quick peck on the cheek, and then she poked me in the ribs with her free hand. I laughed. With Hani it was hard not to laugh.

The door was barely shut behind the other Damaris when my mother issued one of her customary threats. She had overheard Hani, and wasn't taking any chances that I would defy her.

“Don't you dare come home with henna on your hands,” she hissed. “If you do, I will scald your skin, or scrape it with a knife to remove it.” My mother always made it clear that though she was letting me keep company with my new cousin, I was not for one moment to think I was one of her sisters. I knew she was serious. Once my second-eldest brother, Elihoo, ran away and spent three nights living with acrobats and clowns traveling with a caravan from Kashmir. After my father dragged him home, my mother put leather thongs around his wrists and tied him to a fence post, making him stay there two days and nights, until the straps had cut into his skin and he was so hungry he began to gnaw on the leather. My mother never made idle threats, and was willing to shed the blood of her own children if she believed they deserved it.

The next afternoon, after I had finished my chores, Hani took my hand. Aunt Rahel had found henna bushes on the ridge behind the ritual bath, near Masudah's house. We foraged together, while Hani showed me what to look for. “These are the leaves we want,” she said, stripping the plant of green leaves with a little red vein down the center.

I pointed to the blood lines. “They look like crimson pieces of thread.”

“And that's what we want, the leaves with the brightest veins.”

She smashed a leaf on a stone, showed me the color on her nail. She reached out and took the fingers on my right hand and rubbed the color on my fingertips. Then she ran ahead and dared me to chase her.

“You can't pick leaves and then store them for months and use them later for henna. They have to be newly picked.”

“Why?”

“Old leaves lack the most important quality of henna.”

“Good color?”

“No, silly, steadfastness. Old leaves don't leave a decent stain.”