Henna House (19 page)

Compared to Hani, I was miserably ignorant. My mother had taught me my Arabic letters and numbers when I was old enough to be sent
to the market—rudimentary literacy was useful for grocery lists and making change—but I didn't know the Hebrew alphabet, the aleph bet. It had never occurred to me that I would learn. Hani changed all of that. She took a stick and drew letters in the earth. She made me repeat their sounds after her.

“See, Adela,” she said, pointing to the letters that spelled out my name, “
aleph
,
dalet
,
lamed
,
heh
.” She gave me her stick and I traced her letters. Then I wrote my name over and over again. She praised my steady hand, corrected my mistakes. And when I was done learning my name, she wrote the entire aleph bet, all twenty-two letters. I started from
aleph
, and on the third day had them all memorized. Hani also showed me the secrets behind the shapes of the letters. She said that every letter came from a picture, and that if you remember the picture, it is easier to remember the letter itself.

“
Aleph
is an ox, see how we can draw the face of an ox? And
bet
is a house, see how the shape of the letter makes a shelter, a little house?”

When I asked why a girl needed to know such things, she opened her big eyes even wider than usual and said, “Adela, every daughter of God is a spark of light, and when we gather together at the end of time, all of our sparks will illuminate the World to Come.”

“Really?”

“Silly, I'm just teasing you. But it is better to learn than not to learn, don't you think? And anyway, knowledge makes us less susceptible to despair. I heard this once, from an old woman in the coffee marketplace of Aden, and I have decided to believe it.”

She chased me up a hill and drew a big
gimel
in the earth,
gimel, gamal, camel
 . . .

A few nights later, when my father saw me scratching the Hebrew letters of my own name in the dirt by the grinding stones, he smiled and said, “Adela, you are as smart as a boy.”

This remark stung, because if it meant that I was as smart as my brothers, I was still destined for idiocy. But I didn't dwell on it, for I was immersed in my own joy. Hani had indeed rescued me from my dreary life, and I was reveling in the light of her company. I was happy, truly happy, for the first time since Asaf had left. My father rarely coughed these days. And when he did, it was a quiet little cough, not the familiar rumble that shook his whole body and left his eyes gray and his lips white with spittle.

But my happiness was not complete, for my mother would still not let me fully participate in the Damaris' henna ceremonies. I was desperate to have decorated hands and feet, like them, and one day even scratched a design into my left forearm, with the sharpened edge of a twig. I didn't draw blood, but the white lines that emerged from my skin gave me away and my mother rubbed rancid butter on my skin and didn't let me see my cousin for three days.

S
ummer gave way to autumn, and with autumn came our preparations for the New Year. Our New Year marked the end of the yearly cycle of Torah readings and the beginning of a new cycle. I remember thinking about how every year we Jews read the same stories, and how my life felt like it too was a familiar story writ on a parchment. The same portions happened over and over again. I woke in the morning and helped my mother cook, clean, and do marketing. And then I woke another morning to the same cooking, cleaning, and marketing. One day was exactly like the next. Perhaps things would have continued just the way they were, an endless cycle, had Sultana and her son Moshe not fallen ill. It happened in the days between the New Year and the Day of Atonement. Sultana was stricken first. Sick with fevers and rashes, she would neither eat nor drink. She grew delirious. Masudah cared for little Moshe, who was now five years old. But then Moshe wouldn't eat either. He tugged on his left ear and screamed in pain. His body was racked with violent coughs and he could barely breathe. He was wakeful and hot, too tired to even cry.

In my family there are many versions of this story. In one, Sultana and Moshe nearly died, but at the last minute, Aunt Rahel burst into Elihoo's house and came to their aid, saving both mother and child from certain death. In another version, Aunt Rahel insisted on being allowed to help but was forbidden to enter the sickroom, barred by my brother Elihoo, who had heard the stories about Aunt Rahel and refused to allow her to tend his family. In this version, Aunt Rahel tried three times, knocking on the door, even opening it herself, each time being rebuffed until the final time, when she was given passage. Another version was that my mother herself humbled Elihoo, telling her son that he was but a gnat in the bog of the universe and that she
was a spider, spinner of webs. In other words, she let him understand that he had no authority when it came to the life of a child of her own blood. Then she went to Aunt Rahel. Did my mother beg Aunt Rahel to come? I am sure she didn't have to. Whatever bargains my mother made were between herself and God.

When Aunt Rahel arrived, she found Sultana greatly improved, but Moshe . . . Moshe was more dead than alive. He was breathing rapidly and his heart was pounding so quickly in his chest he was more like a bird than a boy. Hani later described the treatment to me. Aunt Rahel examined his little chest, listened to his breathing, looked at the color of his tongue and the consistency of his sputum. Then she prepared tonics. She sliced an onion and put it in a bowl with pure honey; after an hour she had him drink the syrup. She also gave him parsnip juice and a tonic of sesame and linseed. She rubbed peppermint oil on his back and pressed a cotton sack filled with warm, damp wheat to his left ear. I went to visit and to see if there was anything I could do to help. When I arrived, Aunt Rahel was holding Moshe and praying. But it wasn't a prayer I knew. She was asking
Ayin HaChayim
, the Wellspring of Life, to redeem Moshe, to save him from his illness.

Aunt Rahel stayed with Sultana and Moshe all night. In the morning the crisis had passed. Moshe slept soundly in his mother's arms. His chest had cleared, his fever had broken, his ear had drained its noxious fluid. Rahel hadn't even hennaed him. “Sometimes henna comes first,” Hani explained to me when I asked her about the role of henna in treatments. “Sometimes it comes last, and sometimes it is not even needed.”

Before the other Damaris came, my life was empty of questions. Now, everything set me wondering. When Moshe had his sixth birthday, a few weeks later, Sultana proudly walked with him to the bigger well. The other women gathered around and cooed at how tall he had become, they listened to him tell jokes, they cheered his perfect openmouthed grin. Sultana's smile was a sight to behold.

I wondered how Aunt Rahel helped save Moshe. Was she calling on God? Or on God by a different name? Did Elohim answer if you called him Ayin HaChayim? I supposed so, for the boy had lived. But why had I not recognized the words? A few weeks after Moshe's sixth birthday, Aunt Rahel prepared her pot of henna paste. I sat at the grinding stones and watched Hani wash her skin and then help her mother sort through
her array of moisturizing oils and unguents. My mother came out of our house and summoned me. I followed her inside. She put a piece of dough in my hands and told me to make the evening bread. When I had finished rolling and stretching and stretching and rolling, she said, “Enough, enough” as if I had forced myself upon her, as if I had asked for the work. Then she said, “Well, go already.”

“To where?”

She looked out the window, at the house with the red roof.

“To them” she said, spitting out the word
them
but then softening. “To your cousin.”

She had never referred to Hani as “my cousin” before. She usually said “the
other
Damari girl” with a bitter emphasis on the word
other.
I knew that something in our relationship had shifted.

“And may I—”

“Yes, you may let
them
 . . .”