Henna House (3 page)

The night lasted forever. My father coughed. My mother tended him—reserving her pity for the small hours in between midnight and dawn, when she dabbed his burning brow with a wet cloth and murmured comforting words that she would never utter by daylight.

In the morning the heat broke, and the knife that hung above me in the sky sheathed its blade. My father had willed the worst of his sickness away. I don't know how he did this, but by morning prayers his fever had passed. The color returned to his cheeks and the strength to his legs. There was still sallowness to his skin, and he still coughed that horrible cough, but the immediate danger had clearly dissipated. Left behind was a stink—a foul odor of inevitability that made us all anxious and jumpy. In the coming weeks, whenever I went to the market I looked over my shoulder and cocked my ear for the maroon billowing
swish swish
of the Confiscator's djellaba. When I came home, my head was always filled with the ghost of my father's cough, a groaning cautionary lament that scraped the walls of our house even when his lungs were clear. My mother finally began looking for a suitable groom for me. “If only you could marry Binyamin Bashari,” she said over and over again—to me, to Auntie Aminah, to my sisters-in-law, to anyone who would listen. She let it be known that if she'd had her choice, she would already have engaged me to Binyamin Bashari, son of our neighbor two doors up. Binyamin's father made blades for jambias. Jews were not permitted to wear jambia, but we were the masters at making them. Working with one's hands was considered beneath the Muslim men in the Kingdom of Yemen, so the work was left to us Jews. Accordingly, the men of our community became jambia makers, metalsmiths, wicker workers, jewelers, potters, tailors, carpenters, tanners, and rope braiders. Mr. Bashari had learned the craft of jambia from his father when he was just a boy. His father had learned it from his father, who had learned it from his father, who had learned it from his father, who had learned it from his father, and so on, back to the generations who came to Yemen in the retinue of Bilquis, whom others called Sheba the Queen.

Binyamin Bashari was my playmate, a sturdy, good-tempered boy with deep-set brown eyes and a wolf-muzzle jaw that made him look fierce, even when he was laughing. His mother was one of my mother's only friends, but Binyamin had been betrothed to a distant cousin from Sana'a since the day of his Brit Milah, when he was circumcised and engaged almost simultaneously, at the tender age of eight days. Disappointed, my mother had to look beyond the Bashari house, and cast her net widely over the eligible boys of Qaraah.

Alas, her early attempts were all for naught. A recitation of the boys she tried to engage me to reads like a liturgy of misfortune. It was my sister-in-law Sultana who gave me the most comprehensive accounting of my ill-fated fiancés. Sultana, no stranger to misfortune herself, didn't spare me any details. Both of Sultana's parents had died the year after she married my second-eldest brother, Elihoo. After eleven years of marriage, poor, sad, orphaned Sultana had only one living baby, a scrawny little thing named Moshe. Before Moshe, she had lost six babies all in their first year of life. And then one more died in her womb—a little girl so tiny and perfect that her beautiful little body fit into the palm of the midwife's hand. After their last baby died, my brother Elihoo almost took another wife, but at the last minute he canceled the engagement. Elihoo was a brute, but he loved Sultana and pledged himself to her and to her alone, whether they had living children or not.

According to Sultana, my first possible fiancé died of the pox just one week after my mother broached the subject with his mother. The second potential groom fell from the upper platform in the granary where his father worked, and broke his back, dying in agony after the passage of two Sabbaths. The third boy's mother and father agreed to an engagement, but two days before the ceremony, the boy choked on a cashew nut, turned blue, and died at Torah school. The fourth went to sleep one night and never woke up. The fifth boy did not die in an accident or succumb to an illness, but was murdered by a crazy rope braider who lived in the bowels of the market. His headless body was found behind a bush near the bigger well around the corner from the Square of the Just, and his head was found in the madman's lair, along with the heads of three other victims.

After the last and most gruesome incident, my mother threw up her hands.

“There is no one for Adela to marry,” she complained to my father,
chopping nuts for baklava. “She's a bad-luck charm. An opposite amulet. What mother would want her for her son?”

At this my father slapped her, knocking loose one of her teeth.

She raked her nails across his face, drawing blood where there was no beard.

“We should send her to Aden,” my father growled, “smuggle her with a caravan. Such things happen, you know. Children make it out of the Kingdom, I have heard talk of it . . .”

My mother widened her eyes and made a grotesque grimace, as if she had bitten into an apricot with a worm for a pit. “To Aden? Never. Better she be a Muslim than fall into the hands of your brother's wife, that Indian witch.”

Even though I was just a little girl, I knew she was referring to my Aunt Rahel—a Jewess born in Alibag, India. Rahel had come to Yemen as a child, and married my Uncle Barhun in Aden. I had never met Aunt Rahel, but, for reasons I could not fathom, she was the witch in all of my mother's cautionary tales, the villainous harpy who would snatch me at midnight should I dare to dream of a fate other than the one Elohim had written for me in the Book of Life.

My father lifted a hand to slap my mother again. She raised the little bone-handled knife, and waved it in his face. He retreated. He knew, after all, that what my mother had said was true. None of the mothers of the Jewish boys of Qaraah wanted me for their sons. Why would they? Who could blame them? Perhaps the Confiscator was correct and my eyes were too big for my face. Perhaps I was doomed to live a life of misfortune. Some of my first memories are of playing with other little girls who had all been engaged since before they could toddle. They always made fun of me. “Adela,” they cackled, “you will be orphaned and adopted, maybe they will call you Mustafina, you will pray to Mohammed, or you will be an old maid for sure.” I kicked sand in their faces, and ran away to hide in Auntie Aminah's lap. Aminah was my mother's only sister. She was older than my already old mother by eight years. She had wrinkly skin, gray wiry hair, and, most impressive, a crippling hump on her left shoulder that made it hard for her to walk quickly, or even to breathe. She had never married because of her infirmities, but I had always liked her much better than I did my own mother. She would sit under the old frankincense tree behind her house, embroidering or darning. We had a frankincense tree too. Hers
was up a little path, behind an old stone wall and some mint bushes. “Sha, sha, Adelish,” she would say, “don't cry.” But I couldn't help it, and my tears would mingle with the sweet scent of the resin from the tree, giving my sorrow a mellow tincture, though it didn't feel anything but bitter to my heart.

Sometimes I would hear my mother lamenting the conundrum of my groomlessness to her friend Mrs. Bashari, Binyamin's mother. “Maybe if we raise the price,” she said, referring to my dowry. “Perhaps we should throw in the bone-and-pearl
sundug
case.” My mother and her friends all spoke about me like chattel, and in time I even came to see myself as a calf to be sold at market, or as one of the ugly flat-nosed monkeys in the cage of the Somali curiosity trader. The poor creatures would poke their slick pink tongues out of the bars, and make crude gestures to passersby. Sometimes a wealthy man would buy one of those monkeys and lead it away with a collar and leash around its neck. The monkey would hop by its new owner's side, dodging the crush of the market throng, screeching and howling in coy terror at this new variety of imprisonment.

T
he summer I turned seven, the Confiscator grew industrious. Until then, he had been either lazy or compassionate, and had made it a habit to pluck a Jewish orphan only every few months or so, but that season, he reaped a bountiful harvest. It began with poor little Devira Ladani. The story of her confiscation was told to me by my sister-in-law Masudah, who was married to my brother Dov. Like all Jewish women in Qaraah, Masudah collected stories of confiscation and worried over them, like amber beads until they were smooth as silk. Mr. Ladani was a maker of decorative cabinets. She told me that Mr. Ladani had begun to feel faint during the recitation of his morning prayers. Supposedly he swayed midway through the Ve'ahavta, the prayer that begins with the words “And you
shall
love G-d,” which the sages interpreted to mean that all living beings will love God at some point in their future, no matter the paucity of their faith in the present. I don't know if Mr. Ladani had yet reached the point in his life that he loved God, or whether he merely liked Him, or only tolerated Him, but Masudah told me that Mr. Ladani swayed and nearly fainted upon hearing those words. The baker, who was standing next to him in the synagogue, steadied him, and made modest inquiries about the state of his health. Mr. Ladani insisted he was fine. After prayers, he went to work, for he was that sort of man—one who never missed a day of work as long as he could still sit at his bench.

He was finishing an order when he began to feel cold and then hot and then cold again and then very, very hot. He shivered, even though it was midsummer. He put down his file, wiped his blazing forehead with a corner of his apron. He picked up the file and tried to continue sharpening. It didn't take but another moment before he collapsed in his stall. When they took him home, he no longer knew his own name
and his fever had risen so high that he went into convulsions. He was dead by midnight, and in the morning his wife was stricken too. She died at dawn the next day. How their only child, Devira Ladani, wasn't afflicted by the fever was considered a mystery and a miracle.

What to do with the child was a conundrum. No one wanted the poor girl—after all, how could anyone be sure she didn't carry the plague in the damp crannies of her bunched-up fists? But still, one couldn't leave a child alone in a house, and so she was ultimately taken in by the wife of Rabbi Tabib, who was as notorious for his controversial writings as he was praised for his compassion and civic good works. Mrs. Tabib was a good friend of Auntie Aminah. She told my aunt that Devira was the sort of girl who didn't make a peep or bother a soul and was always absentmindedly playing with a spool of thread or looking down at people's feet. Devira was at the Tabibs' for only one week before the Imam's men came for her. It shouldn't have been a surprise, but it was. A horrible surprise—the fierce staccato knock on the door, the way the Imam's men swaggered into poor Mrs. Tabib's house, sneering at her, ordering her around, and giving no explanation at all for the confiscation of the orphan, who had been nothing but quiet and sad and shy since her parents' death, and now screamed like a hysterical kid goat stuck by its neck in a fence. She even spat on the man who grabbed her wrists, and tried to kick his shins when he pulled her toward him with all the grubby tenderness of a lion fondling his next meal.

Mrs. Tabib ran after the Imam's men. She screamed and shook her fists as they disappeared down the Alley of Angels. “She was fierce herself,” my aunt said with admiration. “She yelled to poor little Devira that she would come for her, that she would fight for her, that she would ransom her back.” But none of this would happen. The Imam's men took the girl to Sana'a. The next day Rabbi Tabib himself went to Sana'a and met with the Imam's cousin-by-marriage, minister of Jewish affairs. The minister explained that little Devira had already been converted and adopted by a pious Muslim couple, and would be raised in accordance with the tenants of Islam. “And if you try to get her back, you will hang for your impudence, but why would you risk your life for her? She is not your relative anyway; we are doing you a favor by taking her off your hands.”

After Devira Ladani, the confiscations grew more numerous. A month-old babe was wrested out of his mother's arms. The boy's father had
dropped dead at his market stall. The child was given to a large Muslim family of coffee traders who renamed him Jibril after the archangel. Next to be taken was a four-year-old little deaf girl whose father was killed in a gruesome accident at the new iron forge. And then, in early spring, a six-year-old girl was confiscated. Her parents had both been killed when a horse-drawn carriage overturned in the late-day bustle at the Sana'an gate to Qaraah.

*  *  *

Fall in the Kingdom meant that we Jews were engrossed in preparations for the celebration of the New Year. It was also a traditional time for diplomacy. I was too young for politics, but had I not been, I would have known that the Imam was entertaining a high dignitary from the Aden Protectorate at a banquet in honor of territorial negotiations. The festivities lasted three days but resulted only in further stagnation and hostility. Supposedly the Imam served the British emissary baklava from the best bakery in all of Sana'a. When the emissary bit the pastry, he hit a whole almond and one of his front teeth cracked in half. There were no dentists in Sana'a, and the British emissary's howls of agony could be heard over the Imam's compound wall. Ever after, that night was referred to as the Night of the Broken Tooth, but it also signified a break in pleasant relations. After that there were no more banquets and no more amicable negotiations. The Imam raised an army and enlisted the help of the desert tribesmen—who had rifles that they had bought from the Italians in Eritrea—to force the Brits into the ocean. And while he wouldn't be successful in kicking the Brits out of Yemen, the Imam established temporary dominion over the emirates of Dhala and Beidha, and then sent his men further south to Audhali territory.