Henna House (35 page)

*  *  *

Soon after arriving in Aden, we received the dreadful news that Masudah had died in childbirth and that illness had carried off three of her youngest children, the rest fostered out as her husband, Dov, my eldest brother, had lost his mind. The children weren't in danger of confiscation, because even though he couldn't care for his sons and daughters, Dov still lived, and children would not be taken away from a living father. What can I say about my mourning for Masudah and her brood? I can tell you that it never ended, and that somewhere in my soul, I still cry for her, that other-mother of mine, whose warm touch taught me kindness and love, when my own mother had none to give. Poor Remelia suffered terribly and never smiled in quite the same way again. We sent for Masudah's remaining children. There were six of them, and they were brought down through the mountains by a charitable neighboring family. They lived in all of our houses, but mostly they lived with Yerushalmit, who took Masudah's offspring into her heart with a natural grace that smoothed over the rawest edges of the tragedy.

Several months after the arrival of Masudah's children, Hani bore her first child, a daughter she named Mara. It was late autumn of 1933. I was fifteen years old, and Hani was sixteen. I was with her during the birth and was the third to hold the babe—after Aunt Rahel and Nogema, who helped the midwife in the delivery. Hani gave me the baby after she had suckled her for the first time.

“There,” she sighed, “a dolly for you to play with. If we were back in Qaraah, I would let you bring her to your cave, so you could pretend she was your own.” I tucked little Mara into the crook of my arm, and rocked her back and forth. Hani's words had caught me off guard. I didn't know if she was being mean or playful, but since she had just given birth, I forgave her if she was pointing out the fact that I had no husband, no baby of my own in the offing. I kissed Mara in between her little eyebrows.

“She has your eyes,” I said to Hani, but Hani had already fallen asleep, exhausted from the trials of delivery. I sat for the next hour telling Mara everything I knew about life, which wasn't much at all, because I left out the parts about Asaf and my cave—they were entirely unsuitable subjects for a newborn, though Hani's taunting had riled
up my memories, and even as I kept my tongue, I saw myself as I had been then: a girl who married a prince she had conjured out of sky and earth.

After Mara's birth, there were others. Nogema bore a fourth son, who died the day before his circumcision. Hamama bore twin boys who both lived. Sultana's son Moshe entered the King George V Jewish School for Boys and received many compliments from the headmaster, who called him “a genius little scholar.” Remelia went for a time to live with Masudah's sister, her aunt in Lahaj, but returned complaining shamefacedly that her aunt's husband groped her under her dress and made other advances too mortifying to even mention. Throughout this time, more and more Jews were coming down from the Kingdom, filling the streets of Crater. These refugees were essentially stuck in Aden. They had nowhere to go. If they had their druthers, most would have gone to Palestine. But entrance into the port of Jaffa was severely restricted by the British. Only able-bodied folk under the age of thirty-five who could pay their own passage plus a sizable fee were permitted into the Holy Land. So the refugees glutted up Aden, overflowing the hostel built to house them.

Aunt Rahel began to take a personal interest in the refugees from the Kingdom, and volunteered in the hostel as a nurse and midwife. “After all,” she said, “it is our luck that we are prosperous and have a place here in Aden. These people are our brethren, and we must care for them like brothers and sisters.”

Sometimes Hani would leave her infant daughter with me or one of her sisters, and join her mother at the hostel. But while Aunt Rahel would nurse the refugees, Hani would bring a little pot and stylus and do their henna. When my sister-in-law Yerushalmit asked her why she was “dirtying her hands with the refugees,” Hani glowered, replying, “Yerushalmit, it is as my mother says: these women are our sisters. And a woman can bear greater burdens if she can look in her hands and see the world there. A woman can live in her hands, if she needs to.”

Aunt Rahel nodded her approval. “Hani is as much a nurse as I am,” she said. “She prescribes patterns and elements—paisleys, rose petals, lotus tendrils, conch shells, and three-dot borders on pulse points. Such medicine heals in its own fashion.”

*  *  *

Cleaning. Cooking. Marketing. I helped my aunt keep house for my uncle, but there was also Remelia, and the three of us made quick work of meals and household chores. As time passed, the dullness and heartache inside of me was replaced by a hunger I recognized: the urge to get outside of myself, the urge to ramble and explore. As when I was a girl, I began to wander. My cave was far, far away, my idols smashed, burned, and abandoned, but I still felt the same pull that I had felt as a child. I was a dutiful Jewess on the outside, but inside my heart, I was in search of a new altar at which to bow my head and bend my knee.

I'd learned that the city consisted of four main neighborhoods. In Ma'alla in the Northeast—a former fishing village—the Brits built a customs house and garrisoned their troops. Steamer Point, or Tawahi, to the west, is where they built a new deepwater port. The climate was cooler in Steamer Point, and so it became the locus of English political and mercantile activity with government buildings, housing for high officials, consulates, banking houses, shipping offices, as well as a public park with a statue of Queen Victoria and duty-free stores, catering to sailors and foreign visitors. There was also Sheik Othman, an Arab village north of Ma'alla, whose artesian wells supplied water to Aden. And Crater, the largest neighborhood, built in the crater of an extinct volcano, on the far eastern side of the Aden peninsula. The only way into Crater was through the main pass, which cut through rocky mountains.

Soon after arriving in Aden, I'd developed a regular route. I left our house and walked down B Street, across the Street of Answers, right at the Street of Questions. Another right, past the palace of the Great Banin Messa, departed and beloved president of the Jews of Aden, past the Prince of Wales Hospital, past streets F, G, and H. Finally I reached the Selim School for Girls. What a marvel! Hani had told me about the girls' schools in Aden, but until I saw them for myself I couldn't believe that such places actually existed. I found my window, leaned against the wall underneath it, and listened to the teacher inside speak to her class. I eventually learned that her name was Mrs. Sylvia Townsend. Her deep voice was like a plow—a good firm tool that makes purposeful ruts in the earth. I went almost every day for two months and listened underneath that window. Occasionally I followed Mrs. Townsend away from the building. She had red hair and a lipsticked mouth like a mountain poppy blooming wide open. She had big teeth. Freckles everywhere, even on her eyelids. A big peachy woman, like two Yemenite women
put together. Not fat, just broad. I followed Mrs. Townsend through the market and watched her buy orange persimmons, roasted almonds, and a container of imported hand cream from one of the cosmetics ladies whose stalls were swathed in chemical perfumy vapors. I sat outside the window of the Selim School for Girls and listened to her goad her students, encourage them, drill them, praise them, and celebrate their accomplishments. One day Mrs. Townsend sent a student outside to bring me in. The first thing she said to me was, “I knew you were there all along, and I have finally taken pity on your poor curious soul. How old are you? Are you married? Where do you live? What does your father do? How long have you been in Aden?”

“Dear lady, how is it that you speak our language so well?”

“I learned it the hard way. Walking on my knuckles like an ape through a jungle of Levantine grammar. My husband's secretary taught me. A rare bird of a boy—an Adeni Jew with a British father.”

She taught almost exclusively in the language of the Jewish population, Yemeni-Judeo Arabic, a mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yemenite Arabic. Of course she spoke her own language, English, and in the market, I had heard her haggling in Arabic with an ostrich-feather merchant. I explained to Mrs. Townsend that I myself had been taught to write by my cousin, and how I had taken a stick in my hand and taught the Habbani girls and women their letters. I told her that teaching the Habbanim was like a charm sewn into my soul, a special magic stitch; that I often dreamed of the riverbank, of the letters in the earth, of their hands on my hands. She nodded her big pink head, bit her red lips. She thought for a moment. Then she pointed to my hennaed hands. “Adela, your name is Adela? I will make you a bargain. You give me henna and I will let you sit inside the school. In my classroom. And then, if you would like, you can help with the littlest girls—teaching them their letters.” She pointed again to my hands. “I want you to give me an application. An honest-to-goodness application. Yes? Do you know how? How to do it properly? You have good technique? Good. I have always wanted to wear henna. This is what we call
a fair trade
. My husband will laugh. He will say, ‘Sylvie, now you have really gone native.' And he will be right.” She screwed up her face and let out a belly laugh. When she was done laughing she said, “Tomorrow afternoon? I teach until lunch. But you know that already. Meet me after class, and we will take the lorry to Steamer Point.”

On my way home from the market I thought of the Habbani woman—Rosa—and how she had traded me henna for letters. And now I was trading henna for letters again. Would I be a teacher?
A fair trade
, the British teacher had said, and it dawned on me that my father, who made his living trading the skin of animals for money, would not have seen it that way. Henna is just color and shape. Letters are just shape and ink. But this was a trade of color for ink, and shape for shape. I had to agree with Mrs. Townsend; it seemed a fair trade indeed. Would she really let me stand in the front of a room of girls and teach? The thought left me giddy. I didn't pay attention to where I was going and walked straight into a boy with a basket of seeded loaves on his head. He scowled at me, dodging to the side, a maneuver that almost tipped his burden.

The next day I met Mrs. Townsend on the steps of the school and let her pay one rupee for my ticket to Steamer Point. She lived in a neat white stucco house not far from the crescent of shops near Victoria Park. I held her pale, pinkish palm in my own, pressed a stylus to her life line, and drew for her my very own variation of one of Hamama's amulet water inscriptions. A woman of such learning deserved a powerful design, I thought, a design that would eddy around her palm and flow into her blood. When it was finished, she held up her hands and appraised her own worth.

She said, “My, what a long way I have come from Tottenham Court. What will my Gordon say?” She pointed to a framed photograph of a square-jawed British gentleman.

“You must teach me. You simply must teach me how you do it.” A few weeks later she convened a little class in her house, and that is how I came to teach five British ladies—all of them wives of British engineers or bureaucrats—the basics of the art of henna.

Ever since coming to Aden, my aunt, cousins, and I met on the New Moon to readorn ourselves. Sometimes my sisters-in-law joined us. When next we met for henna at Edna's house, just a few days after I'd taught Mrs. Townsend and her friends, I told everyone what I had done. I told the story of the trade, of Mrs. Sylvia Townsend interrogating me, and of the stale little flat biscuits she served her friends.

Sultana said, “Adela, your mother would beat you for such impudence. She would insist that you never again do such a thing as that.”

But Hani nodded her approval, clapped her hands, and said, “Adela, you are brilliant. British ladies wearing henna. Maybe we can make a
special pair of gloves, mark them with henna designs, and put them on the Statue of Queen Victoria in the park at Steamer Point. Wouldn't that be hilarious? Visiting dignitaries would think that she'd
gone native.
”

Nogema screwed up her mouth. “Adela, they must have their own designs. Your ladies . . . I heard once that there are rings of stones on the British Isles. You must encourage them to incorporate the ring stones into their designs. It is important to honor one's own origin and landscape.”

Hamama didn't approve at all. She was uncustomarily gloomy when she scrunched up her face in disdain. “Pale skin clashes with henna. The contrast is too great, and the evil eye confuses the henna for blood. No good can come of it.”

That night I thought about what Hamama had said, about the British ladies' pale skin and henna. In Qaraah, almost everyone was a toasted sesame brown. But here I had become used to seeing people of different shades: coal-black Nubians who worked down at the docks, dark-chocolate Somali women who served in the wealthier Arab and Jewish houses, burnt-umber Ceylonese coffee traders who came and went from Uncle Barhun's house, sepia-toned Indian customs collectors who levied taxes for the Crown, and their wives—Indian ladies in billowing Calcutta silk having tea on the veranda of the Aden Inn. The Arab fishermen and boatmen who lived in Sheik Othman, their skin the color of honeyed walnuts, and their wives swathed in black
balto
with their faces the same honeyed color, peeking out from behind their kerchiefs as they did their marketing and walked through town. There were the tourists from Europe and Great Britain, people like Mrs. Townsend with skin as white as a cooked whole egg, or as pink as the downy belly of a newborn kitten. They sipped lemon ices on the veranda of the Hôtel de l'Europe while pointing at Abyssinian monks, bare-chested Somali fishermen in loincloths, and Arab tribesmen from the north in robes so long they seemed to carry all the secrets of the desert in the folds of their flowing djellabas.