Henna House (4 page)

But I knew nothing of political machinations. My life was very small; it mostly consisted of helping my mother sweep and scrub, going to the market, carrying a little jug of water from the well, and pounding dough with the heel of my hand. I was being raised to be a wife and mother by a joyless woman who took no pleasure in the simple distractions life could have afforded her. Chief among those for women in our community were henna gatherings. My sisters-in-law, aunties, or neighbors would adorn one another while telling tales, singing songs, and sharing gossip, but my mother always refused to participate. Whenever she saw an elaborately decorated woman, she
muttered cruel epithets under her breath. She had very few friends, and went about her daily duties with a sour expression on her face. If she caught me smiling, or humming to myself as I helped with housework, she would rebuke me. Sometimes in the market I would buy nuts from a pretty lady who always had exquisite henna tattoos on her hands and forearms. When she handed me my change, the coins would sit in the middle of her decorations. I would reach for the money tentatively, half-afraid of the forbidden markings, half hoping that they would magically rub off on my own skin.

*  *  *

Autumn passed quickly. Midwinter was soon upon us, and then early spring. But the spring was gusty, illness abounded, and I went about my chores with an old kerchief tied around my face by my mother, who believed it would protect me from ill winds. I hated that kerchief, for it chafed my neck and made me sweat under my gargush. I often untied it, letting it trail over my shoulders when I was out of sight of our house. One day I was in the market, shopping for persimmons for my mother's Sabbath jelly. I had my basket of fruit, and was walking along distractedly when I tripped on one of the corners of the kerchief and fell. My basket tipped, scattering the orange fruit in the dirt. I hoisted myself half up, and reached a hand in the hard-packed market earth to grab one plump fruit. Just as my fingers curled around it, there in front of me were the fancy maroon shoes with embossed flowers that my father had made. And above them, the daintiest ankles I had ever seen, swathed in gold pants under a dress of rich magenta brocade with an overlay mantle of brown silk.

“What good fortune!” A voice boomed from somewhere on top of me. “It is the little Jewess splayed at our feet. The very one I picked out for you. Remember I told you about her, the shoemaker's daughter.”

I froze. I knew it was the Confiscator. My heart almost jumped out of my chest.

“Oh, Mamoon,” purred the Confiscator's wife in a high silvery ribbon voice, a voice as fancy, impractical, and ornate as the shoes she wore, “you have such exquisite taste. When will she be mine?”

The dirt under me smelled sour of garbage. I tasted blood from my lip, which had banged into my teeth. I sucked in my breath, and kept staring at those shoes, which I myself had helped to make.

“The father is not long for this world. He will die, and then we will bring her home, just as I promised. She can be your pet, your daughter, or your servant. Whatever you wish.”

The bangles on her ankles tinkled like bells, and when she moved her hands, at least ten bracelets slid up and down her wrists.

“Don't be a fool,” she said, “the little capuchin would eat her alive, and the dogs would never share their scraps. She will be my daughter; I will call her Judi, or maybe Ruaa. What do you think? Will either name suit her?”

She spoke about me as if I weren't there. And then I realized that I wasn't. I had turned into someone else, a girl with a different fate. I thought about surrendering, becoming one with the dirt. Disappearing. But then fire blazed inside my whole body.

She bent down. I peeked up and saw that she was pretty—her wide face was shaped like a heart, with a pointy chin, green eyes slanting upward, full lips half-open, her tongue licking sharp little teeth. The bangles on her wrists tinkled along with the ones on her ankles. She picked up a persimmon from near my right knee, almost grazing me with her fingertips.

“Here, my darling, let me help you gather your fruit.” Her nails were perfectly manicured with square tips, the persimmon a plump little sun in her palm.

I scrambled backward and then to my feet. I bunched the miserable kerchief up in my fist, turned, and fled, my arms pumping, chest heaving. Spit coming out of my mouth, snot running down my nose. Crying and running at the same time. Were those footsteps coming after me? Could it be? Didn't he know my father wasn't dead yet? Didn't he know that he had no right? Wouldn't someone tell him? Tell the Confiscator that I hadn't yet become an orphan?
Thud thud thud!
Yes, someone was following me, but it seemed that the market crowd parted for me, and then enveloped me. I didn't dare take the road, so I went through the yards, and when I got to Auntie Aminah's, three doors away from our own, I kept running, through her back garden, past the frankincense tree, down the path that led to the escarpment. And still those footsteps behind me.
Thud thud thud.

“Adela!”

“Adela, it's me!” I turned, my whole body taut with dread and anticipation. But it wasn't the Confiscator. It was my friend Binyamin
Bashari. He had been in the market delivering his father's lunch when he saw me trip and watched the Confiscator and his wife bend over me. Now Binyamin threaded his brown hand in my own, and we ran together. Down the path, our footsteps making a mini-symphony with the buzzing of cicadas and the far-off call of a crow. The path led through a grove of citrons, down to an old culvert that marked the spot where a river had once flowed. The air was tangy, aromatic, and thick. We kept running until we reached a place where the culvert met the mountain and henna bushes grew along the lip of the escarpment. We ran for the safety of their cover, and when we pushed ourselves beneath them, we saw an opening in the mountain. We had to bend down and duck to get in, but inside was a space tall enough for us to stand. I sank down and held myself, rocking back and forth in the cool darkness of the cave.

For several moments neither of us spoke. Then Binyamin told me that after I fell, the Confiscator and his wife had turned to vultures. They grew wings and talons and beaks. He told me that he heard the Confiscator's wife caw, “When you are mine, little darling, I will comb your hair with a tortoiseshell brush” and then she turned back into a woman again, a woman whose laughter was high and shiny and pure as hate.

When Binyamin finished speaking, he flung a clumsy arm around me. I leaned into him. I knew that I might be safe for now, but even there, in the belly of the earth, I heard the tinkling of the bangles on the Confiscator's wife's ankles, and the reverberations of her awful words filled my head.

*  *  *

After that day, that flight, I took possession of that blessed little cave. Throughout that spring and early summer, I felt truly safe there. I knew the Confiscator would never find me in my earthen sanctuary. But it wasn't only the Confiscator that I hid from. I also hid from my mother, whose cruelty toward me often took the form of verbal rebukes, but also manifested itself in beatings that left my behind black-and-blue. I hid from my older brothers, and I hid from the future and whatever miseries it would hold. I grew to love that cave. I brought candles and set them into the stone crevices of the walls, and began stealing knickknacks from home—a little copper pot and tray, an indigo wood-husk pillow that smelled like Auntie Aminah's house, a small reed mat that I wove myself. Eventually I began picking up stones and twigs,
and using the embroidery skills I had learned from Auntie Aminah, I made them into idols. I constructed a small altar and set my idols upon it. I was an uncommonly pagan child for a Jewish girl and imbued my stones with the names of goddesses I had heard mumbled by the fortune-tellers in the corner market stalls. I revered my idols like the tribeswomen of old. I knew what my mother would say if she discovered them; she would say, “If Elohim saw them, he would throw you in a pit and cover you with spiders.” I didn't know much about theology. I couldn't read, and could murmur only the shortest of psalms, but I did suspect even then that my mother's threats were nonsense. I was of the naive opinion that Elohim was as much God of Little Girls as God of Men, so He would surely approve of my stitchery and compliment my cave-keeping. I kissed my idols, petted them, held them tenderly, and left them offerings of honey, sesame, herbs, or wheat. Whenever I left I prayed to Elohim to watch over them in my absence. I never stayed in my cave for long because I didn't want to be caught, though each of the women who were supposed to watch over me—my sisters-in-law, my aunties, and my own mother—always assumed that I was with one of the others.

A month or so after I tripped in the market, Binyamin appeared at the door of my cave. Even though he was my friend, I glared at him, “This is my place now. Swear you won't follow me again.” He bit his lip. His wolf-muzzle face looked ugly to me. I noticed a fresh scab running through one eyebrow. His lips were puffy, as if he had been bitten by a bee. I knew that this meant that one of his older brothers had probably beaten him. He was always getting beaten. I was grateful that I was a girl, and that my mother hit me only on my behind and my brothers took care not to leave scars when they tormented me.

“I promise,” he said with a crooked smile, brushing his hair out of his eyes. And that's all he said. My friend Binyamin Bashari didn't have many words, and those he had, he doled out carefully, as precious as the ruby chips his father mounted in the hilts of jambias.

But he broke this promise many times. Years later, Binyamin Bashari told me that he often followed me to my cave, and that he would sit underneath the bushiest henna plant and listen as I sang to my idols, and that sometimes in my absence he would go into the cave himself, and leave his own offerings to my goddesses with ancient names.

T
he sun hung low over the graveyard and I ran out of my cave without bidding farewell to my idols. It was the summer of 1926. I had recently turned eight. I raced past the old grove of citrons. I was running because I hadn't finished my chores for dinner. I knew that my mother would grab me by the scruff of my neck, berate me, and then beat me for my torn leggings, my messy hair. I had to avoid her. I crossed my auntie's garden. Instead of going home by the road, I crept through the yards in between my auntie's and our own. The house just next to ours was that of our neighbor, a blind man who lived with his spinster daughter. She was a mistress dyer, and the back of their house was always filled with colorful troughs of dye skeins of wool and pieces of drying cloth that people brought for her to dip. She specialized in dyeing the red and black
lahfeh
scarves that married Jewish women wore over their
gargushim
for modesty. Drying lahfeh were pinned to lines on the periphery of the yard. Some were complete—and had red and white roundels winking out at me, like eyes on a face. Muslim women would buy lahfeh too, and tie them around their swelling bellies when they were bearing, thus borrowing the stranger magic of their Jewish sisters.

I ran in between the troughs, and crept through the crack in the wall that led into our yard. I heard cacophony from the kitchen—my brothers all talking at once, followed by my father's guttural sputtering, and his cough, always his cough. His coughing was worse when he was excited. What was he saying? He sounded so happy, but at the same time, concerned. I pulled a washbasin under the window, climbed up, and peeked in. What I saw was that the room was crowded. My father and brothers were clustered around a stranger. The stranger's arm was in a linen sling. He looked like an older clay version of my father left
too long in the sun, drooped and withered from exposure. His skin was an ashen sickly gray. My brothers were all leaning into one another, arms flung over one another's shoulders. My mother was beside my father, holding a large wooden spoon. She was trying to quiet everyone down, yelling my brothers' names while jabbing the spoon in the air for emphasis. My father was speaking, “Oh my,” he sputtered. “Tell me everything. Don't leave out a single detail.”

The sickly looking man took a deep breath. He wiped his brow with his good hand, then he began, “We were in the middle of our annual western journey. We were traveling by boat from Bombay to Oman. Once on land, we hired camels and were crossing the southern edge of the Rub' al Khali. We reached a place called the Oasis of Screams. We stopped in the oasis to water our camels, and spent two nights enjoying the hospitality of the Bedouin who made their camp there. On the third night catastrophe struck. We were beset upon by a pair of criminals. I heard my camels moaning, woke up, went to see what the trouble was. When the thieves saw me, one drew a knife and slashed me deeply in the arm, you see, right here, just below the shoulder. The thieves made off with the bulk of my merchandise, and left me bleeding to death in a fetid puddle of sand where the terrified camels had pissed out their fear at the goings-on.”

The man stopped talking. My father said, “And then what? Who tended your injuries?” But before the stranger could answer, I heard footsteps and jumped off the basin. I crawled under a nearby rosebush. Thorns stabbed my back, but I ignored the pain. If my mother found me eavesdropping, she would beat me with that wooden spoon. But the footsteps were not my mother's; they belonged to a boy who looked about my age. He was crouching down and staring at me under the bush, motioning for me to come out. Slowly, I obliged. Soon we stood face-to-face. I had never seen him before. I assumed that he belonged with the man in the house, but they didn't look anything alike. He was wearing a red cap, a wrinkled and patched brown suit. His gently sloping eyes were a startling eggshell blue. He had a pleasant upturned nose, high cheeks, and very pretty lips, soft and round like a girl's. His twisted earlocks hung all the way down to his chin. His front teeth were missing, though one was in the process of growing in. I too was missing my front teeth, and at the sight of his, I felt my tongue explore the empty spaces in my mouth. I was scratched up and tousled from my run home, my fall
on the escarpment, and my tenure under the rosebush. My headdress had come askew, and the point was tilting toward my right ear, the tassels thrown over my neck. He crooked his hand, and motioned for me to get up. I righted my headdress and followed him around to the front of our house, where a donkey cart was tied to the hitching post. The donkey was out of the harness, eating from the trough my father used to feed Pishtish, our donkey, and Pishtish was tied to the other side of the trough, reluctantly sharing his dinner with the interloper. The boy climbed onto the cart and dug under some blankets. He pulled something out, scrambled back down, and reached for my hand. He opened my fingers, for they were clenched in a fist, and put something on my palm. It was a crude little amulet, a round wooden disk affixed to a square leather backing. I had seen one like this before. My brother Ephrim wore one around his neck for a while, before he was wed. I knew that in between the wooden disk and the leather backing would be a tiny piece of parchment writ with either an angel's name, or one of the many names of God. I wondered which name was inscribed on this little amulet—whether it was a name I knew, or one of the more mysterious names that were never pronounced when girls were listening. We heard a noise from the front of the house. The boy looked me straight in the eye and then nodded down at the amulet. I slid it into my pocket.