Henna House (8 page)

Asaf and I kept meeting at my cave.

“Husband, are you hungry?”

“Wife, are you well?”

“Husband, so good to see you.”

“Wife, I have brought you some fava beans.”

We did our best to playact the parts of devoted spouses, taking cues from our dreams and stories we had heard.

He would come in the early evening and I would serve him a little vagabond supper of scraps I had stolen from my mother's kitchen, or nuts and berries I had foraged myself. Then we would tell each other about our days, or share jokes, tell small stories before going our separate ways. I took the path around the old forge that led to the grove of citrons and into Auntie Aminah's yard; Asaf went farther west on the escarpment, emerging through a hole in the wall behind the silk merchants' stalls in the center of town.

Sometimes he would come on Jamiya, who seemed to consider me a threat for Asaf's affections. But when I dug a turnip for her out of my pocket, she took it gingerly with her big yellow teeth. In no time we were each won over by the other—I by her warm brown-eyed gentleness, she by my turnip-ness—and after that we were good friends.

I
t was early summer of 1927. In the outside world many things were changing, though we knew nothing of them inside of Yemen. Only many years later was I able to look back and put the small events of my life in a larger context. The year of my engagement, the first transatlantic phone call was made between New York and London. Closer to home, Abdul Aziz had just been declared King of Hejaz and Sultan of Nedj, later to become the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Reza Kahn was crowned the new Shah of Persia. In another corner of the world, Stalin consolidated his power. But what did we know of these happenings? In Qaraah there were three weddings and nine births in Jewish households. There were the usual deaths among the old and very young, as well as a strange and incomprehensible tragedy: a scribe who killed himself after slitting the throats of his wife and three daughters.

I mourned the tragedies and celebrated the happiness of my neighbors modestly and properly, from a distance. I watched longingly as my sisters-in-law left their homes to attend henna gatherings for brides. I was always left behind, peeking out from behind my mother's disapproving shadow. I didn't spare any thought for the political or social machinations of the rest of the world. How could I? In Qaraah we were entirely cut off from global politics and modernity.

My concerns were for my father's health, my mother's temper, and the well-being of my many nieces and nephews. The Confiscator's shadow continued to loom large. I knew that I was protected from confiscation by my engagement to my cousin Asaf. I also knew that this protection was tenuous and that I was still at risk, simply because life was unpredictable and I was a Jewish girl in Yemen. Occasionally I would see the Confiscator in the market. Each time my belly clenched up and I felt fire leap in my skull. Whenever the long shadow of his
maroon djellaba disappeared into a throng of marketers, I told myself, “I am safe, I am safe, I am safe” but deep down, I didn't believe it. Every so often, he came to my father's stall and ordered more fancy shoes for his wife. I had kept up my little apprenticeship with my father. Once I made the tops for the shoes. The Confiscator noticed my small stitching and complimented the delicate shape of the moon and stars I had embossed in the leather. I still hid behind my father when he came, and wondered about his wife, and whether she would be able to tell that I made those shoes, not for her, but in spite of her. If I could have, I would have learned a spell that turned dead things into living things, so I could make the leather turn into an animal that would chew on her feet and haunt her as the snakes on her husband's jambia haunted me.

In those days, I saw Binyamin Bashari rarely and never in private. He had left Torah school and was helping his father full-time in his stall, learning to make jambia. Sometimes I saw him when I went to the market to bring my father his lunch, or when I spent an afternoon with my father in his stall. We would nod at each other, and he would smile his half smile when he saw me coming, but usually I hid my face in the fold of my gargush and pretended—with a modesty I didn't really feel—that I didn't see him. When he played the khallool in his father's stall, the sinuous tones of the flute would lick at my ears and remind me of the games we used to play when we were still small children.

As for me and Asaf? We had become experts at playacting. I turned nine that summer. He was ten years old. When we saw each other in public, we pretended to be the perfect strangers everyone assumed us to be. But in my cave we were the best of friends. We spent a lot of time telling each other stories. Most of his stories were about his father's business of buying and selling ingredients for perfume. Asaf told me how, before coming to Qaraah, he and his father spent half the year traveling west to India, and the other half traveling east to sell his father's wares to perfumers in Cairo, Athens, and Istanbul. He had endless stories of their exploits on the road and sea. In return, I told Asaf my auntie's stories about the founding of Qaraah and about the myths and origins of the Jews of Yemen. He loved hearing about the jewelers of Queen Bilquis, about the miners for the Great Temple, and about the son of Noah, who came to Sana'a when the Waters of Judgment receded, and founded the city on a cloud-covered peak of the new world. We
would sit in the lip of my cave, the dazzling sun dappling down on us, but our backs cool from the shady breath of the mountain behind us.

Once I was telling him about Shem, son of Noah, but toward the end of the story, my words caught in my throat.

“What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“Tell me.”

“No, it's silly.”

“Tell me.”

I didn't say any more. I didn't confess my new discovery, which was that Asaf was in my story. A companion to Shem, bending low to the still-wet earth, clearing a foundation for a home we would share. He was in all of my stories. Tall and lean, with eyes the color of good fortune. He was one of Sheba's jewelers. He was in the retinue of miners collecting gems for Solomon's Temple. How could I tell him that no story would be complete without the curve of his smile, the square set of his broad shoulders? I blushed, coughed, looked down at my hands. I didn't yet have the words for it, to explain that he was now braided into my life like a strand of wax in the candle we light to mark the transition between the Sabbath and the rest of the week. And not only into my life but also into my imagination. I would have to ask Auntie Aminah about this. She was always saying that certain embroidery stitches are charmed, and that by putting them into cloth, you give the wearer the power to change her future. She also said that the past had pockets in it, and that if you knew how, you could pick and choose the things you found in those pockets and then use them for your own purposes in the present. I never questioned her mystical pronouncements, but took them at face value. What would she say if I told her I saw Asaf in my stories? And I was there too, engaged to him in ancient days, in places neither of us had ever been, speaking a foreign tongue in which both of us were oddly fluent.

“Well, if you aren't going to finish, then it's my turn.” He lay back, put his hands behind his neck. “Did I tell you about the time my father bought frangipani petals from the one-armed man in Madras? No? Well, that was the day we were both thrown into jail. I was just four years old, and they put us in a cell with murderers, pirates, and thieves.” He talked and talked until the sun was low in the white belly of the sky. We left the cave late that day, and when I returned home, I was almost caught by my mother.

“I was looking everywhere for you,” she berated me. “Where were you? I want you to make the lahuhua bread for dinner.” I was becoming a good cook, and my mother, though never one to praise me, had been relying upon me more and more in the kitchen.

“I was at Masudah's, helping her with the baby,” I lied.

“But I was just there. She said you were at Sultana's.” Sultana had long black hair, heavy mannish eyebrows, and thin lips that always seemed to be puckered around some invisible lemon. Sultana wasn't ugly, but she wasn't pretty either. What she was, was kind. She would always lie for me—usually to protect me from my brothers but also to throw my mother off my trail.

“I went from Masudah's to Sultana's. I picked up some of her eggs for Auntie Aminah. I delivered them, and then I came home.”

My mother stared at me. She knew I was lying, but she didn't care enough to catch me at it. Her nostrils flared, and she shook her head slightly, communicating her boredom with my excuses, her disapproval at my need to lie, and her begrudging admiration that she had raised a daughter who seemed to slip through everyone's fingers, like water. Her eyes glazed over in the middle of my explanation, and she muttered, “Well, go wash up, and then get to work on the dough.”

*  *  *

That year we had gone many months without rain. By midsummer, people all over the northern mountains were going hungry. There had not been enough wheat in the fields, bulb flies killed what crops managed to grow in the parched soil, and a conflict between two of the lesser sheiks in the west was making it almost impossible for camel caravans, laden with dried fish from the coast or with citrus fruits from the lowland orchards, to make their way inland and north to the mountains. In the surrounding villages, people began to invoke the aid of Af Bri, angel of rain, asking that he seed the clouds from above with the water of the heavens. Some began to pray that Elohim would once again send down manna from the sky, as in the days of old. Instead of manna, locusts fell from the sky, and we celebrated. Locusts were a delicacy, and we fried them in
samneh
or roasted them on skewers and went to bed with our bellies full, sure that Elohim had heard us, and that the locust swarm was proof that the plagues of old would not smite our enemies, but feed us and lead us to salvation.

But after the locusts, the great hunger descended once more, and people from surrounding villages began to come to Qaraah in search of sustenance. Our town was blessed with the runoff from a stream called Little Lyre, so named because people said that when the stream ran full in winter, the water made the sound of a strumming psalmist, and that to drink this water was to bring harmony to one's heart. Thanks to the stream, we'd had good harvests in our durum wheat fields when the surrounding villages had none. Refugees from surrounding villages came to us before they ventured farther north to Sana'a.

One of these refugees was a skinny girl named Yael, who was maybe fifteen or sixteen and came with a babe in her arms. Yael would have been pretty, had she not been so thin. She had lovely eyes, tiger-brown with streaks of gold in them. But hunger had made most of her teeth fall out and her poor baby was afflicted with a distended belly and eyes so big they seemed to pop out of her head. Yael had made her way alone into our town, and collapsed at the little well in front of the first market stalls. She was taken to the house of the midwife. When she was revived, Yael asked for my Uncle Zecharia, and a great hubbub ensued because how in the world did a girl from the mountains know Uncle Zecharia, let alone know that he was in Qaraah? The midwife sent for him. According to the midwife, who was a great gossip and later spoke about the moment in detail, when Uncle Zecharia appeared and saw the girl, he fell to his knees and began to kiss her bony hands. Next he gathered her up, against the midwife's protestations. Uncle Zecharia shook off her complaints and carried the girl to his house and laid her on his own bed. The infant was left with the midwife, who took the poor thing to Masudah, who was nursing a new babe of her own and had milk to spare.

For three days Uncle Zecharia tended to the girl himself and refused to let anyone in his house. He didn't even let Asaf come home. So Asaf took shelter in Elihoo and Sultana's house. All anyone talked about was the poor girl's condition and Uncle Zecharia's transgression. The women at the ritual bath were all of the opinion that Yael was a mountain whore, and that Uncle Zecharia was paying her to sleep in his bed. My sister-in-law Yerushalmit said, “I suspect Zecharia knows her from his days as a merchant. She could be a daughter of the dunes . . . someone he knows from his past.” Yerushalmit used the term that referred to the women who lived in desert outposts and serviced the caravanners crisscrossing the Kingdom.

Masudah took pity on the girl, and tsked and scolded Yerushalmit. “While Uncle Zecharia is being most unwise by welcoming an unmarried girl into his house, it is unseemly to speculate, and we should keep our lewd thoughts to ourselves.”

But everyone kept gossiping, and finally my mother took action. On the fourth day she marched over to Uncle Zecharia's with a big pot of lamb
chouia
. She didn't even knock on the door, but barged right in, and spent three hours inside. When she came out she refused to talk to anyone, but that night I heard her say to my father, “Anyone else in their right mind would sever the agreement.”

My father's voice was weary yet firm. “The son is not to be blamed for the sins of the father.”

“Ach Hayyim,” my mother spit out, “who knows who Asaf's mother is? For all we know, our daughter is to be chained to a bastard. But where would we find her another husband? At least this one is still alive, eh?”

I didn't understand the context, but I knew that they were talking about me, and about Asaf and about our engagement. I understood that somehow Yael's spectral presence had ignited the tinder of this horrible conversation. That night I dreamed that my life was a ball of embroidery thread, and a cat with tawny eyes like the starving girl's was batting me back and forth with her sharp claws.

Yael left Uncle Zecharia's on the fourth day. How did she find our house? I have no idea. She must have come in when we were out at the market. When we returned, we heard a noise upstairs. My mother found her in our sleeping quarters with her hands in one of the sundug boxes. She had pulled out a
lazem
necklace, the one with dangling Indian rupees and three little charm cases. I was in the kitchen, making dough for
kubaneh
. When my mother dragged poor toothless skinny Yael downstairs into the kitchen, the rage in my mother's bulging eyes was such that I was sure she would put a knife in the poor girl's heart. But instead, she overmastered her temper, cradled Yael by the cooking fire, brushed her hair back from her damp forehead, then called for me to bring some tepid stew, which she spooned between the girl's cracked lips with the tenderness of a mother feeding her own baby. But the stew couldn't nourish her back to health. Yael and her child both died the very next day. We buried them—the babe in her mother's arms—in the cemetery below my cave.