Henna House (9 page)

The night of the funeral, it became common knowledge that Yael
was Uncle Zecharia's daughter. He had always known of her existence, and had visited her mother twice when she was still a little girl and twice since returning to Qaraah. When she had called for him to come to her at the midwife's house, she had pressed a coral toe ring into his palm, a token he had given her mother. I was sitting around a fire with Sultana and little Moshe. The men were inside chanting evening prayers in what had now become a house of mourning for two people none of us knew. My brother Menachem, who was always shirking prayers, came out of the house before the service was over and ambled over to us. He smelled like sweat and arak, which he wiped from his lips. He spat into the fire, picked up a stick, poked at the flames, and then pointed up at the sky, dark as black pudding and filled with ripe blazing stars.

“Adela,” he smirked, “Uncle Zecharia is indeed the father of a great nation, his descendants more numerous than the stars in the sky.”

Sultana said, “Menachem, leave her be.”

I looked down at my knees. I hated Menachem, and had learned long ago that it was best to ignore him, especially when his breath smelled like drink. But Menachem wasn't finished.

“Sister,” he said, “you must be very proud. After all, you are marrying into a most illustrious family. Uncle Zecharia is a bastard-maker. It seems he planted babies from Bombay to Cyprus. Why, I wouldn't be surprised if your Asaf had one hundred brothers and sisters. Just think, your children will have enough cousins to people a new world.”

The morning after the funeral, Uncle Zecharia flew into a great rage, overturning a table, smashing dishes. Auntie Aminah was there. She said that Uncle Zecharia turned into a bear, but that my father became a lion, tenderly and fiercely nipping him in the neck to force him to surrender his fury, then taking his brother in his paws until the rage of grief had passed. I never doubted that my father and his brother turned into animals, for in those days metaphors were not mere decorations, but the very essence of stories, and it was not uncommon for people to become beasts, or for beasts to take on the mercies and sufferings of men.

I never asked Asaf about his dead sister and niece, how he felt about the whole sad story, how he felt about losing a sister he hadn't even known existed. But a week after the funeral, when he came to my cave, he sat for just a moment before reaching for one of my little idols—a skinny wooden one with slate-colored eyes.

“Could I have this one?” he asked in a half whisper.

“What will you do with her?”

He shrugged in the direction of the cemetery. “Maybe they wouldn't be so lonely.”

“Of course, and take another one for the baby.” I reached for a little idol, no bigger than my thumb, which I had made out of a piece of fallen tamarind and dressed in a piece of old blue apron. I don't know if by burying my idols, Asaf brought Yael, or her babe, or himself, some measure of comfort. Asaf and I never mentioned Yael again, but every so often, when he was in the cave, our eyes would stray to the empty place on the altar.

After Yael's death, Uncle Zecharia was different. It was as if some of his daughter's hunger infected him, and even though we had food to eat, he began to grow thin, his eyes sinking farther into those wide rheumy sockets. Almost immediately after the shiva, Uncle Zecharia decided that he would leave our town for a short journey to Sana'a, where he would stay with an old friend of my father, a rhinoceros horn trader named Aba Jerush. In Sana'a, Uncle Zecharia would replenish his basic stores of perfume ingredients. He said that he was not made for the leatherworkers' craft, and that the stink of dead flesh would kill him quicker than any earthly hunger. He insisted that if he had his basic supplies, he could mix perfumes and set up his own stall in Qaraah. The arrangement called for Asaf to move in with Elihoo and Sultana. Later Sultana told me that the night Asaf came he had a horrible nightmare and kept the household awake until the small hours before dawn.

Uncle Zecharia's short journey stretched out to one month and then two. He sent letters describing how he was waiting for a certain caravan to come in from the Hadramut with a cache of sweet myrrh, or that he would come home after a merchant arrived from the west with mastic crystals and dried karo karounde flowers.

While Uncle Zecharia was gone, no one was really looking out for Asaf, and he began to spend more and more time riding Sheik Ibn Messer's horses. Then the sheik permitted him to ride one of his mares in a race. Asaf described the race to me in great detail. At first I didn't believe him, but he later brought me proof in the form of a half Maria Theresa thaler he said the sheik awarded him as his purse. He also told me a great secret: that there were other Jewish boys who rode in Ibn Messer's races. The third son of the lime burner, the second son of
the lampmaker, the youngest son of one of my father's competitors, a leatherworker, who made jambia belts too. Asaf told me to sit on the escarpment on a certain afternoon and to watch for them. I took my needlework and went past the frankincense tree, past the grove of citrons, and out onto the escarpment at the appointed time. I sat cross-legged and practiced my
Kawkab
stars. Then, just as he said they would, Asaf and the three other boys thundered past me. All the boys had their earlocks tucked into their turbans. The horses galloped with the speed of legend in their legs, as if they were the very mares of foundation, galloping away from an oasis in order to heed the call of the Prophet, proving allegiance, forsaking thirst. After this, whenever I saw those boys in the market or on their way to Torah school, they looked like all the other Jewish boys of Qaraah. But when I dreamed of them—as I often did—they did not ride horses, but were horses themselves. These horses had earlocks that hung in long curls down beside their manes, giving them a comical aspect, and when I woke up from this dream I was always laughing.

T
hat season, when Uncle Zecharia left us, there was a terrible fire at one of the larger synagogues, far away in Aden. It happened on the Sabbath before a wedding when a groom was being called to the Torah. Years later, when we ourselves moved south to Aden, I learned that six people died in the fire: the groom, the rabbi, two cousins of the groom, and two community elders. When we heard the news, I was still a girl, and the story had already rolled up and down the mountainous peaks of our land, and as it came closer to Qaraah, it picked up the dirt and sand of the ages and became a parable we marveled at. Supposedly the groom died trying to save the burning Torah. When fire licked the holy scroll, he threw his body on top of it, and soon the flames were shooting up from his writhing back, taking on phantasmagoric shapes, and ultimately spelling out one of the esoteric names for God.

Much closer, in Sana'a, there was also mourning. The RAF had sent planes from Aden to expel the Imam's troops from Audhali territory. Those men who returned described the great fire coming down from the sky, and though the Imam's men were said to have performed acts of great heroism, their deeds did not translate into parables about God. Instead, we Jews told tales of the devil and wondered who his true agents were—those who fought for the Imam, or those who strafed the clouds, those who could fly?

In Palestine, Jews were speaking modern Hebrew for the very first time, popularized by the lexicographer Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who had revived the language almost single-handedly, naming modern things in the biblical tongue and creating words for phenomena of science and technology that we didn't even know existed. In Qaraah there was one man—Mr. Faheed Ari, a jeweler—who held the rare distinction of being the only one anyone knew who had been to Palestine and back.
He was a small, elegant man with a wrinkled box of a face and a voice too high for his personality, which was as fierce as he was dainty. He held court on lazy hot afternoons, describing the short skirts of the socialist girls from Russia who drank coffee in cafés in Tel Aviv while flirting with British soldiers. He told tales of the Arab boys in Jaffa who dove off huge, slick rocks into the Mediterranean to fish with their hands, and how the farmers of Galilee worked the land with a crude little tool, half hoe, half rake, the backs of their hands bloody from massive thorns that grew from wild roots at the base of lemon trees. Friends and neighbors gathered round. They peppered Mr. Ari with questions. They chewed khat and smoked hookahs while plotting their own escapes to Jerusalem, and lamenting the truth of the matter, which was that it would take a magic carpet to get them there, and magic was scarce in those days.

Far from all this, in our little piece of the world, Asaf and I cast our own spells. It was the autumn of 1927. The Day of Atonement had just passed. The men in synagogue had read the portion in which Jonah is swallowed by the whale. The Muslims revered Jonah as much as we Jews, calling him Dhul-Nun, the one in the whale. And just like us, the Muslim children of Qaraah drew whales in the dirt with the pointy edges of sticks. Children jumped from whale to whale, playing a game called Don't Catch Jonah. It was early afternoon; my mother thought I was at Auntie Aminah's helping her make
bint al-sahn
. But I knew that Auntie Aminah was at her friend Ela's house, helping her make baklava for her daughter's engagement party. On my way from our house to Auntie Aminah's, I stepped on three whales. I thought that the last resembled my brother Menachem, who had a round face and bulgy eyes that shifted this way and that as he appraised a room.

I ran up past the frankincense tree, past the old citrons, past the abandoned forge, around the culvert. I lit the candles in my cave. Sat and waited. It wasn't long before Asaf joined me. How did we each know when the other would be there? We just did. We were synchronized. It was as if each of us could sense that the other was coming.

Asaf came in and saluted the chalk boy and girl on the wall. Sometimes the pair of them smudged or faded, but I always redrew them. He sat down on my little divan. I had brought two old flat cushions from Auntie Aminah's storeroom and laid them on top of a little rope rug I had “borrowed” from the bottom of one of Sultana's chests.

“Come here.” Asaf patted the spot next to him. I was arranging my little idols.

“Wait.” I put some figs, sage, and honey in front of the idol I called Ashtoret and another I called Asherah. Then I turned to Asaf. I sat next to him on the pallet, and soon we were lying down. They say that children who have not reached maturity cannot feel the passions of men and women, but Asaf and I must have been made differently than other children, for in that moment my skin rose to his touch, and my body, though it had never known this sort of hunger, hungered for his.

We quickly sat up, stunned by this new predicament.

He put his hand on my thigh. I shuddered. And because he was an honorable boy and this game of grown-ups we were playing was really just a game, he took his hand off my leg and moved away from me. For a few moments we didn't say or do anything. But then we were drawn close. He put his hands around my waist. I laid my lips on his cheek and smelled him. Wood and rain, sage and harness oil. We kissed. His tongue pushed through my mouth. I sucked on it, hungry as a kid for a teat. He pushed me away and then drew me close again, tracing the outline of my lips with his tongue and then kissing me on my lips, my chin, my eyes, my neck, my ears. How did we stop? I have no idea. Actually I do not think we ever really stopped. Some part of me is still a child in that cave, kissing Asaf as if it were my only purpose on this earth. As if our presence in that cave were part of the balance of all creation. Our infant passion responsible for the spinning of the world, the heaving of the tides, the setting of the sun.

“Adela, I am sorry, I shouldn't have—”

“Asaf, don't say anything.”

“But really, I am so sorry.”

“I'm not.”

“You'll come back.”

“Of course.”

We parted in a veil of Qaraah's ruby rays of light. He left me blushing in a beam that illuminated only the two of us behind the henna bush at the lip of my cave, while the rest of the world was shrouded in misty darkness.

After this he didn't come back to my cave for a long time. I missed him. But I was also relieved. I knew nothing of the ways of the world, and feared that what we had done would get me with child. I dreamed
that a tiny baby had passed from his lips to mine and I lived many a day in terror that the baby we had made by kissing would grow ripe in my belly before I could dose myself with a concoction of dragon's-blood sap, which I had heard my sisters-in-law say that women take when the babe in their womb was not of their husband's doing. Would it kill me? I didn't care. Surely death would be better than the shame of having whored myself to my cousin.

But one month passed, and then another two. By early spring, no cave-begotten baby swelled inside me. My fears subsided. When Asaf finally returned to my cave, I was ready to greet him. I had made fig biscuits, which I kept in a little tin. And I had a flask of weak grape wine. We sat down next to each together and ate. We didn't speak or laugh. When we had finished eating, he wiped the crumbs from his face then said, “Your mother tricked my father into agreeing to our engagement.”

I looked down at my lap. I had not expected this. I bowed my head, and hiding behind the dangling beads on my gargush, asked,“Why do you bring it up? The subject shames me.”

He reached out, brushed his fingers on my hot cheeks, sending a tingling flutter through my body.

I spoke again, my voice quivering with anger. “Laban tricks Jacob into marrying Leah, and because of this treachery she becomes the mother of many children. The mother of most of the world.”

“I am . . .” Asaf cocked his head to one side. His hand had come to rest lightly on my shoulder.

“What?”

“Adela, I am grateful to your mother. And I am not dead.” He sat up, smiled, took his hand from my shoulder, and cracked his knuckles loudly, making little popping sounds. “So the curse of your girlhood must be broken. Maybe it is your little goddesses”—he nodded toward my altar—“maybe they have intervened to save my life so that you can one day become a mother too.” He paused. “Like our mother, Leah. Maybe you too will be mother of most of the world.”