Henna House (13 page)

“Leave her be, Suli.” My father had just come into the house. He sat down heavily at the table and began to cough. When he caught his breath, he said, “Mr. Musa will be here in fifteen minutes. The rabbi is on his way.” Then he looked at me and said, “Adela, the Confiscator ordered two new pairs of shoes this morning. And he asked after your health. I told him that you were to be engaged today, and you know what he did? He ordered a third pair in your honor.
Use the proceeds for a dowry gift for your little girl
, he said. And that is what I will do. I will buy you a lazem necklace for your wedding day.” He looked down at his hands as he said this—as if he knew that the finery was of no use to me, and that the Confiscator's words were nothing but a reminder of the yoke we wore.

I almost didn't say anything, but then I asked, “What shoes did he order?”

My father smiled. “Bashmag sandals and holiday shoes with a little heel. He asked for the tulip border design. Your favorite.”

I went and sat on his lap, as I used to when I was a very little girl, and for a few moments before the ceremony, I imagined that I wasn't facedown in the dirt of my life, but standing on the high, clear crest of the mountain of it. I had been eight years old when I was engaged to Asaf, now I was almost twelve and engaged to a man old enough to be my grandfather. My father kissed my hair. Patted my back. He whispered into my ear, “You can come and help me with the shoes if you'd like. Your hands are nimble, and I always enjoy your company, little rabbit. Sha, sha, Adeloosh, all will be well.” He wiped away my tears with the corner of his sleeve, and held me tight as I burrowed my face in his neck.

Mr. Musa humored my mother and wore the triangle amulet neck ring for the ceremony—the same one that all of my brothers had worn at their engagements, the same one that Asaf had worn when we were engaged as small children. It was much too small for his fat neck so he wore it on a chain, hanging low over his fat belly. During the ceremony I had repulsive thoughts. I imagined that the baby teeth in the amulet belonged to a demon baby who would bite Mr. Musa, drawing blood, maybe even severing his jugular. When the rabbi pronounced us engaged, I imagined that the nails in the amulet were being hammered into his fingers, and when my father signed our engagement document, I imagined that the mercury was in his eyes, making him a true monster,
with silver eyeballs, a groom so grotesque my revulsion was more than justified.

Afterward, I drank all the arak from the leftover glasses. Soon I was retching, heaving, and crying all at once out in the garden, my face a mess of snot and vomit and tears.

Masudah held my hair back. Sultana brought a cool cloth for my face. When my mother came she took one look at me and went into the house. She came back out with an amber vial and uncorked it. “Drink this,” she ordered. I took two sips, and she said, “Not enough.”

“But Mother, I can't.” She reached out, held my nose, tilted back my head, and before I could struggle I had swallowed the rest of the contents of the vial.

“You will vomit for another hour or so, but in the morning, your head will be clear.” She turned around, stomped away, and left me there with my sisters-in-law. They took care of me. In the morning, I awoke with my body so empty and my head so clear I could see my life backward and forward, and I was convinced of one true thing: no matter what else happened to me in my life, I wouldn't marry Mr. Musa.

*  *  *

Kicking my feet. Wiggling my dusty toes. Sweating under my gargush. It was five days after my engagement. I had finished my chores, and was sitting on the fence in front of our house. My head was stuffed with jagged thoughts. Should I kill myself to avoid the disastrous marriage that awaited me? Or run away, which would amount to the same thing, as there was nowhere to run but into the desert? I was imagining the way my bones would look—askew in the sand, picked clean by hungry buzzards—when I first spotted my uncle.
Clop clop clop, creak creak, jangle jangle
. The donkey cart announced their arrival. Barhun Damari was riding sidesaddle on a sturdy black donkey. How did I know it was he? I felt a tug. My life being pulled this way and that. As if he were holding not only those reigns, but also my fate in the sure grip of his thumb and forefingers.

Another two donkeys were pulling a cart filled with furniture and crates of belongings. Riding behind the cart on a fourth donkey was a woman I assumed was my aunt. Riding in the back of the cart was my cousin, Hani Damari. She jumped out the moment she saw me, and came skipping down the road and into my life, changing it forever.
Hani, with her sensual, puckered lips and already womanly hips that swung from side to side.

By the time I had jumped off the rail to run and greet them, Hani was already in front of our house. She was much taller than I. Dark eyes, full lips, a broad nose that made her look a bit like a she-tiger. She was the prettiest girl I had ever seen.

“Oh how I have missed knowing you! Tell me everything about you! Tell me now, right now!” She cooed and petted me. This girl, the youngest of four living sisters, was an expert in the intimate art of sisterhood. She wrapped herself around me, enveloping me in her chestnut-colored arms, smelling of cloves and roses and hibiscus and cinnamon. She didn't wear a gargush; her hair was covered with a black and brown kerchief instead, and she wore a black traveling tunic and gray pants.

“Adela, you must forgive Hani,” Uncle Barhun said affectionately. “We have been on the road too long, and she has become like a wild animal. Hopefully here in Qaraah she will be domesticated. Eh? More like you, a little lady. With this perhaps you could help?” He looked like my father, and like Uncle Zecharia, but he was infinitely more handsome than either of them. He had all of his teeth. His nose was roguishly crooked. And his complexion was smooth, except for a puckered scar under his right eye that looked fresh, for the skin around it was still pink, and the scar itself had that shiny sheen of a newly formed layer of flesh.

Alerted by the commotion, my father had come out of the house. Uncle Barhun smiled broadly when my father held out his arms, face alight. My father also smiled a wide happy smile, showing his black front teeth and missing left incisor. As they hugged, then parted, then hugged again, my father made a series of sounds, like an “aha aha,” crossed with a laugh and a tender throaty exclamation, which, when combined, all sounded to me like the celebratory cackling of a well-fed buzzard. I was embarrassed by my father's sounds, and looked away, showing that I didn't really belong to him, at least not the way Hani belonged to her handsome, elegant father.

Aunt Rahel had hung back while my cousin had surged forward, but when she finally emerged from behind Uncle Barhun's broad shoulders, I was confused. I squinted. I looked her right in the eyes, and then away, for I was embarrassed, and I could see that she too was unsure of herself. I looked back. I thought that she must be the wrong
aunt, for there seemed absolutely nothing extraordinary about her. She was just a typical woman, small-hipped, with good-enough teeth and pretty-enough black eyes, but with none of the beauty or vivacity that blazed from her daughter. I had imagined my Indian aunt billowing into our lives dressed in a brilliant sari, perhaps of gold or yellow silk. But instead she wore common garb—a gray cotton dress and black trousers without a stitch of embroidery. The only bit of color was the magenta and green embroidery on her cuffs. Like her daughter, she didn't wear a gargush, but her head was covered with a simple black scarf. I peeked at her again. She had a nondescript face, one you could easily overlook in a crowd. She
was
Indian and so her skin was a different shade of brown than our toasted sesame complexions, more like tea left to steep overnight.

“Come, Rahel,” Uncle Barhun said, but she barely moved.

“Come,” he said again, urging, but not criticizing. “Come say hello to Adela. Adela, this is your aunt.”

“So you are Adela?”

“I am.”

“Hello, Adela.”

“Welcome, Aunt Rahel.”

She reached up to touch my cheek, a tender gesture. As her hand fluttered back down, I noticed Aunt Rahel's henna—the red geometric flurry that covered her fingers, the backs of her hands. The elements were arranged in patterns I had never seen before. They seemed to tell stories at once simple and incomprehensible. But other than her henna, nothing about her seemed—at least on the surface—intriguing or mysterious.

Hani thrust her hand into mine, asking me one hundred questions all at once about the fairy tales I knew, the secrets I didn't, the stories I would maybe be so kind as to finish for her, for she had come to a point in the plot that needed a fresh perspective.

*  *  *

When the cart arrived, my mother had come out of the house. From the very first moment, she was rude to Rahel and less than deferential to Barhun. “Here,” she said, showing Rahel the path that led to the well. “There”—she pointed the way to the wadi where we washed clothes—“behind the stump of the thorn tree.” She shrugged in the direction of
the outhouse. She snorted out skimpy little answers in a bitter voice, barely looking Rahel in the eye, and letting it be known from the outset that a wide gully existed between our families, one that she wouldn't cross willingly. As for Uncle Barhun, she wouldn't look at him directly. When he tried to compliment her cooking, hospitality, or housekeeping, she barely nodded, and then looked away peevishly. Later, my parents would fight over this. My father even struck my mother on the left cheek, leaving an ugly welt. And I saw my mother spit again—not in dough, but in his face.

Yet that first night, they didn't pay any attention to each other at all. My father acted as if he didn't notice my mother's rude behavior, and welcomed his brother and sister-in-law with the giddy smile of a man who had kneeled down to drink in a river and instead of his own reflection, sees his own boyhood staring back at him from the mossy depths. My father laughed, drank too much arak, and sat next to Barhun with an arm draped over his shoulder. Barhun towered over his big brother, but was gracious enough to sink down in the pillows and slouch so that my father didn't have to reach too high in order to embrace him.

Almost immediately, my mother ordered me to take Hani next door and help her unpack and change out of her traveling garb. Hani shed her clothes, and I must have made a sound. She turned to look at me, but instead of chastising me for insulting her modesty, she giggled and then held up her hands and showed me her forearms, palms, fingers, and then her feet and ankles, proud of their abundant adornment.

I learned that night that the only way to know that girl, to know her truly, was to know her henna. Hani's clothes may have been plain, but she was the fanciest creature I had ever seen. Hani and her big sisters, the other Damari girls, wore henna all the time. That first day I had no idea why they were always decorated—though of course there was a reason. With the other Damaris there were always reasons, and stories behind the reasons, and reasons behind the stories. But I didn't need to know why. At least not yet. That first time she stood before me, revealing the designs on her naked skin, lush and swirling with age-old geometric mysteries, all I wanted to do was admire her, drink her in.

And she was so proud. Shamelessly, and with guileless pride, she pointed out special embellishments in the designs—a single seashell, a tiny swirling conch on each of her fingertips. She spread open her hands, so that I could see each one. Big stars on her palms and interlacing
rosettes on her ankles. Eyes of God on the tops of her feet. The leaves of a laurel tree wrapped like a wreath around her elegant wrists.

As she showed off, I noticed not only Hani's henna but also her body. Lithe, dark like her mother, with full pear-shaped buttocks, lighter breasts, sparrow-wing hips, a concave belly. When she took off her kerchief I saw that she had the most marvelous hair—curly and dark like coffee, with glints of red and gold glistening on the ends of corkscrews. She was tall, like her father, and although she looked mostly like her mother, only prettier, she had something of Uncle Barhun's strong features in the powerful current of her face. I lost myself in the inscriptive bounty of her henna, and in her unabashed nakedness. The dazzling henna designs played tricks on my eyes and made her look simultaneously more exposed and more hidden, as if her henna was at once transparent and opaque.

“Don't blush, little cousin.” Hani pulled on a clean shift and wrapped her arms around me. “And don't be jealous; soon enough my mother and I will henna you too.” She reached out and wiped big fat tears out of my eyes, tears I hadn't even known were there. Why was I crying? Because Hani and her henna changed everything. I didn't know that then, of course, but I did know immediately and viscerally that henna was what separated me from this new blazing star of a cousin, and that if I was to be one of her tribe, I would also need to wear those tattoos.

*  *  *

I learned many things that first night. “Why aren't you married already?” I asked, for surely she was of age. “Shouldn't you already have wed?” While the others were still eating, a dinner of chicken stew, eggs, olives, and hilbeh, Hani took me aside, clutched my arm, and told me that she was in love with a boy she left behind in Aden. “His name is Ovadia, Ovadia Shabazzi, and he is the son of a book trader.”

“You are in love? Do your mother and father know about him?” I was gape-mouthed, full of questions, heady with the flush of being taken into confidence, but mostly I was astonished. I had never heard of a girl arranging her own marriage. She laughed, an arrogant throaty laugh.

“Of course they know, and I will have their blessing. But it doesn't matter whether I do or don't. I will marry him, you'll see. And what is the rush?”

“The Imam—”

“Psha, if the Imam comes for me, Ovadia will vouch for an engagement. And if not him, there is Yusof Bin Turo, the schoolmaster's son, or Amnon Dishdashta, the son of the warehouse manager in Little Aden. Any of them would marry me in a second—and not only to save me from your dreadful Imam,” Hani said with disdain. Then she scrunched up her face, put a hand under my chin. “And what about you, little girl? I hear that you were engaged to be married to another one of our cousins. What is his name? Asaf? But he ran off and left you? My father tells me that he is our eldest uncle's youngest son.”