Henna House (22 page)

“Parchment is skin. The Torah is written on the skin of an animal. So, you see, skin has holiness.”

“But no permanence?”

“Adela, if you look for permanence in this life, you will be sorely disappointed.”

“Well, at least there is your book.”

“What book?”

“Your henna book, with the elements; maybe one day it will be in a museum.”

“Eh?”

“I heard about museums from my father,” I explained. “He said that in Istanbul they have museums of ancient civilization. They have displays of artifacts from the time of Abraham our Father. He said that it is possible to see a bowl or a spoon or a necklace made of iridescent glass beads, perhaps worn by Sarah our Mother herself. What I am saying is that I would like to build my own museum.”

“And what will be in it, this . . . museum?” Aunt Rahel smiled.

“Your henna work. Your patterns. The designs you collect, and those you create.”

“No, not my work.”

“Then whose?”

“They are not mine to claim. The patterns, the elements. The recipes. They belong to all of us. To any woman who has ever held a stylus in her hand.”

*  *  *

That night when I was alone, I took Hani's book of psalms out of my skirt pocket and studied the list of elements and their corresponding letters. I rummaged a piece of thin kitchen paper from the pantry, the kind we used to wrap meat. I copied the letters and their corresponding elements, checking over the list three times to make sure I hadn't made any mistakes. Before falling asleep, I tried to memorize as many as I could. Aleph was a wavy line. Bet was a left-to-right slash. Gimel, an open-bottom triangle. Dalet, a left-open triangle. I folded up the paper and put it in the drawer where I kept my underclothes, under a cotton shift. I put Hani's book under my pillow. When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed of Hani's little cowrie dolls. But in my dream they were all in pieces. The heads had become detached from their bodies. Their hands were broken off. Their legs were all in a tangle at the bottom of the satchel.

In the morning I made some excuse to go next door. The house was
empty. Aunt Rahel and Hani were at the market. I didn't know where Uncle Barhun was. Quickly, I dug underneath the pillows and retrieved the leather satchel. I put the book of psalms back where it belonged. When I came out, my mother was in our doorway. I remembered that I had promised her I would mix more
hawaij
. My mother rarely complimented my cooking, but more and more she asked me to make dishes, spices, and breads that she usually made herself. I knew that everyone liked my hawaij because I added saffron and extra cardamom.

My mother squinted, appraised me. There were wedge-like lines on her forehead and deep wrinkles coming from her eyes.

“You will ruin that dress. So much turmeric will stain more than your fingers.”

“What?”

“Take it off; you can't make hawaij wearing a nice dress, can you?”

“Of course not.”

“Well, go change. Go already. You should be halfway finished with your chores by now.”

By the time Aunt Rahel and Hani returned from the market, my fingers were yellow from the turmeric, and I was tired from all my chores. After the hawaij, I had spent time at the grinding stones smashing corn for meal for dumplings, and then I had collected and delivered eggs to Auntie Aminah. I was a mess. My braids were falling out of my gargush, my apron was stained, my face sweaty.

Hani smiled at me. “You've been hard at work. Let's go wash you up, and then I'll braid your hair.”

We walked from the grinding stones to the washbasin, and I splashed water on my face. Then we walked to Auntie Aminah's house and sat under her frankincense tree, while Hani brushed and braided my hair. I shut my eyes as she tugged my head backward. I imagined that Hani's sisters, the cousins I knew only from her stories, were there with us. Naama and Asisah, the dead twins, were there as shadow-selves; Edna was in front of me, Hamama and Nogema behind us, and we were part of a chain of girls braiding one another's hair, a chain so long that every girl in the whole world was another link, her nimble fingers tugging, tucking, weaving, and telling tales.

“There, now you won't feel so hot.” I had thick heavy hair, and it was a relief to have it off my neck. We sat there for a few more moments not speaking and then we got up to go. As we approached the dye
mistress's yard, we could hear her humming a tune about swallows and springtime. Hani began to hum along. I began to hum too. The dye mistress was at her troughs. She stopped humming when we walked by and we exchanged casual pleasantries. I followed Hani through the wall, to our houses. I thought of her henna alphabet. I wondered if I should ask her about it, and if I did, if she would be amused that I had found it, or angry at me for opening her bag, invading her privacy. I was never a girl reluctant to speak my mind, but when I opened my mouth to ask her about it, no words came out.

She stopped, leaned against the donkey's hitching post. “What, Adela? What is it?”

I think that is the first moment I ever really saw her. Her hair was falling loose from her gargush. Strands of gold and red, embedded in her chestnut locks, glinted in the sun. Or maybe what I mean to say is that for the first time I really understood her. As if she too had been a code that suddenly cracked. I have often thought of her at that moment. So pretty. Her head cocked to one side, as if she were listening to the music of scripture, the desert song of ancient days.

“What is it?”

“Nothing.” I suddenly felt fear, a prickly chill at the back of my neck. “But . . .”

“But what?”

A thought had just occurred to me. How had I trusted her to write on
my
skin? A verse of scripture popped into my head.
The words of Elohim are pure words, as silver tried in a crucible on the earth, refined seven times.
My skin prickled. She looked away from me, up into the sky. I followed her gaze. A pair of sooty falcons was soaring overhead. The air was hot and thick, there was no wind. And then I had the worst thought of all. Hani had delivered Mr. Musa's basket the day he died. What had she once said?
He won't marry you. You will be free of him.

Had she cursed Mr. Musa by delivering the basket? Had evil murderous charms been written on her skin when she handed the kubaneh to Mrs. Musa? Charms that made Mrs. Musa kill her husband?

“Nothing. I am tired. Forgive me.” I walked on, forcing myself to speak normally, and not let my voice betray my horrible suspicions. “I will see you at dinner, Hani.”

I went inside, shut the door, and leaned against it. I thought of the story Asaf had told me so long ago—the one about the groom who tried
to assassinate the Imam by reading the henna code on his bride's feet. I thought about the stories Masudah had told me about Aunt Rahel. How people said she cursed brides and made them bear monsters. Or that she blessed brides and was said to be in congress with the goddess Anath. Henna dyers arrange their designs into pictorial amulets and ancient imagistic charms to ward off evil. But these charms and amulets are not alphabetical. They are language without language. What would happen if people knew that Hani had devised her own alphabet, and was perhaps writing insults instead of blessings? If they knew that she had hidden intentions, an agenda all her own, what would they think of her? What would they do to her? Would they run her out of town? Shame her? Or worse?

I didn't meet Hani's gaze at the meal. That night around the fire, her hennaed hands, and the hands of my sisters-in-law, my aunt, and my own hands flitted and worked as usual. We were embroidering, cracking nuts, weaving on a hand loom, cupping to show a quantity of a recipe's measure, gesturing to show the size of a large drum someone saw at the market. I watched everyone's hands in the orange glow of the firelight. The henna on everyone's skin seemed to shift this way and that, and to glimmer like lengths of shimmering silk. The more I watched, the more the henna seemed enchanted. The elements unwound themselves from ancient patterns, and rearranged themselves into stories no one had dared to tell me before. I imagined that I saw Hani's code curled in every slant and circle. I was transfixed. I couldn't decipher anything, and yet, was sure that there was something to be deciphered.

“Adela, Adela, did you hear me?” Hani touched me on the shoulder. “Didn't you hear?” She repeated the punch line to her joke.

I smiled, and pretended to join in the conversation. But inside, I had a thousand unanswered questions. How had I not noticed it before? How had I not seen the code adorning her life line? And if it was really there, how would I ever be able to read it? I had just learned to read Hebrew; how could I read a code of swirls and lines and stars?

Before she left, Hani said, “You must get good sleep tonight, Adela. You don't seem like yourself. I hope you aren't getting sick. If you don't feel well tomorrow, you must come to Mother for some of her special bayberry tea.”

I lay on my pallet making resolutions: I would memorize the alphabetical correspondences and keep my eye out for any stray
elements on hands and feet that Hani had hennaed. I told myself that if she were using the code on anyone, I would catch her and go to Aunt Rahel. And that if she had used the code against me before, well, there was nothing I could do, but she would certainly never use her dark skills on me again.

But, by the light of day, I found that I wasn't upset anymore. I reminded myself that I didn't believe a whit in dark magic, and that it was ridiculous to think that charms scribbled on a girl's hand could cause a man's death. I reassured myself that Hani had always been kind to me. I told myself that I had overreacted and that her henna alphabet was probably an old discarded game. Nothing but a scrap of nonsense. And I was even a bit enamored of the idea that Hani and I now shared a secret . . . or at least, that I knew her secret. I told myself that I would keep my eyes open, but I had no reason to suspect that she was up to no good.

I
n the late spring of 1931, several months after I'd found Hani's coded henna alphabet, a Jewish girl was found murdered near the camel caravan depot. The men went to search the hills for the murderer, and we girls were not allowed to walk alone. Many of the young men of Qaraah took to patrolling. The patrols were meant to keep us all safe, but we girls scoffed at the boys, and mocked their bravado and bluster behind their backs. Our foraging trips to gather henna were curtailed. My aunt's henna supplies dwindled and she had to resort to purchasing her henna leaves from a stall in the market. We no longer went to wash clothes in the wadi unless traveling in a large group. Hani and I avoided my cave, leaving my goddesses once more abandoned. Two weeks after the first murder, a Muslim girl was found dead, the daughter of a horse breeder. She was found behind the camel market, disposed of just like the first girl, naked, with her throat slashed and clods of earth in her mouth. We grew even more fearful. We stopped going to the well unless a brother, father, or uncle went with us. When my father accompanied us, he often offered to carry water himself. Uncle Barhun carried water too, and sometimes both my father and uncle came with us and would amuse us on the long walk to and from the well with stories from their youth, in which Barhun was often getting lost, and my father tasked with finding him.

My brother Hassan, Half Nose, had hated me from the time I was a baby. “He couldn't have had a reason,” Sultana said, “for you were both too young for reasons.” She told me that when I was born, and he was just four years old, he would add extra blankets to my cradle so I would sweat in the summer and take them off in the winter so I would shiver. He dumped salt in my food so that I would cry and spit it out and go
hungry. He pinched my toes and maligned me to our mother. In short, he made my life miserable whenever he had the chance.

When it came to looking for the murderer, Hassan joined every expedition he could. Everyone knew that Hassan was no hero, and volunteered only because it was his way of shirking his duties. He was lazy, a reluctant worker. He had been apprenticed to a lampmaker when he was just a small boy. By volunteering to look for the murderer, he got himself out of the workshop and into the dunes around Qaraah—freedom to do what he wished.

One afternoon, I was at the breadboard, pounding dough for supper, and my mother was at the fire, clarifying butter for samneh, when the door opened. Hassan strode in, lips open, crooked teeth sharp and menacing, face stretched in a punishing leer.

“Look what I found!” he growled.

I saw with a flash of panic that he was holding two of my idols.

“I was out patrolling,” he continued, “and I came across a cave above the old iron forge. Inside was an altar, a pagan altar. I found ten little idols arranged for devotions. They belong to your daughter—a little witch.” He glowered at me. “For all we know, she conjured the devil who killed those girls. I found all manner of things in the cave that implicate her. Cast-off pots, rugs, and trinkets from our household. Look, Father's leather.” He pinched a piece of leather around the middle of one of the idols. I had made a little apron for Anath, my newest idol, out of a scrap of leather from my father's shop. The edges were marked with my father's distinctive triangle and circle pattern.

My mother had put down her wooden spoon and was now standing with her hands on her hips. Hassan kept talking. “That little harpy. Maybe Adela has cursed every one of us.” He held up the idols. I noticed that his face was a strange shade, pale and greenish, and he looked like he was going to be sick.

My mother turned and lifted the butter pot off the fire. She placed it very deliberately on the cooling stone. Then she wiped her hands on her apron and reached out and took the idols. At that very moment, Hassan put his hand up to his mouth and ran out the door. We could hear him vomiting, retching into the earth. When he came back in, my mother threw a rag at him and made a disgusted face. “Clean yourself up,” she ordered. Hassan dabbed miserably at his glistening lips as my mother held one of my idols, examining it, lifting up her clothes. I had made her
a skirt out of a scrap of blue cloth from our darning basket—the same cloth that was now on our table, set for dinner. My mother raised the idol to her face. Her nostrils flared, as if she were smelling something spoiled, acrid. Then she threw it into the hearth fire. The flames danced around the smooth body, licking it, and scorching the cloth. She put the other idol on the breadboard and then began to beat me. I had suffered enough beatings at her hand to know how to brace myself against her anger. But this was different. Her slaps were harder, and kept coming, blow after blow on my face, my shoulders, and then into my belly, her fingers curled in a fist. I still had a piece of dough in my hand, and I squeezed it hard, focusing my entire soul on that little piece of dough.
Maybe I will become the dough
, I thought,
maybe I will leave this world and return as a bit of simple sustenance.