Henna House (38 page)

“Do you?”

“What?”

“Know where to go?”

He smiled his wolfish grin. “I have always been told that I have a good sense of direction.”

“When I was a little girl, I always wandered.”

“And you never got lost, did you?”

“You know I didn't because you followed me.”

He shrugged. “My brothers beat me, my father was a drunkard . . . Following you was a game I played. I told myself that somewhere in the dunes was a secret city and only you possessed the key to it.”

“Keys again?”

“I suppose I've been dreaming about keys for a long time.”

Soon after this conversation, I dreamed that Binyamin came to my house with a big ring of keys. “These,” he said, “unlock the secret doors of Aden.” He took me on a patchwork tour, unmoored from geography. We explored the Memorial Building, where the British war dead were honored; we entered the bedrooms and ballrooms of the Grand Royal Hotel, the private officers' cinema in Steamer Point, the inner recesses of the concert hall in Crescent, and the back rooms of the belching refinery
in Little Aden. And when I thought we were finished, Binyamin took out one more key. It unlocked the great lighthouse in Crater Harbor. I followed Binyamin up the narrow twisty stairs. He showed me how the great mechanism on the lens lit up the night. We stayed there a long time, spotting ships coming into harbor, as well as the dancing tails of mermaids who surfaced ever so briefly before swimming east to India.

*  *  *

Binyamin courted me throughout that summer, and through the autumn. My memories of those days are of a series of sweet little gifts. One day I was making dough for lafeh bread when Remelia answered the door. She called for me to come. Binyamin stood in the doorway looking awkward and yet very proud of himself. A half smile turned one side of his mouth up. He shifted back and forth on his feet and thrust a basket of dates at me. “These are for you.” I accepted the gift, imagining that the dates were music notes, and he was handing me a basket of melodies.

“What is it?” He looked concerned. My strange vision must have flashed across my face.

“Nothing. Thank you. Thank you so much.” I gave him a big, unambiguous smile. “I was wondering, will you bring your khallool and play for us sometime? My uncle would so love to hear your music.”

Later that night when I ate the dates, I had the same feeling. That I was eating music, delicious music.

He came again the next Friday afternoon with a jar of spicy pickles for our dinner table. And a few days after that with a jar of honey. Once when he came, Hani was over and we were making jachnun together. When he had left she said, “When you marry him, I will give you a special henna. He will lose himself in the tendrils running up your thighs.” She poked and pinched me until I doubled over in a knot of laughter.

“Really, Adela,” she said, “when he first came upon us in your cave, all those years ago, I thought Binyamin Bashari was an animal turned into a boy, a desert creature come to eat you up. But now I see that he has grown quite civilized, and I love him for you, because he has taken you from your vigil at the lonely harbor and turned you into a girl who primps and blushes.” At this, I blushed even redder, then grew angry, for although I knew I had left my post—and replaced my hope of Asaf's
return with hope for a proposal from Binyamin—I felt guilty. In some ways it felt as if I were carelessly relinquishing a holy obligation that had been bestowed on me, not by the Imam nor my parents, but by some other meddling force that spelled out my fate in smoky letters in the sky.

“Achh, don't go all gloomy on me. If Asaf were going to come back for you, he would have been here by now.” Hani rolled out another piece of dough, pounding it with the heel of her hand. “And anyway, we are no longer backward villagers of the Kingdom; we are modern girls”—she winked—“and modern girls can choose their own paths.”

The next week, Binyamin was once again invited to share our Sabbath table. Toward the end of the meal, there was some unpleasantness with my brother Menachem. Menachem had always been pious, but in Aden he had become even more so, and he was suspicious of Binyamin for shearing his earlocks. The men had been discussing the refugee problem—how the Brits claimed to be protecting the Jews of Aden, yet they wouldn't let us immigrate freely into Palestine.

“The Brits lie,” Menachem said bitterly. “If we have rights here, then why won't they let us enter into Palestine without quotas?” Menachem pointed to the broken cord in his guftan coat.

“I'll tell you why. It's because too many of us forget that the Temple wasn't destroyed only in the past but is being destroyed even now, continuously. Our mistreatment by the British is punishment for our own spiritual laxness. Whose? Jews who don't keep the Commandments, Jews like you who are ashamed of looking Jewish. Why don't you wear earlocks, Binyamin? Why do you cut your hair? Such impiety is a grave dishonor.”

“I mean no offense, Menachem. And I pray whether I wear earlocks or not.”

“But I don't see you in synagogue. Don't tell me that you pray with the British soldiers.” His face twisted into a mocking glare. “There aren't enough Jews in your little regiment to make a minyan.”

It was true. Binyamin rarely went to synagogue with my uncle and brothers. When he came for a Sabbath meal he didn't walk with them around the corner to join in community devotions. He told me that sometimes he prayed privately in the mornings, and that he was more comfortable saying his prayers alone than in public. I didn't mind. I knew that Binyamin and I were of the same opinion. We felt
that
Elohim was everywhere—in the black rocky shoals of Crater Harbor, on the banks of the Khoreiba River, in the symbolic break of corded hems, and in a far-off cave found by a girl who prayed in the way she was born to pray. In other words, we both believed that the forms of our prayers were ours and ours alone to fashion.

*  *  *

The next time Binyamin came, he didn't have a little present but an invitation:

“Can you meet me at the fair at Sheik Othman the day after tomorrow?”

“Alone? I don't think—”

“Bring one of your sisters-in-law, or Remelia, or one of your cousins.”

I looked into his eyes. Dark brown with flashes of amber. I was possessed by the urge to touch his face, to feel his bones under his flesh, his soft lips, those warm tuneful eyes deep set in their sockets.

“You'll come?”

I took a deep breath.

T
he fair at Sheik Othman was a lorry ride west from Crater. I had never been there before. When I asked Hani, her face lit up. She said, “Mara will love the festival. And we can use her as our excuse to go.”

The next day, Remelia dragged me to Hani's house after we had finished our marketing. When we walked inside, I realized that I was being treated to a new henna application. I could smell the wheaty henna paste in the pot and the fruity rosewater in fluted glass flasks that Hani would use to wash my hands before beginning her work. My last application—over three weeks old—was a faded gray scrim. I sat down on Hani's low cushions and thoroughly enjoyed myself as she teased me by pretending to have no idea what to draw. She flipped her hair, which was loose, as she was inside her own home and not wearing her kerchief. I noticed that it seemed even curlier than it had been before she had had Mara. She flashed her eyes and looked into my palms for a long time. When she began to draw, I saw that she was giving me the same rose and lily pattern she had given me on my very first henna. But there were other elements in it too: little waves that signified the Red Sea, and twisty mountain paths that signified our journey south, and a little corrugated swirl that was the sign of the secret angel who watched over courting couples.

*  *  *

Binyamin was where he said he would be—standing next to the entrance to the fairgrounds. We spent a pleasant hour walking through the attractions. We watched a puppet show that thrilled Mara, who clapped her hands and let out delightful little laughs at the puppets' clumsy clownish exploits. Binyamin took a turn in the shooting gallery. Then we went to watch the tamboora dancers representing all the many
tribes of the midlands and western Hadramut. Binyamin explained how the long-necked tamboora endowed magical properties on those who danced to it. Hani cheekily asked him if his khallool had a similar effect. “Of course it does,” he replied, “but my magic has a renegade flair, and I can't predict the effect it will have on those who dare to dance to it.”

“How does your major feel about that?” I looked at him sideways, smiling.

“My major has two left feet, so there is no worry that he will get himself in trouble at my expense.”

We walked through the rhythmic throng, stopping occasionally to watch a performance. We played a game of Lucky Dip and a game of Ring Toss. Hani and Mara rode on an elephant. Then Binyamin steered us toward the Ferris wheel. Years have passed since that afternoon and I have since been on Ferris wheels the size of ten-story buildings, but back then, when I was still a girl in Aden, the Ferris wheel in the festival at Sheik Othman was a true marvel—though by today's standards it would be looked upon as nothing more than a pile of matchsticks. It was fabricated entirely of wood, and had three cars. When on top, the riders were approximately one story above the ground. The entire contraption was turned by a giant wheel that was hitched to a team of oxen. There were several three-seat wheels, which turned at various speeds, depending on the perk and vigor of each wheel's oxen. Hani and Mara went in the first car, Binyamin and I climbed into the next.

Every time we reached the top my heart jumped to my throat, and when we swooped down again it came back up, up and down, up and down. Binyamin kept paying extra rupees for extra turns. On our eighth turn, the wheel stopped when we were on the top. We swung there as the operator let Hani and Mara off. But the next couple haggled about the price, and so we were left swinging as they settled the matter. Tamboora music floated over to us from behind the roulette tables.

“Do you know what that is?” Binyamin pointed to the arena. From where we were, we could see the audience and the dancers. The crowd consisted of British officers' families, Indian bureaucrats and their wives, a handful of tourists from Europe and Australia, and an assemblage of local Arabs and Jews from Aden and the environs. The men in the troop began to dance a slow beat, and then a frenzy. One by one they took out their jambia from their sheaths and cut themselves—in the palm, on the face, on the bottom of a bare foot—and all the while they kept dancing.

“The dance of the jambia.” I grimaced. “I have heard of this ritual, though I have never seen it.”

“Some call it barbarism,” Binyamin said. “My major disapproves, and is hoping to eradicate the custom.”

“Do you think he will succeed?”

“Those men have been dancing that dance since the dawn of the seventh day, when man was created.”

“Do you mean to say that Adam our Father danced the dance of the jambia in Eden?”

“No, I mean it just as a figure of speech. I don't believe that Adam our Father was ever in Eden. I am a rationalist, and I believe that men were descended from apes, not men from men.”

“Men were never descended from men,” I teased him, “or do you not know the ways of the world?”

He took up my challenge. “Perhaps I need a wife to teach me.”

I let this suggestion float in the air. But it did not stay there. With those words, the Ferris wheel became gigantic, lifting us higher than Mount Sirah, until we were on top of a spinning wheel of mythic proportions. Our hands touched and our fingers entwined. He espied my new henna, lifting my hands up to examine them. He traced the intricate wonder of the petals, paisleys, and tendrils on my wrists. I shivered under his touch as he patted a little paisley drop on one of my knuckles. From down below some of the jambia dancers had begun to scream. “Look,” I said. I took my hand away from his, pointed. A few of the dancers had broken loose from the arena. “Where do they run to, bleeding like that?”

Binyamin shrugged. “I suppose to the well at the fairgrounds' entrance, to douse the pain.”

“What did you mean to say? About the major . . .”

“Men have always mixed blood with music and magic. No British major will be able to take the dance out of their legs or the knives out of their hands.” Darkness flashed over his face. His eyebrows hunched together, he huffed in exasperation. “Ach,” he said, “what a shame that our conversation should be so serious. It's not . . .”

“Not what?”

“Not at all what I had intended.”

The wheel began to move again.

“Adela?”

Open lips. Soft mouth.

Yes. Oh. Yes.

*  *  *

That Sabbath, Binyamin came once more to my uncle's house. We went out into the garden after grace. He took my hand. Raised it to his lips. Brushed his lips against my knuckles. His finger traced my life line, and then doubled back on the tiny shallow tributary lines that flow up to my fingers and down to my wrist, which inscribe the filigree fortunes of love, hope, trust, and honor. I felt the rose vines on my forearms come to life, as if they were growing, spreading out, wrapping themselves around my arms. He kissed my fingertips. The tiny buds on the backs of my hands burst into bloom. I had heard tell of this in the henna house, how henna can come to life if bidden by the conjuring of a love match. Bride for groom, groom for bride. His forefinger was on my palm, on my life line, and then up to my wrist, my forearm, and then he was holding me by both shoulders and pressing his lips to mine.

In the morning, I rolled onto my back and lifted my arms to inspect my henna. I expected living flowers and sinuous green vines, but my henna lay once more flat and maroon on my skin, and the pulsing life of my nighttime longings seemed to have left no trace of whispers or magic. Had I dreamed it? Or lived it? And had Binyamin Bashari and I really spent a night such as that in the garden? Years later, Binyamin told me that the day after we stood together in the garden, he asked his major for permission to leave his unit and for help in obtaining visas to enter Palestine. He planned to ask me to marry him, and hoped that we would travel together to Jerusalem to make our home there.