Henna House (40 page)

“Am I what?”

“Are you a husband?”

“I will be yours before the week is out.”

Then Asaf told me that before he died, Uncle Zecharia made him promise that he would return for me. He said, “Son, your marriage to Adela is a sacred stitch on the hem of eternity. Swear to me that you will go back for her.”

“Is that why you came back—to fulfill your father's wishes?”

He didn't answer me. Instead Asaf offered up a brittle little smile that seemed to have a smirk tucked in the center. Just then I thought that I heard the sound of a flute, and I looked around in shock and fear, scanning the crowd. Binyamin? What if he were there? How would I face him? No, it was just a child with a toy instrument. But my heart had already missed a few beats. I didn't even know I was crying until Asaf reached out and wiped my tears with the corner of his sleeve.

“Don't cry, Adela, all is as it should be.”

The tears ran freely from my eyes, and I sobbed in spite of my embarrassment.

*  *  *

We married just a few days later. We had been engaged when he was a scruffy imp with an amulet of mercury, baby teeth, dried rue, durra, and sesame around his neck, and the autumn rains of the north washed mud and silt down from the mountains, polluting our spirits with the mud of old creation. When it came time for my bridal henna, I thought about asking each of my cousins to do the task. Edna's designs were
perfect, and yet they somehow lacked vibrancy. Nogema's hand was the least steady, but she invented marvelous thickets and vines that seemed to wrap around a girl's heart. Hamama had become a good friend to me, and her designs were pretty, but she tended to make extraneous flourishes whose esoteric meanings seemed only to blur the end result. In the end, I knew that I would ask Hani, just as Auntie Rahel had said when we were together in Sana'a. And I also knew that I would ask her for a special favor, something far beyond the ordinary.

At my henna ceremony, Nogema beat the tabl drum and Hamama and Sultana played the shinshilla cymbals. Edna mixed together the resin, myrrh, frankincense, and iron sulfate and then heated it until it was a molten waxy paste. Because my own mother wasn't there to marry me off, Aunt Rahel did the dance of the candles. With a tray on her head she swayed her hips as the flickering flames on her head mesmerized me, coming close, closer. “
Kululululululu!
” she sang, “
kululululululu
!
” The henna pot was in the middle of the candles on the tray. When she was in front of me she said, “May you be the mother of multitudes,” and then inaugurated the ceremony by taking a token smear of henna and inscribing a triangle of protection on the center of my palms. She took a seat of honor on my right. Edna and Hamama unwrapped the mehani cloths from my arms and feet. Yerushalmit and Sultana sat on either side of me whispering little stories, telling me jokes. Hani began to apply the waxy mixture to the undersides of my feet, and then worked her way to the tops of them, my shins, my calves. Next she did my hands, my wrists. She had me put my arm on her shoulder and completed cufflets and golden diadems like snakes that I could almost feel moving up and down my biceps. Her stylus tickled and prodded, scratched and caressed. “Don't you dare move!” she hissed when I tried to scratch an itch in the crook of my arm. “Well, then, scratch it for me!” I hissed back. Hamama knelt by my side and scratched where I showed her. Hani wrinkled up her nose.

“Oh, Adela,” she said, “don't you know, a bride must be still as a statue on her Night of Henna.”

“But not in bed,” Nogema added with a whisper.

Hamama joined in, “And remember, Adela, Anath slays Mot.”

Hani continued, “And Baal rises to be her consort.”

I gave a little annoyed snort. “What does that have to do with me and Asaf?”

“Silly little Adela.” Nogema rolled her eyes in mock exasperation. “You'll see, every bride slays her husband on her wedding night. No matter how much he thinks he's your master, it is you who will wade knee deep in the blood of his desires.”

They teased me. “Asaf is dessert,” Edna said, “sweet lahuhua bread with honey.”

“No, he is the savory stew,” said Nogema, “succulent lamb with potatoes, a sumptuous meal that fills you for days.”

“You are both wrong,” said Hani. “He is neither sweet nor savory. He is the hilbeh, the pepper relish that our little Adela must eat sparingly, for it sets the mouth on fire.”

I blushed and pretended to be shocked, but really I was dizzy with the spin of my life. I felt empty inside, blank of all feeling. But I was already a bride, so I forced myself to remember when Asaf Damari had been only a boy, beautiful even then, when he first came to us as a dirt-smeared imp and I was a little girl who thought that relish was just relish, and not a metaphor for scorching desire.

Next Hani applied the shaddar, and when she finished, I sat still while it set, feeling it drying and tightening on my skin as the guests in the henna house ate pastries, gossiped, sang songs, and told lewd stories of brides who took more than their fair share of pleasure and of grooms endowed like horses, mythical centaurs, and lowly goats. There was much laughter. I was given arak to drink. It numbed my tongue and burned my throat. When the paste had set, my cousins rubbed it off my arms and legs, revealing a design that startled us all in its genuine nature, as if it had always been there, as if it were part of my skin and I had worn it since birth. Hani had combined the most vivid elements of various traditions and created a design ornate and intimate, ethereal and seductive.

“Breathtaking!” Sultana gasped. “Hani, you have outdone yourself.” Edna smiled at her little sister and bent down to kiss her lips. They all stood in front of me, my cousins, sisters-in-law, my aunt, and seemed too stunned to speak. Finally, Aunt Rahel reached out a hand and stroked my flushed cheek.

“You are astonishing, Adela. You stand before us a perfect spark of the spirits of our Mothers Sarah, Miriam, Rebecca, Leah, Rachel.”

I looked in the mirrors they held up for me and saw blooms and vines. I saw birds of paradise, snakes, butterflies, shooting stars, and
tiny Eyes of God inscribed on the pistils and stamens of flowers. When I moved about I could smell the mossy humus scent of earth and fecundity coming from my body. I knew that the scent was the perfume mixed with the henna, but it was also the green essence of the design itself.

*  *  *

Aunt Rahel fit the bridal crown on my head. I bowed toward her and lifted my head when she told me to. She shifted it a bit to the right, and then to the left. “It is too big for you,” she said. “We will need extra pins to hold it in place.” She told Hamama to get her more pins, and then went about fastening it to my hair. We had borrowed the towering
tishbuk lu'lu'
from a Sana'an wedding dresser, who, like us, had come from the North. The helmet was made of layered coins, beads, pearls, and amulets, the front was hung with coal, agate, and cowrie shells. Woolen tassels hung off the coins and brushed my shoulders. The pins dug into my scalp. The tishbuk lu'lu' was heavy on my head and made me feel more like a soldier going into battle than a woman about to be wed. When I turned my head, I got a crick in my neck. When I moved the slightest bit, the coins tinkled.

My wedding night?

The first thing I did when Asaf and I were alone was to reach into my sleeve pocket. I held out my palm. It took him a few moments, but then his face lit up with recognition.

“Are you returning this to me?”

“No, but it is all I have from then, and I want you to know that I have kept it safe.”

He put his hand in mine so that the amulet was between both our palms. It was still just a round wooden disk affixed to a square wooden backing, with one of the many names for Elohim written inside, but for a flicker of a moment, it was also more than that. It was the
Mishkan
, the tabernacle in the desert, the ark that contained the written law of our lives. I wondered what name of Elohim was written there, but I knew I would never open it to find out. One didn't open an amulet box any more than one touched the Torah with bare hands.

I undid the buttons on my wedding tunic slowly, and let it fall from my shoulders like a sheet of silvery water. Then I unbuttoned my shift and slipped out of it. I murmured a blessing, for I felt as if I had stepped out of the ritual bath, and that I was emerging into the darkness cleansed
of impurity. Asaf stared, just as Hani had said he would. His eyes took in the elaborate pictures rising from my legs to my sex, to my belly and above. She had decorated more than my hands and feet. Much more.

“You want something special? I will give you an elaborate love charm,” she had said, “an inscription that turns the body into an illuminated manuscript.”

My husband's eyes took in the florets on my hips, the whirlpool of triplet dots and linking swirls around my navel, but his eyes lingered the longest on my breasts, which Hani had decorated with a series of concentric flowers, the petals overlapping, growing smaller as they lapped in little paisley rivulets at the edges of my nipples. I held my hand up to beckon him forward. He didn't hesitate. Asaf wrapped me in his arms, kissed my lips, suckled my tongue, and made love to me not like the boy he had been when I first knew him, but like the man he had become in my absence.

We fell into a dreamy stupor and in my satiety, I imagined that I loved the boy I had married, and that my feelings for Binyamin were the false ones, totems of the little demon who tempts lovers to betray their own hearts.

Just before sunrise we both awoke, and Asaf took me again. But this time he climbed upon me like a bull rutting out of some sloppy ancestral habit, and when he was finished he rolled over, wiped himself on the dirty shamle that had fallen to the floor, and when he next spoke, it wasn't words of love but business.

“Sometime this week,” he said, “I hope to do business with a fellow my father used to know in Uttar Pradesh.”

I gathered the sheets around my body, suddenly feeling ashamed of my gaudy nakedness.

“Oh? You are sure he is in Aden?”

“I got word that he arrived yesterday.”

“And what sort of business, my husband?”

“Why . . . I must fill up my inventory.”

“So you can open a shop in Crater?”

His face twisted into a mocking sneer. “A shop? No, I am no shopkeeper, Adela. Shopkeeping won't get you rich. I am leaving Aden late summer, before the New Year.”

“I don't understand.”

“I have clients. They are waiting for me. For my deliveries. I'll travel
via Alexandria to Istanbul. My father's old clients are all expecting me. I have already taken orders, and have entered into professional obligations. Of course you will stay here. It will take only four or five months; I'll be back in time for Passover.”

How could he leave me, when he just got here? After all these years, how could he so flippantly plan to leave me behind?

“I don't understand. Why didn't you say something before?”

He rolled off our pallet and began to dress. He faced away from me when he said, “What does it matter?”

“It matters because I am your wife.”

He shrugged, and now there was a hard edge to his voice. “Well, I am telling you now.”

I measured my words carefully. “If you leave Aden, I will go with you.”

“That's ridiculous.”

“Say what you will, but I am your wife; I will travel with you, wherever you go. You left me once, Asaf; you will not leave me again.”

“And if I do?”

“You won't. You were promised to me with nails and teeth around your neck. The teeth will bite you if you forsake me. The nails will pound themselves into your heart, if you are a false husband.”

“Ach! Do you believe such things, Adela?” He looked at me incredulously, and for a moment, I wasn't sure if it was my own voice coming out of my mouth. I sounded like a stranger to myself.

I shrugged. “I am not a prophetess, and I cannot tell the future, but I can tell the past, and I know that in the past we were friends. The past is thick, and it has bearing, it gives us sustenance. And because of our past, you will be a friend to me now, and take me with you when you leave Aden.”

Several expressions flashed over his face. He was falling from a great height, and the wind was crushing his spirit. Then he was standing on a mountaintop, with hands hard enough to touch the sun. Finally, he painted a blankness on his face and forced a smile. I did too. And soon we reached for each other a third time, coupling in the dawn light, each of us pretending to take a wild and unruly pleasure in the parched desert of our marriage bed.

He left me lying there. I looked down over my naked body that Hani had turned into a brocade more ornate than her mother's precious
Indian tapestries. My petaled curves, my paisley dark nipples, my secret bouquets of blossoming henna. I saw that next to me was the indentation on the sheets from where his body had lain. I moved over, and put myself in the outline that he had left behind. Something pricked my memory, and I remembered that when he was a boy he had left a sand-angel in the dunes and I had fit myself into it. Now, here I was his bride, his wife. I lay in his spot with the realization that I had not married an angel, and that the form of him was empty of anything but ambition.

Why had Asaf returned? As I lay there, I began to understand everything. He had married me for profit. It wasn't because his father had begged him on his deathbed. That was just ribbon-talk, pretty new words he unspooled to tie up the old box of our engagement. He must have heard that Uncle Barhun was prosperous. He came back for me in order to finance this business trip. Aden was an entrepôt—little merchants from India and Africa came there to sell their goods duty free to traveling merchants like Asaf, who would then resell them at a profit.