Henna House (6 page)

I am told that I cried at the ceremony for no good reason, and that my groom ripped his pants on a nail on a bench. My brother Hassan said that we both looked like babies and that to prove it, in the middle of the ceremony, Asaf pissed his pants, though I am sure this is mean-spirited embellishment, for Asaf was surely old enough to hold his water. The ceremony was held upstairs in the men's parlor of our house. Parched treats were served, and the men—our fathers—cemented the deal over the signing of documents and the blessing and sharing of a ritual cup of wine. There was little celebration, though. According to Sultana, my mother had seen fit to put a holy-name amulet in the secret sleeve pocket
of my dress, and to fasten a triangle amulet ring around Asaf's neck. The neck ring was fashioned with nine nails from different households, as was the custom. Inside the hanging pouch were the traditional magical elements that boys wore to pass through the dangerous crossings of their lives. There were a vial of mercury, baby teeth, dried rue, durra, and sesame. My brothers had all worn this amulet at their circumcisions and engagement ceremonies, and my mother kept it in the locked chest along with her other precious possessions. There was no music at the ceremony. None of the
tabl
drum or
shinshilla
cymbals of wedding festivities, no mothers clapping their hands over their mouths to say
kulululu
. My mother even refused to have my hands dipped in henna for the event, and so I was presented to my groom without the customary bright red palms of fertility and good fortune.

After my engagement, I was prohibited from seeing much of my groom. This was in accordance with tradition. A boy and girl promised to each other from the same family were not supposed to develop affinities for each other, lest they mistakenly grow up thinking of each other as brother and sister. “This would lead to the abomination of incest,” Auntie Aminah explained. “Even if you are cousins, you can still be brother and sister in your souls. So you must not see him, or get to know him. There will be enough time for that after the wedding.” Uncle Zecharia moved almost a mile away from us, into a house far from where most of the Jewish families lived in Qaraah. He and Asaf lived close to a little mosque and two doors from an old one-eyed caravanner from Najran, with whom Uncle Zecharia became friendly. On family occasions, Asaf was sequestered with my father, brothers, and Uncle Zecharia, while I was kept in the bosom of the ladies of the house.

My only real friend from those days was Binyamin Bashari, with whom I was still allowed to interact. We played the games of wild children—chasing lizards, squashing spiders, building forts out of sticks and stones, fashioning catapults out of straw, twine, and cast-off pieces of leather from my father's workshop. Some of my earliest memories are of Binyamin shimmying up onto the subroof of our house to get a ball of gutta-percha that had gotten stuck up there during our exploits. I was very impressed that he could climb so high.

Binyamin had been learning to play a long wooden flute, called a
khallool
. Sometimes he brought his khallool to the frankincense tree behind my auntie's house, and we would sit in the great big saddle of
the tree and he would improvise reedy tunes as crickets chirped along to his tentative melodies. Occasionally Binyamin would bring me disappointing news of my husband-to-be. “He is no good at Torah school,” Binyamin once told me. “He knows nothing of scripture, and refuses to learn the weekly portion.”

“Why do you roll your eyes at my husband? Are you such a scholar that you can call him dumb?”

He shrugged and picked at a scab on his knuckles. “He isn't your husband yet.”

“He will be.”

“He acts as if he is better than us Qaraah boys. He doesn't talk to anyone, and keeps mightily to himself.”

“Well, maybe he
is
better than you Qaraah boys.”

“Is that what you think?” The half smile Binyamin usually wore turned into a scowl. And after that we never spoke of Asaf again, which made me glad because I knew that if the subject were to arise, I would once again speak words that would cut my friend, little ceremonial slashes to his soul, not to cause a mortal wound, just to draw blood and to relieve myself of a nameless burden.

But I was never sure that Binyamin really disliked Asaf. Once I saw Binyamin and Asaf leaving Torah school together. They were following the teacher, a tall, emaciated scholar from Taiz, who was everyone's favorite, even though he espoused the teachings of a messianist whose philosophies were controversial in Qaraah. Asaf was on the teacher's right, Binyamin on his left, and they were walking in the direction of the little well. Another time, I saw them walking together toward Binyamin's father's jambia stall. And a third time, I saw them sitting together on the low wall outside of the ritual bath, on a Sabbath afternoon. This time, they saw me too. But both pretended that they hadn't. I passed, angry with both of them, but mostly angry with Binyamin. My anger quickly turned to shame, for I was embarrassed that I cared.

Once or twice I caught Asaf's eye on the street beside the buckle and nail seller's stall. Once, I passed right next to him as he was going into the Torah school. Usually I saw him in the market. Uncle Zecharia began to spend his days in my father's leather stall. My father embossed his belts with a distinctive triangle and diamond design along the edges. Each belt maker had his own design, a signature on the animal skin. Asaf would attend school with the other boys of Qaraah in the
morning, but in the afternoon, he would join his father at my father's stall, stamping the triangles and diamonds into the belts. My father also made decorative bags that he sold to the wealthier and more discerning matrons of Qaraah, as well as leather phylactery cases for the prayer boxes that men in our community affixed to their foreheads and forearms. Sometimes Asaf cut the straps for the prayer boxes, or helped my father with other tasks, like cutting the soles for the shoes he made for children. I don't think that Asaf ever knew that I had been my father's helper long before him. When Asaf or his father was in my father's stall, we both pretended that I didn't know a thing about leathercraft, though when they weren't there, I assisted him just as before.

When I went marketing with my sisters-in-law or my mother, we would visit the stall to greet my father, or to bring him a flask of hot sweet tea or a pot of egg and meat stew for a midday meal when he was too busy to come home for lunch. Uncle Zecharia was not good with his hands, and really “helped” my father only by keeping him company. Uncle Zecharia would try to romance customers into making purchases, but was not a very good salesman when it came to leather, a deficiency he blamed on himself. “I am a merchant of spice and scent,” I heard him say more than once, “and have no talent for peddling dead flesh. Who can blame me after a lifetime spent inhaling the fruity delicacies this world has to offer?” When we visited the stall, Uncle Zecharia would always make a point to address me personally, saying things like, “Little Adela, what a lovely little collar, did you do the embroidery yourself?” He always complimented me on one thing or another, and I usually hid my face in my scarf and blushed. But Asaf wouldn't act anything like his father. He would keep his head bowed at his task, or look right past me and pretend I wasn't there. After all of these occasions on which Asaf ignored me, I began to feel as if his kindness in the garden on the day of his arrival had been a sham, and that the amulet that I kept under my pillow was a token from a different boy, one who had perhaps continued on his travels, not this cousin who had settled into our lives and was promised to me as my husband.

I
was engaged to Asaf in early autumn, but it wasn't until late winter of that year that we began to defy tradition and became friends. I was lonely most of the time those days. I was no longer supposed to play with Binyamin. We were getting too old to be alone together, my mother said. His mother agreed, and they both did what they could to keep us apart. I spent more and more time in my cave. I was on my way there when I heard the thundering of hooves. I turned with a start, feeling my heart in my throat. A boy on a chestnut horse was almost upon me. I ducked behind a bush. He sped down around the side of the cemetery, and then came back again. This time he slowed down when he got close to a tamarind tree, slid off the horse, and tethered the animal. Then he walked over to where I was crouching. I sucked in my breath. My fiancé.

I remember that a chill was in the air. It was the sort of day when the sun shines so brightly as to make one forget that the heat of summer is still months away. Asaf cocked his head to one side. He squinted and then turned his eyes into laughing stars.

“Come out, cousin. What are you doing here? All alone out here—you should go home. You know I can see you? Come out so we can talk.”

I emerged from behind the bush. He seemed taller, lankier. I wondered when he had grown so much, or if I was just imagining that he had gotten so much taller since we had stood side by side, protected by the old magic of mercury, durra, and rue. I noticed a dimple in his chin, a smudge of dirt below his right eye.

I pointed to the horse. “Where did you get that mount?”

“What mount?”

“The horse tethered to the tree, stupid.”

“Don't call me stupid.”

“I'm sorry. But I would expect you to call me stupid if I tied a horse to a tree and then pretended it wasn't there.”

He shrugged, kicked at a stone.

“The horse isn't mine.”

“Of course it isn't. Where would you get a horse? And anyway, you aren't allowed to ride it.”

“She belongs to Sheik Ibn Messer. A cousin of the Imam.”

I looked at my cousin, my husband-to-be. His missing front teeth had grown in, as had mine. His complexion was a toasted sesame brown. His long hair fell in a tousled fringe out of the sides of a brown turban that had replaced his red cap. His earlocks were tucked into his turban. I think that is the moment I realized that Asaf was pretty, as pretty as a girl, but with boyish grit and swagger. The crumpled brown suit he had arrived in had been replaced by a man's dark blue
guftan
coat trimmed with cord. The cording had a gap on the front hem—not by accident, but because all of our men had their guftans made this way, with an imperfection, so that every time one looked at it, one was reminded of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Under the guftan he wore a white shirt with blue embroidery. The blue stitches on his shirt matched his eyes, which in turn matched the sky.

“Sheik Ibn Messer?” I was skeptical. “He lets you ride his horse?”

I knew who the sheik was. His summer compound was not far from my cave, though it was beyond the view of the escarpment.

Asaf stuck out his chest and squared his shoulders, holding himself in a stance worthy of such illustrious association. Asaf's last word,
Imam,
hung in the air, traveling up like a puff of smoke. I must have scrunched up my face, or otherwise showed Asaf that his explanation was lacking.

“Ibn Messer is a great man and a mischief maker,” he explained. “He likes to let Jews ride his horses. He and Imam Yahye hate each other. They fight the way dragonflies fight, by buzzing each other's wings.”

He bragged, “I am a better rider than most men. Ibn Messer holds races. Awards prizes. He said I could be a jockey if I weren't a Jew. Said I keep my seat better than most. And that the way I handle his horses, he is sure I could win.”

Now I understood. The Jews of the Kingdom may have known next to nothing about the goings-on in the outside world, but we were experts in the political machinations of the Zaidi Muslims who ruled over us. Even I, a little girl, was old enough to know that there were
several “little sheiks” in the mountain valleys surrounding Sana'a. And that every so often one rose up like a “cocky rooster,” as my father would say, “to peck at the ground around the Imam's feet.” All throughout the Kingdom there were tangled allegiances and loyalties. Imam Yahye, while autocratic, did not wield absolute power. And the farther one got from Sana'a, the weaker the yoke of his authority. But politics didn't interest me at all at the moment. I opened my mouth to say something benign and inconsequential like, “How far have you ridden?” but instead I heard myself say, “You aren't a man, you are just a boy.”

Asaf seemed taken aback, as if he didn't know what conversation we were having—one about horses or one about us, about our future together when I would be less a girl than a woman, and he more a man than a boy. He was quiet for a moment, but then he shrugged and smiled. His eyes grew wide and his face opened up, like a present. He looked down the escarpment toward the horse. She had nosed around and found a mouthful of scrubby grass to chew on. “Do you want to meet her?”

“What is her name?”

“Jamiya. Come with me.” He led me to the tree. “Put your hand on her flank, that's right, isn't she soft?” I breathed in deep. The rich animal smell filled my nose—a combination of wet earth and burnt caramel. She made contented little whinnying sounds as Asaf scratched between her ears. Jamiya flicked her tail, widened her nostrils. We stood there like that for what seemed like a very long time. Eventually Asaf mounted the horse and rode away. I watched him make a wide turn and disappear over the dunes to the right of the cemetery. From the back, with his earlocks tucked away, he could have been a Muslim boy. Later that night, as I lay on my pallet, I kept thinking about Asaf and Jamiya. I fell asleep dreaming of a princess who married a horse and spent eternity riding her husband through the fields of heaven.

*  *  *

A few weeks later Asaf and his father came to our house for an evening meal. It wasn't a Sabbath or festival day, but an ordinary midweek night. Uncle Zecharia usually paid a widow to cook for him and Asaf, but she was visiting her daughter who was in childbed, so my father had invited them to share our table.