Henna House (23 page)

How long did it go on? For as long as it took for that idol to catch and crackle. For as long as it took for Hassan to wipe his face, sit himself down on the divan pillows, and lean back in a languid pose, declaring himself both judge and audience. My mother must have paused in her attack to throw the second idol into the fire, though I don't remember a break in her fury. The little Anath idol caught slower than the older idol, its body holding on to its integrity for a few moments before the flames pounced. And still my mother kept beating me. But then the door opened, and Hani was there. Hassan made a scraping sound with his throat, as if the mere sight of her made him feel like vomiting again. My mother, her hand raised to me, gaining purchase before coming down again on my cheek, spat out the words “Out girl, this is none of your business,” but Hani didn't listen. Later she told me that she had had a premonition, and that the idols themselves appeared to her in a vision, telling her that they were burning, like Moses' bush. Sultana said that Hani didn't have a vision, but was walking by our door and heard my mother yelling. Masudah said that it didn't matter why Hani came, only that she did, and that once she was inside, the idols in the fire told her everything she needed to know. She ran right past Hassan, and put herself in between me and my mother. “Oh, Aunt Suli,” she said, dropping down to her knees, “don't blame Adela. The idols are mine. I made them. They are all mine. And so is the altar. I bring them offerings. Adela has never even been to my cave. She has nothing to do with my foolishness.”

Hassan was shaking his head, saying, “Mother, don't be tricked. If
anything, they are in league together. Beat them both. They are both little witches.”

“Get your uncle,” she snarled to Hassan. “Tell him to come. To come now for his degenerate daughter.”

Hani continued to defend me. “Auntie Sulamita, Adela would never do such things. She is a pious girl. Why, every morning she prays, and when she catches me gossiping, she warns me against the dangers of the evil tongue. She reminds me to say the prayer of Motzi before breaking bread and is in every way a modest Jewish girl. Why, if she had known of my idols, I am sure she would have thrown them into the fire herself.”

My mother looked back and forth between me and Hani. Then she sat down heavily on the stool by the hearth. She bunched up her apron and ran a hand through her hair, gray and wiry, which had come loose from her gargush and was hanging in front of her eyes. I was peeking up at her from where I was curled up on the floor, my face stinging, my belly bruised, my whole body shaking from the assault.

I do not know if my mother wholly believed Hani, or if she merely colluded with her. That is, if she let Hani lift the burden of my guilt, and wrap it around herself like a prayer shawl, a holy garment upon which we could all embroider our threats, sacrileges, and suspicions. My mother had blackened my right eye and split my lip. She did not apologize in words, but put me to bed with an onion poultice on my back and potato peelings on my eyes. She sat up by my side, changing the poultices every few hours throughout the night. My father complained to my mother about how she had treated me, but he did not yell or raise a hand to her, which I assume was a concession. After all, she had warned from the very beginning that
the other Damari girl
was a bad influence. Now she had proof. In the morning I was sore and ugly. My right eye was almost swollen shut. But my parents coddled me. My father went to the market and brought me a coral bracelet, a lavish indulgence that I took from him, incredulous, and put on my wrist right away. My mother, in a rare show of remorse, cooked me my favorite lentil soup and fed me herself, as if I were a baby.

Uncle Barhun and Aunt Rahel punished Hani by having her devote herself to prayer. They made her sit and read psalms in the synagogue every afternoon for weeks. And after that, she was ordered to sit with the women who watch over dead female bodies, saying psalms until
they are buried. With this final punishment, even my mother objected, complaining that it was “a morbid task for a girl.” She railed to my father against my aunt and uncle's treatment of Hani, which I found astonishing, as she had seen nothing wrong with beating me, her own daughter, for the same crime.

When I asked Auntie Aminah about it, she said, “Your mother would have beaten you and been done with it. For all her faults, she would not have continued to punish you after that beating, however harsh her blows. But your Aunt Rahel and Uncle Barhun know what it means to be haunted by other people's beliefs and suppositions, and wish no such strife for their daughter. They make her pray in public in order to save her from herself.”

After I had recovered from my beating, I heard many stories about what had really happened when Hassan found my cave. Some seemed credible, others fantastical. Masudah told the lewdest story, which gave it credence, for she was not one to speak of such things ordinarily. She said that after my beating she overheard Hassan crying to her husband, my brother Dov. Hassan told Dov that he found the cave because when he was patrolling nearby, he had heard a sweet melody coming from inside. He was drawn there, unable to resist the allure of the unearthly music. Inside, he encountered a siren—a woman who was also not a woman—and that she made love to him like a man, subjecting him to unholy carnal feats until he begged for mercy.

Sultana rolled her eyes, furrowed her mannish eyebrows, and said that she too had overheard gossip. “There was no siren,” she said, “only a shepherd boy and girl, taking each other in front of the altar. Hassan hid and watched them and grew aroused. When they saw him touching himself they laughed and mocked him, causing his manhood to shrivel. He fled that place like a little girl, his balls withered in their sacs.”

Yerushalmit heard a woman in the ritual bath tell a different story. Supposedly Hassan came across an old sage in the cave. The sage invited Hassan for tea and then cackled that he was a demon, and that since Hassan had shared his drink, he would be a demon too. “When he came to your parents' house, he was deranged with fear. Didn't he vomit? Well, that was the demon's tea, stirring up his insides.”

I don't know if any of this ever happened. But I know that Hassan was different after my beating and Hani's punishment. He was humbler,
and much less horrible. Not long after he found my cave, he married a poor young widow with five children, a woman everyone overlooked, but upon whom he doted. He became a good husband and stepfather, though he never sired children of his own. He applied himself in earnest to learning the lampmaker's trade. He even stopped hating me, and would go out of his way to compliment my cooking and my stitchery and to ask my opinion on matters of consequence.

In the blaze of midsummer, just days before the ninth of Av, when we wear sackcloth and ashes and cry from morning till night to commemorate the destruction of the Temple, a man was caught on the paths above the little well, forcing himself on a girl whose clothes he had already torn to shreds. The girl's anguished screams had alerted a pair of brickmakers working at a nearby kiln and they came to her rescue. Bloodstained clothing was found at the man's house. He confessed to the earlier crimes. The murderer was hung in the scrubyard behind the southern cistern. The community breathed a sigh of relief, though it was still some time before mothers let their daughters walk unescorted to the well, and we could not go out collecting henna without looking over our shoulders and feeling our hair stand on end at the rustling of leaves or the snap of a twig.

With the murderer gone, everyone relaxed. I watched my mother bathe in the wadi for the first time in months with a smile on her thin lips, the water running in cold rivulets down her graying hair. I watched the midwife hitch up her dress and run around our town, mopping her brow as she went from one house to another. Aunt Rahel helped her, and Hani and my sister-in-law Sultana did too—for the midwife couldn't be everywhere at once. It seemed that many mothers had crossed their legs and held their babies in while the murderer was still afoot, and now that he was caught, they'd agreed to let their babies come into the world. My father rarely danced, but now I watched him dance on the Sabbath eve, his arms flung with casual languor around Uncle Barhun's shoulders as they moved together to the beat of the tabl drum played by my brother Dov. Even the Imam's men, when they came on a patrol from Sana'a, seemed more relaxed. Though I suppose this was just coincidental, for what did they really care about the capture of a murderer who killed young girls? But still, they harassed us less. A jeweler who had been fined and imprisoned for building a fifth story on his house, making it taller than the houses of the Muslims in Qaraah, was released from jail.
A boy who had been imprisoned for refusing to carry a corpse out of the house of a Muslim neighbor was also released, and a girl left orphaned when her parents both died of diphtheria was saved from the Orphans Decree. They let an aunt adopt her, even though she could afford to pay but a paltry bribe.

I
carefully considered how to thank Hani, and finally went to Masudah and asked her for some sheets of her paper. This was an extravagant request, but she didn't seem surprised. She agreed even before I had finished bargaining for it. “I'll come every day and help you with the children,” I said. “I'll mix your hawaij and bake your Sabbath jachnun throughout the summer.”

She tsked. “Take however many pieces you want. Just promise me that you won't be using it to give your mother any more excuses to beat you. I don't want to be party to your punishment. Promise me? Yes, that's a good girl. Go, go get what you want; you know where I keep it.”

Then I asked my father for a few pieces of leather. He told me I could use any scraps I could glean from the floor of his shop. I spent an afternoon sorting through the pile until I found a few good-size pieces. I cut the leather into rectangles and used my father's blunt needles to sew the pieces together, adding a little nub of a sandwich panel the size of two joints of my pinky finger between the two larger pieces. I sewed a stiff linen “spine” onto the nub. I glued Masudah's paper onto the spines of the books with some thick animal glue that I boiled myself using a piece of hide I bought from the butcher. I had taken ten sheets of paper, which I cut in half. This gave me two “books” of ten leaves, each with twenty pages. My books were no bigger than a book of psalms, just a little larger than the palm of my hand. I took some silk thread, and reinforced the glue with strong stitches. The leather was embossed with my father's triangle and square signature, the same signature that had implicated me. I left some of the pattern down the sides of the front cover for decoration.

When my books were finished, I took a henna stylus and I mixed henna with black gall. I chose the better-made book, the second one
I had stitched together. In the very center of the inside back cover, I wrote, in Hebrew, “To Hani Damari, from your cousin Adela Damari.” I formed the letters carefully, exactly as Hani had taught me. Underneath our names, I wrote “Qaraah, Kingdom of Yemen, 1931.” I drew a vine of roses underneath. The leather, calf's hide, was very soft and smooth, the color of sugary coffee with goat's milk. It was the kind of leather my father used to make the insides of women's slippers.

Hani was at the grinding stones when I approached her. I held the present hidden behind my back. She looked up, smiled. “Come sit with me.”

I crouched beside her. “Here,” I said, “I made this for you.”

She put down the grinding stones and took the book, which I had wrapped in a piece of yellow cloth and tied with a bow that the dye mistress had dipped for me herself, dipping it three times so that it would come out a bright vermilion.

“What is this?” Her face brightened. She turned the little package over. “What is this for?”

“It's for you. My way of thanking you for what you did for me.”

“I didn't do anything you wouldn't have done for me.”

“But I won't ever have the chance.”

“What do you mean?”

“I won't have to save you, the way you saved me.”

“Now you sound like my sister Hamama.”

“What do you mean?”

“Hamama can see the future. Can you?”

“Of course not. But there is only one cave, and my idols are broken. If I ever save you, it won't be for what was hidden, and what was holy.”

“If your mother could hear you, she would beat you all over again.”

I shrugged, but then I put my hand in a fist and I beat my heart with it, like men do on the Day of Atonement, striking heart with fist in penance for all manner of sins.

“What was most holy to me about the cave was gone long ago. My mother was angry about the wrong idols.”

Hani screwed up her face, and then covered my hand with her own and pulled it down from my heart. “You have nothing to atone for, Adela. Hope is not a sin, and neither is fidelity.”

I nodded toward the present. She pulled the bow and opened my gift.

Her eyes widened, her lips opened in a huge smile. She ran a hand over the cover, and then flipped through the pages.

I said, “It bothers me that henna fades. Your work is so beautiful. It should be preserved. Your mother has a henna book; I thought that you might like one too. You could write all the elements you know, and make up new ones. You could draw your best designs, add notes and henna recipes. It's just a rough, homemade book, but it should last. The glue is strong, and I stitched and restitched all the pages twice.”

She reached the last page and read the inscription. Then she closed the cover and wrapped it back up, tying a tight bow with the cloth. We sat together at the grinding stones for a long time. The evening sun began to set, laying its crimson rays down on top of our conversation. She thanked me many times for my gift, and I thanked her many times for saving me from my mother. Later that night, when I lay down on my pallet, I dreamed of that conversation. I dreamed that our words left our mouths and transcribed themselves into the pages of the book. When I awoke, the dream was still cleaving to my soul, hovering there, only now Hani and I were far away from Qaraah, far away from Yemen, in a country whose name I didn't know. In Hani's hands was the gift I had made for her, she held it while I read from it with a pointer whose tip was a shiny silver finger, of the sort our fathers used on Sabbath days when they were reading from the Torah.