Henna House

by Nomi Eve

  She cocked her head sideways, squinted, and espied my book with a skeptical biting of her lips.

  “Maybe, ummm . . .” I stalled. “Maybe my eyes are too sharp already. Or maybe I am afraid of what I will see. Don’t be offended, Mrs. Rosa.” I put my hand over hers. Her bracelets had fallen all the way down to her wrist, and her rings were so thick on every finger that scarcely any skin showed through. With the other hand I thrust the book a little closer to her. One of her necklaces, with a cylindrical amulet box, brushed the edge of it. She drew back, as if she had touched something foul or hot.

  “Please?”

  She shook her head. “You are a silly girl. You want to keep henna forever. But you can’t trap henna. It is not the same on a piece of pulp. It belongs on a hand or a foot. On a girl or a woman. Not in a book. But don’t worry. I will oblige you. I will draw it wherever you wish. Because I am an obliging woman and you are a nice decent girl . . . well, a nice decent silly girl. I can see that. And I can also see that you have no motives other than a search for knowledge. And knowledge is a blessing. But if the eyes stare at you funny, or glare, or ask you questions you can’t answer, don’t blame me. I can’t be responsible for what the design will do when trapped on the dead animal flesh between the covers of your Torah.”

  “It isn’t a Torah—”

  “Not yet, it isn’t. But it will be. Don’t fret. I won’t tell anyone your secret.”

  “But I don’t have a secret.”

  She smiled. “Here, give it to me, let us begin.”

  She sat on one of the stones and traded the henna stylus for a quill with a black-gall nub. It didn’t take her long to draw the design. When she was finished, it was easy to see the differences between our regular Eye of God and this one—hers had waves, where ours had straight lines. Hers had tiny triangles within triangles, where ours relied more on circles for the outer border. And the diamond eye in the center of hers was smaller and thicker-lined than the one Hani had taught me to make. Even so, these differences did not lend the Habbani woman’s Eye of God its power. It was something else. Like Hani’s constellation of stars, there were simply some patterns that had life and another dimension, other than color and form. Was it breath? Soul? Blood? Or some other essential additive that enlivened the henna, made it shimmer and talk and twinkle?

  When she was finished, I put small rocks on the corners of the splayed pages and left the book open to dry. Then I went over to one of the thorny mimosas, bent down, and rummaged for a sharp fallen branch. I wrote the entire aleph bet in a straight row in the dirt, as it would appear on a page. When I was done, Rosa put her hands on her hips, squinted. “What can you tell me about them?”

  “About whom?” I looked around.

  “Them!” She pointed to the letters. “Pretend they are people and we are gossiping fools. Tell me who they are.”

  “Oh, them.” I smiled at the thought of the letters as people, having their own lives and personalities. Having faults and successes and domestic dramas. Things to gossip about. “Yes,” I said. “I can tell you what I know about them.”

  “Good, and don’t leave out any tidbits or scandals.”

  “If I had tidbits and scandals, I would happily share them with you. But all I have are the tiniest stubs of stories.”

  She shrugged. “Oh, just go on, go on already.”

  I began to relate what Hani had told me about the aleph bet when she taught me how to read. How the form of each letter comes from an ancient picture. And how this picture itself came from an essential part of the lives of the people who first drew the letters.

  “Aleph is the head of an ox.” Next to the , I drew an ox head , and I pointed out how with the addition or subtraction of a few lines, the letter derived from the picture. “Bet is a house”— —“Gimel is a foot”— —“Vav is a tent peg”— —“and zayin is a plow”— —and I showed her the shepherd’s staff in lamed— .

  While I was drawing, Rosa and little Esther squatted next to me. Esther took her second finger and began copying my letters in miniature. Rosa rocked back and forth on her heels.

  I had gotten almost to the end of the alphabet when Rosa shook her head and snorted, “No, that just won’t do.” She got up, stepped forward, and stamped out the beginning of my alphabet, leaving a blurry, illegible smudge underfoot. Esther scampered back and took a perch on one of the big rocks behind us.

  “But it is as I have said. The letters correspond to pictures. I am not making anything up.”

  “Yes, but the pictures are the wrong ones.”

  I cocked my head, squinted at the remaining letters, wondering what they looked like to her. Were her eyes that bad? Maybe my drawings were incomprehensible to her.

  “What I am saying is that they are not our letters.” She thumped her chest, pointed to me, and then back at herself. “Our letters would show this—” She reached for little Esther, pulling her from the rock and gesturing to the enchanting curve of the child’s cheek. “Or that—” She pointed over to the acacia, where one of her companions was nursing a babe. The child’s legs kicked, and with one hand, he was playing with his toes.

  Rosa puckered her lips. “Draw me the letter that shows the lips of a babe pursed to suckle.” Then she reached for her own breast, cupped a hand, and lifted it up. “Or the fullness of the breast at which he sucks. Now, that is something I could read, a letter drawn from my life. And you know what? It would read me back. Tell my stories.” Another one of the women stood up, and came to join us from under the acacia. She was older than Rosa, maybe even old enough to be her mother, though they didn’t look anything alike. She bent down over my letters, the ones Rosa hadn’t smudged. Her dress was a flowing expanse of dusky black between her legs. She had a dot on her forehead and a ring in her nose, and big hoops in her ears. Her nose was like an eagle’s, pointy and sharp.

  She nodded her agreement and smiled, adding in a soft high voice, “Those letters”—she pointed to the collection of Hebrew letters in the earth—“come out of men like globs of spit, or spurts of wet heat from their phalluses. But where is the letter that could show this?” She put her hand in between her legs, crudely, over her own sex. Then she pointed at the letter vav, which took the shape of a straight line. “That letter is a staff or a man’s member, or perhaps it is his weapon, his spear? See the pointy tip? It is a man’s tool. Used for man’s business. But where is the letter that shows the sweet doorway to the Garden of Eden?” Once again, she put her hand in between her legs. “The letter that shows how we welcome men in and out of this world?”

  Rosa cackled her agreement, and then added, “And where is the flower letter that shows this?” She raised her hands and showed me her henna, the lush garden of blossoms on her palms.

  “Adela, that is your name? Adela, the letters you draw belong to them.” She gestured to where the men were smoking hookahs and chewing khat. “Next time we meet, on the road between somewhere and nowhere, show me our alphabet.” She thumped her chest. “Teach me our language”—she motioned toward her companion with the eagle nose, her sister with the babe at her breast—“and then we can teach each other how to speak it.”

  I fumbled for words and stood there for a moment not saying anything. Then I remembered Aunt Aminah’s tale and said, “But ladies, I have heard marvelous stories about your men using letters for weapons. How they draw letters in the air, fell their enemies without shedding blood. What could be more powerful than that?”

  Once again Rosa shook her head. “Sha, don’t be ridiculous. Our men fight with spears and shovels, knives and clubs. Fierce, yes. Dangerous? Of course. But legends don’t win wars, and neither do letters. And if you think they do, then you are the one who needs lessons, not us.”

  At this they both laughed, sharing a joke at my expense. I thought for a moment, and then I squatted once more. I drew a kaf, , the letter that takes its form from a cupped palm.

  “You are right, some of the letters are men’s letters,” I said. “
But there are also female ones. This one is an open palm, see? A hand that can pet a cheek or offer a quenching drink of water. And here is mem.” I drew and . “This one is water, see the ripples, how they come from waves? We women have within us the spirit of the tides and waves. Mem is our letter every month when we flow like the waters. And this one, tet”— —“is a basket, a market basket slung over our shoulders, perhaps filled with potatoes or onions we will use to make our evening soup. And this one is peh”— . “Look, it is a mouth, maybe a mother’s mouth calling her child in for dinner or singing to her as she falls asleep in our arms.”

  Rosa’s and the eagle-nosed woman’s faces both burst into easy smiles. They clapped their hands. “Wonderful,” Rosa said, and the other woman added, “Good, good. At least we will have something to start with.”

  * * *

  We left early the next morning. I turned just as we were about to round the bend that would take us to the road out of the river valley. I saw Rosa and Esther standing by the closest of their reed huts, watching us depart. Little Esther yelled to me, “Good-bye, sister-whoever-you-are.” I waved, making my hand into a kaf, the cupped palm letter . Rosa waved too. And for a brief moment our cupped palms were an entire alphabet unto themselves, a system of writing that did not represent, but actually created, the entire world.

  For the rest of that day, I thought of what Rosa said. And as I listened to my own voice and to the voices of my aunt and cousin and sisters-in-law and their children, I wondered what we would all sound like if Eve our Mother or Esther our Queen, or Miriam our Prophetess or Rosa the Habbani Jewess had been holding the stick that formed the letters that made up our words. But I also thought of the legend of the Habbani warriors, fighting with words. I believed everything Auntie Aminah had ever told me. I wondered how I could form my letters so that they would come out of my mouth not as air but as blades or bullets. I wondered what it would feel like to speak a weapon, and to forge a word.

  Chapter 24

  We approached Aden two weeks later, a month and a half after we first left Qaraah. It was the springtime of 1933. We went through the main pass, down through a deep gorge, past an old Jewish cemetery with graves facing north, to Zion. We descended slowly, and then made our way through streets choked with bulky lorries, imported British automobiles, their green and yellow and red bodies pale under gauzy layers of grime, and Indian army trucks with British or Indian soldiers or Aden Protectorate Levies shoving their boots out the back. I was shocked by all this, my first experience with the truly modern world. I felt overwhelmed by the cars and the iron lampposts and the paved roads. Sana’a had been a medieval circus compared to this panoply of twentieth-century life. And Qaraah? Qaraah was a dusty-winged moth pinned to the distant past. Here was modernity. Acrid exhaust like the taste of forge smoke coated my tongue. Heavy machinery rolled by us on the road. Camels, donkeys, and horses all shared the road in a jostle of metal and flesh and voices yelling “yalla, yalla, yalla,” everyone hurrying each other along.

  During our journey, I’d asked Uncle Barhun to tell me about Aden. From him, I’d learned that Aden is the southernmost settlement on the Arabian Peninsula—the ancient terminus for all camel caravans traveling south through Arabia, as well as the deep harbor seaport through which ships traveling between Europe and the Far East—laden with heavy goods, mercenaries, and soldiers—had passed since Roman days. Equidistant from the Suez Canal, Bombay, and Zanzibar, Aden was perfectly located to ensure its international importance. By the time we arrived, its fortunes had risen and fallen many times but it was ascendant again, the busiest port in the entire British Empire. The Royal Marines had landed in Aden in 1839 to stop pirates from attacking British ships en route to India. With the growing importance of India in the Empire, the British needed a safe and dependable coaling station en route to the Raj. Also, the opening of the Suez Canal made Aden a linchpin in British military communications. Before British rule, Aden had been occupied by the Portuguese, the Ottomans, and the Sultanate of Lahaj. My uncle explained that each of these rulers had left its mark. He said that like a coin minted by many masters, Aden was textured, and while it looked to the future, it was also mired deep in the past.

  * * *

  We rode past hotels with expansive verandas and official-looking buildings. Then we passed a hospital, a big synagogue, a ritual bath, a school, and rows and rows of little shops leaning into one another like companionable fellows. The light in Aden was neither the ruby-red haze of Qaraah or the yellow butter of Sana’a, but bone white, as if the air itself had been bleached by the sun. We continued past streets named with English letters and finally stopped in front of a three-story house. A young woman who looked like Hani, but older and tinier, came running out of it. Edna burst into tears and threw herself at her mother, Aunt Rahel. Only twenty years old, she was already mother to four girls and one dead boy. “Oh, Mother, oh, Mother.” She let out a high waterfall sound—a laugh that had a sob for a scar. “Oh, Mother, how I’ve missed you all.” Or was it a sob that had a laugh for a beating heart? Edna thrust her youngest child—a curly starry-eyed poem of a girl named Noemi—into Aunt Rahel’s arms.

  “Oh, darling, she is a perfect cherub!” Aunt Rahel smothered the baby with kisses while Uncle Barhun took Edna’s face in his hands, squeezed her cheeks, kissed her forehead, and shook her husband’s hand—then quickly gave up with such formalities and hugged him as he would a son.

  “We have been long on the road, and too long gone from Aden. Feed us like cart horses and water us like plants. We are parched and hungry, and I fear that we have grown uncivilized on our journey and we will make a mess of your tables for lack of manners.”

  “Oh, Father, we have been preparing for your arrival. Come in; I have three feasts waiting for you, each one more scrumptious than the next.”

  Soon my new cousins were embracing me. I felt as though I knew them already, from Hani’s stories, even though we were meeting for the very first time.

  “Oh, look at her pretty hair.” This was Edna, who I knew cared the most about beauty, but was so kindhearted that she would never begrudge a girl (myself included) her lack of it, instead managing to see even the most homely of souls as beautiful in spite of themselves.

  “When is your birthday, darling? And for whom were you named?” This was Nogema, who Hani had told me was always full of questions, the family historian.

  “Tell me everything about you! Tell me now, right now!” This was Hamama, who always needed to know things, but also seemed already to know them before they even happened.

  I let myself be petted and cooed over. They all knew of my recent loss of both mother and father and spoke the customary words of mourning. I thanked them for their blessing, and then found myself taking stock of these new wonderful creatures. Hamama was younger than Edna, but she was taller, had a fuller figure, and a chipped front tooth. I was to learn that the henna she wore always had some version of the Eye of God hidden in surprising places. Edna, the eldest, was the most petite. Her voice was also the highest, and I would soon learn that she was the best singer. She favored delicate little conch shells in her henna designs. Nogema was only thirteen months older than Hani, and looked most like her—both had full bosoms and generous hips, but weren’t as tall or voluptuous as Hamama. Nogema was partial to interlocking laurel leaves in her henna, and her forearms were awash in them. She had an alluring birthmark below her left nostril, a broader face than Hani’s, darker shadows under her eyes, and a sprinkling of freckles across her nose. Hani’s hair was the curliest. Hamama’s was the longest, reaching all the way down her back. Edna’s was the lightest, with more gold and red than brown in it. These sisters were dressed in unremarkable Adeni clothes—black and gray trousers and white tunic shirts. They wore red and blue and yellow shimmering kerchiefs and their hair peeked out of the front and cascaded out the back, so that the magnificent scarves seemed to only caress their hair, not hold it at bay.

  The men all helped unload
our carriages. David Haza and Nogema’s husband saw to the donkeys. Little Noemi was shy of her aunt, but Hani bent down and whispered something into her ear. Then Noemi reached up her arms and let out a little laugh. She let Hani pick her up. Aunt Rahel threaded her hand into Edna’s. I walked behind them into the house. They spoke with their heads bent together. Before the day was out, the entire other Damari clan went to visit the graves of their lost twins, Naama and Asisah. And after that Aunt Rahel went often to the old acacia tree, whose boughs were indeed stooped so low to the earth they seemed to be embracing the graves, not just shading them.

  That night we ate a stew made of a white fish. I had never tasted fresh fish before, and did not much like the feel of it in my mouth, but I was hungry and ate my fill. Late that first night, I sat with all four sisters on the pillows in Hamama’s house. Their children had long since fallen asleep, and were arrayed at our feet like so many sleeping doves. I was too tired and too dumbstruck by the twists and turns of the road to join in. I also didn’t know the rhythm, the cadence of their connection; they had been weaving their voices together since before they could speak or toddle. So I was mostly quiet and lost myself in the tendrils of their henna. But then Hamama took my face in her hands, kissed me full on the lips, and brushed the hair out of my eyes.

  “So what is this I hear? You were once engaged to be married to our cousin Asaf?”

  Her voice was lower, huskier than Hani’s. “And he left on a long journey? How many years ago? Four? Five? Well, no worries, little chick, he will come to Aden before you leave it.”

  I felt a shock in my heart, and stammered, “How . . . how do you know?”

  She shrugged and crinkled up her nose in a smile. “Some people have a good sense of time, others a good sense of direction. I was born with a good sense of the stories we live. Sometimes I see ends, sometimes I see beginnings, but usually I see flashes that don’t fit in anywhere. But for you, my darling Adela, I see a boy making his way past the grave of Cain and I know that he is coming here to Aden, and that he is as much your cousin as you are mine.”