Henna House

by Nomi Eve

  My face grew hot, and I blushed and turned away. If what she said was true, my deepest wish would be fulfilled, but perhaps Hamama spoke nonsense? How could I know if she was a true soothsayer, or if she was just clever and sly enough to say exactly what I wanted to hear?

  I lay awake that night, tossing and turning, struggling with my own memories, desires, and prayers. Deep in the night, I thought I heard music. Aunt Rahel had told me the legend of Cain. She said that after Cain murdered Abel, he was cursed by God to wander the earth. When Cain stopped wandering, he founded Aden. In his shame and exile he grew lonely. When the loneliness in his heart became unbearable, Satan appeared to Cain and gave him a reed instrument. Cain played on this little flute, and the shadows lifted from his heart. Cain’s grave sat at the entrance to Aden, just above the narrow mountain pass through which we, like all travelers from the north, entered the city. That night, our first in Aden, the night Hamama prophesied Asaf’s return, it seemed to me that for reasons I could never fathom, Cain himself was serenading my dreams.

  * * *

  We were quickly situated. At the time I had no idea why we were so generously treated. Years later I learned that Mr. Haza was not only speaking the truth about the Fey and Absev Company but also had another source of income. He spied for the British in Aden and had been all over the midlands before coming to Qaraah. He had supplied the British with information concerning the Sultan of Lahaj’s plotting to retake Aden for Yemen. Mr. Haza had been handsomely paid for his covert services. Together, Fey and Absev and the British government settled our entire family in Crater. Uncle Barhun, Aunt Rahel, Remelia, and I were given a little three-story house just next door to Edna and Hamama, who shared a house with their husbands. Yerushalmit’s and Sultana’s families shared a house around a southwest corner. Hani, David, and Mr. Haza moved into a house around another corner. We were all within five blocks of one another. Uncle Barhun became Mr. Haza’s partner. They managed a warehouse for Fey and Absev in Steamer Point and did business down at the harbor—running the Red Sea dhow coffee trade for their bosses in Istanbul. David began his studies with the great scribe Rabbi Aryeh Ben Ari. He also undertook the repair of the deerskin Torah, which Rabbi Ben Ari had inspected and declared “a true treasure, most worthy of restoration.” My brothers all found work in their various trades, and we counted ourselves as lucky that we were not among the impoverished refugees from the north who bunked in big sweltering open rooms on the floor of the charity hostel and who begged in the streets of Crater, hands open for alms, eyes half-closed with the shame of it.

  One thing I needed to grow accustomed to was the heat. In Qaraah, we had benefited from mountain breezes, but my first summer in Aden, I learned that the heat was unrelenting. Hot sandy winds from the north called shamal taught me to walk through the streets with a scarf over my face. And then came the kawi—cauterizing sandstorms that blinded horses and clogged up carburetors, causing lorries to stall in the middle of the road. When I commented on the heat, Aunt Rahel teased me.

  “Adela, don’t you know? There is a furnace buried in the bowels of Mount Sirah, and on the Day of Judgment it will burst forth, scorching souls to hell.” I learned quickly that people liked to joke about the heat in Aden. And that they rarely spoke about it without slipping a noose of dark humor around their words. The only way to stay cool was to admit that the heat was a monstrous adversary, one that would ultimately win. Edna told me another legend of a man who sent a rope down a well in Aden.

  “When he pulled it up, the end was scorched,” she said. “He sent it down again, this time with a bucket. When he pulled up the bucket, the water was steaming. But his thirst was so great he took a drink, boiling his guts.”

  At night, we would all go up onto the flat roof and try to sleep. The house was only three stories, but it was sturdily built and had a little garden in the rear where onions, potatoes, squash, and clematis vines grew. I lay awake deep into the night, sweating from every pore in my body. Sometimes when I opened my eyes my vision was blurry from the sweat on my eyelids. Oh, had I ever been so hot? Remelia was breathing heavily next to me, little beads of sweat above her upper lip. My aunt and uncle slumbered a few yards away. I flipped over my pillow to get the cool side, and lay there for what seemed like hours, unable to sleep, staring at the stars. I no longer felt the fire of fear in my head; the Confiscator couldn’t reach me here. But I did suffer from an ache in my heart that made me dull and sluggish. I was homesick for a blighted place. I missed the dusty prayers that sustained us when the wells ran dry. I missed Masudah and her many children. I missed the dye mistress. I missed those I had already lost for good—Auntie Aminah, my father, even my mother. Here in the new-old city, I was unmoored. It was as if I risked floating up and becoming a star myself, but one with little light to shed on the glories and wonders of old creation. When the sun rose, the city came to life. The muezzin called men to prayer. Cats ran behind fishmongers, mewling for scraps. Donkey carts creaked through the streets. Lorries belched on their route between Crater and Steamer Point. Women called to their children to get away from the sides of the rooftops.

  * * *

  Soon after arriving in Aden, we received the dreadful news that Masudah had died in childbirth and that illness had carried off three of her youngest children, the rest fostered out as her husband, Dov, my eldest brother, had lost his mind. The children weren’t in danger of confiscation, because even though he couldn’t care for his sons and daughters, Dov still lived, and children would not be taken away from a living father. What can I say about my mourning for Masudah and her brood? I can tell you that it never ended, and that somewhere in my soul, I still cry for her, that other-mother of mine, whose warm touch taught me kindness and love, when my own mother had none to give. Poor Remelia suffered terribly and never smiled in quite the same way again. We sent for Masudah’s remaining children. There were six of them, and they were brought down through the mountains by a charitable neighboring family. They lived in all of our houses, but mostly they lived with Yerushalmit, who took Masudah’s offspring into her heart with a natural grace that smoothed over the rawest edges of the tragedy.

  Several months after the arrival of Masudah’s children, Hani bore her first child, a daughter she named Mara. It was late autumn of 1933. I was fifteen years old, and Hani was sixteen. I was with her during the birth and was the third to hold the babe—after Aunt Rahel and Nogema, who helped the midwife in the delivery. Hani gave me the baby after she had suckled her for the first time.

  “There,” she sighed, “a dolly for you to play with. If we were back in Qaraah, I would let you bring her to your cave, so you could pretend she was your own.” I tucked little Mara into the crook of my arm, and rocked her back and forth. Hani’s words had caught me off guard. I didn’t know if she was being mean or playful, but since she had just given birth, I forgave her if she was pointing out the fact that I had no husband, no baby of my own in the offing. I kissed Mara in between her little eyebrows.

  “She has your eyes,” I said to Hani, but Hani had already fallen asleep, exhausted from the trials of delivery. I sat for the next hour telling Mara everything I knew about life, which wasn’t much at all, because I left out the parts about Asaf and my cave—they were entirely unsuitable subjects for a newborn, though Hani’s taunting had riled up my memories, and even as I kept my tongue, I saw myself as I had been then: a girl who married a prince she had conjured out of sky and earth.

  After Mara’s birth, there were others. Nogema bore a fourth son, who died the day before his circumcision. Hamama bore twin boys who both lived. Sultana’s son Moshe entered the King George V Jewish School for Boys and received many compliments from the headmaster, who called him “a genius little scholar.” Remelia went for a time to live with Masudah’s sister, her aunt in Lahaj, but returned complaining shamefacedly that her aunt’s husband groped her under her dress and made other advances too mortifying to even mention. Throughout this time, more and more Jews were com
ing down from the Kingdom, filling the streets of Crater. These refugees were essentially stuck in Aden. They had nowhere to go. If they had their druthers, most would have gone to Palestine. But entrance into the port of Jaffa was severely restricted by the British. Only able-bodied folk under the age of thirty-five who could pay their own passage plus a sizable fee were permitted into the Holy Land. So the refugees glutted up Aden, overflowing the hostel built to house them.

  Aunt Rahel began to take a personal interest in the refugees from the Kingdom, and volunteered in the hostel as a nurse and midwife. “After all,” she said, “it is our luck that we are prosperous and have a place here in Aden. These people are our brethren, and we must care for them like brothers and sisters.”

  Sometimes Hani would leave her infant daughter with me or one of her sisters, and join her mother at the hostel. But while Aunt Rahel would nurse the refugees, Hani would bring a little pot and stylus and do their henna. When my sister-in-law Yerushalmit asked her why she was “dirtying her hands with the refugees,” Hani glowered, replying, “Yerushalmit, it is as my mother says: these women are our sisters. And a woman can bear greater burdens if she can look in her hands and see the world there. A woman can live in her hands, if she needs to.”

  Aunt Rahel nodded her approval. “Hani is as much a nurse as I am,” she said. “She prescribes patterns and elements—paisleys, rose petals, lotus tendrils, conch shells, and three-dot borders on pulse points. Such medicine heals in its own fashion.”

  * * *

  Cleaning. Cooking. Marketing. I helped my aunt keep house for my uncle, but there was also Remelia, and the three of us made quick work of meals and household chores. As time passed, the dullness and heartache inside of me was replaced by a hunger I recognized: the urge to get outside of myself, the urge to ramble and explore. As when I was a girl, I began to wander. My cave was far, far away, my idols smashed, burned, and abandoned, but I still felt the same pull that I had felt as a child. I was a dutiful Jewess on the outside, but inside my heart, I was in search of a new altar at which to bow my head and bend my knee.

  I’d learned that the city consisted of four main neighborhoods. In Ma’alla in the Northeast—a former fishing village—the Brits built a customs house and garrisoned their troops. Steamer Point, or Tawahi, to the west, is where they built a new deepwater port. The climate was cooler in Steamer Point, and so it became the locus of English political and mercantile activity with government buildings, housing for high officials, consulates, banking houses, shipping offices, as well as a public park with a statue of Queen Victoria and duty-free stores, catering to sailors and foreign visitors. There was also Sheik Othman, an Arab village north of Ma’alla, whose artesian wells supplied water to Aden. And Crater, the largest neighborhood, built in the crater of an extinct volcano, on the far eastern side of the Aden peninsula. The only way into Crater was through the main pass, which cut through rocky mountains.

  Soon after arriving in Aden, I’d developed a regular route. I left our house and walked down B Street, across the Street of Answers, right at the Street of Questions. Another right, past the palace of the Great Banin Messa, departed and beloved president of the Jews of Aden, past the Prince of Wales Hospital, past streets F, G, and H. Finally I reached the Selim School for Girls. What a marvel! Hani had told me about the girls’ schools in Aden, but until I saw them for myself I couldn’t believe that such places actually existed. I found my window, leaned against the wall underneath it, and listened to the teacher inside speak to her class. I eventually learned that her name was Mrs. Sylvia Townsend. Her deep voice was like a plow—a good firm tool that makes purposeful ruts in the earth. I went almost every day for two months and listened underneath that window. Occasionally I followed Mrs. Townsend away from the building. She had red hair and a lipsticked mouth like a mountain poppy blooming wide open. She had big teeth. Freckles everywhere, even on her eyelids. A big peachy woman, like two Yemenite women put together. Not fat, just broad. I followed Mrs. Townsend through the market and watched her buy orange persimmons, roasted almonds, and a container of imported hand cream from one of the cosmetics ladies whose stalls were swathed in chemical perfumy vapors. I sat outside the window of the Selim School for Girls and listened to her goad her students, encourage them, drill them, praise them, and celebrate their accomplishments. One day Mrs. Townsend sent a student outside to bring me in. The first thing she said to me was, “I knew you were there all along, and I have finally taken pity on your poor curious soul. How old are you? Are you married? Where do you live? What does your father do? How long have you been in Aden?”

  “Dear lady, how is it that you speak our language so well?”

  “I learned it the hard way. Walking on my knuckles like an ape through a jungle of Levantine grammar. My husband’s secretary taught me. A rare bird of a boy—an Adeni Jew with a British father.”

  She taught almost exclusively in the language of the Jewish population, Yemeni-Judeo Arabic, a mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yemenite Arabic. Of course she spoke her own language, English, and in the market, I had heard her haggling in Arabic with an ostrich-feather merchant. I explained to Mrs. Townsend that I myself had been taught to write by my cousin, and how I had taken a stick in my hand and taught the Habbani girls and women their letters. I told her that teaching the Habbanim was like a charm sewn into my soul, a special magic stitch; that I often dreamed of the riverbank, of the letters in the earth, of their hands on my hands. She nodded her big pink head, bit her red lips. She thought for a moment. Then she pointed to my hennaed hands. “Adela, your name is Adela? I will make you a bargain. You give me henna and I will let you sit inside the school. In my classroom. And then, if you would like, you can help with the littlest girls—teaching them their letters.” She pointed again to my hands. “I want you to give me an application. An honest-to-goodness application. Yes? Do you know how? How to do it properly? You have good technique? Good. I have always wanted to wear henna. This is what we call a fair trade. My husband will laugh. He will say, ‘Sylvie, now you have really gone native.’ And he will be right.” She screwed up her face and let out a belly laugh. When she was done laughing she said, “Tomorrow afternoon? I teach until lunch. But you know that already. Meet me after class, and we will take the lorry to Steamer Point.”

  On my way home from the market I thought of the Habbani woman—Rosa—and how she had traded me henna for letters. And now I was trading henna for letters again. Would I be a teacher? A fair trade, the British teacher had said, and it dawned on me that my father, who made his living trading the skin of animals for money, would not have seen it that way. Henna is just color and shape. Letters are just shape and ink. But this was a trade of color for ink, and shape for shape. I had to agree with Mrs. Townsend; it seemed a fair trade indeed. Would she really let me stand in the front of a room of girls and teach? The thought left me giddy. I didn’t pay attention to where I was going and walked straight into a boy with a basket of seeded loaves on his head. He scowled at me, dodging to the side, a maneuver that almost tipped his burden.

  The next day I met Mrs. Townsend on the steps of the school and let her pay one rupee for my ticket to Steamer Point. She lived in a neat white stucco house not far from the crescent of shops near Victoria Park. I held her pale, pinkish palm in my own, pressed a stylus to her life line, and drew for her my very own variation of one of Hamama’s amulet water inscriptions. A woman of such learning deserved a powerful design, I thought, a design that would eddy around her palm and flow into her blood. When it was finished, she held up her hands and appraised her own worth.

  She said, “My, what a long way I have come from Tottenham Court. What will my Gordon say?” She pointed to a framed photograph of a square-jawed British gentleman.

  “You must teach me. You simply must teach me how you do it.” A few weeks later she convened a little class in her house, and that is how I came to teach five British ladies—all of them wives of British engineers or bureaucrats—the basi
cs of the art of henna.

  Ever since coming to Aden, my aunt, cousins, and I met on the New Moon to readorn ourselves. Sometimes my sisters-in-law joined us. When next we met for henna at Edna’s house, just a few days after I’d taught Mrs. Townsend and her friends, I told everyone what I had done. I told the story of the trade, of Mrs. Sylvia Townsend interrogating me, and of the stale little flat biscuits she served her friends.

  Sultana said, “Adela, your mother would beat you for such impudence. She would insist that you never again do such a thing as that.”

  But Hani nodded her approval, clapped her hands, and said, “Adela, you are brilliant. British ladies wearing henna. Maybe we can make a special pair of gloves, mark them with henna designs, and put them on the Statue of Queen Victoria in the park at Steamer Point. Wouldn’t that be hilarious? Visiting dignitaries would think that she’d gone native.”

  Nogema screwed up her mouth. “Adela, they must have their own designs. Your ladies . . . I heard once that there are rings of stones on the British Isles. You must encourage them to incorporate the ring stones into their designs. It is important to honor one’s own origin and landscape.”

  Hamama didn’t approve at all. She was uncustomarily gloomy when she scrunched up her face in disdain. “Pale skin clashes with henna. The contrast is too great, and the evil eye confuses the henna for blood. No good can come of it.”

  That night I thought about what Hamama had said, about the British ladies’ pale skin and henna. In Qaraah, almost everyone was a toasted sesame brown. But here I had become used to seeing people of different shades: coal-black Nubians who worked down at the docks, dark-chocolate Somali women who served in the wealthier Arab and Jewish houses, burnt-umber Ceylonese coffee traders who came and went from Uncle Barhun’s house, sepia-toned Indian customs collectors who levied taxes for the Crown, and their wives—Indian ladies in billowing Calcutta silk having tea on the veranda of the Aden Inn. The Arab fishermen and boatmen who lived in Sheik Othman, their skin the color of honeyed walnuts, and their wives swathed in black balto with their faces the same honeyed color, peeking out from behind their kerchiefs as they did their marketing and walked through town. There were the tourists from Europe and Great Britain, people like Mrs. Townsend with skin as white as a cooked whole egg, or as pink as the downy belly of a newborn kitten. They sipped lemon ices on the veranda of the Hôtel de l’Europe while pointing at Abyssinian monks, bare-chested Somali fishermen in loincloths, and Arab tribesmen from the north in robes so long they seemed to carry all the secrets of the desert in the folds of their flowing djellabas.