by Nomi Eve
Chapter 30
Asaf himself insisted that our wedding date be set as soon as possible. I didn’t protest, and that is how my nuptials came to be planned for six weeks after he arrived. A few days before our wedding, Asaf and I—chaperoned by Sultana—rode a lorry to Steamer Point. In the center of Steamer Point was a crescent of shops. Behind the shops was a park, and in the center of the park stood a statue of Queen Victoria. The statue had been donated by Adeni merchants who had raised money for the purpose of building a hospital for women. Alas, they hadn’t been able to raise enough, so the British officials prevailed on the leaders of the community to spend the money on a statue of the queen after her death. Since then, Victoria had reigned over Steamer Point, and all visiting dignitaries came to pay homage. I too liked to visit the statue, but for a different reason. The very first time I laid eyes on that statue, it reminded me of my mother, that monarch of joyless spite who had reigned over the country of my childhood. On a whim, I had asked Asaf to come with me to the statue, and I confessed to him that the statue reminded me of my mother.
When we reached the statue, a little yellow bird was dancing on Queen Victoria’s lap. Another came. Sultana stood with us for a moment, but then went to a bench far enough away to leave us alone. Asaf picked up some pebbles and shooed the birds away. He gave a little bow and made a waving gesture. It looked to me as if he were preparing to perform some sort of foreign blessing. I opened my mouth and almost spoke, but couldn’t. I had planned on saying, “Mother, here is Asaf; he came back for me after all.” I felt suddenly shy, speechless. I turned to Asaf. Who did my statue-mother see? A tall, handsome young man. Skin the color of fertile earth. Curly dark hair with long earlocks that fell below his chin and gleamed in the sun. Under his coat he wore black leggings and on his head he had a dark, boxy felt cap wrapped around with a checkered black and gray cloth. His beard was already full enough for stroking.
Asaf broke our silence. “Adela, your mother was always slipping me candied nuts and extra legs of chicken, trying to fatten me up or keep me alive until we could marry, I suppose. And before I left with my father, she corralled me one night when the men were praying the Sanctification of the New Moon and I was hanging around your yard, shirking prayers. She grabbed my elbow, dug her fingers into my skin, and told me that I would come back for you. She said, ‘It is not a prophecy, but a fact that you are not a boy but a husband.’ ”
“And are you?”
“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 y
ourself.” 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.
I got out of bed. My cousins and sisters-in-law greeted me with a bath and a festive breakfast, but I had no stomach for their suggestive conspiratorial glances. By lunchtime I had learned that before the day of my wedding, Asaf had accepted a generous investment from Uncle Barhun, who, along with Mr. Haza, purchased a share in the proceeds from Asaf’s journey. None of the women of our family had been apprised. Not even Aunt Rahel, who looked stricken by the news, and by the same realization that I had had—that I had broken off a true love connection, in favor of one that held no such promise.
“What will you do, Adela?” My aunt sat me down, made me drink a cup of strong tea.
“I will go with him.”
“Is that wise?”
I shrugged. “I am tired of waiting for my fate.”
“And will he take you with him?”
“He has agreed to.”
Her voice softened to a whisper. “And if he abandons you along the way?”
I remembered the spinster dye mistress, and what she said to me long ago about a woman learning a profession, earning her own keep. I thought of the skills I knew. I was as good a cook as any woman, I could sew linens and clothes, and I could do serviceable henna—my skill did not match that of my cousins, but I could decorate a palm pretty enough for payment. And of course, I could make a pair of shoes so perfect that the Confiscator’s wife never knew they were stitched with curses, not ordinary thread.
“I can earn my own bread wherever I am. Whether I am with Asaf Damari or not, I will see the world and return to Aden with sister-stories to your marvelous tales of far-off India.”
* * *
Asaf moved into Aunt Rahel and Uncle Barhun’s house with me. Not a week after our wedding, he sold his patrimony—the deerskin Torah.
David had showed Asaf where he had added panels, where he had been able to fix the flaked gall, where he had executed repairs by ingeniously sewing little parchment screens behind words. Asaf signed an agency contract with the seller of rare books who lived next door to us. Almost immediately after our wedding, the Torah was sold to a wealthy Australian Jew of Iraqi origin. The sale of the Torah left Asaf with generous capital, which, in addition to my uncle’s investment, would allow him to avoid an arduous journey east and leave him at leisure to enjoy the journey west. Asaf spent his days shopping and bargaining for Eastern ingredients—choya nakh and nag champa—which he was able to purchase only in very small quantities. Cypriol and vetiver were easier to obtain, and he had quickly amassed a generous store of each.