Henna House

by Nomi Eve

  Binyamin and I made a good life together. We became Israelis not only in name but also in spirit. I was thirty-two years old when we had our first child. We raised our family; our children grew tall, beautiful, and strong. One day, a month or so after the birth of our fourth child, I dreamed that I was a little girl again, and that I had stumbled through the darkness into the tent of the great Sheik Ibn Messer. When I woke from my dream, Binyamin was by my bedside. “You spoke in your sleep,” he said tenderly, in a quiet voice so as not to wake our babe.

  “What did I say?”

  “You said, ‘Impossible, I came alone.’ ”

  I smiled.

  “What were you dreaming?”

  “I was dreaming of when we were children, and of how you followed me to Sheik Ibn Messer, of how you saved me when I went stupidly stumbling through the darkness.”

  My husband smiled. “I never saved you, Adela. Following you was my way of saving myself.”

  “From what?”

  He shrugged. “From a life without you.” He bent down and kissed our baby, and then kissed me. When I fell asleep again, I dreamed that I was in my cave. I was holding a piece of chalk, drawing on the wall. I worked for a long time, and when I was done, I stood back and surveyed my work. I saw that I had erased the chalk picture of Asaf and drawn Binyamin instead. I had erased Jamiya the horse and in her place, I gave the new chalk boy a khallool. I was there too, a chalk girl, adorned with henna, untouched by fate or time, the minerals of my soul mingled with the minerals of stone and darkness. Just before I woke, I saw the chalk girl reach out and grasp the chalk boy’s hand.

  That night, I put down the babe and kissed my husband on every inch of his body. I kissed him for every step he ever took in my wake, I kissed him for every second we were apart, I kissed him for the future and for our children, tucked safely abed.

  * * *

  When I married Binyamin, I wasn’t a Yemenite bride. I wore no towering tishbuk lu’lu’ on my head, no henna on my hands. I wore a regular Western dress and a little doily of a veil in my hair. This is because we refugees tried our best to become real Israelis. We women shed our antaris and leggings and wore Western clothes. The women among us who stayed religious put away their black and red lafeh cloths and replaced them with ordinary kerchiefs. We who had left our heavy silver-bedecked gargushim on the tarmac in Aden never replaced them. Those who had brought them put them away in the bottom of drawers, to be taken out only on the most festive occasions, and ultimately half forgotten, shown to grandchildren as exotic tokens of a frayed and misty past. We left our henna behind too, for it marked us as savage, foreign, primitive. We didn’t want to be biblical Jews but modern ones. We forgot our ancient matriarchal patterns and our amuletic inscriptions, and walked the freshly paved sidewalks of Israel wearing nothing but slacks and blouses, our hands and feet as blank as the yet unwritten future, our heads as bare as heathens’ without our gargushim and lafeh cloths.

  There were some who adhered to the old ways, but not many. Even Aunt Rahel gave up her henna. I remember when I first noticed. She was at my house helping me with dishes following a Sabbath lunch. I saw the water running over her hands and was stricken by the bareness of her skin. For a moment I remembered her as I had first seen her, standing shyly behind Uncle Barhun—how she had stepped forth into my life with hands and feet so densely inscribed I lost myself in the patterns, staring into her skin as if it were a puzzle to be deciphered. Now her skin looked like the page of a book that had lost its letters, as if the story had somehow fallen off, leaving behind a blankness that no one could read anymore. She noticed me staring. “I know,” she said, self-consciously burying her hands in a dishcloth. “I feel naked without it. Sometimes I dream that I am giving myself an application, and when I wake up I am surprised that the pattern isn’t there. I tell myself that I am on a journey, as when we traveled from Qaraah to Aden. And that once we arrive I will mix the paste as always. Only this journey seems to have no end.” She turned away, and continued with the dishes. After that we never spoke of henna again.

  Uncle Barhun died three months after my wedding, after only one year in Israel. He fell ill on the Sabbath of Ki Tavo, when our men read the portion concerning how our Father Moses instructed the Israelites on the laws and rituals of harvests in the Promised Land. My aunt was already a tired, almost-old woman when Uncle Barhun died, and she had never been beautiful, except in the henna house. But upon her husband’s death, she became young again, a blazing beauty, as she buried my uncle. I realized—while she cast the first handful of earth—that at her husband’s graveside Rahel became the woman he had always seen in her. It was the essence of her soul coming forth to bid her husband, her love, farewell forever. I cried for my uncle, and my cousins sobbed. My brothers and sisters-in-law did too. We all mourned as one, lamenting that Barhun Damari had not lived long enough to sow his own fruits in the land of Israel.

  * * *

  Aunt Rahel fell ill in the spring of 1965. When she was dying, she became once again a woman of henna and asked her daughters to anoint her. When the rest of us fled Aden, Nogema had gone with her husband to England. Now she came back to join her sisters in service of their mother. They did exactly as she had taught them. Grinding the leaves, mixing them with lemon and sugar water, adding cloves and coffee grounds and orange essence and then drawing on her body the esoteric combinations of elements that a woman wears under her shroud and under her lulwi dress with its big sleeves, fish symbols, and pearly embroidery. The pattern becomes one with the soil, inscribing her secret autobiography into the earth. Once Aunt Rahel was gone, I felt my connection to my past grow tenuous. Sometimes I dreamed of Aden or of Qaraah, but when I woke in the morning it was as if I had visited a fictional country, not the land of my birth.

  The years passed. Nogema returned to England and rarely visited, though one of her granddaughters came back to Israel on her own, and settled in Haifa. Too early I buried Edna, and then Yerushalmit. Each time I fulfilled the rites of henna, a last token of who we had been when we were young together. And so it would have all ended, and I would have gone to my grave without having to write any of this story. But then one day in 1979, I received a strange phone call.

  “Hello, is this Mrs. Adela Bashari?”

  “Yes, and you are?”

  “My name is Mr. Yoel Shaham. I am calling from Yad Vashem. I work in the archives here. I tracked you down through your brother Mr. Hassan Damari.”

  Yad Vashem—the Holocaust museum and memorial in Jerusalem. My heart stuttered; I had to sit down.

  “Was your born name Adela Damari?”

  “It was.”

  “And did you have a cousin named Hani?”

  “I did.”

  I heard myself repeat “Yes, I am Adela Damari, and yes, I did once have a cousin named Hani.”

  Mr. Shaham said a few words, explaining something that was at its core inexplicable, and when I hung up the phone, I had promised to travel to Jerusalem the very next week.

  * * *

  We never knew what had happened to Hani and Asaf. After the war, and after we had been resettled in Israel, we tried to find them. Or rather, Nogema tried to find them. She sent letter after letter to the Jewish Agency’s refugee offices and scanned the names from the lists in the displaced-persons camps. As the years passed, and the names of the dead from the concentration camps were published, she always looked, but they were never there. They had simply disappeared. The last place they had written from was Corfu. In 1943, Greece fell to Germany. Late in the war, the Jews of Corfu were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz. We knew that the Jews of Corfu had mostly perished. Had Hani and Asaf been among them? Or had they escaped? Were they living elsewhere? We knew it was unlikely that they had survived, for if they had, they surely would have surfaced. Hani’s daughter, Mara, had been raised by all of us—I had mothered that dear girl, along with Nogema, Edna, and Hamama. No, it was impossible to think that they could have survived and not come bac
k for her daughter. Over time we grew reconciled to the thought that she and Asaf had perished, though without proof, their deaths remained insubstantial, like the ghost of a ghost, something you could never quite believe in.

  Chapter 35

  I went to Jerusalem on a beautiful day in early May. On the road, the bus passed Latrun, where Binyamin had been injured in the war and where, in scripture, Joshua asked Elohim to make the sun and moon stand still so that he could finish the battle against the Amorite kings in daylight. As I ascended the mountains, I looked out the window and tried to discern the color of the sun. It wasn’t the ruby-red haze of Qaraah or the buttery yellow of Sana’a or the bone white of Aden: the sun of Jerusalem was a more nuanced color, a shade from a blazing spectrum I didn’t yet have all the names for. Binyamin had wanted to come with me, but I told him I wanted to go alone. I said, “I used to run out alone into the dunes around Qaraah. I have never been afraid of being alone.” He reminded me that he often followed me to my cave, saying, “So you weren’t as alone as you thought.”

  I took his hand, pressed his knuckles to my lips. “I will pretend that you are following me today, Binyamin, only you will stay home, and I will come back to you and report what I have found. Please, my love, it’s just a feeling I have. I want to go by myself.”

  * * *

  Mr. Shaham was a thin man with a kind smile. Feathered lines came out from his eyes and animated his face with a topography that bespoke an overfamiliarity with great sorrow. He wore a blue and white knitted kippah and offered me a cup of tea. When he called he had reported that “a new cache of papers and artifacts had been recovered from Auschwitz.” He said that they were taken by an American GI at liberation and that the soldier had recently donated them to Yad Vashem. Among the artifacts was a small, handmade book. “Every page is covered with writing,” he said, “but the writing seems to be in code. It is illegible, at least to us. The only words we can read are on the last page. Your name, and your cousin’s name, a date, and the name of a village, Qaraah.”

  It is very strange to be given back an object that you have known in a different lifetime. When Mr. Shaham handed it to me, I felt as if he were returning to me a parcel of time, a precious quantity of lost moments bound in leather, held fast with glue. The leather binding smelled of my father’s workshop, a nutty woody scent that made me dizzy with memory. Masudah’s paper had yellowed but was not at all brittle. I stroked the soft leather cover. I remembered handing Hani the parcel. The look of delight on her face. Our conversation . . .

  “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.”

  “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.”

  * * *

  “Are you okay, Mrs. Bashari? Do you need a drink of water?”

  I shook my head. “No, thank you, Mr. Shaham, I will be fine.”

  I opened the cover. Hani’s elements were arranged linearly, grouped in clusters like words in a book. The “words” were then grouped in sentences, and the sentences formed paragraphs. I would have recognized her “writing” anywhere. Every henna artist has her own style, and Hani’s here was as it always had been—improvised yet expert, elegant but with a haphazard approach to symmetry and flourishes.

  I shut the book. Mr. Shaham and I exchanged pleasantries, and then I left, taking the book with me. I promised that I would return it once I had translated its contents.

  “You don’t have to, my dear, it is yours to keep.”

  “I understand, Mr. Shaham. And I don’t know what I will find on its pages, but if the contents are relevant to history, I will donate it to Yad Vashem, as a memorial to my cousin.”

  * * *

  The code was always with me. Even when Hani betrayed me, I hadn’t destroyed it. When we traveled to Israel, I took it with me, buried in my small bundle of possessions. Over the years, the paper had become brittle and the ink had faded, but it was still legible. I almost never looked at it, but once or twice over the years, I had taken it out and run my fingers over the elements, remembering the day I found it in Hani’s little bag along with her cowrie-shell dolls, and how I had copied the code and kept my discovery secret.

  * * *

  I spent many hours translating what Hani had written. I worked in a little sunny porch off our living room. Binyamin checked in with me every half hour or so. He brought me tea. He made me take breaks. But most important, he listened when I shared with him what I was learning. Hani had written the diary in Auschwitz. She described how she and Asaf had arrived on the island of Corfu in 1940 and that they had lived there until 1944, when they were rounded up and deported. They were separated when they entered the concentration camp. She was taken to a brothel that serviced the SS officers, and was regularly “visited” by a Nazi she referred to as Karl, who was the adjutant to the Kommandant. The adjutant insisted that Hani wear henna, and that she teach the other girls in the brothel to apply it, so that they could help her give herself a fresh application whenever the old one faded. He even procured ground henna leaves for her and brought them to her, along with the stylus, sugar water, and lemon juice she would need to apply it.

  She described how she begged the adjutant for news of Asaf, and how, because she had named him, the adjutant reported to her that he had personally had Asaf killed in a particularly gruesome way. It was winter, and he ordered Asaf outside of his barracks. He had him stripped naked and tied to a scaffold. He turned a hose on him. Asaf died of exposure. But then the adjutant ordered guards to continue to spray the withered corpse with water until Asaf turned into a block of ice that didn’t thaw until springtime. The adjutant mocked Hani’s despair and called Asaf Ice Boy. He tortured her by saying that Asaf was alive inside the ice, begging for rescue. Hani detailed Asaf’s cruel, torturous death, and her own misery—rape, humiliation, and subjugation at the hands of her many tormenters—for the adjutant wasn’t the only sadist who visited the brothel and abused her body and her soul for his own pleasure. Hani’s story ended three pages before the end of the book.

  It took me hours to complete the translation. I read the entire account to Binyamin and then called Mr. Shaham, and read it to him over the phone. When I finished, he identified Karl-Friedrich Hocker as the Kommandant’s adjutant.

  Then he asked, “The young man she refers to?”

  “He was also my cousin.”

  “His death mirrors that of others who died this way. There is an account from Mauthausen of a priest and a boy being killed this way, and made into a block of ice because the priest tried to offer the boy confession. We have eyewitnesses, prisoners who walked by the priest and boy all winter long. They describe how, when the victims thawed in springtime, they were wrapped together, the man embracing the boy.”

  Mr. Shaham was quiet. I could hear his slow, steady breath through the phone. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter than before. “I can tell you how your cousin Hani died.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “We have learned many things about the monstrosities committed during the war.
We continue to learn more and more. I think I can tell you what happened to your cousin. That is, if you want to hear it. The great Tolstoy wrote of families. He said that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. What I have learned in my years here as curator is that every Holocaust death is a harrowing death, yet each is harrowing in its own way. And each time I speak with families of the holy martyrs, I ask the same thing. ‘Are you prepared to hear the details? Are you prepared to have questions answered?’ ”

  “No, I am not. Who could possibly be prepared for such things? And yet if you have answers, I must listen to them. What choice do I have?”

  “You are right, Mrs. Bashari. Forgive me. Hitler breached the castle walls of civilization. Now we all wander the prehistoric plains together, hiding from shaggy beasts and foraging for new forms of sustenance. I will speak, but stop me if it is too much to bear.”

  A pause, and then he began. “Here at Yad Vashem, we have archives from each of the concentration camps. In our Auschwitz archive we have a testament letter written by a woman named Perla Zandman. She is still alive, and is a survivor who was also a prisoner in the officers’ brothel there. In her letter, Mrs. Zandman details the harsh facts of life in the brothel. A litany of atrocities committed by the officers. One concerns a woman she refers to as ‘the Yemenite whore.’ Forgive me for impugning your cousin’s name. Mrs. Zandman refers to all the prisoners in the brothel, including herself, as ‘whores for the Nazis.’ I think, in light of the recovery of your cousin’s diary, that we can safely assume that the Yemenite Jewess in the brothel at the end of the war was your cousin. Mrs. Zandman describes how your cousin was brutalized and then killed two weeks before the liberation of Auschwitz. It is a gruesome account. Do you want me to continue? Yes?