by Nomi Eve
And then catastrophe struck. In the early spring of 1928, Uncle Zecharia returned from Sana’a. He came to my father and told him that he and Asaf would be going away together on a long journey. According to my uncle, an old client of his in Cyprus had located him in Sana’a, and asked him to deliver a quantity of choya nakh, the Indian roasted seashell essence used as the smoky base of several rare perfumes. “We will join the caravan of Sheik Ibn Messer’s stablemaster; he is delivering horses to an illustrious customer outside of Aden and has agreed to let us travel under his protection. We will go with them as far as Aden, and then sail to India. We will spend the spring in Bombay.” Uncle Zecharia cleared his throat, and then continued, “And make the eastward journey in the summer. When I return, I will be a wealthy man, for I will be paid well for this delivery.”
My father protested. “What if Adela becomes a woman in Asaf’s absence? The delay of the wedding could put her in danger.”
“Elohim will look over your family and protect you. And anyway, the engagement itself will save little Adela from the Imam. When we return they will be married. That is, if she is a woman, of course. There is still time, Brother, she is just a child.” I blushed at these words, my father and uncle discussing my body. And I burned inside, for I knew that even if I didn’t have the breasts or blood to prove it, I was more than ready to be Asaf’s wife.
I would like to say that we parted as innocents, but we didn’t. The morning they left, Asaf met me in my cave. He drew me to him, and kissed me as a man kisses a woman—not for the first time, but for the tenth time, when shyness and astonishment have given way to hunger. His lips probed mine, burst through, and explored my mouth. Then his hands began to roam over my body. I felt my whole self rise to him, and I returned the heat of his embrace. When he and his father rode off, I cried so much my throat grew tight, and I had trouble breathing. My mother dragged me into the house and made me stand over a steaming pot of water until I could breathe.
“Ach, girl” she said in a rare show of compassion, as I collapsed heaving into her bosom. “He will send for you in no time, and then you will be his bride, his wife, the mother of his children.” She put a hand under my chin and lifted my wet tearful face. I could tell that she was trying to be kind, but that she was also impatient for me to get on with my chores.
* * *
That night I left my world and traveled to the world of strangers. I snuck out of our house and followed the path Asaf had once shown me to Ibn Messer’s stables. His billowing tents perched on the littoral slope behind my escarpment. It was Jamiya I was after. I had a ridiculous plan to steal her and ride her south in pursuit of my beloved. So what if I had never ridden before? So what if I didn’t know the way? I would do what I must to escape my abandonment. But of course I couldn’t even saddle the creature, and ended up crying in a corner of her stall. She was kind to me, a moist, smelly animal-mother, nuzzling my face with her huge, soft, nutty-breathed velvet mouth. Eventually I was found by a stable servant and brought to the sheik himself. Ibn Messer looked at me, his expression half a smile and half a frown. I was a novelty: a dirty, crying Jewish girl.
“What is your story, little one?”
“Asaf, the boy, the Jew, is my husband. And now he is gone. I must find him.”
He raised a skeptical eyebrow, “Really? Your husband?”
“He will be my husband, when I . . . when we . . . mmph . . .” I blushed purple and looked down at my feet.
“But child, no good would come of your giving chase. The boy and his father are gone, you will find another to love.”
My cheeks were on fire. “He is my intended. You see, we were engaged. There is a contract.”
“Little girl, don’t cry. There, there.”
“Please, sir,” I said between sniffs, “you must know where they went. You must tell me how to find them, they can’t have gotten far.”
Sheik Ibn Messer looked down at me with all the kindness of the ages radiating out of his eyes. He had an attractive face, etched by time, handsome in a way that the people of Qaraah called “hilltop handsome” for it was a quality of beauty that seemed to bring one closer to the sky and farther from the depths of Gehinom. But his eyes were dark. The sadness I saw there told me that the places where our stories met were rocky and steep. Perilous even. The servant returned, and spoke to Ibn Messer in hushed tones.
The sheik turned to me and said, “My dear, you have a friend, he has come for you. Or maybe it is your brother, come to see you safely home?”
I scrunched up my face, and was about to say, “Impossible, I came alone” when Binyamin Bashari came through the tent flap. He wouldn’t look either at me or at the sheik in the flickering lamplight, but down at his feet, a deep serious blush on his wolf-muzzle face. It had been a few years since we had played together. And in such a short time, I had forgotten him, the way you can forget the most vivid parts of your childhood. But now I remembered everything. He was my friend. My playmate. He had followed me here. Had he also followed Asaf to my cave? Did he know what we did there together?
“I see you have a good sturdy chaperone, a brave lad, pure of heart, I am sure. But the night is dark. Should I send a servant with you both?”
“No, sir,” I whispered, “we know the way. And if we are seen with anyone our mothers will beat us.”
“I understand, little one. Go, go on your way. May the darkness shield you. And please, forget about your intended. But see to it that your mother finds you another husband soon. As soon as she can. Right? That’s a good girl.”
Binyamin silently took my hand. We stole across the dunes and up the escarpment. As we ran, I didn’t speak to Binyamin. I didn’t say, “Stop following me.” I didn’t say, “How did you know where I was?” I didn’t say, “I didn’t need you this time,” because that would have been a lie. We didn’t exchange a single word. And we parted behind my auntie’s house, as we had parted a hundred times before when we were very small children, only this time, our journey had taken us farther than we had ever gone, and we were both forever changed for having traversed the nighttime path.
In the morning, when I awoke, I wasn’t sure if I had really gone to the stables of the sheik, or if I had just dreamed I had. Two nights later I had a nightmare. In the morning I half remembered screaming and kicking in the darkness with my father’s cool hand on my hot brow, and someone saying, “Sha, sha, little girl,” in a voice that sounded like the sheik’s—low and melodious and full of bemused compassion.
* * *
The only token my uncle left behind in Qaraah was his tattered deerskin Torah. I took this as a sign that they would one day return, for who would leave an object so precious? It was one of my chores to dust the chest in the upstairs men’s salon. I knew where the key was kept, and when no one else was in the house, I took to opening the chest and looking at the cast-off little Torah. Sometimes I brushed my hand on its hard curved case, even though I knew I shouldn’t. Once I even dared to take the Torah out of the chest and open it. The panel of text that the Torah was rolled to had cracked words and moldy dark spots over whole passages, but the poor condition didn’t bother me. I couldn’t read, but I imagined my own portion of holy words. I mouthed a strange, mixed-up parable about a girl, a cave, a boy, and a visitation from a holy angel who did not wrestle with anyone, but instead used his wings as a sheltering canopy under which the children wrestled themselves.
My engagement contract was in the chest as well. I took it out several times and let the Hebrew words wash over me like water. Sometimes I dreamed about the contract. I dreamed that some of the words floated up off the page and formed a wedding canopy over my head and that other words floated up and formed Asaf, a boy made out of letters who stood next to me and married me, as a rabbi also made of words sanctified our union. I thought that I was the only flesh-and-blood creature in the dream, though when Asaf put the ring on my finger, I saw that my hand was also made of words.
* * *
I c
ried for weeks after Asaf and Uncle Zecharia left. My mother scolded me for giving in to such fragile emotions. But she too gave in to her passions.
“Your brother is a dog who sleeps in his own piss,” she slandered Uncle Zecharia. “He is an ass who eats his own shit. How dare he abandon our daughter?” She ranted and raved at my father, and called my uncle horrible names, and so I knew that she was as perturbed as I was that my cousin and uncle had left Qaraah. In the early summer of 1928, not two months after they left, my mother dressed herself in her best antari, and plodded out of the house.
“Make your father lunch,” she said, “and bring it to him before he dies of starvation.”
I didn’t know where she was going, and spent the afternoon doing as I was told. In the market, my father patted my head and shared his stew with me. We dipped lafeh bread in the meaty sauce. He was making a belt for a jambia, and showed me how he embossed the border with little triangles and squares. The stall smelled rich and alive and made me think of Jamiya, for her saddle had the same smell.
On my way home, I walked a wide berth around where the Confiscator and his wife had once found me sprawled with my persimmons. When I got home, my mother was there.
“Well, it’s done.”
“What?”
“You are free of that bastard wastrel.”
“What?”
“You are free of Asaf.”
“How could you call him such things?”
“What does it matter what I call him as long as he will never call you wife? Now we can betroth you to another.”
“No.”
“No what?”
“I won’t. I refuse to marry anyone but my boy-cousin.”
My mother’s face contorted into a mocking grimace. “Refuse all you want. You are not mistress of your fate in this world. Perhaps you will hold the reins of fate in the World to Come.”
I soon found out that my mother had gone to Rabbi Yusef Bar Yerush and paid him a whole Maria Theresa thaler to declare me an “abandoned bride,” and thus no longer bound by the engagement contract my father and Uncle Zecharia had both signed. Of course she wasn’t reckless enough to destroy the original document—the one that bound me to Asaf. My parents knew that it would prove crucial if my father were to die before a new groom could be found. In those days parents often commissioned small libraries of legal documents—one contradicting the other—each ready to be produced in a wink should it be needed to save a child from confiscation.
The same night my father brought the revocation home from the scribe, I stole it from out of the chest where they still kept Uncle Zecharia’s deerskin Torah. While my parents slept, I threw the parchment into the hearth. As it crackled and burned, I saw strange things in the glowing flames—chief among them a vision of a dancing deer, which I took as a sign that Uncle Zecharia’s Torah approved of my vandalism and that the deer who had sacrificed its hide for the words of the Law was a protective spirit, a totem of good luck and an intermediary between me and my uncertain fate. Before I returned to my pallet I thought of stealing other things—a piece of jewelry, a set of three silver spoons my mother treasured—in order to make it look as though we’d been ransacked. But in the end, I went to sleep without taking anything else or doing any further damage. That night, I dreamed of the young groom in Aden who flung himself on the Torah to protect it from burning. But in my dream it was Asaf who was the hero, and when he perished, it was the words of revocation that leapt from his body, like the mystic name writ in flames.
What I didn’t know was that in addition to the revocation, she had paid the scribe to write two copies of a letter to Uncle Zecharia, informing him of the revocation. Then she paid a messenger to take one copy of this letter to Sana’a and a caravanner to take another copy to Aden—both letters addressed to associates of Uncle Zecharia. But I was ignorant of her treachery—had I known, I would have chased those letters to the far corners of the earth. Everyone would have spoken of me. I would have become a legend—a girl from Qaraah who turned herself into a mountain cat in order to overtake the messengers and dig her claws into their backs before they could tamper with her happiness. But I knew nothing of the letters, so I remained only a girl who sharpened her teeth and claws on nothing more than petty domestic trivialities. Just a few weeks after I destroyed the document, my mother went into the chest and saw that it was missing. She put me over her knees and beat my behind with a wooden spoon. Then she said, “Stupid girl, this was only a copy. There is another draft with the rabbi for safekeeping. Who do you think you are to try to thwart my plans?”
Part Two
* * *
Chapter 7
More than two years passed. I would be lying if I said that I spent those years doing anything other than praying for Asaf to come back. No one knew, of course. I kept my single-minded devotions to myself. The only ones to rebuke me were my little idols, my only true confidants, who grew tired of my doleful lamentations and urged me to stop pining for a boy who would never come back. At least that is what I imagined they said, as I offered them grain and sage and bowed my head to their altar.
Nothing remarkable happened in those years. But when I was eleven everything changed. One day my father stumbled on his way into our house, almost falling, catching himself with a surprised grunt. It was the winter of 1930. He had news to share. A letter in his hand. My mother worked at the table, stretching out jachnun dough. He explained that his younger brother, Barhun, Barhun’s wife, Rahel, and their youngest daughter would be leaving their home in Aden and coming to live with us. My mother relinquished her tender hold on the dough and swore that Rahel Damari wouldn’t cross her threshold, let alone come to live in her house.
“He is my brother.” My father’s voice rose and wavered at the same time; he was incredulous, angry.
“If they come, they won’t leave,” my mother yelled. “And if she comes here, I will leave you.”
My mother had threatened many things in their twenty-four years of marriage, but never this.
“And where will you go?”
“Back to Taiz.”
“You’ll go nowhere, Sulamit!” My father coughed, a great heaving rattle, then grabbed my mother by the wrist and pulled her arm toward him, while at the same time almost pushing her shoulders away. They remained that way for a moment, locked in an insurmountable stasis.
“Make me stay and welcome the other Damaris and I’ll poison your jachnun.”
He hadn’t let go of her, but she twisted her body and turned away from him. A great big glob of sputum flew from her lips and landed in the middle of the dough. It didn’t soak in, but rested there like the white of an egg.
“Why?”
“They will ruin things. You’ll see. They will ruin everything!”
I had been standing near the doorway. I stared at that spit, a glistening token of my mother’s crude audacity. My father let go of my mother’s wrists. But she wasn’t the least bit cowed. She left the house slowly, arrogantly, not bothering to turn around and look back. My father and I were left alone together with that spoiled dough. Ignoring me, he sighed, went to the door, walked outside, and stood there for a moment with his hands up, as if beseeching the heavens for guidance.
I went over to the table and did what I thought my mother would do if she were in her right mind, which she clearly wasn’t. I took a knife and cut out the glob of spit from the center of the jachnun. I pressed the remaining dough on top of itself and threw the spoiled dough in the slop pail. Then I took my mother’s place at the table, rolling, stretching, and pressing. After all, I thought, whether the other Damaris were welcome or not, we still had to have dinner.
In my opinion, the other Damaris couldn’t be coming at a better time, for I needed allies now more than ever. My aunt? If she were really a witch, then perhaps she could brew me a potion I could use to kill myself or to kill the man my mother was currently scheming to make my husband. My father still coughed and was thinner and sallower than ever. The
Confiscator cast a long shadow over our lives. In the time since Asaf’s departure, my mother had failed to find me a new groom. She had recently chosen Mr. Musa, the jeweler—the fattest and richest man she could find—to court me. She rightly believed that his girth and wealth would insulate him from the rumors and innuendos concerning my marriageability.
Just the week before the letter arrived from the other Damaris, she had made my father pay a visit to Mr. Musa. He was the sort of man who stayed fat even when others died of starvation. He was very old, wrinkly, smelly, and wealthy. His first wife had died childless, and his second wife was rumored to be an old toothless woman, who came to the marriage with three grown children of her own—though no one ever saw her, as she stayed confined in the house. Whoever married Mr. Musa next would be her sister-wife. According to my brother Hassan, Mr. Musa was looking for a “virgin” to make his Isaac days sweet as manna. “Isaac days” is what people called old age because Isaac, our Father, lived to be one hundred years old, the longest of the patriarchs. I had no intention of marrying a man as old as time, and swore to my mother that I would kill myself before agreeing to such a union. As usual, she paid no heed to my threats and snorted that I “would be made to marry a dog” if I continued to act “like a little bitch.”
I knew that my parents made up the night that the letter came from Uncle Barhun, though the urgent sounds of their coupling were ordinary enough. As I lay on my pallet, I wondered what my aunt and cousin would look like, what clothes they would wear, and whether my cousin was skilled at cooking or sewing, or both. I wondered about my aunt. I didn’t know why my mother hated her so much and I dreamed that she or my cousin could possibly help me avoid marrying Mr. Musa, as help me they surely must.
