by Nomi Eve
After all the trouble, Aunt Rahel didn’t go often to the wadi where the other women gathered, and she never lingered in the market, gossiping as other women were wont to do. I continued to wonder about her. But when I dared to ask more questions, I never received answers, only more rude innuendo and conflicting stories cackled by the women at the well.
Chapter 10
“What goodies do you have for me today, sweet Adela? Have you brought some of that yummy citron jelly? It is so tart. Makes my lips pucker up, my mouth water.”
His voice was low, phlegmy. He smelled tart and wormy, like moldering melon rinds. I backed up against the wall and held the basket out in front of me for Mr. Musa to take it. Every time, it was the same. He reached for the basket and put it down at my feet. Then he reached up under my antari, shoved aside my underlinen, and pleasured himself, while I stood there shaking. He thrust his fat fingers inside me while I grimaced in pain, swallowed my cries, and watched his face contort into an ugly mask of pleasure. Afterward he wiped his hands on his shamle and then patted me on the head, like a dog.
This was my nightmare.
I dreamed it over and over. And in the morning, I would wait until my parents were out of our room and I would take off all my clothes and examine my body for dreaded signs that womanhood was approaching. To be a woman was to be a wife. To be a wife was to be possessed by Musa. To be possessed by Musa was to be as good as dead. Two months after the other Damaris arrived in Qaraah, I found a hair on my pubis, and I yanked it out. It was early spring and I cursed my own body for sprouting this scrubby mountain grass. When my nipples grew dark and wide, I tried to press them back into my chest. When that didn’t work, I cut a length of cloth and bound myself each morning. If I didn’t give my breasts room to grow, I reasoned, perhaps they wouldn’t swell and betray me to marriage. Sometimes a hard little nut of a thought flashed in my head: When I was engaged to Asaf, I wanted to be a woman right away. Now that I was engaged to Musa, I wanted to stay a girl forever.
In my waking life, as in my dream, I did visit Mr. Musa’s house. But, thank Elohim, he was never there, as he was always at his stall in the market. My mother insisted that I go to his house on Friday mornings before Sabbath, and deliver a jar of our citron jelly and a share of our kubaneh bread. My new cousin, Hani Damari, came with me. Mr. Musa’s wife always answered the door, swathed from head to toe like a Muslim woman, even though everyone knew she was a Jewess from a village to the west of Sana’a. All I ever saw of her were her eyes, tiny little blue slits of light peeking out of her coverings. Those eyes didn’t look old, and they didn’t look crazy or like they belonged to an invalid. She seemed young enough to be one of my sisters-in-law and walked by herself without a cane. The stories about her had been false. She never invited us in, and all she did was reach for the basket and whisper a quiet “Thank you, little sister” in the dialect of her people. She didn’t have any grown children, but a single baby, a little boy with a snub nose whom she carried in the crook of her arm.
One Friday, when we were walking home, Hani asked, “Do you think Musa hits her to give her pain, or to give himself pleasure?”
I balked, “What do you mean? What a horrible thing to say.” I was blushing.
“Well,” Hani said, “clearly she covers her face to hide bruises, and she doesn’t appear in public so people won’t gossip about her injuries. And when a man hits a wife, sometimes it is for punishment, but sometimes it is to open the gates of paradise. For him, I mean. For her? Well, a man’s paradise can be a woman’s hell.”
“How do you know such things?”
Hani snorted. “My older sisters taught me more than my aleph bet. And I will teach you, so you will know the ways of the world. The dark ways, as well as the light. For it is not enough to know just one of them.”
“If those are the ways of the world, I am sure I don’t want to know them. When I am married to Mr. Musa, if he hits me like that, I will cut off his grapes.” I spoke with crude bravado, pretending to be audacious, even though I wasn’t.
“Oh, Adela.” Hani stopped, wrapped her arms around me, and kissed my nose. “Don’t worry. Mr. Musa will not hit you.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he won’t marry you.” Hani spoke with authority. “You will be free of him.”
“What is to stop him?”
She smiled a coy, all-knowing smile but wouldn’t say any more.
“What is to stop him? Can you tell fortunes? Free of him?” I gulped. “I will never be free. Have you heard my father cough? If my father goes to the World to Come before I am married to Mr. Musa, I will be confiscated, and if he doesn’t? Well, I don’t think Mrs. Musa looks very free, do you?”
Hani looked down at her feet, and then looked up at me. She had a strange expression, as if she half knew something that I would like to know the whole of.
A few days after this conversation, I went next door, to the little house with the red roof. I was delivering some soap that I had just finished making with my sister-in-law Sultana. I knocked, but no one answered. I knocked again, and still no answer. The door swung open under my hand. I found myself walking in, breathing in the scent of Eden on the sixth day, and soon I was standing in front of Aunt Rahel’s herbs and unguents. All those little colored bottles and the satchels filled with mashed roots and dried leaves. I picked one up, and then another. I couldn’t make out any of the writing on the little vials, because I didn’t know how to read. But I knew enough about roots and herbs, from listening to my sisters-in-law discuss the treatments they found for their many female maladies, to know that a storehouse of herbs always contained bitter little treasures that were like coins—two-sided, deadly when taken in certain doses, healing when taken in others. My eyes fell hungrily on my aunt’s stores. I breathed in deeply, wondering how I could discern what I needed from this wheaty, earthy amalgam. But as I couldn’t tell one from the other, I just reached out and grabbed a little embroidered satchel with a cinch top. I had almost slipped it into the sleeve pocket of my antari when I heard a noise.
Aunt Rahel had walked in, quiet as a cat. She stood before me, her eyes flashing over the vial in my hand. She reached for it, appraised it, and raised an eyebrow.
“What do you need, Adela? What ails you?”
I opened my mouth. I was going to lie. I was going to say, “Aunt Rahel, I am interested in learning about healing. Will you teach me which herb stops a fever? Which stops blood? Which causes vomiting? Which reduces swelling?” But when I looked into my aunt’s eyes, I saw oceans and deserts. I saw a world not yet created, and worlds that had died long before I was born. In other words, I saw eternity, and in eternity, I also saw myself. So I told her the truth. I said, “Aunt Rahel, I need a deadly poison.”
Aunt Rahel was not like other women. She didn’t say, “Child, it is an abomination to speak of such things.” She didn’t hug me to her bosom either and comfort me, trying to lift me out of my morbid sense of doom. She said, “Do you plan on killing yourself or some other?”
I let out a big sigh. “To kill Mr. Musa I would have to poison the citron jelly that I deliver for the Sabbath. And that would mean that if they had a taste of it, his wife and baby would die too. And I would not like to hurt them. So unfortunately I have to kill myself.” I was relieved to give voice to what had been weighing so heavily on my mind.
“Adela, you have several options.” She reached behind the bottles and pulled one out. “The distillation of this herb is toxic. It is best mixed with wine to mask the bitter taste. But be leery of it; sometimes it only works halfway, and to halfway kill someone makes one a murderer twice over. Another option is this powder. But that will cause you horrible agony and convulsions that last six days. Another option is a diffusion of the contents of this little green jar. Lovely, isn’t it?” She uncorked it, sniffed, and then put it under my nose. “Smells like salty apricots, don’t you think? I got it from a trader from the east. Puts a sufferer to sleep, and escorts
her tenderly over the threshold of death. Better you die in your sleep and dream your way into the World to Come. But before you act too hastily, may I ask you why you want to possess such bitter knowledge?”
“Look, I will be a woman soon.” I stuck out my chest, and showed her my swelling little bosoms. “And I have awful pains. My belly feels like it has been punched. Like I have a bruise in my womb. I am afraid that my blood will come before the new moon. And then I will have to marry Mr. Musa.”
She examined me with her eyes. Then made me open my antari, so she could look at my nipples. She even made me raise my skirt and lower my linens. Then she told me to cover up again and said, “No, you will not become a woman for some time. And by then Mr. Musa will be dead.”
I balked. “But he is not ill.”
“Oh no, you are wrong; he is a very sick man. He has a terminal malady of the liver, I suspect, and perhaps also a blockage of the heart.”
I wasn’t used to people speaking of livers or hearts, unless they were referring to the slaughtering of goats or chickens. I almost laughed. Her diagnosis made me think of fat Mr. Musa slung out on a butcher’s table, his organs glistening under the threat of a cleaver.
“How do you know this? Are you a doctor, Aunt Rahel?” I had once heard a story of a lady doctor in Aden, a British woman who helped bring babies into the world. But Aunt Rahel didn’t answer, and then I heard myself turning mean and saucy. “Or are you a sorceress, like my mother says?” The words were already out of my mouth before I knew what I was uttering. My face got hot, and I tried to hide in the folds of my gargush.
She shook her head again, this time with a pained half smile. I could see that she wasn’t the least bit angry, even though she had every right to be. “No,” she said, “I am not that either.” She had the little embroidered satchel on her palm, the one I had chosen. “Adela, perhaps you are the sorceress among us, because you yourself reached for my most deadly mixture. You brew tea from these dried leaves and it kills in five sips. But perhaps you knew this already. Maybe you already have all the knowledge you will ever need to save yourself.” She tucked the little satchel back in its spot—just to the right of a long fluted green glass vial, and to the left of a big basket of dried henna leaves.
I left the little house with the red roof and walked home thinking about poor Mrs. Musa. Was Hani right? Was the poor girl hiding bruises under her antari? A split lip? A blackened eye? And how would I really behave if Mr. Musa hit me? Would I cower? Or fight back? I had never fought anyone, and when my mother beat me, I curled up deep inside myself until the blows had passed. I thought about Aunt Rahel’s vials and pouches.
Later she would prove herself to be a woman of healing. When one of Masudah’s sons fell and a branch stabbed his thigh, making a deep slash, she rubbed on a poultice and wrapped the wound with linen. When one of Masudah’s babies got a bad cough, she gave Masudah a decoction of powder in wine, which eased his cries, and in the morning he was well again. When my brother Elihoo got a blistering, oozing sore on his lip that festered, she gave him a paste of henna and tea, and the sore was gone in two days. Eventually women I didn’t know visited Aunt Rahel and would leave with little pouches tucked in their dresses. I supposed Aunt Rahel was sharing her cooking spices. But Aunt Aminah—who never hesitated to give me a proper education—told me that Rahel gave the women love charms, and “worts and roots to sprinkle on their husbands’ stew to assure potency.”
But then, in the early days of the Damaris’ time in Qaraah, we still didn’t know what she was capable of. That night I lay awake in bed for a long time thinking about her herbs and potions, and about convulsions that would leave me strangling on my own tongue, foaming at the mouth. The next day when Hani came into our house, I was at the table, shucking walnuts with the big silver cracker. I said, “Hani, your mother cured my bellyache. Please tell her that I feel so much better.”
That night in my dreams I slept on a soft carpet like Hani’s mother’s. My own boudoir was curtained by fuchsia and azure silks from China and wood-blocked drapes from Zanzibar.
Chapter 11
I continued to deliver Sabbath baskets to poor Mrs. Musa. Three months after my engagement, she invited me in. That’s when she took off her veil, and I saw that Hani had been correct. One week her right eye was black, another week, she had a bruised cheek. Another day she opened the door missing a front tooth. I grew to dread these visits, thinking that one day she would come to the door a corpse, and I would still hand her the basket and she would still say, “Thank you, little sister” even though she was already departed for the World to Come.
Once I tried to tell my mother about Mrs. Musa’s injuries, but she rolled her eyes and said, “I hear that she is a clumsy girl, that she falls on her way to the well. Also, she has bad eyesight and bumps into things.” She wiped her shiny brow with a kerchief and said, “You will be a help to her, and will be able to do the chores that her poor eyes make onerous.”
More time passed. My breasts swelled, my hips grew rounder. In the market, from afar, I examined Mr. Musa for signs of the illness that Aunt Rahel had diagnosed. His skin did look yellow to me. And the man was shorter of breath. Perhaps Aunt Rahel was right. But would my body wait for Mr. Musa to die? Or would I become a woman before he was dead in the ground?
* * *
It was late spring when I awoke with pain gripping my belly so badly I was nauseated. Surely this meant my blood was coming. As I carried water from the little well, I sweated more than usual. As I ground wheat, my head throbbed, and all day long the pain in my belly grew worse and worse. Soon, sleepiness came over me. I swooned when trying to straighten up the kitchen. I lay down on my pallet and closed my eyes. In the morning there was a wad of rags between my legs. It was soaked through with my blood. My mother helped me to the chamber pot, and she washed me herself, sponging the blood from my thighs. Then she helped me back to my pallet.
“I am sorry, Mother.”
“For what?”
I shook my head. I didn’t know what I was apologizing for.
“You have nothing to be sorry for other than becoming a woman.” She scrunched her face, left me, and returned a few minutes later with Aunt Rahel, who bent over me, smelled my breath, put her hands on my heart, and then lower, quickly undressed me, exploring my body.
“Ooooh,” I moaned, when she pressed my belly. “Not there, not there.”
I tried my apology again. “Aunt, I am sorry.”
She put a hand on my sweaty forehead. “You asked me if I was a sorceress or a doctor. I told you I was neither.”
“So what are you?”
She cocked her head to one side. Bit her top lip, and then said, “The ancient mothers believed that a girl’s menarche rearranged her organs, putting the womb in the heart and the heart in the mouth.”
“So my heart is in my mouth now?”
She shrugged. “Do you feel rearranged?”
“No, I feel like I am one of the ancients. I hurt everywhere. Like I have become an old woman overnight.”
“Not an old woman, but a baby one. You are a baby woman, poor thing. You will feel better and worse tomorrow. You have indeed become a woman. Here, drink some of this.” She handed me a small flask. “It will help with your cramps. But it won’t help with anything else. Mr. Musa isn’t dead yet. But he will die soon, leaving you a widow, but I am sorry to say, already a wife. Your blood came quicker than his death. I am so sorry. I wish there were something I could do for you, but there isn’t, there simply isn’t.”
* * *
My cousin’s and sisters-in-law’s preparations for me were elaborate. In the two weeks before my wedding, they dressed me up and practiced prettying me. They plucked the hair under my arms, rubbed my whole body with pumice, and then powdered and scented me with myrrh, spikenard, and coriander oil. Sultana shampooed my hair with lavender soap and waxed my eyebrows with beeswax, then darkened them with burnt matchsticks. Hani stained my lips with geranium and poppy pe
tals and rouged my cheeks with a cream Masudah cooked out of vinegar, isinglass, nutmeg, honey, and red sandalwood. Aunt Rahel made me drink a tea brewed out of a root she called kava kava. She said it would give me fortitude and calm my nerves. Masudah gave me new amulets to hide in my sleeve pockets and put under my pillow. Yerushalmit gave me a coral bracelet that she said was my mother’s. Hani experimented braiding my hair in an elaborate coiffure.
I let them pummel and pound me into a bride. But we all knew the truth of it—I was miserable, and my wedding day was no real cause for celebration.
“Will Elohim send a ram in my place?” I blurted out as Sultana rubbed kohl on my eyebrows.
Yerushalmit snapped, “Haughty girl, who are you to compare yourself to Isaac our Father? You are no sacrifice.”
Yerushalmit had been younger than I when she married my brother Mordechai. She had no patience for my complaints.
“Leave her be.” Masudah wiped the tears off my face with her apron. “Sha, sha, little girl, now we have to clean you up and prettify you all over again.” She turned to Yerushalmit and shot her dagger eyes. “All brides blaspheme. Elohim is merciful and has nothing but forgiveness for virgins taken by old men. Sha, sha, all will be well in the end.” Then Masudah hugged me to her big bosom and whispered little lewd things in my ears that I never thought I would hear from my sister-in-law—ugly bedroom tricks on how to make my husband “finish his work before it even started” so I would not have to “suffer like a cart horse under the yoke of him.” In those final days leading up to my wedding, the only thing that aroused in me any emotion other than dread was the fact that I would finally get to have my own henna. I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of excitement. As I was to be a bride, my mother couldn’t deny me a Night of Henna. To do so would be against the custom of our people and would arouse talk of the evil eye. She may have been a spiteful woman, but even my mother wouldn’t launch her only daughter into matrimony under a cloud of ill omen.
