Henna House

by Nomi Eve

  When Aunt Rahel arrived, she found Sultana greatly improved, but Moshe . . . Moshe was more dead than alive. He was breathing rapidly and his heart was pounding so quickly in his chest he was more like a bird than a boy. Hani later described the treatment to me. Aunt Rahel examined his little chest, listened to his breathing, looked at the color of his tongue and the consistency of his sputum. Then she prepared tonics. She sliced an onion and put it in a bowl with pure honey; after an hour she had him drink the syrup. She also gave him parsnip juice and a tonic of sesame and linseed. She rubbed peppermint oil on his back and pressed a cotton sack filled with warm, damp wheat to his left ear. I went to visit and to see if there was anything I could do to help. When I arrived, Aunt Rahel was holding Moshe and praying. But it wasn’t a prayer I knew. She was asking Ayin HaChayim, the Wellspring of Life, to redeem Moshe, to save him from his illness.

  Aunt Rahel stayed with Sultana and Moshe all night. In the morning the crisis had passed. Moshe slept soundly in his mother’s arms. His chest had cleared, his fever had broken, his ear had drained its noxious fluid. Rahel hadn’t even hennaed him. “Sometimes henna comes first,” Hani explained to me when I asked her about the role of henna in treatments. “Sometimes it comes last, and sometimes it is not even needed.”

  Before the other Damaris came, my life was empty of questions. Now, everything set me wondering. When Moshe had his sixth birthday, a few weeks later, Sultana proudly walked with him to the bigger well. The other women gathered around and cooed at how tall he had become, they listened to him tell jokes, they cheered his perfect openmouthed grin. Sultana’s smile was a sight to behold.

  I wondered how Aunt Rahel helped save Moshe. Was she calling on God? Or on God by a different name? Did Elohim answer if you called him Ayin HaChayim? I supposed so, for the boy had lived. But why had I not recognized the words? A few weeks after Moshe’s sixth birthday, Aunt Rahel prepared her pot of henna paste. I sat at the grinding stones and watched Hani wash her skin and then help her mother sort through her array of moisturizing oils and unguents. My mother came out of our house and summoned me. I followed her inside. She put a piece of dough in my hands and told me to make the evening bread. When I had finished rolling and stretching and stretching and rolling, she said, “Enough, enough” as if I had forced myself upon her, as if I had asked for the work. Then she said, “Well, go already.”

  “To where?”

  She looked out the window, at the house with the red roof.

  “To them” she said, spitting out the word them but then softening. “To your cousin.”

  She had never referred to Hani as “my cousin” before. She usually said “the other Damari girl” with a bitter emphasis on the word other. I knew that something in our relationship had shifted.

  “And may I—”

  “Yes, you may let them . . .”

  Them—the word danced in the air, twisted, arched, and unraveled. I didn’t need her to finish her sentence, I ran so fast. Flying to Hani and Aunt Rahel, as if they were birds about to take flight, I, the littlest bird, flapped my wings frantically, heedless of anything but an ancestral urge to join them on their seasonal journey.

  “What is it, Adela?” Hani was holding a pot of henna paste, adding a dilute tincture of coffee water drop by drop. I held up my hands, and then I turned them slightly front to back, as if I were sanctifying a Sabbath flame. She knew. She clapped and shouted. Held out her arms to me, imprinting a permanent design of joy on my skin, my soul, even before the ink was fully prepared.

  Rahel Damari presided over my first henna ceremony but let Hani do the actual inscribing. I felt so lucky as her stylus tickled my skin. My sisters-in-law Yerushalmit and Masudah were there too. They joined Aunt Rahel and Hani in singing a song of Anath and Baal—I heard my voice mingling with their voices. Aunt Rahel led a song about the matriarchs and heroines of scripture. About our mother Miriam and her tambourine, about our mother Sarah’s laughter, about Esther’s courage, Deborah’s wisdom, Ruth’s loyalty, Judith’s daring, Eve’s beauty. The tickle of the stylus on my skin gave me gooseflesh. I laughed when Hani got to my pulse points. She laughed with me. Plaited my hair. Rubbed rose balm on my shoulders. Rubbed my feet and sang me a song that seemed to braid through itself like the strands of a havdalah candle. I didn’t say a word. I must have been a bore and a disappointment to them all, though they never made me feel that way. Not for a single second.

  Aunt Rahel inspected each design, made criticisms and comments, and helped with smudges. “Oh, Adela, you are so beautiful!” The paste dried quickly. I could feel it growing tight and purposeful on my skin. Once all of our hands were decorated, Sultana lifted a tambourine, and all our voices joined in song. We sang a song of the hill-country women who bear baskets on their heads but keep their spines straight as arrows as they traverse the distance between market and home. That first night I was a novitiate. Soon, like the others, I would learn about the stars in the heavens by reading the astronomical tables they inscribed on my feet, shins, and fingers. Soon, I would grow to believe that I myself was an actual text, and that my skin without henna was like a holy book without words—a shameful, almost blasphemous, thing. Without henna, I wouldn’t know how to read myself. With henna, I was as sacred as a sanctified Torah. With henna, I was the carrier of ancient tales—a living girl-scroll replete with tales of sorrow, joy, and salvation. After the singing, we lay back on the fragrant pillows and dozed. When I woke up, everyone gathered around to see my hands. Hani had given me a pattern of roses and lilies. The tendrils and petals wove their way from the insides of my wrists to my pinky fingers, and wrapped themselves into my palms.

  I left the house with the red roof a different sort of Adela from the girl who had gone in. When I walked into our house, my mother was at the fire, frying lungs for dinner. She turned around, saw my arms. She didn’t tell me they were beautiful. She pretended that nothing was different about me. But instead of making me help with dinner, she said, “Go to Sultana and return her second coffee grinder, ours has been fixed.” The grinder was in a basket by the door.

  “I’ll be back quickly.”

  “Take your time.”

  I knew that she was excusing me from dinner preparations so that I wouldn’t ruin my fresh henna, which still had to set. I wanted to thank her, but I knew it wasn’t what she wanted. For my mother, my silence in the face of her kindness was thanks enough. The next day at the market I waved my arms extravagantly, insouciantly, in every direction. Women cooed and clucked at my adornment. There were some, though, who had strong opinions. The candlemaker’s wife told me in no uncertain terms that the henna on my arms marked me as a slut, and that I should soak my hands in lemon to bleach the color off before my reputation was ruined. The lampmaker’s wife told her to shut her mouth, and said that I was as pretty as a picture.

  After I had danced around town with my abundantly decorated arms and feet, I realized that Aunt Rahel was the one my mother had been thanking. I was just the vehicle. My arms and legs, hands and feet spread the news that Sulamit Damari, respected matron and wife of Hayyim Shalom Damari, the leather worker, was proclaiming her sister-in-law’s worthiness and daring any other woman in Qaraah to slander her name. My skin was writ with my mother’s testimony. My body bore a pledge of honor from one woman to another.

  I didn’t know it then, but my mother had forgiven Rahel for being who she was—a woman of henna, with ancient charms on her lips, bloodred hands, and the stories of so many brides tucked up into her skirts. But at the same time, my mother had not forgiven Rahel for a more private sin—a sin that became a bone in my mother’s throat, something she choked on every single time she looked at my aunt.

  That night my father and Uncle Barhun sat out by the fire between our houses while my mother was at Auntie Aminah’s, who had been unwell and needed help when the pains in her back made breathing most difficult. I thought about the first night the other Damaris came to live with us in Qaraah. I remembered how, when Han
i took off her traveling clothes, I was stunned by her beauty and how her henna made her seem both more dressed and more naked. Now, desperate to see my own adorned skin, and alone in the house, I took off my dress and pants and let myself be recklessly naked for just a moment. The light of the fire from the courtyard filtered through the curtains and cast a yellow glow on my body. I was a traveler now too, walking the road with them from Aden, coming north through desert and dune and narrow mountain pass. I held up my scriptural hands, curled my decorated toes, and thought, I am one of them now, truly.

  * * *

  Soon after I received my first henna, my father’s cough worsened. He took to his bed, breathing in big gulping wheezy gasps. But then Aunt Rahel gave him a tonic and a steam treatment and he recovered a measure of his strength. After that, anytime he suffered a “relapse” she would treat him again. He called her Nurse Rahel. My mother grumbled when he said it, but she also found little ways to thank her sister-in-law, like sending me over with a pot of kubaneh for Sabbath, or a tray of sweet nut pastries for a festive meal. After Aunt Rahel saved Sultana and Moshe, the women of Qaraah stopped speaking ill of her and soon they remembered that she was an expert at the art that they all admired. It wasn’t long before she had no trouble getting work as a henna dyer. This is how Aunt Rahel came to henna the hands of the daughter of Ibn Roush, a leatherworker like my father. She also hennaed the hands and feet of a toothless old woman who had miraculously survived a fall off a roof and wanted to celebrate her redemption. And once Rahel started, more and more came for her. She quickly regained her reputation as the best henna dyer to be found. Jewish brides came to her as well as Muslim ones. Soon she was able to charge a premium for her services. Most of the women we knew from Qaraah, but some came to contract her services from the surrounding villages, and some from as far away as Sana’a. They sent messengers to the little house with the red roof, or made the pilgrimage themselves, holding out their hands, showing the width of their palms, and sitting with Aunt Rahel in the stone courtyard between our houses, discussing patterns, intensity of colors, redolence of herbal tinctures.

  Hani would accompany Rahel to her “jobs,” working as her helper and apprentice. Hani became known in Qaraah for a vivid and unusual star pattern that we began referring to as “Hani’s constellations.” No one else could achieve the same effect, not even Aunt Rahel. Hani’s henna stars and planets seemed to radiate off the skin with their own vivid light. And the women who wore Hani’s constellations noticed that each time they looked at them, they saw different arrangements of the stars and found the shapes of new animals and old heroes that would appear and fade into each other, and then reappear as different shapes entirely.

  And what about that magic? Sometimes it seemed to me that Hani believed in scriptural charms and amulets, believed that what she drew on our skin had power to ward off evil, cosmetics with ulterior motives. But other times it seemed that she thought her art was nothing more than elegant scribbles—beauteous designs.

  Aunt Rahel’s reputation grew and grew. On more than one occasion she was even called on to henna the daughters and nieces of the Imam himself. The brides she hennaed—both the Jews and the Muslim girls—began once more to be referred to as Rahel’s Blooms. She used special mixes for her applications and the result was that her designs sank deeper into the skin and lasted longer than henna done by less skillful hands. It was whispered that Rahel’s Blooms not only enjoyed sensuous love affairs but also experienced a pleasure in their marriages that lasted so long that the painted flowers on their palms wilted before they stopped screaming in ecstasy. This was always said with a nod and a twinkle in the eye at the point in the next henna ceremony when the women had drunk their share of spiced wine, and the steam of the fire and the clink clink of the shinshilla cymbals and the damp sea-urchin scent of the incense colluded in making everyone lazy and inclined to confuse fantasies with secrets, and say such things as would make even the most seasoned matron blush.

  If you ask people who remember those days, some will insist that strange things happened once Rahel Damari started to work in earnest. It was said that the men of Qaraah grew too potent for their own good and began rutting in the streets like goats and rams. Others said that it was the women who grew lusty and were not ashamed of their own desires, which took strange forms, and made them drowsy during the day, unable to cook, or clean, or even care for their many children. But there are others who remember those days differently, and swear that none of these things happened, and that the coming of the other Damaris had absolutely no effect upon the marital lives of the community. I myself have no idea what was true, for when I was old enough to ask, the truth of the matter had dried up, like the lava from the ancient mountain volcanoes, lording a petrified history over us like giants of ash and smoke.

  Chapter 14

  In midautumn, a month or so after my first henna, my mother’s thick shadow fell over my hands. I was sitting in the courtyard between our house and the other Damaris’ house.

  “Umph, you have no talent for their work.”

  I was used to my mother’s criticism, and knew better than to respond. I didn’t even look up.

  “Really, you are clumsy; you’ll never succeed at it.”

  I gritted my teeth and ignored her. I had begun to take up the stylus myself, tentatively practicing my own lines on scraps of cured calf skin. At first I tried to hide my new habit, but it is hard to hide henna. I tried to work under the frankincense tree behind Auntie Aminah’s house, but I needed water, because my henna was too thick, and the water was out front, in the basins. I then tried to work next door, by the dye mistress’s pots, but she was nosy and kept looking over my shoulder to make aesthetic suggestions. I moved to behind the chicken coop, but my brother Dov saw me and mocked me in a loud voice, scaring the chickens. I stopped hiding and started working in the small courtyard between our house and the little house with the red roof. And that’s when my mother saw me. She’d come out of the house, walked over to where I was sitting, and peered over my shoulder.

  I kept at it. I was trying very hard to make a seashell. The whirl of the bottom curve was tricky. My hand wavered and blurred the henna, leaving a blotch.

  “Umph,” she said again. But she didn’t leave. I dipped my stylus again and made another shell. Again, I botched it. My mother shifted her feet but still didn’t move away. I heard her breathing, clearing her throat. She never wore henna, not even at very special celebrations. I suppose it was her way of distinguishing herself from them, rebuking their ornate lives with her own austerity.

  “No, you have no talent for their work.” She squatted in front of me, held out her palms, and winced as if she were showing me a tender place, a spot pricked by a deep splinter. She curled her fingers into fists and then opened them again, revealing work-weathered skin overlaid with the skein of her life lines.

  “If you are going to improve, you need to practice on something other than dead animal skin, no?”

  The first time I put the henna stylus to my mother’s skin, my hands shook, my lines blurred, my heart pounded so loudly I was sure she could hear it. I was in a most precarious position. No matter what I did, she would be angry, and would yell, and would use henna as just another way to let me know that I had no real place in her heart. I brought the stylus to her skin so slowly that the henna clumped before I could apply it. I tried again. When I felt the stylus press into her skin, I braced myself. Surely she was toying with me and would smack my ears, swipe the stylus from my hand. But nothing happened. So I drew a line, another line, a wave, a wave, a curl. The littlest flower. She held her hand taut and even let out a little giggle to show that it tickled. She didn’t chastise my artless sloppiness. And when I was finished that first day she held her hands up to her face, puffed out her lower lip, and even nodded her head in mild approval. The next time I was less nervous. After that, the only time my hands wavered was because I was not sure what to draw next, not because I expected to be condemned
by her for my efforts. At first my mother washed the henna paste off before it could dry, but eventually, she let me set it with lemon and sugar water, and left it on. Sometimes she even wrapped her hands at night after I had hennaed them in order to let the color sink even deeper into her skin. And then she went about her work vividly adorned. When someone in the market or in synagogue would comment on her henna, she would say, “Ech, my Adela is lazy with a stylus, but it is all I can do to help her get better, no? It is a mother’s lot to suffer her daughter’s deficiencies.” But I always knew that she wouldn’t have worn my henna if she weren’t proud of my efforts.

  Hani was delighted to be my teacher. “Good henna relies upon intensity,” she said. “The darker the bride’s henna, the longer a couple’s love will last.”

  She showed me how my squiggles were too weak and my angular lines too sharp. She taught me how to make her favorite designs—fish, shells, and peacocks—and then laughed indulgently when my fish looked like snakes and my shells looked like ears and my peacocks looked like pigeon wings.

  She bored me to tears with a lecture on Egyptian and Sudanese henna traditions but was relentlessly patient when I kept confusing squares with circles and diamonds with teardrops for ankle cuffs and wrist bracelets. And she was my tutor in variations of the Eye of God, the most powerful design to ward off evil.

  Almost every henna tradition has its own version of the Eye. Hani began with the most straightforward, a Berber charm of three concentric triangles, with a cross in the center to deflect evil in all four directions. She explained the symbolic meaning behind even the simplest henna marks. “These ripples” she said, pointing to my pathetic and squished attempt at waves, “signify the purification of water, and the abundance of all life.” She wrinkled up her nose. “But maybe your water is not so abundant yet, just a trickle, a little thirsty stream?” She tugged on my hair and smiled, to show me that her teasing was good-natured.