Henna House

by Nomi Eve

  A thought had just occurred to me. How had I trusted her to write on my skin? A verse of scripture popped into my head. The words of Elohim are pure words, as silver tried in a crucible on the earth, refined seven times. My skin prickled. She looked away from me, up into the sky. I followed her gaze. A pair of sooty falcons was soaring overhead. The air was hot and thick, there was no wind. And then I had the worst thought of all. Hani had delivered Mr. Musa’s basket the day he died. What had she once said? He won’t marry you. You will be free of him.

  Had she cursed Mr. Musa by delivering the basket? Had evil murderous charms been written on her skin when she handed the kubaneh to Mrs. Musa? Charms that made Mrs. Musa kill her husband?

  “Nothing. I am tired. Forgive me.” I walked on, forcing myself to speak normally, and not let my voice betray my horrible suspicions. “I will see you at dinner, Hani.”

  I went inside, shut the door, and leaned against it. I thought of the story Asaf had told me so long ago—the one about the groom who tried to assassinate the Imam by reading the henna code on his bride’s feet. I thought about the stories Masudah had told me about Aunt Rahel. How people said she cursed brides and made them bear monsters. Or that she blessed brides and was said to be in congress with the goddess Anath. Henna dyers arrange their designs into pictorial amulets and ancient imagistic charms to ward off evil. But these charms and amulets are not alphabetical. They are language without language. What would happen if people knew that Hani had devised her own alphabet, and was perhaps writing insults instead of blessings? If they knew that she had hidden intentions, an agenda all her own, what would they think of her? What would they do to her? Would they run her out of town? Shame her? Or worse?

  I didn’t meet Hani’s gaze at the meal. That night around the fire, her hennaed hands, and the hands of my sisters-in-law, my aunt, and my own hands flitted and worked as usual. We were embroidering, cracking nuts, weaving on a hand loom, cupping to show a quantity of a recipe’s measure, gesturing to show the size of a large drum someone saw at the market. I watched everyone’s hands in the orange glow of the firelight. The henna on everyone’s skin seemed to shift this way and that, and to glimmer like lengths of shimmering silk. The more I watched, the more the henna seemed enchanted. The elements unwound themselves from ancient patterns, and rearranged themselves into stories no one had dared to tell me before. I imagined that I saw Hani’s code curled in every slant and circle. I was transfixed. I couldn’t decipher anything, and yet, was sure that there was something to be deciphered.

  “Adela, Adela, did you hear me?” Hani touched me on the shoulder. “Didn’t you hear?” She repeated the punch line to her joke.

  I smiled, and pretended to join in the conversation. But inside, I had a thousand unanswered questions. How had I not noticed it before? How had I not seen the code adorning her life line? And if it was really there, how would I ever be able to read it? I had just learned to read Hebrew; how could I read a code of swirls and lines and stars?

  Before she left, Hani said, “You must get good sleep tonight, Adela. You don’t seem like yourself. I hope you aren’t getting sick. If you don’t feel well tomorrow, you must come to Mother for some of her special bayberry tea.”

  I lay on my pallet making resolutions: I would memorize the alphabetical correspondences and keep my eye out for any stray elements on hands and feet that Hani had hennaed. I told myself that if she were using the code on anyone, I would catch her and go to Aunt Rahel. And that if she had used the code against me before, well, there was nothing I could do, but she would certainly never use her dark skills on me again.

  But, by the light of day, I found that I wasn’t upset anymore. I reminded myself that I didn’t believe a whit in dark magic, and that it was ridiculous to think that charms scribbled on a girl’s hand could cause a man’s death. I reassured myself that Hani had always been kind to me. I told myself that I had overreacted and that her henna alphabet was probably an old discarded game. Nothing but a scrap of nonsense. And I was even a bit enamored of the idea that Hani and I now shared a secret . . . or at least, that I knew her secret. I told myself that I would keep my eyes open, but I had no reason to suspect that she was up to no good.

  Chapter 15

  In the late spring of 1931, several months after I’d found Hani’s coded henna alphabet, a Jewish girl was found murdered near the camel caravan depot. The men went to search the hills for the murderer, and we girls were not allowed to walk alone. Many of the young men of Qaraah took to patrolling. The patrols were meant to keep us all safe, but we girls scoffed at the boys, and mocked their bravado and bluster behind their backs. Our foraging trips to gather henna were curtailed. My aunt’s henna supplies dwindled and she had to resort to purchasing her henna leaves from a stall in the market. We no longer went to wash clothes in the wadi unless traveling in a large group. Hani and I avoided my cave, leaving my goddesses once more abandoned. Two weeks after the first murder, a Muslim girl was found dead, the daughter of a horse breeder. She was found behind the camel market, disposed of just like the first girl, naked, with her throat slashed and clods of earth in her mouth. We grew even more fearful. We stopped going to the well unless a brother, father, or uncle went with us. When my father accompanied us, he often offered to carry water himself. Uncle Barhun carried water too, and sometimes both my father and uncle came with us and would amuse us on the long walk to and from the well with stories from their youth, in which Barhun was often getting lost, and my father tasked with finding him.

  My brother Hassan, Half Nose, had hated me from the time I was a baby. “He couldn’t have had a reason,” Sultana said, “for you were both too young for reasons.” She told me that when I was born, and he was just four years old, he would add extra blankets to my cradle so I would sweat in the summer and take them off in the winter so I would shiver. He dumped salt in my food so that I would cry and spit it out and go hungry. He pinched my toes and maligned me to our mother. In short, he made my life miserable whenever he had the chance.

  When it came to looking for the murderer, Hassan joined every expedition he could. Everyone knew that Hassan was no hero, and volunteered only because it was his way of shirking his duties. He was lazy, a reluctant worker. He had been apprenticed to a lampmaker when he was just a small boy. By volunteering to look for the murderer, he got himself out of the workshop and into the dunes around Qaraah—freedom to do what he wished.

  One afternoon, I was at the breadboard, pounding dough for supper, and my mother was at the fire, clarifying butter for samneh, when the door opened. Hassan strode in, lips open, crooked teeth sharp and menacing, face stretched in a punishing leer.

  “Look what I found!” he growled.

  I saw with a flash of panic that he was holding two of my idols.

  “I was out patrolling,” he continued, “and I came across a cave above the old iron forge. Inside was an altar, a pagan altar. I found ten little idols arranged for devotions. They belong to your daughter—a little witch.” He glowered at me. “For all we know, she conjured the devil who killed those girls. I found all manner of things in the cave that implicate her. Cast-off pots, rugs, and trinkets from our household. Look, Father’s leather.” He pinched a piece of leather around the middle of one of the idols. I had made a little apron for Anath, my newest idol, out of a scrap of leather from my father’s shop. The edges were marked with my father’s distinctive triangle and circle pattern.

  My mother had put down her wooden spoon and was now standing with her hands on her hips. Hassan kept talking. “That little harpy. Maybe Adela has cursed every one of us.” He held up the idols. I noticed that his face was a strange shade, pale and greenish, and he looked like he was going to be sick.

  My mother turned and lifted the butter pot off the fire. She placed it very deliberately on the cooling stone. Then she wiped her hands on her apron and reached out and took the idols. At that very moment, Hassan put his hand up to his mouth and ran out the door. We could hear
him vomiting, retching into the earth. When he came back in, my mother threw a rag at him and made a disgusted face. “Clean yourself up,” she ordered. Hassan dabbed miserably at his glistening lips as my mother held one of my idols, examining it, lifting up her clothes. I had made her a skirt out of a scrap of blue cloth from our darning basket—the same cloth that was now on our table, set for dinner. My mother raised the idol to her face. Her nostrils flared, as if she were smelling something spoiled, acrid. Then she threw it into the hearth fire. The flames danced around the smooth body, licking it, and scorching the cloth. She put the other idol on the breadboard and then began to beat me. I had suffered enough beatings at her hand to know how to brace myself against her anger. But this was different. Her slaps were harder, and kept coming, blow after blow on my face, my shoulders, and then into my belly, her fingers curled in a fist. I still had a piece of dough in my hand, and I squeezed it hard, focusing my entire soul on that little piece of dough. Maybe I will become the dough, I thought, maybe I will leave this world and return as a bit of simple sustenance.

  How long did it go on? For as long as it took for that idol to catch and crackle. For as long as it took for Hassan to wipe his face, sit himself down on the divan pillows, and lean back in a languid pose, declaring himself both judge and audience. My mother must have paused in her attack to throw the second idol into the fire, though I don’t remember a break in her fury. The little Anath idol caught slower than the older idol, its body holding on to its integrity for a few moments before the flames pounced. And still my mother kept beating me. But then the door opened, and Hani was there. Hassan made a scraping sound with his throat, as if the mere sight of her made him feel like vomiting again. My mother, her hand raised to me, gaining purchase before coming down again on my cheek, spat out the words “Out girl, this is none of your business,” but Hani didn’t listen. Later she told me that she had had a premonition, and that the idols themselves appeared to her in a vision, telling her that they were burning, like Moses’ bush. Sultana said that Hani didn’t have a vision, but was walking by our door and heard my mother yelling. Masudah said that it didn’t matter why Hani came, only that she did, and that once she was inside, the idols in the fire told her everything she needed to know. She ran right past Hassan, and put herself in between me and my mother. “Oh, Aunt Suli,” she said, dropping down to her knees, “don’t blame Adela. The idols are mine. I made them. They are all mine. And so is the altar. I bring them offerings. Adela has never even been to my cave. She has nothing to do with my foolishness.”

  Hassan was shaking his head, saying, “Mother, don’t be tricked. If anything, they are in league together. Beat them both. They are both little witches.”

  “Get your uncle,” she snarled to Hassan. “Tell him to come. To come now for his degenerate daughter.”

  Hani continued to defend me. “Auntie Sulamita, Adela would never do such things. She is a pious girl. Why, every morning she prays, and when she catches me gossiping, she warns me against the dangers of the evil tongue. She reminds me to say the prayer of Motzi before breaking bread and is in every way a modest Jewish girl. Why, if she had known of my idols, I am sure she would have thrown them into the fire herself.”

  My mother looked back and forth between me and Hani. Then she sat down heavily on the stool by the hearth. She bunched up her apron and ran a hand through her hair, gray and wiry, which had come loose from her gargush and was hanging in front of her eyes. I was peeking up at her from where I was curled up on the floor, my face stinging, my belly bruised, my whole body shaking from the assault.

  I do not know if my mother wholly believed Hani, or if she merely colluded with her. That is, if she let Hani lift the burden of my guilt, and wrap it around herself like a prayer shawl, a holy garment upon which we could all embroider our threats, sacrileges, and suspicions. My mother had blackened my right eye and split my lip. She did not apologize in words, but put me to bed with an onion poultice on my back and potato peelings on my eyes. She sat up by my side, changing the poultices every few hours throughout the night. My father complained to my mother about how she had treated me, but he did not yell or raise a hand to her, which I assume was a concession. After all, she had warned from the very beginning that the other Damari girl was a bad influence. Now she had proof. In the morning I was sore and ugly. My right eye was almost swollen shut. But my parents coddled me. My father went to the market and brought me a coral bracelet, a lavish indulgence that I took from him, incredulous, and put on my wrist right away. My mother, in a rare show of remorse, cooked me my favorite lentil soup and fed me herself, as if I were a baby.

  Uncle Barhun and Aunt Rahel punished Hani by having her devote herself to prayer. They made her sit and read psalms in the synagogue every afternoon for weeks. And after that, she was ordered to sit with the women who watch over dead female bodies, saying psalms until they are buried. With this final punishment, even my mother objected, complaining that it was “a morbid task for a girl.” She railed to my father against my aunt and uncle’s treatment of Hani, which I found astonishing, as she had seen nothing wrong with beating me, her own daughter, for the same crime.

  When I asked Auntie Aminah about it, she said, “Your mother would have beaten you and been done with it. For all her faults, she would not have continued to punish you after that beating, however harsh her blows. But your Aunt Rahel and Uncle Barhun know what it means to be haunted by other people’s beliefs and suppositions, and wish no such strife for their daughter. They make her pray in public in order to save her from herself.”

  After I had recovered from my beating, I heard many stories about what had really happened when Hassan found my cave. Some seemed credible, others fantastical. Masudah told the lewdest story, which gave it credence, for she was not one to speak of such things ordinarily. She said that after my beating she overheard Hassan crying to her husband, my brother Dov. Hassan told Dov that he found the cave because when he was patrolling nearby, he had heard a sweet melody coming from inside. He was drawn there, unable to resist the allure of the unearthly music. Inside, he encountered a siren—a woman who was also not a woman—and that she made love to him like a man, subjecting him to unholy carnal feats until he begged for mercy.

  Sultana rolled her eyes, furrowed her mannish eyebrows, and said that she too had overheard gossip. “There was no siren,” she said, “only a shepherd boy and girl, taking each other in front of the altar. Hassan hid and watched them and grew aroused. When they saw him touching himself they laughed and mocked him, causing his manhood to shrivel. He fled that place like a little girl, his balls withered in their sacs.”

  Yerushalmit heard a woman in the ritual bath tell a different story. Supposedly Hassan came across an old sage in the cave. The sage invited Hassan for tea and then cackled that he was a demon, and that since Hassan had shared his drink, he would be a demon too. “When he came to your parents’ house, he was deranged with fear. Didn’t he vomit? Well, that was the demon’s tea, stirring up his insides.”

  I don’t know if any of this ever happened. But I know that Hassan was different after my beating and Hani’s punishment. He was humbler, and much less horrible. Not long after he found my cave, he married a poor young widow with five children, a woman everyone overlooked, but upon whom he doted. He became a good husband and stepfather, though he never sired children of his own. He applied himself in earnest to learning the lampmaker’s trade. He even stopped hating me, and would go out of his way to compliment my cooking and my stitchery and to ask my opinion on matters of consequence.

  In the blaze of midsummer, just days before the ninth of Av, when we wear sackcloth and ashes and cry from morning till night to commemorate the destruction of the Temple, a man was caught on the paths above the little well, forcing himself on a girl whose clothes he had already torn to shreds. The girl’s anguished screams had alerted a pair of brickmakers working at a nearby kiln and they came to her rescue. Bloodstained clothing was found at the man’s h
ouse. He confessed to the earlier crimes. The murderer was hung in the scrubyard behind the southern cistern. The community breathed a sigh of relief, though it was still some time before mothers let their daughters walk unescorted to the well, and we could not go out collecting henna without looking over our shoulders and feeling our hair stand on end at the rustling of leaves or the snap of a twig.

  With the murderer gone, everyone relaxed. I watched my mother bathe in the wadi for the first time in months with a smile on her thin lips, the water running in cold rivulets down her graying hair. I watched the midwife hitch up her dress and run around our town, mopping her brow as she went from one house to another. Aunt Rahel helped her, and Hani and my sister-in-law Sultana did too—for the midwife couldn’t be everywhere at once. It seemed that many mothers had crossed their legs and held their babies in while the murderer was still afoot, and now that he was caught, they’d agreed to let their babies come into the world. My father rarely danced, but now I watched him dance on the Sabbath eve, his arms flung with casual languor around Uncle Barhun’s shoulders as they moved together to the beat of the tabl drum played by my brother Dov. Even the Imam’s men, when they came on a patrol from Sana’a, seemed more relaxed. Though I suppose this was just coincidental, for what did they really care about the capture of a murderer who killed young girls? But still, they harassed us less. A jeweler who had been fined and imprisoned for building a fifth story on his house, making it taller than the houses of the Muslims in Qaraah, was released from jail. A boy who had been imprisoned for refusing to carry a corpse out of the house of a Muslim neighbor was also released, and a girl left orphaned when her parents both died of diphtheria was saved from the Orphans Decree. They let an aunt adopt her, even though she could afford to pay but a paltry bribe.

  Chapter 16

  I carefully considered how to thank Hani, and finally went to Masudah and asked her for some sheets of her paper. This was an extravagant request, but she didn’t seem surprised. She agreed even before I had finished bargaining for it. “I’ll come every day and help you with the children,” I said. “I’ll mix your hawaij and bake your Sabbath jachnun throughout the summer.”