by Nomi Eve
Those dreadful years passed during which Europe cannibalized itself. We almost never spoke of Hani. Aunt Rahel wouldn’t utter her name, and if someone mentioned her in her mother’s presence, Rahel would withdraw into herself, often not speaking for days. Edna and Nogema held out hope that Hani and Asaf had somehow survived and would return to us. Hamama forsook her habit of prophecy and refused to weigh in on Hani’s fate. As for me, at first I was glad when the letters stopped coming; I didn’t want to hear of her anymore. But when I realized that the silence probably signified disaster, my feelings turned, and I would find myself lingering at the dockside, looking toward the boats on the horizon, desperately willing one of them to carry a letter from Hani, beloved friend of my girlhood, whose betrayal of me suddenly seemed a very small thing, an infinitesimal misunderstanding even, that paled in the face of Hitler’s monstrous betrayal of the Jews.
* * *
I lived modestly and peacefully for nearly a decade—helping Remelia keep house, tutoring at the refugee camp at Sheik Othman, and warming myself in the embrace of my family—but then on November 29, 1947, the UN voted to partition Palestine. Four days later, the Arabs of Aden erupted in mass violence against Aden’s Jews. Eighty-two Jews were murdered, among them two of our own: David’s father, the wonderful Mr. Haza, and Hamama’s beloved husband, Nathaniel Qafih. Scores were wounded, and almost all the Jewish shops in Crater were looted. Synagogues were burnt to the ground and more than two hundred Jewish houses were destroyed in the mayhem. The Selim School for Girls was destroyed along with the King George V Jewish School for Boys. Our houses were also destroyed. Those days were the most fearsome of my life. We were lucky to have Nogema. She and her British husband sheltered all of us. But until we reached the refuge of her home, we feared for our lives. Even now, when I think of them, those hours hurt and haunt. And when I tumble back into the chaos of the riots, I am reminded of the fear that blazed up in my head when the Confiscator visited my father’s stall, but this time the fire was everywhere, lapping at our legs even as we fled.
After the riots, we became refugees, crowding into tents in Sheik Othman, alongside the families of the girls who had been my students. In 1948, the State of Israel was born out of bloody strife. Rumors of the miracle spread. Slowly, the remaining Jews of the Northern Kingdom and the midlands began to walk down through the mountains, cradling their Torahs like infants, making their way to Aden on footpaths trodden by herdsmen since the dawn of time. Bribes were paid to petty sheiks, and spies secured the passage of entire communities. More camps had to be opened in Aden, for the one at Sheik Othman couldn’t hold everyone.
My family had been in a refugee camp for a year and I was thirty-one years old when the government of Israel arranged through secret channels to fly all the Jews of Yemen to Israel. It was unofficially called Operation Magic Carpet, and officially called Operation On Wings of Eagles. When our people refused to enter the airplanes out of fear—for especially our brethren from the North had no experience with modernity—our rabbis reminded them of divine passages. “This is the fulfillment of ancient prophecy,” they said. “The eagles that fly us to the Promised Land may be made of metal, but their wings are buoyed aloft by the breath of God.”
Between June 1949 and September 1950 almost fifty thousand Yemenite Jews boarded transport planes and made some 380 flights from Aden to Israel in this secret operation. The pilots who came for us removed the regular seats and put benches in the planes, so that more of us could fit. Each flight was a perilous undertaking, as the Arab League was at war with the infant state, and the planes had to fly over battlefields to reach Israel.
* * *
“Ouch!” I put my thumb in my mouth and sucked on the blood.
“What did you do to yourself?” Remelia wrapped my thumb with a strip of linen. That night, we were to leave Aden forever. The transports had been flying for a month, and we had just received word that we were next on the list. We were all nervous and excited. It’s no wonder I cut myself while slicing onions. My hands shook and everyone’s voices were shrill with nerves. I left the land of my birth and flew for the very first time, with a finger that throbbed through scraps of torn linen.
When we were on the plane, Sultana chided me. “What are you crying about? Don’t you know we are flying to heaven?” I gulped back my tears and shoved my throbbing thumb into my fist. I stared out the window into the black firmament, and tried to block out the sounds of the journey—but who can not hear all that? The engines whirred, sputtered, and hummed; children cried and parents comforted them; and the old and the young, the sick and the well all said psalms, voices wavering like those of discombobulated angels, unsure of their own claim on the World to Come.
Next to me on the plane sat Sultana, Elihoo, and Moshe, who was now a tall and serious young man of twenty. Behind us sat my brother Mordechai, Yerushalmit, and her big brood of Masudah’s children, the eldest of whom had already married and now traveled to Israel with his wife and babes of their own on their laps. Some of my other brothers had already flown on earlier flights. My brother Efrim and his wife and their seven children and fifteen grandchildren left two weeks before we did. My brother Pinny and his family had left one week earlier. My poor brother Dov also traveled with us. He had walked down through the mountains with the other refugees, and joined us in Aden. Though he had lost his wits years ago when Masudah died, he was sane enough to know that if he were to ever find them again, it would be in the Holy Land, not in Yemen.
The other Damaris—Aunt Rahel, Uncle Barhun, Hamama and Edna and Mara—were on a flight that left the day after ours. Nogema did not fly with us to Israel, but to England with her British husband. Remelia and her husband, Calev, came last, a few weeks after us, with their nine living children. We women were a sorry sight on those planes. Naked of finery, we had all left our gargushim and our heavy jewelry in sad little heaps on the tarmac, because we feared that the plane wouldn’t hold our weight under the carapace of our tribal adornments. Throughout the flight I kept reaching up and patting my head—with my unhurt hand—feeling so strange without the weight of those tinkling coins. None of us had ever been in a plane before. We were equal parts entranced and horrified by this stranger magic that elevated our bodies as efficiently as prayer had elevated our souls for millennia. Sultana fainted on takeoff. My brother Elihoo was sick for the whole flight, retching into his lap. My brother Hassan was a brave and helpful presence on our flight, soothing and comforting any man, woman, or child who needed to be comforted.
Out the window, I saw the images of my life. I saw my father in his stall, cutting a scrap of leather for a pair of shoes. I saw Asaf, the boy he was, making angels in the sand. I saw myself as a girl, tripping through the dye mistress’s colorful pots. I saw Hani wearing a coat of many colors, none of them of this earth. I even saw Binyamin. He was sitting on a distant star, swinging his legs while holding out his hands to me. He seemed to be beckoning, gesturing for me to come close. I pressed my face against the window. Would I meet him again in Israel? I heard that it was a country so tiny you could fit it in your shoe like a pebble. Such a small land, surely we would bump into each other one day. I assumed he was married by now, that he had a wife who loved him as I should have loved him. I wondered how many children called him Father? With this thought, my heart began to throb. I tore my eyes away from the window and told one of Masudah’s daughters to give me the toddler on her lap. Her name was Ella and she was clutching a little wooden nubbin of a doll. I dandled the child and made the doll dance while humming an old song and burying my face in her hair.
We landed on a dusty tarmac in the middle of a hot afternoon. Many of the people on the plane crumpled to the ground and kissed the earth. Others held their hands up to the heavens and loudly praised Elohim. It must have looked as if we Yemenites were giddy with our redemption, but no one really knew what was more astonishing—that we were in Zion, or that we had survived the flight in the metal bird. I stumbled out into the blaz
ing sun along with the rest. I still had Masudah’s granddaughter in my arms. I walked a few steps when I felt a tug on my shoulder. I turned around, and found myself face-to-face with a girl soldier; she had skin the color of raw dough, red hair, and freckles on an upturned nose. “Ema,” she said. “Mother, you dropped the baby’s doll.” She handed me back the little nubbin doll. I opened my mouth to tell her that the child wasn’t mine, that I wasn’t a mother. The soldier kept talking, but her beautiful Hebrew words must have shed the quality of sound, because I couldn’t hear them anymore. I watched the soldier’s lips move, while all around us the plane disgorged more passengers, and my heart was racing, my head spinning. I clutched at the little girl in my arms, using her as ballast to keep from tipping backward into the past or forward into the unknown. The soldier was still talking. What was she saying? I tried to thank her, and to tell her who I was, who I wasn’t, who I had never yet been, but she was already long gone when I finally found the words.
* * *
Quickly, we Yemenite Jews grew accustomed to questions. Self-important reporters asked us what it felt like to be “rescued from the clutches of the corrupt imams and sheiks.” Sociologists asked us how the new Israeli government could have treated us better or better prepared us for life in a modern land. Ashkenazi mothers put their pale hands on our brown arms in the market and shyly asked us for advice on how to properly use certain spices. But my favorite question belonged to the native-born sabra schoolchildren, especially the little girls. They would always ask what we carried in our meager bags. What did you bring with? they shyly chirped. What did you carry with you to Israel?
I played along. I smiled and confessed that when I stumbled dizzily off the plane, I had with me underwear and socks, two dresses, two pairs of pants, one pair of shoes. I answered boringly and predictably as I felt I should. But I never told the truth—of course I didn’t—that the only true possession I brought with me from Yemen was this story, even though I didn’t yet have the words to fold the images into the bag shoved between my knees on the plane. I brought it all with me: the Confiscator, my cave, my Auntie Aminah, Asaf, Jamiya, Sheik Ibn Messer, Asaf’s sister and her doomed babe, my Uncle Zecharia, my beloved sister-in-law Masudah. I brought my one trip to Sana’a and the laughing Muslim bride, I brought Hani as I’d first seen her, and as I’d last known her, I brought Pishtish the donkey, I brought the Habbani girls, I brought the grave of Cain, and the bone-white Adeni sun.
Part Four
* * *
Chapter 34
From the plane, we were taken north, to a refugee camp outside the city of Hadera. We lived in tents, rows and rows of them. Had she lived to make that journey with us, Auntie Aminah would have told the story like this: she would have said, “In Israel, we slid willy-nilly, as if our feet were greased with clarified butter.” What she would have meant was that in Israel we had no purchase on the earth; we slid this way and that, whenever we tried to simply walk forward. The conditions in the camp were difficult. Sickness was rampant. Two of Masudah’s infant grandchildren died within months of our arrival. Israelis came to gawk at us; sometimes they were charitable, and other times they were disdainful, as if we had somehow disappointed them. And we had. They were expecting us to have walked straight off the pages of scripture, when really we sweated and farted and stank worse than they did, because we had no decent place to wash, and our bellies were sick from unfamiliar food and water. Once, a tall gentleman in a white suit came from the government. He was leaning on a cane, and I could see that he had a damaged leg, as he walked with a limp. I was in a big open tent, conducting a class for the youngest children, teaching them their letters. He stood on the outskirts of the tent, and I felt his eyes on me. I lifted my eyes and stared at him, and then he took off his hat, and apologized. “Keep teaching, sister,” he said, in beautiful mellifluous Hebrew.
That night, I dreamed that the man in the white suit was the Confiscator, and that the cane in his hand was the serpent of the Confiscator’s jambia. I awoke with sweat on my brow, and had to blink twice to convince myself that the dream was nonsense. “What is bothering you?” a fellow teacher asked me later that day. “Nothing,” I lied. I couldn’t tell her the truth—that the unfamiliar sun of this new land had addled my brain, that the thread of my life had bunched up and I feared it would take a great effort to smooth it out again.
* * *
One month later, I was still living and teaching in the refugee camp when one of my fellow teachers directed my attention to a man entering our school tent.
“Adela, who is that?”
“Who?”
“That gentleman over there. He is looking at you. Do you know him?”
I looked up and shaded my eyes. At first he was a hazy blur, a shadow framed by the sunlight streaming into the tent. But then he was Binyamin Bashari, my wolf-muzzle boy who had grown into his distinctive looks and become as handsome as the new country itself, with a swagger to his walk and a gleam in his eye that was rugged and civilized at the same time. He was coming through the children, who were craning their necks to see the stranger. When he reached me, my legs almost buckled. “Don’t cry, my love,” he said over and over, “don’t cry.” But how could I not cry? In front of my students and fellow teachers, I sobbed and gasped and shook. No one rebuked me, and the children seemed to understand that mine were tears of joy and that today’s lesson was about much more than ordinary letters. I had been right, on the plane, looking out the window—it was Binyamin sitting on a star; he had been out there, beckoning for me to come to him.
“Oh, my love, my dear, everything is going to be fine, I am here,” he whispered into my ear. “I am here, and I have found you and we will never again be parted.”
That very evening, Binyamin took me to Tel Aviv and made me ride a Ferris wheel that was as high as a ten-story building at a fair on the banks of the Yarkon River. I begged his forgiveness up there in the lofty darkness. But he shushed me and told me that I had nothing to answer for. He kissed my lips, and then pressed his lips to my crying eyes.
As we strolled together through the fair, he explained how he had heard the news of the miraculous rescue of the Yemenite Jews and had gone to the Jewish Agency offices and searched for my name among the lists of the refugees. The list also had information about where to find me in Hadera. How did he know I wasn’t married anymore? He later told me that after he was wounded, when he was lying in bed recovering, an angel came to him in a vision and told him so. He was not a religious man but a freethinker and a rationalist. “Yet I believed the angel,” he said, “and never doubted for a moment that what it said was not only true, but was a radiant truth, a truth that would shine light on darkness and illuminate my life in ways I couldn’t fathom.”
Two months after he walked into the tent, he played the khallool at our nuptials, adorning charms of melody into the fabric of the wedding canopy.
* * *
I was unearthed by his discovery of me, dug out like a fossil from another life, and given new meaning in the context of his enduring love. I quickly learned all that had happened to him since he left Aden. Binyamin had arrived in Israel in the winter of 1935 and become a soldier. He fought with the British against the Arabs; then he left British service and worked for the Haganah, helping Jews subvert British immigration quotas. During the war, he volunteered for the Jewish Brigade, and went to Italy as a British soldier. After the armistice, Binyamin returned and fought in the War of Independence. He was wounded in the effort to break the siege of Jerusalem and recovered under the tender care of friends in Tel Aviv. In the years after the war, he opened a school to teach the music and indigenous instruments of Arabia. He worked with schoolchildren and orchestra members alike, training musicians from Warsaw, Berlin, and Kiev to play the khallool and the tunes of our homeland. I often asked Binyamin to tell me stories of those years. I wanted to know everything that had happened to him. I made him describe his fellow soldiers, the landscape of Italy, and most of
all, I made him tell me over and over again the improbable tales of illegal immigration. These stories had such colorful casts of characters and involved subterfuge, danger. There were whores who slept with British soldiers and got them too drunk to do their jobs. There were knives pressed into backs and whispered threats, signal fires on beaches, yeshiva boys from Europe who sank in the water off the coast of Natanya and had to be carried like sacks of potatoes through the nighttime surf. I loved Binyamin’s stories, but most of all I loved learning the contours of his life, the nooks and crannies I’d missed out on.
We settled in Tel Aviv. His school for indigenous Eastern instruments attracted students from all over the world and ultimately became part of the internationally renowned Rimon School of Music. Binyamin was never again an active-duty soldier; instead he served in a reserve regiment of the IDF that performed at ceremonial military occasions. I bore him six children. All of them lived. And when they were born, I marked all of their palms and navels with henna, for even though I didn’t decorate my own hands anymore, I couldn’t deprive my children of this. After they were in school, I decided to become a real teacher. I received a scholarship to study at a teachers’ college in Ashkelon. My first job in Israel was teaching Hebrew to Eritrean immigrants. From the late 1940s through the early ’60s, the Arab world had disgorged its Jews. Just as it had rescued us Yemenites, Israel rescued whole communities, flying myriad secret and perilous missions into the heart of Arabia. In time, I taught Jews from all over the Arab world. And even though I had hundreds of students, every time I took a piece of chalk and drew a Hebrew letter, some part of my soul was back on the banks of the Khoreiba River. Every child was a little Habbani girl, and every letter was etched in the soil of my history, the scorched volcanic earth of Yemen.
