Henna House (45 page)

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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.

F
rom 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.

Binyamin and I made a good life together. We became Israelis not only in name but also in spirit. I was thirty-two years old when we had our first child. We raised our family; our children grew tall, beautiful, and strong. One day, a month or so after the birth of our fourth child, I dreamed that I was a little girl again, and that I had stumbled through the darkness into the tent of the great Sheik Ibn Messer. When I woke from my dream, Binyamin was by my bedside. “You spoke in your sleep,” he said tenderly, in a quiet voice so as not to wake our babe.

“What did I say?”

“You said, ‘Impossible, I came alone.' ”

I smiled.

“What were you dreaming?”

“I was dreaming of when we were children, and of how you followed me to Sheik Ibn Messer, of how you saved me when I went stupidly stumbling through the darkness.”

My husband smiled. “I never saved you, Adela. Following you was my way of saving myself.”

“From what?”

He shrugged. “From a life without you.” He bent down and kissed
our baby, and then kissed me. When I fell asleep again, I dreamed that I was in my cave. I was holding a piece of chalk, drawing on the wall. I worked for a long time, and when I was done, I stood back and surveyed my work. I saw that I had erased the chalk picture of Asaf and drawn Binyamin instead. I had erased Jamiya the horse and in her place, I gave the new chalk boy a khallool. I was there too, a chalk girl, adorned with henna, untouched by fate or time, the minerals of my soul mingled with the minerals of stone and darkness. Just before I woke, I saw the chalk girl reach out and grasp the chalk boy's hand.

That night, I put down the babe and kissed my husband on every inch of his body. I kissed him for every step he ever took in my wake, I kissed him for every second we were apart, I kissed him for the future and for our children, tucked safely abed.

*  *  *

When I married Binyamin, I wasn't a Yemenite bride. I wore no towering tishbuk lu'lu' on my head, no henna on my hands. I wore a regular Western dress and a little doily of a veil in my hair. This is because we refugees tried our best to become real Israelis. We women shed our antaris and leggings and wore Western clothes. The women among us who stayed religious put away their black and red lafeh cloths and replaced them with ordinary kerchiefs. We who had left our heavy silver-bedecked gargushim on the tarmac in Aden never replaced them. Those who had brought them put them away in the bottom of drawers, to be taken out only on the most festive occasions, and ultimately half forgotten, shown to grandchildren as exotic tokens of a frayed and misty past. We left our henna behind too, for it marked us as savage, foreign, primitive. We didn't want to be biblical Jews but modern ones. We forgot our ancient matriarchal patterns and our amuletic inscriptions, and walked the freshly paved sidewalks of Israel wearing nothing but slacks and blouses, our hands and feet as blank as the yet unwritten future, our heads as bare as heathens' without our gargushim and lafeh cloths.

There were some who adhered to the old ways, but not many. Even Aunt Rahel gave up her henna. I remember when I first noticed. She was at my house helping me with dishes following a Sabbath lunch. I saw the water running over her hands and was stricken by the bareness of her skin. For a moment I remembered her as I had first seen her, standing shyly behind Uncle Barhun—how she had stepped forth into
my life with hands and feet so densely inscribed I lost myself in the patterns, staring into her skin as if it were a puzzle to be deciphered. Now her skin looked like the page of a book that had lost its letters, as if the story had somehow fallen off, leaving behind a blankness that no one could read anymore. She noticed me staring. “I know,” she said, self-consciously burying her hands in a dishcloth. “I feel naked without it. Sometimes I dream that I am giving myself an application, and when I wake up I am surprised that the pattern isn't there. I tell myself that I am on a journey, as when we traveled from Qaraah to Aden. And that once we arrive I will mix the paste as always. Only this journey seems to have no end.” She turned away, and continued with the dishes. After that we never spoke of henna again.