Henna House (44 page)

I rode the lorry home to Aden with my head against the cool window. The entire way, I thought about the letter
shin
. It is a magical letter, as it stands for one of the most ancient names of Elohim.
Shin
is Shaddai,
, God of the Breast and God of the Mountains. Shaddai was the name by which our Fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob knew to call on Elohim. Shaddai, God of the Breast, was kin to Asherah, the One of the Womb. As the lorry rounded the bend that would take us through the Main Pass into Crater, my hand fell on my flat belly and I cringed, thinking that it was both a blessing and a curse that I had stoppered up my womb like the drain of a tub. What if I
had
been pregnant? Would Asaf have betrayed me even then?

A few weeks later, Hani and Asaf departed Aden on a Dutch steamer bound for Alexandria. I didn't see them go, and so their departure, like everything else that transpired since Asaf returned to Aden, seemed unreal to me, as if it had all happened to some other group of people, strangers I'd heard about but never met. They left Mara in Nogema's care. Hani claimed my place on the journey Asaf and I were supposed to take together. But they had no intention of returning to Aden, where they knew they would always receive a frosty welcome from the community. Instead they let it be known that they would make their home in Mocha, on the western coast of the Kingdom. Once there, they would send for Mara to join them.

In the beginning, relations were strained between me and my cousins. But not long after Hani and Asaf sailed, Nogema, Hamama, and Edna gave me a special henna. It was, they said, a henna of penitence, for though they could not apologize for their sister's sins, they could inscribe me with their own picture psalms of remorse, regret, shame, and sorrow for what I had suffered. When they were finished, my arms were covered from fingertip to shoulder, and my feet were covered with breathtaking designs, from soles to the tops of my shins. I looked at myself in the mirror and was reminded of what Hani looked like the first time I saw her, when she came to Qaraah embossed like a princess under her clothes. I forgave them, even though they had not sinned against me. I forgave them, and loved them like sisters once again.

*  *  *

In the years that followed my failed marriage, I lived a quiet life. Remelia married a teacher at the King George V School, and I moved in with them. Quickly, they filled the house with three delightful babies who distracted me with their cherub lips and chubby toes and constant need for attention. I refused any attempts by my sisters-in-law or cousins to play matchmaker. When I wasn't helping Remelia run her busy home, I volunteered as a regular teacher in the camp at Sheik Othman. I taught many little girls to read, including Mara, Hani's left-behind daughter, who sometimes came with me and eventually became my helper in the camp. Mara had her mother's quick wit and dark eyes, but she also had her father's innate goodness. I grew to love her, and to love feeling her small hand in my own. She, of course, never truly understood where I really belonged in the orbit of grown-ups that made up her universe. She felt the gravitational tug of her missing mother and it made her walk closer to the earth, and laugh less and smile less than other girls. To her, I was always “Cousin Adela” and I took comfort in the fact that in her eyes I was not a woman who had been rejected or betrayed, as I was in the eyes of others. When Mara was most sad, I told her stories of her mother and me when we were children in Qaraah. Of how Hani taught me henna, and laughter and letters, and just about everything else.

The camp at Sheik Othman was a saving place for me. Hearing those little girls say the letters and sound out words never failed to return me to myself when I was most lost. On good days, I smiled and laughed with those girls. I took pleasure in the notion that I was helping to prepare them for modern lives in Palestine. That the words they learned from me would help them author their own lives far away, under the good glare of a different sun.

*  *  *

At first, the family heard from Asaf and Hani sporadically. Three months after their departure, Edna received a letter from Hani and Asaf from Port Said. Five months later, my aunt and uncle opened one from Alexandria. A year later, Nogema had a letter from Cyprus. After that we didn't hear from them for over a year, and then we got word that they went to Istanbul, then back to Cyprus, and then to Corfu. Aunt
Rahel opened a final letter dated November 1940, two months after Hitler invaded Poland. By then we were regularly getting reports of the darkness that was descending on Europe. There were those who never believed a word of news from the outside world and treated the stories spread by ship captains with detachment, as if they were speaking of events occurring on a planet as distant and unlikely as Mars. After that final letter from Corfu in 1940, no one heard from Hani again.

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 blazing 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.