Henna House by Nomi Eve

Author:Nomi Eve
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Scribner

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.”

She tsked. “Take however many pieces you want. Just promise me that you won’t be using it to give your mother any more excuses to beat you. I don’t want to be party to your punishment. Promise me? Yes, that’s a good girl. Go, go get what you want; you know where I keep it.”

Then I asked my father for a few pieces of leather. He told me I could use any scraps I could glean from the floor of his shop. I spent an afternoon sorting through the pile until I found a few good-size pieces. I cut the leather into rectangles and used my father’s blunt needles to sew the pieces together, adding a little nub of a sandwich panel the size of two joints of my pinky finger between the two larger pieces. I sewed a stiff linen “spine” onto the nub. I glued Masudah’s paper onto the spines of the books with some thick animal glue that I boiled myself using a piece of hide I bought from the butcher. I had taken ten sheets of paper, which I cut in half. This gave me two “books” of ten leaves, each with twenty pages. My books were no bigger than a book of psalms, just a little larger than the palm of my hand. I took some silk thread, and reinforced the glue with strong stitches. The leather was embossed with my father’s triangle and square signature, the same signature that had implicated me. I left some of the pattern down the sides of the front cover for decoration.

When my books were finished, I took a henna stylus and I mixed henna with black gall. I chose the better-made book, the second one I had stitched together. In the very center of the inside back cover, I wrote, in Hebrew, “To Hani Damari, from your cousin Adela Damari.” I formed the letters carefully, exactly as Hani had taught me. Underneath our names, I wrote “Qaraah, Kingdom of Yemen, 1931.” I drew a vine of roses underneath. The leather, calf’s hide, was very soft and smooth, the color of sugary coffee with goat’s milk. It was the kind of leather my father used to make the insides of women’s slippers.

Hani was at the grinding stones when I approached her. I held the present hidden behind my back. She looked up, smiled. “Come sit with me.”

I crouched beside her. “Here,” I said, “I made this for you.”

She put down the grinding stones and took the book, which I had wrapped in a piece of yellow cloth and tied with a bow that the

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