Page 159 - A Woman Is No Man

That winter, Isra did little but sit by the window, retreating to the
basement as soon as her chores were done. She hardly spoke unless spoken
to, and even then her responses were muted. She avoided her daughters’

eyes, even when she held them, mothering them in a rush, desperate to
return to the window, where she stared in a daze through the glass until it
was time for bed. Only she barely slept, and when she did, she wept in her
dreams, sometimes even waking in a scream. On those nights, she’d look
over to Adam, afraid to have woken him, only to find him in a rough sleep,
his mouth hanging wide.
Isra sometimes wondered if she was possessed. It was possible. She’d

heard countless stories growing up about a jinn entering a person’s body,
making her do unseemly things—commit violence or murder, or, most
often, go mad. Isra had seen it with her own eyes as a child. Their neighbor,
Umm Hassan, had collapsed to the floor one afternoon after learning that
her son had been killed by an Israeli soldier on his way home from school.
Her eyes had rolled back in her head, her hands pounded her own face

wildly, her body shook. Later that night, news had reached Isra that Umm
Hassan had been found dead in her home, that she had swallowed her
tongue and died. But Mama had told Isra the truth: a jinn had entered Umm
Hassan’s body and sucked the life from her, killing her. She wondered if the
same thing was happening to her now, only more slowly. If it was, she
deserved it.

Morning, and Isra stared out the window. Her daughters wanted to build a
castle with their blocks, but she was too tired to play. She didn’t like the

way they looked at her with their dark eyes and sunken cheeks, as though
they were judging her. In the glass reflection she could see three-year-old
Deya watching her from the corner, her tiny fingers curled around a worn
Barbie doll. It was her eyes that haunted Isra the most. Deya was a solemn
child. She did not smile easily, let alone laugh the way other children did.
Her mouth sat in a tight line, closely guarded, a dark worry behind her eyes.

The sight was intolerable, but Isra didn’t know how to make it go away.
She turned her gaze away from the window, signaling to Deya to come
sit in her lap. When she did, Isra clutched her close and whispered, “I don’t
mean to be this way.”
Deya squinted at her, holding the Barbie doll tight. “When I was a little
girl,” Isra continued, “my mother never spoke to me much. She was always