Page 261 - A Woman Is No Man

“I don’t know.” He stood, slightly stooped, by the stove, stirring the
sesame seeds occasionally and opening spice jars he had gathered from the
pantry: sumac, thyme, marjoram, oregano. “Whenever we go home to visit

my brothers and sisters, I see how they live. I don’t know how they do it.”
He turned off the stove.
Isra watched him pour the roasted sesame seeds into an empty jar. “Why
did you come to America?” she asked.
“I was twelve when we relocated to the al-Am’ari camp. My parents
had ten children—I was the eldest. We lived in tents for the first few years,
thick nylon shelters that kept us dry from the rain, though just barely.” He

stopped, reaching for the spice jars. Next he would mix a tablespoon or two
of each into the roasted seeds. She handed him a measuring spoon.
“We were very poor,” Khaled continued. “There wasn’t water or
electricity. Our toilet was a bucket at the back of our tents, and my father
would bury our waste in the woods. The winters were cold, and we chopped
wood from the mountains to make a fire. It was hard. We lived that way for

a few years before our tents were replaced with cement shelters.”
Isra felt the ache of his words inside her. She had grown up poor, yes,
but she could not imagine the kind of poverty Khaled described. As far
back as she could remember, her family had always had water, electricity, a
toilet. She swallowed a lump in her throat. “How did you survive?”
“It was hard. My father worked as a builder, but his salary wasn’t
enough to support our family. The UNRWA gave out food parcels and

financial support. We would stand in line every month for thick blankets
and bags of rice and sugar. But the tents were overcrowded, and the food
was never enough. My brothers and I would go to the mountains to pick our
own food.” He stopped to taste the za’atar and then reached for the
saltshaker, giving Isra a nod. She returned the remaining spices to the
cabinet. “People were different back then, you know,” Khaled said, placing

the dirty skillet in the sink. “If you ran out of milk or sugar, then you
walked next door and asked your neighbor. We were all a family back
home. We had a community. Nothing like here.”
Isra felt a deep and sudden pity, looking at Khaled. “How did you
leave?” she asked.
“Ahhh,” he said, turning to face her. “For years I worked in a small
dukan outside the camp. I worked until I had saved five thousand shekels,

enough to buy plane tickets for us to America. When we arrived, I had