Page 60 - A Woman Is No Man

who wanted them, because they were coddled in a blanket of familial love,
because they had never celebrated a birthday alone. It was because they had
cried in someone’s arms after a bad day, had known the comforts of the

words “I love you” growing up. It was because they’d been loved in their
lives that they believed in love, saw it surely for themselves in their futures,
even in places it clearly wasn’t.

“I changed my mind,” Deya told her grandparents that night as they sat
together in the sala. It was snowing outside, and Khaled had forgone his
nightly ritual of playing cards at the hookah bar because the cold worsened
his arthritis. On nights like this, Khaled played cards with them instead,
shuffling the deck with a rare smile, his eyes crinkled at the corners.

Deya looked forward to these nights, when Khaled would tell them
stories of Palestine, even if many of them were sad. It helped her feel
connected to their history, which felt so far away most of the time. Long
ago, Khaled’s family had owned a beautiful home in Ramla, with red-tile
rooftops and bright orange trees. Then one day when he was twelve years
old, Israeli soldiers had invaded their land and relocated them to a refugee

camp at gunpoint. Khaled told them how his father had been forced to his
knees with a rifle dug into his back, how more than 700,000 Palestinian
Arabs had been expelled from their homes and forced to flee. It was the
Nakba, he told them with somber eyes. The day of catastrophe.
They were playing Hand, a Palestinian card game, and Khaled shuffled
together two decks of cards before dealing. Deya picked up her hand,
scanning all fourteen cards, before saying again, louder, “I changed my

mind.”
She could feel her sisters exchanging looks. On the sofa beside them,
Fareeda turned on the television to Al Jazeera. “Changed your mind about
what?”
Deya opened her mouth, but nothing came. Even though she’d been
speaking in Arabic her entire life, even though it was her first tongue,

sometimes she struggled to find the right words in it. Arabic should’ve
come as naturally to her as English, and it often did, but other times she felt
its heaviness on her tongue, needed a split second of thought to check her
words before speaking. Her grandparents were the only people she spoke
Arabic with after her parents died. She spoke English with her sisters, at
school, and all of her books were in English.