could return. “I mean, would you if you could?”
“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 nothing but two hundred dollars in my pocket and a family relying on me to feed them. We settled in Brooklyn because it was where the most Palestinians lived, but still, the community here isn’t what it is there. It never could be.”
“And you would never go back?”
“Oh, Isra,” he said, turning away to wash his hands. “Do you think we can go back to how things were after all these years?”
Isra stared at him blankly. In all her years in America, she had never stopped to consider whether she would return home if given the chance. Would she be able to eat the small meals of her childhood, sleep on that old lumpy mattress, boil a barrel of water every time she needed to bathe? Surely those were only luxuries, creature comforts that paled in comparison to community, to belonging.
When she didn’t respond, Khaled gathered his za’atar and turned to leave. For a moment his gaze drifted toward the window. Outside the sky had gone gray. Isra felt a shudder of sadness at the sight of his face. As he walked away, she wished she knew how to answer his question, how to find the right words. But saying the right thing was a skill it seemed she would never learn.
“Maybe someday,” Khaled said, pausing in the doorway. “Maybe someday we’ll have the courage to return.”
Deya
Winter 2009
For the remainder of the winter, Deya did little but read Isra’s letters over and over, desperate to understand her mother. She read on the school bus every morning, her eyes buried in her lap. In class she hid the letters inside her open textbook pages, unable to focus on the lesson at hand. During lunch she read in the library, hidden between bookshelves.