A Woman Is No Man(2)
Still, Isra loved the hilltop view of Birzeit. Past the graveyards, she could see her all-girls school, a four-story cement building laced with grapevines, and across from it, separated by a field of almond trees, the blue-domed mosque where Yacob and her three brothers prayed while she and Mama prayed at home. Looking out the kitchen window, Isra always felt a mixture of longing and fear. What lay beyond the edges of her village? Yet as much as she wanted to go out there and venture into the world, there was also a comfort and safety in the known. And Mama’s voice in her ear, reminding her: A woman belongs at home. Even if Isra left, she wouldn’t know where to go.
“Brew a kettle of chai,” Yacob said as he entered the kitchen and Isra handed him the glasses of water. “And add a few extra mint leaves.”
Isra needed no telling: she knew the customs by heart. Ever since she could remember, she had watched her mother serve and entertain. Mama always set a box of Mackintosh’s chocolates on the coffee table in the sala when they had guests, and she always served roasted watermelon seeds before bringing out the baklava. The drinks, too, had an order: mint chai first and Turkish coffee last. Mama said it was an insult to invert the order, and it was true. Isra had once overheard a woman tell of a time she’d been greeted with a cup of Turkish coffee at a neighbor’s house. “I left immediately,” the woman had said. “They might as well have kicked me out.”
Isra reached for a set of red-and-gold porcelain cups, listening for Mama in the sala. She could hear Yacob chuckle over something now, and then the sound of other men laughing. Isra wondered what was so funny.
A few months before, the week she turned seventeen, Isra had returned from school to find Yacob sitting in the sala with a young man and his parents. Each time she thought of that day, the first time she’d been proposed to, what stood out most was Yacob, yelling at Mama after the guests left, furious that she hadn’t served the chai in the antique set of teacups they saved for special occasions. “Now they will know we are poor!” Yacob had shouted, his open palm twitching. Mama had said nothing, quietly retreating to the kitchen. Their poverty was one of the reasons Yacob was so eager to marry off Isra. His sons were the ones who helped him plow the fields and earn a living, and who would one day carry on the family name. A daughter was only a temporary guest, quietly awaiting another man to scoop her away, along with all her financial burden.
Two men had proposed to Isra since—a bread baker from Ramallah and a cabdriver from Nablus—but Yacob had declined both. He couldn’t stop talking about a family who was visiting from America in search of a bride, and now Isra understood why: he had been waiting for this suitor.
Isra was unsure how she felt about moving to America, a place she’d only seen in the news, or read about briefly in her school library. From them she’d gathered that Western culture was not as rigid as their own. This filled her with both excitement and dread. What would become of her life if she moved away to America? How could a conservative girl like her adapt to such a liberal place?
She had often stayed up all night thinking about the future, eager to know how her life would turn out when she left Yacob’s house. Would a man ever love her? How many children would she have? What would she name them? Some nights she had dreamed she’d marry the love of her life and that they’d live together in a small hilltop house with wide windows and a red-tiled roof. Other nights she could see the faces of her children—two boys and two girls—looking up at her and her husband, a loving family like the kind she’d read about in books. But none of that hope came to her now. She had never imagined a life in America. She didn’t even know where to begin. And this realization terrified her.
She wished she could open her mouth and tell her parents, No! This isn’t the life I want. But Isra had learned from a very young age that obedience was the single path to love. So she only defied in secret, mostly with her books. Every evening after returning from school, after she’d soaked a pot of rice and hung her brothers’ clothes and set the sufra and washed the dishes following dinner, Isra would retreat quietly to her room and read under the open window, the pale moonlight illuminating the pages. Reading was one of the many things Mama had forbidden, but Isra had never listened.
She remembered once telling Mama that she couldn’t find any fruit on the mulberry trees when in fact she had spent the afternoon reading in the graveyard. Yacob had beaten her twice that night, punishment for her defiance. He’d called her a sharmouta, a whore. He’d said he’d show her what happened to disobedient girls, then he’d shoved her against the wall and whipped her with his belt. The room had gone white. Everything had looked flat. She’d closed her eyes until she’d gone numb, until she couldn’t move. But as fear rose up in Isra, thinking of those moments, so did something else. A strange sort of courage.
Isra arranged the steaming cups on the serving tray and entered the sala. Mama said the trick to maintaining balance was to never look directly at the steam, so she looked at the ground instead. For a moment, Isra paused. From the corner of her eye, she could see the men and women sitting on opposite sides of the room. She peeked at Mama, who sat in her usual way: head bowed, eyes studying the red Turkish rug in front of her. Isra glanced at the pattern. Spirals and swirls, each curling up in the exact same way, picking up where the last one ended. She looked away. She had the urge to steal a glimpse of the young man, but could feel Yacob eyeing her, could almost hear him in her ear: A proper girl never lays her gaze on a man!