I STEP ON Mama’s scales and see that I have put on three kilograms. Last week Um Buraq took me to a Turkish bathhouse, and we sat together naked in the steam while attendants scrubbed our bodies. It was my first time out of the house since I arrived. Tomorrow we will go there again. But today, she says we will go to a park. “Don’t worry, it’s out of the city and quiet. Hardly anyone will be there and the only noise is from birds and wind,” she says, shaking her head and adding, “You’re as difficult as your grandmother, may God rest her soul.”

“You didn’t even know my grandmother,” I say.

“Of course I did. That crazy old woman made me pull over just to dramatize that I was a bad driver. Don’t you remember?”

I laugh. “She had a point, though.”

The park isn’t really a park, but an open landscape of hills and valleys dotted with trees and rocks. It looks so much like the landscape of Palestine. Like the view over the orchards Bilal and I used to look upon. I indulge an illicit fantasy of a world that would have allowed us to simply live, raise children, hold jobs, move freely on earth, and grow old together. I allow myself to imagine that the dignities of home and freedom might be the purview of the wretched of this earth. Bilal and I would be in a place like this, perhaps hiking with at least one grown child, a teenage girl. Her father would teach her the names and benefits of all the plants we’d encounter. I would listen to stories of her life—her friends, romantic interests, dreams, and plans. We would eat together as a family and go home tired after a long day of being whole and free on earth. I feel the loss of what we never had, and it feels good to know that my heart stirs.

Um Buraq’s cancer has returned. It is her third recurrence, and doctors tell her the treatment isn’t working this time. “It’s the reason Kuwait let me out of prison and deported me to Iraq through Jordan,” she told me the first day she came to our apartment. “Some of our old clients advocated for me.” In Iraq, she lived with distant family.

“It was terrible to be at their mercy, but thankfully Saddam still ensured free health care and social services even under American sanctions. So at least I could have a little bit of my own money from the state and got a little shack to live in.”