Once, when I didn’t have anything for Abu Nasser, he accused me of carrying someone’s bastard child, called me a whore, and left. He came back three days later to apologize for having committed the sin of disparaging a woman’s honor without evidence. In his apology, he exonerated himself since “technically” I wasn’t an honorable woman to begin with.

His timing was impeccable because I had just begun to bleed. I went to the bathroom and came out with a dirty pad dangling from my fingertips. He paid extra that time. If nothing else, he was generous.

Abu Moathe was a bank branch manager who alternated between violence and sentimentality. He wanted me to fight him, to act out rape scenes. Only, I was never acting, because even though I was getting paid, it felt like rape, my screams muffled by his hand. Sometimes he went too far and left bruises on my body.

Abu Moathe was one of the rare mitkawteen, Palestinians who had been granted Kuwaiti citizenship, because his father had been a high-ranking military general before Kuwait struck oil. Most mitkawteen were intellectuals and high-born merchants who took pride in being Palestinian. But Abu Moathe hid his Palestinian origins and went out of his way to deny it. Once, he slapped me hard enough to knock me out because I asked what village in Palestine his family was from. The swollen left side of my face turned out to be a fractured cheekbone.

Um Buraq never liked him and warned me to stay away. “Don’t get me wrong. Money is money, but not at any price. That man is crazy,” she said.

But after he broke my cheek, Um Buraq paid him a visit at the bank. She had good timing too, showing up just as his father, the general, was there with several men to congratulate Abu Moathe on the birth of his second son. Um Buraq pretended to apply for a loan, but by her presence, she was really delivering a message that she could create a scandal and ruin him.

“His face went white when he saw me,” Um Buraq later told me. Concerned about explaining my swollen, bruised face to my mother, the morning after it happened, I sneaked out of the house before my family awoke and went to work early at the school. I made myself fall in front of the guard, Abu Zhaq, a kind, elderly Palestinian man who wore Coke-bottle glasses and dentures and passed the time reading the Quran and Sufi poetry. He rushed to help me, but he didn’t ask how my face bruised that quickly. He knew my fall was for show and played along. I could tell he pitied me, which made me all the more ashamed.

“May God give you long life, Ammi,” I said. “I’m fine. It was just a minor fall.”

Abu Moathe apologized, tearfully. He always did that. He would tell me he loved me. That I was the first woman he’d ever really loved. That his Kuwaiti wife could not understand him the way I did, on account of my being Palestinian. He would kiss my feet, sobbing, and I would feel sympathy for him, which made me think I loved him too—that perhaps it was possible love could be nestled between revulsion and hatred. It wouldn’t be long before he would hurt me again. But after Um Buraq went to him, he changed. There was a plan in his remorse. He asked me to marry him, confessing a fantasy of walking around with two wives, one on each arm.