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"When we were young we thought teachers were like angels and did not need to bathe or eat or sleep," Khanom recalled.
    Usually Zakia would send the servants to buy the food, but sometimes she would do her own shopping. When she left the house to go to Wednesday market, she put on a jacket and dark cape and wore a veil over her face. Occasionally she would take her daughters along.
    At the market the girls would gaze up at the stalls of eggplants and peppers; tomatoes, cucumbers, and parsley; spices and herbs; and live chickens and squab. Village men rode to the oil presses perched atop sacks of olives in flatbed trucks. Horse-drawn carts creaked into market overburdened with produce. Village women would barter chicken and eggs—or, in hard times, silver bracelets and old Ottoman coins—for Syrian silk, Egyptian linen, and cotton from Gaza. The women chose dyes for their embroidery: indigo from the Jordan Valley, red from the sumac growing wild in the fields of Palestine, yellow muchra from the soil found near the Egyptian border.
    The Khairi girls could see how each villager's dress told a story. Some were embroidered with patterns of sesame branches; others with sunflowers or field tulips. In al-Ramla, a citrus-growing region near the sea, patterns of orange branches were woven into the embroidered bodices. These were surrounded by green triangles to represent the cypress trees used as windbreaks beside the orange groves. Below that, undulating lines of indigo stood for the waves of the nearby Mediterranean.
    At home, Zakia and her servants often cooked the girls' favorite, makloubeh, or "upside down," a lamb-and-eggplant casserole they would turn over and sprinkle with pine nuts just after it came out of the oven. The girls would gather around their mother in the kitchen as she sprinkled sugar and pistachios atop the kanafe. The main meals were served at midday in the dining room. Zakia would call the girls to the table; Ahmad would come home from his carpentry workshop to join them; and the family would dine around a short-legged table called a tablieh. When guests came the parents would retire to the salon, where they would sit on couches of engraved wood covered in dark blue velvet, on which the girls were never allowed to sit.
    After dinner Ahmad would return to work, where he had built a reputation as an accomplished furniture craftsman. His vision was bad, and reading therefore difficult, so instead of the university, Ahmad had attended the Schneller's School in Jerusalem, which turned out young men expert in the trades. Now, a decade later, Ahmad had enough work to hire assistants, and his business was prospering despite the Arab Rebellion. His trade, along with the income from the Khairi land, was enough to provide the family a comfortable life.
    Ahmad rarely socialized at home; instead, he would join the other Khairis to play cards, drink Arabic coffee, and smoke from the arguileh (water pipe) at the diwan, or social gathering place, in the family compound. There the talk of politics was unending.
    By the end of 1936, a relative calm had settled on Palestine. The Arab Higher Committee had suspended its general strike and rebellion in response to a British promise to investigate the underlying causes of the conflict. Lord Peel, the former secretary of state for colonial India, arrived from London dressed in a top hat and tails. The British lord was to direct the parliamentary commission of inquiry, but at times he seemed baffled. "I did not realise how deep-seated was the Arab fear of Jewish overlordship and domination," he wrote to a colleague in London. "As to reconciliation between the two races, nobody makes any attempt to bring it about." With increasing numbers of European Jews "pour[ing] into Palestine . . . by means legal and illegal," Lord Peel decried the "unpleasant atmosphere of suspicion" and fretted over the futility of making even "constructive suggestions."
    In July 1937, the Palestine Royal