A couple of years ago, I hired the same contractor to repaint my house. I saw there was a new foreman. He came up my steps limping slightly, thin and wiry, reminding me of the physique of Ahknaton, the elongated Egyptian emperor. When he got close, I saw it was someone I knew. Through the graying hair and bony cheeks I recognized Jamal. He smiled, and I did too. There was something of old friends in our greeting.

I could read in his eyes that I'd gotten older too. I supposed Jamal's traumas had been much worse than mine, and yet here he was again, after all those years. Years of arising from bed at 3:30 a.m., to take the bus at 4 to the border crossing, and then board a second bus an hour later out of Gaza to start work at 6 a.m. Was it this backbreaking cycle of physical labor that made the 35-year-old man look like he was 50? Yet he was smiling.

I say we greeted as friends, but I know this is not the deep truth. Even beyond the economic inequality, I could never look at him without "the conflict" on my mind. His Arabness and my Jewishness hung in the air. I wondered what I could represent for Jamal, in my big house, transplanted to this soil of my own will from another place. I still brought coffee out to the workers in the morning. This time Jamal looked happy to get it. "But I hope this is real coffee -- not Jewish Nescafi!" he would laugh. In his surrender to reality Jamal had kept both his spunk and his dignity.

Jamal and I conversed in Hebrew, neither his native tongue nor mine. On Fridays when he went home to catch the earlier weekend transport bus, Jamal would call out over his shoulder, "A peaceful Sabbath!" Although I couldn't see it, I could feel him grinning.

After the first coat of paint went on, and the workers needed to let it dry, there was still time before the bus came to pick them up. So the boss suggested I ask Jamal to do small jobs around the house. I ran to get out my university diplomas from a drawer. Jamal studied the gothic lettering on one for a long time. "It says New York University, right?" he asked finally, his voice serious and hushed. I nodded yes, flinching a little at the memory of his proud, painstaking English graffiti, which I had ordered covered up.

Jamal hung the diplomas in my study with exquisite care. There was still time before the bus.

I remembered an old reproduction of Renoir's "Girl With a Watering Can" hanging in my youngest daughter's room. It had been my own as a child and was passed on like a talisman to each of my three daughters. By now the wooden frame had fallen apart at the hinges. I asked Jamal if he could patch it up somehow. He nodded.

"Do you have any masking tape?" I foraged in the storage room and came back with a jumbo roll. "Here take this -- it's left over from the Gulf War! Remember when we had to tape up our windows and doors against gas?"

"Allah protect us!" Jamal called with a laugh, holding up the roll. "Imagine how silly we were to think this sticky paper could save our lives. Believe me," he went on, "in my house we never taped the windows or the doors. I told my wife, 'If God wants to kill us, he will, and if he wants to save us, he will.' I never put on any gas mask in the war. Never again! Let that be Allah's will," said Jamal.

An hour later he appeared at my study door. In his hands he held Renoir's "Girl With a Watering Can" -- in a new frame, I thought. Looking closer I saw I was mistaken - it was the original frame bought halfway across the world at the Metropolitan Museum decades before. He hadn't used any of the tape at all. Jamal had repaired it by knocking in dozens of tiny nails perfectly lined up all around the edge. Then, somehow, he had polished the wood to make the black lacquer shine like new.

I asked Jamal how many children he has now.

"Six," he told me proudly. "Four sons, two girls."

This time he didn't hesitate to accept my old clothes and toys, though I hesitated to offer them. I had learned enough not to hand them to him anymore. Now I left the bags in the garden, next to the lamppost where he left his rolled-up jacket when he came to work.

I wished I could help Jamal. I wanted his kids to get enough schooling to read the lettering on their own diplomas. But he was a victim of circumstances larger than both of us, I rationalized weakly. So I didn't do much of anything. I just stuffed shopping bags full of old sweaters with fuzz balls, men's jackets that had gone out of style, toys my children had gotten tired of and scuffed boots they had outgrown.

Jamal took them all. I watched his thin frame receding and saw his limp as he walked down the garden steps. The sinews in his long arms moved as he carried the bulging nylon shopping bags with Hebrew writing down toward the boss's pickup, in a rush to make the afternoon ride back to Gaza.

The fresh white paint covering Jamal's wall gleamed in the sun. From the western horizon over the beach the afternoon rays shone on the bronze crescent atop the seaside mosque before reflecting in the glass of my windowpanes. Was Jamal watching the fading sunlight too, through the dusty window of his bus?

I wondered whether Jamal would be back when it came time to paint again. Would his hair be all gray then? Would his four sons be old enough to throw stones, or will the time of stone-throwing have passed?

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