Outside, I stopped to shield my eyes from the assault of daylight. Crowds were gathered, chanting, singing with the radio. Yousef 's friend Ameen stood on a table at the coffeehouse, holding up the radio speaker. The crowd fell silent and we heard the voice of Yasser Arafat. "What we have done," the voice declared, "is to make the world realize that the Palestinian is no longer refugee number so and so, but the member of a people who hold the reins of their own destiny and are in a position to determine their own future." Goosebumps sprang up along my arms and back.

"Allaho akbar," the crowd roared. Jenin sang with self-worth and pride as people danced in the streets. Haj Salem made his way through the crowd when he saw me. Leaning to kiss my cheek, he said, "Your brother fought in Karameh. How about that! He's fine, I hear." Toothless smile in full beam, he walked away clapping with the people, fingers fully extended and spread apart in front of his old brown face. I saw him in the distance put his arm around Ammo Jack O'Malley, the chanting around them unceasing: "Karameh, Karameh!"

"Yousef Abulheja! Jenin's own fedayee."

"Allaho akbar!"

Even when soldiers arrived to disperse the crowd, the concerto of a revolution in the making continued. From windows, music blared and the zaghareet of women filled the night. The aroma of baking goods suffused the darkness and made our night sweet when those treats were passed through windows and adjoining doors of neighbors to our home, in honor of my brother's heroism. Karameh Karameh.

Huda and I and other young girls had our own celebration. Too weak to participate, I watched my friends dance into the night.

"Since there's curfew, at least we won't have school tomorrow," Lamya said, and the others shared her thrill.

With hope kindled by our excitement plus a measure of naivete, we mulled over the practical details of returning to our original villages, which we childishly took for granted as the inevitable outcome of the victory at Karameh. Our innocent deliberations that evening revealed the minutiae of our dreams. "A real bed." "No soldiers." "A playground." "A garden." "A bicycle." On went the list of our simple wants. We wrote them out, checked the top three, then compared our choices.

Huda wanted to sit by the ocean more than anything else in the world. "Just to sit," she said, "since I can't swim."

I have never forgotten that. The simplicity of her innermost desire is now enough to make me cry.

The television channel broadcast footage of fedayeen parading through Amman, and adults packed around the few television sets in Jenin. Beit Jawad's coffeehouse had the most accessible screen and I could see Haj Salem and Ammo Jack O'Malley at their usual table trying to shoo others from their view. Vivid stories emerged and swirled. There were rallies everywhere in Jordan, where hundreds of thousands of ordinary people gathered in solidarity and praise. Women and children hurled flowers toward the revolutionaries. Grown men cried, breaking through the throngs to kiss their Palestinian brothers. The movement swelled overnight. Everywhere in Arab countries men lined up to join the PLO. Many from Jenin packed up the next day to join, only to be arrested by the Israelis, who had paid informers everywhere.

A month later, we were still under forbidding curfew. Our absurd lists of girlish dreams had soured with the accumulating garbage in the streets by the time an army jeep rode through to grant us permission to leave our homes. Even Lamya was eager to go back to school.

TWENTY-ONE.

Tapered Endings 1969.

WITHOUT BREAKING THE CONTINUITY of their dogged enterprise of knitting on the rickety balcony, Mama and Um Abdallah lifted their heads intermittently to glance at the world around them. By then Mama had plunged far into the abyss of her mind, defecting even from her own body, leaving it to the epidemic of misfortune, and it became necessary for her to wear a diaper. Um Abdallah, in her extraordinary loyalty, took charge of my mother's hygiene.

Mama's eyes were depleted and blank, her flesh shrank, and her respiration began to rattle. My family was gone and I was closing in on fourteen with a disfigured body. Life was mercurial and fickle, not to be trusted. One moment it had caressed me with the enchantment of a young girl's infatuation, my first crush on a boy, and seduced me with every girl's fantasy of finally becoming a woman. Then, cruelly and indifferently it had clothed me in maimed skin, spun from suspicion and the cotton of abandonment.

A portion of my smooth, soft flesh was torn from my waist. The sanctimonious angels who sit on people's shoulders to monitor and report sin to Allah tormented me with "I told you so," and I believed the horror that marked my body was punishment for the sin of masturbation. I bowed humbly before the smugness of those blabbermouth angels, submitting helplessly to everlasting purgatory.

There was nothing left for me but my father's dream, for which he had drudged for pathetic wages, to save enough that his refugee children might get an education. I plunged into that purpose, though I had no intellectual or scholastic appetite of my own. I had no dreams save the wish to be loved and free, as I had been during the dawns with my father.

To honor Baba, to make his dream reality, I devoured books of history, literature, mathematics, and science with ferocious purpose. At night, for self punishment and to sustain the momentum of my scholastic solitude, I fingered the rutted flesh of my abdomen, a reminder that I was damaged goods no boy would want. The loss of muscle made me limp for some time afterward, augmenting my sense of defectiveness.

Huda remained by my side during my recovery, but soon I pushed her away. I say now, with shame and self-reproach, that I begrudged the wholeness of her body and wished my misery on her, so that I might have a friend in the house of the cantankerous, wretched, and mutilated. But she was always there, sturdy in her loyalty, and she did not waver or resent my abandonment.

Despite the assault against it, my body persisted in the habit of waking before dawn, the daily commemoration of Baba, even though my memory had already dissolved the features of my father's face into a vaguely personified scent of honey apple tobacco. I read and reread the books he loved, and today, if I could make a wish list of material things, as we girls had done after the Battle of Karameh, I would covet only those tattered books.

I wrapped my new skin in a storm of paper and ink, unconcerned about my possessed mother wasting away kilo by kilo; about the crass incursions of imperious soldiers; or my best friend, Huda, and the love story unfolding between her and Osama.

I became known as a prodigious student and emerged from my self-banishment to the laudatory eyes of adults in the camp, who also approved of my indifference toward boys, which they mistook for piety. But I knew, and so did Huda, that it was just the anguish of deficiency. When I finally surfaced from the Siberia of my ornery determination, I found, once again, the enduring and solid ground of Huda's friendship, and we picked up where we had left off.

While I was submerged in shame, study, and repentance, Huda was falling in love. By then, it was known in the camp that Huda was Osama's girl, and it was only a matter of time before they would wed. In the physical transformations of adolescence, Huda's cheeks rose high under her streaked cat eyes and her lips ripened, flattening into a curvy stretch over her slightly crooked front teeth when she smiled. The "odd little girl with those rare eyes" had blossomed into a Cleopatra, with a silky river of black hair and fine olive skin. Osama was the envy of all the young men in town.

Huda and I were fourteen when we found Mama cold in her bed one hot June evening. We approached slowly, lighting the oil lantern on the wall. As we had always done in the face of uncertainty, each of us reached for the other's hand. Mama lay on her side, as usual when she slept, the shadow of her stiff form flickering against the wall. The murmur of conversation passing outside our window and the stale scent of an ending crept along the seams between the living and the dead. There, on the spongy foam and worn gaudy colors of her mat, on the floor, against the chipping bare wall of our little shack, in the makeshift nation of the forgotten, Mama had died alone.

My eyes vented quiet tears. I cried, not for this woman's death, but for my mother, who had departed that body years before. I cried with a bittersweet relief that she was finally and completely rid of the whorehouse world that had deflowered her spirit. I cried for the blunt impact of guilt that I could not, had not saved her somehow. I cried because, hard as I tried, I could not find in the small pale body the woman whose womb had given me life. And I cried for the imminence of a sad tomorrow on the barren, body-strewn soil of my days. Huda cried for me. Only Um Abdallah, who had left her constant companion to rest and returned to wake her, cried for Mama. She was the only soul who knew the person who had lived inside that emaciated corpse, over which the three of us wept.

Somewhere between me and the body of my mother hovered a memory of a time when Dalia had taught me to move an unborn baby inside its mother's womb. The baby was going to die, everyone was sure. The mother too, perhaps; people had their doubts. Dalia was finally there. "Um Yousef the midwife is here with her daughter, Amal," someone announced as we hurried inside where the woman had been straining, agonizing while we had waited for permission to leave our homes during curfew hours. None had been granted, so we had sneaked out, Mama's special scissors tucked in her thobe. The woman had exhausted herself trying to scream the pain away. To frighten death away from her child. The dim light and smell of childbirth had filled the small room where the woman moaned on the bed. Dalia had slowly put one hand on the woman's brow, the other on her belly, and begun reciting prayers.

"Breathe, child. Put it in Allah's hands. There's no better place for your fate than in his hands. Breathe, child." Mama's calmness was contagious. "Help me lift her." She motioned to me. The woman's aunt also stepped forward and together we inverted the woman, her legs high on pillows, her shoulders hanging from the rim of the bed. "The baby is tilted and could be tangled. We'll do what Allah wills." Mama's last words to those in the room: "Go out and pray for her and I'll yell if we need help."

We, she and I.

"Put your hands here," she instructed me, and put her own on the other side of the woman's abdomen. "Close your eyes, until you feel the movement, and let Allah guide your hands." I was frightened, but I understood well. Whatever you feel, keep it inside Whatever you feel, keep it inside.

Humming, as if coaxing the baby, Mama rubbed the woman's skin for an eternity. Until there it was, the movement. "Now help me. Move your hands like this," she said, still calm, still humming. The woman was moaning but calm. Breathe, child Breathe, child. I breathed and my hands moved with the baby, opposite Mama's.

We were ready now. The women returned. "Your prayers helped," Mama told them, "but my daughter did the most difficult part." Peeking from the other side of the belly, she said to me, "You positioned the baby, Amal." She smiled broadly with pride, moved to her feet, and came to me with a kiss to my brow. positioned the baby, Amal." She smiled broadly with pride, moved to her feet, and came to me with a kiss to my brow.

How had I forgotten that day and why had it come to me now, in Mama's death? Dalia had loved me. How could I ever have doubted that?

"Allaho akbar." The funeral procession ended in Mama's burial-the tapered end of my mother, the once-fiery Bedouin girl named Dalia, whose footsteps had jingled.

As is customary, women and men mourned in separate quarters. But Ammo Darweesh joined no one. I found him at the cemetery alone suffering a naked heartache, bound to his wheelchair.

Ammo Jack O'Malley mourned Mama's passing. "I met yer mum when she was just a young thing, all broken over her lost baby boy," he told me. "A good woman. Your father, too. I'm so sorry, Amal. El baeyeh fihayatik."

Jack had a simple, spontaneous air that welcomed life as it came. His impromptu demeanor was not a manner of simplicity, for he was sharp witted and well educated. Rather, it was the legacy of experienced honesty and integrity that made him impervious to discord and invited the admiration of both Palestinians and our uniformed Israeli occupiers.

As far as we were concerned, Ammo Jack was an Irish Palestinian who visited his daughter in Dublin once a year and lived in squalor with us the rest of the time. He spoke Arabic as he did English, with that Irish inflection that curls the end of a sentence up into a question.

"Hello, dearie," he said to me in the days after Mama was buried. "Come over to yer ammo's house later on 'cause we need ta speak with ya, 'kay, love?" He spoke to me in English, something he had started doing to confirm the fluency that my teachers had reported to him, and later, to help me exercise the language.

"Yer Englizi is getting ahsan, eh?" He often mixed the two languages like that.

"Yes, my English is getting better."

"Good!" And he chuckled and coughed.

But what was going on at my uncle's house? Why did they want to talk to me? And who were "they," anyway? Whatever it was, I dreaded it. And for good reason. In their eyes, I was nearly fourteen with no mother, father, brother, or sister, poor and pious. All together, I was ripe for marriage.

The next hours passed under an oppressive worry and I formulated schemes to avoid marriage, partly because I feared that as a married woman I would have to expose the extent of my disfigurement. I considered running away. But nothing could bring me to commit such a cultural wrongdoing. Besides, anywhere I went, I was bound to run into Israeli soldiers and settlers, for Israel had already begun massive land confiscations and construction of Jewish-only settlements around the centers of Palestinian life. I even contemplated faking mental illness or a host of other maladies.

By evening's arrival, I was spent, resigned with imagined defeat. Holding hands, Huda and I went together to Ammo Darweesh's home and she waited in the alley as I timidly approached the iron door and stepped into the roofless room where my uncle, Haj Salem, and Ammo Jack O'Malley sat on floor cushions, passing the hooka muzzle and sipping kahwe from tiny cups, unmindful of the chickens roaming next to them. As is the custom, sugar was declined out of respect for the dead. So the kahwe was bitter in deference to Mama's passing. I walked barefoot, a habit that coated my feet with stony skin and prompted people to greet me with, "Where are your shoes, child?"-sanction that was both compassionate and disdainful and reserved for those who lacked parental guidance.

"Take your shoes off, Amal, and come join us," someone said, before realizing that I wore none. I walked slowly toward them on the cobblestone. It was dark and the light from two lanterns was fluttering with moths and mosquitoes.

Appearing from the corner of my eye, a silhouette of outstretched arms hurried toward me. "Hello, darling!" said Khalto Bahiya, Mama's eldest sister. She lived in Tulkarem, where she worked as a maid in nearby settler homes; she had set out for Jenin as soon as she heard the news. Although she lived less than ten miles away, it took her three days to make the trip. Twice, she was turned away at the checkpoint. On the third try, soldiers allowed her through. But Mama had already been buried, and when Khalto Bahiya realized that she had not been able to kiss her little sister good-bye, she had hurled curses at the soldiers.

I hadn't expected Khalto Bahiya to be there, but I was immensely glad to see her. She bore an uncanny resemblance to my mother, but the same beauty bloomed differently in each of them. My mother's fairness was exquisite and untouchable, roaming alone in an abandoned castle. Khalto Bahiya's beauty took you in immediately. Hers was easy and disclosed hordes of laughter stolen from wherever it could be found. Gravity, sun, and time had scrawled on their faces the travails of hard work, childbirth, and destitution. But even these lines disagreed on their faces. Khalto Bahiya's face incorporated them into her joy and her pain, so that lines appeared and hid according to her expressions and provided frames and curves to her tenderness. Gentle folds nestled her lips and made her face open when she smiled, like an orchid. On Mama, the lines had always seemed incongruous- as if her beauty could accept no change or outside interference. The wrinkles on Mama's face had carved her skin like prison bars, behind which one could discern the perpetual plaint of something grand and sad, still alive and wanting to get out.

"Come here, ya binti." Haj Salem motioned me to sit next to him with a raised arm, revealing a jagged oval of sweat that moistened his cotton dishdashe. I settled uneasily onto a cushion between him and my long-suffering Ammo Darweesh, who drooped in the disrepair of his wheelchair, fastened at one hinge by rope and tape. His youngest child, my cousin Fouad, was ill with a fever and slept in the communal room, the reason we endured the mosquitoes in the open courtyard.

Ammo Jack O'Malley rested comfortably on the other side of Haj Salem, the two of them playfully arguing like schoolboys over who was taking a longer turn with the hooka muzzle. "Damn Irishman." "Damn Palestinian." They laughed, one raspy and toothless, the other like a sputtering malfunction.

They had gathered to decide my fate. That much was clear.

"Amal, may the remaining years add to your life. We're all grieving with you for your loss," Ammo Darweesh started. After offering his condolences, he offered me a home: I could live with my uncle, who, for a living-minimal at best-made glass baubles that he peddled to tourists from the bag of curses and salvation of his wheelchair.

"You are family and I will do everything I can for you," my ammo said sincerely.

"Or you can live with me in Tulkarem," Khalto Bahiya interrupted with an inviolable sense of family. Even though she already had five mouths to feed, my khalto was prepared without question to assume responsibility for her sister's child.

My third option was to live in Jerusalem with Amto Sameeha, she whose parents had once saved Ari Perlstein's family.

Ammo Jack leaned forward, across Haj Salem, his small blue eyes prying their way through the fiasco of his hair. "There may be another choice, Amal," he said, capturing me in the intensity of his look. At that moment, the theater of chickens and hookas faded. Everything peripheral to the line of Ammo Jack's gaze held its breath. Ammo Darweesh cleared his throat. Haj Salem and Khalto Bahiya glanced at each other, then at the ground. It was Ammo Darweesh's place to say what came next.

"There is a school in Jerusalem that would like to have you," he said, half-convinced it was the right thing, half-ashamed he could not offer me something better himself.

"But the choice is yours," Khalto Bahiya interrupted, nervous that I might misunderstand their honest intentions. "Our homes are always open to you, anytime and for as long as you want."

Ammo Jack, still leaning forward but having unlocked his stare now, said, "It is a good place for girls like you, Amal, and the schooling is exceptional."

Like me?

It was an orphanage by night and a competitive academic institution by day. As a Palestinian orphan with impressive marks, I would be admitted without question or financial obligation. They had been discussing the subject even before Mama had passed away because Ammo Jack thought I would have a better chance at a merit scholarship to university if I graduated from that school.

But Haj Salem put it another way. "Your father would have wanted this for you," he said, challenging my most tender sympathies. "Everyone knows that you have inherited your father's love of books and it seems you are too far ahead to take more benefit from our schools."

Then he spilled his signature phrase, to which he had earned exclusive patent: "I've seen it all." He launched into a monologue to which I listened impatiently then, but which I would revisit many years later as the greatest wisdom ever imparted to me by another human being. "We're all born with the greatest treasures we'll ever have in life. One of those treasures is your mind, another is your heart. And the indispensable tools of those treasures are time and health. How you use the gifts of Allah to help yourself and humanity is ultimately how you honor him. I have tried to use my mind and my heart to keep our people linked to history, so we do not become amnesiac creatures living arbitrarily at the whim of injustice."

Now his stare stretched to the whole of my past and future. Some somber and deeply wise expedience deposited in his wrinkled brown face an unimpeachable promise that what he said was truth. "We don't like to see our own leave. This is hard on the hearts of your kin. But you have honored the gift of Allah with diligence and hard work, and all of us know that we should help you now to complete your journey, not to stifle Allah's gift."

I sat motionless, unbelieving, in the stupor of an accidental imposter. I had done nothing to earn the frightening credit they granted me. The diligence and hard work of which he spoke were merely cowardice and fear of purposelessness, of divine punishment, of rejection; fear of light and sound that seemed to turn up one notch into war, death, and the debasing surprises of lonely bullets that tumbled end over end in the flesh. Forthrightness scrambled to set the record straight that what they witnessed in me was pure fear, not a gift or its honoring. Honest language struggled on my lips to assemble the proper order of words.

"But . . . ," I said. "I don't . . . I mean . . . I'm not . . . God, I didn't . . . It isn't like that . . . You don't understand." Finally, my mangled thoughts came out in the honest-to-God simple truth of my existence since Baba had left: "I'm scared."

I vomited those words. My lips trembled and I almost cried. It was the unpredictability I feared and hated.

"Maalesh." Khalto Bahiya tried to comfort me, but I no longer needed reassurance; I needed food. My belly roiled a loud reminder that I hadn't eaten a thing all day. Khalto Bahiya had already prepared hummus, fried eggs, salata, and leftover koosa, bowls and platters of which she spread out on the ground over old newspapers. We all shared the food, arms reaching over and across to grab bites with strips of bread. The chickens pecked nearby at a handful of old bread thrown on the ground. We didn't use utensils, and we dipped into the same plates. Many years later, after I became accustomed to U.S. corporate luncheons, I amused myself by imagining the consequences of reaching and dipping my bread for a taste from another's plate.

I remained with Ammo Darweesh after everyone left and Khalto Bahiya went to bed next to my cousin Fouad, whose fever had broken and who was now wide awake drawing pictures on Khalto's sleeping face. "Where is his mother?" I asked, for the first time noticing her absence.

"She's visiting her parents," Ammo Darweesh answered, it being understood that he and his wife had quarreled and she had left him with the children, as she often did, to return a few days later.

It was that night that I learned the facts of Dalia's broken ankle so many years earlier in the small village of Ein Hod, before my time, before Israel, before refugee camps. My uncle showed me a picture of a dashing young man on a black Arabian horse peering from beneath a white turban. He told me how that handsome man had wanted to marry my mother. It was hard to believe my uncle and he were one and the same. The story he told resolved in my ears like a lyrical verse, settling into the poetry of Dalia and sinking into the quicksand of a Palestine that could never be the same.

"Is that Ganoosh?" I asked, happy to finally see a photograph of the fabled family horse.

"Yes! That's him," he answered, his face opening up to the fresh air of the past. He pulled himself closer to me, his useless legs, small and limp, dragging behind the force of his arms, and he let loose a string of tales about Ganoosh and Fatooma- about the goat that thought Fatooma was its mother and cried whenever the horse left its sight. The way my ammo had had to sleep in the stables when it thundered to ease the horses' fear. How they had carried him with great speed through the Galilee and along the Mediterranean coast. And how those magnificent animals were likely the greatest loves of his life.

The time I spent with my uncle that night is one of those occasions that increase in wonder with age. Ammo Darweesh filled the late hours with stories about Baba when they were young boys, about my jiddo and teta and great-grandparents. It was the nearest I would ever again come to the company of Baba, and I decided then that I wanted to live with my ammo rather than at the orphanage in Jerusalem or at Khalto Bahiya's home. When I spoke my thoughts, Ammo Darweesh's face closed, a web of lines gathering at the corners of his eyes.

"See this," he said, pointing to the photograph of himself. "This is you now, and if you stay here, you will undergo a similar transformation to what I am now." His face was now clear, revealing the truce he had made with his own fate to keep bitterness at bay.

"The future can't breathe in a refugee camp, Amal. The air here is too dense for hope. You are being offered a chance to liberate the life that lies dormant in all of us. Take it."

"But I don't want to leave Jenin."

"Then I have to convince you somehow. Because someday, when your father and I meet again, I will have to report to my older brother how I set his daughter on the right path, the one he would have wanted you to take."

That was all my uncle needed to say.

TWENTY-TWO.

Leaving Jenin 1969.

A CROWD OF FRIENDS AND family gathered at the little house where I was the only remaining resident, knotting the narrow alley just outside. They came to bid me farewell in a ceremony of kisses and hugs that lasted hours in the sweltering summer when Mama died. From the time people started arriving until I rode away with Ammo Jack in a yellow taxi, Huda and I kept our hands in a sure and sweaty lock. Osama was there, hovering around Huda with yearning and hurried glances that seemed to ladle into our palms the sap of some secret between them, something caught and oppressed by the strict ways of a religious culture that would not permit him even a gentle kiss on her cheek.

Ammo Darweesh's wife had returned from her retreat and the two of them, with their five children running about, were there with advice and gifts. "Study hard, and don't stray from your salat," my ammo whispered to me, laying a featherweight kiss on the lovely bond he and I had forged just days earlier. He wished they could take me in the taxi themselves, he said, but he reminded me that only foreigners were allowed to move freely.