Um Abdallah kissed my forehead with savage maternity that seemed to love indiscriminately. Haj Salem cautioned Ammo Jack to be sure to impress on "that orphanage" that they should take good care of me. "You remember now what I told you to tell them there at that orphanage," he said with as much sternness as his toothless mouth and wagging finger could muster.

"I forgot already, haj," Ammo Jack taunted him, and let loose a laugh.

"Damn Irishman!" Haj Salem said, turning away to hide his grin.

Khalto Bahiya had already returned to Tulkarem and we had said our good-byes the day she departed. Neighbors and friends made me promise to send word if there was anything I needed.

"Anything, Amal. Anything."

"May Allah extend your lives and expand your fortunes," I said, thanking them.

There were tearful embraces and "God be with you" and "Bless you" and "Oh, I can't believe they're sending away one of our own," and the like.

Lamya, her round face streaked with dry trails of earlier tears, took my free hand and deposited in it a pair of dice. "Here," she said with solemn penitence, closing my hand over the dice with her fingers, "I took these from your desk at school." She must have done it years before-or she had taken them from someone else's desk, because I had no recollection of it. But I thanked her, Huda and I both taking her in a threesome embrace, and I giggled silently at the petty torment Lamya must have inflicted on herself for having stolen from an orphan.

Osama stood at the front of the crowd gathered on the dusty road leading to Jenin's refugee camp while Huda and I held each other in a long tearful embrace. She whispered in my ear that Osama's family had made an appointment to ask for her hand in marriage. She wanted more than anything to lunge into the safety of their love, and I was happy for the news.

"Congratulations." I squeezed my best friend tighter.

"I'm going to miss you, Amal. It's like half of me is leaving," Huda sobbed in my neck.

We stood crying, Huda with tears, I with my mother's silence and taut jaw. We were enfolded in each other like the last word of an epic poem we had never imagined would end. A childhood story we had lived together line by line, hand in hand, was ending and we knew it would close the moment we unraveled our arms.

"Don't you two worry, now. You'll see one another again," Ammo Jack called out from the taxi, waving me in.

It was time to leave.

Huda and I let go, and I got in the taxi.

I rode away in the sad wreckage of parting. Small children ran behind us in the taxi's dusty wake. The people I loved grew smaller in the rear window until they faded, then disappeared at the turn in the road. The dice from Lamya still clutched in my hand, I turned to face front. The car's vinyl burned the back of my thighs through my clothes and it seemed to burn through the grief of leaving as well. I was struck by that lack of grief and I tried to feel the sadness that had flowed moments earlier, but none came, as if jail bars had descended around my emotions.

"Hard to believe I've known you since you were born," Ammo Jack said, looking at me, searching my face. "You're as smart as Hasan and as tough as Dalia." He looked ahead now. "God rest their souls. Your parents were good people."

Their souls. Their Their.

I said nothing. My teeth were clamped together inside my jaws, which I had unknowingly locked. A small band of tears leaked from my eyes-this time, and for the first time, because I missed my mother.

Whatever you feel, keep it inside.

More than an hour into our trip, Ammo Jack pointed from the window toward Jerusalem, its dome rising in the distance. "There it is."

The Dome of the Rock, al Aqsa, where the prophet Mohammad ascended to heaven in the fabled Night's Journey, was the point where all of Jerusalem's stories met. I had a memory of standing inside al Aqsa, beside one of its twelve solid marble columns that surround the rock of the ascension. The image of that massive pillar, which reached higher than my five-year-old mind could fathom, was the impression I had taken away from a family trip to Jerusalem in 1960, before Israel had conquered it. Mama had kept a photograph taken that day of the four of us-of her and Baba, Yousef and me-standing in the tiled compound, the golden dome above us. It was our only family photograph. The camera caught me clutching my father's leg over his robe, as if I intended to go on photographic record as the sole proprietor of him. I looked small and serious and when I found that picture after Mama died, it hit me how little I smiled. Father's face, expansive and gentle, gave the impression of a smile, but his lips were relaxed. His smile was in his eyes. Mama stood next to him, upright in perfectly aligned symmetry, her natural posture, and unreachable depths clear in her eyes. Yousef gaily leaned on one leg with the heartwarming smile that always escaped from the right side of his mouth first, then spread across to the left. Of all of us, he appeared the happiest, the most tender, the most endearing.

After Israel conquered Palestine in 1967, we never went to Jerusalem again. It was too difficult at first and eventually we weren't allowed. On its first day of occupation, Israel bulldozed the entire Moroccan neighborhood of some two hundred ancient houses and several hundred residents, who were given less than two hours' notice to evacuate. Muslims and Christians alike, Greeks and Armenians saw most of their property confiscated, while they themselves were evicted to ghettos or exiled.

Ammo Jack asked the driver to take us to a place called Khilwa on the Mount of Olives.

"This place is a wee bit out of our way, but you'll like it. It's a good spot to see the city," he said to me. Moments later we were driving through narrow streets bounded by tall biblical stone walls, until we stopped along the edge of an old Jewish cemetery below the Seven Arches Hotel overlooking that eternal village.

I have always found it difficult not to be moved by Jerusalem, even when I hated it-and God knows I have hated it for the sheer human cost of it. But the sight of it, from afar or inside the labyrinth of its walls, softens me. Every inch of it holds the confidence of ancient civilizations, their deaths and their birthmarks pressed deep into the city's viscera and onto the rubble of its edges. The deified and the condemned have set their footprints in its sand. It has been conquered, razed, and rebuilt so many times that its stones seem to possess life, bestowed by the audit trail of prayer and blood. Yet somehow, it exhales humility. It sparks an inherent sense of familiarity in me-that doubtless, irrefutable Palestinian certainty that I belong to this land. It possesses me, no matter who conquers it, because its soil is the keeper of my roots, of the bones of my ancestors. Because it knows the private lust that flamed the beds of all my foremothers. Because I am the natural seed of its passionate, tempestuous past. I am a daughter of the land, and Jerusalem reassures me of this inalienable title, far more than the yellowed property deeds, the Ottoman land registries, the iron keys to our stolen homes, or UN resolutions and decrees of superpowers could ever do.

"Not a bad place ta be, eh, love?" Ammo Jack said.I smiled shyly and got back into the car.

It was dark by the time we arrived at Dar el Tiflel Araby, Home of the Arab Child. The headmistress, Miss Haydar, greeted us at the gate with rehearsed poise and led us to her study, where she began laying out the history and rules. Under the electric light, Ammo Jack and I watched a clear comedown in Haydar's expression, as though we had somehow blighted her hopes. Over the next years I would realize that some elusive and ferocious romantic aspiration perked up in her whenever she knew a man was to enter the compound. Clearly, Ammo Jack was not what she'd hoped for, though neither of us understood then what was taking place in her face as she spoke to us.

"This institution was founded by Miss Hind Husseini," she said, "as in the Husseini family of Jerusalem," lending the emphasis of a raised brow. The Husseinis were Jerusalem notables with a well-documented history of leadership and prominence in the city through the centuries. Miss Hind had been a wealthy unmarried heiress when Israel had established itself on most of Palestine in 1948.

She had lived in a red-stone mansion adjacent to the hotel she owned where lords, diplomats, dignitaries, poets, and writers had lodged when they visited Jerusalem before Israel took the city. But in April 1948, three bloodied orphans had made their way to east Jerusalem, where they had wandered until someone had taken them to Miss Hind's doorstep. The children were from Deir Yassin, a village on the outskirts of Jerusalem, where more than two hundred Palestinian men, women, and children had been massacred by Jewish terrorists. Miss Hind had taken in the waifs. In the weeks that followed, as more atrocities were committed by Israelis, more children were taken to Miss Hind, until she closed the hotel and turned it into a shelter, then an orphanage, then a school.

Miss Haydar had been among those first orphans and she had been adopted by Miss Hind, who had remained unmarried. In the brief orientation with Ammo Jack and me, Miss Haydar did not share her own story. She merely, self-importantly, introduced herself as Miss Hind's daughter. The tragic circumstance of her adoption was disclosed by the girls during my first few days at the orphanage.

Miss Haydar was a hard-hearted woman. She compensated for her short stature with high-heeled shoes that she wore with more grace than her own bare feet. She moved in those awful things with natural ease as if she had never learned to walk but on her tiptoes. Her hair was henna dyed and the only thing about her that seemed soft. It framed a stucco face that suffered far too much makeup and limited eyes that had lived almost exclusively in the confines of the orphanage.

"You should feel privileged to have access to the education that will be provided for you," she said, her eyes burning into me. "Families pay a lot to send their daughters here." She was talking about the day students who came for school and went home afterward. I would learn to call them, as the other orphans did, the "outside girls," and I never befriended a single one in my four years there. We scrounged or bullied money and food from them, but meaningful friendships with them were difficult when we looked at their new shoes, nice uniforms, and other privileges that smacked of a "normal" we all coveted. Ultimately, however, their tuition, along with international donations, is what subsidized the existence of us orphans-the "inside girls" -in Jerusalem.

The main building was a five-story limestone beauty with the ornate arched doorways typical of Palestinian architecture. Its western wing served as a dormitory for girls aged ten to twenty- three. The remainder of the building housed classrooms, where I sat for biology, mathematics, Arabic, religion, geography, German, and English lessons. The balcony-hung back of the building looked on a large courtyard where a lonely basketball goal, well worn from use, stood at the far end, behind which a very old growth of ivy clung to the masonry wall enclosing the compound.

"Grab your things and follow me," Miss Haydar said, motioning imperiously toward my small bag of clothes. "Mr. Jack must go."

I wasn't prepared for another parting. My heart sank and my shoulders sagged. I fell to my knees and tears pooled behind my eyes, though I did not cry.

"Don't leave me, Ammo Jack," I begged.

He moved his colossal body to meet my eyes, shooing unruly hair from his brow with a trembling hand. In his other palm he held a small package, wrapped in newspaper and brown tape.

"I should not have kept this so long," he began softly. "I meant to give it to your brother Yousef. But I couldn't muster the grit to recount what I witnessed the day I saw this fall to the ground."

He handed the box to me awkwardly, in a painfully tender stroke.

"There was nothing I could do, Amal," he said, submitting to the questions he knew I would ask when I opened the box.

But Miss Haydar tore me away, impatiently pulling my arm. "No more of this. It's too dark to stay outside now."

She turned to Ammo Jack. "Thank you, sir. Please escort yourself to the gate."

Some thirty girls clamored to see the new arrival winding up the narrow, three-hundred-year-old stone staircase. I walked through their stares, my hard fists clutching the package from Ammo Jack and the dice from Lamya, the loose remnant of my former life. Miss Haydar showed me to my bed, a curious metal contraption she called a "bunk." Sixteen pairs of these bunks lined the rectangular room, eight along each of the long walls, and all thirty-one girls who lived in that room held me in their scrutiny. Sixty-two eyes, a silent tribunal etching into my flesh.

"Girls, show her around and make sure she knows the rules," Miss Haydar commanded, then pivoted away on her high heels. The girls came toward me and I cowered inwardly.

The closest one to me, a redhead with translucent skin and a soft smile, caressed my head. "Your hair is pretty. My name is Samra." I would soon learn her name was an unending joke in the orphanage because "Samra" in Arabic means "the dark-skinned one," and her carrot top stood out like an orange balloon in a dark ocean.

"What's your name?"

I didn't answer.

"Where are you from?" another asked. Then another and another.

"Why are you sad?"

"Will you be my friend?"

"Did Haydar give you her stupid dissertation?"

"Are you an orphan, too?"

Not getting answers from me, they started answering themselves.

"Of course she's an orphan, stupid!"

"Her name is Amal. I heard Haydar talking on the telephone."

"Why on earth would she want to befriend you, bucktooth?"

"Haydar is full of shit."

An admonition resonating with seniority came from a pretty dark-skinned girl with a silky blanket of black hair. "Get away from her!" she ordered. "Can't you see she's upset? Give her some space, you leeches." Everyone obeyed. That was my first encounter with Muna Jalayta, who became my dear friend.

Before she turned to leave, Muna assured me that it wasn't so bad here at the orphanage and that she would hold the girls off as long as she could. Then she smiled and left.

Alone and red eyed, bewildered and dizzied by life's turns, I opened the package that Ammo Jack had given me. Inside the crackle and hiss of tearing newspaper, inside a flimsy box, was an olive-wood smoking pipe. I lifted the pipe, holding the fragile memories of Baba, the two of us with his poetry and the rising sun. Near the mouthpiece, a line was worn in the pipe's shaft where Baba's mustache had rubbed against the wood over the years. The pipe still smelled of the honey apple tobacco that Baba had smoked, the scent of my father's labored breath and tired clothes when he unleashed his love through the pages he turned for me at dawn. I knew that smell so well that I had unknowingly come to think of it as the aroma of the sunrise. I curled up with Baba's love in my new bunk, letting that soothing waft of my father envelop my wounds and lull me to sleep on that first night in that Jerusalem refuge for Palestinian girls.

I never saw Ammo Jack again to ask him by what circumstance he had come to possess my father's pipe. In the summer of 1971, two years after he had escorted me to Jerusalem, I learned that Jack had died in his sleep. I could not return for the funeral because Jenin was under curfew. I also did not have money enough to make the trip, but news reached me that thousands of people had turned out to bid him farewell in a display reserved only for martyrs. Ammo Jack was deeply loved by everyone who knew him, especially the refugees in whose service he lived the last years of his life. Even some Israeli soldiers who frequently manned Jenin's checkpoints had gone to pay their respects to his daughter, his only relative, who had traveled from Ireland to bury him-for he had specified that he be buried in Palestine.

Haj Salem wept at Jack's funeral. After that he never returned to Beit Jawad's coffeehouse, where the two of them had shared countless hookas in the manufacturing of friendship-a dainty thing they had created from the playful grouchiness of men growing old in the tedium of a timeless battle to leave the world a better place for the young.

TWENTY-THREE.

The Orphanage 19691973 MUNA JALAYTA WAS RIGHT: the orphanage wasn't so bad; and from the beginning she took me under her wing. It was sometime during my second year, a hot summer night suffused with humidity and the sounds of vigilant bugs, that I could hear Muna tossing in the bunk above mine.

"You awake?" I whispered.

"Who the hell can sleep, besides the snoring dumbasses around us!" she huffed, dangling her head from the side of her bed. "Let's try the cool tile."

"Good idea," I said, getting out of bed and removing my night shirt.

"Even better idea. Naked on the tile." But the floor space was too cramped. "The balcony?"

"Sure, why not."

We stepped through the double doors into the open air and were instantly embraced by the moon.

"Wow! I've never seen the moon so close," she said, gripping the wrought-iron bars of the balcony. Her womanly form was outlined against the night's lantern sitting low in the sky.

"Full moons remind me of my father. Even though I can't really remember him. Isn't that silly?" she said, inhaling the night, eyes shut. "He told my sister that a full moon is a portal to God's ears. Silly."

"Let's complain to it about fat-ass Haydar. Maybe it'll suck her up into outer space," I said clumsily.

"And who says Abulheja doesn't have a sense of humor!"

"How did they die-your parents?"

A pause. "My father was a professor who lectured the truth about King Abdullah's dirty dealings with Golda Meir. The Arab leaders betrayed us just like the British. Sold us up the river. Sons of bitches. I'd kill every one of them if I could, from the Hashemites to the House of Saud." Another deep breath in the night. "Students loved my father and lined up for his classes. I suppose that made him a threat to the Hashemite monarchy.

"It was a February day and rain had started on our way home from my aunt's house. My mother, father, my sister Jamila, and I were hurrying under umbrellas. Mother was yelling at me to stop splashing in the puddles when an agent of the Hashemites of Jordan called out, 'Ahmed Jaber Jalayta.' "

When Muna's father reacted to the call of his name, the agent shot him once in the head. A second bullet tore through Muna's mother's lungs as she tried to shield her husband. Two quick gunshots and terror muffled by rain inaugurated Muna's first memory, at the age of four.

We lay on our backs, her head on my belly, mine on the ball of our nightshirts as the moon poured light on our dark skin. "I'm sorry, Muna," I said, stroking her hair and wiggling my sweaty toes against the metal balcony rail.

I remember that night clearly, the comfort between two friends. At the edge of Muna's memory, I felt an unstoppable evolution inside of me. No longer a girl, not yet a woman, I wondered which of us was better off-she who lived with the detailed terror of her father's death or I who lived without the knowledge of what had happened to mine. I leaned into Muna's hurt and kissed her forehead. We held each other on a carpet of moonlight and in quiet wonderment, I put my arms around her. She kissed my scar and we fell into sleep.

Muna took me into the folds of her clique, which was something akin to family. Among my new friends were the "Colombian Sisters," Yasmina, Layla, and Drina. They had been living at the orphanage for three years prior to my arrival. Following the 1948 war, their father had been able to emigrate to Colombia, where the three girls were born and had blossomed to the spicy beat of the salsa and merengue-which they taught me to dance. But their South American life had come to a halt when their father had died of cancer. Rather than use what little money he had on medical treatment, he had spent it to secure his family's return to Palestine, where an uncle had helped them find a small flat and sent the girls to the orphanage because it was the only route to continue their schooling. Their two oldest brothers, already out of school, had remained with their mother in Ramallah.

Whether the Colombian Sisters fought or got along, it was always drama. I could never get enough of Drina's laughter. It was a disorderly thing that tumbled off the walls like a drunken echo and always erupted from a wide-open mouth with head flung backward. She was the oldest of the three sisters and, with a strong athletic body, was also the toughest girl in school. Though I don't recall that she actually hurt anyone, her crass approach to everything often gave the impression that she was gearing up to maul the first person to annoy her. What I remember most about Drina was the quick snap of her head that positioned her eyes in a straight burning focus on the object of her scrutiny, demanding honesty and loyalty.

She snapped that look toward me once after I emerged from a grueling interrogation by Miss Haydar, who had held me for five hours in the dorm basement, the "dungeon," to persuade me to rat out my accomplices. The five of us, Muna, the Colombian Sisters, and I, had broken into the art studio the previous night, as we had been doing every night of Ramadan. It was during the last week of that month of fasting that Miss Haydar had discovered us, and it was because of a pot of stuffed grape leaves brought to us by a French nun.

That nun was Sister Clairie, whose name I could never pronounce correctly. She had taken a special liking to Layla, the middle of the Colombian Sisters, during Christmas that year when a group from the convent had brought gifts to the world's less fortunate: us. Recognizing in Layla that spirit of giving, Sister Clairie had approached my friend with an extended hand. "My name is Clairie," she had said, uttering her own name as if water gurgled in the back of her throat.

"May I help?" she had asked, motioning to the nameless infant girl in Layla's arms.

"Thank you. She was left this morning at the front gate," Layla had said, carefully placing the baby into the nun's arms.

"Layla always takes the babies," Drina had said. "You'd think she'd given birth to them for all the fussing she does."

It was true. Layla's nurturing instincts were so pure and well-known to us that every wounded girl, physically or otherwise, was put into her care.