"Thank you," I answered, unsure of the proper American response to her gracious enthusiasm. In the Arab world, gratitude is a language unto itself. "May Allah bless the hands that give me this gift"; "Beauty is in your eyes that find me pretty"; "May God extend your life"; "May Allah never deny your prayer"; "May the next meal you cook for us be in celebration of your son's wedding . . . of your daughter's graduation . . . your mother's recovery"; and so on, an infinite string of prayerful appreciation. Coming from such a culture, I have always found a mere "thank you" an insufficient expression that makes my voice sound miserly and ungrateful. I gazed at the cityscape. Ribbons of concrete and asphalt stretched and looped under more cars than I had ever seen. Row homes, factories, and warehouses overlooked the interstate, and smog blurred the clustered skyline of downtown Philadelphia. The scent of the city seeped into the car. Street vendor cheese-steak hoagies, greasy fries, diesel truck fumes, and car exhaust gave my nostrils a full-bodied welcome. It smelled like the irretrievable loss of white madonna lilies growing in the limesinks of Palestine, the bereavement of my country's camphires, which would burst forth each spring into fragrant flames of white and yellow clusters, delicate and fiery.

Lisa's mother, Angela Haddad, spoke softly, pointing out the Museum of Art, the William Penn statue, City Hall, Independence Hall, and other monuments that meant nothing to me. She kept her neck perfectly straight and her long fingers wound tightly on the steering wheel of her Mercedes as she drove through the city. She had an impenetrable elegance, and though she was extremely generous and kind to me, I found it difficult to relax in her presence.

"Mom, is Dad coming home this week?" Lisa asked her mother.

Lisa's father lived with his girlfriend and came to visit his family occasionally. I thought it was an odd arrangement until I met him. He was a tall, swashbuckling parvenu who had married an heiress, Angela, and used her money to subsidize expensive womanizing, a cause he championed in Philadelphia's finest gentlemen's clubs. "She your mom's new project, sugar?" he asked Lisa, nodding his head toward me on the one occasion that he arrived to take his daughter "out."

"This is Amal, Dad," she answered uncomfortably.

"Hello, 'Omar.' Name's Milton Dobbs." He extended his hand and I shook it. "That's what I love about your mother, sugar, she's always trying to save the world. It's why I married her in the first place," he said, raising his voice to reach Angela, who stood ignoring him behind the kitchen counter.

"No, you married me for my money," Angela retorted in classy, unaffected dryness.

"I'm not sure if he's coming this week or not, darling," Angela answered as she continued to point out notable Philadelphia sights. "And this, Amal, is your home for the next three weeks, or longer if you wish," she concluded, slowing her car into the long circular driveway.

At the door, my eyes widened to take in the enormity of their home, the likes of which I had never imagined. Money flaked off the air of its oversized, immaculate rooms, and I could barely comprehend that Lisa and her mother lived alone, with part-time domestic help, in that expanse.

What I recall most vividly of my first night in the United States was sleeping for the first time in a real bed. Not a mat or a bunk. I stretched my limbs in a large, soft sea of white linen and down soaking up the fatigue from my jet-lagged body. Over the bed, Lisa had hung a poster of a man with leather hair and a leather jacket unzipped in a comically seductive pose. Lisa loved him, she informed me, calling him "the Fonz." Leaning against the wall was a gift for me: a 1973 baby-blue Schwinn bicycle, which Angela taught me to ride in the coming days. As if to brace myself with context in that big bed, I reached to the past, moving my hand over the mangled skin of my belly. Snuggled in luxury on the threshold of a world that brimmed with as much promise as uncertainty, I was starting a new life. But like the scar beneath my hand, the past was still with me.

In Philadelphia I wandered among the contrasts of wealth and poverty, a desperate smile plastered on my face. I found no commonality with the men and women who walked with purpose and self-possession, nor with the human beings asleep on the city sidewalks. I marveled as these self-assured Americans went about their daily business. They bought groceries, walked to work, ate dainty foods, and chatted in outdoor restaurants. I felt diminished, out of place, and eager to belong.

Angela helped me with the daunting paperwork that had to be understood and completed before I could commence my first year of study at Temple University. I had never dealt with so many papers and forms for health insurance, library registration, school ID-and on went the list. But I was ready before classes started and with Angela's help, I moved into the dorm.

Elana Rivers, a wisecracker with a massive bosom, asked our dorm mother if there was a form to register her boobs. Within the first months of classes she was well established among the upperclassmen as easy prey, a distinction that earned her invitations to the "right" fraternity parties. She often staggered loudly back into our dorm in the wee hours. She made no attempt to speak to me, though she referred to me not infrequently as "the Arab," pronounced "ay-rab," or as "the rag head."

One evening, I watched her taunt a drooling pizza delivery boy in the foyer of our dorm. Dumbstruck by Elana's lasciviousness, he ogled her with a comical hang-jawed expression that made me chuckle in passing. At that, she turned sharply toward me. "Oh my God!" She burst into laughter. "The ayrab thinks this is funny." Swift fear flushed my face, draining away my amusement as Elana came toward me. "Have you ever had sex?" she asked unctuously.

I froze. I had never even kissed a boy. Thankfully, a disgusted voice behind me intervened, "God, Elana! Do you ever stop?"

It was Kelly Mason, a pre-med student whom I knew from science classes. "What? I'm just making conversation," said Elana. But Kelly whisked me away, pushing herself daringly in front of Elana, who did not bother me again.

Save the occasional lunch with Kelly, my first year in college was friendless. It was an isolated and busy year. My accent was a social handicap, or at least I regarded it as such. So I did little more than study and ride my bicycle all over town. Whatever attempts I made to participate in the social arena were clumsy and unsurprisingly ignored or snubbed. I was left with books, and the payoff was a perfect 4.0 average for both the fall and spring semesters.

I found my place eventually and settled comfortably among a small group of friends with whom I shared a house until graduation. It was a run-down three-story brick row home that became known in our junior year as "the Outhouse," after sewage backflowed onto the floors.

I remained on solid academic ground throughout college, but the Palestinian girl of pitiable beginnings was trampled in my rush to belong and find relevance in the West. I dampened my senses to the world, tucking myself into an American niche with no past. For the first time I lived without threats and the sediments of war. I lived free of soldiers, free of inherited dreams and martyrs tugging at my hands.

But every house has its demons.

I metamorphosed into an unclassified Arab-Western hybrid, unrooted and unknown. I drank alcohol and dated several men- acts that would have earned me repudiation in Jenin. I spun in cultural vicissitude, wandering in and out of the American ethos until I lost my way. I fell in love with Americans and even felt that love reciprocated. I lived in the present, keeping the past hidden away. I did not write to Huda, nor to Muna or the Colombian Sisters. Nor to Ammo Darweesh, Lamya, Khalto Bahiya, or Haj Salem. But sometimes the blink of my eye was a twitch of contrition that brought me face-to-face with the past.

Walking downtown once, I thought I saw my mother, the gust of a ghost breezing through my reflection in a store window. I paused, starring at my mother's daughter. Dalia, Um Yousef, had bequeathed to me the constitution that could not breathe while holding hands with the past. She could isolate each present moment while existing in an eternal past, but I needed physical distance to remove myself. I thought at that moment that no other soul could understand me as she might.

The undercurrent of my life in America was a sense of shame that I had betrayed my family-or worse, myself. But I consigned myself to American mores and subscribed to their liberties.

There were, however, moments that prodded me to look into the abyss separating me from those around me. During the sewage incident that gave our college house its nickname, the commotion provoked memories of Jenin, where the open sewers sometimes overflowed and we would scramble, gathering old clothes and towels to plug the joints of our dwellings. Vile as the experience and subsequent cleanup were, Huda and I could not contain our excitement and anticipation at being allowed to sleep on the roof to escape the foul odor. Other children did the same, and we filled the air with calls, jokes, and giggles of young refugee souls. We were naively full of dreams and hope then, blessedly unaware that we were the world's rubbish, left to tread in its own misery and excrement. There, on the flat rooftops, we offered up our wishes and secrets to the starry Mediterranean sky. There were no soldiers then, before the war of 1967. Our wants were simple, but they could not have been more complicated. Always we thought about returning to Ein Hod. We thought it was paradise. Those untroubled nights on the rooftop hang in innocence. The evening call to prayer was our blanket and we slept in a little-girl embrace, Huda and I, until the dawn came with whatever book Baba chose to read to me. The foul slosh that glistened in the alleyways was, as far as we were concerned, a temporary inconvenience that offered a delightful escape.

So, in Philadelphia, while my housemates made frantic calls to their parents, the landlord, the health department, and insurance companies, I was unperturbed. While they acted as if their world had come to a shitty end, I felt a sweet nostalgia and longing for old friends.

The divide could not have been greater, nor could it be bridged. That's how it was. Palestine would just rise up from my bones into the center of my new life, unannounced. In class, at a bar, strolling through the city. Without warning, the weeping willows of Rittenhouse Square would turn into Jenin's fig trees reaching down to offer me their fruit. It was a persistent pull, living in the cells of my body, calling me to myself. Then it would slouch back into latency.

I worked two jobs through most of college. The university hired me as a peer tutor and I worked "under the table" on weekends at a twenty-four-hour convenience store in West Philly, a "bad neighborhood" where white people ordinarily did not go, especially after dark.

"You've got a death wish," my housemates said to me. "You're pressing your luck working in that area." They were sure I would turn up a rape victim, or at least get mugged. "You don't know this country well enough yet. I'm not being racist. It's just a bad place."

But each Friday, I set out on my bicycle through the hurried energy of Broad Street, turned right to the fine homes on Spruce, all the way to the dilapidation of West Philly. Opportunity Opportunity took a detour around Thirtieth Street, and took a detour around Thirtieth Street, and Liberty for All Liberty for All slouched in its chair like a lazy student. In West Philly, nature and architecture hunkered down with the ghost of slavery, letting litter and urine move in the place of flower bushes. Young men loitered in bell-bottomed jeans and Afros. In the beginning they whistled, called me "mama," and made references to my backside. But as my face became a constant part of the weekend landscape, they called out my name in a rhythm that whistled, acknowledged my backside, and welcomed me, all in one word. Old women, imposing matriarchs, gossiped on their porches and kept watch over the neighborhood as best they could. They too eventually turned their mistrusting expressions into generous smiles when they saw me coming. Little girls, their hair chained in obedient cornrows, played double dutch in spectacular displays of coordination. It seemed to me that black folk brought a beat to every task. In a day, they restored a church by the coincidence of their song. Their enslaved culture had given birth to rock and roll, I learned-a kidnapped race that came to define the entire culture with its music. slouched in its chair like a lazy student. In West Philly, nature and architecture hunkered down with the ghost of slavery, letting litter and urine move in the place of flower bushes. Young men loitered in bell-bottomed jeans and Afros. In the beginning they whistled, called me "mama," and made references to my backside. But as my face became a constant part of the weekend landscape, they called out my name in a rhythm that whistled, acknowledged my backside, and welcomed me, all in one word. Old women, imposing matriarchs, gossiped on their porches and kept watch over the neighborhood as best they could. They too eventually turned their mistrusting expressions into generous smiles when they saw me coming. Little girls, their hair chained in obedient cornrows, played double dutch in spectacular displays of coordination. It seemed to me that black folk brought a beat to every task. In a day, they restored a church by the coincidence of their song. Their enslaved culture had given birth to rock and roll, I learned-a kidnapped race that came to define the entire culture with its music.

Sometimes there were killings and muggings. Drug pushers and pimps. Perhaps foolishly, I felt no fear in the darkness of West Philly. The soldiers in my life had raised the bar for bad guys. So the frightened teenagers with a gun, who once held up the store for forty dollars, weren't scary at all.

There were three of them at half past midnight one Saturday. They walked in together, their hasty plan still written on their faces with marks of apprehension. Three customers were already in the store and Bo Bo, the owner, had left only an hour earlier. Two of the boys went to opposite corners of the store and the third waited in line at the register where I stood behind the counter. I knew something was wrong, and as I collected money from the paying customer, I replayed Bo Bo's instructions in my head. "If you ever get held up, just give them all the money and don't hold back," he had said when I had first started working a year earlier. At the counter, the young robber laid down two packs of spearmint gum and a bottle of Coca-Cola and added a 9 mm. Then, he demanded money. His eyes were flooded with fear and his dark skin was pulled smooth by his youth. The other boys busied themselves collecting loot from the shelves and covered the door. I was struck by the irony of that boy's fear and my calm. As I emptied the cash register of its contents into a brown paper bag, I thought how I should be more frightened. The boy's gun was a toy compared to M-16 assault rifles. "You. Stop!" An M-16 in my face. "You. Go this way." An M-16 at my chest. "Everybody, turn back. This is now a closed military area." An M-16 swinging across the crowd, maybe fired a few times in the air if we didn't move fast enough.

After I gave the boy all the money, I showed him a hidden change box where his friends could find an extra thirty dollars. Then I gave him a carton of cigarettes. "I don't smoke," he remarked, stunned.

They left. I called Bo Bo, not the police. The following weekend, also on Saturday, Bo Bo came to the store dragging a boy by the collar. "Is this the one?" he asked. It was that same frightened young man who had threatened me with a 9 mm. I nodded and Bo Bo, whose real name was Bernard, turned his brawny black body on the boy, knocking him and the contents of the candy aisle shelf to the floor. "You either pay me now what you stole or you show up here every day to work it off," he growled with authority only a fool would dare disobey. The young man-Jimmy was his name-kept working for Bo Bo even after he had paid his debt. The police never knew about it. "He just got caught in the dragnet, is all. It's an old web that squeezes black folk until they got no more juice," Bo Bo told me.

What I knew for sure was that people in West Philly thought I was beautiful, not different, and my accent was not a call for mistrust. The very things that made me suspect to the white world were backstage passes in the black neighborhoods.

TWENTY-FIVE.

The Telephone Call from Yousef 19781981 THE SUMMER OF 1978, before I started graduate study at the University of South Carolina, I gave in to the egging of my housemates to go to Myrtle Beach.

I had, for the previous five years, selfishly tuned the world out. The Yom Kippur War came and went in 1973, as did further turbulence in Palestine, and Jimmy Carter's Camp David Accords were soon to be signed-all without response from me. I deliberately avoided political discussions, did not write to the people who loved me, and let myself be known as "Amy"-Amal without the hope. I was a word drained of its meaning. A woman emptied of her past. The truth is that I wanted to be someone else. And that summer at Myrtle Beach, I was Amy in a bathing suit, lounging on the sand as far away from myself as I had ever been.

It took me days to find a suitable swimming suit. A bikini was out of the question.

"Wow. Were you in an accident or something?" Kelly asked in the changing room when she saw my belly.

"Something," I answered.

I chose a conservative black suit because it had a cluster of plastic daisies, a rather silly-looking thing, on the fabric that fell over the most obvious indentation in my abdomen.

I had assumed the Mediterranean shores of Haifa would be the dominant beaches of my life. But at age twenty-three, I swam in ocean water for the first time, and I wormed my toes in the Atlantic sand of a South Carolina beach.

I stretched my body to receive the sun, the same one that had risen over Jenin since the dawn of my life and had brought me purple skies and poetry in the asthmatic baritone coming through Baba's chest.

No soldiers here. No barbed wire or zones off-limits to Palestinians. No one to judge me. No resistance or cries or chants. I was anonymous. Unloved. Wearing my first bathing suit, I remembered Huda's great yearning after the Battle of Karameh, when we thought we would return to our Palestine. "To sit by the ocean. Just to sit, since I can't swim," was her wish, at the top of that naive list we had made in our youth. Huda Huda.

One year into graduate studies in South Carolina, I received my green card and adopted the United States as my new country.

Amy. Amal of the steadfast refugees and tragic beginnings was now Amy in the land of privilege and plenitude. The country that flowed on the surface of life, supine beneath unwavering skies. But no matter what facade I bought, I forever belonged to that Palestinian nation of the banished to no place, no man, no honor. My Arabness and Palestine's primal cries were my anchors to the world. And I found myself searching books of history for accounts that matched the stories Haj Salem had told. Amal of the steadfast refugees and tragic beginnings was now Amy in the land of privilege and plenitude. The country that flowed on the surface of life, supine beneath unwavering skies. But no matter what facade I bought, I forever belonged to that Palestinian nation of the banished to no place, no man, no honor. My Arabness and Palestine's primal cries were my anchors to the world. And I found myself searching books of history for accounts that matched the stories Haj Salem had told.

Another year passed. Whatever you feel Whatever you feel . . . I kept it all in. Until one day when the telephone rang at five a.m. Half-sleeping, I picked up the receiver. . . . I kept it all in. Until one day when the telephone rang at five a.m. Half-sleeping, I picked up the receiver.

"Hello."

"Aloo," answered an accented male voice. "Amal?"

"Aywa," I said, suspecting his identity and fully awake now. He chuckled, a sound I could recognize anywhere. It was the muffled laughter that first escaped from the right side of Yousef 's mouth, then stretched a smile across his handsome face. A lifetime ago, Fatima had told me that my brother's smile had melted her heart the first time she ever saw him, when he was sixteen and she fourteen.

"Finally, little sister! We've been trying for months to find you."

Someone took the phone. "Amal! Habibti, darling! We found you." It was Fatima.

Amal. I cried at the sound of my Arabic name. The telephone was an inadequate connection to transmit the warm longing and surprise as we tried to speak through sobs and static.

"We're pregnant." Their first child. "Where are you in the U.S.? We're in Lebanon now. You know what they did to the PLO in Jordan, the bastards."

I heard Yousef interrupt. "Not now, habibti," he said to his wife.

"Okay, darling." And she continued.

It was a long story of endless fighting-"Yousef will tell you all about it"-through which ran a river of endless love-"but you already know that."

My brother had risen through the ranks of the PLO in the decade following the Battle of Karameh. The movement gained so much popular support in Jordan that the Hashemite monarchy feared for its own survival and crushed the Palestinian guerrillas and civilians in terrible massacres that marked the ninth month as Black September. The PLO was thus pushed into Lebanon in 1971, under the leadership of Yasser Arafat, and my brother took up a teaching position at an UNRWA school that served the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, where he also continued to operate within the ranks of the Palestinian fighters.

"I never gave up waiting for him, you know . . . I'll tell you all the details when we meet again. Yousef misses you terribly. So do I, darling," Fatima said.

Despite the long years of absence and the uncertainty of Yousef 's whereabouts and Fatima's fate, each had held fast to their love, resisting the pressures of tradition to marry any other. Finally, in 1977, after difficult probing, Yousef learned that his love had not married, and he immediately sent Fatima a letter that took almost a full year to travel less than fifty miles south through underground channels to Bartaa village, where Fatima still lived with her mother.

"It was as if Allah opened the heavens and dropped that letter for my heart," Fatima said. The heart that longed for my brother as much as life longed for breath. Within three months, they were united and married in Beirut. To make that journey, Fatima said a final farewell to her family and country, because once she left, Israel would not allow her to return to the land it occupied. She gave up everything she knew to marry my brother and never regretted it. He was thirty-four and she was thirty-two.

"Little sister, you better get here before Fatima makes you an aunt!"

"When is she due?"

"Sometime in the middle of June."

"It's December now. That gives me a few months to save up for a ticket and finish my master's."

"A master's degree? . . . Baba sure would be proud."

Even after so many years, I longed to make my father proud. Wherever he was. I looked out the window and saw that the sun was making its ascent, and I got choked up for the force of light, Baba's smile, coming into the room.

"Hurry up and get here, sis. We miss you."

"I miss you more. I'll be there soon."

Yousef left a number where I could leave a message for him to call me at a specified time. Reluctantly, I hung up the phone.

I graduated in June with no plans but to go to Lebanon. Ever since Yousef 's call, I had thought of little else but to return to my family, to myself. But I had also forged real ties in America and in many ways, the place I had called home for the past years had become part of me. I was sad to leave my friends, but I was happy in the face of what awaited me as I boarded a plane to Beirut, hoping to arrive before Fatima made me an aunt.

V.

ALBI FI BEIRUT.

(my heart in Beirut)

TWENTY-SIX.

Majid 1981.

A GUST OF WARM, DRY wind greeted me as I stepped off the plane onto Lebanon's soil. Beirut International Airport was an ominous place, made so by too many rifles strapped to too many uniformed soldiers. But the guttural silk tones of Arabic rippled through me as I heard the melodic calls and responses of my language. It's a dance, really. A man at a desk was offered tea as I walked through the metal detectors. He said, "Bless your hands" to the one making the offer, who responded, "And your hands, and may Allah keep you always in Grace." Calls and responses that dance in the air.