Emerging from tense immigration lines, I found a tall, haggard man standing impassively behind a sign that bore my name. His dark eyes were set deep beneath straggled eyebrows. Sparse hairs sprang haphazardly at his jawline in a vain struggle to become a beard, and a meticulously symmetrical mustache could not conceal the fullness of his lips. When our eyes met, recognition pulled his face into a smile.

"Al hamdulillah ala salama," he said, extending a hand. "My name is Majid. Your brother sent me to pick you up."

"And God keep you in safety, too," I replied. Calls and responses Calls and responses.

"I knew you right away. You look like Yousef."

"We take after our mother."

He smiled, taking my luggage.

Beirut's traffic moved in jolts amid a bedlam of honking horns. Bicycles darted between cars as Majid drove patiently through the uproar, apologizing for the "foul lexicon" of the street as mustached drivers, irate and sweaty, hurled colorful insults at one another. Arabic profanities are often nothing more than a gratuitous reference to the anatomy of a female relative. Simply the mention of it. "Go, fool! Your mother's pussy." Another, "Are you waiting for the red carpet to move your damn car? Your sister's pussy!" And there's always "Curses upon your father and your father's father!"

Dispersed in the pandemonium, peddlers sold newspapers, flowers, and Chiclets while the aroma of freshly baked bread- the streetside displays of sesame kaak with crushed thyme and cheese-crawled through my senses into memories of Palestine.

"It's good to be on Arab soil again," I thought aloud.

"I hear you've been gone quite a while," Majid said after a brief pause.

"Yes, quite a while."

"Sorry. I didn't mean to pry."

"No, it's okay. I went on a scholarship and couldn't go back to Jenin. You know how it is when you're gone for a while. The Israelis don't let you come back . . ." Furthermore, I had nothing, no one, to go back to. And to be honest, I wanted to be an American. I wanted to pack away my baggage of past and tragedy and try on Amy for size Furthermore, I had nothing, no one, to go back to. And to be honest, I wanted to be an American. I wanted to pack away my baggage of past and tragedy and try on Amy for size.

I turned my head to the open window to end the subject and inhale more of the hot jibneh and zaatar on sesame kaak from the sidewalk carts.

Majid called out the window and a vendor, a slender, kindly old man, approached with two large kaaks wrapped in newspaper.

"May God give you a long life, haj," Majid said to thank the old man, and paid him.

"And may he grant you and your family happiness, son," the old man replied.

"I'll bet you haven't had one of these in a while." Majid turned to me with a jibneh kaak. That smile again That smile again.

Thrilled, I thanked him: "Bless your hands. They're made of kindness and chivalry."

"I knew something could make you smile."

Majid's shy, fine manner contradicted the gruff exterior I had first noted. "My mother and I often took long walks together when I was a boy and I'd always make her stop to buy me one of these tasty things," he said, gently parting the silence. I listened, not wanting to spoil his memory with conversation or interrupt the smooth equanimity of his voice.

The dented small Fiat barely accommodated Majid's long body, pushing his head slightly down from the roof and his knees up near the steering wheel. We ate in the sun-dusted quiet of the car, windows up and occasional horns barking at our slow pace, and his color reddened when the hand shifting into fifth gear accidentally brushed against my leg.

"Excuse me. I'm very sorry."

"It's okay."

Farther on, traffic dwindled on the potholed, partially paved roads.

"Why didn't Yousef come himself to pick me up?"

"I can't believe I forgot to tell you," he exclaimed, lightly smacking his forehead. "Fatima had her baby. You have a niece!" His eyes widened as those of bearers of good news do. "Yousef was hoping for a boy, but he melted just the same when he saw his daughter," Majid said.

I'm an aunt!

"Don't all Arab men want a son first?" I joked, feeling more comfort with this man. We laughed.

"Actually, I imagine a little girl. Sara, after my mother, mercy on her soul. But truly, whatever Allah grants is a blessing," Majid replied. His voice was like velvet, his profile an embodiment of certainty, and his presence assuring. He looks like Che Guevara He looks like Che Guevara.

Shatila was one of three Beirut-area refugee camps. Next to it, Sabra, and both were similar to Jenin's camp, densely packed mazes of concrete and clay shacks that had risen from the indignity of handout tents for Palestinians who had fled the war in 1948. Culverts carried raw sewage in the alleyways, where children played and floated paper boats downstream.

I knew we had arrived when children began to swarm around the Fiat. We had done the same when I was a child. In particular, we had badgered visitors and UN investigators to no end, desperate to pose for their clicking cameras. Though we never saw the photos, we nonetheless had fought one another for positions in front of their lenses. Seeing the children at Shatila now gave me a look at myself as I must have appeared to those visitors-bedraggled and needy. But in truth, we had been excited when they visited and we had happily basked in their Western grace. We had wanted only their approval, expressed in the passing attention of a camera shutter, a smile, a question, and sometimes, candy treats, which Huda and I had always shared.

Majid reached into the glove compartment, pulling out a handful of candy. "I did this once and now they expect it. I get in big trouble if I come empty-handed."

Majid at the center, giddy children around, the sweetness of candy. How Huda and I would have loved such a man in our youth. "Doktor Majid! Doktor Majid!" the children called out, and he caught the surprise in my face. I had not taken him for an educated man. I had viewed him with Amy's eyes. This he saw. And I lowered my eyes, embarrassed by the judgment he knew I had made in our initial contact.

A white sun followed us through the trash-strewn town to Fatima's and Yousef 's house. It was a single-story structure with two crumbling steps leading to the front door. Its roof, like others, was mostly corrugated metal and asbestos held in place with rocks, old tires, and anything else to lend weight against the wind. Outside, a crowd of some twenty men was gathered, improvising chairs, laughing, smoking, and passing a tray of knafe, a cheese delicacy soaked in sweet syrup. No doubt in celebration of my niece's birth.

There he was.

Yousef! My brother, dear God!

Now, after thirteen years of separation, only a small distance remained. Twenty footsteps at most. Easily traversed. A short walk along a dirt path where a canary cage and potted flowers tried to defy poverty.

"Amal!" He saw me and rose at once among his PLO comrades, the waxed tips of his mustache curled at the corners of his smile.

I dropped my small handbag and ran to him. Safe in his embrace, I remained there as long as I could, trying to siphon the lost years from his massive chest, which felt so much like our father's. For a moment, my brother's arms dulled the aloneness of my life.

In the courtyard, a group of women, wives of the men outside, were keeping watch over mother and infant. They leapt with hugs and kisses when we entered.

"It is nice to finally meet you," said several at once.

"Fatima has told us so much about you," said others. A woman in a dotted red scarf pursed her lips and said, "Fatima told us you were shot when you were little, may Allah shoot them all."

"Amen to that," said another. "Here, have some tea. And knafe."

The eldest among them, in a traditional embroidered thobe and white headscarf, rose with some labor, interrupting the others. "You think she's here to see you? Or her kinfolk and the baby?" She led us into the communal space of my brother's three-room home. A kitchen and bathroom off the courtyard made up the rest of the house.

Fatima appeared comatose, depleted from twenty-one hours of labor, and my baby niece lay swaddled next to her mother in angelic sleep. They had named her Falasteen, the Arabic word for Palestine.

"How original," I joked to Yousef, who reached for his baby girl.

Broad-shouldered Yousef, his vast tenderness cradling tiny Falasteen, was a sight to behold. When I think of him now, that sublime moment of unspoiled, unconditional devotion to his family is what I see. I still hear his words. "I am holding the most perfect of all God's creations. Like a turn, little sister?"

"Ismallah, ismallah!" I took my baby niece with great care, my heart tiptoeing in that house of love. Her small mouth opened in a delicate yawn and I moved closer to drink her scent. There is nothing quite so pure, as if pieces of God live in the faint breaths of babes. In Falasteen's yawn, I caught a whiff of divine promise, bequeathed even to us.

I placed my niece at her sleeping mother's breast and watched my brother, turgid with affection, look back and forth from his wife and to his newborn daughter. In that refugee camp, which Israel would label a "breeding ground of terrorists" and a "festering den of terror," I bore witness to a love that dwarfed immensity itself.

Later, alone with my brother in the courtyard, it was time. "I have something for you," I said, removing Baba's pipe from my pocket. I handed the package to him slowly, as Ammo Jack O'Malley, mercy on his soul, had given it to me years before when he took me to the orphanage in Jerusalem.

The heavy, turtle-paced creep of gravity prodded Yousef to rise on his legs. And the frail waft of honey apple tobacco, as he uncovered our father's smoking pipe, turned those legs to clay. Yousef 's shoulders drooped and I saw my brother cry for the first time in my life.

"How did you get this?" he asked, composing himself and wiping tears.

The constant, background-humming craving for just one more moment with our father moved to the forefront of our yearnings, crowning the next hours between brother and sister getting to know one another as adults. He was sorry for having left me in Jenin. He'd have taken us with him, if he could have. "I'm sorry I wasn't there for you when Mama died." He hadn't heard about my being shot until a year after. Life hadn't been easy. Nor for me Nor for me. But we were a family again and now there was a baby, a promise that we could live on.

"I didn't know what else to do, Amal. But I want to make it up to you. I want to be here for you now."

"You did the best you could, brother. I know that," I said.

"There are some things I never told you," Yousef began. He looked down at his hands, as if placing the words in his palm first before uttering them. "Our brother Ismael, the baby we lost in forty-eight, is alive," Yousef said, looking intently at my face.

He was surprised when I told him that I already knew, or at least I had always suspected ever since Huda and I had overheard him talking so many years earlier about the Yahoodi they call David Yahoodi they call David.

"Does Huda also know?"

"I don't think your conversation that day left the same impression on her as it did on me. Anyway, we never spoke of it."

My brother and I served Fatima in bed when she awoke and the three of us feasted together on reunion and family, nibbling from the side dishes of Nablus jibneh and watermelon. I can replay the details of that day in my mind now, only they come to me strangely without sound. The rhapsody of mother and child is metered in the shallow bobs of Falasteen's little head as she breastfeeds. Fatima is beautiful, overjoyed, in love. Something funny is said and I notice a silver filling in Yousef 's back teeth as his laughter opens his mouth wide. The bread-the large, thin Iranian khobz that I love-is torn and passed.

Later, Yousef saunters proudly around the camp holding his baby girl. I take her for a while, and Yousef leans back in his seat, lighting our father's pipe with fresh tobacco. He inhales the smoke and his eyelids fall, moving my brother to some memory that makes him grin. He opens his eyes and we are secure in the scent of our father. My memory can read the movement of his lips but cannot hear the words now: "Baba and Mama would have danced today," Yousef says. Since he was a boy, he had wanted to watch them dance again as they had the day Jiddo Yehya returned with his forbidden fruits from Ein Hod, and all the refugees had rejoiced.

I snapped many photographs that evening in Shatila, but there is one in particular that I treasure, that I framed and placed on the mantel. It evokes the details of that day's happiness. It is the photo that would one day leave my Pennsylvania home in a CIA evidence box, after which I would frantically search for the negative to print another copy. My big brother is frozen in a silly, toothy grin holding his firstborn child, Falasteen, while Fatima, the love of his life, sweetly leans on his shoulder, smiling, in their tiny dwelling in that shanty refugee town.

Fatima and I bonded as women that summer in Lebanon. I was no longer the little girl who delivered their letters and played barefoot in the camp, but a young woman she could take under her wing. We shared domestic responsibilities, marking time with Falasteen's development, and Fatima embarked on a matchmaking mission to pair me with a husband.

She had only one man in mind, a physician by circumstances similar to mine. He was a refugee and an orphan who had earned a scholarship through the United Nations and spent eleven years at Oxford, specializing in vascular surgery.

I faked disinterest, of course. But she goaded me, joking about how frustrated I must be at my age without a man.

"Well, you should know, since you did not have sex until you were thirty-two!" I retorted.

"Yes. And it was surely worth it!"

"Please. I don't want to hear about my brother's sexual competence," I yelled, hands pressed over my ears.

She laughed. But when I confessed to a string of disappointing relationships in the United States, her voice deepened, pulling words from a wisdom at her core.

"Amal, I believe that most Americans do not love as we do. It is not for any inherent deficiency or superiority in them. They live in the safe, shallow parts that rarely push human emotions into the depths where we dwell. I see your confusion. Consider fear. For us, fear comes where terror comes to others because we are anesthetized to the guns constantly pointed at us. And the terror we have known is something few Westerners ever will. Israeli occupation exposes us very young to the extremes of our own emotions, until we cannot feel except in the extreme.

"The roots of our grief coil so deeply into loss that death has come to live with us like a family member who makes you happy by avoiding you, but who is still one of the family. Our anger is a rage that Westerners cannot understand. Our sadness can make the stones weep. And the way we love is no exception, Amal.

"It is the kind of love you can know only if you have felt the intense hunger that makes your body eat itself at night. The kind you know only after life shields you from falling bombs or bullets passing through your body. It is the love that dives naked toward infinity's reach. I think it is where God lives."

In the long wait for one another and in the sacred love nestled in war, Yousef and Fatima had discovered this secret.

Majid came to visit my brother one Friday after Jomaa prayer. The day marked the end of my second week at the UN girls' school where I had taken a summer teaching post. It was also a milestone day, when baby Falasteen first smiled.

Walking past me with a tray of nuts and coffee for her guest, Fatima whispered in my ear, "This is the doctor I've been telling you about."

The man she hoped to pair me with was the man who had picked me up at the airport.

In the glory of her matchmaking, Fatima suggested that Majid show me around the city since I hadn't left the camp in a month of being there. He hesitated and I was embarrassed. Fatima's scheme was obvious and it made for an uncomfortable situation. Yousef frowned at the impropriety of his unmarried sister being seen about with a man. He trusted Majid, of course. But there was an order to things. There was rectitude.

"I just mean that Amal can help you with deliveries," Fatima added, undeterred.

Majid volunteered regularly in the camp, which meant he attended a fair number of childbirths.

Fatima continued, "Um Yousef, mercy on her soul, was a midwife and she taught Amal. The two of them delivered a lot of babies in Jenin."

Dalia and I had been a team.

Majid turned to Yousef in deference to his authority in the household. My brother made no protest and Majid in turn welcomed my help. "Um Laith is expecting next week," he said. He'd be honored and relieved to share the responsibility. If, of course, I was interested.

I turned to Yousef, out of love, to affirm that matters in his house were subject to his judgment. He understood the gestures and loved us all. "It's fine by me. Allah give you strength." His sister and dearest friend together would complete his joy. He wanted to make things right. To honor his promise to Baba and to me.

Yousef smiled his goofy grin, privately now in cahoots with Fatima.