"THEY SLAUGHTERED MY WIFE AND MY CHILDREN LIKE LAMBS!"

The line went dead. And I stood, besieged by the trickery of destiny. By stolen futures and the unbearable sorrow of extinguished love.

Again, I walked outside, freshly fallen leaves crackling under the weight of my steps. I overpowered my tears with a tight clench of my jaw. I was afraid to cry, lest I feel the storm inside my brother.

Whatever you feel, keep it inside. Oh, Dalia, Mother! I understand!

I removed my shoes, took off my socks and sweater. I removed my shoes, took off my socks and sweater.The better to freeze my heart.

And I imagined myself screaming at Philadelphians, who went about their daily American lives.

Ten blocks later, I collapsed at Rittenhouse Square and, I was told, did indeed grab a woman, begging her to tell me what she found so funny in the world that she could laugh at that moment, with her friend, on a bench in the park?

My water broke and an ambulance carried my wet, pregnant, and barefoot body away from the crowd of onlookers, who stared in pity at the deranged little woman about to give birth.

My obstetrician, who was called by the hospital at the behest of the medics, alerted Mohammad, who immediately summoned Elizabeth. The two of them heard the news and needed only one look at my face to know that Fatima and Falasteen had not survived. But I looked away from their eyes, afraid their sorrow might free the tears I labored to contain.

For ten hours, my body convulsed with contractions. I wanted the labor to go on until eternity. My eyes turned to glass, my heart to ice, and no breath left my body without first being stripped of its sound. I held it all in, gripped it with my fingernails. Imprisoned it all in an inexpressible clench of my jaws.

Whatever you feel, keep it inside.

I wanted the pain to last longer, to become more intense, to kill me, too. The need to hurt was far greater than the need to push and I saw the confusion, even fright-or terror-of the nurses who came in one after the other "to check on me."

The aging elegance of Elizabeth's face was damp with compassion and a discernible desire to lift me out of my own fate. But in her wisdom, she said nothing, merely holding my hand without once letting go, as I gazed into space clinching my jaw tight on its trembling hinges, lamenting the few tears that escaped in a silent journey from my eyes.

At last, my baby's instinct for life conquered me and I let go. I pushed, drenching the cloth beneath me with the pulp of childbirth and tears, freed at last.

The head began to emerge, tearing my flesh, and I thought of Fatima's belly ripping at a murderer's blade. I yelled her name like a battle cry-"Fatima!"-pushing harder and harder to rip my body as hers had been ripped. I wanted to bleed for the penance and torment of purgatory. Why should I live while Fatima lay rotting in an unmarked mass grave? Why should my baby be born while hers was torn from her womb? I pushed with a heart that loved and longed for Majid. I pushed again, with the determined force of self-punishment, of contrition and apology for living.

At last, my child lay wrapped in my arms, like a flower bud. I settled my being in the rhythm of her jaw suckling at my breast, while she spooned life over my hardened heart, like moss cushioning a stone. But I kept my distance, going only through the mechanics of caring for a newborn. This fragile infant had forced upon me the will to live, and I resented her for that, for all I really wanted then was to die.

THIRTY-FOUR.

Helpless 19821983 But you do not see, nor do you hear, and it is well.The veil that clouds your eyes shall be lifted by the hands that wove it,And the clay that fills your ears shall be pierced by those fingers that kneaded it.And you shall see.And you shall hear.Yet you shall not deplore having known blindness, nor regret having been deaf.For in that day you shall know the hidden purposes in all things,And you shall bless darkness as you would bless light.-Khalil Gibran, "The Farewell"

I EMBARKED ON MOTHERHOOD WITHOUT Majid and with only a thread of will. Elizabeth and Mohammad were there, steady and compassionate. I moved in with them, at their insistence. In many ways, they saved us, Sara and me.

I watched my child with curiosity, nourished her body for the sake of duty. I held my emotions in a tight fist and hard jaw. But Sara's scent was irresistible, an intoxicating, wordless promise that weakened me. So, at times, I sneaked over my heart's fortress to inhale her baby smell into the deep parts of myself that still craved love. And I would lose myself in the rhythm of her suckling jaw, the warmth of her helplessness, the insistence of her endless needs.

A week after the massacre at Sabra and Shatila, Newsweek Newsweek magazine determined that the most important story of the previous seven days had been the death of Princess Grace. magazine determined that the most important story of the previous seven days had been the death of Princess Grace.

The following week, the cover story was "Israel in Torment." Israel, a victim Israel, a victim.

American press "reports" agitated the ghosts crowding my mind. Aisha's sweet face would smile before my eyes, annoyed. Fatima and Falasteen, too, would come knocking at my visions in search of a decent grave, for an honest reckoning of what had happened to them. Thoughts of Mama, Baba, and Yousef, and a deluge of longing for Majid's touch, would build up an oppressive weight that then would crumble over my heart, like the concrete of our building that had crushed my husband in his sleep. The only way to stop the emotional storm from gathering was to splash cold water over me. Literally, I needed physical coldness to mute it all. Otherwise, I'd have gone mad, I'm sure of it. But the storm was always there, latent, lurking in the vast clench of my iron jaw. So I stopped reading or watching the news and I feared touching Sara, lest I infect her with my destiny. Lest she warm my heart and unthaw the wrath and the ghosts and madness I feared lived inside me.

I shut down. My defenses pricked anyone who dared to come near me, including Sara, though I secretly continued to consume her scent at night while she slept, to fill my lungs with the reason I needed to breathe. I loved her in spite of myself. I loved her immeasurably. Infinitely. And I feared that love as much as I feared my own fury at the world.

Ariel Sharon remained free to pursue the politics of violence, until eventually he rose to the highest office of power in Israel, becoming prime minister of the Jewish state. The citizens of Israel elected him on February 6, 2001, more than a year into the second Palestinian uprising, and the American press described him as "a portly old warrior" and a "tough veteran of Israel's many wars." The forty-third president of the United States of America, George W. Bush, referred to him as a "man of peace."

How the memory and horrors of Sabra and Shatila were vanquished.

The last time Yousef and I spoke was in January 1983, though he said he would try to call again before "this was over."

"Before what's over?" I asked.

"Yasser Arafat is a coward who leads his people to slaughter with the rope of American lies," he said.

"Brother, you sound ill. Are you okay? Where are you?"

"I left the PLO," he said. He had done so shortly after they had been exiled to Tunis and now he spoke to me from Lebanon.

"Lebanon?" I gasped. "How did you get back there?" I was sure the Americans did not know. He must have sneaked in. But how? Who was he working with? And, my God! Why was he there?

He answered nothing and I began to feel the frost in his voice. "Don't ask questions, Amal . . . I just called to be sure you were fine and secure," he said, each word emerging stiff, isolated, chilling.

"Yousef. I love you. Please leave Lebanon. Please, my sweet brother. We can come together again and find a life, maybe in France . . ."

He didn't answer.

"I named my daughter Sara. You should see her. She looks like Majid. Are you there? Hello! Yousef! Please . . . Yousef. Yousef? Please answer me, I can hear your breathing."

Silence.

"Yousef, please. You aren't alone. There are thousands of fighters who lost as you did. As we all did. You and I still have each other. I know your pain, Yousef. You know I know it. I have hateful thoughts just like you. But please just . . . brother. Don't get yourself killed. I couldn't bear it. I need, Yousef."

The telephone connection was severed. My brother was irretrievably gone. He had traversed the burning abyss, before which I still cowered, and landed on the calm, detached shore of vengeance. He had left his soul to rummage through Sabra and Shatila, where his wife and daughter lay in a mass grave beneath a garbage dump, under the impunity of their killers, under the broken promises of superpowers and under the world's indifference to spilled Arab blood.

THIRTY-FIVE.

The Month of Flowers 1983.

APRIL ARRIVED IN 1983. On its eighteenth day, the month of flowers saw the harvesting of the bile that had been sown in Lebanon. Fire was vomited from the bowels of revenge, injustice, and yes, history, sending plumes of smoke onto every turned-on television screen.

My dreams the night before had forced me out of bed at three a.m., but I cannot recall those dreams now. I took coffee before taking in the sunrise, while Sara took my breast in her hungry sleep. I rocked her in my lap, her rapacious little lips suckling my nipple, and I reached for The Prophet The Prophet, strewn on the floor among the chaotic piles of my books. I read these words, last read to me by my father when I was too innocent to understand: A little while, and my longing shall gather dust and foam for another body. A little while, and my longing shall gather dust and foam for another body.A little while, a moment of rest upon the wind, and another woman shall bear me.Farewell to you and the youth I have spent with you.It was but yesterday we met in a dream.You have sung to me in my aloneness, and I of your longings have built a tower in the sky.But now our sleep has fled and our dream is over, and it is no longer dawn.The noontide is upon us and our half waking has turned to fuller day, and we must part.If in the twilight of memory we should meet once more,we shall speak again together and you shall sing to me a deeper song.And if our hands should meet in another dream, we shal build another tower in the sky.

I did not read the newspapers that day. Always, there was an excuse to avoid the news, and always, I took it. But it came to me anyway on that eighteenth day of the month of flowers.

A man had driven a truck loaded with explosives into the U.S. embassy in Lebanon, killing sixty-three people and wounding scores more. The triangular compound was a horrid place, littered with body parts. Footage showed survivors dazed by the blast, walking aimlessly in what could have been hell. A man, overwhelmed by the bloodbath, sobbed against a wall. Another man and a woman, each having thought the other had not survived, threw their arms around each other. Towers of black smoke rose from the ruins, paling in the sky, as the ABC reporter choked on the mist of death. He excused himself and I knew the smell he was breathing at that moment. "Terrorists hit the U.S. embassy here . . . ," he said.

Elizabeth and I sat red eyed in front of the television for hours, transfixed. Tearful family members of the victims gave emotional interviews and the stillness of my heart reached through space to commune with their pain.

A while later, the day found me burrowed in the sofa cushions, watching Elizabeth lovingly feed my daughter the soft baby food from a jar. The television was off. A persistent breeze lifted the thin curtains, fluttering a few moments of tranquility into that turbulent day. The neighbor's rose vines had grown high and pretty outside the window. Across the room, Elizabeth cajoled baby laughter with a flying spoon and airplane sounds and I thought, as I always did, that I should be the one feeding my child. So, I tightened my jaw to keep her baby laughter from unearthing love in the gray stillness inside me. But I smiled anyway at the spectacle, discreetly filling my inner quietude with an irresistible, but secret, joy, and at that moment, the FBI, the CIA, and local police were surrounding our home.

I answered the doorbell, hoping to find Yousef standing there. But my heart dropped at the sight of their badges.

"Are you Amal Abulheja?"

"Yes, can I help you?"

"We'd like to have a word with you," said a handsome blue-eyed man in a spotless dark suit. "If you don't mind," he added politely, professionally. They were all polite and professional, in fact. All six of them suddenly inside my house.

"My name is Jack O'Malley," the agent began, but I interrupted him as that name smiled in my mind.

"I knew a Jack O'Malley once. He was from Dublin. Worked for the UN in a Palestinian refugee camp."

"We need you to come with us," he said dryly, a tone unbefitting his name.

I left Sara in Elizabeth's care, voluntarily submitting to go with O'Malley for further questioning.

There, on a folding metal chair centered in a small bare police room, I sat subdued by curiosity and foreboding.

"My name is Jackson. Tom Jackson, ma'am. I have some questions," said a corpulent man with an angry face. "Do you know this man?" he asked, sliding a photograph toward me on the table separating us.

I took the photo of Yousef with trembling hands. It showed only his face, in harsh details I had never before seen. The deep lines around his eyes held the pitiless resolve I had heard in his voice the last time we spoke. The upward-curling waxed tips of Yousef 's mustache, where he had carried the memory of Jiddo Yehya, were cut off.

It was Yousef 's face, but nowhere in his features could I find the brother I had known all my life.

"This is my brother," I said, and I feared the answer to the question I could not utter: Why do you ask? Why do you ask?

O'Malley, who had been standing silently against the bare white wall, stepped forward, slowly leaning his weight on the table to meet my eyes with the fire in his. "We think he's the terrorist who bombed the embassy in Beirut. What can you tell us?" He enunciated each jagged word with profound contempt.

I locked my jaw and threw away the keys. I didn't believe them and my heart retreated to its inner tundra. But my senses exploded with awareness, heightening the experience of disjointed details in the room. The slight, almost imperceptible sway of the hanging light, the cheap smell of a man's aftershave, the sniffle of someone with a cold, the shift of another's weight, and the dirt particles grinding on the tile beneath his shoes. A wrinkled note, torn from a school notebook, landed before me. Yousef had written it and it had passed through the hands of many, including a CIA informant, making its way to me, for whom it was intended.

Forgive me, Amal. It is time they taste a small dose of the heaps they have fed us all our lives-Yousef.

For the next ten hours I answered their questions and their accusations. They may have been as drained as I was, but they remained unsatisfied with my answers. "Yes, I know he left the PLO . . . I don't know why . . . Because he called me and told me . . . That's all he told me . . . I don't know anything about the Islamic Jihad group . . . I swear."

He had done it all, they thought, the planning, the recruiting, and the bombing. "I don't believe you," I said.

"We don't believe you, either."

Ammo Mohammad arrived with his lawyer and I was, a day later, at last free to go.

I remained in the absolution of my inner darkness, but demons followed me there too, crowding the back alley of my days with a past too dense. I let Mohammad go on without me while I roamed the streets of Philadelphia, trailed by government agents who made no secret of their presence and thenceforth for many years rarely left me.

Rain fell and I welcomed the distraction of the splash of my boots on the pavement. The agents behind took cover beneath black umbrellas, maintaining only a few steps away from me until I stopped at a bar. It was a musty red-lit rectangular chamber with brick walls hoisting life-size photographs of Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe. It was the bar on South Street where I had first tasted alcohol during my college years at Temple. Drenched, I found an empty stool at the far end of the bar and settled in. My hair was soaked with rain and my yellow T-shirt clung to my skin, revealing fine feminine contours on one side and the unsightly legacy of one Israeli soldier on the other. A string of Long Island iced teas cocooned me in a fog, where the only sound was the sermon of colliding ice cubes in my fat glass of liquor, which I raised once in recognition of the two trench-coated agents drinking tonic at the other end of the bar. Somewhere in my befogged state, I heard a voice ask in surprise: "Hey . . . Aren't you that girl that used to live with Angela? What's your name . . . Omar or something. Amy? No, Omar, right?"

It was Milton Dobbs. I recognized him immediately. Angela Haddad's ex-husband. Without a word, I returned to the solace of my drink. He mumbled something to his friends and they all laughed.

Suddenly a clarity shattered my oblivion. Attention in the bar turned to the television screen. The music was turned down.

Everything seemed to give way to the voice of a reporter standing amid the wreckage of the U.S. embassy. "Rescue teams are still finding body parts," said the broadcaster, and I watched the wretched scene, frightened that the FBI could be right. That the brother I loved with every part of me had done it. But then I thought about the brother I knew and was sure it could not have been him.

The two poker-faced agents watched me, not the reporter.

"Fucking terrorists!" Milton declared, puncturing an abscessed resentment inside me. From the corner of my eye I saw him turn in my direction as he shouted, "I think we ought to carpet-bomb the whole fucking place. Get rid of every last sand-nigger."

Rage nominated me to hell.

I rose, blind with anger. The truth I knew swarmed over me like locusts, and fire screamed in my veins. No crevice of my being did not sting as I watched my arms pound fists into Milton, who floundered beneath me in shock, blood running from his nose and the flying white dress of Marilyn Monroe winging on the mural above us.

I was a small woman, with a frame bearing no more than 105 pounds, and in no time I was handcuffed, hearing the testimony of a bystander, and I stood there panting.

". . . she flew like a . . . I mean it, officer. She literally flew off that-there barstool and knocked him clear off. Shit, I never seen a woman do that," he told a police officer, pausing between thoughts to laugh and marvel at what he had witnessed.

A crowd gathered, but the men who had been trailing me all night still sat at the bar. Behind the faces circling Milton and me, I saw Jack O'Malley.

A humiliated Milton refused to press charges, dismissing me as "a psycho bitch."

The police removed the handcuffs and left. The crowd thinned. And I don't know why, but I walked up to Jack O'Malley and rested my head on his shoulder.

Looking at my swollen hand, he called to the bartender, "Can we get a bag of ice for the lady?"

My brother was a boy who walked the hills of Tulkarem and drank from the water springs in Qalquilia. He played soccer with the abandon of youth on the plains of Haifa and fed from the bosom of an ancient lineage in the land of his forefathers. We played backgammon, he and I. He was a man with a smile that melted many a Mediterranean heart. Truly, it was the most beautiful smile I have ever seen. He was denied, imprisoned, tortured, humiliated, and exiled for the wish to possess himself and inherit the heritage bequeathed to him by history. His own heart he devoted to one woman only, for whom his grief shook the earth and spilled the blood of those who stood on it.

The picture from O'Malley's pocket made its way to television screens across the country and my brother Yousef became the poster boy of all things vile and evil in the world.

Once, when I was four, Yousef tickled me so hard that I peed in my pants. When I was six, he spent days upon days teaching me how to blow a bubble with chewing gum. With the same patience, he taught me to whistle. In the sweetness of my youth, he and I walked together endless miles to the markets. We are captured in a photograph-the two of us digging into an orange in front of the Damascus Gate in the Old City before Israel conquered it. We ate figs, olives, and peaches straight from their trees. I spied on him while he read dirty magazines with his friends in our pitiful refugee camp. I read his love letters to Fatima and in his absence, mocked his sentimentality, like any bratty little sister would do.

While his unforgiving face peered out at the world from television screens, I found the picture I had taken the day Fatima gave birth in the Shatila refugee camp, now forgotten killing fields and mass graves. The lines around Yousef 's eyes were all made of love. His expansive smile hung by the tips of his mustache, the meticulous legacy of Jiddo Yehya's love, which my brother had waxed daily into his appearance. Yousef looked silly in that picture, frozen in his toothy grin with newly born Falasteen cradled in one arm and Fatima, the love of his life, sweetly leaning on his other shoulder.

THIRTY-SIX.