For your sake, oh city of prayer, I pray.Ya bahiyat el masakin. Oh rose of all cities.Our eyes travel to you each day . . . to ease the pain of your churches and to wipe the sadness from your mosques . . .

I stopped, spread my arms to my sides to touch both walls of the alley, and ran my palms along the stone of those taller, closer-together homes. "This is how Huda and I always walked through these corridors," I said to my daughter.

"You have no idea how moving it is for me to be here, where you grew up. I can't wait to meet Huda and hear stories of you two." Sara was visibly excited.

Another song now. This one reached into the heart, first with the wail of its nye, then with its words.

Unadeekum. I'm calling your help, tugging at your hands and I kiss the ground beneath your shoes . . .I give you the light in my eyes . . .And I take my share of what pains you.I have held nothing back for my country . . .And I scoffed in the face of my oppressors, an orphan, I, bare and without shoes.Unadeekum. I'm calling your help, holding my blood in my palm . . .

Ahead, some children giggled at two grown women running their palms on the walls as they walked. A rush of squawking chickens batted their useless wings in an attempt to flee from the small children chasing them. Some things had not changed.

The old had died, the young had aged, homes had grown taller and alleyways more narrow, babies had been born, children had gone to school and chased chickens, and the olives had twisted with fruit. Still, the refugee camp of Jenin remained as it had been, a one-square-mile patch of earth, excised from time and imprisoned in that endless year of 1948.

A voice from my past crept behind me. "You're in Jenin." It made my heart explode with the memory of love. With the memory of life. "Must you always state the obvious?" I said, turning to the tiger eyes of Huda. We flung ourselves around each other, laughing through tears.

"You got fat," she said.

"So did you," I said.

"Must you state the obvious?" she said, imitating me.

She pulled Sara into our hug and the three of us, jolly, made our way to her home.

"It's only me and my youngest, Mansour, in the house now," she said, panting as we trudged up the sloping alley toward the small shack not far from the dwelling where we had spent our youth. "The Jews took Osama last month. Jamil, one of my twins, comes often to check on us, but most of the time we don't know where he is." She stopped, stored up a breath, and went on. "He's with the resistance," she said, opening the metal door of her home. "The Jews killed his twin, Jamal, when he was twelve years old. Jamil never got over his brother dying in his arms like that. Sit down, I'll make us some tea."

Huda's beautiful eyes shone from a face engraved by decades of weather and by the loss of her child. In her eyes, our shared yesterdays tarried with the taller, denser Jenin of the present. The continuity of our friendship was stored in those eyes, and I searched them to find the sense of home, which I had expected to feel in Jenin but did not. Had I changed that much? How unnatural it felt to pick up strands of a past I had abandoned long ago.

"Mansooooooour!" Huda called to her youngest. Within minutes, a tall, languid young man bent his back to enter the house. He acknowledged our presence with a passing look, not rude and not polite. His arms dangled, as if they were weighed down by his hands, which were splattered and brushed with paint of all colors.

"Habibi, this is Amto Amal. She's finally back. And this is her daughter, Sara," she said. He shook our hands, looking through us, and he left as he had entered, in matter-of-fact silence, bending his body to clear the doorway.

"That was my baby, Mansour. He's an artist!" Huda said, emerging from her tiny kitchen with a tray holding three glasses of hot tea and some biscuits. "But don't be offended. Mansour doesn't talk. He stopped speaking when he was six."

Later that day, Sara and I watched Mansour paint a mural portrait of a recent shaheed, the one who had blown up the Jerusalem cafe. He moved his arms in large fluid brushstrokes along a wall that would greet the looming Israeli invasion. Soon an implacable face emerged from the paint, its larger-than-life eyes peering beneath a tightly swathed kaffiyeh into the futureless 1948, into the freedom of a defiant death exploding in a shit-pile of glory.

Though he spoke to no one and gave few more than a passing glance, Mansour was much loved in the camp. It seemed everyone knew his name. Passersby stopped to admire his work, pat him on the back, and mumble private thanks and prayers for the boy and his talent.

"He's very talented, isn't he?" Sara said.

But it was more than artistic ability. It was his silence. A quiet so dense and thick that it seemed to exist on the verge of materializing. He painted from the depths of its hush, and it hovered around him like an invisible force.

"It makes me angry knowing what they did to him. How they got away with it," Sara said. Over tea, Huda had given us the abbreviated version of his kidnapping at the age of six, when he had been taken blindfolded in the back of an Israeli army jeep and returned a week later for a ransom of five hundred dollars. "Of all my children, he was always the most sensitive. The one who needed me the most," Huda had said.

Ammo Darweesh had become a beloved patriarch in the camp. I could see that by the number of people at his home, most of whom recognized me when I stepped through his door. "Are you who I think you are?" one of my cousins exclaimed, coming to embrace me.

"Praise be to Him who brings our loved ones home from el ghurba," another said. "Praise to Him." And they all rose excitedly to greet me but waited respectfully for my uncle to see me first.

I made my way to Ammo Darweesh, leaning on his wheelchair to meet his outstretched arms. "Ya habibti, ya Amal." My ammo began to cry. "You bring the winds of Hasan and Dalia into this house, darling. You bring me joy, beautiful daughter." I kissed his hand three times, touching it to my forehead between each kiss.

My heart swelled with love and memories, more and more so as Sara and I spent the evening there. Ammo Darweesh had grown old and frail, but he was spirited during those hours with us. My cousin whispered to me, "I haven't seen my father this happy in a long time, Amal."

Not until our third night in Jenin, on April 2, did I learn that Haj Salem was still alive.

"We take turns taking food to him every day, just like our mothers used to. The children here do not know him the way we did. I am not sure when he stopped the storytelling. It was gradual, I think. Mostly he just chips away at wood sticks now with a small pocket knife, which we intentionally keep dull," Huda said.

I would visit him first thing the next day.

We were in for the night. Lights all over town were out or locked inside by blackened windows. Israel had launched a bombing campaign against nearby Bethlehem, the little town of, and moved hundreds of troops to towns around Jenin.

Nestled in candlelight and sandbags, Huda and I reminisced, unpacking the burdens and delights of memory for our children and finding gems we had almost forgotten. We made Huda's home that night into a shack of small happiness in a one-square-mile mute sea of anxiety.

Slouched against a stack of sandbags, Mansour sketched on a pad across from us, smiling occasionally. Sara's vocabulary narrowed to three basic words, "Tell me more," while Huda and I tossed back our shared life, tasting it now through our grown children. The Warda house, home of our one-armed doll, climbing trees, hopscotch, Yousef 's dirty magazines, Baba's solitude, the dawn, Mama, Haj Salem, spit-string contests, war. The latent instinct of sisterhood moved us to clasp hands, as we had done since we had awareness, and we walked hand in hand to the end of our memories. Sara lay her head in the nook of my shoulder, wrapping her arms around me, as she had not done since she was too young to remember. And while the air outside was foreboding and pulsed with coming death, I burned with the love I had denied myself and this perfect child resting in my arms. It occurred to me then that I had found home. She had always been there.

"Let's put the night in the hands of Allah and try to get some rest. May Allah protect us and protect my boy Jamil wherever he is right now," Huda said, and we closed our eyes where we sat, reclining on the floor cushions and on each other. Hours passed, but it seemed like we had only just closed our eyes when a volley of voices shouted throughout the darkened camp, "The Jews are coming! The Jews are coming!"

The Jews are coming.

In a moment, an exquisite creature hurriedly entered, bending his shirtless body to clear the doorway. A lantern in his hand illuminated the outlines of hard muscles beneath his brown skin. He whispered to Huda, "Yumma, are you awake? Mansour, brother, where are you?" He flicked the light switch. "It's okay. The Jews will not be here for another hour."

An hour.

Swollen with tears, my dearest friend wrapped her body around her son. She kissed him with frantic love, making sure that no space on his handsome face was left unkissed, no inch unloved by his mother. Huda knew that Jamil might never return after that hour. The spectacle of that good-bye moved me to grip my daughter, both of us pulling ourselves and our tears away from a moment where we had no right to be.

"Mansour, brother. If anything happens, it's up to you to take care of Mother," Jamil said, understanding the silent response of Mansour.

When Jamil went to leave, something extraordinary happened. It lasted for less than an eternal thirty seconds and I believe that only I witnessed it. As he turned-a black-and-white checkered headband tied behind him, communist red armbands marking two violently perfect limbs-his untamed round black eyes fell accidentally onto Sara, and a stare held them both in place. An unexpected urgency, a plea. A sudden love wanting to be. Some fantastic desire, which neither of them could afford. A familiar oasis between two strangers, calling to them both.

"Jews! Jews!" we heard, and the moment was banished by that call to find refuge in that refugee camp. Mansour turned out the lights, lit another lantern, and hugged his brother. Jamil kissed Huda on her forehead. "Allah yihmeek ya ibni," she cried, praying for his protection.

"Khalto Amal," Jamil said flatly, "after whom my sister was named," stating the obvious. He did not allow his eyes another glimpse of that oasis standing next to me.

Instead, I watched his presence pass over my daughter's skin, like a caress. Like an apology, a regret before the end. A rite of the dead.

Jamil reached to the only wall hanging, brought the frame close to his face, kissed its glass, and returned the photograph of Jamal, his twin, forever twelve years old.

Then, Jamil was gone.

At 2 A.M. came the roar of rolling tanks, like the purr of a beastly cat. We held each other. The metal teapot, cooled by the night, sat where it was left. Mansour pulled close into the arms of his silence. He kept drawing. Huda faced her mat toward Mecca and prayed quietly.

In time, other sounds came. The raspy shelling of tanks. The shrill of helicopter missiles. The thunder of airplane bombs. The clap of explosions. The cacophony of military power was parceled amid a devious quiet, where the ti-ti-ti-ti ti-ti-ti-ti of critters leaving their holes and cries of small children could be heard as soldiers went from home to home. The sounds of death and destruction rose and fell, lasting nine days, which we spent in the innermost, lowermost room. A bigger kitchen hole. of critters leaving their holes and cries of small children could be heard as soldiers went from home to home. The sounds of death and destruction rose and fell, lasting nine days, which we spent in the innermost, lowermost room. A bigger kitchen hole.

"Remember?" Huda turned to me.

"I remember."

We knew homes and buildings were being leveled nearby. The scream of bulldozers, like an orgy of dragons, made the earth quake beneath us, and we devised an exit plan for if and when they came toward us. Huda wrapped a small package of family photos along with her family UN identification cards, tucking the small bundle into the chest pocket of her thobe. Sara and I kept our American passports in our respective brassieres. All of us kept our shoes on.

Through it all, I held my daughter close in a private dream, falling in love with her as if I had just given birth to her once more. We talked for nine days, dismantling the unuttered words of a lifetime. As death rained from the sky and bullets sprayed the outer walls of Huda's home, Sara and I peeled back the pain and bitterness we each had held so dear and found our shared longing for Majid despite, or perhaps because of, the terror we felt.

"I wanted so much to know. To talk about him with you, you know. Why wouldn't you even talk about him?" Tears quivered in the rims of her eyes. Majid's eyes. Infinite black spheres; a lazy arch in the corners and one brow that could lift itself away, like a smile. The feminine version of Majid in our daughter's face. In the dust of memory I could find nothing whole, only pieces of him. A particular wrinkle. A scar. Cowlick at the base of his neck. The sky and the Mediterranean blending into a single hue. But I could conjure his scent, indeed. The dew of his sweat after labor and after love. After so many years, Majid was the scent of blue.

"I'm sorry, Sara." I opened my hands and unhinged my jaw. "I was afraid . . . so afraid of what I might feel." I put my heart in my open hands. "Do you remember what it was like when the Twin Towers fell on September eleventh?"

Her brow lifted. "Yes. I remember you stayed in your room all day the next day and didn't go into work. I thought you took it pretty hard and I'll admit I didn't understand. What does that have to do with my father?"

And there was Yousef 's voice, oppressed and sad and angry and impotent coming through telephone wires of twenty years ago. "Your father was killed the same way. Israel bombed our apartment building the night before he was going to leave Beirut to join us." There, it came through my heart and my lips. There was no fury or rage or despair. Just a sweet pain. A sadness I could drape over my heart, in my open hands, to keep it warm.

"Oh, God!" She held me dear, tightly so.

"I grieved three thousand times. Then I grieved for myself, a lonely woman without the honor given to the wives of the fallen. The reverence for their loss, for their children's loss. It was eloquent and grand. So moving and charged with solidarity. And there was me, in the mirror with the disparate worth of my husband's life. The disdain for my loss. FBI always there, somewhere. The past always loomed. But on September eleventh, I faced the last moments of your father's life. I saw him in every person who tried to jump and every body they pulled from the rubble. And I saw myself as I was never allowed to be, consoled, understood, and loved."

Sara was crying. Guilt, because my behavior then had irritated her. "Oh, Mom. I'm so sorry. I had no idea. I was so insensitive. I didn't understand."

I looked at my daughter and knew, as I know the sun will set and rise again, that I loved her with a longing and depth more profound than time, more profound than God.

"Shhhh, habibti. You don't need to explain anything. I wasn't a very good mother. I should have told you. We should have talked like this years ago. I'm the one who's sorry."

Activity outside made us all jump, Huda from her sleep. I was eleven again in the kitchen hole. Huddling again, praying, Mansour drawing. We held on, checked our papers, passports. Shoes tied, ready to run. Stretched our legs; a cramp could be fatal. But we didn't stand up; bullets could come through the windows. Huddle, huddle in the innermost lowerermost rooms. Fear flying from hearts like little birdies in the air. Chirp, chirp Chirp, chirp.

Sara was frightened beyond anything I'd ever seen in her face. Even the color of her face retreated and hid. I rubbed back the hair from her forehead, kissed it. I kissed her face. Kissed away the fear. Until it was calm again.

Bullets and tanks and helicopters went back to their bullet and tank and helicopter world. Quiet, and so were we. An occasional scream or a cry. Soldiers inspecting their work, perhaps. Quiet, but for the chirping of invisible birdies.

Now it had been quiet long enough. We exhaled, blowing the birdies into a corner, and began to whisper. Then talk.

"Was it love at first sight? When did you fall in love with my father?" Sara asked, but I could not define a moment. I had a sense that I had always loved Majid. How can one find the first moment of love? When, in what instant, does the night's dark sky become blue?

"I don't know, habibti," I answered honestly, but her expression demanded something else. A story.

"Well, on that ride from the airport. After we got to the camp, your father got out of his Fiat with candy falling from his grip for the dozens of children gathering around him. It was such an endearing sight . . ." And the memory of my husband, of blue and love and loss, settled gently in my throat. Tears fell from my eyes. Mercifully, they fell.

"Tell me more, Mom."

The quiet didn't last. We heard more explosions now followed by intermittent fire.

The terror raging around the walls of Huda's small shack pushed us together into the wonderful bonds of mother and daughter and friendship.

"You know," Huda began, "Fatima wrote to me about you and Majid. She seemed so happy." Then Huda let her eyes fall to the floor. "But I didn't get the letter until many months later, until . . . after . . ."

"Do you still have the letter?"

"Of course. It's right here, with all my important papers," Huda said, pulling the bundle from the chest pocket of her thobe. She removed a folded piece of orange paper and I remembered the pad of orange stationery that Fatima had kept in her kitchen pantry, a detail tucked in my memories of Lebanon.

I unfolded it and began to read how Falasteen was getting so big. That Yousef worked and worried too much and how happy they were to have me with them in Lebanon. The letter spoke of Majid and me, and Fatima praised her own matchmaking skills, taking full credit in her letter for our marriage. She had just received the news of her second pregnancy and she had written, "You're not going to believe this, but Amal is pregnant also. She's due in September, too!" She wrote how much she missed Huda and missed her family in Palestine. "Someday," she said, closing her letter.

Inshalla. Ya Rabby, we will be together someday. All of us. Yousef, me and the kids, Amal and Majid with their kids, you and Osama with your kids. I dream of this day. Yousef, me and the kids, Amal and Majid with their kids, you and Osama with your kids. I dream of this day.Love, Fatima Fatima On the seventh day, Mansour was taken away. Soldiers blew open the lock on the metal door, hemorrhaging through. While two soldiers ransacked the house, another demanded Mansour strip to his underwear. We looked away in a futile attempt to save him some dignity. They blindfolded and handcuffed him. And Mansour's silence draped itself over him like an overcoat as they took him, leaving his drawings littering his home.

"Allah be with you, son," Huda said. Not crying. She had run out of tears, I think. "Mansour will come back. They will beat him up. They always do. He always comes back," she said, mostly to herself.

Always is a good word to believe in. is a good word to believe in.

We collected Mansour's art in a small pile of papers. It was the world as he saw it. Huda praying, Sara resting in my arms, Jamil victorious in battle, Sara's profile, all of us bent over a small meal with the angel of death standing guard over us.

Precious little water remained and we were nearly out of bread. What had happened? What had happened? We dared not remove the sandbags over the window to look out and were too afraid to move near the mangled metal door, which offered a lookout hole. We dared not remove the sandbags over the window to look out and were too afraid to move near the mangled metal door, which offered a lookout hole.

But it was calm now. It had been calm for a while. Soon, they will ride with loudspeakers allowing us to leave our homes Soon, they will ride with loudspeakers allowing us to leave our homes. But they did not and we ran out of water and finished the bread. We thought surely someone would come soon to clear the dead, whose unseen bodies forced us to breathe through cloth soaked in rosewater.

The odor became unbearable. The markings we made on the wall indicated that two days had passed since the bombing had stopped, but we could see nothing through the hole in the metal door. An infinite cloud of dust and debris of demolished homes hovered in the air.

We licked the last drops of rosewater, breaking the bottle to get at the last bit, and we slept. "The world cannot possibly let this go on," I said to Huda.

"The world?" Huda asked sarcastically, rhetorically, and uncharacteristically, deeply bitter. "Since when does 'the world' give a goddamn about us? You have been away too long, Amal. Go to sleep. You sound too much like an Amreekiyya." With that, she and her wisdom pulled up the cloth over her nose and closed her eyes. The next dawn, the sun rose over the haze of a decimated refugee camp. I heard the sound of a large vehicle. A Red Crescent ambulance A Red Crescent ambulance. I left a note that I would return with supplies from the aid truck, and I stepped out, covering my face from the assault of light and dust. I walked on into an eerie stillness, like the quiet of a graveyard where the imperceptible sounds of vanished souls and banished little histories crawled up my feet from the earth like ants.

I thought it was over. I thought the Israelis were gone. It had been quiet. I thought the car I heard was a rescue vehicle, an aid truck.

I was wrong.

It was an Israeli military truck. I saw it stopped ahead in a prairie of rubble where hundreds of homes had stood only days before. The bed of the truck was weighed down with lifeless bodies stacked on top of one another, like lumber. The truck had stopped to remove the mangled body of a Palestinian hanging dead on a protruding metal stake on the side of a partially demolished building. Its head was hugged around by a black-and-white checkered headband, and around its arms by two communist red armbands. Symbols made hollow by death in that truck of lumber.

The weight of my mistake fell on me. Cautiously, moving only my eyes, I looked upward and saw the snipers. The Jews are still here The Jews are still here.

Click. Click.

I turned in horror toward the shrill of metal switching on itself and felt the muzzle of a rifle at my forehead before I saw the young face of the soldier standing before me.

The moment made a space for us, pushing the dust away, and fixed us together.

Here we are now. I see his contact lenses swimming in his eyes and sweat bubbling on his forehead.