Sister Marianne approached me, putting her arms around me-how good that felt.

"Do you know this woman?"

"Is she dead?"

"No, dear. She's in shock. Do you know her?" Sister Marianne asked again.

Just then, a beseeching resentment filled me. I hated Mama for being in shock, whatever that was, for not being the one to put her arms around me, for always having been different from the other mothers.

"No," I lied. "I don't know her."

I shrank behind my disgraceful lie to remain in the protection of Sister Marianne, and Huda followed my lead. She was confused and frightened, wanting only to stay with me.

I recognized many other faces in the makeshift hospital and tried to recall the last time I had seen them before all this. Basima lay sleeping on a cot with a bloody bandage around her head and a splint on her leg. I had last seen her breastfeeding her baby at Khalto Sameeha's house, the day baby Aisha had had her ears pierced. Ammo Muneer was awake and bloody in a chair. My last image of him had been at Beit Jawad's coffeehouse, where he had sat reading and cursing Arab leaders who were quoted in the newspaper.

But still no Baba.

I closed my eyes and kept them that way as long as I could, opening them just enough to dispel the images from my own head.

Later that day, Sister Marianne took Huda and me with her in a Red Crescent truck on a long ride to Bethlehem. She made us hide inside food crates when we arrived at a checkpoint. Luckily, the soldiers just opened the door, took a quick look, and closed it back. When the truck stopped again, we were at a familiar church. Baba had once pointed it out to me as the Church of the Nativity, during one of the Christian celebrations we had often traveled to watch. "They say that's where Master Esa was born," he had said to me, patiently answering my endless questions.

Bethlehem looked just like Jenin, crumbled, torched, and strewn with death. The church where Master Esa was born had been shelled and still smelled of fire. Inside, hundreds of children, most of them orphaned by the war, sat on the floor. No one spoke much, as if to speak was to affirm reality. To remain silent was to accommodate the possibility that it all was merely a nightmare. The silence reached up to the cathedral ceiling and cluttered there, echoing sadness and unseen mayhem, as if too many souls were rising at once. We were existing somewhere between life and death, with neither accepting us fully.

Sister Marianne arrived, carrying an urn of water.

"Follow me, dears. You'll need to bathe together to save water," she instructed us as Huda and I walked behind her to the washroom. The good nun poured the water and left us. We were so bewildered that we got into the metal tub with our filthy garments. The warm water traveled over my body like a loving embrace, whispering a promise of safety.

Huda and I disrobed in the tub and sat across from one another. Browned water separated us, but our legs rested together. Face to face, we stared at one another's thoughts, seeing each other's terror and knowing that we had crossed some unmarked boundary beyond which there could be no return. The world we knew was gone. Somehow we knew that. We cried silently and moved into each other's small arms.

We lay that way, in the quiet of a foreboding for which we knew no words. I looked at my toes protruding from the water. Chipped red polish. It had been only one week since we had passed around the nail polish, giddy over something that had made us feel older. Now, in that bathtub inside the church where Master Esa was born, Huda's nails and mine still bore the chipped red remnants of that day. I calculated one week as the distance between girlish vanity and hell.

Slowly, I let my body slide, pulling my head beneath the water. There, in that silent world, like the stillness I had heard after the blast that had torn the kitchen and killed Aisha, I had an odd desire to be a fish.

I could live inside water's soothing world, where screams and gunfire were not heard and death was not smelled.

TEN.

Forty Days Later 1967.

LOOKING OUT THE BROKEN window in our devastated camp, the sun was still hidden from view, but the sky was already ablaze with the purples and oranges that announce its coming. Amazingly, the cocks had survived, keeping to their regimen of crowing, unaware of the portentous shadow that hung over us. As always, I was up before dawn. Sunrise belonged to Baba and me, when he would read to me as the world around us slept. It had been forty days since the war had ended and Sister Marianne had returned us to Jenin and I had found Mama with a broken mind. Baba and my brother Yousef were still missing.

Soon, the melody of the adan came through the air, into our makeshift homes, to call the faithful to prayer. Decades later, after a life in exile, that unmistakable cadence of the Arab soul would summon a calm certainty in my heart that I had made the right decision to return to Jenin.

Although it was still dangerous to venture outside, little Samer, our five-year-old neighbor, was running through the refugee camp yelling incoherently, his high-pitched voice slashing the stillness of "curfew," which was now a fact of our lives.

I guessed that the poor child was reliving the terror of recent events. It would not have been surprising, for lately most of the young ones wailed in their sleep.

"They're naked," Samer panted, struggling to order his thoughts. "They need clothes. They told me."

Little Samer sounded hysterical and people began to stir. Exhausted and bewildered eyes peered from windows. Old women cracked their improvised doors for a look.

"What's going on?" called a voice down the alleyway.

"Are we at war again?" asked another. In these moments of confusion, despair, and anticipation, the rumor pulsed like a wave of hope through the living dead.

People began to shout, "Allaho akbar!"

Faces appeared at the windows of every shack and more cries were heard as excitement surged through the camp. From a window opening blackened by fire came a euphoric note: "The Arab armies are coming to liberate us!" But the people remained hesitant, for we could see Israeli soldiers perched on their lookout posts. Arrogant conquerors, they. Murderers and thieves. I hated them as much as I hated the sea of white cloth fluttering over our homes-signs of our humiliating surrender.

But as quickly as the euphoria rose, so it fell when Samer began to make sense.

"Enough! There is no more war. The boy says our sons are alive," came a man's voice, quieting the war songs. It was Haj Salem. He survived! He survived! I wondered where he had taken refuge. I wondered where he had taken refuge.

Haj Salem had seen it all. That's what he used to tell us youngsters. It took many seasons to learn his story because he gave it in pieces. "I've seen it all," he would say. "I worked faithfully for those yellow-haired, colored-eyed men, and in return they brought us foreign Jews who stole my furniture." Always just pieces to the puzzle of his existence, offered up one at a time. "I've seen it all. All the wars. They kicked us off the land and they took all the furniture I had made." Then he would walk away, leaving us to the naggings of curiosity. But in our camp, his story was everyone's story, a single tale of dispossession, of being stripped to the bones of one's humanity, of being dumped like rubbish into refugee camps unfit for rats. Of being left without rights, home, or nation while the world turned its back to watch or cheer the jubilation of the usurpers proclaiming a new state they called Israel. Haj Salem was a sagacious man with light-hearted humor who morphed wood into ornate furniture and delicate trinkets. Once, he claimed, a high-ranking British officer had bought one of his olive-wood carvings of the Virgin Mary to give to the queen of the yellow-haired, colored-eyed men, provoking in me a fantastical notion that Haj Salem knew a queen.

He was the most animated and lively character of my youth, and it was he who passed history on to the camp's children. My treasure of Palestinian folklore and proverbs came from him. It was he who gave me the names and stories of people I would encounter as miscellaneous victims of war in the history texts that I would read decades later.

We loved to trap him, tugging at him with pleas for a story about the old days. We would beg, ten or twenty snot-nosed, barefoot urchins promising not to bother him again, until he would relent, knowing well that we would return the next day, or the next hour.

We would gather around him on the ground and position our attention to absorb the great gifts he told. Then, he would weave dynamic accounts of life and past events with such intricate clarity that Palestine and all her villages, many long since razed by Israel, would come alive in my mind as if I had lived there myself. His raspy voice, scratched by years of smoking muaasal on the hooka, would spiritedly rise and fall, prodding our imaginations to live among our forefathers, watching past events unfold as if that very moment.

To our young eyes, Haj Salem seemed inconceivably old. "At least ninety," Lamya ventured to guess on one occasion. Only as an adult would I realize that he was merely in his early sixties during those times before the 1967 war. He was nearly bald, with thinning white hair patched over enormous ears. His brown skin bore a great deal of hair, covering a tall frame of bones that protruded at his shoulders like a clothes hanger under the traditional dishdashe. Like most Palestinian men, he wore the checkered black and white kaffiyeh, loosely swathed around his head. He had an unkempt mustache that often betrayed the foods he ate. It was a massive, jet-black thing that never aged-even when he was well into his nineties-an odd relic of youth on a withered old face. Best of all, he had no teeth. He had lost them, he said, "in a battle with scurvy." Naturally, all of us children hated "scurvy," which we assumed to be an Israeli monster. When we indulged in juvenile name-calling, invariably "scurvy" was invoked as an insult. "You're wicked like scurvy" was part of my own arsenal of vulgarity. By the time I was nine, someone had set me straight and I never used it again.

I remember well that toothless grin. As children, my cousins, friends, and I had often tried to make him laugh. We would lampoon Israeli leaders, ridiculing the self-important character of Menachem Begin, whose features we imitated by squishing our faces, or mocking the gnarly disorder of Golda Meir, the "Old Hag," as the Egyptians called her. Finally, when he could take no more, his pink gums would split his brown head in hearty laughter, squeezing his eyes shut into two long wrinkles that were indistinguishable from the other lines that took their place in that wonderful laugh. Having provoked what we thought was a hilarious sight, we would join him with our giggles.

I never knew from where he came, which town or village, because he knew so much about nearly every part of Palestine. Mama never told me and Yousef wasn't sure. It was said that his family was killed in the Nakbe of 1948-although he never told us that story. He lived alone, no wife, no children, no brothers or sisters. This was quite remarkable since Arab society revolves around the extended family. No one had "no family." But Palestinians, who became scattered and dispossessed following the Nakbe, proved so many exceptions to Arab society. He had been friends with Jiddo Yehya. That much I knew from Baba.

Haj Salem was also the first person to tell me about my brother Ismael, who had disappeared as an infant in the fateful mayhem of 1948. "The baby just vanished," he said in one of his narrated exhumations of history. "Your mother was never the same after that."

The day when little Samer ran yelling through the camp and I learned that Haj Salem had survived the war of June 1967 would mark the end of life as I had known it and the beginning of a military occupation that would rule our lives. It had been forty days since Israeli soldiers had gone from shelter to shelter, rounding up all the men who remained in the camp. For forty days, we were under curfew, and during those long hours Huda and I remained inseparable, even going to the bathroom together. Our house had been destroyed, so we took refuge in Khalto Sameeha's house, where we tried not to look at Aisha's crib. Mama was already there when we arrived, praying. She didn't say anything to me, just produced an old loaf of bread and cheese for us and went back to her prayer mat. I had followed her, and standing behind her, I wrapped my arms around her. I felt ashamed, wondering if she had been aware when I left her. Mama didn't say anything and neither did I. She just patted my hand softly, maybe lovingly. Then I left her, again. Huda and I found a deck of cards in the pantry and invented games with improvised rules. Sometimes we sat silently in a corner, hypnotized by the rhythm of Mama's murmur and the slow swaying of her body as she prayed on the floor for hours on end. We combed and braided one another's hair and started to talk about what we had lived through. Eventually, we cried.

Little Samer banged on the metal door. My head was already hanging out the window, and our neighbor, Samirah, hung her head from the window next to mine.

"Amal," Samer called to me, "Yousef is alive!"

Samirah, her hair wild and eyes still full of sleep, asked about her brother. "What about Farook?"

But Samer had already moved on, his little legs sprinting. By then other children from the camp had joined him, and they ran in a growing pack, like stampeding little banshees. I pulled my head inside to wake Mama, but she was already coming toward me.

"What's happening?"

"Samer Haitham says Yousef is naked."

"What?"

"Yousef is alive."

"Allaho akbar! Where is my son?"

"I think the peach orchard."

"Is he with your father?" She asked the question foremost in my mind.

Mama and I were outside in no time. Her favorite scarf was tightly wrapped on her head, its hems pouring down her shoulders. That scarf had been a present from Baba years ago when he got his first pay as a janitor at the UNRWA school for refugee boys in our camp. Now yellowed by time, it had been white with ornate stitching along its border. When Mama's body finally caught up to her mind, which had departed the world soon after the 1967 war, I kept that scarf, and I still have it, tucked safely in a small box that holds what remains to me from my family.

But on that fortieth day, all I wanted was to see Baba. Nothing else mattered. Nothing less would heal my wound but to lie in the safety of his embrace and hear him whisper that everything was going to be fine.

By the time a small crowd of people started to form, it was clear that, indeed, some of the men were returning to the camp. Women started their ululating zaghareet and chanted, "Allaho akbar." I knew Yousef was among them, but there was no mention of Baba.

I waited in the chaotic anxiety of those endless moments before the men arrived. The longer I could not make out Baba's figure in the distance, the greater my heart's fear of the unbearable. With fatiguing will, I held back an urge to cry and climbed onto the flat roof of an intact building for a clear view.

Looking out at the new landscape of hastily built Israeli watchtowers, I felt years crammed into weeks, a terrible dream with no end. The earthen taste of demise pervaded, and those days entrenched themselves in my memory as particles of bloodied dust and the putridly sweet scent of rotting life and scorched soil. We moved but went nowhere. We looked, but reality blurred our vision. We inhaled and exhaled the dust of carnage, but we were not breathing. As the crowd grew larger, I watched from the roof in the silence of my private upheaval. We were refugees, all of us. Those who had fled had become refugees once again, in another human junkyard dotting Israel's brief history. And those of us who had remained became prisoners in Jenin.

Now our waiting was for freedom. The original hopes to return home became pleas for elemental rights. Before, we had longed to see Haifa, Yaff a, Lydda, Lod. Now it was a mortal risk to step into the fresh air. Gone were the days of family trips to Tulkarem and Ramallah. Jerusalem, too, was gone. "They burned Jerusalem; may God burn them, too," came a woman's voice in a context that I no longer recall.

Huda climbed next to me on the roof, where I stood searching the distance for Baba.

Our terror in the kitchen hole had only strengthened the bond between Huda and me. She possessed a tenderness and loyalty that yielded to me in our friendship. Although adversity in the decades ahead would reveal a natural poise and a quiet strength, in our youth her timidity and solitary temperament made many think her odd, especially the adults.

The old women in the camp loved to survey Huda's eyes. "There's that strange little girl. Come over here, darling," they would say. And while she stood obediently without protest against their prodding fingers and stale breath, they would behold what they proclaimed to be the "touch of the divine" in her eyes, which were an unusual melange of gray and bronze.

Huda had lived with us for three years before the 1967 war. Those were likely the happiest times of my childhood. Each day, fourth through sixth grades, she and I walked hand in hand to and from school. We found trees to climb where no one could see us girls behaving like boys. We collected bugs and played make-believe in a playhouse we constructed. Our friendship was hallowed with "Warda," a one-armed doll that we rescued from a garbage pile near the village of Taybeh. Our playhouse was a home we built for Warda. It had four walls of piled stone and sat beneath the third olive tree, behind the twin cedars on the footpath to nearby Bartaa. We went there nearly every day to care for Warda, and word got around among other girls in the camp that Huda and I were the proud parents of a handicapped baby whose arm had been shot off by an Israeli and who soiled her diapers and cried real tears. It was not long before bands of curious little girls flocked from Jenin to visit at the "Warda house" near Bartaa. And, to keep with custom, they brought sweets. Sometimes the sky would darken over our tea and pastry parties, where Warda was passed among the cooing of so many mothers.

Huda's father was the reason she came to live with us. He was a dreadful man who beat her and when she was eight, It It happened. He did happened. He did It It to her. It would be an unforgivable betrayal to utter the word. After to her. It would be an unforgivable betrayal to utter the word. After It It happened the first and only time, she confessed to me as if happened the first and only time, she confessed to me as if It It were her disgrace, and she allowed me to tell Baba. Alarm had concentrated in Baba's eyes when I relayed the heavy secret, which I did not fully understand. With firm caution, Baba ordered me to honor Huda's confidence with discretion. If people knew, it would have been a fadeeha. Such a scandal involving a girl's virginity was of serious consequence in our culture. Not wanting to scandalize Huda's pain, my father convened with Ammo Darweesh and Haj Salem in a sober conspiracy to dislodge Huda's father. Baba did not disclose his cause to either my uncle or the haj, nor did they demand explanation. For my father had a natural authority that inspired loyalty from those who knew him. The three men went first to Faris, Huda's older brother. Humiliated, Faris turned his outrage on the weakest target, his sister Huda. But Baba managed to have Huda come live with us. And she and I could not have been happier. were her disgrace, and she allowed me to tell Baba. Alarm had concentrated in Baba's eyes when I relayed the heavy secret, which I did not fully understand. With firm caution, Baba ordered me to honor Huda's confidence with discretion. If people knew, it would have been a fadeeha. Such a scandal involving a girl's virginity was of serious consequence in our culture. Not wanting to scandalize Huda's pain, my father convened with Ammo Darweesh and Haj Salem in a sober conspiracy to dislodge Huda's father. Baba did not disclose his cause to either my uncle or the haj, nor did they demand explanation. For my father had a natural authority that inspired loyalty from those who knew him. The three men went first to Faris, Huda's older brother. Humiliated, Faris turned his outrage on the weakest target, his sister Huda. But Baba managed to have Huda come live with us. And she and I could not have been happier.

We did not see Huda's father after that. It was rumored that he was crossing into Israel, supplying information about anyone in Jenin trying to organize opposition to Israel. Perhaps that was true for a time, but not after the war. I would not have recognized him in that wheelbarrow but for his four-fingered hand that dangled over the side. I never divulged that sight to Huda.

"Is your brother one of them?" Huda asked as she searched the crowd below.

"Yes. Is Faris?"

"Yes. He's naked."

"Yousef is naked, too."

"Why are they naked?" The question burned between us.

"I think their clothes were stolen," I finally said.

In the crowd below, I saw the top of Mama's head next to Um Abdallah, the woman who lived in the shack above ours. She was Samirah's, Farook's, and Abdallah's mother, a widow who was also Mama's closest friend. They spent much time together, cooking and knitting. Now they waited together for their sons.

"There's your mother." Huda's annoying habit of accentuating the obvious.

"I know."

"She's wearing her silk scarf."

"I know."

"She's with Um Abdallah."

I wanted to yell at her, but I knew such callousness, after all she had lived through, was too cruel. In the stupidity of my youth, I did not have the bearings to appreciate Huda's sensitivity and allowed it, instead, to exasperate me. I wish I had been as good a friend to her as she was to me.

Still standing on the roof, Huda asked, "Is Farook coming too?"

I did not answer. I could not find Baba among the approaching men.

"Do you think he's naked, too?" She looked at her feet, then at the sky, and answered herself: "Probably. They're all naked."

Lamya, the girl whose somersaults I envied and a regular guest at the Warda house, climbed up next to us. "Why are they naked?" she asked.

Huda answered, "The Jews stole their clothes . . ."

I felt crowded. The sun was full in the sky now. Another dawn without Baba made the air sink with a dreadful reality, and I found it difficult to breathe. Baba's absence since the war had grown as big as the ocean and all its fishes. As big as the sky and earth and all their birds and trees. The hurt in my heart was as big as the universe and all its planets.

The war changed us, Mama most of all. It withered Mama. Her essential fiber unraveled, leaving her body a mere shell that often filled with hallucination. Following the occupation and the disappearance of my brother and father, Mama hardly left her prayer mat. She had no desire for food and refused even the paltry rations that arrived on the charity truck. The cotton of her gown grew dark with the stench of her unbathed body, and her breath soured. She smelled of fermented misery. Her lips hardened into a web of cracks and her body shrank, while she prayed. And prayed. And while her body lost mass, I watched her eyes grow more vacant, betraying a mind that would henceforth slowly forfeit its charge of reality.

Mama's bravery during the war would later be invoked as the essence of a fellaha's fortitude. She refused to flee. She had been pushed off her land once when Ismael was lost, and she had resolved not to let it happen again. Everyone agreed that when it mattered, she showed herself to be truly courageous. "A lot of us just talked big, but we ran for our lives while Um Yousef was true to her word. She said she would not let the Jews take away the only home her daughter knew," is what people said about Mama after the war.

Mama had stayed for me. And I had left her alone to go off with Sister Marianne. I have never forgiven myself for that.

The day Yousef came back was a day when I recall having great affection for Mama. She still had moments of lucidity then, though with a softer disposition, her austerity perhaps conquered by delirium. I saw her that day in the fullness of motherhood, with all the wounds of her shattered life and broken mind momentarily healed. I saw her as the woman who had risked her life to protect me from what she had once endured. Her movements were sincere, as were her tears. But it was fleeting, as she had already begun to lose her mind. I'd have grabbed those tender moments with my bare hands if I could and stored them in a safe place.