He had not wanted all this. He had wanted wholeness: a homeland, a wife, a family. He had fought to save the Jewish people. But at his heels now were the awful evictions, the killings, the rapes. Moshe could not face all those faces, their voices. He found so little rest in his life. What repose his heart could extract was in the solace of drink. So he walked every day around the corner, then three blocks farther, and entered his refuge to silence the demons and himself.

David left with Yarel a few days later and signed in at the Ramle prison early that morning. The tight sound of their army boots echoed off the dingy walls as they walked toward the clinic. In a moment, David stood over Yousef 's bed. His swelling had lessened and an IV bag dripped fluid into his arm, still marked with the red paint. Less than six inches separated their bodies, and in that space fit nearly twenty years, a war, two religions, a holocaust, the Nakbe, two mothers, two fathers, a scar, and a secret with wings flapping in the slow butterfly way.

David felt the Arab's wrist. "He has a pulse."

Swollen eyelids opened slowly and David's scar parted the haze of physical pain. They beheld each other for nearly twenty seconds. Twenty eternities, wherein David lingered, dangling by the hooks of too many wrong questions. Is it possible they Is it possible they captured a Jew by mistake? A Jew who is related to me? A Jew who came to Palestine without knowing his relatives had also survived? captured a Jew by mistake? A Jew who is related to me? A Jew who came to Palestine without knowing his relatives had also survived? He searched his mind for answers, opening and closing the doors of memories for a clue to who, or what-if anything- this prisoner might be to him. He searched his mind for answers, opening and closing the doors of memories for a clue to who, or what-if anything- this prisoner might be to him.

A tear slid from the corner of the Arab's eye. Ismael! Ismael! He reached his hand toward the soldier and fell unconscious again, his arm dropping to the side of the bed. He reached his hand toward the soldier and fell unconscious again, his arm dropping to the side of the bed.

FOURTEEN.

Yousef, the Man 1967.

I CHANGE.

My world changes, beginning with the day Haje Um Naseem calls me by my name. I go back to Jenin and have to push my way through the crowd into our home. My sister is stiff with fear against the wall. She cannot see me and I want to go to her. I want to speak to her, to pull her in to absorb the fear away, but I am pulled away by my father. He hands a weapon to me from his small cache in the kitchen hole to defend against the fury closing in on the earth. For the first time in my life, I hold a gun.

I need to find Fatima. You cannot go, my mother says. Mama, an experienced victim of war, is gathering supplies and mapping out hiding places with other women. She tells me that Fatima has gone with her mother and sisters to her uncle's house in Ramallah. Then she adds, she'll be safe there.

In the days that follow, I am once again surrounded by fire and fleeing souls. By fear coiled around rage. I fire my weapon, but in the moment of truth, when the test of my courage looks me in the eyes, I cannot take the life of another. I am afraid of violating life. Afraid of losing mine. So I walk with the others, my arms high in surrender. One of the Jewish soldiers pulls my face, searching it with amazement. I am puzzled then by the disbelief in his eyes. But now I understand it was recognition.

In that week I see how familiar words can break like glass and reassemble into goblins that waylay the mind with their claws. "Example" was but a pebble. I had heard and said it countless times before: "for example." Such an insignificant and mediocre word invades the happy days of my youth and steals the memory of playing soccer with young Jamal, whom the Jews make an "example" right before my eyes. I watch life trickle from the bullet wound of a sixteen-year-old "example" and marvel how things weak, even words, will turn vicious and merciless to gain power, despite reason or history.

FIFTEEN.

Yousef, the Prisoner 1967.

HERE IN THIS DANK place, I live on the love of Fatima and memories of our future. These are the threads onto which I cling for breath. My body is stunned by the dialects of torture. I have passed the threshold of pain into numbness. I cannot see, for my eyes are swollen shut. I lie here, bound to myself with rope, and I think something or everything is broken. I think I will die. I think of Fatima, my love, and I can smell the jasmine in her hair. I can see her lashes float through the air when she glides her eyes, mischievously, sinfully, toward me in the crowded market. An urn is perfectly balanced on her head and it does not fall when she seductively pulls her embroidered scarf to cover her lips before looking away. Suddenly, she turns her head back, to be sure I am watching. I am thrilled and my breath goes dry in an open mouth. She is walking for me. The urn on her head saunters with her and I am struck by the symmetry of her posture. I imagine her dancing with the urn balanced on her head as her hips and belly curve into each other in a private performance for me. I read her letters again, scribbled with ribbons in my memory: My love, my mother and sisters are going to Jerusalem on Wednesday evening until Friday. Meet me on Thursday before the dawn prayers in our usual place. I miss you unbearably. It has been two weeks! My love, my mother and sisters are going to Jerusalem on Wednesday evening until Friday. Meet me on Thursday before the dawn prayers in our usual place. I miss you unbearably. It has been two weeks!

I hear sounds around me. Soldiers are feeling for a pulse in my neck. Water is thrown on me and I am sober now. No matter; I return to Fatima, the link that holds my body to its breath.

I see her in the peach orchard beneath the clear sky of the Orient, beneath my body, which I fear will explode with desire. She whispers into my lips, "When we are married, Yousef. Not now." But she lets me taste her softness, leading me into the hot paradise of her mystery. I take her breasts into my hands, keeping pace with the thrash of her heart's beating. She moves her body in a web of inexperience, passion, and the fear of guilt and sin. Her body exhales into mine a declaration of love and it calms my fever. I rise over her, absorbing her nakedness, her sacrifice of culture for love, her submission to me. I taste her breasts, gingerly, and feel the earth's spin in my heart. I make unspoken promises to God to deserve her love and protect her until eternity. I find the virgin grail that will someday bear my children, and I drink from her cup. She rises abruptly, alarmed by the surging ascent of pleasure. I kiss her lips. "Trust me," I say, and she does. Her back curves with the arc of the rising sun and she tumbles, moaning, in my arms. Soldiers wrestle me from my memory of Fatima. They speak to one another and leave. Soon I am transferred to a clinic. I go where I am led and wherever I am, I return to the place in my mind where Fatima lives.

The swelling has lessened and the electric bulb seeps into my eyes. I find light for the first time in an eternity and it illuminates a scar from another life. The scar I drew with carelessness onto the face of my brother, Ismael. But Ismael is dead. A Jewish soldier, whose face is mine, has taken my brother's scar. I think I am dreaming. I reach my hand to touch. But he backs away. Later, not now, I am sure that it was not a dream. Ismael lives. My brother is a Jew. He is an Israeli soldier.

Oh, Father, where are you? We were separated and I wonder, have the Jews taken you, too? Are you somewhere in this prison? In this clinic?

I am still alive. I am returned to the peach orchard where I had discovered heaven in Fatima's skin. The camp is destroyed. The refugees have been made refugees again and I cannot bear the welcoming back. The graffiti of torture on my body is indignant and will have nothing to do with celebration. I see soldiers perched on lookout posts and my heart fills with hatred. Strangely, it is the first time I feel so. But I am certain it will not be the last.

There are too many people around me and I search their faces for Fatima. Um Jamal comes to me in search of her son and I cannot bear her anxiety, the pain of what she knows deep in her heart. I cannot look her in the eyes. I want her gone from my sight. I cannot tell her that Jamal's life was taken to give meaning to the word "example." A meaning to which it has no right. I cannot tell her that the child she carried, fed, and loved is buried inside a word, which takes its new form from Jamal's smile and big ears.

There is gunfire and people let us be. Mother is stoic, though I know she is crying. Her tears fall on the wrong side, into the bottomless well inside her. My little sister, Amal, is cowering in the corner. Something has crawled into her eyes and made them cavernous. Though I want nothing more than solitude, the force of Father's absence compels me to reach for Amal, and she comes in hurried need into my chest, squeezing my bruised body as if she will fasten herself to me for all time.

Father has not been seen since the war. The sky leans on my fractured ribs as I conceive the inconceivable. That Father, the man I thought could never die, is dead. I lean back, a pillow at last, and hear the words of Rumi, murmuring in the susurrus of Father's breath:

How does a part of the world leave the world?How can wetness leave water? . . .What hurts you, blesses you . . .Darkness is your candle.Your boundaries are your quest.

I can explain this, but it would breakthe glass cover on your heart,and there's no fixing that.

Are these enough words,or shall I squeeze more juice from this?

And in my mind I tell Father what I have learned. Ismael is a Yahoodi, a Sahyouni who fights for Israel.

SIXTEEN.

The Brothers Meet Again 1967.

FIVE ISRAELI SOLDIERS, FOUR on the ground, one in the watchtower, were manning a checkpoint near the village of Bartaa. They rotated their duties in sets of two, shuffling and sitting back in the ennui of tedious cruelty. David was idling in the jeep when two Palestinians approached the checkpoint, IDs and permission slips extended for inspection. All was in order but the soldier at the gate ordered them to step aside, halting the long line of Palestinians waiting to cross. The soldier was a corpulent New Yorker whose family had immigrated to Israel.

"Hey!" The soldier stuck his head in the jeep, where David sat eating watermelon. "Come see this son-of-a-whore Arab. He looks like your fucking twin!" he said, laughing.

Dread washed away the boredom. Jolanta's butterfly wings fluttered in David's belly; Moshe's demon breathed down his neck. The secret he did not know, did not want to know, had followed him and he hesitated before getting out of the jeep.

Following the officer, David suppressed an impulse to kick his superior, to watch the fat New Yorker roll down the hill. He did not want to see that Palestinian again. The one who had his face without a scar.

Peering beneath the rim of his helmet, David approached the Palestinian and the two men became yoked in the same angles of their jaws, the same dimples on their chins, the same fullness in their lips.

Their stares bulged with questions-Who the fuck are you, Arab?-How did you become a Jew, Ismael?-and in the air hovered a secret David did not want to know.

With the sorrow of so much gone so wrong, Yousef asked using the few Hebrew words he knew, then in Arabic in case the soldier understood, "Is your name Ismael?"

The New YorkercumIsraeli soldier laughed.

Violent wing-flapping butterflies cluttered David's vision and demons blew in his ears.

David slapped the Arab. He struck him next with the butt of his rifle. He knew not why, but now he could not stop. He kicked the Arab's groin repeatedly. He did it again and again until that that Arab- Arab-that face-was unconscious. The man's friend cried nearby. "Please, please stop. We are not terrorists. He has done nothing. Our permits are valid. Please," he begged. face-was unconscious. The man's friend cried nearby. "Please, please stop. We are not terrorists. He has done nothing. Our permits are valid. Please," he begged.

"Okay. Okay," the New Yorker responded, pushing David aside. "I don't want to have to fill out all the paperwork for a checkpoint fatality," he said.

Yousef lay bleeding. "Okay. Take him where you came from. Now!" the fat soldier ordered.

David walked away breathless.

SEVENTEEN.

Yousef, the Fighter 1968.

I FEAR I MAY BE impotent. From when he beat my genitals, I think there is permanent damage.

Urinating hurts. But I hurt more when I see Fatima. She walks past the garage and I hide beneath a car hood, pretending not to notice her, when all my friends know she has no business in Jenin but me. And they all watch me hide, and they in turn hide from the sorrow on her face.

My little sister, Amal, searches for me, too. I see her with Huda, staring at me across the street. I know she is waiting for me to fill the void Baba left.

Soldiers search for me.

Mama is wasting away.

I am damaged, of no use to the people I love. I'll die if I stay here. But something in me remains afire. Something that refuses to break, insists on a fight.

EIGHTEEN.

Beyond the First Row of Trees 19671968 AS THE CONQUEST IN 1948 did for Hasan, Israel's attack in 1967 and subsequent occupation of the West Bank left his son Yousef with a tentative destiny. The grip of Israeli occupation wrapped around his throat and would not let up. Soldiers ruled their lives arbitrarily. Who could and could not pass was up to them, and not according to any protocol. Who was slapped and who was not was decided on a whim. Who was forced to strip and who was not-the decision was made on the spot.

Yousef matured in the likeness of his father, his quiet temperament whispering Hasan's legacy. He found refuge in the belly of solitude and braced his air with deliberation and thought. Because the occupation curbed Palestinian movement, Yousef could no longer travel to his work and gave up his post at Bethlehem University, accepting a teaching position at the UNRWA boys' school, where his father had worked as a janitor.

For the same reason, Yousef was unable to escape to the hills at will. Instead, he tipped his after-hours energy into the garage he had inherited from his father. Before long, Yousef was away from Amal and his mother most waking hours. Occasionally, he could be found at the Beit Jawad coffeehouse, puffing on a hooka, idling with friends over backgammon or cards. But every Friday, after the Jomaa prayers, coerced by the call of solitude, the seduction of natural beauty, and the potent compulsion of habit, he would risk the humiliation and interminable delays at checkpoints to venture to the hills, as he and Hasan had done since before Yousef could remember. There, under the shelter of trees, Yousef read. It was a daring endeavor, each time a solitary incitement to honor his father's memory. Just as Amal continued to read at dawn, as she and her father had done, Yousef kept returning to the pastures with a book. These were the conditions of helplessness, grasping at continuity, salvaging what could be kept of their source of strength-Hasan, their baba.

Within six months, Yousef had endured torture and random beatings that had marked nearly every part of his body. He had been forced to strip before women and his students, had been made to kiss the feet of a soldier who had threatened to beat a small boy if Yousef did not kneel. Most men had endured such treatment. Most were broken. And most had returned from the humiliation with violent tempers aimed at their wives or sisters or children.

Yousef turned everything inward, as Dalia had done. He cloistered the pain, letting it tangle with powerlessness. Silence consumed their little shack in Jenin, and both Amal and Yousef would later recall those times with a thick taste of emptiness.

Toughness found fertile soil in the hearts of Palestinians, and the grains of resistance embedded themselves in their skin. Endurance evolved as a hallmark of refugee society. But the price they paid was the subduing of tender vulnerability. They learned to celebrate martyrdom. Only martyrdom offered freedom. Only in death were they at last invulnerable to Israel. Martyrdom became the ultimate defiance of Israeli occupation. "Never let them know they hurt you" was their creed.

But the heart must grieve. Sometimes pain emerged as joy. Sometimes it was difficult to tell the difference. For the generations born in the camps, grief found repose in a bed of necrophilia. Death came to resemble life and life, death, and there was a time in her youth when Amal aspired to martyrdom. I can explain this, / but it would break the glass cover on your heart, and there's no fixing that I can explain this, / but it would break the glass cover on your heart, and there's no fixing that.

Yousef rarely joined the angry chanting of funeral marches. He did not celebrate martyrdom, nor did he show grief. A deep aching for life simmered inside him behind a shell of indifference.

Amal adored him so and longed to be in the folds of his every day. Sometimes, she and Huda sat across the street from the garage to watch her brother work, hoping that he would invite her to look beneath the hoods. To share in his life. To reassure her of family. To hug her as he had on that fortieth day after the war.

Yousef spotted her a few times but never asked her over.

They hardly spoke anymore, Yousef and Amal. After the incident at Bartaa, when David had beat him to the ground, Yousef closed the doors of his heart. Letters from Fatima came and were not answered.

While Yousef encased himself in a simmering decision, their mother roamed the crowded realms of her mind, embroiled in discourse with shadows. Um Abdallah was Dalia's persistent companion, the two of them knitting all day on the balcony that leaned under their weight and shaded the front entrance of their home. Amal and Huda often marveled at the two older women, wondering if they were very brave or just unaware of the balcony's rickety state. For it was essentially decorative, barely wide enough to accommodate two people. Other than that, Amal paid little attention to Um Abdallah then. But in revisiting those times years later, she grew to love the woman who had shown her mother such undaunted loyalty. Even when Dalia was most confused, Um Abdallah listened to her gibberish monologues and gently placed her back in the knitting chair if she started to wander off.

Huda returned to live with her mother and brother soon after the war. But she and Amal still spent their days together and that was the only sense of continuity they had.

As before, the girls mostly fended for themselves, but now Amal was bound by custom to ensure the proper running of the household. Before the war, the backdrop to Amal's life had been colored with Baba's love at dawn, Mama's stoic rearing, and Yousef 's clandestine love affair with Fatima. Now, those hues were replaced by military green and the pale emanations of depletion. Neighbors looked at her with pity and whispered.

"What is the girl going to do?"

"She's almost marrying age. That's good."

"Yes. God willing she'll find a good man soon to take care of her."

Though her body had already begun to stretch and curve with new form, Amal was a child, twelve years old, on that cool January Friday when the citrons were ripe and the vines were being pruned and Yousef unexpectedly came home from the Jomaa prayers.

Amal was delighted by the surprise. She made lunch, their biggest meal, and was preparing the floor with a covering of old newspapers, where they would eat. The prospect of spending time with her elusive brother elated her and she was eager to flaunt her culinary skills. Dalia had also been coming up for air from the abyss of unreality and Amal thought it would be like old times. Something like the family they had been.

"Amal, can you deliver this to Fatima?" Yousef asked, holding out a sealed envelope.