My mother knew nothing and would curse the luck that had brought her here and say she hated Beirut, and hated this camp, and hated al-Ghabsiyyeh and its people, and didn’t know why she’d married man who was destined to die.

Should I tell you how my father married her?

Or maybe these things don’t interest you. You prefer stories of heroes and heroic deeds. You’d probably rather hear the story of how the man died on the threshold of his house.

But I don’t know that story.

Listen. I’m going to tell you a story I don’t know. My story isn’t beautiful like yours, but I’ll tell it so we don’t get bored.

I know you’re fed up with me. This way we can save some time and kill it before it kills us. I’m certain you can hear and are laughing to yourself and want to say lots and lots of things. Never mind, Father, say what you like, or say nothing at all; what matters is that you arise from this sleep. I’m certain you’ll wake up one day and discover that I bathed you in words, and washed your wounds with memories.

Fine words, you’ll say, but I don’t like them.

You like words when they’re like a knife’s edge. You used to make fun of people’s speech, of how instead of stating their opinions directly they take refuge in euphemisms and metaphors. “Words must wound,” you’ll say. But where do you want me to find you words that wound? All our words are circular. From the beginning, which is to say since Adam, our language has been circular. No matter how hard we try to break its circles, we find ourselves falling into new ones. So bear with me and play the game. Come, let’s circle with our words. Let’s circle around the sun, let’s circle around the camp, let’s circle around Galilee, let’s circle around Nahilah and Shams and around all the names. Let’s circle with names, let’s circle without names. Let’s circle and come back to the beginning. Come back with me to the beginning, so we can get to the opening of the story.

I see the opening as a long dress. I don’t know if it belonged to my mother or my grandmother. Two slender women covered from head to toe by long, ample, black dresses. Two women waiting, sitting on the doorstep of the house with me between them not knowing which is my mother and which my grandmother.

When I was little, I had two names and two mothers. My first mother called me Khalil and my second mother called me Yasin. The first told me stories about the death of her man, the second about the loss of her child after the village fell. Both stories belong to me, and I juggle them, becoming both child and man. You’ll understand what I’m saying because you yourself are living the moment that everyone yearns for: You’re in your second childhood — helpless as a child, speechless as a child, resigned as a child. Ah, how good you smell! Didn’t I tell you we’d go back to the beginning? Your childhood smell has come back to you, your childhood has come back to you. Even your shape has started to change. I’m convinced you’ve started to get shorter, that you’ve lost a lot of weight, and that you’ve returned to that mysterious moment that confuses our memory when we try to recapture our childhood.

Put out your hand so I can prove it to you.

I open your hand and place my finger in its palm; your hand closes over my finger. Do you know what that means?

It’s the first test we give a child at the moment of its birth. It’s an involuntary reflex. So now you’re at that stage: You’ve become a child again, and instead of being my father you’ve become my son. I open your hand again, and you have the same reaction, and I’m as proud of you as any father of his child. I play with you and hug you, and you surrender to the game and play and squirm. I hug you and breathe you in; your smell fills my nose. It isn’t the smell of soap and ointment and powder; there’s something that comes from deep inside you, a new smell that transports you to the first sproutings of childhood, to an ageless age, where we find the beginnings of speech.

I can return there, too, and see those mysterious days that I lived between two mothers. Najwah went away to her family and left me with Shahineh, daughter of Rabbah al-Awad — the leader of Ghabsiyyeh’s militia — and wife of Khalil Ayyoub, who was killed in ’36 when he was a bodyguard for his wife’s father in the revolution. I see the two as one woman. They looked as alike as sisters, the same dark complexion, small eyes, high forehead and long hair rippling black. When Shahineh died, I felt that Najwah had died, too. I won’t talk to you about Najwah now because I know nothing about her. I do know that I looked for her once. I went to Jordan and looked for the wife of Ayyoub and daughter of Fayyad in the Wahdat camp but could find no trace of her. Then I got that mysterious letter from Sameh’s wife in Ramallah. Then nothing.

I asked you why my father died, and you didn’t answer me.

I asked my grandmother, and she said he had been killed because he was destined to die like his father.

“Dear God! How could the dream come twice?” she asked. “And both times, the man dies.” The first time was in ’36, when I saw, as a dreamer sees, this light go out, and the second time was in ’59, when the light went out again. How can I describe what I saw to you, my son? A light like no other light, a light white and brilliant. It was over me as I sat on the ground. The light came in through the window and drew closer and closer to me. I got up and moved toward it, and when I got there, I saw the face of your grandfather, Khalil. ‘What’s the matter, man?’ I asked, and his face started to crumble into bits like glass. He came to me and hugged me, and suddenly he went out. People, like lights, go out. The light that came from the faces of your father and grandfather went out before my eyes, and I said to myself, ‘He is dead.’”

Both times, my grandmother saw a light that went out. She never tired of retelling her dream, which took the place of the actual story.

“Al-Ghabsiyyeh was like a light, and it went out,” said my grandmother as she listened to her son-in-law telling of his visit to the village.

“Al-Ghabsiyyeh went out,” said Shahineh. “I was alone that day. My late father and my husband were commanding the militia, and I had Yasin and his brothers with me. Suddenly they attacked. The Jews broke into the village from the north and southeast. They occupied the house of Osman As’ad Abdallah in the southern part of the village and seized him with his son. Then the shelling started, and we fled.”

My grandmother told how a man fell from the minaret of the mosque. She said she saw him falling like a bird. His name was Dawoud Ibrahim. In the midst of the bombardment and the chaos, he climbed to the highest point of the mosque to hang a white rag on the minaret to announce the village’s surrender. She said she saw him there at the top waving it in his hand. Then he hung the rag, but it fell. He picked it up, looking into the distance, toward the source of the shelling, as though he wished they’d stop firing for a while. As he tried to hang up the rag again, he was struck by a bullet in his chest and fell like a bird. He hugged his arms to his chest and plummeted. My grandmother said that when she saw him she understood how birds die, that Dawoud was like a bird. She gathered together her children and ran with the others, scared of the tall trees — she kept glancing upward as she ran, scared that people would fall from the trees.

She kept running until she reached the fields of Amqa, where she lived for a while with her children beneath the olive trees.

My grandmother said she lost all her relatives and her father disappeared.

I’m sure that you must know my grandfather because he joined up with you after the fall of al-Ghabsiyyeh on May 21, 1948. He went to Sha’ab and stayed there with your garrison until it was dismantled and you were all arrested. He died in prison in Syria. You got out and went to the Ain al-Hilweh camp, where you put on an unforgettable show of madness that allowed you to move in on the police post and seize their rifles before disappearing.