The story I want to tell you is that of my father in Amqa.

I swear it’s as though I were the one who lived the story. My grandmother told it to me hundreds of times, and every time she’d say to me, “You did such and such,” and then would catch herself and say, “May God forgive me, I was starting to get you and your father mixed up.” I’d enter the story and correct the details because she’d forget names or mix them up. Even the name of Aziz Ayyoub, my father’s uncle, that nobody from al-Ghabsiyyeh could possibly forget, slipped her mind when she was telling me the story of my father and the donkey.

They were in Amqa.

My grandmother was living under the olive trees, like everyone else, with her four children: three daughters and Yasin.

Let’s suppose now that I’m her son, by whose name she used to call me. I’m her son, and I’ll tell you the story.

I was short and round, and no one could believe that I was really twelve years old; they thought I was just a child until the day I returned with the sack of vegetables.

We were hungry. Do you know what we ate during that long month? Almost nothing: bread, thyme, and weeds. Then the bread ran out. Can you imagine a whole people living without bread? We’d gather greens and weeds, and we’d eat them and still be hungry. We slept under the trees, we’d spread woolen blankets over the branches of the olive trees for protection, and we waited. My mother wasn’t afraid. The olive trees weren’t so tall that she had to be afraid of dead men falling out of them. Her father let her know he’d joined the Sha’ab garrison and asked her to stay put with her children until he came and took them to Sha’ab. But he didn’t come, and she couldn’t take it any longer. She told her children that hunger had made her ache for her village and she’d decided to go back to gather some vegetables from her field and bring back some flour and oil. She told her children to stick together and to be careful while she was away.

So I volunteered.

“Yasin volunteered,” said my grandmother, “and insisted on coming with me. I refused and asked him to stay with his sisters. ‘You stay, and I’ll go,’ he said, and to cut a long story short, Yasin came with me.”

We walked with the others who were going to the village, each one with sack in hand. My mother had a donkey she’d gotten from a relative in Amqa. We kept walking until we reached al-Sheikh Dawoud. There the firing started from the rampart that dominates the village. The Jews were hiding behind the barrier, and the firing began. People got scared and ran back toward al-Kweikat and Amqa. I lost my mother, she’d gone off with the donkey toward Amqa, while I kept going toward al-Kweikat, running and shouting. Then, suddenly, there was a man standing in the middle of the road behind his donkey that was moving straight into the line of fire. “Help, Uncle Aziz!” I say, and he says, “Get behind me,” as if the donkey were a shield. I got behind him, and, after a while, the firing stopped. I left Aziz and his donkey and went down toward the valley. He told me he was going to al-Ghabsiyyeh to stay there. “I’m the guardian of the mosque,” he said, “and I won’t leave it. Come with me.” “I want my mother,” I told him, and I left him and went down the valley. I heard firing and thought, Uncle Aziz is dead and started crying, and when I saw my mother I told them Uncle Aziz had died behind his donkey, and everyone believed me.

But Uncle Aziz, as you know, Father, didn’t die. He remained dead in the memory of the people of al-Ghabsiyyeh until ’72, when my sister’s husband returned from his visit and told the amazing stories of Uncle Aziz. Then people found out that my father had lied, that he hadn’t seen Uncle Aziz dead. Yasin died before his son-in-law’s visit to the village, so he won’t be able to tell you about it. So I’ll tell you about it, but not just now.

Where were we?

We left Yasin in the valley of al-Kweikat, crying from fear. Then the bullets became fewer. “I pulled myself together and climbed in the direction of Amqa. On the way, I found a bundle of okra and vegetables. Someone must have thrown his bundle down and fled for his life when he heard the shots. I picked the sack up with difficulty; in fact, I couldn’t really lift it, so I dragged it and the vegetables started spilling out onto the ground. Then I slung the sack onto my back and set off.”

Shahineh reached the olive groves of Amqa and said she’d lost her son at al-Sheikh Dawoud and had fled along with everyone else. She’d led the donkey through the valleys looking for her son; she held on to the donkey’s halter and cried out her son’s name. On the outskirts of Amqa, she had to admit that she had truly lost him and, fearing that she might lose the donkey, too, she returned it to its owners before she went back to stand in front of her blanket-tent, waiting and weeping.

She said she was weeping and didn’t see him.

Yasin returned carrying the bundle of vegetables he’d found in the valley of al-Kweikat. He was small and bent over — the bundle hid him completely.

“I was tired, my back was bent, and the vegetables were on top of me — I was all sweat and okra pods. I made it to the entrance of the olive grove at Amqa with the okra spilling everywhere. I was exhausted and couldn’t believe I’d made it. Instead of throwing the bundle down and running toward my mother, I stood where I was with my back nearly breaking, inching toward her with tiny steps. She was tall and thin and kept waving her hands about and crying while everyone looked on and wept with her. Everyone was rooted to where they were while I drew closer, the bundle of vegetables still on top of me, until I reached her. Then I threw the bundle down on the ground and stood up. Everyone said, ‘Yasin’s here! Yasin’s here!’ They all saw me except for her. She kept crying and waving her arms around, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I grabbed hold of her long black dress and started tugging on it. She bent down and saw me and fell to the ground as if she’d fainted, and everyone went and got water and sprinkled it on her face.”

My grandmother said that when she saw her son, she lost her voice and couldn’t remember anything after that.

She was the only one not to see him. When she recovered from her faint, Yasin and his three sisters were around her. He opened the bundle on the ground and told her he’d gathered all these things: “I went and harvested the land, and I wasn’t afraid of the Jews.” The mother slowly got up, asked her daughters to start the fire beneath the stew pot, and the bustle of cooking began.

My grandmother said they attacked the village at dawn.

The village was half-empty because after the fall of al-Kabri and what happened to its inhabitants we’d understood that everything was over. “But my father, God bless his dust in its foreign grave, didn’t leave,” said my grandmother. “He stayed with the militiamen, so we stayed. Do you know, Son, I don’t know where they buried my father. They said he was killed in the military camp, trying to escape from prison.”

My grandmother said she went to look for him in al-Neirab camp in Aleppo. She paid her uncle and his children a visit, who lived in strange barracks the French army had built. They were squashed on top of one another like flies, in long, oblong rooms. Her husband’s brother, Azmi, said he wasn’t sure, but he thought they’d buried him in the Yarmouk camp and suggested she forget the matter.

“The man’s dead,” Azmi said, “so we can say he died in Palestine.”

But Shahineh wasn’t convinced.

“Forget it, Shahineh, and look after your children.”

But Shahineh didn’t forget it.

She went to the Yarmouk camp and visited Abu Is’af, the commander of the Sha’ab garrison, who was living in the camp alone under a sort of house arrest.

In his tiny house, which consisted of one room without a bathroom, Abu Is’af told her he’d heard shots, but he wasn’t sure if the man had died. He said the military camp they’d been in resembled a prison.