“You’re Jordanian?”

“Yes.”

“Give me your passport.”

“Here.”

“Do you have a driver’s license?”

“Yes.”

“Go. Go, all of you. He stays here.”

I take a step toward Anis and ask him, “Where will I find your license, Anis?”

“In the drawer. In the desk drawer. Or ask Zaghlula.”

We set off in the car, leaving our cousin, Assistant Undersecretary at the Ministry of Planning and International Assistance in the Palestinian National Authority, hostage to the soldiers of the settlement of Halamish.

I drive fast from Halamish to Beit Rima and then to Deir Ghassanah.

We stop in front of Anis’s house, the first in the village.

Husam and I get out. Quickly we go inside.

Zaghlula appears in the courtyard, a troubled expression furrowing her face when she notices that I’m driving her brother’s car and he’s not with us.

“Don’t worry. We need Anis’s driver’s license.”

“And where’s Anis?”

“At Halamish.”

She climbs with me the staircase leading to Anis’s room. We search in the drawers and every other possible place. We don’t find the license. We go back to the car.

“Who’s with you in the car?”

“Tamim and Ya‘qoub.”

Her emotions are torn between welcoming Tamim and anxiety over her brother.

“Welcome, welcome!”

“We have to go back to Anis. Excuse us.”

I drive back in the direction of Halamish, afraid that they may have taken him off to Bet-El and made things even more complicated. I intend to try to persuade them to let him go with me and get the license himself but I’m not optimistic. Husam, mixing seriousness and humor, says, “Your cousin Anis is an admirer of the Oslo Agreement and of all agreements signed, not signed, and to be signed. He admires the peace and Palestinian moderation and moderates, and this is the result. He’s been made to eat shit. Serves him right.”

Close to Beit Rima, we’re surprised to find Anis walking alone, returning to Deir Ghassanah. They’ve let him go without waiting for us to come back with the license.

Anis gets in and explodes. “The bastards just wanted to have a bit of fun with us. Two guards fed up with being on duty at the settlement gate, so they decide to use us for entertainment. The moment you left with the car, they gave me back my papers and told me bye-bye. I asked, ‘What about the license?’ They said they didn’t need it.”

Then he remembers that our whole trip is for Tamim.

“I’m sorry, Tamim. I wish you could have entered the village in a nicer way. What have they got to do with driver’s licenses? And I don’t know what made me forget my license on this of all days. Damn it!”

This is how Tamim entered Deir Ghassanah for the first time in his life: checkpoint — pointed machine guns — driver’s license — Bet-El— “This is the State of Israel!”—“Understand?”—“Respect the law of the state!” And the first Barghouti he saw in the village he didn’t have time to shake hands with or hug.

I say to myself, he’ll go through what I did the day I first returned two years ago. His fingers will gradually exchange the touch of velvet for that of cactus — the mountain top of the imagined for the valley of the actual.

In our dreams we draw them as rainbows, but homelands aren’t our poems of homelands, and when they are afflicted with occupation, poverty, and a costly endurance, the gray halo to their rainbow becomes thicker than anyone could imagine. Then I catch myself and think again: Tamim’s response may be different from mine in the end. I come burdened with my past. He starts from the white page of the future. I think, this page is his; it’s his to color as he chooses and to narrate as and when he wishes.

To make Anis feel better, Tamim says, “The important thing is that you’re okay, Uncle Anis. We’re the ones who should apologize for all this trouble we’ve put you to.”

For Tamim, Deir Ghassanah is, before any other house, the Ra‘d House, ‘Dar Ra‘d,’ and before any other face, the face of my uncle’s wife, the ample Umm Talal. On our arrival, Umm Talal rushes out beaming, hugs him, and lets out a trill of joy to celebrate his arrival.

The neighbors of Dar Ra‘d gather to greet us or rather, this time, to greet Tamim. I say ‘greet’ and not ‘get to know.’ I’m sure they ‘know’ him already — know what he looks like: athletic, on the tall side, his eyes black, his hair black and strong as a horse’s. What other topic of conversation is there in the houses of Deir Ghassanah than the news of their sons and grandsons, off in faraway countries?

The absent are the talk of their evening gatherings on winter nights around the stoves and pots of tea. They are the objects of their anxiety whenever the weather, or political, conditions in their countries of exile turn nasty. The village knows their names down to the youngest grandchild and knows their characters and what they look like. It knows who was born, who got married, who fell ill, who was given a ten-dinar pay raise, and who quarreled with his wife or his mother-in-law or his director at work. It knows who got rich and who went bankrupt, who was taken into detention, who obtained his family reunification papers, who did well at school, and who failed. And all this without meeting any of them.

Tamim asks, “Where’s the room? Where were you born, Baba?”

We enter the large room with the high dome and the four piers that meet in the middle, from which an electric bulb now dangles in place of the oil lamp of 1944.

“I was born here, Tamim.”

The word ‘here’ takes me to everything that is ‘there.’ It takes me to the houses of exile. It takes me to times that overlap in my mind. It flies with me from ‘my’ room here and Tamim’s silence to searching in 1963 for a place to rent in the Agouza district of Cairo, to asking for the timetable for the first days of studies at the university there, to driving over the Margaret bridge between Buda and Pest in Hungary, to sleeping on the floor in the Khalifa Prison in Cairo, to the soldier kicking me with his boot in my right kidney to wake me up so that I could be expelled from Cairo at dawn when Tamim was a five-month-old child, and to Radwa’s voice as she curses the officers and then cries after they leave, taking me with them for an absence that will last seventeen years. The word ‘here’ flies me to a apartment in the Mkahhal Building in the Fakihani district of Beirut, the studios of the Voice of Palestine in the building opposite, and to the rooms of hotels, too numerous to count, where I and other young men argue with delegations and organizations from around the world over a comma or half a sentence in order to assert our right to self-determination and in defense of the PLO. I see the PLO’s leadership bending its backbone lower, year after year, under every successive pressure until it has lost its posture altogether, while I raise objections and protest in prose, in poetry, and by keeping my distance. Paradoxically, the political mistakes of the PLO then brought me back to ‘here’ under a nonsensical selectivity that permitted my return but not that of my brothers or their children — Ghassan, Ghada, Ghadeer, Fadi, Shadi, Yara, Lara, Sara, Dima, Dara, and Muhammad. How did politics come to play this back-to-front game with us? Is it enough that by pure coincidence I met the conditions that determined the numbers of Palestinians Israel would allow to return? Is it enough that as an observer at the Palestinian National Council I should be allowed to return?

What kind of a paradox is this?

Does the blind dog of politics wag its tail in greeting to an enemy like me?

And I’m an opponent both calm and rude. I have got out and continue to get out my message of opposition and I shall go on doing so in the future too despite my ‘benefiting’ from the policy that I criticize even when I’m here.