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north, the south, and the east. And the mountain villages are Arab and not Jewish. The people of Ain Ghazal and Jabaa and Ijzim repelled the attack and we aren’t less than they were. Besides, we’re not alone; all the surrounding villages are ready to help save us.”
    My uncle slapped his cheeks in grief. He slapped his cheeks like a woman. The sobbing of my mother and aunt got louder. My father shouted, giving up, “God help you. You go, with your wife and son. But as for my family, I am free.”
    “Have we become two families, Abu Sadiq?”
    “Yes, we have become two families!”
    My uncle sprang up, and said to my aunt, “Get up, Halima. We’re leaving tomorrow morning.”
    My aunt got up and my mother followed her. They were both weeping. Ezz and I followed in their wake, not knowing what to do in this situation that was unlike anything that had happened to us as long as we could remember. My mother could not imagine her little sister moving to live in Sidon, farther than Haifa or Acre or maybe even Jerusalem. And my aunt was terrified of leaving her sister, who had been with her every day of her life. They kept crying until my uncle came into the room and scolded them. Then he addressed Halima and told her that she and Ezz might stay in Sidon for several months, and she should take that into account. The sisters’ sobbing grew louder. He said, “I only need one change. I’ll come back in two days. Come on, you two, get going, enough women’s dawdling!”
    On the morning of the following day we bade them farewell on the beach. My father did not go to say goodbye to them. He stayed angry with his brother, and all through the following days he kept repeating, bitterly, “You’ve left my back exposed, God forgive you.”
    The family crisis did not end. My uncle appeared four days later, alone, coming from the sea. He said that he had come to take the women and children. My father refused, threatening my uncle with a weapon. My uncle left in the boat he had brought from Sidon, taking the townspeople who wanted to leave, women and children and a few men. I was a witness to the event, both halves of it, but my uncle would tell me the story later as if I had not witnessed it. He would tell it with all the details, calmly sometimes and at other times in agitation; and two days before his death he called me and told it to me again in detail, as if he had not told it to me before, dozens of times.

6
    Saturday, May 15th
    Fridays are all alike in being different from the rest of the week. We heat the water three times, for my father bathes first and then my brothers. They put on their long garments and go to the mosque for prayer. When they return my mother will have finished preparing a midday dinner different from the usual midday meal, “Because it’s Friday,” and because the boys, “Poor dears are far from home in Haifa, they’re bachelors who don’t eat enough to nourish them all week.” Even after Haifa fell and Sadiq and Hasan returned to live with us, my mother continued with what she was used to. Friday she would cook and huff and puff and pick up and put down and “Ruqayya, give me this and do that,” “Peel these garlic cloves for me,” “Chop these onions for me,” “Take this plate to the wife of my uncle Abu Jamil, she likes rice pudding,” “Take this dish to this neighbor, for the Prophet said we should care even for distant neighbors.” I get fed up. I say that Friday is my holiday and I work more on it than I do on school days. When I finished sixth grade and could no longer use that excuse I would hide. I would go to the sea. I thought, “She won’t see me in front of her so she’ll manage.”
    It was Friday. It was different from the rest of the days of the week and from other, similar Fridays. My father did not bathe. He left the house early. Sadiq and Hasan were sleeping; when they woke up they did not bathe but rather asked about my father and left the house in a hurry. None