It had taken them days to cover the distance and he recalled the postcard his father once showed him of snow resting atop Mount Qasioun. Sufien imagined that when they arrived in Damascus snow would be there waiting for him too. But it was April now, and the morning was warm. It was the saddest spring in Arab memory, but it was still spring.

  Yalla, his mother called to him, to Ahmed, and to Wafa, their sister.

  She was always crying out to them to keep moving, even though they had scarcely stopped for days, as if if they paused for a single second, if they looked back too long, they would be turned to salt.

  Um Khalid was there just ahead of them, her back hunched. She had stopped speaking entirely when they left Safad. Sufien had kept an eye on her these last days because he still owned a child’s perception of that borderland between this life and the next. She was nearly upon it. Um Khalid’s son had also been martyred, though she would never know it. She wouldn’t know that her only son already lay still, gazing up for the last time at the skies above Palestine.

  Now Um Khalid paused, and pointed to something, brought her fingers to her lips, gesturing like a spirit in a dream. She was performing the Shahada, though neither Sufien, nor the others, understood why. She hadn’t spoken in days, after all. How could she tell the others that she wanted no more of this life? They would just say: Ehna Raji’een, we’ll return, we’ll return, Um Khalid. And you’ll be reunited with your son.

  Later, on Sufien’s own deathbed, when words had failed him too, when his throat just wouldn’t open, he would gesture just as he had seen Um Khalid do at five years old, raise his pointer finger up to substitute the prayer, la ilaha illa Allah, la ilaha illa Allah. When his daughter asked what he was saying, what he was seeing, he would try to speak, but only his finger would move, that finger which had once written letters, that had touched women on the inside.

  One minute Um Khalid was walking, if slowly, the next holding her finger to the heavens, and then, she had fallen clutching her chest.

  * * *

  *

  Heart attack, the old Syrian doctor said.

  But she’s breathing, Sufien cried. He remained hovered over her when the rest of the refugees had drawn away. They were afraid she was ill with something more—that they might catch it. It had been in the water, Sufien had been sick too, they said. They didn’t want that boy nearby them either.

  That’s what you expect to see, breathing, so that is what you see, the doctor said. Because in life we see life. Only the dying can see the land of the dead. The doctor’s eyes were blue with blindness.

  She’s already cold. Feel her feet, he said to Sufien, feel her hands. Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un. She’s gone to meet her maker.

  Sufien had never seen death before, never looked at it in the face. Um Khalid appeared to be smiling. Young as he was, this made sense to Sufien. And he was not afraid of her.

  Sufien then realized something mundane, and at the same time profound, something that had the capacity to undo him, the thought that can undo us all if we remain with it too long—that every single person he could see in that enormous city, all of them were born and all of them would die.

  Allah yerhama, his mother said, and grabbed Sufien away from the corpse by the collar like a cat. Stop looking at her or the jinn will feed on you. That woman, Um Sufien, she was always moving on.

  I thought we were staying here, here in Damascus, Sufien said to his mother. He loved the city already, all those buildings sprawled against the hills. Sufien likened it to the spread of Allah’s house above, a home of many mansions.

  That’s when Sufien saw the officer in the distance, commanding them all in French.

  They walked and they walked, and when Sufien looked back, hours had passed, and the dense city had fallen away. Before him spread out rows, as far as he could see, of tents, people’s belongings piled around them in unruly stacks, like a natural disaster had swept through, and there were suitcases unfolded and clothing hung on lines. At once the stars were rising, and then a flurry of clouds passed overhead and someone began to cry out, already smelling the coming weather in the dirt. It will destroy everything, a woman cried. All that we have left. And before Sufien knew it, the rain was falling meanly, and they were all scrambling, hiding books and briefcases, and little boxes of jewelry beneath the tents which were flailing in the wind. His mother had the baby in her arms, and the rest of the children she yelled at, told to find cover. So they ran, and found nothing, just a tarp which had been hung over the entrance to the camp, and Sufien was squashed there between so many strangers, watching his mother with the baby to her chest struggling to keep him dry. The wailing hadn’t stopped. It wouldn’t stop.

  Later he would read in Dante’s Inferno of the souls arriving at the River Acheron being flagellated by the ferryman before making passage into the underworld. Back then, Sufien had no metaphor for what was happening. Still, he knew if it went on this way, the wailing and the rain, it might just form that mythical river which spread in secret around the length of the planet, and it might carry them all across to that other bank, the one from which no living soul ever returns. Though he couldn’t name it, he could feel it, that losing home is the closest approximation we have for losing our bodies. To be a refugee is to be nearly apparitional.

  Bienvenue, someone said. And Sufien looked up. Who had spoken? Now the ferryman was speaking in French. Through the hordes of ghostly bodies, he saw the officer emerge again, in his blue helmet. He was hollering at them all, holding them back with a baton. Bienvenue, bienvenue!

  6

  Find It Again

  On those nights in the camp, in those worst of times, Sufien never felt less alone. He was surrounded. They wept, yes, but they also sang and they danced and they played the oud and babies were born, and there were even weddings held in the twilight. The soundtrack of that place was life on this planet, all at once—the screaming, the crying, the laughter, the chatter of children. Even the hushed arguments of adults, followed by the moans of their love.

  At no other point in Sufien’s existence did the gangly chorus all come together quite like that. Forever afterward, he always felt his heart pinch at the end of a party because everyone was always leaving too abruptly. That was how he eventually came to drink. He never wanted a party to end, he never wanted to be left with himself after all that music.

  For now, home was this, this tragedy laid bare beneath the stars. They slept on mats, and some on sheets on the raw ground, and drank the water they were given by the UN soldiers, exchanging a bag of lentils for a few pieces of bread, always the scent of cigarette smoke in the wind. To pass the time, Um Sufien taught him how to play iskambil, always beating him, then throwing her cards down on the little makeshift table made of a suitcase, singing her victory song, that went something like ya maghlub, time to cry, loser. Everything was reduced to its simplest elements. This was a period of his life for which Sufien always felt a particular nostalgia, but when he later confessed that to comrades of the struggle, he got into trouble. The Nakba was a catastrophe. It could never be romanticized.

  Didn’t they realize that prosperous times are treacherous in that they obscure the coming misfortune, Sufien protested. The worst of times, those times when true survival is at stake, are allowed to just be beautiful, because there is no other option: rejoice in the beauty that remains or succumb to death.

  Besides, at that time, he was too young to know what any of it meant, historically speaking, that a thousand years, more, of a homeland, had been stolen, was being stolen, cast to the dustbin of history, that his family had lost their gold, their fortune, all they had amassed for centuries. His blood right, his inheritance, was gone. That what it meant, the event, the Nakba, would not end, and that for the rest of his siblings’ lives, they would all wander, work as taxi drivers and shoe salesmen and substitute teachers and some even as prostitutes and low-level criminals, and that some of them would end up institutionalized, and that he himself, Sufien, would die without a dollar to his name, owing hundreds of thousands of dollars to credit card companies and American banks.

  Sometimes, later, he would catch a glimmer of it, a glimmer of what he felt on those camp nights in 1948—once in the ’70s, as evening fell over the greenness of summer in Central Park, God how sweet the music was, and how orchestral were fireflies, and in Italy in the ’60s, there were the nights he danced to “Bella Ciao” in the streets drunk on Chianti, and as an older man, already in 1998, in the high desert of Arizona, beneath constellations so wild they made him cry because suddenly spread across the sky was a sight not seen since the prophet Mohammed spoke to the angel Gabriel, and finally, in 2015, in the last years before his death, standing on the sand at the edge of the almighty West, as the Pacific waves grew hallucinatory with bioluminescent algae, and his wife kissed him, it had been so long since they kissed like that, he felt that where they were, tucked between those coves carved into the California cliffs, yes, that where they were, reflected the secret signature of the eternal one Himself.

  It wasn’t Safad that Sufien looked for all of his life, it was those whirling nights in the camp. In that camp he had witnessed the true beauty of the human soul, there where it sings best, when trapped in the cul-de-sac of loss. He would look for this place, this time, for the rest of his life—he wanted its splendor from every party, but he would never quite find it again.

  7

  My Little Lion

  The war was over so soon, the war was lost. And then Sufien’s father, Abdul Jalil, reappeared. He arrived at the camp so thin, his clothing torn, and his rifle, which Sufien had come to believe was another of his father’s limbs, was missing.

  Yalla, his father said. We’re leaving here. Pack your bag.

  Sufien was too young to understand what had happened to his father’s eyes. Their shape had changed, gravity had tugged them down, and his hair was nearly all grey when just months earlier it had been a pretty wave of black. No child can understand the language of failure. How it has its way with a person’s face. Sufien asked his father why his hands were shaking.

  We’re free from this place, Abdul Jalil said. Somehow Abdul Jalil had used the last of his own father’s money, and his father’s father’s money, and his father’s father’s father’s father’s money, to secure an abode in Damascus for his six-person family.

  Sufien did not want to leave.

  Can I bring Najya? Sufien asked. He had been caring for a kitten in the camp, the only survivor of its litter.

  That cat will bring the disease of this place with it, his father barked.

  Sufien began to talk about the kitten in Safad, if it had lived, when his father grabbed his arm fiercely.

  Stop talking about stupid cats and start packing! he yelled.

  * * *

  *

  At the apartment inside the city, when the children shrieked, with joy or while tantruming, Abdul Jalil covered his ears. Shut up, he swore at them all, cupping his hands over their mouths. Didn’t your mother teach you how to keep quiet?

  Hadn’t Abdul Jalil once been so nice? Hadn’t he been the one to never shout? Before the war, it was always Um Sufien losing her temper. The siblings all concluded that he was now a mean, awful father. And Sufien wished Abdul Jalil would just disappear again. Even wished he had died in the fighting in Palestine. Then he could say his father was a martyr. Instead, Abdul Jalil was always sitting beside the radio, his shoulders hunched, like he was waiting for a voice in it to come on and tell him to get up, that it was time to go home.

  Baba, why are you sad? Sufien said one evening. He had wanted to ask this question of his father for so long. As the eldest, he still retained the lovelier memories of his father, memories in which his father wasn’t always so angry.

  You can’t understand this, Abdul Jalil said. Then he shook his head and began talking to himself, his hands gesturing violently, a habit that Sufien would later inherit.

  Sufien returned to hating Abdul Jalil for being so unhappy. He could not yet fathom that night which would come, once Sufien was already so far away, across seas, and then across an entire ocean in New York City, when he would find himself alone, smoking a cigarette, his eyes soft, his heart plummeting, after reading that letter which would inform him of Abdul Jalil’s death.

  Back in Damascus, it was still 1948, forever 1948, and he resented his father for living, for surviving, so much so that he fantasized various mishaps for Abdul Jalil, especially when his father commanded that Um Sufien cook kousa or mujaddara because it was all they could afford when Sufien desired mansaf instead. He wanted lamb, he wanted beef, the thick, cozy taste of meat.

  Still, it was Abdul Jalil who brought Sufien back to Earth when the little boy awoke crying from his nightmares, and when once Sufien’s dreams had pulled him out of bed and onto the balcony, his tiny hands clutching the rails—and alhamdullilah, Abdul Jalil had raced outside, had been awake listening to his accursed radio, had clutched his son in his arms just in time, before his most precious had nearly climbed over, and fallen stories down…

  Sufien had always been afflicted with this desire—no, it was a call, a call to fly, a call to fall.

  * * *

  *

  Sufien lay down on the mattress on the floor which he shared with his brothers and sisters, while Abdul Jalil listened to the same news night after night, and Palestine never returned, they never went back, until it was suddenly 1953. They had been in Damascus five years surviving on lentils and chickpeas and Sufien was already ten. He loved soccer, math, and almost girls. Sufien had waited so long to see a smile cross his father’s face, and now he hardly trusted his senses, seeing the way his father shined over breakfast one morning. The man had surely lost his mind at last, Sufien thought. Little did he know it was another thing entirely.

  We’re moving to Kuwait at the beginning of Safar, his father announced.

  That’s next month! Sufien cried.

  Aren’t you happy? Abdul Jalil said. Baba finally has a job.

  Sufien wanted to cry but he was too old now to cry. So, he pursed his mouth. To leave again. After he had finally almost learned to speak in French like the other Syrian kids.

  I want to go home, Sufien said.

  Shu home? What home? his father said. He was smoking and ashing the cigarette all across the carpet. Sufien imagined a fire erupting. Now there were two more children in the five years that had passed.

  Home was here for a while. Then it will be somewhere else, Abdul Jalil said. Wala yahimmak. Don’t worry so much, ya asad zghir, Abdul Jalil said. My little lion.

  8

  Ahlan Wa Sahlan

  Each evening, Abdul Jalil’s glass of arak rendered an armistice to his otherwise unquiet body. Ever since the Nakba, a bat had become trapped in his chest, and it was always flapping about, raising some evil mutiny inside and against him. Sometimes he clutched himself for fear his heart might stop from the insurrection, and it would eventually, but for now the drink shut it up, put the beast to sleep. He could take a full breath through the tightness in his lungs.

  In truth, the habit set in long before ’48. It was during the revolt of the ’30s that he first tasted the spirit. Together, he and his cousin Imad had drunk nearly an entire bottle the evening they ambushed the British battalion camped near Deir al-Asad. Everything became erotic in the drink’s embrace, the smell of the liquor mixed with cigarette smoke, the whispering of the land in the deep middle of the night. This was his home. Abdul Jalil would kill for it.

  Then, after he and Imad had fired a messy barrage, Abdul Jalil heard the soldiers’ terrified shrieks and though he had wanted so much to shatter their stupid teacups, he realized that he did not actually want to kill them. And that perhaps even he had misfired unconsciously to avoid doing so. He would never unhear those soldiers after that or forgive himself for the cowardice he discovered hiding in his heart.

  Though there were no casualties, Imad was hanged a week later; Abdul Jalil was spared. Abdul Jalil never knew why. His name appeared on the Queen’s to-be-assassinated list for years. He waited and waited, obsessed with every bootstep he heard, but the British never came for him. Instead, the bigger war drew closer. In that war, the war of ’48, he killed one boy and it was enough. It was enough. Now it was only drink that suppressed the lingering music from the fighting of those months. Yes, it was haram. He had nothing else. How many brothers had he held through their last breath? Abdul Jalil didn’t like to see them again. He didn’t like to hear them gasp. And he didn’t like to see that one especially, that one he had shot in the belly. So, he drank. Soon he was leaving this city, which wasn’t his city, though after these five years, had it become home? Was that all home would be from now on? A place to leave.

  Here was the hilal moon rising. Safar had begun. How many evenings had he waited for its sign to signal the start of a new month, from the garden of the house his father had bequeathed to him, the one his father’s father had built on the foundation of the one which had crumbled beneath the shock of some ancient thunder, that house which was built by his father’s father’s father’s father on top of Jebel Kan’aan, the most majestic mountain in Safad. It was theirs, that mountain, and the whole town knew it. Once they had an entire mountain, and now…Now they would have desert.