I should recall more about my father. I was old enough to have accumulated memories by the time he died. For a while I invented memories of things I wished he’d done—brush my hair, teach me to fix cars, visit school on Parent Day, tell my stupid teachers to kiss his ass, swim together in the ocean, read to me, carry me on his shoulders, take my side against Mama on report card day, and put Sitti Wasfiyeh in her place when she said I was stupid as a donkey or when she made me wash my mouth out with soap for cursing. I imagined him being as fed up with Mama’s Singer sewing machine as I was, insisting that she stop sewing our clothes and take us shopping in the Salmiya souq.

But all that is left of my father is a man who sings the Fattooma song and wipes the coffee table with Windex until he dies and fades into the looming absence of a face in the framed photo hanging on a wall in a long-abandoned Kuwait apartment in a country that abandoned us.

Mama was pregnant with me when Israel made her a refugee for the second time. After fleeing Haifa in 1948, she had made a home with my father in Sitti Wasfiyeh’s ancestral village, Ein el-Sultan. Fleeing once more in June 1967 with only whatever they could carry, they walked more than eight kilometers to cross the River Jordan at the Allenby Bridge. When they got there, the bridge was overwhelmed with bodies and eventually collapsed just as Mama was about to cross. Some people fell and had to be rescued. Some didn’t make it out. But people kept walking on the collapsed bridge, holding on to its cables and broken pieces as they waded through the water. Mama told me: “I just prayed to God as your father and I crossed, and I made a deal with the river. I said I’d name you after it if it didn’t swallow any of us.”

But calling me Jordan would have been too strange. That’s how I got the name Nahr. River.

My father made the dangerous journey back into Palestine after he got us to safety in Jordan. Palestinians learned the first time in 1948 that leaving to save your life meant you would lose everything and could never go back. That’s why Baba stayed alone in our empty house for months under curfew while Israel consolidated power over the whole of Palestine. To be alone in the eerie quiet of the emptied home, where he and his siblings had grown up amid the daily bustle of a large family, must have been painful. Still, he stayed and got a hawiyya; he could thenceforth remain in Palestine as a “foreign resident” in his own home. He said it was better than being a refugee.

Baba joined us as soon as he could. But his long absence had fractured our family, and by the time I was born, my parents had already made their way to Kuwait, where my father was fucking the first of many girlfriends. Her name was Yaqoot and that’s the name he recorded on my birth certificate—not Nahr—without consulting my mother. He was probably with Yaqoot the night Mama went into labor, probably a little drunk when he reached the hospital and still basking in the glow of a romantic evening when he impulsively named me after his new lover, perhaps underestimating Mama’s intuition and rage.