“Why are you so depressing?” Sitti Wasfiyeh chimed in from her room. “Doom and gloom, by God! You’re going to jinx the girl and make her not want to go to Palestine.”

Mama peeked her head through the door. “Hajjeh, we thought you were taking a nap. Come sit with us.”

“It looks like I need to. I’m a better storyteller, because I’m older and remember more, because I was in Palestine longer,” she said, walking into the family room with her cane. “Make us some tea while I talk to my granddaughter.”

There was still a lot of hope and euphoria over the Oslo Accords. A famous Palestinian in America named Edward Said was warning that this agreement was no cause for excitement; it was a trap to buy Israel more time to keep colonizing Palestine. My brother agreed with him and said Bilal did too.

“Nahr, I think you’re going to get along well with Bilal,” Jehad said. “He headed the Communist Party in Palestine back in the day. He probably hates rich Kuwaitis too.”

I didn’t know how to answer. The only things I knew about communism were that its color was red and Russians were communists. I made a mental note to find out what I could about the Communist Party. People were talking about how easy it was to research anything on the Internet. I thought I might learn to do the Internet too.

It was around this time that I ran into an old friend at a mall in Amman. Literally, I ran into him. I almost didn’t recognize him, until he bent to pick up his bags, which he seemed to have spilled purposely. “I’m very sorry, sister,” he said.

It looked like an accident to onlookers, the carelessness of distracted shoppers. But when I looked up, I saw Mohsin, the young man on the balcony in Kuwait, smoking a cigarette, confessing that he preferred boys and asking me to tell him a secret of mine.

“No harm done, brother,” I said.

He picked up my bags and handed them to me. I saw in my peripheral vision a woman with children stop to stare at us from a store. His wife.

“Thank you,” I said, and walked away to the privacy of the nearest bathroom. As I suspected, he had dropped his business card into my bag. He was a banker. A handwritten note on the back of the card read Please call me.

I waited a day to call, confessing, when I finally did, that I had been worried his wife might answer. He laughed, because I had called his personal mobile phone. He had been vacationing with his family at the Dead Sea and had stopped in Amman for a few days before heading back. The woman I’d glimpsed at the mall was indeed his wife.

We made small talk. I told him I was planning to go to Palestine. “I’m so happy for you,” he said. “Someday, enshallah, when Jerusalem is liberated, we will all once again be able to visit our holy city.”