“The Jews wanted us to leave,” she said. “They intentionally left the eastern side of the village unguarded to give us an escape route. We had no time to pack any clothing or even to take something to eat. We just started running. But still the Jews weren’t satisfied. They fired at us as we fled across the fields we had tilled for centuries. Five villagers died in those fields. The Haganah sappers went in right away. As we were running away, we could hear the explosions. The Jews were turning our Paradise into a pile of uninhabitable rubble.”

The villagers of Sumayriyya took to the road and headed north, toward Lebanon. They were soon joined by the inhabitants of Bassa and Zib and several smaller villages to the east. “The Jews told us to go to Lebanon,” she said. “They told us to wait there for a few weeks until the fighting ended, then we would be allowed to return. Return? To what were we supposed to return? Our houses had been demolished. So we kept walking. We walked over the border, into exile. Into oblivion. And behind us the gates of Palestine were being forever barred against our return.”

REIMS: FIVE O’CLOCK.

“Pull over,” she said.

Gabriel guided the Mercedes onto the shoulder of the Autoroute. They sat in silence, the car shuddering in the turbulence of the passing traffic. Then the telephone. She listened, longer than usual. Gabriel suspected she was being given final instructions. Without so much as a word, she severed the connection, then dropped the phone back into her bag.

“Where are we going?”

“Paris,” she said. “Just as you suspected.”

“Which way does he want me to go?”

“The A4. Do you know it?”

“I know it.”

“It will take you into—”

“—into southeast Paris. I know where it will take me, Palestina.”

Gabriel accelerated back onto the motorway. The dashboard clock read: 5:05. A road sign flashed past: PARIS 145. One hundred forty-five kilometers to Paris. Ninety-one miles.

“Finish your story, Palestina.”

“Where were we?”

“Lebanon,” Gabriel said. “Oblivion.”

“WE CAMPED IN THE HILLS. We foraged for food. We survived off the charity of our Arab brethren and waited for the gates of Palestine to be opened to us, waited for the Jews to make good on the promises they’d made to us the morning we’d fled Sumayriyya. But in June, Ben-Gurion said that the refugees could not come home. We were a fifth column that could not be allowed back, he said. We would be a thorn in the side of the new Jewish state. We knew then that we would never see Sumayriyya again. Paradise lost.”

Gabriel looked at the clock. 5:10 P.M. Eighty miles to Paris.