“I’m far better off than those who went into exile. It could have been like this for all of us if there’d never been a war. I don’t blame you for my loss. I blame the Arab leaders. If Haj Amin and the others had accepted the partition, the Western Galilee would have been part of Palestine. But they chose war, and when they lost the war, they cried that the Arabs had been victims. Arafat did the same thing at Camp David, yes? He walked away from another opportunity at partition. He started another war, and when the Jews fought back, he cried that he was the victim. When will we learn?”

The goat came back. This time al-Samara gave it a whack on the nose with the mouthpiece of his water pipe.

“Surely you didn’t come all the way here to listen to an old man’s story.”

“I’m looking for a family that came from your village, but I don’t know their name.”

“We all knew each other,” al-Samara said. “If we were to walk through the ruins of Sumayriyya right now, I could show you my house—and I could show you the house of my friend, and the houses of my cousins. Tell me something about this family, and I’ll tell you their name.”

He told the old man the things the girl had said during the final miles before Paris—that her grandfather had been a village elder, not a muktar but an important man, and that he’d owned forty dunams of land and a large flock of goats. He’d had at least one son. After the fall of Sumayriyya, they’d gone north, to Ein al-Hilweh in Lebanon. Al-Samara listened thoughtfully to Gabriel’s description but seemed perplexed. He called over his shoulder, into the house. A woman emerged, elderly like him, her head covered by a veil. She spoke directly to al-Samara, carefully avoiding the gaze of Gabriel and Yaakov.

“You’re certain it was forty dunams?” he asked. “Not thirty, or twenty, but forty?”

“That’s what I was told.”

He made a contemplative draw on his pipe. “You’re right,” he said. “That family ended up in Lebanon, in Ein al-Hilweh. Things got bad during the Lebanese civil war. The boys became fighters. They’re all dead, from what I hear.”

“Do you know their name?”

“They’re called al-Tamari. If you meet any of them, please give them my regards. Tell them I’ve been to their house. Don’t tell them about my villa in al-Makr, though. It will only break their hearts.”

34 TEL AVIV

34

TEL AVIV

“EIN AL-HILWEH? ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING mind?”