It was like the day at the orange grove in Haifa, the day it all happened. Maybe it wasn’t when the problems started, but it was when I began to understand. Most of the Palestinians in Haifa were thrown out in 1948, but Baba managed to return after the war. Even so, by the time I was born, nothing was certain. Our life was temporary, like we always knew they would come for us one day. If we didn’t eat our food, Mama would always threaten us, “The soldiers will come for you.” I remember your grandparents always seemed worried. My father always had a frown on his face, making his mouth look like a scar, and my mother started practicing in secret how to shoot a gun. I found her and my uncle Fouad one day—Fouad was her youngest brother, the one who died in 1982—behind the house when Baba was in the fields. Uncle Fouad’s hatta waved in the breeze around his head. It was always pure white, because he washed his own clothes and took care of his appearance. I thought he looked like a prince when he sat on his horse, his reddish-brown stallion with the white streak between his eyes.

On this day, Uncle Fouad was helping my mother point a shotgun at a box on top of the white stone fence on our land. “Aim properly,” he was saying in his gentle voice. “If you watch it as you fire, you will hit it.”

I giggled then, from the sheer delight of seeing my handsome uncle, and hoping he would take me for a ride on his horse. But when I giggled, Mama shot the gun prematurely and the blast frightened me so much that I started crying, humiliated to be doing so in front of my uncle, but scared anyway.

Mama yelled at me for sneaking around, and warned me not to tell my father. I stood there, still sobbing, when Uncle Fouad offered to give me a ride around on the fields. I clapped excitedly, and let him hoist me up in the saddle.

“Why is Mama playing with the gun?” I asked, feeling the wind in my hair.

“To protect you from the Zionists,” he responded calmly. He never lied to me, the way the other adults did, and I adored him. That’s his picture there, in the small frame, the black and white photo. See how white his hatta is? He refused to leave the camp with us, and he broke your grandmother’s heart when he died, because she used to take care of him like her own son.