Weeks after I saw my mother with the gun, I heard her screaming for me and my brother and sisters. We ran back to the house, and my skirt and pockets were filled with oranges from the grove. Mama and Baba were frantically packing some clothes and money and loading them onto the old mules we owned. I saw Mama stuff her gold—her bracelets, necklaces, and rings, in the front of her thawb, near her bosom.

We started to walk, and I thought we would never stop. Seven of us trudged on, and sometimes I helped Mama carry Rabe—your uncle was just a baby then—and keep Ihab, Rana, and Samia in line and cheerful as we marched. Sometimes, I would wake up and realize that Baba was carrying me. For the first few days, we still had some of our oranges with us, and we would peel them and eat them, and then lick the juice from our fingers. The smell of the oranges got on my dress and on my skin and I smelled it the whole time we walked. We didn’t ask what was going on. I thought if I kept eating my oranges, they would stop coming for us, but when I said this out loud, your grandparents’ frowns shut me up.

Do you know that I sat in that janitor’s closet, and even though I knew that the pine cleaner odor surrounded me, I still smelled fresh oranges? It’s impossible, logically, but I tell you that it filled my nostrils, that scent, and the back of my tongue prickled. In the camp we ended up in, I used to smell it. Even now—how many years later?—I can still smell it, and I remember it all—Dina huddling on my mattress, Huda chewing on her hair, Uncle Fouad riding the horse with the white streak between its eyes, Mama stuffing gold in her bosom, and me, hiding under a UNRWA desk, hiding in a closet, hoping something would shield me from what was to be, from the soldiers, the bombs, the devil. Everyone.