Prince of Fire

“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.”
    “W E 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.
    “W E WALKED NORTH , to Sidon. We spent the long, hot summer living in tents. Then the weather turned cold and the rains came, and still we were living in the tents. We called our new home Ein al-Hilweh. Sweet Spring. It was hardest on my grandfather. In Sumayriyya he’d been an important man. He’d tended his fields and his flock. He’d provided for his family. Now his family was surviving on handouts. He had a deed to his property but no land. He had the keys to his door but no house. He took ill that first winter and died. He didn’t want to live—not in Lebanon. My grandfather died when Sumayriyya died.”
    5:25 P . M . Paris: 62 miles.
    “M Y FATHER WAS only a boy, but he had to assume responsibility for his mother and two sisters. He couldn’t work—the Lebanese wouldn’t permit that. He couldn’t go to school—the Lebanese wouldn’t allow that, either. No Lebanese social security, no Lebanese health care. And no way out, because we had no valid passports. We were stateless. We were nonpersons. We were nothing.”
    5:38 P . M . Paris: 35 miles.
    “W HEN MY FATHER married a girl from Sumayriyya, the remnants of the village gathered in Ein al-Hilweh for the wedding celebration. It was just like home, except the surroundings were different. Instead of Paradise, it was the open sewers and the cinder-block huts of the camp. My mother gave my father two sons. Every night he told them about Sumayriyya, so that they would never forget their true home. He told them the story of al-Nakba, the Catastrophe, and instilled in them the dream of al-Awda, the Return. My brothers would grow up to be fighters for Palestine. There was no choice in the matter. As soon as they were old enough to hold a gun, the Fatah started training them.”
    “And you?”
    “I was the last child. I was born in 1975, just as Lebanon was descending into civil war.”
    5:47 P . M . Paris: 25 miles.
    “W E NEVER THOUGHT they would come for us again. Yes, we’d lost everything—our homes, our village, our land—but at least we were safe in Ein al-Hilweh. The Jews would never come to Lebanon. Would they?”
    5:52 P . M . Paris: 19 miles.
    “O PERATION P EACE FOR G ALILEE —that’s what they called it. My God, even Orwell couldn’t have come up with a better name. On June 4, 1982, the Israelis invaded Lebanon to finish off the PLO once and for all. To us it all seemed so familiar. An Israeli armored column heading north up the coast road, only now the coast road was in Lebanon instead of Palestine, and the soldiers were members of the IDF instead of the Haganah. We knew things were going to get bad. Ein al-Hilweh was known as Fatahland, capital of Diaspora Palestine. On June 8, the battle for the camp began. The Israelis sent in their paratroopers. Our men fought back with the courage of lions—alley to alley, house to house, from the mosques and the hospitals. Any fighter who tried to surrender was shot. The word went out: the battle for Ein al-Hilweh was to be a fight to the last man.
    “The Israelis changed their tactics. They used their aircraft and artillery to raze the camp, block by block, sector by sector. Then their paratroopers would sweep down and massacre our fighters. Every few hours the Israelis would pause and ask us to surrender. Each time the answer was the same: never. It went on like this for a week. I lost one brother on the first day