When they moved to Beirut in 1980, the war had already begun. Al’s father promised they wouldn’t stay for long. He said the embassy needed him, that the war would end soon. He gave Al a 35-millimeter Canon camera for her thirteenth birthday, a few days before the move. She trusted her father, towering over people in his Brooks Brothers suits, his low Oklahoma voice unflappable while discussing American foreign policy. And her mother—her mother was eager for adventure.

They walked off the plane, into a horde of tanned men in uniforms, holding guns. Moustaches. Uniforms, guns, moustaches. More uniforms, more guns, and more moustaches, and shouts of “Yella, yella, yella,” which, Al later learned, meant “come on, come on, come on.”

A man wearing a white shirt open to his stomach stood holding a sign with their name.

“Hi, I’m Muhammad. I’m your driver”; he spoke fluent English.

They followed him through the chaos of the airport. He put their bags in his battered Buick.

Outside, the breeze was warm for November. Palm trees lined the avenue leading from the airport. Al wished she hadn’t checked her camera, as her mother had insisted. “Al, stop hiding behind that camera. Look around. Enjoy. Why would you need a camera during the flight?”

“This looks more like a resort than a war zone,” her mother now said, pushing her freshly highlighted blond hair from her sunglasses. “It reminds me of Florida, or maybe California.”

Al said nothing, since she had visited neither Florida nor California, and the places they had lived in were so different they never reminded her of one another. Her father had joined the foreign service at twenty-two, straight out of college. He had wanted to see the world and the State Department had complied, so they moved every few years and he never tired of “promoting our interests abroad.” And although he took a passing interest in her photographs, he never spent much time with Al.

Muhammad rolled down the windows and turned up the radio. He leaned his elbow out the window, rested his hand on the rooftop, and with the long nail of his pinky drummed the beat of the Arabic music. Except for the manicured, inch-long nail on his left pinky, all of his fingernails were bitten to the quick.

They drove along the Mediterranean. Muhammad leaned his head out the window and shouted at the driver ahead. Below the wailing Arabic music, they could hear the surf breaking on the shore.

“The Mediterranean is so blue, isn’t it?” her mother said. “The water looks so inviting. I’d love to swim.”

Her mother’s sundress fluttered against her leg, and once again Al felt irritated by her mother’s easy enthusiasm.

Her mother had been a hippie in the sixties and still wore her hair long. She always laughed at her husband’s solemn reserve and told him to “cheer up, live a little, have fun. FUN,” but neither Al nor her father ever quite understood what she meant by “fun,” and while her mother’s quick smiles and optimism charmed Al’s father, they oppressed Al.

Muhammad drove them through the Dahieh, a Shiite slum near the airport. It was where a few years later the American hostages were held. Clothes hung from windows, laundry ropes stretched between houses, and veiled women hurried by carrying jugs on their heads. Al watched flags waving from lines strung between the street lamps, and the giant writing on posters stuck to the sides of buildings. To her, Arabic looked more like random drawing than writing.

She had already lived on four continents, and knew words in Japanese, Swahili, and Swedish, but she wasn’t good with languages, and her family never stayed in one country long enough for her to learn. Besides, people answered her in English even when she tried to speak their language. They said they could tell she was American. Sometimes they said it was her hair or clothes or sneakers, but mostly they said it was the braces on her teeth. Her Rs, they said, were a dead give-away. So she stopped trying. She spoke only in English and took photographs to document the different places. But after a few years in one city, she had usually picked up enough to get by. People’s gestures helped. She found that people often enacted their words, and she could learn the language backwards, from the gestures.

“They write from right to left,” her mother said. Her mother had just finished reading her first book about the Middle East.

Muhammad drove down narrow streets, pointing at walls riddled with bullets.

“This part of Beirut got a lot of bombings,” he said. “See, they fixed one, but not the other.” He slowed down in front of two once identical buildings, the repaired white one facing its charred twin, and again Al wished she had not packed her camera.

Muhammad pointed at buildings that had collapsed like cardboard houses. Al looked at the sides slumped in, and marveled at how light they seemed yet how heavy they must be. There was little to suggest the weight or force of the impact—only a few coiled iron rods, frizzed rather than coiled, and craters in the ground where the buildings had fallen.

A week after arriving in Beirut, they awoke to explosions and war planes flying low. “It sounds far away,” her mother said. “But maybe we should sleep in the hallway.” Al said they should leave Beirut, but her mother hushed her and continued calmly, a testimony to the hours of advice she had received from the embassy and from neighbors—advice on what to do, where to go, what to say in case of bombing. The next morning, the shops opened and life resumed as usual.

Al couldn’t sleep. At night, she thought about how her father had promised Beirut would be their last stop. She saw them leaving Beirut, how they would buy a house back in the U.S. and settle down and never move again, and how she would never need a camera again, since she’d already be home. The streetlight streamed in through the shutters, and she listened to the people outside, walking and talking, laughing, giggling and whispering, and she wondered who they were and what they were saying. She thought that if only she could photograph them, she would be able to read their faces and understand their lives.

Animals woke her before dawn. Sometimes it was an eerie screeching, which her parents said was a donkey; but mostly, it was cocks crowing. She had never before heard a cock crow.

And if the cocks didn’t crow, the Muslim early-morning prayers woke her. She never found out if, as she imagined, an actual man stood in the mosque minaret, calling into a microphone at 5 a.m., or if it was a recording, but she could clearly hear his chants. He’d start with “Bism I’llah,” which meant “in the name of God,” then several minutes of incomprehensible, guttural sounds, ending with “Allah u-Akbar,” or “God is great.” She liked his voice, warm, summoning, reassuring, inviting them into a community; but her parents didn’t believe in God.

Her grandparents were Baptists and her parents had met at a required church youth group in their native Stillwater, a small town in Oklahoma where people left their front doors unlocked and baked breads for their neighbors for Christmas—pumpkin bread and poppy-seed lemon loaves in aluminum-foil pans wrapped in red and green ribbons.

Although her parents had abandoned their religion, her mother joined the only Protestant church she could find in Beirut, a Presbyterian church, but they never attended, and, besides, no one was ever sure when it was closed due to bombings or threats. Her father laughed, saying they didn’t believe enough and the Beirutis believed too much. Al didn’t understand what the war was about, who was fighting whom, or why different factions of the same religion were killing one another. Her father said it was all from too much ego and rabid conviction and not enough irony, but still she was confused.

The embassy had rented them a house already furnished with Persian rugs and gold-leaf mirrors, hexagonal tables and chests with mother-of-pearl inlay. Her father complained that it was all too gaudy, but her mother said she liked it, that it was exotic, that it made her feel she was in the real Orient, and that, besides, it didn’t really matter since they were in Beirut for such a short time.

Her mother liked to eat breakfast on her bedroom balcony and look out at the orange, lemon, and palm trees in the backyard. Because she loved the view so much, she encouraged Al to photograph the trees, and while Al welcomed her mother’s newfound interest in her photographs, she resented the insistence on beautiful subject-matter and felt her mother didn’t understand photography at all. Looking at Al’s photographs, her mother said she wished they had olive trees, that she had spoken to their neighbor, Samer, and that he had an orchard of olive trees, that he pressed gallons of olive oil, had homegrown olives throughout the year, and even made soap from the olives.

Her mother assumed people spoke English, and usually they did. Her father had translators at the embassy. Al tried to learn Arabic, but found several of the sounds impossible to make, especially the h, kh, and ah, all of which required exerting in quick violent succession different muscles of the throat. The h required a flattening, contracting motion as you might make while clearing your throat; the kh was harsher, came from somehow pressing the back of your tongue against your nasal passageway, and was the sound she’d heard men make before spitting; and the ah required a widening and relaxing of the lowest part of the throat. She couldn’t get her throat to contract, become near-nasal, and then relax so rapidly.

At school, the Arabic teacher was patient, but Al was by far the worst student. Instead of studying Arabic, she spent hours in the school’s dark-room, staring at white blank paper submerged in chemicals until the figures emerged, first shadows, then contours of faces and features coming into focus.

Nevertheless, her Arabic improved, thanks to their housekeeper, Warde.

Al’s mother joked that Warde had slept through the 1960s and the women’s movement. Warde was Shiite. She was forty-two but looked sixty. She had had eighteen children, the first when she was fourteen. Al couldn’t remember all of Warde’s children’s names, only the standard ones: Muhammad, Ahmed, Ali, Mahmoud, Fatima, Aisha, Alia.

Warde pronounced Al’s name well.

“Al, Al,” she’d say. “But ‘Al what?’” she’d wring her hands.

“What do you mean?”

“In Arabic, Al means the. Al-something; the-something. It is not a real name.”

Al explained that Al could be short for Alice or Alyson or Alexandra, but that in her case it wasn’t. Al was just Al, a name her parents had liked, a shortened name they had given her as a full name.

Warde shook her head in pity and disbelief, and said that names should mean something, that al-Warde meant the flower, and that she had named most of her children from the Koran, starting with her firstborn, Muhammad, who was named after the Prophet.

Al sat in the kitchen and watched Warde cook. Warde talked about her children, about her son who had recently been killed during the war, and how his daughter now hid in his closet and smelled his clothes. Al photographed Warde puréing chickpeas for hummus, peeling eggplants for baba ghanoush, and stuffing kibbeh with meat, onions, and pine nuts. She photographed Warde chopping handpicked tomatoes for everyone’s favorite tabouli salad. Al ground the pistachios and cashews while Warde buttered the phylo sheets for the baklava.

Some of Al’s favorite evenings were spent watching Warde peel pomegranates. Warde cracked open the pomegranate, peeled off the delicate membranes, and deftly disengaged patches of kernels. Al photographed the seeds falling, a cascade of burgundy crystals, or thousands of rubies, a deep blood red against the white bowl. She offered to help, but Warde said “no” and held up her stained hands in explanation. With small spoons, Al ate large bowls of pomegranate seeds at breakfast, lunch, or dinner, as an appetizer or a dessert, bare or covered with sugar. When Al left Lebanon, Warde gave her a bag of pomegranates and a cake spatula with a blue glass handle.

“For good luck,” she said.

Warde spoke to her in Arabic, and, when Al didn’t understand, which was most of the time, Warde would translate into broken English. What Al liked best were Warde’s phrases of endearment, uttered when Al was tired or sad or scared: “ya ruhe,” “ya albe,” “ya yune,” she would say. “Ya ruhe” meant “you are my soul,” “ya albe” “you are my heart,” and “ya yune” “you are my eyes.”

Al tried to find English equivalents for Warde’s phrases. “Sweetheart,” for “ya albe”; “you are the apple of my eye” for “ya yune.” But she couldn’t think of an English endearment involving your being my soul. “Soulmate” didn’t seem close enough. Whenever Warde spoke with her children, she started or ended the conversation with “ya tu-ebrene,” which meant “I hope you bury me.” Al also couldn’t think of an English expression wishing you’d bury me.

When Al asked her father if he could think of English equivalents for “ya ruhe” or “ya tu-ebrene,” he said “no”; he said he thought these idioms somehow reflected the vehemence of the culture, a kind of violence through which you became an extension of the people around you, and your actions were approved or disapproved depending on whether they were ego inflations or deflations. This, he said, led to war.

Her least favorite word was “Inshallah.” “Inshallah” meant “God-willing” and was Warde’s answer to every question.

“Do you think the war will end soon?”

“Inshallah.”

“Do you think school will reopen tomorrow?”

“Inshallah.”

“Do you think they’ll bomb tonight?”

“Inshallah not.”

“Inshallah” made Al panic. It implied there was nothing that could be done to change the outcome—it was total resignation, a lethal fatalism. Warde also answered “Inshallah” to easier, more concrete questions:

“Do you think these jeans will shrink?”

“Inshallah not.”

“Do you think I can find this book in Beirut?”

“Inshallah.”

“When will you be back?”

“Inshallah soon.”

It upset her that Warde had relinquished all control.

The occasional bombing didn’t scare Al’s mother much. She kept the radio on the BBC station and quoted the British news as the most reliable source of information about the political situation in the Middle East. Gong, “BBC World Service. The News, read by Timothy Brown”; and again an hour later, Gong, “BBC World Service. The News, read by Timothy Brown.”

A few weeks became a few months and then a few years, and they were still in Beirut, and her father was still promising they’d leave soon, but Al was the only one anxious to go. Her mother liked the friends she had made and the weather and the pace of life, and had adopted the people’s ways.

Like the Lebanese, her mother lived for the ceasefires. After long nights in the hallway or in bomb shelters, when the fighting stopped, Al and her father followed her mother to the beach, where her mother swam and Al read and her father sat with friends, chuckling at the beautiful toned women swimming in string bikinis and their overweight mustachioed husbands sitting poolside, smoking and playing backgammon.

Al’s mother said they should take advantage of their stay and travel around, that the land was historic, Biblical, and that they should see it. She suggested that Al bring the camera along, almost as a form of appeasement and enticement, Al thought. So, when there were no bombings or warnings of car explosions, and when they could pass through the army checkpoints, they tried to see the country. Lebanon was smaller than Connecticut, and they could drive from the northern- to the southern-most point in just a few hours.

In January, they drove north to Tripoli to look at the Arab souks, and east to the mountains to look at cedar trees.

“I don’t know why we’re driving all this way to look at trees,” Al said.

“Well, sweetheart,” her mother said, “the cedar tree IS on their flag, and everyone says the cedars are beautiful, and I’d like to see them. You can take pictures.”

Al stood huddled in her coat against the car while her mother trudged through the snow to look at the cedars.

“I can see the Mediterranean from here,” her mother yelled.

Her mother stopped at a souvenir stand and pointed to rows of crosses cut from cedar wood: “Al, take a picture.” She asked if Al wanted anything. Al said no. Her mother bought a cross and a miniature copper pot that she said she would fill with potpourri.

In the spring, they drove to a Medieval monastery perched on a mountaintop, with a steep drop to the Mediterranean.

“If you stood here for a year, your head would also hang that way,” their guide laughed, pointing to cypress trees bent over the cliffs, but Al couldn’t understand his humor. Her mother nudged her to take a picture of the spectacular view.

They drove to Jounieh to look at the Christian seaport, and to the Shuf to look at the Druze stronghold. Her mother especially liked Castle Beit-el-Din in the Shuf. She said she loved the ogee arches, and urged Al to take more pictures. She said she’d read about Beit-el-Din and ogee arches in her book about the Middle East.

“Who are the Druze?” Al asked.

“I’m not sure. I think they’re Muslims. Let’s ask Muhammad.”

They drove to Baalbek to look at the Roman ruins.

“The Bekaa Valley,” Muhammad said, pointing to mountains in the distance.

Through the rain and mist, Al thought the mountains looked arid, but Muhammad said the Bekaa was one of the most fertile parts of the country.

“They say the Bekaa is training camp for, how do you say, radicals, terrorists,” he said.

“Well, it looks beautiful from here. It really does look Biblical, doesn’t it? I mean, you can just imagine Christ here. Al, please take a picture,” her mother said, which made Al want to give up the camera altogether.

They stopped at a checkpoint.

“No photos of the army,” a soldier said.

“She’s not photographing the army,” her mother said, but he waved his hand, shook his head, and threatened to take the camera.

Their last sightseeing trip was south to Tyre and Sidon. Al took pictures of the Roman ruins at every stop, and in Tyre spent over an hour at the necropolis.

“Look, the guidebook says the tombs are different sizes for different members of the family,” her mother said.

They ate lunch outdoors in Tyre, at a restaurant named “The Rest House,” overlooking the water.

“Can you smell the sea?” her mother said, leaning back.

Al could barely hear her mother’s voice above the sound of the waves crashing on the rocks. They drank “white coffee,” which wasn’t coffee at all, but a warm drink of boiled water, sugar, and rose water. Her mother asked why Al was taking a close-up of what looked like a cup of water when the Mediterranean Sea was in plain view.

Minutes later, explosions, silence, and more explosions.

“They’re fighting again,” their waiter said.

“No, no, relax. It’s just training, practicing,” another waiter said.

“Let’s go,” Al said.

“Let’s at least finish lunch,” her mother said. “Al, take a picture of me with the Mediterranean behind.”

On the way back from Tyre, her mother asked Muhammad to stop at a pastry shop. Her mother bought nougat and a pound of ghraibe, which Al thought tasted like shortbread. Al bought pistachios rolled in tart apricot paste and dusted with sugar.

They walked into a trinkets store beside the pastry shop, and her mother picked out a blue glass hand on a key chain.

“What’s this?” her mother asked the shopkeeper.

“A hand. A palm. It’s Fatima’s hand,” he said.

“What’s it for?”

“For good luck. Against the evil eye.”

Her mother bought it. They drove home, past small Shiite shops selling vinyl Christmas trees and plastic Santas.

A month before a suicide bomber drove a truckload of explosives into the American embassy and blew up 220 U.S. marines, Al awoke in the night to lightening and deafening thunder.

“The hallway, NOW  . . .  No, it’s too late for the shelter,” her mother said.

Her father dragged a mattress into the hall.

For over ten hours, the bombs fell around them. Explosions, the whizzing of bullets, glass shattering and falling, and then more explosions and the walls shaking and glass crashing. The lights blew out. She heard her mother’s cork-soled flip-flops click clacking down the hall toward the kitchen. Her mother came back with two lit candles, put them down, and went back for more.

Al hid in the guest bathroom, held her breath, and vomited. She vomited onto the copper pot of potpourri, into the toilet, onto the floor. She locked the door and bit her nails until they bled and she could see the pink pulse under her nail.

They spent three days in the hall and several more in the bomb shelter, but then the warring factions called a ceasefire, the bombing stopped, shops and schools reopened, and she and her parents moved back into their house.

A few days after the ceasefire began, she stood with her mother in her mother’s bedroom. Her mother opened the balcony door to “let in the glorious day” and leaned into her closet, pulling out clothes, looking for a skirt to wear. A sniper on the roof of a nearby building aimed at her through the open balcony door and shot.

Her mother died instantly. Somehow, in the haze and amid her own screams, Al found her camera and photographed her collapsed mother, close-ups and zoom back, time drawn out, the arms and legs still-lifes, quiet pools of blood enlarging and advancing until Warde grabbed the camera and pulled Al away.

Her father asked for an investigation. The American embassy said it was probably random, senseless violence, but they would look into it. But then the marines were killed and the embassy was overwhelmed. They said they would leave her mother’s file open, but they were almost sure it was a random killing. They advised that Al and her father leave immediately. They said that Beirut was no longer safe for Americans, that the U.S. government would probably issue a ban on American travel to Lebanon, that her father could transfer to West Berlin.

Exactly two months after her mother died, they left Beirut.

Al couldn’t sleep the night before they left. She thought she heard the phone ring, then the doorbell. She sat in the bathroom, then back in bed. She scrubbed her face, washed it again, then lay back down. She heard the clock strike twelve, twelve thirty, one, one thirty. She thought she heard planes flying low and wondered if they were war planes. She heard cocks crowing. The sea in Tyre had been beautiful; the water had looked inviting and the breeze had been so gentle.

They left while it was still dark, the camera around Al’s neck and rolls of film in her purse. The airport was closed, so they drove to Jounieh, stopping at checkpoints, driving by tanks, ducking in the car to avoid snipers. She held her breath and counted to ten, exhaled, then held her breath and counted again.

In Jounieh, at a store called “Artisan du Liban,” she bought two brass handheld mirrors she thought her mother would have liked. The brass formed an intricate ogee arch at the top. One mirror came in a colorful silk case striped with gold thread; the second had no cover, but hanging from its lower edge was a blue stone to thwart the evil eye.

She looked out at takeoff, careful not to let the camera bang against the window. When it became dark, she searched for patterns of light over the cities. Sometimes she thought the lights just marked roads or rivers; sometimes she imagined they were veins; and sometimes they were sinewy neon scars. She watched until the lights grew faint and all she could see was her own face staring back at her in the window.

She looked at her watch. “Six o’clock, Beirut time . . . seven o’clock, eight o’clock, nine o’clock, Beirut time.”

They landed in West Berlin at ten-thirty German time; it was dark, but she could tell from her window seat that it was humid and cold, the type of humid coldness that sat in your bones and chilled your body.