The news came over the brother-in-law's radio while Su'ad was peeling potatoes in her sister's kitchen in Nabatieh, where she had been living for eleven months in three rooms with eight others, and the news said that the soldiers of the Lebanese army had entered Srifa, her village, together with Froun and Zawtar, and that those three villages had been chosen as the first from which the other soldiers, the ones who had come from the south, would withdraw, on condition, though, the radio said, that the weapons be handed over and the tunnels closed, after which, the radio said, reconstruction would begin and people would be able to return.

Su'ad set down the knife. She said nothing. Her sister looked at her.

And she stood still with her hands in the potato water, because the word return, which for eleven months had been the word she held in her mouth in the evening the way you hold a date pit so as not to throw it away, now that someone had spoken it on the radio with a near date and with conditions attached to it seemed to her suddenly another word, or rather the same word but turned the other way round, the side on which return did not mean to find again but to see: to see what was left of the house her father-in-law had built in nineteen seventy-four and into which she had come as a bride in nineteen ninety-six and out of which she had walked on foot, with one bag, the night the glass of the kitchen window had fallen all at once onto the sink without shattering into a thousand pieces but splitting into two clean sheets, which was something she had never told anyone because she did not know what it meant.

The condition was reasonable. That was the point that kept her awake. The man on the radio was right: you do not go back inside a house while under the road there are still the tunnels and in the gardens there are still the weapons, you do not bring a daughter back to a place like that, you do not sleep under a roof that could become a target again; those who said wait, wait until it is safe, wait for the reconstruction with the money that will come from outside, were not saying something wicked, they were saying something true, perhaps the truest thing of all.

Only Su'ad had already heard talk of reconstruction with the money that will come from outside back in two thousand and six, after the other war, and part of it had come and part of it had not, and her neighbours' houses had been raised halfway and left halfway for years, with the iron of the pillars sticking out of the concrete like the fingers of an open hand, and she knew, with the part of herself that did not listen to the radio, that waiting for a thing to be perfectly safe is often the most polite way of never doing it at all.

(In the other room the eldest son, who had passed through Beirut for the weekend, was talking on the phone in German with someone in Hamburg, where he studied, and laughing, and his laughter crossed the corridor and came into the kitchen, and Su'ad understood, hearing it, that that son would not return to Srifa, not now and not later, that for him Srifa had already become a place you come from and not a place you go to, and that therefore the decision to return, if she took it, she would take alone, for herself and for the old father-in-law who asked every day about his garden.)

She dried her hands on her apron. She went into the room where she kept the bag, the one she had walked out with. At the bottom, in a cloth pocket, was the bunch of house keys, which she had carried with her the way everyone carries the key even when they know the door may no longer be there, because the key is not for opening, it is for saying that a door, somewhere, is yours.

She slid the big key off the ring, the one for the front door, brass, worn on the back. She held it in her palm. It weighed nothing.

And in that moment the choice was no longer between returning and waiting, which is a radio choice, the choice of a man who speaks with reason; it was between holding that key in her palm as an object that says something true about the past, or putting it into the lock of a door that may no longer hold its frame and finding out, by turning it, whether it still says something about the future too; and neither of the two was wrong, and neither of the two was free.

Her sister called her from the kitchen. The potatoes.

Su'ad closed her hand around the key. She put the bunch back in the cloth pocket, but not the big key, that one she kept, and she went back into the kitchen, and she took up the knife again.

Outside, eleven months' distance from a brass door worn on the back. And the door, now, was within reach again.

But is within reach the same as open?