We forget about the grenade, because an early spring storm sweeps in from the coast for days, drenching us, filling our shoes with muck, making it impossible to thin out the foliage and prune the trees, which we are anxious to do before the spring growth.

Then when the ground has dried, we find that just above the hole where our father left the grenade has sprung up a cover of weed with little white flowers, like the bindweed our father says used to grow here when he was a boy. When our father threatens to clear it out, we beg him to let a little piece of it stay, because we have never seen it before and its small flowers are so beautiful. And so he agrees, just a little spot, and just until the beginning of summer.

We bring some of the flowers to our mother. And in the room where the white flowers sit in a vase, our mother begins watching the television, listening to programs that recount the terrible things that happened in the war years. And soon at dinnertime, she says she remembers that when she was a girl, her family, who lived in this same house, had not only fig trees, but pomegranates and oranges too. Our land was larger then, before the war, and she speaks of how rich and satisfied we would have been if the enemy had not invaded us.

The village girls begin spending time picking the small flowers, and when some of the boys try to stomp it out, because it is crowding out the fig roots, my sister throws a rock at one of the boys, and before the end of it, the boy has a black eye and she has a bloody lip.

The small white flowers are so beautiful though, and one day at dusk when the other children have already gone home, I visit them alone, and the flowers whisper to me: In this very spot, the enemy razed this land. They cut down the trees that lived here and impoverished your family. They killed one of your great uncles, who had wished to get married and have children, and his children would have been your cousins, who would have grown up with you and with your family, but the enemy crushed this line of your family. The one who threw the grenade is living happily in his country, with the plunder they took from your family, and their family barely remembers the war, and their family remembers nothing about yours or what happened during those years, while you are suffering, and your parents toil for so little.

I begin to be filled with murderous thoughts about the enemy, living off what they took from us—the missing pomegranates and orange trees. And I tell the other neighborhood children about the whispers, and the next evening we gather around the bush, and we are all filled with murderous thoughts. And even though the war is long over, we children long to enlist as soon as we are old enough. The flower cover tells us it’s so very sorry things had to be this way, and it isn’t our fault the enemy took everything from us, but we are brave, and it’s up to us now to set things right.

In the summertime, when school is out, and the days stretch endlessly and bake our skin, we cannot help but daydream about the missing pomegranate and orange trees and how nice it would have been to crack the fruits open and drink their juices. By this time, our father has come to fulfil his promise to pull the weed and join the village boys in stomping it out. He regrets having listened to our pleas in the first place, because the weed is spreading more quickly than anyone would have guessed, threatening to strangle our fig grove. By this time, the flowers from the weed have fallen off, and little fruits have formed everywhere across the groundcover, green, small and delicate, like closed-up pinecones, and our grandfather says they are like tiny grenades. And so my brothers and I pick them up and throw them, pretending the other village boys are the enemy.

We are unable to pull up the weed completely. And in the late summer, we hear from our mother’s television program about the international visitors who are coming to our country, and the professors who are holding lectures to talk about relations between us and our enemy, and our father asks us to stop playing the grenade game, and he and our grandfather continue stomping on the groundcover, and digging at the weed, but it’s too much for them.

The international professors and peacekeepers and aid workers fill nearby hotels, eat at our capital city’s restaurants, and warn us on television that we need assistance and a peace deal. They say they are here to preserve our way of life, but our mother says not to believe them.

One group of aid workers comes right to our village to dig up the very spot where the bindweed first sprung up. It takes them just a short time with a yellow backhoe. And when they pull it up, now from meters under the earth, finally, they find the husk of that grenade, covered in roots that stretch as far across the grove as anyone can see. One of the aid workers holds it up by its tangle of twisted, white roots. It is large, damp, and swollen, like a severed head.

The aid workers say they are there to take out the weeds and protect our trees, but our mother says, They come as peacekeepers now, but did you know they sold the grenades to our enemies in the first place? And then our grandfather reminds her, Before they sold them to our enemies, they sold them to us. And the next morning, our mother says she’s heard from the television that we have turned down the peace deal, but we are not afraid, because our village and country are strong. And this is our grove, and if anyone tries to take it, we will defend it with our lives.

We are not sure exactly what we are defending though, because when the harvest comes, and we gather buckets, the figs too, now intertwined with the bindweed, have been replaced by the tiny green pinecones.

I sign up for the war willingly when I turn eighteen, along with the other men from my village. The international visitors are gone now, and our groves are overgrown with the bindweed that has overtaken the whole village. The figs never come anymore, just tiny fruits shaped like grenades, with no pink inside, that crumble like chalk in our hands. When the children ask how it got that way, the other men and I exchange a look and tell them no one can remember. And when you get pluck the tiny fruits, there is a little flash, and a pause, and then, sometimes, the sound of an explosion coming from somewhere far away.