They left before dawn, walking east with what they could carry. The road out of their village was lined with others doing the same. Old men pushed carts, women balanced bundles on their heads, and children gripped sleeves so they would not get lost. Smoke rose behind them. Somewhere back there, soldiers were moving from house to house. The sound was distant but steady, the end of something familiar and the beginning of something nameless. They did not call it the Nakba then, not yet. They just knew they could not go home.