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The last leg of his journey home to West Bank on Wednesday will be the easy part. God, it could be said, does have a sense of humor.

When his wife and children wave goodbye at PTI Airport, Masoud Awartani will travel light. In his pocket will be a plane ticket; in his bag, a camcorder to document 10 siblings and the large extended family he has not seen since he left West Bank 26 years ago, barred by separation laws from coming and going freely.

And no chance the Greensboro restaurateur will forget to pack the document making this visit possible. It is a newly issued passport stamped with two words he has had less than a month to get used to: "U.S. citizen."

Like many Palestinians of his generation, living in exile from their troubled homeland, scattered to the four winds, Awartani, 46, is not used to being a citizen of anywhere.

But to Greensboro, he is a familiar face, in a sense. One of those talking heads reporters have run to over the years for quickie quotes every time there is a flare-up in Gaza or Jerusalem, he is a dial-up "Palestinian perspective" to counterpoint "the rabbi."

Ah, but exactly how Greensboro's Southern-fried version of Ellis Island became the Awartani family's home - in the end, home in the truest sense - is quite the American tale.

It has twists and knots like the branches of the olive trees Awartani's father planted for him - though his father, who died in March, wouldn't live to see this particular reunion.

It starts with a '70s Afro-haired exchange student simply wanting an American education that would profit his homeland. In the '80s it detours headlong in love and marriage to a woman, Annah Laymoun, from a town 10 miles from his hometown, Anabta.

In the next decade, there is a first go at a restaurant, Adriatic, and a popular slow-food stand at the Greensboro farmers' market. Finally comes the mature Zaytoon, a swank bookend in the city's financial district.

Everything is smooth sailing until a black squall blows in and stops over the Awartani household. That is when Masoud and Annah find out how many friends they have. And what the definition of "home" really is.

But, here, we've gotten way ahead of our tale. Masoud is just now finishing a business meeting at Zaytoon, his polished, sunlit Middle Eastern restaurant at the foot of the U.S. Trust Bank plaza.

"This is going to be a long story," he says. "Where do you want to start?"

* * *

When he wakes up at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, Masoud Awartani's room is full of flowers. Seven days a week it is like this, for four weeks. Which is sufficient time to take stock of all sorts of things.

It is June 2007, and Masoud's doctors, finding cancer, have removed most of his stomach. His once-stout figure is a pale, graying ghost in a hospital gown, down 70 pounds, with as many worries as there are dots in the ceiling.

What will they do now - Annah and the three kids especially, and all the relatives abroad who depend on him to send money? What happens to the restaurant?

And there is one other question suddenly real and close at hand - close as if it is sitting on his chest.

"Where would they bury me?" Masoud recalls thinking. "Here, or back home? This stuff was bearing down."

He had left West Bank in 1983, first to go to school in Jordan, where he meets Annah, then in Greensboro in 1986 to study agricultural economics at N.C. A&T. It is the perfect course of study for a young Arab who plans to return home and feed, literally, his extended family. He wants to learn about cash crops.

But Masoud's father, Mohammad, a playful man with a flair for backgammon and a knack for metaphor, has a better idea.

He wants to plant olive trees - for the uprooted Palestinian people, a symbol not just of sustenance, but of roots, of place. Olive trees, evergreen and maturing over generations, are planted to mark big occasions such as births and weddings and stand for permanence.

Everything Palestinians lack.

So the year Masoud leaves West Bank - never dreaming, at the time, he won't return in his father's lifetime - Mohammad plants an olive orchard for his son. Each time the son phones home, the banter revolves around the olive orchard.

"So," the father would begin, "Mr. Agricultural Economist. Mr. Cash Crop. Wait until you come and see my babies. You don't know the value of the olive tree."

Masoud, like many of his siblings, has to make a choice. Once he has lived outside the Israeli-occupied West Bank for six years, according to separation laws, he loses his residency and his right to travel to the West Bank.

He is stateless, a man without a country. The United States is his refuge.

Here, however, his academic major is not the sensible choice it would have been in West Bank, so he goes into the restaurant business.

Annah gets her master's in vocational education and focuses on raising the children full-time.

Likewise, Masoud's life consists mainly of - life. There is his oldest son Layth's soccer game, good enough that they named the restaurant's bestselling dish No. 9, after his jersey.

Younger Nora and Adam settle in at New Garden Friends School. Annah's organic cooking gains a following at the market.

And when the next-to-the-worst happens - 9/11 - people reach out to them, just the way a town, in theory, is supposed to. Take care of Greensboro, Greensboro takes care of you.

In Masoud and Annah's case, it was to be. Not only when a far-off black cloud like 9/11 appears. But when one parks itself over your house.

Which leads us back to Baptist, and a room full of flowers, where Masoud is in for several surprises.

* * *

The first goes without saying. Masoud lives to tell the tale, and not just in a sound bite about Gaza Strip.

The second surprise? People across Greensboro - Muslim, Christian, Jew, whatever, have all this time been praying for him, cutting his grass, bringing meals.

Third? The restaurant does fine in his and Annah's long absence. The employees rally, and customers such as Pam DeBerry, today a part-time worker, show up unannounced to work for free.

"She said, 'This is for Masoud,'" Annah recalls. "I get goosebumps. It really showed us the city."

The final surprise just this month came in the mail, after his Dec. 17 swearing in, in Charlotte, as a U.S. citizen. It's a passport.

He can now travel to West Bank - roundtrip - and see his brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles who are still alive.

And at last, beneath the hills where he last stood in 1983, Masoud will get to see the twisting branches of the olive trees his father needled him about for so long.

This last surprise, the sweetest. What more to tell? Only where he got the name of his restaurant, Zaytoon. What does it mean?

"Olives," he says. "You see? Olives are everything. My father was right. I am my father's son."

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com