Exile: a novel Read online

  Good, David thought.

  “And the grand mufti,” Ruth concluded, “was nothing if not the authentic voice of Islam. Why else did the Arab nations invade Israel in 1948?”

  “How,” Saeb inquired with fearful politeness, “do you invade something that does not exist? Who made Israel a country? Your ‘invasion’ was, in truth, a failed war of liberation—the liberation of Palestinians from a Zionist program of expulsion. You could not have your ‘Jewish democracy’ with more Palestinians than Jews. You needed to be rid of us, by whatever means at hand.” The young man paused, biting off his final words. “But you will never be rid of us for good. Not all of us.”

  His deep-set eyes flashed with warning. There was about him, David thought, a molten anger deeper than Hana’s. Though this smell of the visceral was galvanizing, it left David disheartened. When, he wondered, could these two peoples leave their histories behind?

  As if to answer him, Hana spoke in more level tones: “It is generations since my grandparents fled what you call the State of Israel. They died in the squalid refugee camp in Lebanon where their children—my parents— still live. Saeb’s parents died there as well, murdered by Christian militia in a slaughter condoned by Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon. Now the rest of our land, including the West Bank, is occupied by the Israeli army.”

  At this, Marcus Goodman spun on her. “The West Bank is a center of terrorism—”

  “You talk of terrorism.” Saeb’s tone was acid and accusatory. “Israel was conceived in terrorism. It is drenched in terrorism. The Jewish Irgun brought terrorism to the Middle East. They bombed and killed the British until the Brits could stand no more, and then deployed more terror to expel us from our land. And then their henchmen killed still more of us in the Lebanese stinkhole that confines us.

  “If we are terrorists, it is because we must be. Perhaps killing is all the Jews have left us.”

  The silence of the audience suddenly felt stifling. Marcus and Ruth were zealous advocates, David thought, but Saeb Khalid spoke from raw experience. It was fascinating, and more than a little frightening.

  “Let us hope,” the moderator intoned, “that the Oslo Accords, paving the way for the return of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization to land now occupied by Israel, will provide an alternative to violence. And, with that thought, I’d like to thank the audience, and our panel...”

  “You go ahead,” David murmured to Noah. “I think I’ll stay for a while.”

  David lingered, watching Hana from the edge of the scrum of law students who had gathered around the panelists for further inquiry and debate. She was smaller, he saw, than the impression created by her intensity. In private conversation her manner seemed to soften, the directness of her gaze leavened by attentiveness and flashes of humor. She appeared a different species from Saeb, who had about him the air of a prophet, a man too consumed by his vision to make allowances for others. David had no desire to speak with him. His only interest was in Hana.

  At length, David angled through the crowd until he stood in front of her. Around her neck, David noted with curiosity, was a simple necklace on which hung what appeared to be an old brass key. Her upward gaze held the same disconcerting directness she had trained on him before. “You found all this amusing, I noticed.”

  Once again, David resolved to stand his ground. “Not terribly,” he answered evenly. “Death is not amusing. Nothing about your history amuses me. You simply caught me admiring your gifts. And I’m way out of sympathy with anyone, even my friend Marcus, who thinks that God has punched his ticket.”

  This elicited a first, faint smile. “God gave us the land as well. He just forgot to leave the deed.”

  David glanced again at her necklace. “The key you wear,” he asked, “what is it?”

  “The key to my father’s home. In Galilee.”

  “In Israel,” David amended gently. “Have you ever seen it?”

  Still she held his gaze. “No. Nor has my father, since he was seven. When my grandfather took a mule and cart and packed up his family and all he could take from the home he had built with his own hands. Including this key.”

  David shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “Listening tonight, I found myself wondering where each of you thought history began. Does your history begin in 1947?”

  “Don’t patronize me,” Hana answered crisply. “I know the Jewish narrative, all too well. And don’t sell our history short. My history begins with the thousands of years we occupied the land that you call Israel.”

  David smiled. “I happen to be Jewish, as you might have guessed. But if I recall my Middle Eastern history course, what I call Israel—a strip of land on the Mediterranean—was occupied thousands of years ago not by Arabs or Jews but by Philistines. Gentiles, in short. So I suppose I could make a case for the Philistine Liberation Organization.” He held up his hand, fending off the irritation flashing through her eyes. “I don’t mean to make light of this. I’m just trying to point out that the past is a black hole. There’s no way to resolve it.”

  “That’s no reason to forget it—”

  “I’m not suggesting amnesia. Peace would be enough. An end to killing.”

  At this, Hana glanced at Saeb, who was speaking with two law students. David sensed that she, like him, had just discovered that Saeb was furtively watching them. Seemingly disconcerted, Hana turned back to David. “With all respect,” she said dismissively, “I think you have much to learn.”

  “And time to learn it.” David steeled himself to make a suggestion that—unique to this woman among all the women he had known—he found surprisingly difficult. “I’d like to talk with you some more.”

  For an instant, Hana looked genuinely startled. Then she stared at him so deeply that, it seemed to David, she believed that she could gaze into his soul. “Perhaps lunch,” she murmured at last. Glancing at Saeb again, she added softly, “Somewhere less incendiary.”

  David felt a tingle of surprise. This was nothing, he assured himself, a small distraction from the tedium of a last semester, the way station to his certain future.

  “Lunch,” he said, and their private history began.

  3

  For Ibrahim, San Francisco was a cool gray purgatory.

  It was the sixth day. He stood on Ocean Beach, the edge of America, his back to their seedy motel across the fourlane road. For all he knew the dense, swirling fog in which he stood stretched, like the ocean, to Asia. The dull tan of the beach merged with the featureless gray water, which vanished in the mist. A bleak depression seeped into his bones like the dampness of the air. He could not believe that this misery was summer.

  There was no one on the beach but the two of them. Ibrahim folded his arms against the cold, staring into nothingness as Iyad, perhaps a hundred feet away, called her on his cell phone.

  She had a system, Iyad had explained. All communications were through phones with local numbers, avoiding the American spy agencies that monitored international calls. Every two days, she would order him to discard the phone and direct him to a new one, purchased for cash by one of her faceless helpers. Only she would know the cell phone number; she would call Iyad on the new phone, giving him fresh instructions and the number of her latest unregistered phone. Her system, Ibrahim knew, was that used by drug dealers and arms smugglers—or, under the Israelis, by the Palestinian resistance. She was clever, Iyad conceded, or at least well schooled.

  Ibrahim tried to imagine their conversations. By a strange mental trick, Ibrahim sometimes fantasized that it was his sister—whose mind, in reality, was as dark as ruined film—who issued such precise instructions. Perhaps the stress was eroding his own reason.

  Ibrahim shivered, miserable in the cold, against which his polo shirt provided no cover. In the distance, Iyad flipped his cell phone shut and shoved it in his pocket. For a moment, he, too, gazed at the water, as if absorbed by what he had heard. Then he walked toward Ibrahim.

  Standing
close, Iyad spoke in Arabic—softly, as though his words might carry in the mist. They would drive to the Greyhound station marked on the map. Taped to the back of a men’s room toilet in the last stall to the left would be a key to another locker. Inside they would find a new phone, a last safeguard against detection, for the instructions that would bring about their deaths.

  “God willing,” Iyad said in the somber tones of prayer, “the enemy will die with us. Tomorrow.”

  The telephone rang in David’s office, startling him from the past. This time the voice was Carole’s, and he understood how completely a single phone call had effaced the thirteen years since Harvard.

  “Dad wants to take us to lunch. To celebrate.” Her voice was a fusion of warmth for Harold Shorr and concern that David understand. “I told him you’d love that. Is it okay?”

  David did not exactly love it. Outside of politics, he avoided lunch dates—he did not like to fall behind, losing control of his day. Glancing at his watch, he realized that an hour had already been lost to memory. The day remaining was a full one: a meeting with United States Attorney Marnie Sharpe—who loathed him—to discuss a high-end bank robbery carried out by his patently guilty client; a conference with a medical expert in a complex, and regrettably fatal, case of medical malpractice. Carole knew these things, even as she knew that his workday would be cut short by her dinner for Prime Minister Ben-Aron, for which she had extracted David’s pledge to arrive a half hour early.

  So he was mildly annoyed that, whatever her excitement, Carole had placed her father’s enthusiasm above the pressures of his own workday. But knowing this made him feel petty. And though he could never replicate Carole’s deep bond with her widowed father, he understood it. In his own more restrained way, David loved and admired his father-in-law-to-be and, he was forced to admit, suspected that the attachment of father and daughter exposed an emotional deficiency in David himself.

  Like Carole, David was an only child. There the similarities ended. He rarely examined his own past or spoke of his now-deceased parents— indeed, he avoided it. But Carole’s childhood, intertwined with her fierce love for Harold Shorr, was such a richly remembered presence in her life that, to David, it seemed more vivid than his own.

  Some memories he knew by heart. That every Sunday Harold, a graceful skater, had taken her for ice-skating and hot chocolate. That he could fix any toy she broke—the doll’s arm might be funny, but now she could scratch her back. That father and daughter learned Hebrew together. That her parents never argued over Carole except once, in Polish, about whether she could watch TV past nine o’clock.

  But there were other, darker memories. That, after coughing, Harold flinched as though remembering those days and nights in Auschwitz when the Nazis might shoot him for being sick. That he carried within him a deep silence that could consume him for hours. That Carole sensed that each new day was a surprise because no one wished to kill him.

  It was this that infused her memories with so much meaning. Harold Shorr’s consuming quest was to give Carole a better life, one of warmth and safety. Her wedding would be the culmination of his most cherished, most wistful dreams.

  So when David responded to her question, his tone was one of wry affection. “Lunch? Of course I’d love it. You knew that even before you didn’t ask.”

  Hanging up, David smiled. Once more, he found himself reflecting that though Harold’s wounds touched both father and daughter, Harold had wrested from a horror he could not fully articulate the cocoon of goodness that defined who Carole was. And then, sadly, David thought again of a twenty-three-year-old woman, dark and lovely, whose wounds he could never heal, and she could never quite transcend.

  4

  It was during their first lunch that David sensed the vulnerability beneath the articulate fierceness Hana Arif presented to the world.

  At Hana’s suggestion, they met at a Chinese restaurant off campus, notable for its lack of clientele. As Hana glanced around the restaurant, empty save for a professional-appearing man and a pretty, much younger woman who looked as furtive as her companion, David realized that Hana feared being seen alone with a man—especially a Jew. It was a feeling of otherness David seldom had.

  “Why,” he inquired mildly, “am I feeling like a secret agent? Is one of us not supposed to be here?”

  The question seemed to deepen her unease. “It’s not like I’m a prisoner,” she said. “But I am Muslim, and Saeb and I are to be married.”

  For an instant, David felt a foolish disappointment. Casually, he asked, “Was that your decision?”

  Almost imperceptibly, she stiffened. “I’m not a prisoner,” she repeated. “But there are conventions. Within reason, I try to respect them. Saeb wouldn’t understand this lunch, and it’s not important that I make him.”

  David sifted the conflicting intimations of this answer: that David himself was unimportant; that, nonetheless, she was committing a small act of defiance which caused her real discomfort. “How has it been for you?” he asked. “Harvard, I mean.”

  David watched her ponder the question, and then, it seemed, conceal Hana the woman behind Hana the Palestinian. “We feel isolated. There are fifteen Arab students at the law school, and not all of them care for Palestinians. And so many of our classmates are Jews—”

  “Yes,” David said. “We’re everywhere.”

  She regarded him with a smile that did not touch her eyes. “Perhaps you think I’m anti-Semitic.”

  He returned her smile in kind. “I wouldn’t know.”

  After a moment, Hana shrugged. “At least you don’t assume I am. But if I say I don’t like Zionism, people think it means I hate all Jews.

  “My torts professor, a Jew, saves the hardest questions for me. The day after the debate you saw, another student came into that class, sat beside me, and put a miniature Israeli flag on the desk in front of him.” Her voice became both weary and sardonic. “I suppose God had made that desk another grant to the Jewish people. But that day all I wanted was to sit in class and learn whatever I could.” Pausing, she shrugged again, her voice softening. “I didn’t start the Holocaust, and I don’t deny that it happened. But the American Jews I meet are completely ignorant of the history you would like me to set aside. Sometimes I think Jews are so consumed by anti-Semitism that they can only see their own suffering and loss, not that of others.”

  David repressed his first rejoinder—that Hana’s plaint, even were it true, could be turned back on itself. “Of course,” he parried. “That’s why so many Jews joined our civil rights movement. For that matter, it’s why I asked you to lunch.”

  Eyebrows raised, Hana gave him a penetrant look. “Yes,” she said, “why did you?”

  “Because I was curious about you. Why did you come?”

  “Because I was curious about why you asked me. Though I expected that you saw me as some mildly exotic novelty, like encountering a chin-chilla in one of your petting zoos.”

  At once, David grasped the deeper truth beneath her cleverness: her facility with words and images concealed an isolation far deeper than she chose to confess. Only candor, he decided, had a chance of piercing her defenses.

  “When I met you,” he said, “I saw a particular woman. A beautiful one, which never hurts. A woman who might despise me for what I am. But also one with a life so different from mine that I wanted to know more about it. Besides, as I said, I have the time.”

  She studied him. “So why not ask Saeb?”

  “Because he’s not a beautiful woman.”

  Hana laughed, a clear, pleasing trill free of rancor that took him by surprise. “And because,” David finished, “with all respect to your fiancé, I don’t think ten lunches in a row would make the slightest difference to him.”

  A young Chinese waiter arrived to take their order. When he left, Hana was gazing at the table with a veiled look of contemplation. “So,” she inquired at length, “what do you want to know about me?”

  “To start,
what you envision as your home.”

  “We have no home,” she said bitterly. “The refugee camp is an open sewer, a burial ground.” She paused, draining the disdain from her voice. “Our home is in the Lower Galilee. It’s built on a hillside, surrounded by the olive trees my grandfather planted, with a system of pipes and drains that capture the rainwater and channel it, and a cistern for the house. The house itself is stone. Its ceiling is reinforced with steel beams, and there are four rooms—a room to gather in, and bedrooms for my father and my uncles, for my aunts, and for my grandparents. There is no kitchen. My grandmother cooked outside, and they ate from plates they shared—”

  “How can you know all this?”

  Hana’s face softened. “My grandfather described it for us, countless times, before he died. Stone by stone, like Flaubert described the village in Madame Bovary. But my grandparents’ village was real, not imagined.”

  David wondered about this—what memory embellished, time destroyed. “And Saeb?” he asked.

  “Is from the same village. Not literally, of course—in 1948, our parents were children. But their memories are as vivid as my grandfather’s.”

  Perhaps their memories are your grandfather’s, David thought but did not say. Instead, he inquired, “How did you come to Lebanon?”

  Hana summoned a smile that signaled her forbearance. “Another accident of the history you have so little use for, and of people who have little use for us. After hearing of the massacre at Deir Yassin, my grandparents fled to Jordan. So did hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. The war in 1948 brought still more, as did the war of 1967. But all those Palestinians challenged the power of King Hussein. And so the Jordanian army shelled our camps, and drove our fighters into Lebanon.” Her voice held quiet anger. “From which, as a by-product of the cleansing operation Saeb mentioned, the Israelis forced Arafat and the PLO into exile in Tunis, claiming that their acts of ‘terror’ threatened northern Israel.