Exile: a novel (10 page)

When Carole finished reading the journals, she told David, she had gone to Harold and said that she loved him more than life.

Tears had filled his eyes. “Please,” he told her with a wistful smile, “not more than life.”

“It was strange,” Carole told David later. “At that moment, I knew that the most important thing that would ever happen to me had happened before I was born.”

Now Harold raised his glass to them, filled to the brim with rich red wine. David saw the tattooed “8” appear above his shirtsleeve.

“L’chaim,”
Harold said.

Raising his own glass, David thought of Hana’s key.

Both Harold and Hana were marked by history, he reflected—as were Carole and Saeb Khalid. David did not compare the ways; to him, the horror of Harold Shorr’s suffering was reinforced by the terrible deliberation of its authors, repeated six million times. But Saeb’s family was as dead to him as Harold’s. And the question he had asked Hana thirteen years ago still lingered in David’s mind.

Where does history begin?

For Harold Shorr, history began on the day the Nazis killed his father—the same day, David knew, that it began for Carole. For Hana, the date was the flight of her family in 1948—as with Carole, she was marked by events she had never witnessed. But for Saeb, as for Harold, history truly started with the murder of his family at the hands of gentiles—and, Saeb would insist, Jews. Thinking of another lunch long ago, his only meeting with Saeb Khalid, David found himself wishing, for Hana’s sake if not his own, that Saeb could have come to terms with his own past.

10     
I
t was one of those moments after making love, when Hana seemed to slip away from him. She remained tantalizingly close, her back against his chest, the nape of her neck moist and warm as his lips grazed her skin. And yet her face was turned from him; David knew that her eyes, though he could not see them, were troubled and abstracted.

“What is it?” David asked.

She drew a breath. “Saeb wishes to have lunch. With you, and me.”

Startled, David stiffened, propping his head on his palm. “You must be joking.”

“No.”

“How did
that
happen? We’ve never even spoken. Unless I’m missing something, he doesn’t know that I exist. Let alone about what we’ve just finished doing.”

Hana turned to him, sheet around her waist, her breasts uncovered. She was so beautiful that it silenced him.

“I told him we’d begun to talk—at law school, between classes or at the cafeteria. That you’re interested in what’s happened to us.” She hesitated, then said, “A lie is more persuasive if it contains a little truth.”

The ambiguities of Hana’s psyche, oscillating between guilt and its absence, unsettled David further. “Why take the chance of mentioning me at all? Unless,” he added with sudden hope, “you’re getting ready to tell him the undiluted truth.”

“No,” she said flatly. “Not that.”

The swiftness of her response deepened David’s hurt. “Then what other, smaller truth did you tell him?”

“None. Only that I’ve come to like you, and that you’re not like other Jews.”

This stung him. “No,” he said harshly. “I’m hardly Jewish at all.”

Hana touched his arm. “I didn’t mean that as it sounded.”

“Like an anti-Semitic cliché, you mean? Unlike most of us, I’m not cheap, either, or obsessed with money. No wonder your fiancé is dying to have lunch with me—I’m that rare Jew any Arab would be proud to know. If not to sleep with.”

“Please, David.” Her eyes implored him. “Please, I’m sorry.”

David rolled on his back. “God help me, I’m sounding like some neglected woman, someone you’re fucking on the side. Which is true, I guess.”

“Not the way you say it—even without the sexism. I told you, the first time we were like this, how it is for me.” She hesitated, then asked quietly, “So is this the day that I stop coming here?”

The fear of losing her, David found, was as strong as the hope that she would keep coming back until she found that she could not stop, and was forced to confront what that might mean. “Lunch with Saeb,” he said at last, “is not a good idea.”

There was a subtle change in her expression, a softening, as though she was relieved that he was edging back from the precipice. “But how could I say no to him? At least without acting like I’m hiding something important.”

“And aren’t you?”

For minutes after, he pondered his own question, the disturbing ways that Hana’s half-truth to Saeb suggested the depth and complexity of their connection—her need to speak to him of David, yet her willingness to dissemble. Hana lay her face against his shoulder.

They were to meet at a Lebanese restaurant in Cambridge—Saeb’s selection. It was seedy and a little dark, its quiet broken by taped Middle Eastern music discordant to David’s ear, the words as alien as a muezzin’s call to prayer. David felt on edge, his mood soured by his being forced to play the part of prospective Jewish friend to a betrothed Palestinian couple, complicated still further by his desire somehow to gain from this charade at Saeb’s expense.

When Hana arrived with Saeb, she was composed but distant. David felt as though he were watching her through glass; she sat across the table, but did not touch him. Saeb’s handshake was perfunctory and soft.

“We’re glad you came,” Hana said pleasantly, as though to an acquaintance.

Amid the awkward small talk with which they began, David tried to focus on Saeb Khalid.

He was slight, much smaller than David; though his motions were fluid and graceful, there was nothing of the athlete about him. His face was an intellectual’s, slender and fine-featured. But what captured David’s attention were Saeb’s eyes, the principal source of his undeniable charisma. Dark and liquid, they seemed at once deeply human and terribly wounded, suggesting a mind both troubled and intuitive. Knowing what had happened to his family, David felt an awkward sympathy—this was a man to whom lasting damage had been done, living with an aftershock that must permeate his soul.

But it was the intuitive quality that David found unnerving. Saeb was no fool, David felt certain, and he was vigilant against hurt or humiliation. His manner seemed to vacillate between reticence—intensified, David suspected, by an aversion to David himself—and a desire to find out why this American Jew might interest Hana, and therefore pose a threat to him. The one thing David did not feel from him was the simple curiosity of one human being about another.

“So,” Saeb said, “you’re about to graduate, Hana says. That leaves so little time to know you.”

Intended or not, this double-edged remark put David more on edge. Hana would not look at him. Lightly, David answered, “It’s the only thing I mind about graduating.”

“What will you do?”

“Go back to San Francisco, work as a prosecutor. And you?”

Saeb’s smile was brief. “That’s a little more problematic. A master’s degree in international relations might entitle me to teach. But where? The Zionists do not seem very anxious to let me return to my actual home.”

“Israel, you mean?”

Saeb’s eyes flashed briefly, and then he covered this with a briefer smile. “So they call it. How have your people, David, come to live in our land, and we live in camps or exile?”

When David glanced at Hana, she looked away. “For Jews,” he answered, “our history is the history of exile, a history two thousand years long. But land is only land. My homeland is some city in Germany, I suppose, though my ancestors would have been murdered had they stayed there. So I guess my parents’ homeland is San Francisco. They seem to like it quite a lot.”

At this, Hana’s eyes widened in unspoken warning. “Not Israel?” Saeb
interjected with mock surprise. “Then why were we so badly inconvenienced?”

“I don’t dismiss what happened to you,” David answered calmly. “A people was dispersed. But land doesn’t make a people; people make a land. That land could be the West Bank—”

“Which is occupied by the Zionist army. If Jews can remember two thousand years, forty-five years is not too long for Palestinians to remember. Do you expect me to forget all that’s happened to us?” Saeb paused, and his tone became quietly insinuating. “Or do you require Hana to remind you?”

All at once, David sensed the second agenda beneath Saeb’s question, even more visceral than the first. Hana folded her hands, staring at the table. “After I came here,” Saeb continued as though nothing were amiss, “I researched how your media reported the massacre at Sabra and Shatila. The
Washington Post
was typical. Mainly they interviewed American Jews, allowing them to agonize about how Jews could have countenanced such acts.” His tone became quieter. “Even our deaths were about Jews and their feelings. No one thought to ask
us
how we felt about women and children being raped and slaughtered. We were, as always, faceless. Because Jews write the story.”

Facing Saeb across the table, David fought to curb his temper. Fueling Saeb’s dislike, he told himself, was the shame of watching his family massacred and his sister raped, a humiliation that would follow him to the grave. Now, in front of Hana, he was facing an unscarred man she liked, and might even desire. Suddenly, David felt a disturbing mix of envy and superiority.
Do you wonder if I’m sleeping with her?
he wanted to ask Saeb.
Or is despising someone like me simply as hardwired in your psyche as distrusting Jews?

It was good, David supposed, that lunch arrived.

Hana served the dish of spiced lamb and onion and rice to Saeb, then David, then herself. “So here we are,” she ventured in a mollifying tone. “And you are right, David—all of us have our histories. But now it is we Palestinians who suffer. The deaths we remember are of family we knew. Our memory of dispossession is fresh, and new memories grow day by day.” Her voice lowered; for the first time, David saw something in her eyes like an apology, a plea for understanding that was more personal than political. “You must realize how raw this is for us.”

David gazed at her openly. With a doubleness he intended, he asked her, “Then what is the way out for us?”

Saeb covered Hana’s hand, a proprietary gesture that—David felt certain—was intended more as a message to David than to signal Saeb’s desire to speak. “There is no ‘way out’ for ‘us,’ David. In the end, only one of ‘us’ survives.”

And for
us
? David wanted to ask Hana. Instead, he paid for lunch.

It was the last time he had seen Saeb Khalid.

11     
I
brahim sat with Iyad in the van. “What now?” he asked.

“We wait.”

Ibrahim had been waiting all his life. Waiting for Arafat; waiting for the Zionist occupation to end; waiting for his oldest sister’s first child to be born, for the joy of being called uncle. Waiting for the soldier to acknowledge their desperate pleas to let them take his sister to the hospital. Now in fear and frustration, he was awaiting a woman’s permission to become a man.

Perhaps, somewhere in this city, she waited also, for her own permission to deliver their final instructions. From whom these would come, Ibrahim did not know.

Restless, he watched the shoppers driving in and out of the parking lot. There was much left to do; less than twenty-four hours remained, and yet Ibrahim and Iyad were without the means of destruction, still ignorant of where or how to kill him. Ibrahim tried to restrain himself from checking his watch, and could not; by this time tomorrow he should be well beyond doing such a thing.

One thirty-seven.

Iyad’s cell phone rang.

Basking in the warmth of the occasion, Harold and Carole lingered over coffee as David swiftly checked his watch.

He could relax, he told himself. There was still a comfortable hour before he met with the expert witness in his somewhat grim malpractice case, time to enjoy the company of his future wife and father-in-law. And now
even his new timepiece reminded David of how much he valued this man, and had come to understand him.

The watch was a Piaget. A few moments before, David had remarked on it. “Then have it,” Harold said, and took it off his wrist.

“Good Lord, no, Harold. It’s yours, and it’s way too expensive.”

Harold smiled. “And, for me, a waste. I was going to put it in a safe. Such a fancy watch feels wrong to wear in public, just as I can never imagine a Holocaust survivor flaunting a hundred-foot yacht. As for watches, I can remember all too well when I measured time in days, not hours.” Firmly, Harold took David’s wrist and slipped on the thin gold piece of art. “It is my nature,” he said softly, “the one the Germans gave me. You have no such inhibitions, nor will your children. Pass it on to your first son with his grandfather’s love.”

He stopped, embarrassed by his own sentiment, even as he sometimes seemed embarrassed by his hard-earned success as a real estate developer. But his hand remained on David’s wrist—as so often, David thought, Harold’s hands spoke for him. As though to cover this moment of emotion, Harold turned to Carole, saying in a fondly chiding tone, “And so I will see you both again tonight, when you force me to listen to this man Ben-Aron. Perhaps you wish me to sing ‘Beautiful Dreamer’ as he speaks.”

David shot Carole a swift grin. Though a liberal in American terms, in Israeli politics Harold favored the most adamant skeptics about the Palestinians as partners in peace. Amos Ben-Aron had long been just as obdurate. But his selection as prime minister had changed him—despite the increasing sway of Hamas, pledged to the destruction of Israel, Ben-Aron now argued that as many Palestinians as Jews desired peace, and that Israel must work with the opponents of Hamas to establish a viable Palestinian state in the territories controlled by Israeli soldiers.

“Wishful thinking is not a plan,” Harold continued. “Ben-Aron has begun thinking about the Palestinians like a man kidnapped by terrorists: it is intolerable to believe that they mean to kill him, so he imagines that they’re holding him captive because they like his company.” Turning to David, he asked, “And do you agree with me?”