Exile: a novel (18 page)

“Thank you, David.” Relief flooded her voice. “I did not know what you would say.”

When Hana hung up, David closed his eyes, still holding the receiver.

Two nights before his graduation from law school, Hana had come to his apartment.

At first she had said nothing. As though possessed by emotion she could not express in words, she had kissed him with impetuous fury and, as she had never done before, began unbuttoning his shirt, her lips sliding down his stomach. David felt the beating of his own pulse, the shiver of desire. Then, for the first time, she took him in her mouth.

David raised her face to his. “No, Hana. I want
us.
”

Eyes closing, she nodded. He led her to the bedroom. She undressed swiftly, turning away as though she could not face him.

“Look at me,” he said. “I want to see you.”

Turning, she looked into his eyes, slipping out of her jeans. When she was naked, Hana asked softly, “Do you see me now, David?”

Suddenly he was afraid to ask why she had come. She took his hand, drawing him down beside her on the cool white sheets.

His lips moved across her nipples, her stomach, seeking the most intimate part of her as she murmured his name, over and over, “Please, David—yes...”

When he was inside her the murmurs became an urgent cry, her hips thrusting against his. Her body was taut, insistent; their lovemaking became frenzied, all barriers shattered, two people as one and yet, David sensed at the edge of his consciousness, separate in their own need. Her last cries became a shudder he felt against his skin. “God,” she said in a voice suffused with pain. “The price of you . . .”

He chose to hear this as the crossing of her psychic bridge, the decision to be with him. “It’ll be all right,” he said after a time. “My parents will be here tomorrow. You can meet them—they can’t help but like you, I know...”

She turned from him, burying her face in the pillow. Then she gave the smallest shake of her head, as though completely spent. “I can’t.”

For a long time she lay prone, silent. David could only wait, fearful of her response. He guessed, but was not sure, that Hana was crying.

When she turned to him, he saw that this was true. But her voice was clear and quiet. “I’m going back to Lebanon, to marry Saeb.”

David could not comprehend this—their lovemaking, then her words, as cold to him as a death sentence. “You can’t, Hana. It’s not human. You’ve been in prison so long you can’t believe you’re free.”

“Free,”
she said with sudden anger. “You keep using that word, ‘free.’ Don’t you see—I am Palestinian, you are American and Jewish. To marry you would deny everything I am. In our culture we don’t just marry a man. We marry his family, his history, just as he marries ours.

“No one asks you who your parents are. But among my people, the first question is, ‘You are the daughter of whom?’ I could never replace my family, or betray them—it would be like cutting off a limb.” Her voice quickened, the sound of emotions bursting their bonds. “I would be a traitor in their eyes, the wife of an enemy, making them carry my shame to the grave. They’ve always been my source of love—”

“What kind of love,” David snapped, “cuts a daughter off from it? What about loving you as much as they love themselves? Maybe even enough— though this must be hard for you to imagine—to care about whether you’re happy?”

Hana stood abruptly, staring at him in anger. She began to dress. Then, perhaps because she saw the depth of his pain, she spoke more quietly. “This is not a drama of Montagues and Capulets, a story of blind adults and clear eyed children in love. My parents are Palestinian.”

“That can’t be all that matters to you.”

“
You
matter to me.” Suddenly her voice broke. “I love you, David. I think perhaps I will always love you. But there are so many things that tell me, in the deepest part of my soul, that I must be with Saeb. Please, try to understand. No man by himself could heal the pain of losing my family. Not even you.”

She turned from him, pulling on her sweater. In the turmoil of his emotions—anger, desperation, disbelief—David felt the last vestige of
self-control slip away. “You say you love me,” he said tightly. “But do you know what’s even worse? The empty life you’re running to.”

Hana whirled on him, eyes alight with resentment. But then something akin to fear seemed to dull her outrage. “Good-bye,” she said in a hollow voice.

David reached out for her. “Hana...”

She turned from him, rushing to the living room. In the instant it took for her to close his front door, she vanished from David’s life.

David graduated from law school in a trance, acting out the pleasure his parents had come to see. He never spoke of Hana; they never knew that she existed. He could not bear for her to be as vivid to others as she would always be to him.

David and his parents flew back to San Francisco. Later, when he saw his father’s photo of him, smiling as he received his diploma, David could not recall the moment.

21     
S
itting across from Amy Chan the next morning, David sipped freshly roasted coffee from a mug emblazoned “Channel 2.” One of the virtues of living in San Francisco, David reflected, was that even TV stations had good coffee. But his mood was bleak—images of Ben-Aron’s death filled his mind, and the day’s news featured still more death, the murder of three Israelis near the settlement of Bar Kochba.

“We understand,” Amy Chan said to David, “that you’ll be attending the memorial service for Amos Ben-Aron.”

The question caught David by surprise—the information must have come from Burt Newman. “Yes,” he answered simply.

Chan clearly hoped for more. “You were friends.”

“Better just to say that I admired him.” With that answer—which others would take as modesty—David knew, to his profound discomfort, that he had made himself sound more important to a dead man than he had ever been in life.

“Let’s turn again to his tragic murder,” Chan was saying smoothly. “According to sources inside the investigation, Ibrahim Jefar has begun proffering scraps of information through his lawyer. If you were Marnie Sharpe, how would you determine whether to believe him?”

“Besides corroborating evidence? She can ask him to take a polygraph—”

“Those aren’t admissible, right?”

“Not in court. And it’s a gamble for the prosecution—if he names a coconspirator, that person’s lawyer may be able to obtain Jefar’s answers.” David shrugged. “But what’ll keep Marnie up at night is the fear
that he’s still lying, or covering something up. A polygraph’s better than nothing.”

Ibrahim began pacing—the tiny room felt stifling, and they would not let him exercise. In a tentative tone, his lawyer said, “Sharpe says she needs to give you a lie detector test—”

“I am not a liar,” Ibrahim snapped.

The lawyer watched him closely. “Perhaps she just wants to know that you’re willing to take it. But I can’t promise you she’s bluffing.”

Ibrahim turned to him. “So?”

“So,” the lawyer answered coolly, “unless you think you can pass it, I strongly advise we tell her no.”

Ibrahim folded his arms. “I tried to kill my enemy, and myself. I am not afraid of a test.”

The room they used was bigger than where Ibrahim met with his lawyer; it held a laminated table with room for his lawyer, Marnie Sharpe, an FBI agent, and a laconic polygraph examiner. Ibrahim did not like being wired to a machine whose instruments measured his honor as a human being, or the way this examiner asked questions: toneless, persistent, probing for inconsistencies.

“You were a member of Al Aqsa?” the examiner asked.

“Yes. I told you that.”

“Did you get your instructions from Iyad Hassan?”

“Yes.”

“Did you discuss the plot to kill Ben-Aron with other members of Al Aqsa?”

“No. Again, no.”

Expressionless, Sharpe and the examiner watched as the paper spooled, bearing marks Ibrahim could not see. “And you never discussed the plot with anyone but Iyad?”

“No. As I said, it was a matter of operational security.”

“And Iyad gave you your instructions?”

“Yes.”

“And did he receive instructions from someone else?”

“Yes.”

“Did you speak to that person?”

“No,” Ibrahim said impatiently. “Listen to my answers.”

The examiner did not react. “Did Iyad tell you who that person was?”

Ibrahim felt clammy. Now, when it was too late, he found himself reluctant to answer.

Marnie Sharpe scrutinized him like a specimen on a slide. Ibrahim remained silent.

“Let me repeat the question,” the examiner said. “Did Iyad tell you who that person was?”

Ibrahim bowed his head. “Yes,” he said at last. “The same woman who recruited him. The professor from Birzeit.”

 

 

 

 

 

P A R T

   

The Labyrinth
1     
W
ith a quiet knock on his office door, Hana Arif reentered David’s life as swiftly as she had left it.

She paused on the threshold. Beneath the flowing dress she was still slim, her carriage straight and proud, the sense of kinetic energy at rest still present. Her eyes remained brown pools, but somehow older, their fires banked. Her face had aged but subtly—her skin was perhaps closer to the bone, and when she smiled at him, the first hint of lines appeared at the corners of her eyes. To David, she had the beauty that only time can bring, reminding him that this had happened outside of his awareness, and that he knew nothing about who she had become.

“So,” she said wryly. “Now you are my lawyer.”

Standing, David managed a smile of his own. “You’re free to hope.”

“I said that once, didn’t I.” She came to him quickly, standing on tiptoe to give him a chaste kiss on the cheek, leaving a small tingle of electricity on David’s skin. “You look wonderful, David—even better than on television. Time has been good to you.”

David smiled again. “I exercise,” he said lightly.

Hana gazed at him, silent, then scanned his office as if searching for something to do. Walking to his bookshelf, she studied a framed photograph. “This is Carole?”

“Yes.”

Head tilted, Hana appraised her picture. “A good face, I think—warm. But smart-looking. More than a nice Jewish girl.”

“Nice Jewish girls,” David answered, “were never my obsession.”

“No. As I remember, you had no ethnic requirements.”

There was irony in her tone and, perhaps, the hint of an apology. When
she turned to him, plainly disconcerted, David motioned her to the couch. “Tell me about your visit from the FBI.”

She sat a few feet from him, ankles crossed, regarding him with quiet gravity. “Before we start,” she said, “I am very grateful to you for seeing me. And it is very good to see you, David. There isn’t a day I haven’t thought of you.” Amending this with a smile, she added more lightly, “Or, at least, a week. My life has been rich with incident.”

David did not return her smile. “So it seems. How does Saeb feel about you coming here?”

Hana straightened her skirt, her expression pensive. “Ambivalent, at best. But not so ambivalent about the vagaries of the American legal process in the wake of Ben-Aron’s assassination.” Hana angled her head, making eye contact again. “We both watched you on television, and it’s clear you know the system very well. And it’s not as though we have a list of local lawyers passionate to help us.”

“I imagine not. Given Saeb’s political leanings, I’m surprised our government let him come here.”

Hana shrugged. “Saeb has no record of violence—merely violent opinions. It is not like admitting a friend of Osama Bin Laden.” Briefly Hana looked away. “We are not terrorists, David. Nor are we wealthy. We have little money for lawyers.”

“We’ll worry about that later. Though I’m wondering who paid for your trip.”

“We’re also not destitute,” she said with a note of defensiveness. “But our trip was sponsored by a broad coalition—Palestinian opponents of the occupation, representatives of the refugees in Lebanon, university professors, even European peace activists. People who believe that our story remains untold in America, and that we Palestinians remain stereotypes— terrorists or victims, never ordinary people—”