Exile: a novel (11 page)

“Nope,” David said flatly. “Even granting the rise of Hamas. Because you’ve omitted Palestinians from your list of human beings.”

Harold accorded David a wry smile. “And what do you know of Palestinians?”

“Something. I knew a couple in law school.” David paused, toying with his coffee cup. “Let’s start with where we agree—that Israel’s survival is a
moral imperative. But it was always way too facile to call Israel ‘a land without a people for a people without a land.’ Granted, the Palestinians were living in the place to which Jews have the deepest connection, and where British domination had left the Arab populace without a government of their own. But, geopolitically, it was an arbitrary act, with all the injustice an arbitrary act creates. So now Jews and Palestinians are stuck with each other—”

“David,” Harold protested, “these ‘human beings’ strap belts of explosives on their young people and send them to blow up Jews. They hate us— especially Hamas.”

Briefly, David thought of Saeb Khalid. “Some do. Others don’t. But their grandchildren, we can hope, will have more to live for than killing us. It’s in our interest to help them.”

Harold clasped his hands. “I’m a realist, David. Life has taught me that this Palestinian state you hope for is less likely to be a palliative than a haven for Hamas terrorists. They do not want us there, and never will.

“Perhaps you know that, after college, Carole wished to live in Israel. She’d fallen in love with an Israeli. But I put her off, pleading her mother’s health, playing on the guilt of a loving only child until her relationship died out.” With palpable reluctance, he faced his daughter. “For this manipulation, I’m sorry. But I was afraid. For all my talk of sacrifice, you were dearer to me than Israel.”

Carole took his hand. “You were pretty transparent, Dad,” she said in a husky voice. “It wasn’t because of Mom I didn’t go. It was because of you.” Inclining her head toward David, she added with a smile, “And it’s all turned out okay.”

“Yes. It has.” Turning to David, Harold said, “You are all I could have wished for, Carole. And neither of you should be dragging an old man’s fears behind you like an anvil.” Summoning a smile, he said, “I love you dearly, David, almost as much as my own daughter. Enough, even, to break bread with Amos Ben-Aron. Our last, best hope of peace.”

Entertaining with a purpose was central to Carole’s life, and the apartment she had chosen served it well. Eighty years old, the brick building carried an elegant flavor of the 1930s, with a doorman, a generous foyer, and an old-fashioned elevator, which, although it wheezed a little, had carried David smoothly to Carole’s door. Her apartment had the hardwood floors, crown moldings, and high ceilings more common to a time of luxuriant construction. The rooms were spacious, and the furniture carefully chosen and arranged, creating space for guests to mingle and more intimate places for them to sit in small groups. The living and dining areas shared the same floor-to-ceiling view across San Francisco Bay to the gold-brown hills of Marin County; as David watched, the last glow of sunlight faded on the deepening blue water, and sailboats had begun tacking toward their moorings.

He heard the click of Carole’s heels behind him, and then she put her hands on his waist. “Meeting okay?” she asked.

“Good enough. My defendant the doctor has some problems. But that’s what expert witnesses are for.”

“Some days,” she admonished him with a smile, “you sound a little cynical about your clients.”

David turned to her. “Just not sentimental. That’s a lawyer’s big mistake.”

“I’d just hate you to be sentimental,” Carole rejoined. Giving him a
quick kiss, Carole went to the dining room and began arranging the place cards.

David glanced at the television, tuned to CNN. “At this hour,” Wolf Blitzer was saying, “Israeli prime minister Amos Ben-Aron is arriving in San Francisco, the last stop on a trip aimed at rallying American support for his highly controversial peace initiative . . .”

On the screen, Ben-Aron was disembarking from a jumbo jet, surrounded by men in suits who appeared to be security guards. Though the camera was far away, Ben-Aron was easy to spot. Silver-haired and erect, he was slighter than the others, and his brisk, purposeful stride bespoke the general he had once been. David felt a keen anticipation: he looked forward to meeting this man and hoped they could talk in private.

The picture changed to an angry, chanting crowd of demonstrators, one of whom, David saw, carried a placard showing Ben-Aron with Adolf Hitler’s mustache. “Earlier today in Jerusalem,” the anchorman continued, “an alliance of Orthodox Jews staged a massive protest against Ben-Aron’s new proposal. At stake, they believe, is the future of Jewish settlements on the West Bank, the putative site of a Palestinian state advocated by Ben-Aron. For many Israelis, a Palestinian state is necessary to a lasting peace; for some, like these demonstrators, it is a betrayal of God’s grant of the West Bank—the biblical Judea and Samaria—to the Jewish people...”

Since when,
David remembered Hana inquiring,
did God become a real estate agent?
He could not help but smile at the memory.

On the screen, a bearded man appeared against a backdrop of rocky, barren hills, accompanied by Wolf Blitzer’s voice-over. “A few extremist settlers, like Barak Lev, the American-born leader of the controversial Masada movement, centered in the Israeli settlement of Bar Kochba, are making some very troubling pronouncements...”

David stopped smiling. Lev was young and lean, with the black gaze and slow, insistent intonations of a prophet pronouncing judgment on the unrighteous. “Like Adolf Hitler,” Lev said to the camera, “Ben-Aron wants our biblical land to be
Judenrein
—free of Jews. His Palestinian partners, Hitler’s heirs, have no identity beyond the hatred of Jews, no culture beyond the murder of Jews. This ‘homeland’ he proposes for them is the base they will use to exterminate the Jews of Israel . . .”

In close-up, David saw, Lev’s eyes seemed dissociated, his gaze intent on his own inner vision. “This will not be allowed,” he intoned. “As God struck Hitler dead, so, too, will He strike down Ben-Aron.”

Carole came in to watch with him. “As I recall,” David remarked to her,
“Hitler put a bullet in his own brain. But I suppose God works in mysterious ways.”

“This man’s bughouse,” she said flatly. “He doesn’t speak for Israelis— he’s the minority of a crazy minority of dead-enders.”

Still watching, David put his arm around her shoulder. “Near Bar Kochba,” the newscaster was saying, “several dozen settlers threw rocks at soldiers seeking to remove two mobile homes inhabited by squatters. A right-wing member of parliament protested the prime minister’s plan to dismantle allegedly illegal settlements—like Bar Kochba—by reading the names of settlers ‘marked for expulsion by the traitor Ben-Aron.’ Outside, demonstrators with sleeping bags prepared to fast until, they say, Ben-Aron reverses course.

“Ben-Aron’s challenge is to demonstrate, despite the rise of Hamas and the turmoil roiling Israel, that he can somehow deliver what most Israelis want: security, then a lasting peace with a people that many distrust, and even fear.”

David kissed Carole on the forehead. “Congratulations,” he said. “This should be a truly exciting dinner.”

“But the controversy,” the newsman’s voice-over continued, “has followed the Israeli prime minister to America. Today, in San Francisco, a spokesman for Palestinian opposition groups characterized Ben-Aron’s peace plan as a ‘sham.’ ”

Though David should have expected it, his first glimpse of Saeb Khalid startled him.

Saeb stood in front of the Commonwealth Club, where Ben-Aron would speak at noon tomorrow. Crow’s-feet creased the corners of his eyes, and the fine angles of his face were concealed by a well-trimmed beard, which made him appear harsher than the tormented man with whom David had shared the subtle poison of their lunch. Unlike Barak Lev, he spoke with the confidence of an intellectual who—whatever his Muslim beliefs—was firmly grounded in his version of fact.

“First they took our land,” Saeb was saying. “Now Ben-Aron offers us a ‘homeland’ on the West Bank that is one-fifth of what we had. He offers nothing to the refugees in Lebanon whose families were slaughtered at the direction of Israel—certainly not a return to the land from which the Zionists expelled us...”

“They
can’t
return,” Carole said flatly.

Unsettled, David watched, disturbed by the complex of emotions— jealousy, compassion, sheer male competitiveness—that Saeb could still
arouse in him. “Where was Ben-Aron the peacemaker,” Saeb inquired acidly, “when they slaughtered us at Sabra and Shatila? And now he proposes to remove a pitiful few settlers among the many who will remain to burn our crops, destroy our greenhouses, and use our water for their swimming pools.” Saeb’s voice hardened. “The settlers will remain, and so will their injustice. And Ben-Aron’s ‘peace plan’ will keep Israel’s fingers around our throats, strangling the life out of our people...”

“Who
is
this guy?” Carole interjected. “He’s scary.”

“He’s damaged.”

Carole turned to him in inquiry. “I knew him a little,” David added, “at Harvard.”

“You were friends?”

A lie is more persuasive,
Hana had told him,
if it contains a little truth.
“Saeb and I could never be friends. Then, or now.”

“Because you’re Jewish?”

“And because I’m me.” Abruptly, David switched off the remote, banishing Saeb Khalid from Carole’s living room as he had once wished to banish him from Hana’s life.

A week after the lunch with Saeb, David came home to his apartment in Cambridge, tossed his spiral notebook on the couch, then stopped abruptly.

Beside the notebook was Hana’s bright cloth purse.

He had not seen her since the lunch, nor had she returned his calls. With a glow of excitement, he walked quickly to his bedroom.

She stood with her back to him, her head bowed. Though she must have heard his footsteps, she did not turn.

“Hana...,” he began.

Facing east, Hana was lost in the Muslim ritual of prayer. In that moment, more profoundly than when she gave voice to it in words, David felt the distance that divided them, even when they were skin to skin.

For minutes he stood behind her. Then, without turning, she raised her head, and began to silently undress.

When she had finished, she faced him. They did not speak. She made no sound until, lying beneath him, she cried out—whether in pleasure or anguish, David could not tell.

Palm cradling her face, David spoke first. “I thought I’d never see you again.”

“Yes. I thought so too.”

“And so?”

Hana spoke softly, almost sadly, as though she had looked into her soul and seen its weakness and desire. “At first, you were an indulgence—an attractive man from a different place. My own small rebellion. But now you are inside me.

“I imagined you—how
I
would feel—how
you
must feel. Like I had rejected you for Saeb. It’s so much more complex than that, and I had no way to tell you, except to be with you.” Hana touched his face. “And, yes, I wanted you. We have so little time—just as Saeb said. Though I pray he never knows how precious that time is to me.”

Though her last words disheartened him, David tried to smile. “You make it sound like I’m about to be executed, and this is your last conjugal visit.”

She did not return his smile. “When you’re obtuse like this, I
know
we are from different places. You have no idea of my world—how complicated it is, even among ourselves—”

“You’re talking about politics,” David cut in. “That’s not about us.”

Briefly Hana shook her head, regarding him with melancholy fondness. “You are so American, David. At times much more American than Jewish. An Israeli would not say that to me. But to Americans, the world is America. If you have fantasies about a life together, it is an American life, where I leave the messy past behind and realize my full potential as a woman.” A corner of her mouth turned up. “In America, of course. Where else are such things possible?”

This stung him. “I’m not that simpleminded, Hana. I’m just not blind. I watched you at lunch—you’re different with Saeb than with me.
You
didn’t choose him—your parents, and his tragedies, chose you. I may have started as a ‘small rebellion,’ some sort of emotional jailbreak. But the reasons for that are not so small.”

Hana turned on her back, gazing at the ceiling. “I don’t need you as my psychiatrist. I know what my resentments are, even what my fears are— that, as a woman, I may not achieve all I wish. But that is all the more reason for women to try within our own culture, not someone else’s. Our people have so many challenges, and they need all of us—”

“But what about
you
? What about
your
days and nights? Maybe you can give Saeb what he wants—as a wounded man who needs to heal, or an Arab man who needs more adoration than I do. But who do you want to wake up with?” David felt his anger and frustration break loose. “Who? Look at me, dammit.”

Slowly, Hana turned her face on the pillow and looked into his eyes.

“I see you as a woman,” David said more evenly. “And as a Palestinian. But I don’t see you as an emotional prop. You listen to me; I listen to you. We respect each other. And we sure as hell
want
each other—more than either of us has wanted anyone. We can overcome the things that divide us, because they aren’t about us as people. But I don’t think you can ever overcome being with the wrong person—”

“How can you know what is right?” she answered with quiet vehemence. “How can you know so much without living my life, knowing how that feels. We’ve had three months—”