Exile: a novel (45 page)
Anat Ben-Aron, David saw, was still contemplating the table. “Also the place,” David countered, “from which your prime minister’s security detail is drawn. Including the most junior, and therefore perhaps the least reliable. But we’re talking in riddles. Which ‘disparate’ men? And how might they be connected to Iran?”
“Were there such a connection,” Masur answered cautiously, “it could traumatize the Israeli people. But in the end, this knowledge might be the saving of us, and of Anat’s father’s plan. Sooner or later, Mr. Wolfe, everything in Israel leaks. Why not in a good cause?” Once more, Masur smiled. “Whether a plan for peace, or the defense of a former lover.”
Astonished, David realized that Anat Ben-Aron was studying him. “For now,” she said quietly, “we are done. But you should not leave Israel too soon. With skill and patience, you may start to find some answers to your riddles.”
I
n the hills of Haifa, a striking coastal city with commanding views of the Mediterranean, David sat on a patio with four middle-aged Israelis, two widows and a wife and husband, whose families had been shattered by the female suicide bomber from the refugee camp at Jenin.
It had happened, as Ehud Peretz had told him, on the Saturday night of Passover, when four generations—the eldest, survivors of Auschwitz—had gathered to celebrate the regeneration of their families. The restaurant was owned by Arabs: Haifa was a place where Israelis and the descendants of Arabs who had chosen not to flee lived in relative amity. At the moment of the bombing, each of these survivors had just finished a delicious meal and felt suffused with well-being and the love of family.
From Zev Ernheit, who had driven him here, David knew their stories. Shoshanna Ravit, a dark, slender woman of fifty whose mournful gravity evoked for David a Velázquez painting, had come to the restaurant with her husband, Isaac, a retired army colonel turned businessman; her son, David, a keen soccer player and student of architecture; and their daughter, Rachel, a young teacher of students with special needs. Saar Mendel had come with her husband, Mickey, and son, Dov; that night they were celebrating Dov’s release from military service. Eli and Myra Landau had attended the celebration with their daughter, Nurit, a high school senior whose raven hair and bright smile were captured in a photograph that gazed back at David from the wooden table around which the four of them had gathered in the twilight.
David struggled for words to bridge the gulf of sorrow and distrust between himself and these grieving parents, wondering as he did so why General Peretz had arranged this meeting. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he told
them. “I can’t claim to know how you must feel. But I want you to know, especially given the reason I’ve come to Israel, that I hate what you’ve been forced to suffer.”
In the silence, Shoshanna Ravit regarded him. She sat in a wheelchair, her slacks hanging loosely where her feet should be; as with the others, her voice was drained of life. “General Peretz said you came tolearn,” shetold him. “But that you shouldn’t be allowed to pick and choose. For our part, we’ve become used to speaking of our families to keep them alive in memory, along with the hope that others outside Israel will comprehend what we must face.”
David nodded.
“So, do you want my memories?” she asked.
In the candlelight, Shoshanna had looked into the face of her daughter. The atmosphere was boisterous, filled with talk and laughter; in the privacy this offered them, Rachel leaned closer and confided, “Two weeks ago, I met this guy . . .”
At the corner of her eye, Shoshanna saw a movement that distracted her: a young Arab woman with dark, soulful eyes approaching a table filled with four animated generations of an Israeli family, the youngest a blond infant on her great-grandfather’s lap. His arm, circled around her, showed the tattoo on his forearm.
“Arik’s really cute,” Rachel was saying. “And so completely smart . . .”
The Arab woman smiled at the infant. When the great-grandfather looked up, returning her smile, she closed her eyes, then exploded with a concussive shudder that lifted Shoshanna from her chair.
When consciousness returned, she lay in a pool of blood, faintly aware of the keening sounds around her, the lack of feeling in her legs. Beside her lay her husband, blood trickling from his mouth. The thought came to her, slowly, that he was dead.
Turning on her stomach, Shoshanna faced the room. It was nothing like before. Where families had been were splintered tables, bodies or pieces of bodies, blood spattered on the wall.
Shoshanna closed her eyes. She must be strong for her children, she admonished herself, and then darkness overcame her.
She awakened in the ambulance as a paramedic was giving her a shot. “What is this for?” she asked groggily.
“Tetanus and hepatitis B.”
“Then be sure to give this to my children,” she instructed him. “Even though Rachel still cries at shots...”
Finishing, she told David, “I used to love to walk along the seashore
with my family, feeling the cool splash of water on my feet and ankles. When I awakened from my numbness, I saw that I had no feet or ankles, and realized I also had no family.”
Unlike Shoshanna Ravit, pain had left Saar Mendel with a look of passive bewilderment, as though she were confronted by a puzzle to which she could not divine the answer.
She had met Shoshanna at a gathering arranged by Eli Landau, spurred by the realization that “normal” people feared to be with them. “We both confided,” Saar explained, “that what still haunted us at night was the fear that our children had suffered pain.”
Six months after the bombing, resolute but afraid, they had gone to the police and asked to view the photographs of those who had once been their loved ones.
Shoshanna’s husband, daughter, and children appeared in the photographs much as she recalled them in life. Saar, however, could not recognize the ruins that were proven by medical science to be what remained of Mickey and Dov; she could identify only Dov, and only by the gold necklace that he wore to contrast with his tan. But the photographs afforded her a terrible consolation—her family could not have suffered for more than a split-second. “If God had let me choose,” she told David with moist eyes, “I would have begged to become another photograph. Instead, He cursed me with the role of witness.”
Compared to this, Myra Landau explained, the death of their only child was a fluke. “The same nail that struck my elbow pierced Nurit’s aorta. Her face was calm, unchanged, as though she were asleep. But when I put my face to her lips, I could feel no breathing.”
She turned to her husband, Eli. He was framed by a lush garden at his back and, beyond that, a panorama of the Mediterranean in twilight, the fading glow of sunset becoming a deep purple on the water, the first encroachment of night. It was a stunning view in which David could take little interest, save to wonder whether Eli Landau could ever contemplate this with anything like pleasure.
“Why do you defend this woman?” Eli demanded.
Ari Masur’s earlier allusion to his true relationship with Hana still shadowed David’s mind. But that knowledge, he had decided, was a result of the surveillance of Saeb and Hana at Harvard. “Because I don’t think she did this,” he answered. “And because I want to know who did. There are those in Israel who did not care for Amos Ben-Aron.”
Eli stared at him. “Palestinians, not Jews, murdered Amos Ben-Aron, and with him our illusions. All our government can do is to build this fence and try to keep out bombers. From what we learned about this woman and where she came from, if the fence had existed then, so might our daughter. Instead our army went to Jenin. After that, Ehud told us, there was no one left to punish.”
But there would always, David thought, be someone left to punish. Watching his face, Myra Landau said, “Americans judge us, as does the world. But no one can understand. We are normal people who suffered at random; the only abnormal thing about us, as victims of terror, is that we symbolize the loss of the security and serenity Americans take for granted. At least until Hana Arif helped a suicide bomber kill a Jew in San Francisco.” She managed a smile that brought no light to her eyes. “When will you make peace? the world asks us, even after Hezbollah rains missiles on our city. I used to hope for peace, and now I don’t. It is like Nurit. One moment you have a child, and then you don’t. So you ask yourself, Did I dream that child? All that keeps you sane is to speak of her.” Pausing, she added quietly, “Even to you.”
In the candlelight, David looked at the faces of four suffering parents, and could find nothing to say. “By heritage,” Eli Landau told him, “we are Europeans. But we live surrounded by people for whom life has a different meaning. Arab families murder their daughters in honor killings, send their children to kill our children and themselves. Our own settlers, whatever you may think of them, don’t stone their wives and slaughter Arab families.”
Listening, David chose not to mention the followers of Barak Lev, who had attempted to blow up a school filled with Palestinian children. “This suicide bomber,” he asked, “what
did
you learn about her?”
“Ehud Peretz said that you would ask this. Her name was Farah Abboud.” Eli Landau gave him an ironic look. “She was Hamas, the sister-in-law of Iyad Hassan.”
Zev Ernheit was parked outside. David got into the passenger seat, drained by the emotion of the evening. Only now did David fully understand why he had come: in exchange for agreeing to the experience of hearing those stories, Ehud Peretz had left for him a nugget of information, the possible connection of Ben-Aron’s assassin with Hamas.
“How was it?” Ernheit asked.
“Wrenching.” David slumped back in the seat. “I saw a suicide bombing, after all. My imagination may work a little better than they suppose.”
Ernheit fished out a cell phone from his shirt pocket and placed it in David’s hand. “I’ve been told to give you this. Once you’re alone, listen to your messages.”
In his hotel room, David turned on the cell phone and pressed the “1” key.
The man’s voice was Israeli, his English faintly accented. Tomorrow, David was to go to the Old City, meandering like a tourist. But at four o’clock he must find himself, as though by chance, in the Assyrian Chapel, deep in the bowels of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the place of Christ’s crucifixion.
A
round two o’clock, David entered the Old City of Jerusalem on foot, a map sticking from the back pocket of his khaki slacks.
He paused at the base of the wall built by Romans over two thousand years before, scarred by bullets from the wars of 1948 and 1967; passing beneath an arch designed by Muslims, he followed the path used by Crusaders and entered a vibrant world teeming with tourists, Arabs, Orthodox Jews, students, and professional-looking men and women of varying origins. Reflecting its history, the city was divided into four quarters: Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and Armenian, the last occupied by those whose ancestors had fled slaughter by the Turks. But in many places, these peoples intermingled; taking a narrow cobblestoned street past stone buildings with no space between them, David passed the home of an Armenian family, a mosque, and a young Jewish boy reading a book in his parents’ palmsheltered courtyard. It was hard to imagine any country staking an exclusive claim to this place, although many had tried; David thought of the bomb that had exploded as he ate at the King David, adding to the thousands of people killed in this city over thousands of years.
Pretending to consult his map while registering the faces around him, he followed a seemingly purposeless path that, in fact, he had committed to memory. He passed another incongruity: in a Roman plaza excavated after 1967, a Jewish girl chattered on a cell phone, reminding him of Munira. A Jewish section became a Muslim shopping area without notice; the alley was only a few feet wide, with Arabic signs for shops offering candlesticks, condiments, pillows, brightly colored rugs, grains, noodles, and olive oil, sold by an Arab man smoking from a hookah. Looking up, he saw police surveillance cameras. There were no garbage cans allowed here, a
precaution against terrorists hiding bombs; every evening at five o’clock an army of street cleaners entered the Old City.
David checked his watch.
At two forty-five, he stood atop a stairway above the plaza of the Western Wall. Beyond the wall he could see the golden Dome of the Rock and the severe black dome of the Al Aqsa Mosque, the touchstone for the group that had spawned Ibrahim Jefar. Entry to these places was forbidden to him. Yet the Dome of the Rock was the site on which Abraham had built an altar to sacrifice Isaac, or Ishmael, depending on whether one was Jewish or Muslim. It reminded David of the gulf between Hana and himself, of all the ways people differ over, and kill for, their own conceptions of God.
David looked about him and saw, pasted to the stone walls, a campaign poster for Isaac Benjamin and another, older poster of Amos Ben-Aron, with Hitler’s mustache painted on his upper lip. He snapped a couple of random photographs. If someone was following him, he could not detect it.
Descending the steps to the Western Wall, he saw an Orthodox Jew dispensing paper yarmulkes for the men who wished to pray there. He hesitated, then accepted a yarmulke and took his place among the bearded men at the wall, who were bobbing and bowing so that they might better be seen by God.
David closed his eyes, trying to clear his thoughts of all distraction. Then his mind formed as close to a prayer as he could summon—a remembrance of his father and mother, then of Hans Wolfensohn and his family. Finally, he thought of all who had died, or would yet die, for possession of this beautiful, tragic place.
When he finished, it was a little after three o’clock.
Consulting the map again as though deciding where to go, David began tracing the path of Jesus on the Via Dolorosa, toward the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
It was a long climb up well-worn stone steps, with the Stations of the Cross marked by metal plaques engraved with Roman numerals. David passed a wedding party of pretty young Arab women laughing as they hurried by, their dresses and shawls filigreed with gold. Turning as though to look at them, David recognized no one he had seen before.
