Exile: a novel (48 page)

David tried to smile. “You’re way too modest.”

“Just too honest.” Sausan paused, then added quietly, “I like your company, too, David. I hope that’s flattery enough.”

He watched her unlock the door and disappear inside.

Alone in his room, David lay awake, conscious of the woman on the other side of the wall, the woman awaiting trial in America, the cell phone that did not ring.

10     
W
hen David and Sausan met for breakfast, she was quieter than the night before, at times regarding him over the rim of her coffee cup with a quizzical look. Perhaps, David guessed, she was wondering, as he did, whether their rapport had been partly an illusion, an accident of time and place and uncertainty in both their lives. “I enjoyed last night,” he finally said. “Quite a lot, actually.”

Her green eyes searched his, and then betrayed the hint of a smile. “Yes,” she answered. “So did I.”

After this, the silence they shared on the drive to Hana’s village felt less awkward than companionable.

A few miles short of the village, they stopped at a Jewish cemetery. Some of those buried here, David saw from the tombstones, were lost in the wars of 1948, or 1956, or 1967, or 1973, or, in 1982 and again in 2006 in Lebanon; here was the history of Israel’s survival, punctuated by war and death. “Perhaps only in America,” Sausan told him, “do people believe they can erase the past. Here we know it’s not so simple.”

Approaching the land where Hana’s father and mother were born, Sausan tried to evoke their world. They, like their neighbors, were olive farmers. Every October, they picked the trees clean and carried the olives on donkeys to an olive press, where they visited with other farmers. After this, they seeded the ground with winter wheat. If the winter was good—if God willed that there be rain enough—the wheat would rise and help feed their family; if it was stunted, it would feed the sheep and goats, which provided milk, cheese, and, for celebrations, meat.

“Like that way of life,” Sausan said, “these villages have vanished. The
Israelis destroyed some of them; others collapsed on their own. But memory has proven less perishable.”

When they reached their destination, David sat for a moment, gazing through the windshield at the landscape farmed by Hana’s ancestors, the ruins of a dream.

Sausan led him among stone rubble and untended trees to the remnants of a house at the edge of what had once been a village. The walls were now at most three feet high; the ceilings had collapsed, leaving stones strewn in random piles, both inside and out. The steel beams that had once reinforced the ceiling, Sausan said, had been stolen long ago; the cement that had bound the stones had turned to dust.

“We’re in the sitting room,” she continued, “used only by Hana’s grandfather and his guests. The women cooked on a woodburning stove outside the house. The water came from a well used by the entire village—perhaps twenty families, two hundred and fifty people in all, many of them cousins or second cousins. Except to press the olives, they rarely left. For them, this was enough.”

David looked out at the sweeping view of the Galilee. The place had a timeless feel, bespeaking a way of life passed from one generation to the next. Amid the rubble, David spotted pieces of glazed clay, the shattered remains, Sausan explained, of a serving platter from which the family had eaten. “Hana says that her grandfather buried money in a metal chest,” he told her, “to dig up when they came back.”

“No matter. The currency would have been from the British Mandate, quite useless now. Like the ruins of this house.”

David felt profoundly sad. He thought of Munira, who could no more return here than engage in time travel. And it was impossible to imagine Hana here, living as a simple village woman. In the perversity of history’s cause and effect, the founders of Israel, as much as the murderers of Sabra and Shatila, had made Hana who she was—a feminist and lawyer, uprooted from her family’s pastoral traditions, who dreamed of a liberated future for her daughter, the great-grandchild of the olive farmer whose key Hana still wore around her neck. It was the key to a myth; the key to her life. But it had long ago served its purpose, steeling her determination to leave the refugee camp where she was born. It was time, if David could manage to free her, for Hana to put the key aside, and to free Munira from the myth in which Saeb, out of bitterness, meant to suspend her like a fly in amber.

Perhaps he would say as much to Hana. But what he would say to her parents, when the time came, he did not know. “When I visited Hana,” Sau-san said now, “she did not ask about this place. And so I did not tell her.”

David shook his head. “All this misery,” he murmured—to Hana, to Munira, to himself, and, finally, to Sausan, his companion in this moment.

“I know,” she answered simply.

As Sausan drove them back to Mukeble, they were quiet. For once in his life, David had nowhere to go. The next hours or days were uncharted until a stranger called or Zev Ernheit, through some alchemy he would not explain, materialized another lead. David could as easily stay in the Galilee as drive back to Jerusalem.

Then, just as they reached Mukeble, the cell phone in his pocket buzzed.

Snapping from his reverie, David pushed the “Talk” button. “There’s a room reserved for you at the Dan Hotel in Tel Aviv,” the voice said. “There you’ll learn how and where to meet the person you are seeking.”

It was the voice of the man from the Assyrian Chapel. Before David could speak, his caller broke off the connection.

“What is it?” Sausan asked.

At once, David was filled with anticipation and uncertainty. “Something about Hana’s case,” he answered. “I have to leave, I’m afraid.”

Parking, Sausan was quiet for a moment. “Your visit has been interesting,” she said with a wry smile. “If fleeting.”

“Too fleeting,” he answered. “But thank you.”

Sausan looked at him intently. “I wish you luck, David. And please tell Hana that I think of her.”

She touched his hand, then left him, walking briskly toward the school. Watching, David had a flash of memory—Hana, in Cambridge, walking away from his car after their respite in New Hampshire. Sausan, like Hana, did not look back.

Focusing on what he must do, David drove to Tel Aviv.

11     
T
el Aviv was less than an hour’s drive from the border at Mukeble, another measure of Israel’s vulnerability. Yet it was more possible here than in Jerusalem to have the delusion of safety—one saw no fence or, for that matter, many Arabs, nor were there Arab villages in the surrounding hills. The city itself was more secular and cosmopolitan, with traffic jams, high-rises, chic shopping areas, and smartly dressed women along the street. It was here that, despite its insistence on Jerusalem as its capital, Israel maintained the headquarters of the IDF. And it was partly for the same reason—security—that the United States had situated its embassy in Tel Aviv.

Calling from his car, David asked for times when the American ambassador might consent to see him, a courtesy extended to provide at least the appearance of cooperation from a government that, by fiat of Judge Taylor, must press his cause with the Israelis. His assistant promised that she would get back to him—though David’s call was expected, the ambassador’s schedule was in flux. And so, David thought, was his own.

He reached the Dan Hotel in late afternoon. It was a modern high-rise near the water, as different from the King David as Tel Aviv was from Jerusalem. Ordering a light dinner from room service, he gazed out at the Mediterranean in twilight, the cell phone at his side. When he answered the knock on the door, expecting dinner, he found a bellman carrying a basket of cheese, fruit, and crackers, bearing a handwritten envelope that read, “David Wolfe” —a welcoming gift, the man said, of the hotel. Tipping the bellman, David opened the envelope.

The message inside was typed. At ten
a.m.
the next day, David was to meet a taxi in the underground garage. The driver would drop him two
blocks from the Café Keret; David should walk to the café and look for a man drinking coffee at the last table in the back. The man was a member of Ben-Aron’s security detail; his name was Hillel Markis. Markis was expecting to meet someone from the Shin Bet, the message concluded, and it was up to David to learn what he could before his quarry grasped the subterfuge.

David finished reading the message, his senses fully alert. Markis, he knew, must be “the soldier,” Barak Lev’s friend from their days together in the army. And if Markis’s name was linked in public to Barak Lev’s, the legal equation in Hana’s case—and the political equation within Israel— might be utterly transformed.

As instructed, David ripped the card up and flushed its pieces down his toilet. A moment later, the telephone rang. It was the embassy; the ambassador would see him for breakfast at eight o’clock, in the dining room of the hotel. The Galilee suddenly seemed light-years away.

David slept badly. He awakened with a feeling of caged restlessness; at two minutes before eight, he was drinking coffee in the restaurant, watching a tractor crawl up and down the beach.

“Mr. Wolfe?”

Standing, David saw a bald, compact man with a broad, pleasant face and shrewd blue eyes, behind whom a watchful security detail stationed itself at various points in the restaurant. Giving David a firm handshake, he said, “I’m Ray Stein—your man in Tel Aviv.” He flashed a smile. “At least, sort of.”

“All I can ask.”

Stein sat across from him. “What’s with the tractor?” David asked.

“That’s a specially designed backhoe. Every morning it sifts the cans and cigarette butts. Sand’s the perfect place to plant a bomb, and trash cans aren’t allowed—by afternoon the beach is littered. This is their solution.”

“A tough way to live.”

“So’s what you’re doing,” Stein answered bluntly. “The other day I met with an editor from the
New York Times.
All
they’re
doing is trying to report what’s going on here. But if they run a photograph of a grieving mother, it’s considered a willful provocation by one side or the other. Objectivity is an offense: Jews say the
Times
is anti-Semitic; Palestinians want it to take Jewish reporters off the beat. And for each new murder, the
Times
is supposed to provide a history lesson, explaining why some faction thinks that particular act of violence is okay.” Stein gave him a penetrating look. “Defending Hana Arif is infinitely worse. Either you’re a complete idealist, or just insane. Like half the Middle East, I often think.”

“I only got nuts recently,” David answered. “Before this case, I was fine.”

“So I hear. So how’s your trip been? Exciting?”

Reluctant to discuss the events that had brought him to Tel Aviv, David described his visit to the village of Hana’s family. “No one’s ever going back,” he told Stein. “That’s the sad thing—not just the violence and the hatred, but the sheer futility of it all. The ‘right of return’ is about psychology, not reality.”

“Ben-Aron understood that,” Stein answered. “Too bad he’s dead. Though I’m not sure how far he’d have gotten. When Palestinian leaders hint in private that they’ll compromise the idea of return, I don’t believe them for a minute. I won’t until they start saying it in public. And you and I will likely be dead by then.”

“Do you think there’s any hope?”

Glancing up, Stein signaled to a waitress. “There has to be,” he answered, “or what’s the point? The extreme right in this country, the ones who hated Ben-Aron, see nothing but perpetual war or the threat of war. So why have a country at all? Why not go somewhere safer and hope to be a protected minority, like us Jews in America?

“I don’t believe in some great pan-Arab plot against Israel—too many of these countries, like Egypt and Jordan, have better things to worry about. I do believe in specific threats, like Hamas or Al Qaeda or Iran. They’re more than enough to deal with, but maybe it can be done.” Stein’s tone grew quiet. “This is a wonderful country in most ways, something to be proud of. I’d hate to see it dragged into the abyss.”

The waitress arrived to take their orders. As she did, David contemplated how much to tell this man, and how far—in spite of Stein’s directness—to trust him.

After the waitress left, Stein asked, “So how is it I can help you?”

By instinct, David chose candor. “Suppose I can develop hard information linking the assassination to Barak Lev. Would our government help me back the Israelis to the wall?”

The ambassador stared at him. “Where the hell did you come up with that? And how do you expect me to answer?”

“Like a man who’d rather have me pissing outside the tent than in.”

“I guess it hasn’t escaped you,” Stein said at length, “that we’d rather shift responsibility for the assassination. What I assume you’re implying, without quite saying it, is that Lev is linked to this security breach you’ve been talking about, which our own people think may well have happened.”

“Yup.”

Stein pursed his mouth. “Well, that would certainly shake things up around here, including the Israeli government. Be that as it may, any prospect of a solution between Israelis and Palestinians serves our interests in the region.” Narrow-eyed, Stein contemplated his coffee cup, then looked up at David again. “Tell me, since you seem to be so knowledgeable about the mysteries in the case, who set up the network in the United States? I agree it wasn’t Al Aqsa—they don’t have the capacity. And I don’t believe for a nanosecond that the Mossad, which does, was complicit in the plot against their own prime minister. Leaving us with whom?”

With this question, David knew he was standing on quicksand. “Who else,” he parried, “can operate in the United States and Israel?”

“Iran.” Stein exhaled audibly. “But people like Lev and Iranian intelligence don’t live in the same universe. The Iranians would have to use cutouts, people you couldn’t trace to the Ministry of Security in Tehran.”