Exile: a novel (2 page)

Ibrahim checked his watch. Inside, he knew, Iyad was finishing his extended prayers—head bowed, eyes squinting tight, deepening the premature lines of a face too careworn for a man who, at twentyfour, was only two years older than Ibrahim himself. Sometimes Ibrahim believed that Iyad had known everything but doubt.

Sometimes he wished that Iyad had not chosen him.

He could not envision paradise. He could experience what martyrdom would bring him only in earthly imaginings of the Ramallah that would persist after his death, peopled by ordinary citizens whose pleasure it was to recall Ibrahim’s sacrifice while living out their ordinary lives—in a land, he could only pray, transformed by his act. He would never know the unborn children who, Iyad had assured him, would feel pride in the mention of his name, study his photograph for the markers of bravery. The pieces of his ruined body would find no grave at home.

This place was his oasis, and his prison: he was a hostage to time that dragged with agonizing slowness, waiting for the phone call that would propel them into action. So yet again, he sat on a stone bench atop a rocky ledge where waves struck with a low thud and shot spumes of white into the air, dampening his face and bare chest with a cool mist. The sandy space between the rocks and the villa was thick with palms; the pounding surf filled the air with a ceaseless watery static. The villa itself was bright and airy, and in the sheltered front garden was a swimming pool. Ibrahim could not imagine that anyone lived like this—except the Zionist settlers, the red tile roofs of whose houses resembled the roof of this villa, or, he thought with fleeting disdain, the eminences of the Palestinian Authority, once his nominal leaders. But from the evidence of the photographs, this was the home of a bearded American Jew and his skinny wife, grinning maniacally at the camera in a parody of the vacationer’s escapist glee. On their coffee table was a picture book entitled
A Day in the Life of Israel,
a
catalog of Zionist achievement, schools and cities and deserts bursting with green orchards and bright fruits and vegetables. Still, what Ibrahim saw as he leafed through the pages was his grandfather dying in a refugee camp, a small wizened man with a gaze at once nearsighted and faraway, the look of decades of wretchedness and dispossession. There was no book with a picture of his grandfather, he thought now; the old man had died as he had lived, seen only by his family.

Remembering, Ibrahim felt his eyes mist with grief and anger. The world weeps, he thought, at the death of a Jewish child. But there is no press coverage of dead Palestinians, unless they die killing Jews; there was no notice of his sister, or the daughter she would never hold, by a media obsessed with Jews blown up in cafés and restaurants by those brave few who chose to emerge from the faceless squalor of their camps, seeking to make their enemy suffer as deeply as did their people. And yet, though Ibrahim respected their courage and understood its purpose, he could not easily conceive of taking women and children with him to their doom. He must be grateful that he had been sent to kill a man.

This
man, the face of Israel.

Ibrahim had known that face since childhood, as long as he had known Israeli soldiers and overcrowding and humiliation; that even dogs, but not Palestinians, were allowed to bark; that the real terrorists were not only the Jews but the Americans; that when a Jew dies, the president of the United States weeps in sorrow. He had known all this, and done nothing. Until the day when he looked into the eyes of his sister, now as dull in life as they would someday be in death, and knew that he must redeem his honor . . .

Something heavy struck his back. Flinching, he heard the bomb’s percussive pop, stiffened against the explosion that would tear his limbs apart. Then he saw, rolling to a stop, a halfruined coconut that had dropped from the tree behind him.

Wanly, Ibrahim laughed at himself—a displaced Palestinian on a verdant patch of Mexico, with imaginary bombs falling on him from a palm tree.

Before the trauma of Salwa, he had laughed more often, even in the worst of times. He wondered if what he saw on Iyad’s face had entered his soul without touching his own unmarked face—this sense of having felt too much, of a despair deeper and older than his years. On television, at home, he could see beautiful people from all over the world, as free and happy as the half-naked women on the beach at Akumal. But that television set, all he possessed besides a few books and clothes and a college degree from Birzeit without a future he could see, filled him with a sense of his own nothingness. He would sit in his international relations class, furtively
admiring Fatin of the light brown eyes and seductive smile, and know that nothing was all he had to offer her.

Even this sojourn was a tribute to their facelessness. That they were in Akumal instead of western Mexico, Iyad informed him, was a change of plans, a fluke of racism and oppression. Self-appointed American vigilantes had begun spending their idle hours patrolling the borders of Arizona and New Mexico, hoping to snare Mexican illegals scurrying across. Those who had planned their mission did not want them caught by some white people’s hunt for brown invaders they could not tell from Arabs.

Americans, and Jews. When Iyad had first approached him, he had recited a sermon he had heard from a radical imam. Wherever you are, the holy man had said, kill Jews and Americans. He who straps a suicide belt on his children will be blessed. No Jews believe in peace; all are liars. Even if some piece of paper is signed by Jews and Palestinian traitors, we cannot forget Haifa, or Jericho, or Galilee, all the land and lives the Zionists have stolen from us, the day-by-day degradation into which the occupiers grind our faces. “ ‘Have no mercy on the Jews,’ ” Iyad repeated. “ ‘No matter what country they are in. And never forget that Jews are the sword of the United States of America, the enemy who arms our enemy.’ ”

This recitation left Ibrahim unmoved. He had heard it all before, countless times; hearing it again gave him the dull sensation of being rhythmically pounded on the head with a bag of sand. Then he thought of Salwa...

Once more, Ibrahim flinched.

Tensing, he heard the second discordant ring of Iyad’s cell phone, carrying through the screen door of the villa. The ringing stopped abruptly, followed by the sound of Iyad’s voice.

Ibrahim closed his eyes.

For minutes he was still. Then, with a sense of foreboding, he heard Iyad’s footfalls in the sand, felt his shadow block the sun.

Raising his head, Ibrahim looked into his companion’s gaunt face. Then, as before, he thought that God had given Iyad too little skin to cover his bones.

“She called,” Iyad said. His monotone had the trace of disdain that Ibrahim found so discordant, given the exactitude with which he carried out her directives. “This is our last night in paradise on earth. The next will be far better.”

Two afternoons later, driven by a lean, cold-eyed man they knew only as Pablo, they rode in a van headed toward the border. Crossing would be no
problem, Pablo assured them in surprisingly good English—thousands did it every day. Although not, Ibrahim thought, for such a reason.

Pablo left them a mile from the border. Stepping onto the parched earth, they began to walk in the sweltering heat. Turning, Iyad watched Pablo’s van disappear, then ordered, “We leave the cell phone here. And our passports. Everything that names us.”

These few words, Ibrahim found, sealed his sense of foreboding.

He emptied his pockets. With the care of a man tending a garden, Iyad buried their passports under a makeshift pile of rocks.

An hour later, sweat from their trek coating his face, Ibrahim saw the metallic glint of a silver van driving toward them across the featureless ter-rain. Ibrahim froze in fear. With preternatural calm, Iyad said, “We’re in America. The home of the brave, the liberators of Iraq.”

The van stopped beside them. Silently, its dark-haired young driver opened the door, motioning them into the back. In English as fluent as Pablo’s, he said, “Lie down. I’m not getting paid to lose you.” To Ibrahim, he looked more Arabic than Hispanic. But then, he realized, so had Pablo.

When the man told them to sit up, they were in Brownsville, Texas. He dropped them near a bus terminal with nothing but what he had given them, the key to a locker inside.

The terminal was nearly empty. Glancing over his shoulder, Iyad opened the locker. The brown bag they found held a credit card, three thousand dollars in cash, car keys, a binder, two American passports in false names, and California driver’s licenses. With mild astonishment, Ibrahim gazed at his photograph, encased in plastic, and discovered that his new name was Yusuf Akel.

“Let’s go,” Iyad murmured in Arabic.

Expressionless, he led Ibrahim to a nondescript Ford sedan with California license plates, parked two blocks away. Iyad unlocked the passenger door for Ibrahim.

“We have seven days,” Iyad said. “We’ll drive until it’s dark.”

It was June, late spring, and the days were long. Tasting the last saliva in his dry mouth, Ibrahim got in, knowing he would not sleep for hours, if at all.

Iyad drove in silence. Ibrahim riffled through the binder. It contained a sheaf of maps, detailing a route from Brownsville to San Francisco. On the final map of San Francisco were two stars scrawled with a Magic Marker: one labeled “bus station,” the other beside a place called Fort Point.

Closing his eyes against the harsh sunlight, Ibrahim tried to summon an image of San Francisco, the end of his life’s journey.

P A R T

Except for the spring of Hana, as he still thought of it, David had always had a plan. He had planned to excel in prep school as a student and at sports, and did. After college, he had planned to go to Harvard Law, and he had. He had planned to become a prosecutor and then enter politics, and now he was.

That this last was proceeding even more smoothly than he could have hoped was due to his fiancée, Carole Shorr, who, though not planned on, had entered his life at least in part because her plans meshed so well with his. Now their plan was the same: marriage, two children, and a run for Congress, which continued the more or less straight line of David’s life since his early teens, when he had realized that his dark good looks, wry humor, and quickness of mind were matched by a self-discipline that wrung every last particle out of the talents he possessed. Only once—with Hana—had nothing mattered but another person, an experience so frightening, exhilarating, and, in the end, scarifying that he had endured it only by clinging to his plans until they became who he was. It was a sin, David had come to believe, to be surprised by your own life.

This conclusion did not make him callous, or disdainful of others. The experience of Hana had taught him too much about his own humanness. And he knew that his self-discipline and gift for detachment were part of the mixed blessings, perhaps intensified by Hana, passed down by his parents— a psychiatrist and an English professor who shared a certain intellectual severity, both of them descendants of German Jews and so thoroughly
assimilated that their banked emotions reminded him of the privileged WASPs he had encountered when his parents had dispatched him from San Francisco to prep school in Connecticut, with little more sentiment than he had come to expect.

All this made him value and even envy the deep emotionality of Carole and her father, Harold—the Holocaust survivor and his daughter, for whom their very existence was to be celebrated. So that this morning, when he and Carole had selected a wedding date after making love, and her eyes had filled with tears, he understood at once that her joy was not only for herself but for Harold, who would celebrate their wedding day on behalf of all the ghosts whose deaths in Hitler’s camps—as unfathomable to Harold as his own survival—required him to invest his heart and soul in each gift life gave him, of which his only child was the greatest.

So David and Carole had made love again. Afterward, she lay against him, smiling, her breasts touching his chest, the tendrils of her brunette curls grazing his shoulder. And he had forgotten, for a blissful time, the other woman, smaller and darker, in his memory always twentythree, with whom making love had been to lose himself.

Thus the David Wolfe who answered his telephone was firmly rooted in the present and, blessedly, his future. He was, he had told himself once more, a fortunate man, gifted with genetics that, with no effort on his part, had given him intelligence, a level disposition, and a face on which every feature was pronounced—strong cheekbones, ridged nose, cleft chin— plus cool blue eyes to make it one that people remembered and television flattered. To his natural height and athleticism he added fitness, enforced by a daily regime of weights and aerobic exercise.