Exile: a novel (21 page)

“Because she actually mourns Ben-Aron’s death, if not the man himself.” Pausing, Saeb stared into David’s eyes. “You knew her once—very well, I sometimes think. Can you imagine her as the mastermind of a suicide bombing? I cannot.”

David met his stare. “What I can imagine, and what I know, are different.”

“I know no more than you do. Perhaps less.”

Saeb’s comment, though delivered in the flattest of tones, nonetheless carried the same curious resonance, another intimation of double meaning. “Where were you,” David asked, “when Ben-Aron was murdered?”

“At the hotel, with Munira. I’d listened to his speech on CNN. I was making notes for a statement of my own when they broke in to say that he’d been killed.”

“And Hana?”

“Was shopping, she told me—she did not care to watch him. I watched
only so that I’d be able to refute him.” A spurt of anger suffused Saeb’s face and voice. “By dying, Ben-Aron has trapped us in this wretched country. I’m ready for my family to leave.”

For the moment, David had heard enough. “So am I,” he answered softly. “For all our sakes. But first I want to meet Munira.”

For a time, David watched with them. The service was held on Mount Herzl; the president of the United States and then the president of Israel spoke of Amos Ben-Aron’s service in war and his quest for peace. To David, his life and death encapsulated the fears and hopes of a people who felt always on the precipice of tragedy. David searched the crowd for Carole and Harold; instead, the camera panned to Ben-Aron’s rival and apparent successor, Isaac Benjamin, whose thinly veiled opinion was that this memorial service captured the futility of compromise. In the hotel suite, no one spoke—Saeb, Hana, and David entertained their own thoughts, until the silence was broken by the distant crack of a sonic boom.

Startled, Hana glanced at David. “Fleet Week,” he explained. “The navy does it every year—warships in the harbor, the Blue Angels flying jets in close formation just above the rooftops. Kids love it.”

Saeb raised his eyebrows, mouth framing an ironic smile.
The same jets,
David imagined him thinking,
with which Israel terrifies our children.
But all he said was “What a fortunate country you are.”

David turned from the screen to Hana. “Where’s Munira?” he asked.

Hana nodded toward a closed door. “In her room. I’ll get her.”

Hana opened the bedroom door, leaving it ajar. David heard the sound of two female voices, one higher than Hana’s, murmuring in Arabic. Then Hana emerged, followed by an adolescent girl.

Unlike her mother, Munira covered her hair with a black scarf. Incongruously, she carried a boom box, which emitted the faint sound of a man
singing, in Arabic, what might have been a love song. Hana said, “This is our daughter, Munira.”

At the brief nod from her mother, Munira extended her hand, according him the touch of her fingertips. Her face was stronger than Hana’s, he saw at once; though she had the same bright eyes, her chin was cleft, her nose more prominent. She would not become a beauty like her mother, but her looks were arresting and might, in time, become uncommonly striking, even imperious. That she would be taller than Hana was already clear, though she half-disguised this with a slump. Her gaze at David was filled with a deep reserve.

Smiling, he said, “I’ve looked forward to this. Back when I knew your parents, I couldn’t have imagined you.”

“Nor could we.” Though Hana interposed this lightly, it was awkward, an obvious attempt to ease David’s way. “Munira is our good fortune.”

The subject of this exchange did not alter her expression. Glancing at Saeb, David asked, “Is it okay if I take Munira for a walk?”

“If you must,” Saeb answered grudgingly, looking at his watch. “I shouldn’t think you’d need much time.”

Without responding, David turned to Munira. “Shall we go, then?”

The girl glanced at her father, as if for a cue. Briefly, he nodded; as though in mimicry, she gave David her own barely perceptible nod. Glancing at Hana, David caught a fleeting look of melancholy he could not interpret.

Gingerly, he shepherded Munira out the door.

Ten minutes later, when David found a bench for them in Union Square, Munira still had not spoken.

What to do, David wondered. In his awkwardness, he recalled that park, Union Square was where Carole, as a child, had first confronted the subject of the Holocaust. Now David sat with a Palestinian girl, head covered, as she listened to a boom box playing plaintive songs in Arabic.

“Who’s the singer?” David asked.

Munira gazed at the shoppers passing in the noonday sun, affluent men and women on their way to Saks Fifth Avenue or Neiman Marcus. “Marcel Khalifa,” she said at last. “Do you know him?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“He’s famous,” Munira amplified with a touch of impatience. “He’s even come to America.”

David struggled for conversation. “What’s this song about?” he asked.

Munira frowned. “It is the story of a Palestinian man who falls in love
with an Israeli woman. ‘Between her and my eyes is a gun,’ he is singing— though he loves her, they are separated by hatred. So marriage between them is impossible.”

Gazing at Hana’s daughter, David felt an inescapable sadness. “Do you think that?”

“Yes,” she answered with quiet vehemence. “I could never be with a Jewish man.”

The only Jews she had ever seen, David supposed, were soldiers. “I’m a Jewish man,” he answered gently. “I’m also your parents’ friend.”

For the first time, she looked at him, her curiosity peering at him from beneath long eyelashes that he had not noted before. “Is that why you’re helping them?”

“Yes. And you, I hope. So does it matter to you that I’m Jewish?”

Turning from him, Munira pondered the question with a look of deep contemplation, the first finger of her left hand resting against her cheek. Something in the gesture was familiar, David realized—surely from Hana, though he could summon no memory to confirm this. But the intensity of her expression was so like her mother that it briefly swept away the years. “No,” she finally answered. “Not if you are a friend to both of them.”

“I am.”

Again, while David could not quite define it, Munira’s sideways look of skepticism elicited a faint memory, though its origins eluded him. “What was she like?” the girl asked abruptly.

“Your mother?”

“Yes.”

David paused to consider what attributes to choose, how familiar with Hana to seem. “She was very smart,” he answered. “And confident—one of the best arguers I ever met. Sometimes it was hard for me to keep up with her.”

Munira watched his face. Quietly, she asked, “She was also beautiful, you thought?”

“What do you think?”

“She’s my mother,” Munira answered with a faint, admonitory undertone. “She did not cover, did she?”

“No.”

“Did she smoke, or drink, or go out with boys?”

Was this a twelve-year-old’s curiosity, David wondered, or was she gathering data to argue on her own behalf? “When I knew your mother, Munira, she was already engaged to your father.”

For a moment, Munira’s look of inquiry persisted: not only was she
bright, David perceived, but she seemed sensitive to nuance, perhaps from interpreting her parents’ reactions to each other. With the same abruptness, she said, “My father doesn’t wish me to see boys until I’m married.”

David shrugged. “I’m not anyone’s father, so I don’t know what to say. But he’s probably trying to save you a little trouble, or maybe hurt.”

“Then why does my mother refuse to cover?”

Contemplating his answer, David watched a pigeon strut across the grass in front of him, puffing its chest out like a middle-aged plutocrat on his private beach. “Because, as a modern woman, she thinks differently. So do I, actually. But that’s neither bad nor good. I guess that’s why your mother hopes someday you’ll study here—to learn more about how different people think.”

“I already know what Americans think,” Munira answered sharply. “They think we are nothing. So they arm Israelis to kill us. At Jenin, the Jews came with American warplanes, the F-16s, bombing women and children.” The girl’s fists balled, and her voice became strident. “We will never forgive the Jews, and we will never forgive America.”

Though she suddenly quivered with life, so much like Hana, David could find no pleasure in it. He remembered Hana’s story of the checkpoint, the two soldiers humiliating Saeb as his daughter’s eyes filled with hate. “So,” David ventured, “why do you think our government wants to question all of you?”

Munira folded her arms. “Because my father’s a Palestinian patriot.”

“All
I
know,” David began, “is that they’re investigating the assassination of Israel’s prime minister.”

“For
this,”
Munira countered contemptuously, “my
parents
are to blame? Two professors from Birzeit?”

“No one seems to be taking credit.” David looked into the girl’s eyes, seeking trust. “Please understand, Munira, to Americans—as well as to Marwan Faras—this is a terrible thing. Ben-Aron came here under the protection of the United States government, to speak out for peace between Jews and Palestinians. Now our government is responsible for finding out who killed him, and they’re looking for information anywhere they can.

“I don’t think for a moment that your mother, or your father, had anything to do with this. Once the questioning is done, I don’t think the investigators will either. My job is to get this over with, so that you can get back home. So can I ask you what I think the FBI would ask?”

Narrow-eyed, Munira stared at the well-dressed passersby as though studying her parents’ enemies. In her silence, the plaintive crooning of the
singer filled the space between David and her. “All right,” she said curtly. “My mother explained this.”

David chose to adopt a tone of mild curiosity. “Then maybe we can just talk about your time in San Francisco, before the murder. How was it?”

Munira shrugged. “All right, I guess.”

“What did you do?”

“She made me go a lot of places—the university at Berkeley, a restaurant where we watched some seals, a round tower where we looked out at the prison on the bay.”

David could not help but smile at the girl’s passionless recitation of her mother’s efforts to string together sites of interest. “Alcatraz?” he asked.

“Yes. Also a bus trip through the city, and a ride on a ferryboat.”

“Was that okay?”

Munira shrugged again. “I missed my friends. There was barely time to talk to them on the cell phone—my father has strict rules about that. Sometimes I was feeling like their prisoner.”

David made a mental note, as a prospective father, to go light on family trips. “I suppose you were always with your parents—at least one of them.”

Munira considered this. “Mostly my mother. Sometimes my father was busy, speaking out about the Zionists.”

“Did you go sightseeing every day?”

“Yes. She made me.”

He could piece much of this together, David thought, through credit card records and parking receipts. But the only specific interval he knew to focus on began shortly after one P.M., when the two suicide bombers, dressed as policemen, had rushed to Fourth Street as though alerted to a change in Ben-Aron’s route. “During the prime minister’s speech,” David asked, “do you remember where you were?”

“Yes,” Munira said flatly. “Watching television with my father. We listened to the Zionist’s lies.”

“Was your mother there?”

“No. She was out shopping.”

“Why didn’t you go with her?” David inquired lightly. “Shopping sounds like a lot more fun than listening to Zionist lies.”

Munira did not smile. “She didn’t ask me. So I stayed.”

“Did you want to go?”

Reflecting, Munira brushed back a strand of hair that had escaped from her scarf. “I don’t remember. She was in a hurry, I think.”

The implications of the answer, at least to someone less friendly, troubled David. “Did she say that?” he asked.

“No. She was there, and then she just decided not to watch with us.”

It was better not to push this, David decided. “Do you remember—”

Abruptly, Munira stood, a sudden look of panic in her eyes. David was instantly aware of the air around them, vibrating with the roar of jet planes. Turning to him, Munira cried out, “They’re bombing us...”

David reached for her. The panic that seized her body made her tremble uncontrollably, even as she flinched from the touch of a man she did not know. Then the planes were directly overhead—the gleaming metal bellies of six fighter jets in tight formation nearly grazing the rooftops of department stores with a deafening scream. Crying out, Munira collapsed into his arms, her scarved head pressed against his face.

“It’s okay,” he murmured. “It’s okay. That’s just a bunch of our fighter pilots, showing off. It’s supposed to make us feel safe.”

Though Carole was calling from Jerusalem, her voice was clear. David leaned back in his chair. “How are you?” he asked.

“Sad,” she answered in a somber voice. “People here seem wounded. The whole country is numb. It’s a little like I imagine Europe on the verge of World War II—a state of siege, where no one believes that what’s going to happen will be good.”

“And the service?”

“Very moving. Especially Ben-Aron’s daughter, Anat, speaking of his dream of peace. But I didn’t know whether to think that she was noble or just forlorn.”

She sounded a little forlorn herself, David thought. “How’s your dad?”

“Depressed. We both are.”

In her voice, though toneless, David imagined hearing a faint reproach. “Is there any talk,” he asked, “of a breach in Ben-Aron’s personal security?”

“Some,” Carole answered. “You know the press here. But the government has a lid on whatever it’s investigating.”