Exile: a novel (5 page)

Eyebrows raised, Hana gave him a penetrant look. “Yes,” she said, “why did you?”

“Because I was curious about you. Why did you come?”

“Because I was curious about why you asked me. Though I expected that you saw me as some mildly exotic novelty, like encountering a chin-chilla in one of your petting zoos.”

At once, David grasped the deeper truth beneath her cleverness: her facility with words and images concealed an isolation far deeper than she chose to confess. Only candor, he decided, had a chance of piercing her defenses.

“When I met you,” he said, “I saw a particular woman. A beautiful one, which never hurts. A woman who might despise me for what I am. But also one with a life so different from mine that I wanted to know more about it. Besides, as I said, I have the time.”

She studied him. “So why not ask Saeb?”

“Because he’s not a beautiful woman.”

Hana laughed, a clear, pleasing trill free of rancor that took him by surprise. “And because,” David finished, “with all respect to your fiancé, I don’t think ten lunches in a row would make the slightest difference to him.”

A young Chinese waiter arrived to take their order. When he left, Hana
was gazing at the table with a veiled look of contemplation. “So,” she inquired at length, “what do you want to know about me?”

“To start, what you envision as your home.”

“We have no home,” she said bitterly. “The refugee camp is an open sewer, a burial ground.” She paused, draining the disdain from her voice. “Our home is in the Lower Galilee. It’s built on a hillside, surrounded by the olive trees my grandfather planted, with a system of pipes and drains that capture the rainwater and channel it, and a cistern for the house. The house itself is stone. Its ceiling is reinforced with steel beams, and there are four rooms—a room to gather in, and bedrooms for my father and my uncles, for my aunts, and for my grandparents. There is no kitchen. My grandmother cooked outside, and they ate from plates they shared—”

“How can you know all this?”

Hana’s face softened. “My grandfather described it for us, countless times, before he died. Stone by stone, like Flaubert described the village in
Madame Bovary.
But my grandparents’ village was real, not imagined.”

David wondered about this—what memory embellished, time destroyed. “And Saeb?” he asked.

“Is from the same village. Not literally, of course—in 1948, our parents were children. But their memories are as vivid as my grandfather’s.”

Perhaps their memories
are
your grandfather’s, David thought but did not say. Instead, he inquired, “How did you come to Lebanon?”

Hana summoned a smile that signaled her forbearance. “Another accident of the history you have so little use for, and of people who have little use for us. After hearing of the massacre at Deir Yassin, my grandparents fled to Jordan. So did hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. The war in 1948 brought still more, as did the war of 1967. But all those Palestinians challenged the power of King Hussein. And so the Jordanian army shelled our camps, and drove our fighters into Lebanon.” Her voice held quiet anger. “From which, as a by-product of the cleansing operation Saeb mentioned, the Israelis forced Arafat and the PLO into exile in Tunis, claiming that their acts of ‘terror’ threatened northern Israel.

“Now they are gathered on the West Bank, still occupied by Israeli soldiers. My parents still wait in Lebanon. Only Saeb and I were able to leave for the West Bank, and then the Zionists closed Birzeit University before we could study there. And so,” Hana continued with a smile that was no smile, “with the help of the refugee agency of the United Nations, Israel’s creator, and some scholarship money, we washed up on the shores of America, the openhearted patron of those who displaced us. Where I carry on my people’s struggle by engaging in foolish debates with those whose notion of
Arabs comes from the novel
Exodus,
and who see our history as a western in which Israel is Jimmy Stewart and Saeb and I are Indians.” Hana caught herself, summoning a bitter smile. “You asked. But perhaps you did not wish for an answer quite so comprehensive.”

“I did ask,” David said simply. “And you exaggerate.”

To his surprise, her smile became more wistful than resentful. “I wish it were so. But I’ve learned to hope for nothing.”

“And Saeb?”

“Has his own history.” She looked briefly down again, pensive. “I’m not ready to talk about him, David.”

Surprised by the tacit intimacy of his name on her lips, David tried to decipher what lay beneath her answer, and then the waiter appeared with steaming plates of beef chow mein and cooked vegetables. Serving them both, Hana said, “So I’ve become this contradictory person, a semi-observant Muslim leftist. Not because I embrace the Communists but because only the left seems determined to give us what we want.”

David sampled the chow mein, more flavorful than the paucity of customers would suggest. “Which is?”

“A homeland. Our land returned to us. If Jews want to live among us, they can. But not in a Jewish ghetto called Israel, one that oppresses and excludes us.”

“There are negotiations going on,” David objected. “Arafat and Prime Minister Rabin already have agreed to let the PLO take over the civil governance of Gaza and the West Bank. A start toward your own country.”

“We’ll see,” Hana answered with weary resignation. “More likely our children will someday have the same discussion. And it will be as academic to your child as it is to you.”

David did not know what moved him next. He had always lived the circumscribed life of the American upper classes—professional parents; privileged friends; elite schools. The women he had dated, though of varied personalities and, at times, neuroses, were of the same class, with similar aspirations comfortably supported by similar families. But this woman had passion and experiences David Wolfe had never encountered, and it seemed to draw from him his own small spark of rebellion.

Whatever it was, he reached out and covered her hand with his. “Not academic. Not to me.”

For a long time, she gazed down at his hand on hers, though she made no move to withdraw it. “This is complicated.” Her voice was soft, muffled. “You have no idea how much.”

“Then tell me.”

“I’m pledged to Saeb.” She drew a breath, still looking down. “I’m Muslim. Wherever my home will be, Muslim women do not have men who are not Muslim. Let alone a Jewish man.

“There are rules. Women represent the honor of their family, as I represent mine.” She looked up at him, eyes clouded. “That I even let you touch me stains their honor.”

“But not yours, Hana. We’re people, you and I.”

She shook her head. But still she did not move her hand. “We can’t afford to be.
You
can’t afford to be. The price could be too great.”

David gazed into her dark eyes, filled with uncertainty and even fear. Then he gave an answer that, when he recalled it later, seemed as blithely, blindly American as it must have seemed to her. A statement invincibly David Wolfe at twenty-five in its ignorance of pain.

“I want to see you, Hana, as often as you’ll let me. I’ll take my chances with the rest.”

They stood at Fort Point, the foot of the massive concrete pillars beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, an orange-painted span that jutted above them into the fog creeping from the ocean through the narrow passage to the bay. Ibrahim’s sense of living a surreal nightmare deepened; he felt like an automaton, being moved to ever more alien locations by someone who did not even acknowledge his existence. How had he come to be in this place, he asked himself, with this man, on the eve of his death? He knew nothing but what Iyad deigned to tell him—that their enemy was coming; that the woman would soon place the weapons of destruction in their hands.

But how? So many hated their quarry that he lived in a steel cocoon, guarded by a handpicked elite chosen from the Zionist army, ruthless men with reflexes for killing. Standing in this place unarmed, his only link to humanity a laconic, hate-filled zealot, Ibrahim felt as naked as Salwa before the insolent soldiers...

He still could see the checkpoint, clear as yesterday—it stretched for miles, cars and trucks backed up in a relentless heat that baked the parched earth and asphalt. His sister lay in the back seat of the car, belly swollen and face contorted in agony, her flowing skirt pulled up around her waist to expose what a brother should not see. “Please, God,” she kept pleading, “please don’t let us die.”

Eyes shut, Ibrahim had grasped her hand. Now Salwa lived, her mind as empty as her womb.

Iyad’s new cell phone rang.

“Don’t be cute, David.” Marnie Sharpe used her most caustic tone. “Don’t tell me this bullshit trick doesn’t have your fingerprints all over it.”

They sat in the United States attorney’s corner office in the federal building: Sharpe at her desk, David facing her in a chair that was none too comfortable. Sharpe and David had a history, and now they were playing it out.

The year before, Sharpe had asked for, and promptly received, David’s resignation as an assistant United States attorney. Their problems had begun with rancid chemistry. David sometimes found the vagaries of law amusing; little amused Marnie Sharpe. She had carried into her mid-forties a humorless single-mindedness, Spartan habits, and no known passions save for her personal vision of justice, as inviolate as a family might be to someone else. When he had worked for her, David had tried to imagine Marnie Sharpe making love to anyone, man or woman, and failed utterly. The label for Sharpe he settled on was “armadillo.”

They could have survived this. Marnie was a good lawyer, and in his better moments David could work up sympathy for anyone who needed a carapace so thick. But the death penalty had done them in.

Sharpe believed in it; David did not. He had refused to seek it in the murder of an eight-year-old girl by a child molester who had himself been sexually abused and tortured by his father and who was, David knew, borderline retarded. After David’s resignation, his successor, following Sharpe’s instructions, had sought and secured a death sentence. Asked by a reporter to comment, David had not restrained himself. “This murder was a sickening tragedy. But were I Ms. Sharpe, I’d reserve the death penalty for men smart enough to know what dying means.”

This sealed their mutual dislike. To Marnie Sharpe, David Wolfe put his own rarified sensibilities above the law; to David, the U.S. attorney did not admit, even to herself, that her zeal for the death penalty was intended to endear her to those who dole out federal judgeships. That he was now a defense lawyer worsened their dynamic, allowing David to use the one gift in his toolbox Marnie did not possess: the imagination to exploit the ambiguities of a legal system that Sharpe saw as a blueprint. Throw David Wolfe into a legal thicket, and what he saw were escape routes.

All of which had led to the gambit that brought them together now: the chance to frustrate Sharpe in the interests of a client who, but for
David, might be on his way to an extended term in prison. But lurking beneath this was a purpose just as serious: David’s absolute conviction that Marnie Sharpe should never wield the power invested in a federal judge, as deep as her own belief that he should never be a congressman.

“I’m not here to be chastised,” David told her calmly. “In fact, I’m wondering why I’m here at all.”

She shot him a look of irritation. “We have an eight-million-dollar Brinks robbery. Your client was caught. All he had to offer was ‘The Mafia made me do it.’ ”

“ ‘Or they’d kill me,’ ” David amended. “Raymond thought
that
part was important. So do I.” He spread his hands. “It’s a first offense, and you’re charging Ray Scallone with everything but planning 9/11. He’s a tool—”

“He’s a goon who threatened a security guard with a Saturday night special. He needs to be off the street.”

David shrugged. “So let’s work out a deal or try the case.”

“Why should I cut a deal? I suppose because someone, not from our office, leaked to the press that we—which is to say the FBI—were investigating whether the Mafia was connected to this robbery. We weren’t investigating any such connection—”

“Then you should have—”

Sharpe spoke over him. “But after Channel 5 reported this so-called Mafia connection, the FBI started to investigate the possibility. Then, coincidentially enough,
you
demanded access to all the records of its investigation, claiming that they were vital to Scallone’s defense.”

“They
are
his defense,” David said. “After all, you
did
catch him with the money. So why didn’t you just turn over the records?”

“There
are
no records that would help Scallone,” Sharpe retorted. “There
is
no evidence that the Mafia threatened anyone. But now you’ve filed a motion to dismiss the entire case, claiming that you can’t put on a proper defense without knowing why the FBI launched an investigation of what turns out to be vapor—just as if you didn’t know.” She paused, fixing David with a gelid stare. “Any sane judge would use this motion to line their cat box. Any judge who was still breathing would have wondered who the source was for this serendipitous ‘leak.’ But you’ve lucked into ‘Kick-’Em-Loose Bruce’ Myers, the last hemophiliac on the federal bench.”

David shrugged again. “Beats a necrophiliac, I suppose.”

This tacit reference to the death penalty caused Sharpe’s eyes to narrow. “You know what’s happening here, David. And so do I.”

“I’m hoping so,” he responded blandly. “I’m willing to discuss a plea if you are.”

Sharpe sat back, considering him in silence. David took this for what it was: a concession that, however distasteful, cutting a deal might be preferable to what Judge Myers might do with David’s motion. “Based on what, dare I ask? Your bogus motion?”