Exile: a novel (60 page)

“Saeb Khalid’s school,” David answered.

At the hotel, David scribbled notes, sorting through what he had learned: the relationship between Hillel Markis and Barak Lev; the unhappiness of Hana’s marriage; Saeb’s access to her computer at home and in her office; Muhammad Nasir’s denial that Al Aqsa was connected to Hana or the plot against Ben-Aron; Saeb’s extended trips to Jordan; Iyad Hassan’s connection to Hamas and, perhaps, to Iran; Hassan’s class with Saeb. In themselves, the facts were tantalizing. But the information to weave these disparate threads into a design, if there was one, remained beyond his grasp.

Mentally exhausted, David began packing. He was traveling to Lebanon, as he had promised Hana, to see her mother and father. Though curious, he did not expect the trip to be rewarding. But he would not be sorry to leave the West Bank, and not only because of the sense, alien before now, that as a Jew he might be the subject of undifferentiated loathing. He also felt the soul-wearing pressure of occupation, of becoming an accidental member of a population whose sole interest to the occupier was that one might be a suicide bomber. The Promised Land, which many on each side believed was promised them alone, might be consumed not merely by hatred and violence but also by the most banal of human faults—a failure
to imagine the life of another. The only common denominator of occupation was that it degraded everyone.

What he needed most, David told himself, was sleep.

Stripping off his shirt, he noticed an envelope that had been slipped beneath his door. Hopeful, he ripped it open. Inside, awkwardly translated into English, were the files of Saeb’s doctor in Ramallah.

As he read, David exhaled. If the files were legitimate, Saeb suffered from a serious cardiac arrhythmia, which might, under certain circumstances, become a fatal heart attack. There was a referral to a specialist in Amman; records of examinations to confirm Saeb’s visits. By all appearances, Saeb Khalid was a very sick man.

But not so sick, David noted, that his medical examinations in Jordan took more than a day. Then he found a second curiosity: Saeb had asked his doctor in Ramallah to send certain specimens, not otherwise described, to the only lab the doctor knew sophisticated enough to perform the tests required. A lab in Tel Aviv.

Calling Zev Ernheit, David arranged to meet him in Jerusalem. But first David had a promise to keep, in Lebanon.

By now the refugee camp of Shatila seemed familiar. Even the rubble, preserved for a quarter century, evoked the ruins in Jenin, except that it was more extensive, haunted by more ghosts and the horror of systematic slaughter. He could not help but think of Saeb Khalid, a boy of fourteen, forced to watch the rape of his sister and the murder of his family.

At the community center, David got directions to the home of Hana’s parents, located in the section named for the village they had fled as children. It was a concrete rectangle among several others like it that lined both sides of a narrow alley that smelled of sewage. With considerable trepidation, David knocked on the wooden door.

When a white-haired woman answered, David knew at once who she was. Slight and wiry, she had clear brown eyes that contrasted with a face lined with age and care and the harsh simplicity of her life. Maha Arif was like a glimpse of Hana’s future had she not left this place and culture— although, David knew, Hana had never wholly parted from it. Maha looked up at him suspiciously while David absorbed the fact that this small Arab woman was Hana’s mother.

“I’m David Wolfe,” he told her. “Hana’s lawyer. She asked me to come see you.”

The name Hana drew a sharp, querying look, expressive of fear and hope. David realized that he had overlooked the gulf between Hana and her parents. “I’m American,” David said. “Do you know someone who speaks English?”

The woman held up her hand, then disappeared inside the house, leaving the door ajar. David heard voices speaking Arabic, and then a stocky middle-aged man with a dark mustache came to greet him. “I’m Basim,” he said, “Hana’s uncle.”

Once again, David identified himself. “Please,” Basim said, opening the door wide.

David followed him into a small sitting room, not unlike that of Iyad Hassan’s mother, but with a window to the alley, affording a swath of natural light, which fell on a stunted olive tree in a pot. An older, gray-haired man with a gaunt face gazed at him warily through thick glasses that suggested extreme myopia. “This is Yousif,” Basim explained, “Hana’s father.”

Basim spoke a few phrases to Yousif and Maha while Yousif blinked at David as though he had just dropped in from the moon. David had a painful, incongruous vision of Hana’s parents and his own—the Jewish psychiatrist and the professor of English—trying to converse as Hana translated. Eyes fixed on David, Maha Arif spoke in a burst of Arabic.

“She needs to know,” Basim translated, “if her daughter will be safe.”

Facing Hana’s mother, David answered, “For now, she is safe. I promise I’ll do my best to free her.”

Basim translated this, and then Maha’s next interrogation: “Did you go with Hana to the school for lawyers?”

In the life Hana shared with them, David realized, he had never existed. “Yes,” he said simply. “I knew her at Harvard.”

A film of tears came to the woman’s eyes. “Since Hana went to America,” Basim explained, “her mother has rarely seen her. Of Hana’s child, she has only pictures.”

Belatedly, Maha requested that he sit with them on the worn pillows scattered across the carpet, then offered him tea. Abruptly, Yousif Arif spoke in a tone both mournful and harsh. “He prays that his daughter can find justice in America,” Basim translated. “There is no justice here.”

Since Hana’s father was a child, David reflected, this place was all he knew. David thought of Maha’s sister—Hana’s aunt—buried beneath the ruins of her home. “In America,” David said, “there is justice.”

“Even for Palestinians?” Basim asked sharply.

“Yes.”

When Basim translated, Yousif spoke more vehemently. “Here,” Basim said for him, “we are prisoners. There is no work for us, and we are not allowed to be citizens. This poor olive tree you see is all that remains of our real home. And now they may take our daughter’s life.”

Maha spoke again, her voice urgent. “Are you a good lawyer?” Basim translated.

“Yes,” David answered simply, “I’m a very good lawyer.”

As Basim translated, the first trace of relief appeared in Maha’s eyes. Now she spoke in a quieter voice. “That is what her daughter deserves,” Basim explained. “Hana has a fine husband, from a good family. But Saeb is not a lawyer. Now only a lawyer can save her.”

Hearing these words, David recalled Hana quoting her mother’s warning:
Please do not love anyone in America.
And wished that he could say to her:
If Hana had been free to love me, now she would be safe.
Instead, he merely nodded.

“And how is my granddaughter?” Maha asked through Basim. “Is she afraid?”

David hesitated. “She has her father,” he answered. “And like her mother, she is strong, and very smart.”

When this was translated, Yousif gave his wife a look, then responded through Basim. “Does she also talk back like her mother?”

“Yes. Hana told me that Munira is your revenge on her.”

Yousif made a clicking sound with his tongue, and then his brief smile vanished. This time his voice was guttural. “She did not kill the Jew,” Basim said for him.

David was not sure whether this was a statement or a question. “No,” he answered. “She did not kill Amos Ben-Aron.”

“Then it is all Zionist lies,” Basim persisted.

“It is
someone’s
lies,” David answered. “I mean to find out whose.”

When Basim translated this, Hana’s mother looked at him dubiously. What went unspoken, he supposed, was her belief in the depth of the Zionists’ perfidy, their bottomless disdain for the rights of Palestinians. Choosing to divert the conversation, David passed on Sausan’s greetings. “Her grandfather,” Yousif answered through Basim, “was my father’s brother. But he remained. He was married to a Jew.”

This was his only response. Belatedly, Maha said, “We do not know Sausan. He remembers her father only as a child.”

Yousif spoke again. “It is unnatural,” Basim translated, his expression conveying the sadness of Yousif ’s words. “Families are cut off from their land, and divided from one another. Yousif sells Maha’s sweets from a handcart in the street, a man without his daughter or granddaughter. It is not a life; it is the shadow of a life.”

Sitting beside him, Maha touched her husband’s sleeve, speaking to him quietly. Basim hesitated, then told David, “They get by, she says.”

Yousif did not seem to hear this. “When we fled,” he said through Basim, “my parents left our teacups on the table, to show that we would come back to refill them. They did not imagine dying in this place.”

As though to affirm her husband’s memory, Maha spoke to Basim. “There were olive trees,” Basim told David. “Lemon trees, as well. She says she can still smell them.”

“Can you?” David asked.

Basim’s smile was almost bitter. “Some days I believe I can. But I was born here. My memories are of the Phalange.”

At the word “Phalange” Maha’s expression darkened. Standing stiffly, Yousif reached into the drawer of a battered table. With swollen fingers, he removed a wrinkled paper, turned sepia by the passage of time, and held it out to David.

To David’s surprise, it was written in English. “It is a registered land document,” Basim explained, “issued by the British government of Palestine. It proves Yousif ’s title to his father’s home.”

David thought of its ruined walls, its shattered ceramic plates. Yet, to Hana’s parents, the house remained as it was when they were children, a place to which they might return, in a time that still existed. This was as impossible for David to imagine as Hana and Munira existing in such a place. Yet Hana wore her grandfather’s key, and Munira recited his memories.

Carefully watching David’s face, Maha spoke to him. “When you saw Sausan,” Basim asked for her, “did she take you to our village?”

David looked into the eyes of Hana’s mother. “No,” he answered softly. “But it sounds beautiful. I hope you will see it again someday.”

As Basim repeated his words in Arabic, Maha’s eyes filmed: she seemed to know that she would never return, and that David knew this, too. Reaching out, she touched his wrist, the lightness of her hand a ghost of Hana’s. “I just want to hold my daughter,” she said. “Please save her from our enemies.”

Katie’s was small and intimate, with candlelit tables and a voluble proprietress, a Moroccan Jew who bantered with Ernheit before bringing their wine. “And so,” Ernheit asked of David’s time in the West Bank, “what were your impressions?”

“That the occupation’s a disaster,” David answered bluntly. “For everyone.”

Ernheit spread his hands. “What choice do we have? Hours ago, at a checkpoint in Ramallah, we caught a twenty-year-old from Hamas carrying a bomb and an IDF uniform. That’s the balance sheet for today— thousands of Arabs inconvenienced, unknown Jewish lives saved from another terrorist. Would you prefer that they died?”

“What I’d prefer is that sane people on both sides find a way out.” David put down his wineglass. “What in hell are settlers doing in Hebron?”

“Hebron is at the heart of Jewish heritage,” Ernheit countered. “Jews have a right to worship there.”

“At what cost?” David asked with real exasperation. “Deploying the IDF to keep a pack of Jewish fanatics free to dump their garbage on Muslim peddlers?

“You know what amazes me, Zev? It’s that so many Jews and Palestinians don’t give a damn about one another’s stories. Too many Palestinians don’t grasp why three thousand years of death and persecution make Jews want their own homeland, or how suicide bombings alienate Jews and extend the occupation. Too many Jews refuse to acknowledge their role in the
misery of Palestinians since 1948, or that the daily toll of occupation helps fuel more hatred and violence. So both become clichés: Jews are victims and oppressors; Palestinians are victims and terrorists. And the cycle of death rolls on. The two things the extremists have in common is how much they hated Amos Ben-Aron, and a gift for keeping old hatreds fresh.” David stopped, then continued more evenly: “In three short weeks I’ve seen all kinds of suffering, from the families in Haifa to the misery of Hana’s parents. But they live in different worlds. Hana has become a bit player in a tragedy that shows no sign of ending. Not for her, or her daughter, or anyone who lives here.”

Ernheit studied him coolly. “In the end, David, which side would you choose?”

David’s own gaze did not waiver. “I’m a Jew. I feel more at home here; on the West Bank, I heard enough anti-Semitism to remind me of how often Jews have had no choice but to fight or run. So if I had to choose, I’d have no choice.

“The problem is that every day more choices are foreclosed for those who live here. Each day that Jews fight to build more settlements or Palestinians stoke the fantasy of return, they guarantee that someone else will die. And the hatred embedded in the DNA of this region continues to metastasize.

“With Ben-Aron dead, I don’t see peace anytime soon. It may not come at all. If it doesn’t, you have no choice but to end the occupation anyway, withdrawing behind your security wall into a Fortress Israel that incorporates settlements that never should have existed. On the other side, instead of a diverse and resilient people, you’ll see a lot of educated Palestinians fleeing to Los Angeles, leaving a wounded, angry populace on a festering scrap of land, listening to the voices of fundamentalism and the rhetoric of return. You’ll get Hamas for good. You’ve already got Iran.”

Ernheit gave him a bleak smile. “And then?”