Exile: a novel (7 page)

“Go ahead. My ego’s not that fragile.”

“Maybe not about cooking. But all men are fragile, somehow.”

Smiling, David resolved to focus on the cutlets. When he looked at her again, she was freeing her hair from the band at the nape of her neck. Luxuriant and black, it fell across her shoulders. But when she saw him gazing at her, she seemed embarrassed, as though they had been caught at something.

“I was thinking your hair’s beautiful.” He paused a moment, searching for some conversational escape route. “At home, do you cover?”

“At times. For religious observances, or when I’m with women who are older.”

David turned the cutlets. “It seems a waste.”

Hana moved her shoulders, the smallest of shrugs. “That’s just what’s done. But when I do it here, men seem to notice me even more. So it rather defeats the purpose.”

How much was she aware, David wondered, of the power her beauty had on him? “Dinner’s ready,” he said. “You can grade me afterward.”

They ate without haste, sipping wine, talking both of small things and the world as they saw it. “Then you have no religion?” she asked.

“Not in the way you do, though I’m culturally Jewish, which is something I take pride in. They keep on killing us, and yet we do far more than survive—we invent, write, discover, build, create. And no matter what you think, Judaism, at its best, is a tolerant religion—we don’t proselytize, and we’ve learned enough about suffering and oppression to notice others who are suffering and oppressed.

“But the history of religion, at its worst, is the story of mass murder. Why have other religions roasted Jews on spits for two thousand years? Why do Jews and Arabs hate each other now? It’s hard to think of all that and raise your eyes to heaven. Sometimes I think it’s man who created God in his own image—murderous and narrow.”

Hana gave him a long, thoughtful look. “What lies between your people and mine,” she said finally, “is more than some bloodthirsty God, or the Torah and Koran. It’s history and land. It’s people’s stories—among many others Saeb’s. And mine.”

“But don’t you think if it were left to you and me, we’d find some way to resolve all that?”

“I wonder. Anyhow, it’s not, and never will be. This is so much bigger than two people.”

Gazing at the table, David smiled a little but said nothing. “What is it?” she asked.

“I was thinking of what Bogart said to Ingrid Bergman at the end of
Casablanca
.”

Her own smile was a flicker. “This isn’t a movie. You can’t rewrite the ending.”

“Then perhaps I’m as American as your puppy. But I believe in people writing their own endings.”

Hana looked into his face, her eyes shadowed with an emotion that David could not quite grasp. “Dinner was good,” she said at last. “We should be happy just with that.”

“What were you thinking?” David asked. “Before.”

Briefly, she looked away, and then directly at him. “That I’m afraid of what else I might want from you. And of what you want from me.”

At first he had no answer. Then, impulsively, he stood, taking her hands, gently raising her from the chair so that he could look into her face. “What if you’re not just ‘something I can’t have’? What if I end up wanting all of you?”

For a long moment she was still, eyes locked on his, and then she rested her forehead against his shoulder. He felt, or perhaps imagined, a tremor running through her. “Only that?” she murmured. “So much more than I can give you. All I could ever give you is an hour at a time, until I can no longer stand it.”

David could smell her hair, fragrant as fresh-cut herbs. “You make it sound like torture. Don’t you think we should find out?”

“Not just torture . . .”

She did not finish. As his lips grazed her throat, he could feel her pulse beating, then felt the warmth of her body against his.

Their kiss, at first gentle and tentative, did not stop at that.

David reached beneath her sweater, tracing the slender line of her back and shoulders. When he slowly raised her sweater, she held her arms up to help him, a kind of surrender. Her eyes did not leave his.

She wore no bra. David felt himself quiver with wanting her, and then saw that her eyes were filling with tears. Softly he asked, “Is this all right?”

“Yes.” Her voice was tremulous. “This once.”

David kissed her nipples, her stomach, then unfastened her belt. Wordless, he slid her clothes off, then his. They leaned against each other, still silent, caught between doubt and desire.

“We’ll be all right,” he murmured.

Taking her hand, he led her to the bedroom. Hana’s fingers curled around his.

Filled with a haste he fought against, David drew down the bedcover. Rain began to spatter his dark window.

Together they slipped into the bed, warm skin on cool sheets, her breasts resting against his chest as they looked into each other’s faces. He allowed himself to savor the surprise of touching her, of her touching him where she wished.

“No rush,” he whispered. “No rush.” And then the rush was hers.

When he was inside her, she stared up into his eyes, as though to read his soul. Then it was all feeling, her hips rising to take him, their bodies moving together slowly, then more quickly, her soft cries his only guide.

With the first tremor of her body, Hana cried out his name, the damp tendrils of her hair pressed against his face.

Afterward they lay facing each other, quiet and warm, rediscovering each other in the light from David’s kitchen. Time passed like that, new lovers content with wonder.

“Perhaps
this
is why I came,” she said at last.

David felt unsure. “To make love with me?”

“More than that. Perhaps I thought you could help me escape myself.”

“And can I?”

Her eyes were troubled. “Not for long, I think. But at least here I’m allowed to look at you.”

“Here? The first time you saw me your eyes reminded me of burn holes. Like if you stared at me long enough, I’d turn to ash and bone.”

This made Hana smile. “Then I must tell you about Arab women—at least Palestinian women, or Jordanians or Lebanese. We’re allowed to look at men in public, as long as we employ the appropriate stare of hauteur to cover the fact that we’re interested. I saw you were attractive, so I allowed myself to look at you with as much contempt as I could muster, for as long as I dared.”

David laughed at this admission. “You certainly fooled me.”

“Yes. And look how well it worked.”

David kissed her. And then, with less fear but no less desire, they began to find each other again.

Only later, sipping coffee at his kitchen table, did Hana glance at her watch.

“Are you afraid?” David asked.

A shadow crossed her face. “It’s not what you think,” she answered. “Another myth about Arab women is that we’re subservient. Perhaps Saudi women. But in my culture, the sole imperative is never to confront men with what would shame them. Or shame you.”

“And for men?”

“It’s different. For example, if an Arab man sleeps with an American woman, it’s no problem. But it’s understood they will marry one of us.”

Her tone of matter-of-fact acceptance took him by surprise. “Nice to have the double-standard codified.”

Hana shrugged her shoulders. “It is true that Arab men have a streak of paternalism and misogyny—like many Israelis. I hope someday we can progress to the state of social relations in America, where men are hypo-critical about their chauvinism, and even slightly embarrassed.”

Though he smiled, David would not be deflected. “And what do you hope for from Saeb?”

“More openness,” Hana said flatly. “Including for our daughters, should we have them.”

This casual acknowledgment of her future wounded him. As though sensing this, she touched his face. “I am sorry, David. But that is how it is.”

“That may be. But I don’t know
why
it is.”

“Is that so important?”

“I think so, yes.”

Hana closed her eyes. “There’s so much to it,” she said at last. “Our fathers were cousins, our mothers second cousins. When we were eleven, our fathers began discussing that we should marry—”

“That can’t be what you really want.”

“Because I’m here, with you, in secret?” Hana drew a breath. “It’s true that Saeb would be consumed by my betrayal. With a Jew, yet never with him.”

Astonishment slowed David’s answer. “Sleeping with me is one thing,” he said at last. “Marrying Saeb is another.”

“And why is this your concern?”

David spread both palms in a gesture of bewilderment and frustration. “Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps because in my hypocritical culture, it’s women who are supposed to sentimentalize sex, and men who compartmentalize it—”

“And so this means nothing to me,” Hana cut in. “How little you
do
understand.” Her voice adopted a tone of weary acceptance. “Marrying Saeb is about far more than an arranged marriage, the traditions of a village culture. The wisdom of our fathers’ pledge lies in the things that have made us who we are. That we are Palestinian. That Saeb more than matches me in intellect and ambition. All that, and, yes, history.

“History is not just that our parents were born in the same village. It’s how the Zionist victory shaped the narrative of all our lives. Because they came from Galilee, our parents fled to Lebanon. Saeb’s parents married at the refugee camp of Tel Zaatar—mine at the camps of Sabra and Shatila. The cesspools of their exile, crowded, dirty, ridden by disease.” Her voice held quiet anger. “At first my family thought we were the lucky ones. Because when civil war broke out between the Lebanese Christians and Muslims, the Christian militia—the Phalange—surrounded Tel Zaatar and rained rockets on our people’s homes.

“It took sixteen days for them to tire of this. When they were through, the Phalange burst into the camp and began slaughtering the men. Saeb, the oldest child, was only eight. So he, his mother, four brothers and sisters survived, although their home was rubble. But now they thought
they
were lucky—Saeb’s father was looking for work in Beirut when the siege began, and could not get back to die—”

Hana paused abruptly. “When it was done,” she told David, “the Phalange rounded up the women and children, drove them in trucks to the border of West Beirut, and told them to start walking.

“Saeb’s father was searching for his family. When he found them, Saeb has told me, tears rolled down his face.” Her voice was toneless now. “Their refuge was my birth place—Sabra and Shatila. Two camps side by side, run by the United Nations—thousands of Palestinians crowded into one-story concrete buildings with corrugated roofs and bare bulbs hanging from the ceilings. Saeb’s family found a place near ours, in a squalid corner named after their village, but where the only olive tree grew in a barrel filled with soil my parents had dug up from their garden.

“ ‘He who is not interred in his own land,’ my grandfather always told me, ‘has had no life.’ But we buried him at the camp, with his chickens and goats and pitiful olive tree the only remnant of the life he knew—a farmer with nowhere to farm, part of a faceless mass that, to Americans, is at most an object of scorn or pity. This is the place where our parents decided we should marry.”

The last was said with a casual bitterness that, David knew, bespoke a far deeper anger. “Perhaps,” she finished in a softer tone, “you begin to
understand. But you cannot truly understand unless you know what the Jews and Christians did to us at Sabra and Shatila. By marrying me, Saeb is honoring the wishes of a dead man.”

David poured more coffee for both of them. “Tell me about what happened at Sabra and Shatila, Hana.”

For a time she gazed at him over the rim of her cup. Then, quite softly, she began speaking.

Saeb’s family had little to eat. His mother helped support them by sewing and baking; after school, Saeb would sell the sweets she made. Their home had four small rooms—a bath and kitchen combined; a living room, where his parents slept; a bedroom for Saeb and his brothers; another for his sisters. No one thought of privacy—that was a Western concept. Saeb’s world, and Hana’s, was as constricted as their hopes.

But the outside world was close at hand. At five o’clock one morning, Hana awakened to the terrible scream of Israeli F-16s over the rooftops of Beirut. The fearsome planes, a gift from the United States, flew well above the fire from the PLO’s hand-cranked antiaircraft guns and shoulder-fired missiles. Hana could still feel the concussive shock waves of bombs exploding; see the skies afire with orange-red flares; hear the cries of her mother, brother, and sister as her father rushed them into the living room, lying with their faces pressed against their tattered carpet. Watching Hana tell this story now, David saw her eyes filling with reflexive terror.

“That was the beginning,” she told him.

For two months, the Israelis bombed Beirut and the camps. By day there were burials at Sabra and Shatila, while children played in the craters made by Zionist bombs. The only way Arafat and the PLO could end this devastation was by agreeing to leave Lebanon for Tunis.