Exile: a novel (82 page)

Sharpe’s repressed annoyance surfaced in her eyes. “Hoping for joint custody?” she asked in mildly caustic tones. “Or just weekend visitation?”

“Now that you’ve made this personal,” David answered coolly, “I’m hoping for a living daughter. I’m also hoping that the government is competent enough to keep the Iranians from killing anyone else in San Francisco—”

“Enough,” the judge interrupted tartly. “Do you have a more helpful response, Ms. Sharpe?”

Sharpe paused, her expression glum. “The United States will extend Ms. Arif ’s visa, and that of Munira Khalid, for one year’s time, pending further action by Immigration and the Department of State. During that time, they can petition for permanent residence on whatever grounds they choose.”

David felt his body relax, even as he could hardly believe Hana’s change in fortune. “Are there any other variations you wish to work on this dream deal?” the judge asked him dryly. “Short of an executive pardon, that is.”

“Yes. Protection of Hana and Munira should they choose to stay. At least for the year’s period Ms. Sharpe mentioned.”

“I think that’s reasonable,” Taylor told Sharpe. “Saeb Khalid could have used it—which is one reason why we’re here.”

Sharpe nodded. “We’ll work out the details with Mr. Wolfe.” Turning to David, she said, “For your part, we expect that you and your client will agree to make no statement about the case, including about who may have authored this conspiracy. No press conferences, no anonymous whispers. Nothing.”

So this, David thought, was how Hertz meant to enforce silence: a lifetime gag order in exchange for Hana’s freedom. “That’s acceptable,” he answered, “just as long as Hana isn’t charged again. Also that no one on your
end talks about Munira’s paternity or what she might have learned about Khalid. If not, all bets are off.”

The judge looked from Sharpe to David. “Silence isn’t enforceable,” she said, “but it certainly seems advisable for all of us.” Pausing, the judge gave David a slight smile. “
Someone
really has thought of everything, haven’t they?”

David gave no answer; the judge expected none. “Let’s go to court,” she said after a moment. “Then we can kick your client, and your daughter, loose.”

Leaving the judge’s chambers, Sharpe and David paused in the hallway.

Sharpe summoned a wintry smile. “You’ve done it,” she said. “Just what you intended from the beginning. You played Israel off against the United States and made the cost of prosecuting too high for Israel to pay.”

David did not return her smile; on this point, he could feel no elation. “The cost,” he answered, “was even higher than I thought.”

“Too many deaths, you mean?”

“Too many deaths, too much knowledge.” He paused, then added wearily, “Some days, Marnie, I feel like the guy who bit the apple.”

She looked at him askance. “So what else
do
you know? Was Munira really with Khalid for the entire time in which the handler called Iyad Hassan?”

“I don’t know about that,” David answered. “Unless I choose to press Munira, I may never know. But Hana passed a polygraph. And nothing she ever said about this case—to the FBI, to me, or to you—ever turned out to be a lie. Except, perhaps, when it came to protecting Munira.”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Sharpe retorted. “Whether Arif helped her husband in order to protect Munira—Khalid’s blackmail as opposed to your graymail.”

David shook his head. “Once Hana was charged, she would have implicated Saeb before she’d let him raise Munira.”

“That’s just speculation,” Sharpe said dismissively. “Which is pretty much all we’re left with.” Her tone became more fatalistic than angry. “I hate losing like this—you know that. But now that we’re here, I’m not sure how much I’d have liked winning either. I felt too much like a pawn, and I wasn’t sure whose. There’s no ending that quite satisfies, is there?”

So Sharpe felt it too. “No,” David answered. “But this is the only ending I could live with.”

Sharpe gave him a last, dubious smile. “Then I hope you get some good
out of it,” she said and, abruptly turning, marched ahead of David to the courtroom.

Four hours later, David awaited Hana outside the federal detention center.

Flanked by two marshals, she emerged, dressed in the clothes she had worn on the night of her arrest. She stopped for a moment, blinking in the sunlight. Then, leaving the marshals, she walked toward David. A foot in front of him, she stopped again, aware of the media on the other side of the fence. Then she took his hands and looked up into his face.

“Thank you,” she said, eyes glistening. “But that is hardly enough. You’ve given me back my life, and my daughter.”

David tried to smile. “That’s what you hired me for, isn’t it?”

“Yes. And the only one who paid for that was you.” Briefly, Hana lowered her gaze. “Whatever happens, David, I have to see you. Not like this, and not in a courtroom or an office.”

He could not tell what this meant. Still conscious of the cameras, she stepped away from him and turned to the marshals. Briefly, she looked back. Then the marshals escorted her to the van that would begin her journey to wherever she and Munira chose.

22     
T
he afternoon passed in a blur, David warding off the media with a carefully crafted mantra: Hana was innocent; the dismissal her vindication; her release the beginning of a life she wished to share only with a daughter shaken by the death of Saeb Khalid. Hana had never wanted to be a public figure, David emphasized, and she did not want mistaken charges or unanswered questions about her husband to keep her in the public eye. What she needed was to heal, and this required that she say nothing more—now or ever—than she already had said in court. This chapter of her life was done.

For the most part, the media was disbelieving or offended—reporters were used to functioning as a hall of mirrors through which persons thrust into the spotlight, however accidentally, paraded with a quickly acquired narcissism. That was their expectation of Hana, and of David. They did not know, of course, that his silence was the price of Hana’s freedom. Nor would they ever learn, if David could help it, the deeper reasons, buried in the past, that the reticence of both lawyer and client was not merely their desire but their need.

And so when David returned to his flat in the Marina, a man with no clear vision of his future, he ignored the cadre of reporters gathered by his driveway and the ringing of his telephone and doorbell. Four hours later, when he glanced out the living room window, the reporters were gone.

At a little past nine o’clock that night, David heard a soft knock on his door. Rising from the chair where he sat in the semidarkness, he peered through the peephole.

Surprised, David opened the door.

Hana wore jeans and a sweater. She stood on his doorstep, unsure of herself, awaiting his invitation to enter. “I tried to call,” she said at last.

David mustered a smile. “I didn’t expect to see you quite this soon.”

He backed away from the door. Glancing over her shoulder, Hana slipped inside.

They stood in the alcove, looking at each other. “This feels so strange,” she said finally. “Sometimes I imagined being alone with you again, a girl’s fantasy. But I never believed it would happen.”

David tilted his head. “Who’s with Munira?”

“Nisreen.” Hana hesitated. “Munira is asleep.”

David could feel the beating of his pulse. “And if she were awake?”

“There are things I cannot yet say to her. I can hardly say them to you.” Her voice was thick with sadness and remorse. “I don’t know your feelings, David, and there could be so many. I was selfish when we were young, selfish when I asked you to defend me. I will try to be less selfish now. If it is better that I go, I would understand.”

David shook his head. Then, instinctively, he put his arms around her. He could sense Hana closing her eyes as she let her body relax against him. Silent, they held each other, rocking gently. “And what is it you want?” he murmured.

She leaned back, looking up into his eyes again. “To stay,” she answered simply. “To have this time with you, however we choose to spend it.”

David gazed into her face, so lovely that, this close, it almost hurt to look at her. Then his fingers grazed the nape of her neck, and he bent his face toward hers.

Her mouth was soft and warm, at once strange and familiar. David felt the two of them suspended in time, unconscious of anything else, uncertain whether this was past or present. And then the hunger for her returned, the sense of passion deferred, of years falling away. What this meant no longer mattered.

His lips found the hollow of her neck. Hana shivered, pressing hard against him. Taking her hand, David led her to the bedroom.

As they undressed, their eyes never left each other’s. He could feel the beating of his own pulse, see Hana’s desire so intensely that it was almost painful. She was even more beautiful than the woman he had remembered against his will.

Transfixed, they slid between cool sheets, her breasts grazing his chest. At once, they were frenzied, less tender than demanding, ripping away the past with equal ruthlessness until both of them cried out.

Afterward, he touched her cheek with curled fingers, looking into the
eyes of a woman he could not be sure he knew. “Was this just gratitude?” he asked.

Her eyes filmed with tears. “If you could see inside me, you wouldn’t ask. I’ve had thirteen years to think of you. But I didn’t know you anymore. So I’ve loved how I remembered you, or my imaginings of who you had become.” Briefly, she looked away. “I told myself that my memory of desiring you was a trick of the mind—that I could not have lost myself like this. Now I know that I did, and could so easily again.

“But so much has happened to us. You’re so much more self-protective than I remembered, perhaps because of me. And all I can do now is feel sorry for all you’ve lost.”

“I tell myself that it’s for the best,” he answered softly. “Perhaps someday I’ll believe it.”

Accepting this, Hana nestled her head against his chest. Moments later, David discovered that it was now he who needed her.

This time it was sweeter, more intimate, less the cauterizing of need than the fulfillment of a desire to be closer. Later, filled with wonder, David and Hana were able to smile into each other’s faces.

“So,” he said with a fair attempt at humor, “we’re lovers after all. But where do we go from here?”

“I wish I could see that far.” Pausing, Hana looked away. “It was strange for me today—I was looking at Munira and suddenly saw you. And I felt a kind of peace, like different parts of me were at last becoming reconciled.

“But Munira has lived nearly thirteen years without you. Right now, she is a girl who has lost the father she may feel that she’s betrayed. I struggle to know what is best for her.”

“To stay here,” David answered firmly. “It’s best for you, and for Munira. Why should she be sacrificed to hatreds she had no part in causing? America could be a safe place for you both. It’s a home for people without a home, or for people whose home has become too dangerous. There will be no peace in the West Bank.”

“Dreams are not so easy to give up,” Hana said. “How can Munira and I abandon our people in a time when the world makes us pariahs once again? We are needed more than ever, to try to build a country for all of us, not just extremists who would condemn us to narrowness and hatred. However hard, we are still trying to make a homeland, not just a home.”

David felt a stab of guilt at what he could not tell her. “For Hamas?” he asked. “Do you imagine Munira as a forty-year-old veiled grandmother? She’s my daughter, too—a Jew as well as an Arab, and an American by birthright.” David gazed at Hana intently. “Your story—yours and Saeb’s—
is the story of what happens to people when war and reprisal never end. And after this there’s no end in sight. But does this tragedy of Jews and Palestinians have to define Munira? At least we can do better for her than we did for ourselves.”

“Than
I
did,” Hana amended softly. “But please do not shame me with it. I made Munira Palestinian, and her home and her friends are there. Among my women friends, such as Nisreen, there is support for younger women to grow into their own identity—”

“What identity is that?” David interrupted. “Can you tell Munira who her father is? Can you tell your women friends that her father is a Jew? Or will Munira remain the product of a sin that has to be hidden? Including from Munira herself.”

In the pale light of a bedside lamp, Hana looked bereft. “Adolescents are utterly moral people, David, but only in the narrowest sense. They do not forgive their parents’ sins, and they have no room for moral ambiguity. To tell Munira the truth now would give her a mother who is a liar and a whore, and a father who her
supposed
father told her she must hate.

“She might reject us both. She might become our worst nightmare— the closed-off fanatic Saeb tried so hard to create.” Hana took David’s hand. “When she is closer to being a woman, I will tell her. Then she may have some compassion for us. But now it is more than enough for me to help her heal, free from Saeb.”

David felt his buried anger returning. “And what’s my role, Hana? To send e-mails? To see myself as a sperm donor? This script was tired thirteen years ago.” He forced himself to speak more softly. “I have something more to offer her—a life that doesn’t bear the fingerprints of history or hatred or unreasoning religion. When I agreed to defend you, I did it because I wanted to believe in you. Now I have a daughter, and what I did in the end was as much for her as for you.

“I’m willing to be patient. I don’t see you as my debtor. But the last few months have changed me, and I want to be a part of Munira’s life.”

Slowly, Hana nodded. “Then that is only fair, to all of us. Somehow we will find a way.”

“Only if you live here,” David retorted. “There’s no place for me on the West Bank, and you know it. Just as you know that you and Munira are safer here.”

“Why?” Hana said softly. “Because if I return, those who may have murdered Saeb will kill me for what I know? When they do not, perhaps you will finally know for sure that I am innocent. Otherwise, you can never really love me.”