Hoda is drawn to every detail of Marc’s story. She finds comfort that he’s like her—a child of refugees. Marc’s agreement with many of her political and personal beliefs increases her attraction to him. She is close to making her decision.
Marc is obliged to spend several more days in Shemlan. Air France flights from Beirut are becoming scarcer, but his friends at the French embassy intervene to finally get him a seat. He calls his mother to say that he is coming soon. His father is now in a coma, and the rest of the family are already in Rennes-Les-Bains.
To relieve the stress of waiting, Marc begins to walk daily the mountain paths near Shemlan. At times, his mind wanders back to the long hikes he would take with his father in the Pyrenees. There they would look into Catalonia, la pàtria. The day before his departure, he finds Hoda waiting for him around a bend on the path to the summit. She has packed a lunch of tabbouleh, hummus and flat bread. Together they begin the long ascent to the end of the trail near the summit. There is still snow on the ground. From the mountain, they can see the coast. The sea is free from the American and French warships that will later dominate the Lebanese coast. Small fishing boats from Sidon go about their business unimpeded. It’s hard to imagine such a beautiful country at war.
“Do you like it here in Shemlan?” Hoda asks.
“Yes, I love being in the mountains.”
“What do you like best about them?”
“I love the mountain flowers. They’re so different. So fragile yet vibrant. And you?”
“I love them too. My favourite is the sawfar iris. Do you know it?”
“I’ve never heard of it. Are there any around here?”
Hoda stands up and scours the mountainside.
“Yes, there! Can you see those rocks up there. There is a sawfar iris growing between them.”
Marc sees a glimpse of purple 20 metres up the rock face.
“You said it’s your favourite flower, right?”
“Yes.”
Marc begins to scramble up the steep rock face.
“No, Marc. Don’t do that! It’s too dangerous.”
At first, Marc moves quickly. He has climbed many mountains in the Pyrenees. He jams, side-pulls and dynos his way up the first eighteen metres, but halts when the rock face becomes smoother and offers fewer footholds. He notices the clouds darken in the sky. Rain is coming and he should hurry. He hears Hoda’s calls imploring him to come down. Then he sees it, a crimp just large enough for the tips of his fingers. He knows that the only way to get within reach of the iris is to mantle the smooth rock protrusion and scamper his feet to the ledge just below the flower. It is a dangerous manoeuvre, one he has never tried before. He presses his fingertips into the crimp and swings his leg over to the upper ledge. He makes it, but barely. Balancing on one foot, he stretches up to loosen the small rocks at the base of the flower. Then with a quick tug, he pulls the iris free. The sudden movement dislodges a sharp piece of slate, which falls, cutting his arm. It’s not a deep cut, but it throws him off balance. He begins to bounce off the mountainside. Just before he hits the ground, he grabs a small shrub firmly rooted in the rock face. It’s enough to break the fall, and with a large thump, he lands on his feet.
Hoda races to him.
“Marc, you could have killed yourself!”
“No, I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not. Your arm is bleeding.”
Hoda quickly takes off her hijab and wraps it around his arm. Her long hair falls down to brush lightly against his skin, sending a sensation he has never experienced before. He moves his hand to her cheek. With the other, he offers her the iris. She looks into his eyes, then turns to kiss the palm of his hand. “Marc, you’re completely crazy.”
“Yes, crazy about you.”
He leans in to kiss her, and she doesn’t move back. It’s the first time a man has ever kissed her. She feels his youthful energy. It excites her. She pulls herself against him and returns his kiss before pulling away. “We should go now. It’s going to rain soon.”
Marc nods, and watches her fold the picnic blanket. Adrenaline races through his body. He looks at the hijab wrapped around his arm. His blood seeps through the cotton. And he understands.
Hoda can’t accompany Marc to the airport. The checkpoints are too dangerous, too unpredictable. Alliances are constantly shifting. And the Guardians of the Cedars have resumed executing every Muslim who crosses their path, provoking the Lebanese nationalists to retaliate—an eye for an eye.
Evan offers to drive Marc to the airport, taking the long route through the Druze-controlled Shouf down to the coastal highway. The trip is without incident. Marc’s French passport ensures them safe passage through Damour, which is still under Phalangist control. He looks at the town’s Christian inhabitants. The months of encirclement are taking their toll. Most residents are gaunt, with seemingly perpetual fear in their eyes. Marc touches the fabric of Hoda’s hijab in his shoulder bag. He had forgotten to return it after washing out his blood. Now it gives him an odd sense of reassurance.
When they reach the suburbs near the airport, Hoda’s cousin, Abdullah, meets them to give them a letter for the Palestinian and Druze checkpoints. The Lebanese army is still nominally in control of the airport, but it rarely checks the cars entering and leaving it. Marc thanks Evan for taking the risky journey with him. Evan shrugs it off. “Anything for a mate.”
Part of the tarmac is pockmarked from the 1968 Israeli attack on the airport. There is no money to repair the potholes or clean up the debris of the sixteen destroyed airliners. Or perhaps, the Lebanese just relish the chance to tell the world that they, not the Israelis, are the victims of aggression. Despite the looming dangers of the civil war, the incoming Air France flight is full. Beirut is still the hub for business in the Middle East. Among the disembarking passengers, Marc recognizes the military attaché at the French embassy. Marc greets the colonel. His driver joins them.
Both have many questions for Marc. What did he see on the road through the Shouf and up the coast? Heavy arms? Mixed Palestinian-Shia checkpoints? Nervous Phalangist soldiers in Damour? Signs of evacuation?
Marc is candid about the seriousness of the situation but dodges explicit questions. He doesn’t want the reputation of being a spy.
The colonel leans toward him.
“Marc, you should reconsider your plans to return. Our intelligence tells us that the country will soon be in all-out civil war.
“I appreciate the advice but I have other reasons for returning to Lebanon.”
Chapter
13
Istanbul – February 2007
MARC HANGS UP THE PHONE. He’s disturbed by what Marie has told him. Mossad agents here in Istanbul. How could they know she’d be here? Marc looks over at Bronstein who is checking the Israeli news on the internet.
“Jonathan, we have to change plans.”
“Why?”
“The Mossad has tracked Marie Boivin here.”
“I didn’t know that she was part of this.”
“Yes, she is here to do her second interview with me. I’ve asked her to pass a message to Abdullah.”
“Why her?”
“I don’t know. There’s something about her that tells me I can trust her.”
Bronstein looks at his friend. Taragon is not one who makes snap decisions based on emotions. Finally, he asks: “So what do we do now?”
“There is a place in Karpathos. I know half of the village, retirees from Canada. Greek Communists for the most part. I did a feature on them several years ago: “Little Montreal in the Aegean.” I also know the local police chief, the son of one of the returnees. We get along very well, being both sons of political refugees.”
“If they catch up with us there, it will take more than a small-town police chief to protect us.”
“We’ll have to take our chances. Nowhere else is safer.”
“How do we get there? They may be watching the airport and ferry terminals in Athen
s.”
“We can get to Karpathos by fishing boat from the Turkish mainland. The Turkish and Greek fishermen have a friendly little smuggling operation going. For the right price, they’ll take passengers.”
“How are you going to get word to ‘Akkawi?”
“Our Circassian friend will arrange it.”
“When do we go?”
“Now. We’ll take separate taxis to the coast. It’ll be expensive, but it’s safer than by train. And travelling as a group is too dangerous.”
Taragon walks down to the reception. He leans toward the young man, who then calls up Café Esmir to order two coffees and baklava. “Send Ahmet,” the receptionist says. When the young boy turns up, the receptionist whispers in his ear. Ten minutes later, ‘Akkawi is handed a new bill. On it the number of a taxi driver.
Although an experienced sailor, Bronstein has always dreaded the sea at night. In the army, he was forced to conduct too many missions during pitch-black nights, and those were before infrared goggles. But it wasn’t really the darkness that bothered him. Somehow water at night was stiller, more menacing, more ready to swallow one up at the most unexpected moment.
Bronstein lays his head down near the bow. Sleep betrays him and allows in dark dreams. The muffled breaking of the water as the paddles slowly propel the dinghy forward. Beirut April 10, 1973—a moonless night. Bronstein is the newcomer to the unit, recruited because of his impeccable Arabic learned from childhood friends. It’s ironic that he has more Arab friends than Jewish ones, and yet his mission is to kill Arabs.
The dreams turn to the news brought by the police to a young boy—both parents killed in a car crash in Haifa. Sent to live with his Aunt Sadie in nearby Kiryat Tiv’on, he was at first incredibly alone. His aunt ran a small hardware store on the outskirts of town. Many of her customers came from the new Bedouin township of Basmat Tab’un. The government had cleared some land there for a rudimentary soccer field, and the Bedouin customers, who took a shine to the young orphan, convinced his aunt that he should join one of the town’s soccer teams. Bronstein became the first and only Jewish player in the village. How he relished those days on the playing field, shouting “Yallah—Let’s go,” and listening to his friends’ mothers ululate whenever the team scored a goal.
The young boy was soon part of a world that few Israelis knew even existed. From his friends’ fathers, he learned to hunt with antique rifles the red-breasted geese of the Alonim Hills. And after the hunt, the women would feed them warm flatbread cooked on large upside-down cauldrons. After sunset, he would sit with the other boys listening to the old men speak of Bedouin honour, dignity, and hospitality. Then Abu Yassin, the local storyteller, would complete the evening with tales of Qahtan, the first of the Southern Arabs, and of Adnan, leader of the Northerners and grandson of the patriarch Abraham. And whenever he would mention Adnan, Abu Yassin would look at the young Bronstein and say: “You Jews, too, are of the family of Abraham. May God protect you!” Later he would serve with these same Bedouin youth in the Border Police.
Bronstein sees himself back on the beach outside Beirut, listening to Kasdan, the squad leader, give the order to hide the dinghies. Kasdan’s squad was composed mostly of boys, fresh from their first year of intensive training in Israel’s special forces. Bronstein himself was only nineteen, but he had already served in the Border Police long enough to demonstrate remarkable skill as a sharpshooter. At seventeen, he had killed his first fedayee. It had been a cold kill at a distance of five hundred metres. The Palestinian was barely visible in his scope. At first, he was unsure whether it was a man, woman or child, but when his sergeant, a Druze from Haifa, gave him the order, he pulled the trigger. The distant figure dropped, and the sergeant patted him on the shoulder and uttered laconically in Hebrew: “Tov—good.”
Kasdan instinctively distrusted Bronstein who spoke Arabic flawlessly and was too at ease with the Druze and Bedouin army recruits. Kasdan didn’t want someone so close to Arabs to be in on the actual assassinations. And he certainly didn’t want an Arab lover witnessing whatever collateral damage they might have to inflict. He assigned Bronstein to guard the unit’s escape route, and left with him another new recruit, Ari Epstein. The latter, a recent Moldovan immigrant, was a hopeless shot but was ruthless with a knife. Kasdan gave the two men their orders. If Palestinian or Lebanese fighters came by once the shooting started, Bronstein was to shout to them in his fluent Arabic that the Israelis had fled in the other direction. If he could, he was also to eliminate them when they turned their backs to him. Epstein was to clean up. Bronstein did his duty, and Epstein scoured the alleyway for those still alive, bending down twice to bloody his blade.
After Beirut, Bronstein returned to his studies. Kasdan went onto loftier things, and Epstein disappeared into the labyrinth of the Mossad, for a job suited for one without a heart. Bronstein never regretted the role he played, the lives he took. Perhaps, more lives than anyone he knew. His targets were enemies of Israel.
He parted ways with his former comrades in the special forces when Israel turned against its own non-Jewish population. The mayor of Kiryat Tiv’on, a right-wing fanatic from America, convinced the government to build a road directly to the Alonei Abba Moshav, bypassing Basmat Tab’un, but expropriating some of the village’s best grazing land. Bronstein’s young Bedouin friends were serving in the Border Police in Jerusalem, on the Golan and some on the border with Lebanon. They were too far away to challenge the expropriation order. In their stead, their fathers went to the authorities in Haifa, who turned them away. When the bulldozers arrived, twenty ageing men sat defiantly across the road. Young soldiers from Tel Aviv were called in. At first, the soldiers waited while a local interpreter tried to negotiate an end to the protest. But the old men were proud and would not budge.
The mayor arrived on the scene. Fat, sweaty, cursing in bad Hebrew, he bullied the soldiers to move forward and use their rifle butts on the old men. Bronstein was returning from the university in Tel Aviv when he heard the news. He immediately visited his friends’ fathers in the hospital, and for the first time in his life, he felt shame.
Bronstein protested to the mayor, who only shrugged his shoulders, saying: “Why do you care? They’re only Arabs. And we need the land for the new road.” He held back from striking the man, from screaming obscenities, and instead, wrote a blistering letter of protest to the local newspaper. In it, he cited by name all the members of the tribe who were serving in the Border Police. To his surprise, the letter was published, and the prime minister himself ordered that the road be rerouted. The new minister of defence even sent a letter of apology to the injured protesters. Perhaps, that’s why he chose journalism. It was an avenue to raise his voice over the clamour of blind nationalism.
A wave splashes over the bow awakening Bronstein. He looks up at the night sky, now bedecked with every constellation imaginable. He remembers their names in Arabic, but not in Hebrew. Taragon’s presence at his side surprises him. Bronstein has been trained as a soldier to be always vigilant, alert to every sound and movement. How the Frenchman has passed unnoticed through his defences baffles him.
Silently they watch the lights of Karpathos flicker across the now placid sea. Only the soft rumble of the boat’s diesel engine challenges the night’s harmony. To their right, the small lights of a second boat appear, also heading for Karpathos. The Turkish captain of their vessel signals three times with his flashlight. Five short flashes come back from the other boat, now closing in on them.
As the second boat bumps up against their bow, a large figure rises from beneath a tarpaulin. Taragon stretches out his hand to the giant who quickly clambers aboard. Bronstein stares at the face that he hasn’t seen for more than thirty years, a face so different from the one he remembers. A huge hand reaches out and grasps his. “Salaam Aleykum, my brothers.”
Chapter
14
Karpathos – March 2007
THE DISCUSSIONS HAVE GONE WELL in the small m
ountain village of Arkassa. Bronstein and ‘Akkawi now believe that a deal can be sold to the more reasonable in both their camps, and through their contacts in the media to the broader public. The hardliners in government will, of course, turn on them, and they’ll need to take security measures. The Israeli settlers present an even greater danger—they’ll stop at nothing to thwart a negotiated peace with the Palestinians. How Iran will act is difficult to predict. Its network of agents in the Middle East and Europe is extensive. Tehran is likely to see ‘Akkawi’s involvement in the deal as treason. Its Quds Force is now 15,000 strong and operates clandestinely throughout the world. Its agents could well be ordered to assassinate ‘Akkawi. All the Israeli intelligence services also have a price on his head.
“Abdullah and Marc, there’s a lot at play inside the Israeli intelligence services these past months,” Bronstein says. “Rogue elements are operating within the Mossad, ones who no longer distinguish between Arab, Westerner, or Israeli when it comes to identifying enemies to eliminate.”
“Many of our people have also been radicalized,” ‘Akkawi says. “The influence of hard-liners in Tehran over much of Hamas and some of the Fatah movement is now stronger than ever. Many friends in Iran who are more pragmatic have been shoved to the sidelines.”
Marc at first just nods his head. Then he leans back in his chair and says: “This is what we will do. You two will go into hiding until my journalist friends have a chance to make the story go viral. Abdullah, you’ll go to Barcelona. My father’s friends are in power there now. They’re honourable men who won’t bend to pressure from Spanish or foreign security services. Jonathan, you’ll go to Montreal. I’ve a friend there. I trust her with my life. She’ll keep you hidden until the news breaks.”
“And you?” Bronstein asks.
Quill of the Dove Page 7
