Hana whirled on him, eyes alight with resentment. But then something akin to fear seemed to dull her outrage. “Good-bye,” she said in a hollow voice.
David reached out for her. “Hana...”
She turned from him, rushing to the living room. In the instant it took for her to close his front door, she vanished from David’s life.
David graduated from law school in a trance, acting out the pleasure his parents had come to see. He never spoke of Hana; they never knew that she existed. He could not bear for her to be as vivid to others as she would always be to him.
David and his parents flew back to San Francisco. Later, when he saw his father’s photo of him, smiling as he received his diploma, David could not recall the moment.
21
Sitting across from Amy Chan the next morning, David sipped freshly roasted coffee from a mug emblazoned “Channel 2.” One of the virtues of living in San Francisco, David reflected, was that even TV stations had good coffee. But his mood was bleak—images of Ben-Aron’s death filled his mind, and the day’s news featured still more death, the murder of three Israelis near the settlement of Bar Kochba.
“We understand,” Amy Chan said to David, “that you’ll be attending the memorial service for Amos Ben-Aron.”
The question caught David by surprise—the information must have come from Burt Newman. “Yes,” he answered simply.
Chan clearly hoped for more. “You were friends.”
“Better just to say that I admired him.” With that answer—which others would take as modesty—David knew, to his profound discomfort, that he had made himself sound more important to a dead man than he had ever been in life.
“Let’s turn again to his tragic murder,” Chan was saying smoothly. “According to sources inside the investigation, Ibrahim Jefar has begun proffering scraps of information through his lawyer. If you were Marnie Sharpe, how would you determine whether to believe him?”
“Besides corroborating evidence? She can ask him to take a polygraph—”
“Those aren’t admissible, right?”
“Not in court. And it’s a gamble for the prosecution—if he names a coconspirator, that person’s lawyer may be able to obtain Jefar’s answers.” David shrugged. “But what’ll keep Marnie up at night is the fear that he’s still lying, or covering something up. A polygraph’s better than nothing.”
Ibrahim began pacing—the tiny room felt stifling, and they would not let him exercise. In a tentative tone, his lawyer said, “Sharpe says she needs to give you a lie detector test—”
“I am not a liar,” Ibrahim snapped.
The lawyer watched him closely. “Perhaps she just wants to know that you’re willing to take it. But I can’t promise you she’s bluffing.”
Ibrahim turned to him. “So?”
“So,” the lawyer answered coolly, “unless you think you can pass it, I strongly advise we tell her no.”
Ibrahim folded his arms. “I tried to kill my enemy, and myself. I am not afraid of a test.”
The room they used was bigger than where Ibrahim met with his lawyer; it held a laminated table with room for his lawyer, Marnie Sharpe, an FBI agent, and a laconic polygraph examiner. Ibrahim did not like being wired to a machine whose instruments measured his honor as a human being, or the way this examiner asked questions: toneless, persistent, probing for inconsistencies.
“You were a member of Al Aqsa?” the examiner asked.
“Yes. I told you that.”
“Did you get your instructions from Iyad Hassan?”
“Yes.”
“Did you discuss the plot to kill Ben-Aron with other members of Al Aqsa?”
“No. Again, no.”
Expressionless, Sharpe and the examiner watched as the paper spooled, bearing marks Ibrahim could not see. “And you never discussed the plot with anyone but Iyad?”
“No. As I said, it was a matter of operational security.”
“And Iyad gave you your instructions?”
“Yes.”
“And did he receive instructions from someone else?”
“Yes.”
“Did you speak to that person?”
“No,” Ibrahim said impatiently. “Listen to my answers.”
The examiner did not react. “Did Iyad tell you who that person was?”
Ibrahim felt clammy. Now, when it was too late, he found himself reluctant to answer.
Marnie Sharpe scrutinized him like a specimen on a slide. Ibrahim remained silent.
“Let me repeat the question,” the examiner said. “Did Iyad tell you who that person was?”
Ibrahim bowed his head. “Yes,” he said at last. “The same woman who recruited him. The professor from Birzeit.”
P A R T
The Labyrinth
1
With a quiet knock on his office door, Hana Arif reentered David’s life as swiftly as she had left it.
She paused on the threshold. Beneath the flowing dress she was still slim, her carriage straight and proud, the sense of kinetic energy at rest still present. Her eyes remained brown pools, but somehow older, their fires banked. Her face had aged but subtly—her skin was perhaps closer to the bone, and when she smiled at him, the first hint of lines appeared at the corners of her eyes. To David, she had the beauty that only time can bring, reminding him that this had happened outside of his awareness, and that he knew nothing about who she had become.
“So,” she said wryly. “Now you are my lawyer.”
Standing, David managed a smile of his own. “You’re free to hope.”
“I said that once, didn’t I.” She came to him quickly, standing on tiptoe to give him a chaste kiss on the cheek, leaving a small tingle of electricity on David’s skin. “You look wonderful, David—even better than on television. Time has been good to you.”
David smiled again. “I exercise,” he said lightly.
Hana gazed at him, silent, then scanned his office as if searching for something to do. Walking to his bookshelf, she studied a framed photograph. “This is Carole?”
“Yes.”
Head tilted, Hana appraised her picture. “A good face, I think—warm. But smart-looking. More than a nice Jewish girl.”
“Nice Jewish girls,” David answered, “were never my obsession.”
“No. As I remember, you had no ethnic requirements.”
There was irony in her tone and, perhaps, the hint of an apology. When she turned to him, plainly disconcerted, David motioned her to the couch. “Tell me about your visit from the FBI.”
She sat a few feet from him, ankles crossed, regarding him with quiet gravity. “Before we start,” she said, “I am very grateful to you for seeing me. And it is very good to see you, David. There isn’t a day I haven’t thought of you.” Amending this with a smile, she added more lightly, “Or, at least, a week. My life has been rich with incident.”
David did not return her smile. “So it seems. How does Saeb feel about you coming here?”
Hana straightened her skirt, her expression pensive. “Ambivalent, at best. But not so ambivalent about the vagaries of the American legal process in the wake of Ben-Aron’s assassination.” Hana angled her head, making eye contact again. “We both watched you on television, and it’s clear you know the system very well. And it’s not as though we have a list of local lawyers passionate to help us.”
“I imagine not. Given Saeb’s political leanings, I’m surprised our government let him come here.”
Hana shrugged. “Saeb has no record of violence—merely violent opinions. It is not like admitting a friend of Osama Bin Laden.” Briefly Hana looked away. “We are not terrorists, David. Nor are we wealthy. We have little money for lawyers.”
“We’ll worry about that later. Though I’m wondering who paid for your trip.”
“We’re also not destitute,” she said with a note of defensiveness. “But our trip was sponsored by a broad coalition—Palestinian opponents of the occupation, representatives
of the refugees in Lebanon, university professors, even European peace activists. People who believe that our story remains untold in America, and that we Palestinians remain stereotypes— terrorists or victims, never ordinary people—”
“Ibrahim Jefar,” David interjected, “made Saeb’s mission a little tougher. And he’s from Birzeit, where both of you teach. Did you or Saeb know him or Iyad Hassan?”
David’s abruptness seemed to wound her. “So, it’s on to business,” she said more coolly. “As for me, I checked to see whether either were students of mine, and no. Nor can Saeb recall ever having met them. Birzeit has several thousand students, and one does not befriend them all.” Her tone became quietly angry. “That leaves Munira—twelve years old—as the plotter in our midst.”
David walked to his desk, picked up a legal pad and pen, and went back to the couch. “Who contacted you from the FBI?”
“A man named Victor Vallis came to our hotel. Do you know him?”
“No. He must be out of Washington.” David wrote down the name. “What did Vallis say?”
“That he had a material witness warrant, and we could not leave America. He wanted to question us right away. When we said we wanted to consult a lawyer, he took our passports. Then he said he wanted to meet with us, and Munira, on Thursday.”
Three days from now, David noted. “Did Vallis indicate why he wanted to question you, or their basis for keeping you in San Francisco?”
“Not specifically.” Sitting back, Hana folded her hands. “We’re Palestinian, we teach at Birzeit, we oppose the occupation, and we followed Ben-Aron to San Francisco. Isn’t that enough?”
“Maybe. But tell me more about the current state of Saeb’s politics. And yours.”
Hana gazed at her hands. At length, she said quietly, “We should start with where you and I left off, David. The dawn of the Oslo Accords, the harbinger of peace. We were going to have a country, remember? Instead the Israelis doubled their settlements, confiscated more lands, and divided us into Bantustans isolated by Israeli security roads, and checkpoints that can turn a twenty-minute drive home into a three-hour nightmare. Unemployment rose, per capita income dropped—”
“What about the first intifada,” David cut in, “all the suicide bombers beginning in 2000—”
“After years of Israeli occupation,” Hana retorted. “Creating more suicide bombers by the day, and destroying any pretense of Zionist morality.” Pausing, Hana spoke more evenly. “Saeb would argue that Arafat was of little help. He imported a group of PLO fighters who became the privileged class, profiting from monopolies, patronage, and corruption instead of building a real government that served its people. Arafat governed—to the extent he had the will or power to govern at all—out of his back pocket. So between them, Arafat and the Israelis helped create Hamas, while Israel catered to a fanatic minority, their settler-zealots. Based on their collective legacy, our children can look forward to nothing but violence.
“I will tell you a story, David. A friend of mine was making a documentary about the children in a refugee camp outside Ramallah. The day I went with her she was filming young boys who’d saved up money to taxi to a checkpoint and throw stones at Jewish soldiers.” Recalling this, Hana gazed into some middle distance. “They passed through two checkpoints to reach a third—barren, without shade, the heat shimmering off the asphalt road. Why, I asked a boy Munira’s age, did they travel to this place?” Abruptly Hana turned to David, as though striving to convey what she had seen. “He was very thin, with large brown eyes—sensitive-looking, as Saeb had been at that age. His answer was that the Israeli soldiers had not shot anyone at the other checkpoints, but had killed his best friend’s brother at this one. And I understood that this boy, barely able to comprehend death, was hoping to be killed.”
To David, her tone conveyed the weariness of someone who had seen such things since childhood, and now was seeing them through the eyes of another generation of wounded children. “I asked,” Hana continued, “what he wished to be when he grew up—a doctor, or perhaps a scientist? He gave me a look of incomprehension—if he lived long enough, growing up to him meant killing some Israelis when he died.” Hana gazed out the window at David’s view of the Golden Gate Bridge, but she did not appear to see it. “I despise the men who turn children into human bombs—one sees no ‘leaders’ of the resistance sending their sons to die. But this boy was a tragedy in the making. Even Ibrahim Jefar will have a story.”
“I somehow doubt I’ll work up any sympathy for Jefar.”
“Perhaps not. But now I find myself remembering how you and I would talk of the Holocaust, of Jews living with a collective memory of violence. I worry about my people in this way—to be the subject of violence distorts the soul. And yet the Israelis themselves still cannot acknowledge the poison of their occupation.”
“This poison,” David interrupted, “how badly has it affected Saeb?”
Hana sat back, choosing her words. “Differently from me,” she said at length. “I, too, am sick to death of Israel and Israelis. But I would accept a two-state solution if—and I sincerely doubt this—the Jews were willing to give us a viable country.
“Saeb has no doubt they never will. For him, Jews drove his grandparents out of Galilee, planned his parents’ slaughter, and now occupy the place that Israel calls our ‘homeland’—imprisoning us with or without cause, humiliating us at checkpoints in front of our own children, killing other children who throw stones.” Pausing, Hana studied her hands, and David sensed within her a quiet sadness. “The Zionists have defined Saeb for himself. It shames him to have been studying in America instead of resisting on the West Bank, just as it shames him not to have died trying to protect his sister, even though he was just a boy. Sometimes he mocks himself as a ‘rhetorician—the great theorist of struggle.’ ”
David set down his legal pad. “I don’t know about the U.S. attorney, Hana. But if I were Marnie Sharpe and knew what you just told me, I might want the FBI to question Saeb.”
Hana looked into his eyes. “I’m Saeb’s wife,” she answered simply. “I’ve known him since we were children, and we have a child now. In his heart he may have wished Ben-Aron dead. But if Saeb were involved in killing him, I believe that I would know.”
David studied her. “When you first called me,” he reminded her, “you told me that Saeb had become much more Islamic. Tell me what you meant.”
Silent, Hana contemplated his question and, David guessed, her marriage. “That is something,” she responded, “that I’ve considered a great deal. And I’ve come to believe that much of it has to do with Munira.”
“How so?”
“I’m not quite sure. But for a man, male authority—to demand the respect and obedience of one’s children—is a hallmark of our culture. And yet Palestinian children see their fathers treated like cattle by teenage Jewish soldiers.” Hana raised her head. “One weekend, we were stopped on the way to a wedding—Saeb, Munira, and I. Two armed Israeli soldiers forced Saeb to get out of the car and remove his shirt and belt. He stood there in the sun, looking frail between these strapping soldiers in combat gear as they joked about God knows what.
“I glanced into the back seat. Munira stared at the soldiers with such hatred that I was glad she did not have a gun—this girl, eleven years old. And yet I think what she hated most was not the soldiers but her own confusion at witnessing her father’s impotence.” Hana’s tone bore the weight of a crucial memory, sifted and resifted. “When Saeb got back in the car,” she went on, “I tried to pretend that things were still normal. Neither of them would speak.
“So I think there is this disturbance in their relationship, and that Saeb now looks to Islam as a way of restoring his proper role as a father—just as he has come to believe that it is Islam, and not Marxism, that will restore our dignity as Arabs. But that is a difficulty in our marriage, because I am Munira’s model of a woman. Saeb wishes her to cover, and asks that I do. He forbids her to spend ti
me with boys, and presses me not to socialize with men.” Briefly, Hana looked down. “And he wishes to arrange her marriage, as our parents did for us.”
David chose not to comment. “And you?”
“I wish for a more secular society, and a more secular home.” Hana gazed at him directly. “For Munira, I want the best education and a good career—even to study in America, perhaps. And I want her to have reasonable independence.”
“More than you had?”
Hana’s gaze didn’t waver. “Perhaps,” she answered softly. “There still are things she doesn’t yet know to want.”
What those things might be, Hana’s tone suggested, was not open for discussion. “Munira,” she continued, “has her own ambivalence about me. For several years I was a consultant to our peace negotiators, spending nights away. Munira resented that—more than once she told me that when she grew up, she would never leave her children.
“One night she even managed to blame me for the occupation. At three A.M., soldiers broke down the gate outside our apartment building in Ra-mallah, locked us inside the building, and searched each apartment door-to-door. Munira was badly frightened. But when they had left, she screamed at me, ‘If you’re such a great peace negotiator, why are the Jews still here?’ ”
Quiet, David contemplated the distance between them—the ways in which Hana had been redefined by marriage, motherhood, and thirteen years of living he could only try to imagine. “You said Munira was scarred by the occupation. Is that what you meant?”
Hana gave a quick shake of the head. “I meant much more,” she answered. “As a child she would awaken to the thunder of the Israelis shelling the homes where people they called terrorists lived. For a brief time she wet the bed again. And since she saw Arafat’s compound reduced to rubble, she’s had great trouble sleeping.
“If she grows up whole enough, there is hope. Women can advance in our society—even now, twenty percent of our legislature are women. But Munira must somehow heal, and decide for herself what kind of woman she wants to be.” Hana’s smile was fond but fleeting. “The name Munira means ‘radiates life’—it was my expression of hope for a baby girl. My hope for her now is that this turns out to be so.”
Exile: a novel Page 14
