Exile: a novel

by Richard North Patterson

  She had met Shoshanna at a gathering arranged by Eli Landau, spurred by the realization that “normal” people feared to be with them. “We both confided,” Saar explained, “that what still haunted us at night was the fear that our children had suffered pain.”

  Six months after the bombing, resolute but afraid, they had gone to the police and asked to view the photographs of those who had once been their loved ones.

  Shoshanna’s husband, daughter, and children appeared in the photographs much as she recalled them in life. Saar, however, could not recognize the ruins that were proven by medical science to be what remained of Mickey and Dov; she could identify only Dov, and only by the gold necklace that he wore to contrast with his tan. But the photographs afforded her a terrible consolation—her family could not have suffered for more than a split-second. “If God had let me choose,” she told David with moist eyes, “I would have begged to become another photograph. Instead, He cursed me with the role of witness.”

  Compared to this, Myra Landau explained, the death of their only child was a fluke. “The same nail that struck my elbow pierced Nurit’s aorta. Her face was calm, unchanged, as though she were asleep. But when I put my face to her lips, I could feel no breathing.”

  She turned to her husband, Eli. He was framed by a lush garden at his back and, beyond that, a panorama of the Mediterranean in twilight, the fading glow of sunset becoming a deep purple on the water, the first encroachment of night. It was a stunning view in which David could take little interest, save to wonder whether Eli Landau could ever contemplate this with anything like pleasure.

  “Why do you defend this woman?” Eli demanded.

  Ari Masur’s earlier allusion to his true relationship with Hana still shadowed David’s mind. But that knowledge, he had decided, was a result of the surveillance of Saeb and Hana at Harvard. “Because I don’t think she did this,” he answered. “And because I want to know who did. There are those in Israel who did not care for Amos Ben-Aron.”

  Eli stared at him. “Palestinians, not Jews, murdered Amos Ben-Aron, and with him our illusions. All our government can do is to build this fence and try to keep out bombers. From what we learned about this woman and where she came from, if the fence had existed then, so might our daughter. Instead our army went to Jenin. After that, Ehud told us, there was no one left to punish.”

  But there would always, David thought, be someone left to punish. Watching his face, Myra Landau said, “Americans judge us, as does the world. But no one can understand. We are normal people who suffered at random; the only abnormal thing about us, as victims of terror, is that we symbolize the loss of the security and serenity Americans take for granted. At least until Hana Arif helped a suicide bomber kill a Jew in San Francisco.” She managed a smile that brought no light to her eyes. “When will you make peace? the world asks us, even after Hezbollah rains missiles on our city. I used to hope for peace, and now I don’t. It is like Nurit. One moment you have a child, and then you don’t. So you ask yourself, Did I dream that child? All that keeps you sane is to speak of her.” Pausing, she added quietly, “Even to you.”

  In the candlelight, David looked at the faces of four suffering parents, and could find nothing to say. “By heritage,” Eli Landau told him, “we are Europeans. But we live surrounded by people for whom life has a different meaning. Arab families murder their daughters in honor killings, send their children to kill our children and themselves. Our own settlers, whatever you may think of them, don’t stone their wives and slaughter Arab families.”

  Listening, David chose not to mention the followers of Barak Lev, who had attempted to blow up a school filled with Palestinian children. “This suicide bomber,” he asked, “what did you learn about her?”

  “Ehud Peretz said that you would ask this. Her name was Farah Abboud.” Eli Landau gave him an ironic look. “She was Hamas, the sister-in-law of Iyad Hassan.”

  Zev Ernheit was parked outside. David got into the passenger seat, drained by the emotion of the evening. Only now did David fully understand why he had come: in exchange for agreeing to the experience of hearing those stories, Ehud Peretz had left for him a nugget of information, the possible connection of Ben-Aron’s assassin with Hamas.

  “How was it?” Ernheit asked.

  “Wrenching.” David slumped back in the seat. “I saw a suicide bombing, after all. My imagination may work a little better than they suppose.”

  Ernheit fished out a cell phone from his shirt pocket and placed it in David’s hand. “I’ve been told to give you this. Once you’re alone, listen to your messages.”

  In his hotel room, David turned on the cell phone and pressed the “1” key.

  The man’s voice was Israeli, his English faintly accented. Tomorrow, David was to go to the Old City, meandering like a tourist. But at four o’clock he must find himself, as though by chance, in the Assyrian Chapel, deep in the bowels of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the place of Christ’s crucifixion.

  7

  Around two o’clock, David entered the Old City of Jerusalem on foot, a map sticking from the back pocket of his khaki slacks.

  He paused at the base of the wall built by Romans over two thousand years before, scarred by bullets from the wars of 1948 and 1967; passing beneath an arch designed by Muslims, he followed the path used by Crusaders and entered a vibrant world teeming with tourists, Arabs, Orthodox Jews, students, and professional-looking men and women of varying origins. Reflecting its history, the city was divided into four quarters: Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and Armenian, the last occupied by those whose ancestors had fled slaughter by the Turks. But in many places, these peoples intermingled; taking a narrow cobblestoned street past stone buildings with no space between them, David passed the home of an Armenian family, a mosque, and a young Jewish boy reading a book in his parents’ palmsheltered courtyard. It was hard to imagine any country staking an exclusive claim to this place, although many had tried; David thought of the bomb that had exploded as he ate at the King David, adding to the thousands of people killed in this city over thousands of years.

  Pretending to consult his map while registering the faces around him, he followed a seemingly purposeless path that, in fact, he had committed to memory. He passed another incongruity: in a Roman plaza excavated after 1967, a Jewish girl chattered on a cell phone, reminding him of Munira. A Jewish section became a Muslim shopping area without notice; the alley was only a few feet wide, with Arabic signs for shops offering candlesticks, condiments, pillows, brightly colored rugs, grains, noodles, and olive oil, sold by an Arab man smoking from a hookah. Looking up, he saw police surveillance cameras. There were no garbage cans allowed here, a precaution against terrorists hiding bombs; every evening at five o’clock an army of street cleaners entered the Old City.

  David checked his watch.

  At two forty-five, he stood atop a stairway above the plaza of the Western Wall. Beyond the wall he could see the golden Dome of the Rock and the severe black dome of the Al Aqsa Mosque, the touchstone for the group that had spawned Ibrahim Jefar. Entry to these places was forbidden to him. Yet the Dome of the Rock was the site on which Abraham had built an altar to sacrifice Isaac, or Ishmael, depending on whether one was Jewish or Muslim. It reminded David of the gulf between Hana and himself, of all the ways people differ over, and kill for, their own conceptions of God.

  David looked about him and saw, pasted to the stone walls, a campaign poster for Isaac Benjamin and another, older poster of Amos Ben-Aron, with Hitler’s mustache painted on his upper lip. He snapped a couple of random photographs. If someone was following him, he could not detect it.

  Descending the steps to the Western Wall, he saw an Orthodox Jew dispensing paper yarmulkes for the men who wished to pray there. He hesitated, then accepted a yarmulke and took his place among the bearded men at the wall, who were bobbing and bowing so that they might better be seen by God.

  David closed his eyes, trying to clear his thoughts of all
distraction. Then his mind formed as close to a prayer as he could summon—a remembrance of his father and mother, then of Hans Wolfensohn and his family. Finally, he thought of all who had died, or would yet die, for possession of this beautiful, tragic place.

  When he finished, it was a little after three o’clock.

  Consulting the map again as though deciding where to go, David began tracing the path of Jesus on the Via Dolorosa, toward the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

  It was a long climb up well-worn stone steps, with the Stations of the Cross marked by metal plaques engraved with Roman numerals. David passed a wedding party of pretty young Arab women laughing as they hurried by, their dresses and shawls filigreed with gold. Turning as though to look at them, David recognized no one he had seen before.

  At last emerging from the narrow alley, David stood in the plaza before the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. He no longer glanced at his watch; he had reached his destination and did not want to suggest that time had meaning for him.

  Of Roman design, the church was the oldest in the world, built in the year 330 at the direction of the mother of an emperor who had declared herself a Christian. Inside, the sectarian rivalries pervading Jerusalem reached their apex. The dark and vast interior was divided among various sects, and today each was holding its own procession. David found their discordance at once beautiful, haunting, and disturbing: Franciscan monks in dark robes read aloud from Latin missals as they proceeded by candle-light up the stone stairway, while nearby a group of Armenian Christians, voices raised in competition, sang a hymn of their own. Above them, two chapels, one Catholic and one Greek Orthodox, depicted the crucifixion of their savior according to their own lights; as David descended to the floor beneath, candlelit and redolent of religious mystery, he saw a splinter group of Catholics reciting a Latin mass. Suddenly, he found his path blocked by a congregation of Greek Orthodox priests, kneeling for their separate observance.

  Now David had to worry about his deadline. When he looked about him, searching for an alternate route, he saw no one familiar. As time passed with agonizing slowness, he watched until at last the chanting ended, then he resumed his journey with a carelessness he no longer felt.

  Minutes later, in the bowels of the church, David entered the Assyrian Chapel. It was small, circular, and dark, occupied only by five Ethiopian women in white veils and cloaks; they made the sign of the cross, then prostrated themselves in the manner of Muslims. When David checked his watch, it was eleven minutes past four.

  There was nothing to do but wait.

  To his left, through a break in the stone wall, David saw a cave. Peering inside, he heard soft footsteps behind him. “Some believe,” a quiet voice said, “that Christ was buried in this cave. That would be consistent with the custom of the times.”

  Turning, David saw a short man of indeterminate age and origin with a high forehead, slicked-back brown hair, and a smooth face that featured full lips and shrewd, crescent eyes. More quietly yet, the man said, “It seems no one followed you.”

  “Except you, perhaps,” David answered. “And I have no clue who you are.”

  The man shrugged, as if this detail were trifling. “Let us sit together in Christ’s cave,” he said. “A couple of Jews can do no harm.”

  David wondered about this, or even if the man was Jewish. For an instant he had a random, skittish thought: were he to die inside the cave, he had no hope of resurrection. “After you,” David said.

  The cave was claustrophobic, too confining for David to stand. He knelt beside the stranger, two tourists contemplating the place of Christ’s presumptive burial.

  “So let me tell you a story,” the man said in the casual tone of a tour guide. “Several years ago, two men joined our army—one from Tel Aviv, one an immigrant from America. Both were Orthodox, devotedly religious; both were disciplined and highly motivated. Both were taken into our elite military unit, the paratroopers; both became officers. And both came to think of themselves as brothers.” The man’s lips formed a smile, as if at the thought of their friendship. “They took leaves together, visited holy sites, formed a mutual interest in archaeology. But when their times of service expired, only one remained in the army. The second man left, having decided to establish a settlement to fulfill the biblical destiny of Jews to populate the land of Greater Israel. Though he was disappointed that his friend chose not to join him, the settler and the soldier remained close, bonded by their shared experiences and common beliefs.”

  David glanced behind him. The Assyrian Chapel was empty; his companion kept speaking, his tone conversational yet hushed. “The soldier knew an Orthodox woman in Tel Aviv who, he thought, might wish to become part of the new wave of pioneers. The woman traveled to the settlement and met his friend; to the pleasure of all three, the two of them fell in love and decided to marry.

  “But then the woman fell victim to the terrible lottery of terrorism. Taking the bus to work one morning, she sat next to a suicide bomber from Hamas.” The man shook his head. “Though the explosion killed many, she simply vanished. There was nothing left to bury.”

  David thought of the photograph of Eli and Myra’s daughter, her bright smile and warm gaze. “Stricken by grief,” his companion went on, “the settler was consumed by his hatred of Palestinians. The soldier, also grieving, applied for assignment to protect a man he revered as Israel’s protector, Ariel Sharon.” The man turned, gauging David’s reaction. “You begin to see the point of my sad story, I think.”

  “Not until it ends.”

  “They said you were a cool one,” the man responded. “I’ll get to the point. Though the settler found a wife and had a daughter, nothing healed his heart. The soldier, after several years, became the protector of the man his settler friend believed to be worse than Arafat, the new prime minister, Amos Ben-Aron. And the settler, whose name is Barak Lev, became the leader of the Masada movement, the alleged plotter of a bombing of Palestinian schoolchildren, and the father of a murdered six-year-old.”

  David stared at him. “Let me understand you. Are you suggesting that these two men were complicit in the assassination of Amos Ben-Aron?”

  The man picked up a pebble near his feet. “What I’m saying is that Barak Lev would have strangled Ben-Aron with his bare hands, but he would never get that close. His friend the soldier could fulfill his wishes by much more artful means.”

  “After Ben-Aron’s assassination, I assume the soldier was treated harshly.”

  “On the contrary. You would expect that every member of Ben-Aron’s detail would be thoroughly vetted for contacts with anyone like Lev; were there doubts about any individual, he might be subjected to sleep deprivation, polygraphs, or sodium pentothal. But our man remains untouched.”

  “Don’t you think their friendship’s already known?”

  “We know it’s known. But this murder, it seems, is quite complicated. Perhaps our government’s investigators are simply proceeding with the caution such a matter deserves. Certainly those in power have no interest in taking steps that might be uncovered by the media, and that might suggest, before it’s wise to do so, where their inquiry is headed.” The man’s tone became ironic. “In such a case, political self-interest might be the incidental by-product of sound judgment and discretion. Whatever the reason, the truth—if what we suspect is true—may not emerge in time to do your client any good. But that is not my interest.”

  “What is?”

  “The future of Israel. And who will decide that future.”

  David’s knees had begun to ache. “Our interests may coincide,” he said with measured impatience. “But so far your story brings me nothing. I need the name of Lev’s army friend.”

  “We understand your legal process, Mr. Wolfe. We know your judge will require a name. Even better, would you like to meet our suspect?”

  Astonished, David laughed. “You’re joking.”

  “Not quite so cool now?” The man took a cell phone from his pocket “
This is your new cell phone. Sorry if that makes you feel like an assassin, but you need to keep it with you. And be patient—it may be hours, it may be days. But you will get a call. Shabbat Shalom.”

  Without another word, the man left.

  8

  The next morning, cell phone at his side, David drove from Jerusalem to Masada.

  The place was formidable, sheer cliff surrounded by desert. Taking the cable car to the walled plateau that held the ancient fortress, David could see miles of Judean wasteland, the blue expanse of the Dead Sea. The fortress itself, an ingenious redoubt of storerooms, living spaces, and bathing pools of which ruins still remained, had once served as King Herod’s palace. It was here where Jewish rebels, besieged by Romans, had killed their families and themselves, leaving the victors with corpses instead of slaves.

  Gazing out at the desert, David considered his own connections to this tragedy. The rebels were an extreme religious sect, the Zealots, who killed other Jews for not adopting their practices; their resistance had precipitated a Roman military campaign that deepened the subjugation of the Jews. In myth and film, David had seen the Jews of Masada portrayed as martyrs; no doubt this heroic symbolism had caused Barak Lev to attach the name Masada movement to his outposts in the West Bank. But what struck David now was that these “martyrs” had begun by killing their fellow Jews and, having drawn their conquerors deeper into the land of Israel, had ended in self-extermination. He could only hope this cycle would not recur.

  David descended to the parking lot and headed for the Lower Galilee, from which, sixty years ago, Hana’s parents had fled the Jewish army.

  The e-mail from Hana’s younger cousin, Sausan, had given him precise directions couched in engaging humor. “When the vegetables outnumber the people,” she had written, “you’ll know you’re close.”

  Two hours later, so it was. The rolling land of the Galilee was ripe with corn, sunflowers, olives, citrus, tomatoes, garlic, chickpeas. This richness was the product of water and irrigation, employed by Jews to transform the land years before the State of Israel was born. Here and there David saw the remnants of Arab culture: a mosque, a distant hillside town where the residents, like Hana’s parents, once had grown olive trees but, unlike them, had remained. Among their descendants was Sausan Arif, Muslim daughter to a Christian, granddaughter to a Jew.