Exile: a novel

by Richard North Patterson

  “Now we have a hundred-and-fifty mile security infrastructure: an electronic fence, a ditch, more fence. Where Israelis in their cars or homes are within range of a handgun, the barrier becomes a wall.” Ernheit pointed to the barrier as it snaked along a distant hill. “It’s designed to pick up Jewish settlements and exclude Palestinian villages. But Palestinians who once could go from one village to another in twenty minutes now may have to travel for five hours. So we started building underground tunnels to facilitate their movement and still allow us to check for bombs and weapons. But commerce between us is dead.”

  “This is Alice in Wonderland,” David said. “Fences, walls, ditches, tunnels.”

  “It’s real enough to the settlers.” Ernheit turned to him. “The fence excludes outposts like Bar Kochba, where Barak Lev and the Masada movement are centered. That’s another reason why Lev wanted God to strike down Ben-Aron. For them, this barrier dooms their future, and the future of Greater Israel.”

  David tried to imagine the desperation such men might feel. “A few hours ago,” he told Ernheit, “there was a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. What do you know about it?”

  Ernheit showed no surprise. “Enough. Besides the bomber, there was only one death, that of an Israeli drinking coffee by himself. Very unusual—suicide bombers typically try to kill as many people as possible. It’s also odd that no one’s taken credit for it.”

  A remark from Moshe Howard came to David: that after the Second Intifada began, he sought out unpopular restaurants, believing that the absence of customers would cause a suicide bomber to move on. “No one will,” David said. “It was an assassination. The victim was Hillel Markis, a member of Ben-Aron’s security detail, and a close friend of Barak Lev’s. I was supposed to meet him.”

  Ernheit stared at him. “Let’s get away from the road,” he said. “This is not the day to be standing around with you.”

  David drove behind Ernheit along the security fence, climbing a hill to a beautifully terraced community of spacious homes. At the top of the hill was a grassy playground where two girls played on swings; at its edge, wooden benches commanded a view stretching all the way to Tel Aviv. Leaving his car, David followed Ernheit to a bench. “From here,” Ernheit told him, “the housing and land you see hold four million of the seven million citizens of Israel. Before 1967, this was the site of a Jordanian artillery battery. The settlement behind us, Alfe Menashe, was established to claim a strategic point as ours. After forty years, it’s hardly the frontier outpost imagined by most Americans.” Pointing to his left, Ernheit said, “That village on the other side of the fence, less than a mile down this hillside, is Arab. Lev and his settlers also live beyond this fence. It’s the divide between life and death, they believe.”

  A muezzin’s call to prayer issued from the Arab village, a thin cry in the hot, dry air. Ernheit turned to David. “Before or after the bombing, were you followed?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “It was good you chose to leave at once. You don’t want people asking how you happened to be there, and who might have sent you. Although it seems that someone knew.”

  “I’m no CIA agent, but whoever arranged the meeting was very cautious.”

  “Not cautious enough.” Lines of concentration etched the corners of Ernheit’s eyes. “Let’s take your theory,” he continued. “In San Francisco, the assassins’ network disappeared, leaving the Americans with nothing but Hana Arif. In Israel, a member of Ben-Aron’s security detail is killed in a ‘suicide bombing,’ which may leave you with nothing but guesswork about Lev. The Israeli link to your ‘conspiracy’ has been cut.”

  David allowed deferred emotions to seep through him—helplessness, horror, confusion, fear, and, above all, despair that Hana’s fate might have been planned by someone whose presence he could only sense. “Who’s doing this, Zev?”

  “I’ll tell you who’s not,” Ernheit said brusquely. “The Israeli government. No doubt they’re keeping tabs on you. But Israelis believe in the rule of law. At least,” Ernheit added with irony, “like the Americans, within the borders of our own country. If the Mossad wanted to do Markis in, they’d lure him to Monte Carlo.

  “Our government may not be anxious to share their leads with you— for good reason, given that your interest may have precipitated Markis’s death. But our people are at least as curious as you are about how Ben-Aron’s security broke down. If they thought this man knew anything at all, they’d very much want him alive.”

  “And someone else wanted him dead.”

  “Then start with the bomber—an Arab, by all accounts, though if you’re right no one will claim him. The problem with your conspiracy is that it still fails to cohere.” Ernheit smiled grimly. “Remember that insane film Oliver Stone made about the Kennedy assassination? In Stone’s fever dream, JFK was killed not by Lee Harvey Oswald but by Lyndon Johnson, the CIA, Fidel Castro, right-wing Texas oilmen, and gay cross-dressers from New Orleans. The connections made no sense, and you’d have had to rent a hotel ballroom just to get them all together.”

  “Oswald,” David said, “could have acted alone. JFK was riding in a convertible and his route was public knowledge—all Oswald needed was a rifle and an open window. But Hassan and Jefar needed a lot of help in San Francisco to supply the uniforms, motorcycles, and explosives. Even that wasn’t enough: they also had to know that Ben-Aron’s route had changed.

  “The list of groups who could set up that kind of network in the U.S. is very small. So’s the list of people who could leak a change in route. I need to understand how they got together, and what their motives were. Somewhere there’s an answer.”

  Ernheit leaned forward, chin propped on his hands as he surveyed the landscape. “But in Israel? Someone just blew up your witness, and you’re running out of time. Sooner or later our government will place you near the Café Keret. They’ll be very curious. And your invisible helpers will become even more cautious.”

  “Then I have to hurry, don’t I?”

  “To do what?”

  “Meet Barak Lev.”

  Ernheit laughed aloud. “Perhaps for lunch? If I follow your rather convoluted logic, someone just killed his coconspirator, making him extremely wary. Or maybe it was Lev who had Markis killed?”

  “Not lunch,” David persisted. “Just a meeting. I expect you’re not without ideas about how to arrange one.”

  Ernheit shook his head. “Do I really want to be mixed up in this, I wonder? Do you? And what is it you expect from such a meeting? A confession?”

  “A conversation. Enough to take to the judge.” David’s tone became urgent. “I can’t wait for your government. Are you really so sure, after today, that whoever is ruthless enough to kill Hillel Markis would have let Hana live if she was guilty?”

  After a moment, Ernheit turned to him. Softly, he said, “You’re right, of course. I’m not without ideas.”

  13

  Back in Jerusalem, restless but exhausted, David did not leave his room at the King David.

  He sat up late into the night, the meaning of what little he knew shrouded in obscurity, certain only that the complexities of defending Hana exceeded his resources. No one called. Fearful of surveillance, he did not seek to contact those few people he could identify—Moshe Howard, Avi Masur, Anat Ben-Aron—who might have set him on the path to the Café Keret.

  He had taken that path, and a man had died. The guilt David felt— whatever Hillel Markis might have done—was deepened by the fear that someone, tracing his movements, had ordered this murder to prevent discovery of a complex design that had claimed Amos Ben-Aron. In trying to help Hana, he might have sealed her fate.

  His only company was television. The authorities were notably reticent: in public, no one connected Markis’s murder to that of Ben-Aron. How long, David wondered, would it take for the government to appear at his door, inquiring about his trip to Tel Aviv?

  With Markis dead, David’s only lead was Barak Lev; his only
hope was to persuade Judge Taylor that Lev was part of a conspiracy David could not define. Lev was a recluse, hostile to outsiders. Except perhaps through Ernheit, David had no way to reach him. After Markis’s murder, he was not sure that he should try.

  Shortly after nine o’clock the next morning, Ernheit appeared at his door. He, too, seemed uneasy. “I keep thinking about Markis,” Ernheit said. “I’ve looked at his murder six different ways. The only way it makes sense is if you’re right. But I’d like to know just what it is you’re right about.”

  Like Bar Kochba, Ernheit explained as they drove, the settlement they were visiting lay outside the security barrier, arousing a deep fear of abandonment among those who lived there. But, like Alfe Menashe, it did not conform to the image of a pioneer outpost, peopled by a few Orthodox Jews and fanatics living on the edge; what David saw instead was a lush hillside town of terraced streets, with brightly hued gardens blooming amid palm and jacaranda trees. The sidewalks were brick, the streets well marked, and the school modern, its playground filled with children. The spacious homes, ranch or Mediterranean in style, had the red-tiled roofs distinctive to modern Israel. It was called Sha’are Tikva, the Gates of Hope.

  The man they had come to see, Akiva Ellon, was an intellectual beacon of the settler movement. The editor of a magazine that was the voice of the Israeli right, uncompromising in its purity and rigor, he was also known for his connection, if not his unquestioning allegiance, to members of the Masada movement. But far from being unwelcoming or austere, the white-haired man who led them to his garden had a courtly manner, youthful blue eyes, and a faintly humorous expression. No doubt Ernheit’s introduction of David played a role; in his ambiguous description, David was a well-connected American lawyer interested in the settlers’ point of view. His defense of Hana Arif went unremarked.

  An attentive host, Ellon served coffee in china cups, insisting that Ernheit and David sample his fresh pastries. Troubled by his deception, David reminded himself of his obligations to Hana. “You’ve made this a beautiful place,” he said. “How did you come to live here?”

  “Me, personally?” Ellon gave a small, ironic smile. “As with so many of our stories, it began with the Nazis. When I was a fourteen-month-old baby, in the Ukraine, they came to our village with an invitation for all Jews. We were to assemble in the square at daybreak, to be given a loaf of bread, a ration of sugar, and transportation to a ‘friendly camp.’ My father was already serving in the Russian army; when my mother discovered I had a fever, she refused to expose me to the cold. All the other Jews from our village, of course, were shot.

  “What followed is a paradigm of Jewish denial. My mother fled with me, spreading the word to other villages. They refused to believe her— when the Germans came, the Jews followed orders, showing up for transit to that ‘friendly camp.’ How those Nazis must have laughed.”

  The story, David understood at once, was defining for Akiva Ellon. “How did the two of you survive?” he asked.

  “My mother spoke flawless German; I was a blond, blue-eyed baby, a virtual copy of the picture of the German child published by Rosenberg, Hitler’s arbiter of Aryan perfection. So we settled in another village, where no one knew us, masquerading as gentiles. Fortunately, no one but her ever saw me nude.” Ellon’s voice grew soft. “After the war, my mother told me, ‘Every day, I thought you would be my executioner.’ But she clung to me, her only child, waiting for my father to return. He never did. And so she brought me here to Israel, our refuge.”

  David heard a quiet bitterness in Ellon’s last words. “And after that?”

  “From the first, I gave myself to our new country, body and soul— worked on a kibbutz, fought in the wars of ’67 and ’73, then moved here to help secure the future of our nation and our people. And now the State of Israel has no use for us.”

  Ernheit glanced at David. “Tell David how Sha’are Tikva came to be,” he suggested.

  Ellon spread his hands, a graceful gesture of sadness and self-deprecation. “It is such a typical story, really. Many of us are kibbutniks— for us, settling in this place, the biblical Samaria, was a normal part of repopulating the land of Israel. Nor did we steal this hilltop. A quarter century ago, we simply bought it from an Arab and came here to live in trailers, eight families with no roads or schools or electricity. Now we are eight hundred families, five thousand of us in all, who have no other home. In fact,” he added softly, “my mother is buried here.”

  David paused, taking in the shaded garden, Ellon’s freshly painted villa. “The government, Zev tells me, claims Sha’are Tikva would be difficult to defend.”

  “Defend?” A trace of anger crept into Ellon’s tone. “The defense of Israel was why the government encouraged us to come here—we were heroes, the new pioneers, embraced by politicians of every stripe. We did not change. Men like Amos Ben-Aron did, bandying about Orwellian phrases like ‘the Palestinian people,’ as if such a people ever existed.” Ellon shook his head in wonder. “And what of our people? We are parents who love our children and our neighbors, wanting nothing but to live on the only land God ever gave us, made home to us by our own labors. Yet we may be sacrificed to the Arabs’ need for ethnic cleansing. Perhaps Hamas or Al Aqsa will remove us to a ‘friendly camp.’ ”

  A thought struck David. Though they had driven past Arab villages, he had seen no Arabs; the bypass road they had taken was for Israelis, rendering the Arabs invisible. “So what would you do,” David asked, “with the Arab population of the West Bank? You are a quarter million; they are maybe twelve times that.”

  Ellon shrugged. “Give them back to Jordan, I suppose—ethnically, that is what they are, Jordanian. It is not simple, I know. But history never gave the Jews a choice between good and bad, only bad and worse. Worst of all would be giving up this land.” Punctilious in his role as host, Ellon stood up and refilled David’s coffee cup. “Ben-Aron was a tragedy. He began as a soldier and ended as a coward—the pathetic caricature of history’s sub-servient Jew, made the most dangerous man in Israel by the witchcraft of his rhetoric.

  “Why this transformation? Like so many others, his mind crumbled under the weight of Jewish history.” Sitting again, he looked at David intently. “No other people have been the target of extermination throughout history; no other country wonders how long it can continue to exist. So how do Israelis react to an unbearable reality that, except for the strongest of minds, is psychologically crushing? By inventing ‘peace’ where there is no hope of peace. By denying that those who dispatch suicide bombers to murder us would kill us all if we let them. And by turning their backs on us, their brothers and sisters. We settlers were to be Ben-Aron’s initial sacrifice on the altar of denial.”

  For this man, David thought, the certainty that his fellow Jews were gripped by a mass delusion must be close to unbearable. “How do you live with this?” he asked.

  Ellon gave a wistful smile. “By writing poetry, and translating Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays. Anything but The Merchant of Venice.”

  Above Ellon’s roses, a small bird hovered in delicate suspension. “But now Ben-Aron is gone,” David ventured.

  Ellon regarded him closely. “A reprieve,” he said at last. “But others like him will arise. Within Israel, the Jewish disease flowers anew—politicians who believe that the Arabs who hate us will be seduced by kindness, intellectuals for whom the suffering people are Palestinians, not Jews. Two years ago, the six-year-old daughter of one of our leaders, Barak Lev, was shot by an Arab sniper. No politician spoke of her, no poet commemorated her in verse. She had become that unremarkable thing, a murdered Jew. Now I look at this barrier and wonder how many more of us will join her among the anonymous dead.”

  “If that is what your children face, why stay here?”

  “Where, in all the history of the world, do we go? Where will this not happen to us?” Ellon’s tone hardened. “This is our land. That is why some will take up arms rather than abandon it. If I were young
er, I would join them, and fight our enemy to the end. Whether Arab or, God help us, Jew.”

  David felt a chill—in an hour, in the lovely garden of this civilized, tormented man, he had come far closer to grasping why Ben-Aron might have died. “Perhaps David should meet Barak Lev,” Ernheit suggested, “and see Bar Kochba.”

  Ellon considered this, his eyes shaded. Then he looked at David with a level gaze that, despite his feeling of betrayal, David returned.

  “Excuse me,” Ellon said courteously. “I will make a call.”

  14

  Driving toward Bar Kochba, the outpost of Barak Lev, David and Ernheit moved deeper into the Occupied Territories. David saw the rubble of an Arab home destroyed by shelling, with a black scar on the wall where the rooms above it had collapsed. The vistas were rugged, sun-baked. Above the terraced hillsides were Arab villages; on the road, controlled by Israelis, David still saw no Arabs.

  As the road took them gradually higher, the landscape became even more stark. Turning a corner, they encountered the rudiments of Jewish civilization: trailers, goats, a wine press, a modest synagogue. To David, the settlement of Bat Ein looked like a trailer court in the Mojave Desert, except that it was perched atop a jagged landscape with a harsh and contested history. Following the directions provided by Ellon, they passed a ram-shackle school and stopped beside a vineyard with a stirring vista of the Judean hills. In the distance, David could see the wooded Green Line, a measure of how far they had traveled beyond what had once been the border of Israel.

  Amid the vines a burly, red-bearded man in overalls leaned against a tractor. As they approached on foot, David saw that he wore a yarmulke, and that a prayer shawl was tucked under his overalls. His gray eyes were keen, his face weathered, and his high forehead had the sheen of sun and sweat. Smiling, he extended his hand to David. “I’m Noam Bartok. You’re the American who’s looking for Barak.”