by Hesh Kestin
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For Chiara, Aidan, Shane, Lila, Noam, Aviv, Maksim, Leora and Eliana. In the hope they may live in peace.
There is among people no dividing line greater or more absolute than that between the happiness of some and the suffering of others. Affairs great and small divide people, yet none so sharply as the inequality of fate.
—Holy Week, by Jerzy Andrzejewski
Author’s Note
No book is perfect, and no author.
The Lie is fiction, but it is fiction hung upon a framework of the real. Though I spent some twenty years reporting from the Middle East and have been to most of the places described in these pages, some locations may have changed since my last visit. In addition, memory does play its tricks. So if I have perpetrated the odd miscue, I beg the reader’s indulgence and, should he or she wish to extend the favor, correction. These may be sent to me at [email protected].
My last novel, The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats, included one intended mistake. In a preface to that book I challenged readers to find it. In the three years it took for a careful reader to discover the error, other careful readers—to my shame and delight—discovered a dozen more.
Rather than learn my lesson, I have included in The Lie three intentional mistakes of fact—nothing egregious, nothing upon which the story hangs—but present nonetheless. I have no doubt that other errors will be brought to my attention, for which this author expects to be at once mortified, satisfied, and gratified.
Happy hunting!
HK
Prologue
Nearly forty-five years before our story begins, in a birthing room at Hillel Yaffe Hospital in Hadera, a city in central Israel, two children come into the world at almost precisely the same time.
The Arab mother has been silent through her long labor. Having borne seven children, she knows by now that screaming does not help.
The Jewish woman in the next bed is becoming a mother for the first time. The walls shake with her cries. She screams curses in one long stream until the child is out. The sweating doctor—there is no air-conditioning—tells her, “A boy—mazel tov!” He is smiling.
The midwife holding the other child shows less emotion. But she tries. “She is so pretty,” she whispers. “A house full of girls brings happiness.”
The Arab woman begins to weep almost soundlessly. In a moment the weeping swells into hysteria, her village Arabic peppered with the single word la! repeated over and over. It is Arabic for no.
Though neither doctor nor nurse speaks Arabic, each knows what the woman is saying and why she is saying it.
“Shall I give her the Abu-banat?” the nurse asks. It is an Arabic phrase well known in Middle Eastern obstetrics. Abu-banat means father of daughters, a curse for the father, a fearful burden of guilt for the mother.
“Ten cc’s,” the doctor says.
1
In the oak-paneled study of a comfortable Georgian home in the prosperous Westmount neighborhood of Montreal, Edward Al-Masri stops packing papers into his briefcase when he hears the doorbell. His rimless spectacles and academic tweeds are belied by a certain brooding intensity: His jaw is set, his eyes narrowed. Covered in a close thatch of premature gray—he is not yet forty-five—his large, handsome head is planted at an angle from shoulders that have never known physical work. His body seems a bit too small to hold it.
“Mr. Al-Masri?” Snowflakes the size of coins flood in with the Arabic. The taxi driver holds a wheeled suitcase high above the snow. It is the largest suitcase meeting the regulations of international airlines, but to judge by the way it swings from the driver’s hand it is clearly empty.
“You’re late.”
“Praise Allah, a flat. Imagine. In this storm. First to take off the chains, then—”
“Late is late, habibi.” The word—it simply means my friend—is uttered in a tone of near-feudal condescension. Al-Masri takes the suitcase from the driver. He looks at the snow coming down, the all-white street. In the taxi, a small flame momentarily lights up the dark rear seat, a lighter, not a match. He knows the man in the rear seat. He knows the man’s gold lighter.
When he turns back to the driver, Al-Masri’s reluctance is palpable, but the snow cannot be ignored: Arabs are taught hospitality from an early age. “Wait inside.”
While the taxi driver stamps his boots on the grate and shakes off the snow that has already covered his shoulders and the stocking cap that warms his shaved head, Al-Masri rolls the suitcase into his study. He places it next to an identical one, a subtle tan plaid trimmed in blue piping, transfers his neatly folded clothes and a dozen books from one to the other, then disposes of his own empty suitcase in the rear of a closet. He locks the closet. Some things must remain secret, even from his wife. He wheels the new suitcase out of the room.
In the foyer, where the driver examines the book-lined walls with the awe of the barely literate, Genevieve Al-Masri holds their son. She brushes the fawn-colored hair from her face. “Kiss Daddy good-bye, honey,” she says in the heavily metallic French of the Québécois. Many years before, Al-Masri published a book, adapted from his doctoral thesis, called The Political Dimension of Language: Anti-Colonialism in Patterns of Inflected Speech. It sold only a few copies, but was a beginning.
As Al-Masri embraces them, the toddler, suddenly aware that his father is leaving, begins to wail.
“Be careful, Edward,” Genevieve tells her husband in English. “Those people . . .”
He winks, and follows the driver out the door.
The suitcase wheels are useless in the snow. The driver slips twice. Al-Masri does not reach out to steady him. He knows this much about himself: He loves his people in the abstract, less so when it comes to individuals. He knows this as well: He hates himself for it. This is why he will do what he is about to do.
2
The courtroom in Jerusalem is carpeted in a lush blue, apparently meant to echo the two blue bands and Star of David of the flag on the wall behind the three judges. The walls are paneled in a pale oak veneer. Oak forests covered much of northern Israel until the Ottoman Turks, who ruled the Middle East until 1914, built railroads that crisscrossed the Holy Land and fueled them with what was at hand. As a result, the number of old-growth oaks in modern-day Israel might be counted in the hundreds. Occasionally, solitary trees can be found like sentient monuments among the pine and fir of the reforested hills around Jerusalem. The oak panels in the courtroom are from Sweden.
Dahlia Barr, at forty-four a stark beauty whose face, long drained of softness, retains the glow of resilience, stands with the prosecutor before the judges. Her hair is the color of the oak veneer, shot with streaks of dramatic gray that pick up the color of her eyes. Her voice is clear, still young. “Your Honors, in any other situation, but a thirteen-year-old girl who is unable to communicate?”
The prosecutor breaks in. “Fourteen in two days.”
“Thirteen, fourteen—a distinction without a difference,” she says. “This is a child, perhaps not even capable of understanding the charges against her, a condition that will not be improved by further incarceration.”
The presiding judge removes her glasses. “Prosecutor?”
“Your honors,” he says with the sullen impatience of the put-upon. “This so-called child was carrying explosives, an undisputed fact. Does my learned colleague believe defendant received these explosives from an angel? Defendant received them f
rom a human being. The state believes another week of careful and sensitive questioning will reveal—”
“Sensitive questioning? The child is both deaf and mute. We might as well have her on the rack. Does my respected colleague not have children?”
“My children do not carry bombs.”
The judges confer in a whisper. “Forty-eight hours more,” the presiding judge says.
Across the courtroom, a translator signs to the young girl. She immediately begins shaking her head. This sets off her family who, as one, shout imprecations at the judges, the court, the state.
Dahlia has seen this often. It is, she knows, a paradox: Palestinian Arabs believe cursing will improve the result, reflecting at once resentment against Israel and faith that the same Israel will not, as would any court in the entire Arab world, imprison them for it, even kill them. But she is a mother, too. She thinks, Can any mother be blamed for losing her self-control in such a situation?
The presiding judge bangs her gavel repeatedly.
It is minutes before Dahlia can speak. “After which defense respectfully requests defendant be remanded to an appropriate juvenile facility.”
The presiding judge bangs her gavel once more. “So stipulated.”
The prosecutor turns to Dahlia. “My children could have been on that bus.”
Ignoring him, Dahlia approaches the sobbing girl as her large family gestures angrily behind the child. Unable to communicate with the girl, she places a hand on her shoulder. The family will have none of it. Now they are cursing her.
3
As the taxi plows sullenly through the Montreal snows, Fawaz Awad sits behind the driver puffing on a Gauloise in a gold cigarette holder. The left side of his heavy face is scarred, perhaps from burns, his thick glasses framed in gold with the left lens blacked out. In his mid-fifties, he is elegantly dressed, his left sleeve folded and pinned at the elbow. A cashmere overcoat is neatly arrayed on the seat between the two passengers.
“The Jews have one weakness,” he says. “They will fight to the last child. They will clean up the blood and broken glass so that an hour from the worst attack, there is not a sign. They do business, conduct scientific research, write novels, make love.” He sighs for effect. “But they hate when the world condemns them. Funny, no? We send thousands of rockets over their cities, and they laugh. But when the UN declares them to be criminals, they cry and tear their hair: ’Oy vey—nobody loves us!’ ” He laughs. “Praise Allah, this is not an Arab trait.”
Al-Masri cracks the rear window against the veil of smoke. “Praise Allah,” he says, not bothering to hide the cynicism. He has not seen the inside of a mosque in years.
4
In South Lebanon, Tawfeek Nur-al-Din stands at the edge of a high cliff overlooking the Israeli border. Still fit at forty, he is one of a rare group of Palestinian military commanders who has learned to emulate the example of the officer corps of his enemy: He does not lead from a desk; he leads by doing. Trained in Libya and Afghanistan, Commander Tawfeek carries with him the aura of personal martyrdom that is standard issue among Palestinian military leaders. Though he makes a point not to speak of this painful subject, it is said that his young wife and son were killed in an Israeli bombing raid over Gaza on the fiftieth anniversary of Al Naqbah, the Catastrophe, when the normally fractious Palestinians unite to commemorate their bitter loss in the struggle that Israel calls its War of Independence.
There was no Israeli bombing raid over Gaza on May 15, 1998. Commander Tawfeek’s wife and two children are safely abroad. He does not know how the legend began. Nor does he care. A Palestinian military commander must have an aura. He has no tanks.
On the high cliff, twenty-one intensely trained black-garbed commandos face their leader, each strapped into an identical black hang glider. They have been training with this equipment for months.
Tawfeek raises his own glider wings, holds a wetted finger to the wind, winks theatrically, then breaks—with the wild improbability of a Bollywood film—into sweet Arabic song.
No wind today,
A sign for tomorrow
When our young martyrs will
Fall upon the filthy Jews
Like hawks upon rats,
Like eagles upon snakes.
His fighters join in heartily for the rousing chorus.
O purify the Muslim lands
Of Jews and Christians and their bands
Of rapists, murderers and thieves,
Devils’ dung who won’t believe.
Tawfeek holds up his right hand. “Praise God. Follow me now for one final practice flight. Radios off.” With a flourish, he lights a cigarette from a pack marked Liban, then leaps, the others jumping after by threes. Seen from below, the black wings of their gliders all but eclipse the sun.
5
At Montreal International Airport, a young El Al security inspector questions Al-Masri while an assistant—like the inspector, an Israeli graduate student enrolled at a Quebec university—carefully examines his suitcase, which has already gone through an automated check for traces of explosive. This is the backup check, concerned as much with conversational nuance as with physical detection. Machines interrogate poorly.
The security inspector scrutinizes the two passports she has been given, then asks in English: “Who is Mohammed Al-Masri?” Her tone is even, friendly.
“That is I,” Al-Masri says.
“And who is Edward Al-Masri?”
“The same.”
“Two names, two passports, one person?”
“In Israel I am known as Mohammed. I use Edward professionally. I changed my name legally upon becoming a Canadian citizen.”
She switches to Hebrew. “And what, professionally, does such a citizen do in Canada, Mr. Al-Masri?”
“I am a professor at McGill University. You may also have seen me on television. CBC, CNN. I am an author as well.”
“You speak very good Hebrew.”
“As both my passports indicate, I was born in Israel. Pardes Hanna Agricultural High School, Haifa University. The complete sabra.”
“You served in the Army, then?”
“Arabs are exempt from conscription.”
Less friendly: “But not from volunteering. The purpose of your visit to Israel?”
“To see my family. And to do research for a book.”
“A book about what?” She has switched back to English.
“The struggle for a just peace.”
The security inspector looks to her colleague, who whispers something as she shakes her head: Nothing in the suitcase.
“That may take more than a book, professor. Have a pleasant flight.”
As Al-Masri moves into the El Al waiting room, the security inspector picks up a phone.
6
At the taxi stand outside Jerusalem District Court, Dahlia opens the door of the first cab in line. From down the street, another Mercedes taxi pulls suddenly ahead of it. A muscular man in blue jeans and dark glasses jumps out of the front passenger seat. “Madam,” he says. “You’ll find this taxi is better.”
As she stands holding the door of the first taxi, Dahlia’s driver lets loose in primal Hebrew. “You see the queue, ass-wipe?” he shouts. “Find the other end of it. I’ve been sitting here for an hour!”
The newcomer flashes an ID. “We’re a special taxi.”
Dahlia gives him a withering look. “Habibi, I have a taxi.”
“Ours gets you to Tel Aviv faster. We don’t stop for red lights.”
“Who says I’m going to Tel Aviv?”
“Zalman Arad.”
This gives her pause. “If Zalman Arad wants to see me, he can make an appointment.” She watches as the driver of the taxi that is clearly not a taxi gets out and looks impatiently at his watch. “Why does Zalman Arad wish to see me?”
“To tell you the truth, Ms. Barr, Zalman Arad doesn’t consult with me about such matters,” the man with the ID tells her. “You’ve got two choices. Sit
in the backseat or sit in the trunk. It’s all the same to us.”
7
Seated next to Al-Masri in business class, an older man in skullcap, goatee, and vested suit whispers a request to the El Al flight attendant.
“You object to sitting with an Arab?” Al-Masri says. He is not whispering.
“Sir, I have Arab friends. Edward Al-Masri is not one of them.”
8
In the rear of the speeding taxi, Dahlia answers the insistent cell phone in her purse. “What is it, Dudik?”
“I filed. This morning.”
She looks out the window as the taxi winds down the highway past the orange-painted vehicles strewn like abandoned toys by the side of the road, the remnants of trucks destroyed by the Arab Legion as they sought to relieve a besieged Jerusalem in 1948. “Mazel tov,” she says. “Assuming a fair settlement, I won’t contest. Just let’s keep it out of the papers.”
“I moved some of my things this morning, after you left. I’ll come by for the rest. Hopefully, you won’t be there. I don’t need tears.”
“Dudik, what a prick you are. Tears would be the last thing. I stopped feeling anything for you years ago.”
“In that we’re equal.”
“We have to tell the boys.” She hears silence. “I said—”
“I told them.”
“You told them? When?”
“I phoned Ari at his base last night. Uri I told this morning before school, the minute you left.” He paused. “I was watching from the road.”
“I’m the last to know?”
She snaps the phone closed, dropping it in her purse, staring blankly out the Mercedes window as the hills level out abruptly to the green fields of a well-watered Israeli winter, groves of orange trees already heavy with fruit, the orderly barracks of chicken farms that always bring to her mind the images of certain camps in Poland and Germany that she considers the cultural baggage of the Israeli Jew. To a citizen of any other country this would be a shocking connection; to an Israeli it is merely appropriate. Lamp shade: skin. Railway cattle car: concentration camp. Tattoo: Auschwitz. When the first Holocaust survivors were brought here after the war, mean Israeli children called them soap. Dahlia’s late father had taught her to say cleansing bar instead. He could not bear to say soap.