That David knew better, and that a single phone call had reminded him of why, was not something he cared to discuss. “I don’t feel immune,” he told her. “No matter what you think of my charmed life.”
“Not just charmed,” she countered softly. “Detached.”
“Don’t you mean ‘in denial’? I know it still bothers you that my parents were Jewish in name only. They barely mentioned the Holocaust, or Israel. They were patrons of the symphony, the opera, and the ballet who preferred a life of intellect and refinement to one of feeling or group identity—”
“They had an identity, David. They were German Jews, American for three generations. We were Polish Jews, immigrants, the kind your parents would find embarrassing. We even talk about body functions.”
David smiled at this. But the difference, he understood, went deeper than his parents’ tastes in music, or that her parents’ refrigerator had been crammed with beets and homemade soups, or that Jewish holidays were strictly observed in her family and perfunctorily noted in his. It was that Harold’s family had vanished up the stacks of Hitler’s camps, impelling Carole to remember, even to live for, men and women she had never known. As she had once mordantly put it to David, she was “suffering from secondhand smoke.” It left her with a profound sense of tribal loyalty coupled with an indefinable foreboding that lay beneath her air of confidence and good humor, a sense that mischance must be avoided, not courted.
“We’re certainly a pair,” David said now. “You and I.”
Carole smiled a little. She knew what he meant, David suspected. Carole was determined to order the world as she wished it to be, the better to fend off doom. But, like Harold, she had a certain reticence—the sense that power was better exercised in private, in ways less conspicuous than was David’s inclination. So her public ambitions were for him, a melding of their temperaments and needs.
David smiled back at her, appreciating how comfortable he felt with her. Like Carole, he wanted children; it was easy to imagine her as a mother, one of the many ways in which he thought of her with confidence and warmth. If he sometimes watched Carole with the eyes of a partner rather than a lover, David knew that this was his way: between Hana and Carole no woman had truly touched his heart, and he had stopped believing that he would find a love that could wholly erase the past. He had loved without constraint only once, and it had brought him such misery that he was determined never to endure it again.
“We are a pair,” David reaffirmed with a quick grin. “Our son will have his bar mitzvah, our daughter her bat mitzvah. And we’ll make them go to Hebrew school until they hate us both.”
Accepting this concession with a look of satisfied amusement, Carole turned the key in the ignition. “I can hardly wait to tell Dad about Hebrew school. He’ll be thrilled.”
They pulled out of the garage into the sunlight, David watching Carole’s hair ripple in the breeze of a cool summer day. So, Hana had said, a nice Jewish girl, and a rich one at that. Things often end up the way they’re supposed to, I think.
Years before, David thought, she had tried to tell him.
7
Hana looked around herself as if she had stepped through the rabbit hole.
It had taken several long telephone calls before Hana had agreed to meet again, this time in the only place where no one could see them: his apartment. It was a warren off Harvard Square—a living room with a couch, coffee table, television, desk, and computer; a cramped kitchen with a table that seated two, a bedroom with a queen bed, a dresser, and the racing bike David used for exercise in the spring and fall. Dressed in blue jeans and a sweater, Hana stood in the middle of the living room, unsure of whether to stay or go.
“It’s all right,” David said gently. “You’re safe with me. Or from me, if that worries you.”
“It’s just that this is so strange. Being here.”
“I’d gladly take you out to dinner. You know that.”
“I can’t though. You know that.”
David considered her. “Do I? I don’t know anything but what you’ve told me.”
Hana smiled a little. “Were you Arab, you would know without my telling you.”
“Were I Saeb, you mean.”
A flicker of emotion—guilt, David thought—surfaced in the dark pool of her eyes, causing him to regret his last remark. “I can learn, Hana. Really.”
“Why is that so important to you?”
“I’m not sure yet. I only know that it is.”
She gave him a look of cool appraisal. “Perhaps I’m something you can’t have,” she said at length. “And so you’ll want me until you do.”
David shook his head. “Right now, all I want is to cook dinner. And all I need from you is your company.”
She followed him to the kitchen. David had set the table—white dishes, two wineglasses, bright cloth napkins, a candle in a brass candlestick holder—and laid out the veal cutlets, soaking in a marinade of his own invention. As though for something to say, she inquired, “Did you cook at home? Your parents’ home, I mean.”
“Not really. The housekeeper did, mostly. My mother’s passion is for English literature, not cooking.”
“And you have brothers and sisters?”
The question reminded David of how little they knew of each other, the gaps between his instinctive sense of her and the accretion of fact and detail through which people learned—or thought they learned—who another person was. “No,” he answered. “I seem to have exhausted their interest in playing life’s genetic lottery.” He nodded toward an open bottle of cabernet sauvignon. “I usually sip wine while I cook. But I’m guessing you don’t drink at all.”
Hana hesitated. “I do, a little,” she told him. “When I’m not with Saeb, or girlfriends who might disapprove.”
He poured some for her. “Then taste it, if you like.”
She hesitated, then took a sip. “It’s good, I think. But then how would I know?”
David gave her a sideways glance. “What you think is all that matters. Only wine snobs care about knowing. In California, some people devote their lives to it.”
Hana smiled, as if she found this inconceivable. “Americans—even your indulgences take on such importance. You would think no one was starving, here or anywhere.” She took another sip of wine. “That’s much of what makes America dangerous, I think—this self-absorption that keeps so many of you so strangely innocent. Sometimes America is like a large puppy, all big paws and floppy tail, that runs through the living room breaking the glassware and knocking things off tables, too happy discovering all it can do to care about the damage. Except that your living room is the world.”
The metaphor made David laugh. “I’ve got such a lot to atone for.”
Hana gave him an indulgent smile. “It would take a lifetime. Your annual day of atonement—Yom Kippur, is it? Repentance on the installment plan will not be enough.”
“Even if I can cook?”
“That remains to be seen.” Her tone became teasing. “Another thing about Americans is they’re overconfident. They’re not used to letting outsiders grade their performance.”
“Go ahead. My ego’s not that fragile.”
“Maybe not about cooking. But all men are fragile, somehow.”
Smiling, David resolved to focus on the cutlets. When he looked at her again, she was freeing her hair from the band at the nape of her neck. Luxuriant and black, it fell across her shoulders. But when she saw him gazing at her, she seemed embarrassed, as though they had been caught at something.
“I was thinking your hair’s beautiful.” He paused a moment, searching for some conversational escape route. “At home, do you cover?”
“At times. For religious observances, or when I’m with women who are older.”
David turned the cutlets. “It seems a waste.”
Hana moved her shoulders, the smallest of shrugs. “That’s just what’s done. But when I do it here, men seem to notice me even more. So i
t rather defeats the purpose.”
How much was she aware, David wondered, of the power her beauty had on him? “Dinner’s ready,” he said. “You can grade me afterward.”
They ate without haste, sipping wine, talking both of small things and the world as they saw it. “Then you have no religion?” she asked.
“Not in the way you do, though I’m culturally Jewish, which is something I take pride in. They keep on killing us, and yet we do far more than survive—we invent, write, discover, build, create. And no matter what you think, Judaism, at its best, is a tolerant religion—we don’t proselytize, and we’ve learned enough about suffering and oppression to notice others who are suffering and oppressed.
“But the history of religion, at its worst, is the story of mass murder. Why have other religions roasted Jews on spits for two thousand years? Why do Jews and Arabs hate each other now? It’s hard to think of all that and raise your eyes to heaven. Sometimes I think it’s man who created God in his own image—murderous and narrow.”
Hana gave him a long, thoughtful look. “What lies between your people and mine,” she said finally, “is more than some bloodthirsty God, or the Torah and Koran. It’s history and land. It’s people’s stories—among many others Saeb’s. And mine.”
“But don’t you think if it were left to you and me, we’d find some way to resolve all that?”
“I wonder. Anyhow, it’s not, and never will be. This is so much bigger than two people.”
Gazing at the table, David smiled a little but said nothing. “What is it?” she asked.
“I was thinking of what Bogart said to Ingrid Bergman at the end of Casablanca.”
Her own smile was a flicker. “This isn’t a movie. You can’t rewrite the ending.”
“Then perhaps I’m as American as your puppy. But I believe in people writing their own endings.”
Hana looked into his face, her eyes shadowed with an emotion that David could not quite grasp. “Dinner was good,” she said at last. “We should be happy just with that.”
“What were you thinking?” David asked. “Before.”
Briefly, she looked away, and then directly at him. “That I’m afraid of what else I might want from you. And of what you want from me.”
At first he had no answer. Then, impulsively, he stood, taking her hands, gently raising her from the chair so that he could look into her face. “What if you’re not just ‘something I can’t have’? What if I end up wanting all of you?”
For a long moment she was still, eyes locked on his, and then she rested her forehead against his shoulder. He felt, or perhaps imagined, a tremor running through her. “Only that?” she murmured. “So much more than I can give you. All I could ever give you is an hour at a time, until I can no longer stand it.”
David could smell her hair, fragrant as fresh-cut herbs. “You make it sound like torture. Don’t you think we should find out?”
“Not just torture . . .”
She did not finish. As his lips grazed her throat, he could feel her pulse beating, then felt the warmth of her body against his.
Their kiss, at first gentle and tentative, did not stop at that.
David reached beneath her sweater, tracing the slender line of her back and shoulders. When he slowly raised her sweater, she held her arms up to help him, a kind of surrender. Her eyes did not leave his.
She wore no bra. David felt himself quiver with wanting her, and then saw that her eyes were filling with tears. Softly he asked, “Is this all right?”
“Yes.” Her voice was tremulous. “This once.”
David kissed her nipples, her stomach, then unfastened her belt. Wordless, he slid her clothes off, then his. They leaned against each other, still silent, caught between doubt and desire.
“We’ll be all right,” he murmured.
Taking her hand, he led her to the bedroom. Hana’s fingers curled around his.
Filled with a haste he fought against, David drew down the bedcover. Rain began to spatter his dark window.
Together they slipped into the bed, warm skin on cool sheets, her breasts resting against his chest as they looked into each other’s faces. He allowed himself to savor the surprise of touching her, of her touching him where she wished.
“No rush,” he whispered. “No rush.” And then the rush was hers.
When he was inside her, she stared up into his eyes, as though to read his soul. Then it was all feeling, her hips rising to take him, their bodies moving together slowly, then more quickly, her soft cries his only guide.
With the first tremor of her body, Hana cried out his name, the damp tendrils of her hair pressed against his face.
Afterward they lay facing each other, quiet and warm, rediscovering each other in the light from David’s kitchen. Time passed like that, new lovers content with wonder.
“Perhaps this is why I came,” she said at last.
David felt unsure. “To make love with me?”
“More than that. Perhaps I thought you could help me escape myself.”
“And can I?”
Her eyes were troubled. “Not for long, I think. But at least here I’m allowed to look at you.”
“Here? The first time you saw me your eyes reminded me of burn holes. Like if you stared at me long enough, I’d turn to ash and bone.”
This made Hana smile. “Then I must tell you about Arab women—at least Palestinian women, or Jordanians or Lebanese. We’re allowed to look at men in public, as long as we employ the appropriate stare of hauteur to cover the fact that we’re interested. I saw you were attractive, so I allowed myself to look at you with as much contempt as I could muster, for as long as I dared.”
David laughed at this admission. “You certainly fooled me.”
“Yes. And look how well it worked.”
David kissed her. And then, with less fear but no less desire, they began to find each other again.
Only later, sipping coffee at his kitchen table, did Hana glance at her watch.
“Are you afraid?” David asked.
A shadow crossed her face. “It’s not what you think,” she answered. “Another myth about Arab women is that we’re subservient. Perhaps Saudi women. But in my culture, the sole imperative is never to confront men with what would shame them. Or shame you.”
“And for men?”
“It’s different. For example, if an Arab man sleeps with an American woman, it’s no problem. But it’s understood they will marry one of us.”
Her tone of matter-of-fact acceptance took him by surprise. “Nice to have the double-standard codified.”
Hana shrugged her shoulders. “It is true that Arab men have a streak of paternalism and misogyny—like many Israelis. I hope someday we can progress to the state of social relations in America, where men are hypo-critical about their chauvinism, and even slightly embarrassed.”
Though he smiled, David would not be deflected. “And what do you hope for from Saeb?”
“More openness,” Hana said flatly. “Including for our daughters, should we have them.”
This casual acknowledgment of her future wounded him. As though sensing this, she touched his face. “I am sorry, David. But that is how it is.”
“That may be. But I don’t know why it is.”
“Is that so important?”
“I think so, yes.”
Hana closed her eyes. “There’s so much to it,” she said at last. “Our fathers were cousins, our mothers second cousins. When we were eleven, our fathers began discussing that we should marry—”
“That can’t be what you really want.”
“Because I’m here, with you, in secret?” Hana drew a breath. “It’s true that Saeb would be consumed by my betrayal. With a Jew, yet never with him.”
Astonishment slowed David’s answer. “Sleeping with me is one thing,” he said at last. “Marrying Saeb is another.”
“And why is this your concern?”
David spread both palms in a gest
ure of bewilderment and frustration. “Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps because in my hypocritical culture, it’s women who are supposed to sentimentalize sex, and men who compartmentalize it—”
“And so this means nothing to me,” Hana cut in. “How little you do understand.” Her voice adopted a tone of weary acceptance. “Marrying Saeb is about far more than an arranged marriage, the traditions of a village culture. The wisdom of our fathers’ pledge lies in the things that have made us who we are. That we are Palestinian. That Saeb more than matches me in intellect and ambition. All that, and, yes, history.
“History is not just that our parents were born in the same village. It’s how the Zionist victory shaped the narrative of all our lives. Because they came from Galilee, our parents fled to Lebanon. Saeb’s parents married at the refugee camp of Tel Zaatar—mine at the camps of Sabra and Shatila. The cesspools of their exile, crowded, dirty, ridden by disease.” Her voice held quiet anger. “At first my family thought we were the lucky ones. Because when civil war broke out between the Lebanese Christians and Muslims, the Christian militia—the Phalange—surrounded Tel Zaatar and rained rockets on our people’s homes.
“It took sixteen days for them to tire of this. When they were through, the Phalange burst into the camp and began slaughtering the men. Saeb, the oldest child, was only eight. So he, his mother, four brothers and sisters survived, although their home was rubble. But now they thought they were lucky—Saeb’s father was looking for work in Beirut when the siege began, and could not get back to die—”
Hana paused abruptly. “When it was done,” she told David, “the Phalange rounded up the women and children, drove them in trucks to the border of West Beirut, and told them to start walking.
“Saeb’s father was searching for his family. When he found them, Saeb has told me, tears rolled down his face.” Her voice was toneless now. “Their refuge was my birth place—Sabra and Shatila. Two camps side by side, run by the United Nations—thousands of Palestinians crowded into one-story concrete buildings with corrugated roofs and bare bulbs hanging from the ceilings. Saeb’s family found a place near ours, in a squalid corner named after their village, but where the only olive tree grew in a barrel filled with soil my parents had dug up from their garden.
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