Exile: a novel

by Richard North Patterson

  David sat back, sipping the sauvignon blanc Nisreen had ordered for them both. “I guess you’d better tell me why Hana quit.”

  Nisreen took another deep drag on the water pipe. “First, you have to understand the context of Hana’s anger—these settlements, and this cynical land grab the Israelis call a security fence.

  “In 1993, as part of the Oslo agreements, Israel promised to freeze the settlements. Instead, they kept expanding them, adding territory and population and using more of our water.” Nisreen put down the water pipe. “Since 1993, the settlement population has almost doubled, cutting deeper into the West Bank. But almost as bad as the Israelis’ geographic expansion is their psychological detachment.

  “The settlers live in a bubble. Their bypass roads connect the settlements to one another, dividing the West Bank and enabling Israelis to travel without seeing any Arabs. So they create their own delusion.” Nisreen flashed a quick, sardonic smile. “Once we met our Israeli counterparts in a Jewish settlement. Hana pointed out a painting on the wall—a landscape of the surrounding area, totally accurate except that the Arab villages had disappeared. ‘You have erased us,’ Hana told them, ‘just like you erased my parents from the history of the place you now call Israel.’

  “That initiated an angry debate. When Hana accused the Israelis of breaking their word by expanding the settlements, one man responded that they had to do this to pacify right-wing Israelis. ‘Then truth is a convenience,’ Hana said. ‘And I should not believe anything you tell me.’ ” David could imagine Hana’s eyes flashing as she upbraided the Israelis.

  “Anger is one thing,” David said. “Did you ever hear her call for violence against Israel or Ben-Aron?”

  Nisreen considered the question. “To the Israelis, she said more than once that they were manufacturing suicide bombers by the score. But we all say these things.” Pausing, Nisreen added with obvious reluctance, “Once, to me, Hana said that Ben-Aron would certainly die, and all that mattered was who killed him. I know what she meant: better their extremists than ours. By the time of the trial, I expect this conversation will have faded from my memory. But I hope she did not say as much to others.”

  The tacit acknowledgment that she would protect her friend by lying, while not surprising, left David uneasy. “What prompted Hana’s resignation?” he asked.

  “The security wall. Most Israelis and Palestinians know that there must be a two-state solution, with sensible borders. So how could they call it a security wall, Hana asked the Israelis, when it snakes this way and that to pick up settlements, water extraction points, and more Palestinian land? She’s right of course—if they complete it as planned, it will block our roads and surround our cities, cutting us off from one another. The whole idea is to create a de facto border that takes as much land from us as possible, while penning up our population in separate enclaves.” Nisreen looked at David intently. “Hana comes from people trapped in the refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila, unable to go anywhere. To see us hemmed in by a wall made her heartsick and discouraged. So when Ben-Aron refused to renounce or redraw the wall, she quit. ‘It’s hopeless,’ she told me. ‘I cannot take part in this man’s charade.’ Again and again, the Zionists cannot resist reaching for one more piece of cake.

  “After she resigned, she was more depressed than I had ever seen her. It was as though everything—her life, her hopes for Palestinians—was collapsing all around her. A slow death of the spirit.” Nisreen’s voice grew husky. “My God, I thought, this woman deserves so much more.”

  “Than what exactly?”

  “The life she’s facing. She came back from America in a time of hope, believing she could help build a country, and found herself surrounded by death and oppression, with hatred mounting on both sides.” Nisreen leaned forward, her voice and manner becoming even more impassioned. “Occupation gives young Israeli soldiers the power of life and death, at the same time exposing them to constant fear, all of which leaves them cynical yet traumatized and, in a certain way, dehumanized. And its constant pressure on the occupied breeds hatred in Palestinians and, in children, a lasting trauma. Seeing this in Munira pierces Hana’s heart.” Gazing at David, Nisreen continued in a tone of deeper resignation. “Most Israelis refuse to come here. Part of it is fear, but it’s also a form of denial. It’s ironic, really. The Israelis are a magnet for the guilt of others because of the Holocaust and centuries of persecution. But they cannot reconcile the suffering they’ve endured with the reality that, under their occupation, it is we who are suffering.

  “In law school, at NYU, one of my closest friends was a Jewish girl from Tel Aviv. But she won’t come to see me in Ramallah, and when we talk on the phone, it is all about suicide bombers, never about occupation—she cannot seem to hear me. And yet she, perhaps more than I, holds the key to our future.

  “For Hana, the future has become Munira’s future. And what is that future, here, exactly?” Briefly, Nisreen scanned the crowd. “What you see is us spending what we have today instead of planning for a tomorrow we do not control. We are voiceless—however we cry out, the world does not hear us.”

  Throughout this remarkable monologue, David watched the emotions flashing across Nisreen’s face: anger, sadness, resignation, the deep need to express herself to someone not a Palestinian. “I know something about Hana,” he said. “Tell me about you.”

  Nisreen gave him a smile of self-deprecation. “Actually, I’ve been talking about myself all along. Occupation is all I know. But if you want to hear about me, I’ll tell you a few stories from my life. I’m to be a witness, after all.

  “Unlike Hana, I am native to the West Bank. My mother was PLO. In 1967, she was arrested and my father, her apolitical fiancé, was detained. He would be released, the Israelis told her, if she revealed the names of her associates in the PLO. She refused.” Nisreen’s tone commingled pride and indignation. “Three years later they released her. She was deaf in her left ear from being slapped on the head. When she married my father, she had to stand to his left in order to hear their vows.

  “That’s my parents. One of my cousins is serving nine years for being Hamas. My brother served a year for joining Al Aqsa. My sister’s fiancé went to Arafat’s compound to pick up a friend—also Al Aqsa, though her fiancé was not—and both were killed by Israeli soldiers who were hunting down the Al Aqsa guy.” Nisreen’s voice hardened. “You might think us an unusual family or, at least, unusually unfortunate. We are not.

  “For reasons of traditions and economy, I still live in my parents’ home. The woman who cleaned it until recently has eight children, and a marriage that was in trouble—her husband could not find work where they lived and, because of checkpoints, spent most of the week in another village.

  “One night he came to our home, looking for his wife. My parents and I could not tell him where she was. Then, while we were talking, we heard her name on television. When we turned to watch, we saw her standing between two Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint. She’d been arrested for carrying explosives.” Nisreen shook her head. “We were all astonished—they were not even Muslims, let alone political. Just poor people with eight children to feed.

  “It turned out someone from Hamas had paid her to carry explosives through the checkpoint—the raw ingredients for a suicide bombing that might well have killed Israeli children. What’s even more jarring is that, in the morning, she had gone to the market and bought clothes for her own children. Then she’d cleaned our house and gone off to the checkpoint. In her mind she was merely taking an opportunity to make money and, I think, express hostility toward her husband for his failure to provide.

  “It’s absolutely nuts, of course—practically and morally. But it should introduce more complexity into your vision of who carries out acts of terror, and how the occupation distorts our lives.”

  Listening, David sorted through his reactions. “When Palestinians talk of suicide bombing,” he told her, “it often sounds like something thrust on
them by the Israelis. But when I was in Israel I saw a tape of an imam speaking to a group of men that included Jefar and Hassan—the worst kind of anti-Semitic crap in which Jews have no more worth than cockroaches. Worse, the imam’s little sermon ran on Palestinian TV.”

  Nisreen waved a dismissive hand. “This is deplorable, I grant you. But no one watches. It’s just government propaganda, a reflexive reaction to the fact that the Zionists’ lobbies and their sympathizers dominate the world media.”

  “As a Jew,” David cut in, “I don’t take it quite so lightly. Neither did Hassan.” His voice softened. “In this better world of yours, could Munira marry a Jewish boy? Could you? Or does hatred of Jews go deeper than the occupation?”

  For the first time, Nisreen did not look at him directly. She drew on the water pipe, receding into her own thoughts. “At work,” she said at last, “an Arab man is dating a Jewish woman in Jerusalem. It is difficult, and not just because of checkpoints. To some of us, it is offensive that he does not date a Palestinian. That is the honest truth.” She looked at David again. “My reasons are political. What the others feel, I cannot say.

  “For me, it is all about the occupation. All of us, Jew and Arab, need an end to this. That is why I continue to work on negotiations, and why I did not despise Ben-Aron as Hana did.” Nisreen spoke in a voice tinged with regret. “With him alive, our people had at least some hope. Now there is only more hatred and reprisal, with the Palestinian Authority crumbling before our eyes. The only winners are extremists on both sides. If this is Munira’s future, it seems very bleak.

  “For Hana, the occupation is even worse than it is for me. At least I have my parents. Hers are trapped in Lebanon; the Israelis will not let them come to live here. And now her daughter may be trapped as well—not only by the Israelis but by her father’s insistence on what an Arab woman should be.”

  David pondered this. “At Harvard,” he observed, “Saeb didn’t strike me as a Muslim fundamentalist.”

  “According to Hana, he wasn’t. Otherwise she would never have married him.” Contemplative, Nisreen sipped her wine. “My sense is that his turn to Islam mixes politics and psychology. Politically, Hamas is more antagonistic toward Israel, and uses Islam as a kind of ideological glue. Psychologically—and this is where it gets tricky—my guess is that the more friction there is between Saeb and Hana, especially about Munira, the more he is impelled toward a religion whose extremists insist on male dominance.

  “I came to view Saeb and Hana’s clash over their daughter as symbolic. On the one hand, you have Hana, a fair example of the progressive Arab women who could form a base of support for a girl like Munira.” Briefly, Nisreen smiled. “Not that I’m any role model, but, in many ways, Hana would like Munira to live as I do—free to say what I want, date whom I please, go where I like, spend time with whoever interests me, satisfy my ambitions, and stretch my curiosity any way I choose. That can be a hard life: I am gossiped about, and many traditional Palestinians find my attitudes unforgivable. But there are more and more women like me. In Hana’s mind, we are the future she desires for Munira.”

  David flashed on Munira, covered, reciting in a monotone how her father compelled her to study the Koran. In that moment he felt, more keenly than before, the visceral struggle between husband and wife to define the destiny of their only child. “On the other hand,” Nisreen was saying, “there is the structured life of a woman embraced by fundamentalist Islam, where she has no relationship with men except for marriage, and that, at its worst, manifests itself in spousal abuse, polygamy, and honor killings. Do you know about those?”

  “Generally,” David answered. “My understanding is that a woman can be murdered by her family for some real or imagined sexual transgression. In one case, I was told, a married woman who had become pregnant as the result of an affair was forced by her brother-in-law to become a suicide bomber.”

  Nisreen nodded. “It’s not always about sex, or even the woman’s conduct. Last year, in Ramallah, a Muslim father killed his daughter for wanting to marry a Christian. In another case, a father raped his daughter, then tried to sell her into prostitution because her honor had been lost. When a group of women tried to intervene, the father simply killed her. Grotesque.” Her face softened. “Your story of the female suicide bomber was one Hana and I discussed. It seemed to upset her more than most.”

  The last remark stirred David’s curiosity. “Was there a particular reason?”

  With uncharacteristic reluctance, Nisreen contemplated her lap. Quietly, she said, “You are a friend from law school, right?”

  “Yes.”

  Nisreen exhaled. “Hana is a deeply unhappy woman. By this, I mean not only unhappy in her marriage but unhappy in her heart and soul. Beneath her intellect and self-possession hides a terrible solitude.”

  David felt an answering sadness. “Because of her marriage?”

  “Her marriage, and her regrets.” Nisreen looked up at him. “I tell you this in confidence, okay?”

  “All right.”

  “In law school, Hana had an affair. Saeb never knew, of course; if he had, he might have killed her—literally. But this lover left his mark.”

  David felt his skin tingle. “What did she say about him?”

  “Very little. Just that he was American—that the whole thing was impossible, but that she had never been able to forget him.” Nisreen looked reflective. “We only spoke of it twice, the last time just before Hana left for America.

  “She was wondering whether she should try to see him. The pull was very strong, but Hana was frightened of her emotions. Then she said to me, ‘Do you know what I’ve been feeling? That he would have made a better father for my daughter.’ ” Nisreen smiled sadly. “It was so unlike Hana— magical thinking, impossible in life. If she’d chosen this man, she would have no Munira. And Munira is all to her.

  “What it told me was that her sense of loss was so deep, and her worries for Munira so pronounced, that she wished to indulge herself in fantasy. It made me sadder than anything else she could have told me.”

  David could find no words. He sat there as a series of realizations overcame him, transforming the way he understood every word Hana had said to him, and everything she had done, since the day that she had first called him. Looking at him askance, Nisreen inquired, “You knew this man, perhaps?”

  David managed a smile. “You’re her best friend, Nisreen. You know how private she can be. Especially about something like this.”

  Nisreen nodded, satisfied. In that moment, David understood how she had missed what, to a woman so perceptive, might otherwise have been obvious. Nisreen could not imagine David as Hana’s lover, because David was a Jew.

  20

  In a haze, David checked into the Park Hotel and shut himself in his room.

  He lay on the bed for hours, barely moving but unable to sleep. Ever since Hana’s plea for help, he had distrusted her—not merely because of doubts about her innocence but because of misgivings about who she had become. It was absurd to care for her after thirteen years, he had argued to himself, and infantile to believe she might still care for him—if, indeed, she had ever cared as much as he. David had been wary, distant, resentful of her impact on his life, uncertain of his judgment as a lawyer and a man. And now Hana’s closest friend had transformed his understanding of her.

  Vainly, he wished that he could reach Hana—just to hear her voice, and to ask about her confessions to Nisreen. Instead, he reran the tape in his head that had recorded their every meeting—her words, her expressions, her tone of voice. Now her questions about Carole, and even her hesitations, were illuminated. She had loved him at Harvard; she cared for him still; as a wife and mother facing imprisonment or execution, she was at least as conflicted about her feelings as David.

  But this new understanding could not change his doubts about her innocence—although, intuitively, Hana’s feelings for him put her ability to pass the polygraph in a better light. Yet t
he evidence against her remained intact, and his chief rebuttal—that, as a mother, Hana would not risk involvement—assumed that her love for Munira necessarily equated with innocence. One fact could change this assumption overnight.

  Again and again, David’s thoughts returned to the murders of Markis and Lev, and to his own role as catalyst. He was still uncertain of his competence, ignorant of the dimensions or design of the conspiracy he imagined, and fearful that if he came closer to the truth someone else—perhaps he himself—might die. Turning out the light, he knew only that when he awoke he would feel more confused, caught between his doubts about Hana’s innocence and his knowledge that the one thing he was certain that she had concealed was her feelings for David himself.

  Zahi Farhat, a principal adviser to Marwan Faras, sat with David in the lush garden of his villa in the hills above Ramallah, reflecting the affluence that had settled on the leaders of Fatah and aroused so much resentment among ordinary Palestinians—especially men like Saeb Khalid. “They are soft and corrupt,” Saeb had remarked with scorn. “They forget what we brought them back to do.” That Saeb had meant not merely the establishment of a functioning government but the extinction of Israel had not been lost on David.

  A courtly man whose gray hair and glasses added to his somewhat professorial appearance, Farhat was certainly better company than Saeb. And his importance to David had been emphasized by Nabil Ashawi: if he chose, Farhat might arrange access to leaders of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. As he poured David tea from a china carafe, Farhat spoke of Ben-Aron’s assassins. “These refugee camps,” he said with a melancholy expression, “are such a problem. And now these two alumni may have pulled everything down around them—not just Ben-Aron but Fatah, Al Aqsa, and, of course, any hope of peace. While Hamas profits, Marwan Faras and the rest of us are hanging on by our fingernails.”