Exile: a novel Read Free Page A

last-ditch plan to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinians, with whom it had too long been locked in a violent and corrosive struggle—about which, as it happened, David knew a little more than he could have admitted to Carole without inflicting needless wounds, or re-opening his own.
    Dismissing the thought, David gazed down at his wedding date. Perhaps the prime minister, David mused with a smile, would agree to serve as their best man. No doubt Carole had considered this; in her reckoning, David’s only flaw was a shortfall of Jewishness. Not that this was obvious: a gentile former girlfriend, studying David’s face after lovemaking, had remarked, “You look like an Israeli film star, if there is such a thing.” Then, as now, David had no idea; he had never been to Israel. No doubt Carole would change this, as well.
    Still light of spirit, he had just looked up from the calendar to his view of the San Francisco skyline when the telephone rang.
    He glanced at the caller ID panel. But the number it displayed was a jumble that made no sense to him—a cell phone number, he supposed, perhaps foreign. Intrigued, he answered it.
    “David?”
    Her voice, precise and soft at once, caused the briefest delay in his response.
    “Yes?”
    “David.” The repetition of his name was quieter yet. “It’s Hana.”
    “Hana,” he blurted. He stood up, half out of reflex, half from shock. “What on earth...”
    “I know.” She hesitated. “I know. I mean, it’s been long.”
    “Thirteen years.”
    “Thirteen years. And now I’m visiting here. San Francisco.”
    David managed to laugh. “Just like that.”
    “Not exactly. Saeb is relentlessly tracking Amos Ben-Aron, pointing out the manifest defects and incongruities of this new plan of his—perhaps more sharply than our American hosts are happy with.”
    She said this as if it were logical, expected. “So you two are married.”
    “Yes. And we—or I—decided it was time for Munira to see the United States.” This time it was Hana who laughed. “I’m a mother, David.”
    There was something in the timbre of her laugh that David could not define—perhaps simply the acknowledgment that she was not the young woman he had known, the lover he might still remember.
    “It happens,” he answered. “Or so I’m told.”
    “Not you?”
    “Not yet. But I’m getting married in seven months. According to the conventions, children follow.” Temporarily, he lost his place in the conversation. “So how is it, being a parent?”
    This time it was Hana who seemed, for a moment, distracted. “Munira,” she answered dryly, “is my own parents’ revenge. She’s bright, willful, and filled with the passion of her own ideas. Sometimes I think she will never imagine that I was such a person. Or experience the kind of amusement, pride, and chagrin a mother feels when she looks at her daughter and sees herself.”
    Though he had begun to pace, David smiled a little. “So she’s beautiful, as well.”
    “Beautiful?” The word seemed to take Hana by surprise. David recalled that she had often seemed unaware of her own impact—at least until she looked at him and saw it in his eyes. “Oh,” she added lightly, “of course.”
    With this, neither seemed to know what to say. “This is all right?” she asked.
    “What?”
    “To call you.”
    “Of course. I’m glad you did.”
    She hesitated. “Because I thought we might have lunch.”
    David stood still. “The three of us?” he asked at length.
    Another pause. “Or four of us, counting your wife-to-be.”
    She tried to infuse this with a tone of generosity, including in her proposal a woman she did not seem to have expected.
    “How is Saeb?” David parried.
    “Much as you would recall him. We are both professors at Birzeit University, near Ramallah—it’s been some time, you may recall, since the Israeli army last shut us down. Saeb is still brilliant, and still angry. Perhaps angrier than me now.