Exile: a novel Read Online Free PDF

other, darker memories. That, after coughing, Harold flinched as though remembering those days and nights in Auschwitz when the Nazis might shoot him for being sick. That he carried within him a deep silence that could consume him for hours. That Carole sensed that each new day was a surprise because no one wished to kill him.
    It was this that infused her memories with so much meaning. Harold Shorr’s consuming quest was to give Carole a better life, one of warmth and safety. Her wedding would be the culmination of his most cherished, most wistful dreams.
    So when David responded to her question, his tone was one of wry affection. “Lunch? Of course I’d love it. You knew that even before you didn’t ask.”
    Hanging up, David smiled. Once more, he found himself reflecting that though Harold’s wounds touched both father and daughter, Harold had wrested from a horror he could not fully articulate the cocoon of goodness that defined who Carole was. And then, sadly, David thought again of a twenty-three-year-old woman, dark and lovely, whose wounds he could never heal, and she could never quite transcend.

4     

I t was during their first lunch that David sensed the vulnerability beneath the articulate fierceness Hana Arif presented to the world.
    At Hana’s suggestion, they met at a Chinese restaurant off campus, notable for its lack of clientele. As Hana glanced around the restaurant, empty save for a professional-appearing man and a pretty, much younger woman who looked as furtive as her companion, David realized that Hana feared being seen alone with a man—especially a Jew. It was a feeling of otherness David seldom had.
    “Why,” he inquired mildly, “am I feeling like a secret agent? Is one of us not supposed to be here?”
    The question seemed to deepen her unease. “It’s not like I’m a prisoner,” she said. “But I am Muslim, and Saeb and I are to be married.”
    For an instant, David felt a foolish disappointment. Casually, he asked, “Was that your decision?”
    Almost imperceptibly, she stiffened. “I’m not a prisoner,” she repeated. “But there are conventions. Within reason, I try to respect them. Saeb wouldn’t understand this lunch, and it’s not important that I make him.”
    David sifted the conflicting intimations of this answer: that David himself was unimportant; that, nonetheless, she was committing a small act of defiance which caused her real discomfort. “How has it been for you?” he asked. “Harvard, I mean.”
    David watched her ponder the question, and then, it seemed, conceal Hana the woman behind Hana the Palestinian. “We feel isolated. There are fifteen Arab students at the law school, and not all of them care for Palestinians. And so many of our classmates are Jews—”
    “Yes,” David said. “We’re everywhere.”
    She regarded him with a smile that did not touch her eyes. “Perhaps you think I’m anti-Semitic.”
    He returned her smile in kind. “I wouldn’t know.”
    After a moment, Hana shrugged. “At least you don’t assume I am. But if I say I don’t like Zionism, people think it means I hate all Jews.
    “My torts professor, a Jew, saves the hardest questions for me. The day after the debate you saw, another student came into that class, sat beside me, and put a miniature Israeli flag on the desk in front of him.” Her voice became both weary and sardonic. “I suppose God had made that desk another grant to the Jewish people. But that day all I wanted was to sit in class and learn whatever I could.” Pausing, she shrugged again, her voice softening. “I didn’t start the Holocaust, and I don’t deny that it happened. But the American Jews I meet are completely ignorant of the history you would like me to set aside. Sometimes I think Jews are so consumed by anti-Semitism that they can only see their own suffering and loss, not that of others.”
    David repressed his first rejoinder—that Hana’s plaint, even were it true, could be