Exile: a novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

turned back on itself. “Of course,” he parried. “That’s why so many Jews joined our civil rights movement. For that matter, it’s why I asked you to lunch.”
    Eyebrows raised, Hana gave him a penetrant look. “Yes,” she said, “why did you?”
    “Because I was curious about you. Why did you come?”
    “Because I was curious about why you asked me. Though I expected that you saw me as some mildly exotic novelty, like encountering a chin-chilla in one of your petting zoos.”
    At once, David grasped the deeper truth beneath her cleverness: her facility with words and images concealed an isolation far deeper than she chose to confess. Only candor, he decided, had a chance of piercing her defenses.
    “When I met you,” he said, “I saw a particular woman. A beautiful one, which never hurts. A woman who might despise me for what I am. But also one with a life so different from mine that I wanted to know more about it. Besides, as I said, I have the time.”
    She studied him. “So why not ask Saeb?”
    “Because he’s not a beautiful woman.”
    Hana laughed, a clear, pleasing trill free of rancor that took him by surprise. “And because,” David finished, “with all respect to your fiancé, I don’t think ten lunches in a row would make the slightest difference to him.”
    A young Chinese waiter arrived to take their order. When he left, Hanawas gazing at the table with a veiled look of contemplation. “So,” she inquired at length, “what do you want to know about me?”
    “To start, what you envision as your home.”
    “We have no home,” she said bitterly. “The refugee camp is an open sewer, a burial ground.” She paused, draining the disdain from her voice. “Our home is in the Lower Galilee. It’s built on a hillside, surrounded by the olive trees my grandfather planted, with a system of pipes and drains that capture the rainwater and channel it, and a cistern for the house. The house itself is stone. Its ceiling is reinforced with steel beams, and there are four rooms—a room to gather in, and bedrooms for my father and my uncles, for my aunts, and for my grandparents. There is no kitchen. My grandmother cooked outside, and they ate from plates they shared—”
    “How can you know all this?”
    Hana’s face softened. “My grandfather described it for us, countless times, before he died. Stone by stone, like Flaubert described the village in Madame Bovary. But my grandparents’ village was real, not imagined.”
    David wondered about this—what memory embellished, time destroyed. “And Saeb?” he asked.
    “Is from the same village. Not literally, of course—in 1948, our parents were children. But their memories are as vivid as my grandfather’s.”
    Perhaps their memories are your grandfather’s, David thought but did not say. Instead, he inquired, “How did you come to Lebanon?”
    Hana summoned a smile that signaled her forbearance. “Another accident of the history you have so little use for, and of people who have little use for us. After hearing of the massacre at Deir Yassin, my grandparents fled to Jordan. So did hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. The war in 1948 brought still more, as did the war of 1967. But all those Palestinians challenged the power of King Hussein. And so the Jordanian army shelled our camps, and drove our fighters into Lebanon.” Her voice held quiet anger. “From which, as a by-product of the cleansing operation Saeb mentioned, the Israelis forced Arafat and the PLO into exile in Tunis, claiming that their acts of ‘terror’ threatened northern Israel.
    “Now they are gathered on the West Bank, still occupied by Israeli soldiers. My parents still wait in Lebanon. Only Saeb and I were able to leave for the West Bank, and then the Zionists closed Birzeit University before we could study there. And so,” Hana continued with a smile that was no smile, “with the help of the refugee agency of the United Nations, Israel’s creator, and some