The following is an excerpt from the book Exile
by Richard North Patterson
Published by Henry Holt and Company; January 2007;$26.00US/$32.00CAN;
978-0-8050-7947-0
Copyright © 2007 Richard North Patterson
1
Until Hana Arif called him after thirteen years of silence, and he knew
whose voice it was so quickly that he felt time stop, David Wolfe's life
was
proceeding as he had long intended.
Except for the spring of Hana, as he still thought of it, David had always
had a plan. He had planned to excel in prep school as a student and at
s****ts, and did. After college, he had planned to go to Harvard Law, and
he
had. He had planned to become a prosecutor and then enter politics, and
now
he was.
That this last was proceeding even more smoothly than he could have hoped
was due to his fiancée, Carole Shorr, who, though not planned on, had
entered his life at least in part because her plans meshed so well with
his.
Now their plan was the same: marriage, two children, and a run for
Congress,
which continued the more or less straight line of David's life since his
early teens, when he had realized that his dark good looks, wry humor, and
quickness of mind were matched by a self-discipline that wrung every last
particle out of the talents he possessed. Only once -- with Hana -- had
nothing mattered but another person, an experience so frightening,
exhilarating, and, in the end, scarifying that he had endured it only by
clinging to his plans until they became who he was. It was a sin, David
had
come to believe, to be surprised by your own life.
This conclusion did not make him callous, or disdainful of others. The
experience of Hana had taught him too much about his own humanness. And he
knew that his self-discipline and gift for detachment were part of the
mixed
blessings, perhaps intensified by Hana, passed down by his parents -- a
psychiatrist and an English professor who shared a certain intellectual
severity, both of them descendants of German Jews and so thoroughly
assimilated that their banked emotions reminded him of the privileged
WASPs
he had encountered when his parents had dispatched him from San Francisco
to
prep school in Connecticut, with little more sentiment than he had come to
expect.
All this made him value and even envy the deep emotionality of Carole and
her father, Harold -- the Holocaust survivor and his daughter, for whom
their very existence was to be celebrated. So that this morning, when he
and
Carole had selected a wedding date after making love, and her eyes had
filled with tears, he understood at once that her joy was not only for
herself but for Harold, who would celebrate their wedding day on behalf of
all the ghosts whose deaths in Hitler's camps -- as unfathomable to Harold
as his own survival -- required him to invest his heart and soul in each
gift life gave him, of which his only child was the greatest.
So David and Carole had made love again. Afterward, she lay against him,
smiling, her breasts touching his chest, the tendrils of her brunette
curls
grazing his shoulder. And he had forgotten, for a blissful time, the other
woman, smaller and darker, in his memory always twenty-three, with whom
making love had been to lose himself.
Thus the David Wolfe who answered his telephone was firmly rooted in the
present and, blessedly, his future. He was, he had told himself once more,
a
fortunate man, gifted with genetics that, with no effort on his part, had
given him intelligence, a level disposition, and a face on which every
feature was pronounced -- strong cheekbones, ridged nose, cleft chin --
plus
cool blue eyes to make it one that people remembered and television
flattered. To his natural height and athleticism he added fitness,
enforced
by a daily regime of weights and aerobic exercise.
His current life was a similar fusion of luck, self-discipline, and
careful
planning. That morning, upon reaching his clean and sparely decorated law
office, David had flipped his desk calendar, looking past the orderly
notations of the lawyer and would-be politician -- the hearings,
depositions, and trial dates of a practice that commingled civil law with
criminal defense; the lunches, evening speeches, and meetings of civic
groups that marked the progress of a Democratic congressman-in-waiting --
and lit on the wedding date he and Carole had selected. It would be an
occasion. Harold Shorr would spare no expense, and this served Carole's
interest in a day that combined deep celebration with an op****tunity for
David's further advancement in the Jewish community that would become his
financial base in politics.
This was fine with David: Carole's penthouse was a focal point for
Democratic and Jewish causes, and he had become accustomed to Carole
filling
dates with social op****tunities both onerous and interesting, the latter
represented by the dinner Carole was hosting that evening for the Israeli
prime minister, Amos Ben-Aron. This one of Carole's many dinners promised
to
be particularly intriguing. Formerly an obdurate hard-liner, Ben-Aron was
now barnstorming America to rally sup****t for his controversial-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 reopening 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." Tem****arily, 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. He's just as committed to Palestine, but more radical. And
very
much more Islamic." She stopped there. Is it such a good idea, David
wanted
to ask, to put Saeb and me at the same table once again? But to question
this would be to intimate that to Saeb, and perhaps to Hana, David
occupied
the lingering psychic space that Hana did for him. Then she spoke again.
"Perhaps you're right," she said simply, answering the question he had not
asked. "You are well, David?"
''I'm well. Very." He felt a brief twinge, his last memory of Hana. "And
you?"
"Yes. Enough." Once more she sounded hesitant, perhaps rueful that she had
called. "And you've become a trial lawyer as you wished?"
"Yes."
"And a good one, I am sure."
"Good enough. I've yet to lose a case -- mainly because I spent all my
career until last year as a prosecutor, and prosecutors try the cases they
can win. Now I'm a defense lawyer with my own practice -- me and one
associate -- working as tribune for the mostly guilty. So I'm overdue for
a
loss."
"I hope not, if only for the sake of your next client." Her voice softened
again. "Your fiancée, does she have a name?"
"Carole. Carole Shorr."
"What does she do?"
"Good works, mainly. She has a master's degree in social work. But her
father's quite wealthy, so she's found her way into causes she cares
deeply
about -- raising money for the Democratic Party, chairing the board of a
group that combats violence against women and children. A lot of time put
into Jewish charities and promoting ties between Israel and the United
States." He paused briefly. "Without, I might add, despising Palestinians.
All she wants for Israel is a stable peace, and an end to killing."
Hana was briefly silent. "So," she said gently. ''A nice Jewish girl, and
a
rich one at that. Things often end up the way they're supposed to, I
think."
There was a moment in time for me, David thought, when "supposed to" did
not
count. Had it ever been like that, he wondered now, for Hana? Then he
heard
his own silence.
"So here we are," he said. ''I'm happy about Munira. If there was ever a
graduate of Harvard Law School who should downstream her DNA, it's you."
After an instant, Hana laughed briefly. "Then congratulations to us both,
David." Her voice abruptly sobered. "Though I worry she has seen too much
on
the West Bank, too much oppression, too much death. I can feel her growing
too old, and too scarred, too quickly. The Zionist occupation has been
criminal -- generation after generation, they are always with us. Ben-Aron
most of all."
David did not respond.
Hana paused, seemingly uncertain of what to say next, then retrieved a
note
of warmth. "I'm glad to know you're well. Take care, David."
''And you."
"Oh, I will." A last moment of hesitation. "Good-bye, David."
"Good-bye, Hana."
Slowly, David put down the telephone, his morning utterly transformed.
Copyright © 2007 Richard North Patterson
Author
Richard North Patterson is the author of thirteen previous bestselling and
critically acclaimed novels. Formerly a trial lawyer, Patterson was the
SEC's liaison to the Watergate special prosecutor, has served on the
boards
of several Wa****ngton advocacy groups, and is currently the chairman of
Common Cause, the grassroots citizens lobby. He lives in San Francisco and
on Martha's Vineyard with his partner, Dr. Nancy Clair.
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