“That’s what the bastards thought when they ran away and left me,” her brother noted. Six times Kamal had taken a squad of fedayeen out of Fatah Land in Southern Lebanon to rocket a kibbutz, mine a road or ambush a passing car. On the seventh, an unsuccessful effort to fire a Katushka rocket into the Haifa oil refineries, his squad had been intercepted by an Israeli patrol. A cluster of well-placed grenades had wounded Kama] and scattered his men.
“You were lucky the Israelis didn’t finish you off when they found you,”
Laila remarked.
“Luck has nothing to do with it. It’s because you can’t interrogate a dead fedayeen.” The Israeli patrol had rushed Kamal to the prisoners’ ward of Tel Aviv’s Tal Hashomer Hospital. There he had lain in a coma for a week until the medical skill of his captors and the vitality of his own constitution had combined to save him.
He picked up his beige jacket and drew from its pocket the pendant-shaped vial three inches long that had been in his second airline bag. Laila gasped at the sight of the pale-yellow fluid in its bulbous base.
“My jasminel”
Kamal nodded. His sister grabbed the vial, plucked out its stopper and thrust it to her nostrils. She gulped its odor the way a suffocating man might gasp at the first rush of air flowing from an oxygen mask. Laila closed her eyes. A world, a forgotten world, swam back at her as the pungent scent invaded her senses. Abdul’s perfume shop in the souk of Old Jerusalem, a dark cavern of olfactory miracles, its air so heavy with musky smells it seemed she could almost caress it between her fingertips.
“How did you-” she started.
“One of our people who was in Jerusalem on a mission brought it out,” Kamal explained. Illicit traffic across the Israeli-Jordanian border was something Kamal understood. He had been an illegal export himself, hidden at the bottom of a truckload of oranges after his escape from the prisoners’ ward at Tal Hashomer Hospital.
Laila clutched the vial to her breast. “Dear, sweet Abdul,” she said.
Her brother started at her phrase. Those blue eyes of his, the eyes that, the family had always joked, were the legacy of an errant Crusader knight’s dalliance with a member of the Dajani clan, seemed to protrude from their sockets, their delicate robin’s-egg cast darkened by some interior storm.
“Don’t be in a rush to use up that jasmine,” he said. “It happens to be the last your dear, sweet Abdul ever sold. He’s dead.”
Laila gasped.
“He was executed for treason.”
His sister looked unbelievingly at the vial in her hands, then at her brother who had brought it for her.
“May I have some tea?” he asked.
Too stunned to speak, Laila turned to the kitchen alcove behind her and prepared to light the gas stove.
Her brother continued. “I’ve come to see you because I need your help.”
Laila spun, the match still sputtering in her hand. She had found her voice. “Why? Is there some poor grocer down the street you want killed?”
The tone of her brother’s reply was as sharp as the snap of a breaking bone. “Laila, we never kill without a reason. He sold two of our people to the Jews.” He paused, throttling down his anger before he continued. “1
want you to convince Whalid to help us in a very important operation.”
“Why me? Why don’t you talk to him? He’s your brother, too, isn’t he?”
“Because Whalid and I don’t talk to each other. We only argue. And I’m interested in getting his help, not winning an argument.” Kamal got up and moved to the window overlooking the clinic across the street.
“Whalid would never understand what I’ve been doing.” Kamal looked out the window, almost melancholy, groping for a phrase, for a thought to explain himself to his sister. “The end justifies the means.” He uttered the words as though they were an original thought he had just discovered, the absolution of a new age designed to be pronounced before rather than after confession. “For me they do. Not for him. Except in those laboratories of his where everything’s an abstraction.” He gestured with his head to the crowded street below. “Never down there where it matters. He’d call me a criminal,” he said softly. “I’d call him a coward. After five minutes we wouldn’t have anything left to say to each other.”
“You never did have much to say to each other,” Laila remarked. “Long before he went into those laboratories of his and you …” She paused, searching for a word.
Kamal provided it. “Became a terrorist. Or a patriot. The line between them is sometimes thin.” Kamal walked back across the room, gesturing as he did to the kitchen. “You were going to make me a cup of tea, remember?”
Laila set the kettle on her stove and came back to the sitting room. “He’s changed, you know. He’s more French than the French are now. What happened to us, our parents, Palestine-all that just seems to have faded away like it was a part of a life he lived in another incarnation. He’s like everyone else. The car. The house. The cleaning woman on Thursdays. His work. His wife. A happily married man, no?”
“We’re not going to ask him to give up all that, Laila,” Kamal’s voice was calm, almost serene. “But he’s not like everyone else. Not for us at least.”
His words sent a tremor of apprehension through Laila, confirming what she had suspected from the moment Kamal had mentioned their elder brother.
“It’s about his work-what you’re after?”
Kamal nodded.
The kettle whistled. Laila rose. She walked to the alcove, her steps paced off in the slowed rhythm of someone whose mind is lost in thought. So that’s what it is, she told herself. After all the years, after all the rumors, the angry late-night discussions, they were going to do it now.
She set the cups on the table beside Kamal’s chair, the noonday sun highlighting as she did the rich rolls of auburn hair cascading down to her shoulders. She shivered inadvertently as the enormity of what her brother contemplated overwhelmed her.
“How in God’s name will we ever get him to help us?” she asked.
Outside, the harsh bleat of an ambulance rushing toward the clinic across the street pierced the noonday quiet.
Laila Dajani’s face lit up at the sight of the familiar figure advancing toward her through the crowded waiting room of the Marseilles airport.
Her brother Whalid still walked with his splay-footed gait. John Wayne, she had always thought, ambling away from his horse in an old Western.
As he drew closer, something else struck Laila about her elder brother.
My God, she thought, he’s put on weight!
“Frangoise feeds you well,” she laughed.
Selfconsciously her brother drew in his stomach. “You’re right,” he said.
Smiling broadly, Whalid led Laila out of the airport to his Renault 16
parked in the airport’s reserved parking area, opposite the arrival lounge.
He owed that privilege to a yellow-and-green sticker in one corner of his windshield. It was a security pass to the Nuclear Research Center at Cadarache, the heart of France’s atomic-energy program and, above all, the developmental work on the Super-Phenix, the breeder reactor which France counted on to replace the world’s first generation of nuclear reactors.
Whalid Dajani was an expert on the bizarre behavior patterns of one of the most precious and dangerous elements on earth, plutonium. His doctorate thesis for the University of California’s Department of Nuclear Engineering, “A Revised Projection of Neutron Release Across the Plutonium Isotope Spectrum,” had been published in the March 1970 Bulletin of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and stamped him as one of the most brilliant young physicists of his generation. A paper he had delivered on the same subject at a Paris forum in November 1973 had prompted the French to offer him a key position in the Phenix program.