This time it was his sister’s turn to erupt. “A better world!” she said scornfully. “Why does Qaddafi want the bomb? Because the Israelis have it.
You know damn well they do. Do you think they got it to build a better world with? Like hell! To use on us if they have to.”
Her brother remained impassive. “Yes, I know they have it.”
“And you can sit here beside me, admit the Israelis have it, and still tell me you won’t help your own people, your own people who’ve been trampled on like no other people in the world, to get it?”
“I can. And I am, because I feel a commitment to something higher than Palestine. Or the cause. Or whatever you want to call it.”
“Higher than to your own flesh and blood? Your own dead father?”
Brother and sister were silent for a moment, each spent by the intensity of their argument. The midday sun was warm now and the stucco houses across the square seemed to radiate a terra-rosa glow in the bright light. The knot of hangers-on around the boules game had thickened, and the sound of their muttered comments lapped at the edge of the square, wavelets of a gentle sea sliding along a beach.
“The answer is no, Laila. I’m not going to do it.”
A sense of emptiness, of despair filled Laila. For a second she felt physically ill.
A pair of boys, perhaps twelve years old, set their skateboards onto the hard-packed square. In an instant, they were swinging through it with the gentle grace of birds cruising a summer sky. Laila glanced at her brother’s forearm. On the inside of his wrist, just above the steel band of his Rolex Submariner watch, was a tattoo, a blue serpent entwined around a heart pierced by a dagger. Laila leaned over to her brother and slowly, almost sensually, scratched the surface of the tattoo with her crimson fingernail.
“And this?” she asked.
He looked at her, furious. That tattoo was a souvenir of the most painful moment of his life, the death of his father after their exile from Jerusalem in 1968. The day of his funeral, he and Kamal had gone to a Saudi Arabian tattoo artist in the souks of Beirut. The Saudi had fixed that design on the flesh of each brother’s forearm: a pierced heart for their lost father, a serpent for the hatred they bore those responsible for his death, a dagger for the vengeance they had sworn to obtain. Then they had sworn together a vow from the fourth chapter of the Koran to use their lives to avenge their father’s death under pain of losing them if they faltered in their pursuit.
Laila saw his muscles twitching. At least, she thought, I’ve given a face to the people, to the cause, I’m pleading for.
“You got out, Whalid,” she said. Her voice was tender; there was no hint of reproach in its tone. “You’ve been able to forget here with your new life, your wife. But how about the ones who didn’t? Are they to be a people without a home forever? Without an address? Is our own father’s body never to go home again?”
Whalid looked at the tattoo under his watchband, glowering at it as though somehow his glare might erase its stigmata from his flesh.
“What am I supposed to be?” His voice was an angry, sibilant hiss. “A prisoner of this skin because I was born with it? Do I have to go against my reason, against the things I believe in, just because I was born in a place called Palestine thirty-eight years ago?”
Laila waited along and thoughtful moment before answering. “Yes, Whalid,” she said. “You do. I do. We all do.”
After lunch with Whalid’s wife, Frangoise, brother and sister drove back to the airport in silence. Laila went immediately to the checkin counter to register for her return flight to Paris. When she had finished, she walked across the airport lounge toward the newsstand where Whalid scanned the headlines of the evening papers. His dark eyes seemed distant and melancholy, shutters turning his vision back into some interior world of his own. He’s understood, Laila thought. He’s miserable, but he knows he has no choice. She laid a hand on his elbow. “I’ll tell them it’s all right. You’ll do it.”
Whalid flicked the pages of a magazine on the kiosk before him, an unconscious effort to postpone a few seconds the terrible decision his sister’s words bad thrust on him.
“No, Laila,” he said finally. “Tell them I won’t do it.”
His sister felt her legs tremble. She thought for an instant she would retch on the airport floor.
“Whalid,” she whispered. “You’ve got to. You have to.”
Whalid shook his head. The sound of his own voice saying “No” had dispelled his lingering indecision. “I said ‘No,’ Laila, and I meant it.”
Laila was pale, her eyes blinking, unfocused. He doesn’t understand, she thought. Or if he does, he doesn’t give a damn. “Whalid, you must. You must.”
He shook his head. Laila understood. There was no appealing his decision now. To her horror, she realized that she had failed. Fingers trembling, she opened her pocketbook and took out a second envelope, this one much smaller. “They told me to give you this if you said no,” she said, pressing the envelope into her brother’s hands.
Whalid began to open it. Her fingers closed over his. “Wait until I’ve left.” Laila pressed her cheek, damp with tears, against her brother’s. “Ma salaam,” she whispered. Then she was gone.
Whalid watched from the terrace of the airport as his sister crossed the tarmac to her waiting flight. She did not turn back. As she disappeared into the 727’s rear hatch, he opened the envelope clutched in his hands.
Glancing at the single sheet of paper it contained, he staggered. He had recognized instantly both the verse from the fourth chapter of the Koran and the handwriting in which it was written.
“And if they turn back from their vow,” it read, “take them and kill them, wherever ye find them.”
On Sunday, March 3, 1977, explaining to Frangoise that he had family business in Paris, Whalid Dajani boarded the Mistral, the French railroad’s crack express, for the French capital. Shortly before midnight that evening, the doorbell’s raw screech shattered the quiet of Frangoise Dajani’s darkened bedroom. At the sight of the three shadowy figures gathered on her doorstep, the identification card with its official tricolor slashes thrust sharply at her half-closed eyes, Frangoise gasped. Oh my God, she thought. There’s been an accident. He’s dead.
The three agents of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire pushed abruptly past her into the living room.
“What is it?” she cried. “Has something happened to my husband?”
Ignoring her, two of the agents headed upstairs toward her bedroom.
“Where are you going? What do you think you’re doing?” she shrieked after them.
The leader of the trio, a stout florid man, grabbed her by the shoulders.
“Get dressed,” he ordered. “Immediately. Pack a bag with whatever toilet articles you will need for the next seventy-two hours.”
Franc oise protested. The agent reached into his pocket for the only explanation he was prepared to offer her, a brief typewritten order from a juge d’instruction, authorizing the DST to detain her for seventy-two hours.
Frangoise moved toward the telephone. “I’m going to call my father,” she announced angrily.
The agent reached the phone first. He locked the receiver into its cradle with his hand. “No, madame, no calls.”