CHAPTER

9

THE BACK OF his wife’s head whisked by, a well-sprayed wren’s tail. It was the morning after the party and she was reassembling herself, one cosmetic at a time. Irritation drifted from Carole. How she’d changed! In the beginning, there’d been so much desire they couldn’t keep away from each other. The memory made Hafez smile. Atom by atom, like a piece of wood petrified by stone, anger had displaced passion.

“How could you?” she was saying. “Really. How could you, Hafez? That horrible . . .”

“Hayati,” he called her. My life. “But I had nothing to do with the invitations list.”

She knew! Well, of course she did. She caught him every single time. There was so little to catch! Hafez didn’t have affairs; he stole kisses. So innocent. He loved kisses, slow and luxurious and longing for more. But you couldn’t have more, which was what made them devastating.

Last night at the King’s dinner, Carole had drawn a bead on Mrs. Waleeda. Why, she wondered aloud, was this unknown seated nearer the head of the table than Hafez, or indeed, the wife of Hafez? Who was she? Why was she seated next to Amani? What was the meaning of this? Hafez himself wasn’t sure. Rafi and Mrs. Bosa had orchestrated the seating chart—with just a few incursions from Hafez. He didn’t think he’d arranged to seat them together, but what an odd coincidence—especially for someone who didn’t believe in coincidence. He wondered if some twist in his imagination, some imp of the perverse, had led to this arrangement. It was said that the guilty wish to be caught—the notion of acquiring a strict moral conscience appealed to him about as much as that of acquiring dementia.

Now Carole turned, hands on her hips, and speared him with her dark-blue look. “You may not do the seating charts, but you suggest. Hayati.” She threw the word back at him like a cheap ring. “You call up the social secretary and say, ‘Invite my niece, my brother, and oh, how about that little number Madame X? In the painted-on dress?’ ”

Madame X? Madame X, he liked that.

“Ya wardi.” Oh, my flower. “But you’re so wrong. I would never, ever—” He followed her into the bathroom, where she was rubbing her face with a cream.

“Ya wardi,” she muttered. “Hafez, you are wonderful at what you do, but you are always and forever looking for an angle. You attend the King’s parties for favors. And networking.” She ticked items off on her fingers. “And to see what the queen is wearing. But you. You won’t even taste the soup unless there’s some advantage to it.”

“Is it lentil?”

“You invite your niece to show off; an Israeli to prove you’re in support of the peace process. And if there’s some little—little social climber that you can lean over and leer at—well, how could you resist?”

Now she was wiping the cream away with a hand towel. Why this exercise, with the cream and the towel and the more creams to come?

“But it wears on one, ya albi.” My heart. “It gets old. I suppose your one redeeming virtue—if we can call it redeeming”—she splashed water over her face—“is that you’re too self-absorbed to have an affair.”

He snaked his arms around her from behind and peered shyly at her reflection over her shoulder. She didn’t meet his eyes but let the water drip down into her pale-green dressing gown. “There is no one to fall for but you, my clementine.”

A vertical line between her eyebrows. “Ha. Ha-ha.”

“I’ve fallen down an entire staircase for you,” he said. “I’ve broken every bone in my body. There is no more falling for anyone. There are no more bones.”

She began brushing her hair with vigor. The bristles made a scraping sound. “Funny, funny Valentine.” He watched her put down the brush and start rubbing some clear fluid into her skin. He kissed the side of her sticky cheek. She shot him a look. “Did you notice, by the way, your brother is looking quite a bit fitter than you or Farouq? Perhaps America isn’t quite so barbaric after all.”

He chuckled and stroked his stomach: he’d eaten two slices of birthday cake yesterday, necessitating more insulin, necessitating a late-late snack, resulting in heartburn for the remainder of the night. “That isn’t saying much.”

“Wouldn’t it be funny,” she said, putting down the lotion, “if you’d invited your brother to this duel and he beat the King? Imagine that.” She walked out of his arms, wiped her hands on another towel. “That really would be funny.”

Ah, still angry.

But leave it to Carole. Connecting all the dots, she finally worked out that Lubna Waleeda was at the dinner to stand in for the archbishop, who wasn’t feeling well. Her connection to the archbishop—not to mention that Lubna’s professional contacts, plus her wealth and old family name—gave her a superior ranking. Hafez wondered what Lubna and Amani had discussed. At one point in the evening, he thought he saw them looking in his direction. It was fortunate that Lubna was married—fortunate for everyone! Extra incentive for all involved parties to stay discreet. If their special relationship were discovered, it would go far worse for her.

Carole bent over the enamel jewelry box on her dresser, poking through it with her fingertips. “By the way. I gave Amani my necklace.”

“Very good.” He rolled back, crossed his arms comfortably. “Did I ever mention I think of her as my intellectual heir—”

“The Nefertiti. The one you gave me.”

He uncrossed his arms.

“I didn’t think you would mind,” she said briskly, and swept out of the room.

SHE GAVE AWAY that necklace? His father, Munif, had given it to his mother, Natalia, when they married. It was part of Hafez’s inheritance—what there was of it. To his knowledge, it was the only gift Munif had ever given his wife.

Back then, Munif Hamdan was tall and lean, with tumbling locks, a full mustache, eyes black and staring. True Jordanian, he called himself. Dissolute, lazy, and abusive toward the mother of his children. He was not, Hafez supposed, the most wonderful of fathers. And Munif’s preference for his youngest son hadn’t escaped Hafez. He’d named his eldest boy for a poet; number two, Farouq, for a king; but Gabriel—originally Jibreel—for a goddamn angel. Oh, he knew his father had always held Hafez in esteem. But esteem is not love. Sometimes it was even distaste. Hafez was too ambitious, too hungry—right from the start. He was a foreign element to his father. He remembered how Munif marveled at the teachers’ reports, squinting and turning them over. But Jibreel—so playful, so quick to laugh—Munif wreathed in kisses.

“I am a true Jordanian!” Hafez hears.

“True Jordanian!” Munif bawling drunkenly, nearly flat on his back, sprawled on the thin cushions, one hand beating his chest.

When he was younger, Munif had panache, an insouciance, that Hafez found irresistible and tried to emulate. His father’s eyes, penetrating, heavy-lidded, caught the imagination. He was able to recite verses of the pre-Islamic poets as he followed his sheep through night-filled fields.

But his mother. He blamed her for bringing Munif indoors. She hired Bedouin to tend the fields and animals. She would not be married to a nomad. She was a thinker, collector, tender of books. She’d grown up in Bethlehem, wearing good wool dresses and shoes her auntie sent her from Milan. She’d read Zola, Goethe, Epictetus, Longinus—some in translation to English, some in their original languages. In 1917, in the midst of the dissolution of the centuries-old Ottoman occupation, Natalia, her parents and two siblings, along with all their neighbors, had been driven from their homes by the retreating Turks. These soldiers, in a state of stunned desperation, walked through the streets, their jackets in tatters, boots broken, shooting men and children on sight, kidnapping women, stealing food and jewelry. Natalia’s family were separated in the fleeing crowds. Her sister Intizar remained behind with her brother Khalil and their father: it would take the sisters twenty years to locate each other. Natalia and her mother boarded the Hijazi Rail line. From Amman, they walked twenty-three kilometers to the little town of Yara, where her mother had connections—the venerable Hamdan family.

When Natalia and her mother arrived at Munif’s family home, her cotton stockings hung in shreds; she clung to an Arabic edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Their faces were streaked with grime and sweat. She was fourteen with dark, lovely, melancholy eyes. Munif was seventeen, the eldest of seven. They were legally joined within the year.

This was their marriage: Munif drank; after he got drunk, he walked the fields. Natalia read, cleaned, brooded. She told her children so many stories of lying on hillsides covered in greenery, floating in her books. When the Israelis moved into Palestine, she mixed them up with the Turks; she saw shadow-soldiers in fezzes, banded trousers, and bandoliers hiding in every corner of their venerable old house. Two of her babies died before Hafez was born, two more died after. He had a recollection of an infant, a small knot of fists at Natalia’s chest. Little unnamed markers in the family cemetery. Girls, he supposed. Neighbors praised their family of all boys. A father’s triumph. Natalia didn’t live with them so much as she lived with her past—like all Palestinians—caught up in longing for their blessed history, unfaithful to their present. Munif’s older sister, Lamise, would rant at her: why aren’t the children fed? She’d pick up a frying pan and bang it with a metal spoon above Natalia’s head as she stood over a tub of dishes. Wake up! Lamise called her kelbeh, haiwaneh, dog, animal, right in front of her own children, treated Natalia as if she were an incompetent servant. Once, Hafez saw his aunt strike his mother so hard her fingers left streaks on her face.

And what did Hafez do? He grew harder, a wafer of stone within his chest. He would be like his father, who watched it all in silence. Over the years, despite his drinking, Munif remained lean and elegant, his voice grew richer. Natalia grew squat, her back stooped by age forty, her eyes burning with memories. It was her fault, Hafez thought. Her fault that she’d lost all those children: she wasn’t a natural mother or wife: she cared too much for her mind. She was a refugee. Sometimes he glimpsed his mother’s face, gazing over his head, her expression never changing—as if she regretted her home, her husband, even her children. She stopped laughing. She was like all the Palestinians he’d come to know—scorning their new country. He’d seen it as a sign of weakness in his father that he’d married their mother: Hafez wished Munif had chosen better. Though, of course, then Hafez might not have been born at all. But he preferred to think he’d have been born a stronger version of himself, a better, purely Jordanian Hafez.

AN HOUR LATER, on his private mobile, his office door locked, he called and told Madame X that yes, decidedly yes, he’d started the wheels turning on securing that pardon and visa for her brother. It wasn’t entirely an untruth. Decidedly yes might have been overstating the case. He hadn’t actually done anything yet. There was no profit to be had in helping a journalist, but there had to be a way to keep her happy.

Wary at first, Madame X’s voice began to defrost after he gave his assurances. The sooner my petition is dealt with, he’d added, the easier my mind will be, the sooner I can deal with your brother.

“Well it just . . . so . . . happens . . .” she said. “A little spot may have just opened in His Eminence’s schedule today. Noon, in fact.”

“Lunch?” His voice lifted. It was no problem for him to get an appointment with the archbishop, but Madame X sped things up ever so efficiently.

“You’d have to get in the car right now,” she warned. “He’s at a conference—it’s down at Il Bahir. But this is a good chance to catch him. Otherwise, who knows. He’s on the road a lot these days.”

“No problem, my dear. The driver and I love an outing.”

Before they hung up, she paused then said, “Your niece, by the way, is enchanting.”

“Ya’ani,” Well. “She is, isn’t she?” he asked, stretching his neck and pleasurably scratching the underside of his chin.

It was early November, a fine day for a drive. They wound the soft curves of the King’s Highway and Hafez let his mind wander over the memory of Madame X’s bare shoulders at the birthday party. He recalled Carole’s earlier comments with a twinge—she’d given away that necklace! Without even asking! He lowered the window and let the air rush over him. The stony earth turned to powder, a potion he inhaled through the open windows. “Love Potion Number Ni-ee-ya—ee—ine. Love potion number nine.” He crooned softly in the backseat. Samir joined in for a few bars, but kept drumming out of sync on the steering wheel.

The archbishop was attending an ecclesiastical conference at the Dead Sea Mövenpick resort. A handful of clergy in black robes drifted through the dining room, murmuring and nodding to one another, carrying tiny cups and saucers. The reception hall signs announced panels on ministering to refugees; land rights and the Church; reconciling peace with justice. Hafez found Father Jacob at a table on the terrace overlooking the water. The air was sweet and limpid with turquoise light. Hafez stopped, bowed to the man; taking his spotted hand, he kissed his ring.

Jacob flicked his hand as if brushing away a fly. But he said, “Sit down. Sit. Sit.” He sank his chin glumly on to the heel of his palm, folding his stiff gray beard forward. “So, you found me.”

“How is your cold? Feeling better, I hope.”

“My cold? Oh.” He sniffed once. “Yes. Much better.”

“Is this not a good time? Mrs. Waleeda told me—”

Again, the flitting gesture. “There is no good time, bad time. There is just time.”

Holy men. No wonder the insides of churches made him itch. Hafez smiled. “I agree one thousand percent, Your Grace. And we mustn’t waste a moment of it, which is why I come to you with potentially wonderful news.”

“Potentially wonderful.” The priest’s smile was all but hidden by the wool of his beard. “Hafez, why do you so often make me feel I’m about to buy a really terrible car?”

Hafez chuckled—it was an obeisance, like kissing his ring. “I know you’ve been wanting to restore the chapel in Ma’an, correct? Isn’t that the most historically significant site? While I can’t offer to underwrite the entire thing, I’d like to be helpful.”

The priest’s heavy eyebrows lifted. He combed the backs of his fingers up from under his beard then back down through again. He didn’t look at Hafez. “I’m listening.”

Hafez had tried to mentally rehearse in the car, but now his stomach tightened. He took a breath. “There’s a petition before you, for the disposition of an inheritance. Amer Amer, my cousin, Allah yerhamu,” bless his soul, “left behind an estate, in land and cash, equivalent roughly to 275 million JDs.”

The archbishop inhaled the steam from his tea, then replaced his cup with a small click.

“There was no will,” Hafez said quietly. “And there’s no immediate family. He lived with his mother—my grandfather’s sister. When my great-auntie died, he was all alone. In fact,” he added, “Amer Amer wasn’t even Jordanian. His mother was second cousin to Natalia—Amer’s parents from Gaza.”

The bishop cleared his throat. “No siblings? First cousins?”

Hafez shook his head. “My mother was his closest relative—the property would all go to her house. And now, my brother Farouq and I are the only living relations. . . .” He picked an invisible crumb from his chest. “Also, it should be noted, I am firstborn.”

The archbishop’s eyes remained lowered.

“In our tradition, the Hamdan clan . . .”

“You have other siblings as I recall,” the bishop interrupted.

Hafez sniffed. “Well. Two girls, and my second brother, Ra’ed, all died in infancy. . . .”

“Were you truly firstborn, Hafez?” The archbishop squinted at the windows. “It seems to me . . . I’m not sure.”

His mind turned white. What did Jacob remember? Hafez collected himself: he filled his chest. There were so many lost children—who could keep track! Not so long ago, Amman was the size of a country village, the archbishop was merely Jacob and his family were distant poor relations to Hafez’s family. While unlikely, perhaps it was possible Jacob remembered how many Hamdan brothers there had been. They were a Christian family in a Muslim country, so their land inheritance had to be studied and approved by the Church. Hafez needed the man’s approval to be deeded the estate; he also needed to purchase Jacob’s forgetfulness. He tried again. “In the Hamdan clan, the rule is that the firstborn son inherits his father’s property.”

“But if, for whatever reason, there is no living firstborn son, the estate is then divided up among the remaining heirs,” the archbishop said. His eyes framed by his beard seemed to Hafez intensified somehow, like those of women in hijab.

Hafez tipped his head to one side then the other: Maybe, maybe not.

The archbishop picked up his tea. “And isn’t there another brother?”

Hafez put his hand on the table as if taking an oath. “Gabe. He lives in the States. But, you know—he converted, ages ago.” Under the table, he crossed his legs, one foot bobbing.

“He said the Allah illahu?” Father Jacob’s forehead lifted.

“In the military,” Hafez said. The Church would disqualify a Muslim from inheriting what they deemed a Christian estate.

The archbishop picked up his cup. Hafez picked up his cup. He followed the man’s gaze past the terrace to the gleam of water. He’d never liked the Dead Sea. Il Bahir didn’t roar like a proper sea but laid there, buzzing, flat, magnetic, a tile glowing under the sun. He hated the way its water clung to the skin, how you had to shower right away after touching it or it dried into white mineral, shriveling the body. The last time he’d been made to go in the sea, it was because the King’s aide-de-camp devised a team-building exercise for a meeting of diplomatic envoys and attachés. It was impossible to swim. Even to remain upright was a struggle. His posterior had bobbed up, then his stomach, like a cork. Afterward, he escaped to the shower the first moment he could, but he still caught whiffs of that sulfurous water for days.

“Neither of my brothers know anything of this, for obvious reasons,” Hafez said, his gaze fixed on the far horizon. “It’s a sensitive matter. Neither of them had anything to do with Amer, and there’s no point to troubling them with this situation—at least until everything is settled.”

Beyond the Dead Sea were the sage-and-almond-colored reaches of their country. Hafez sighed deeply, charged with reflection. Once upon a time, no one cared. Just a little neck of land, a corridor to cross between greater, older nations, called Trans-Jordan. Flyover zone. Set in place to buffer Syria, Egypt, Iraq, its borders stretching hither and yon, with no natural demarcation. A British concoction. “Winston Churchill’s Sneeze,” they called it. The Brits imported a king—the King’s grandfather—from the Hijaz and kept in him in armies and under protection; they had to watch their backs since the French had helped themselves to Syria.

So much claiming and chopping, so many invaders, but this was homeland to Hafez—his breath and bread. This inheritance was the start of a long-overdue restoration. A making-whole. He’d eventually have to shave off bits to mollify and arrange cooperation—from Farouq, from the Archbishop, from a few secondary cousins. Most importantly, he was planning to offer Gabe a swap: land for a knife! A little spot near the water, in the graceful, fertile Ghor—the Jordan valley—to build a home. He saw the longing in Gabe’s eyes—it had been a master stroke to bring him back. It was there in the way his brother had jogged out on that falconry field, his body light and fluid. He saw joy in his movements. Who could resist the delicious call of childhood?

“Hafez.” The archbishop turned his teacup in his hand. Hafez noticed a jet-black rosary twined between the man’s fingers. “You know that God sees everything you do. Not just what you profess.”

Hafez glanced at the sky, a couple of clouds drifting in from the west. Hafez, you could charm the angels from the trees, his mother used to say, but you don’t fool me. “All is well between me and my God,” Hafez said.

“But what about my God?” The bishop replaced the cup. He moved the rosary beads with his thumb. After a moment, he said, with maddening persistence, “Truly, I’d thought there was another brother.”

Hafez nodded slowly, uncertain if the holy man was toying with him or if he really couldn’t remember. He took a risk: “Perhaps you’re thinking of my cousin Musa?” He lowered his chin. “He vanished years ago. Around the time the Turks were in Jordan, taking boys for their army. Presumed dead. God rest his soul.”

“Did he have no children?”

“No, no, none. He was taken so young.” Hafez sighed heavily. He studied the man’s eyes, so damp they looked almost gelled, their color of faded darkness. It wasn’t right, he thought, to be led by those least able to enjoy the fruits of the world. Swaddled in his robes and acorn-shaped turban, the priest ignored the dish of chocolate and cake and white cream the waiter put before them. The thought of Madame X rose in Hafez, evoking her scent of almonds, evaporating in a trace of sugared smoke, fortifying him such that he declared again, almost happily, “But it’s the law, isn’t it? What can one do?”

The archbishop exhaled through his nose, the cushion creaking as he sat back, fingers tented, gazing at the silvery length of water in the window.

After a moment, Hafez said, “I . . . This is a very—draining—issue for me. But when all this paperwork is worked out, if the money is there, perhaps you and I could look at building a new chapel? Something near the sea? With a view—like this . . .” Tentatively at first, then with a growing sense of hope and urgency, of overcoming resistance through persuasion, Hafez pressed on. “It’s essential for people to understand our country is not a Muslim monolith, that we embrace all identities. Christianity has educated and enriched the Middle East.” Sitting back, he laced his fingers over his stomach and enumerated the wonders of Cordoba, Spain, its multicultural architecture and religious diversity; he spoke of the tenth-century Jewish Andalusian writer who advised his community, “Let Scripture be your Eden and the Arabs’ books your paradise grove.” He mentioned the great tradition of Muslims guarding Christian monuments: the Joudah family in Jerusalem, entrusted with the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, passing them down generation after generation.

Mystery, authority, and faith make the world go ’round. This inheritance could make many good things happen. Imagine, he thought, how a bequest might improve his youngest brother’s life as well as that of his wife and daughter. Having lapsed into silence, Hafez studied the dwindling light in the windows—it was getting darker so much earlier these days. He nudged the plate toward Father Jacob. “The desserts here are outstanding—you really should have a taste.”

The archbishop waved it away. “I must be getting back.”

“Not one bite?”

The man touched the center of his chest. “Please have mine. Sahtain.”

“Gladly. Though I do hate to rob the Church!” he joked. Hafez took a forkful from the near corner and said, “Fourteen hundred years ago or so, the Patriarch Sophronius entrusted the keys of Jerusalem to Umar ibn Khattab—a Muslim!” He took another bite.

The priest smiled and lifted his eyes. “An act of faith.”

“Indeed. And it is the only way to get anything done—like the leap that precedes our own peace talks! Think what a monument to faith we could build, together. Think of what you could achieve with an extra 100,000 dunums of land. A chapel that could stand as tribute to peace itself. The Israelis—they see Muslims as troublemakers—well, let’s speak openly: as terrorists. They see how Arabs in other countries suffer under their own leadership—the heart cries out for the Syrians, enduring Hafez Assad.”

The archbishop shook his head. “Ya haram. May God have mercy.”

“By enlarging the public profile of a healthy Christian community, we expand on our image as a country of both East and West. It instills confidence in the Israelis, a sense of fraternity—both of us people of the book.”

“Well, yes. And the Muslims,” the archbishop said. “They, too, venerate Abraham and Jesus.”

“By helping the Church, we’re actively helping the peace process—the King’s greatest endeavor.”

The archbishop didn’t reply. He brushed at what might have been a dusting of dandruff down his front. He frowned, but didn’t speak.

“Of course, we shouldn’t forget—the Palace is continually on the lookout for resettlement lands—places to stash the refugees. Land like this, in transition—they declare it ‘unassigned.’ Neither of us can speak of this inheritance—not one word—or all the property will be in danger of confiscation.” Hafez shifted his gaze out to the aluminum glow of the Dead Sea. Later, he would stop at the gift shop and buy lotions for his wife. She always said that the minerals of Il Bahir were the best for reviving the skin. “You and I both,” he told the priest. “We could lose it all. And that would be a shame.” He took another bite of the chocolate: it really was very good cake.