The Black Widow (Gabriel Allon #16) - Daniel Silva Page 0,55

produced the sweetest melons and bananas in the Galilee. They buried their dead over there,” he added, swinging his arm to the left. “And they prayed to Allah here”—he placed his hand on the ruins of an arched doorway—“in the mosque. They were your ancestors, Leila. This is who you are.”

“‘My roots were entrenched before the birth of time.’”

“You’ve been reading your Darwish.” He walked deeper into the weeds and the ruins, closer to the highway. When he spoke again, he had to raise his voice to be heard over the whitewater rush of the traffic. “Your home was over there. Your ancestors were called Hadawi. This is your name, too. You are Leila Hadawi. You were born in France, educated in France, and you practice medicine in France. But whenever someone asks where you’re from, you answer Sumayriyya.”

“What happened here?”

“Al-Nakba happened here. Operation Ben-Ami happened here.” He glanced at her over his shoulder. “Have your instructors mentioned Ben-Ami to you?”

“It was an operation undertaken by the Haganah in the spring of 1948 to secure the coast road between Acre and the Lebanese border, and to prepare the Western Galilee for the coming invasion by the regular Arab armies.”

“Zionist lies!” he snapped. “Ben-Ami had one purpose and one purpose only, to capture the Arab villages of the Western Galilee and cast their inhabitants into exile.”

“Is that the truth?”

“It doesn’t matter whether it’s true. It’s what Leila believes. It’s what she knows. You see, Leila, your grandfather, Daoud Hadawi, was there that night the Zionist forces of the Haganah came up the road from Acre in a convoy. The residents of Sumayriyya had heard what had happened in some of the other villages conquered by the Jews, so they immediately took flight. A few stayed behind but most fled to Lebanon, where they waited for the Arab armies to recapture Palestine from the Jews. And when the Arab armies were routed, the villagers of Sumayriyya became refugees, exiles. The Hadawi family lived in Ein al-Hilweh, the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. Open sewers, cinderblock houses . . . hell on earth.”

Gabriel led her past the rubble of the little houses—houses that were dynamited by the Haganah soon after Sumayriyya fell—and stopped at the edge of an orchard.

“It belonged to the people of Sumayriyya. Now it is the property of the kibbutz. Many years ago they were having trouble making the water flow through the irrigation tubes. A man appeared, an Arab who spoke a bit of Hebrew, and patiently explained how to do it. The kibbutzniks were amazed, and they asked the Arab how it was he knew how to make the water flow. And do you know what the Arab told them?”

“It was his orchard.”

“No, Leila, it was your orchard.”

He lapsed into silence. There was only the wind in the weeds and the rushing of the traffic along the highway. He was staring at the ruins of a house that lay scattered at his feet, the ruins of a life, the ruins of a people. He seemed angry; whether it was genuine or for Leila’s benefit, Natalie could not tell.

“Why did you choose this place for me?” she asked.

“I didn’t,” he answered distantly. “It chose me.”

“How?”

“I knew a woman from here, a woman like you.”

“Was she like Natalie or Leila?”

“There is no Natalie,” he said to the veiled woman standing next to him. “Not anymore.”

22

NAHALAL, ISRAEL

WHEN NATALIE RETURNED TO NAHALAL, the volume of Darwish poetry had vanished from the bedside table in her room. In its place was a bound briefing book, thick as a manuscript and composed in French. It was the continuation of the story that Gabriel had begun amid the ruins of Sumayriyya, the story of an accomplished young woman, a doctor, who had been born in France of Palestinian lineage. Her father had lived an itinerant life typical of many stateless, educated Palestinians. After graduating from the University of Baghdad with a degree in engineering, he had worked in Iraq, Jordan, Libya, and Kuwait before finally settling in France, where he met a Palestinian woman, originally from Nablus, who worked part-time as a translator for a UN refugee agency and a small French publishing house. They had two children, a son who died in an auto accident in Switzerland at twenty-three, and a daughter whom they named after Leila Khaled, the famous freedom fighter from Black September who was the first woman to hijack an airplane. Leila’s thirty-three-year existence had been rendered in the pages