Omar Yussef touched his friend’s arm lightly. He knew Khamis Zeydan’s destructive boozing had started after his injuries in Lebanon.
“By the time I returned to Beirut,” Khamis Zeydan said, “Liana was no longer around.”
“Where did she go?”
Khamis Zeydan’s pale eyes darted toward the mansions on the ridge.
“Kanaan?” Omar Yussef asked.
“That bastard used to come to Beirut to do dirty financial deals with the Old Man. He’d waft into the bunker in a Saville Row suit, trailing eau de cologne and primping his long hair. While I was in the hospital, he married her and sent her back here to his hometown.”
“She didn’t visit you in the hospital?”
“She wrote to me later that she had come once and I hadn’t recognized her. I suppose it’s possible. I was badly wounded, drugged up and depressed. Maybe I even told her to fuck off. You know my temper.” Khamis Zeydan raised his good hand, palm upward.
Omar Yussef laughed. “It’s an old acquaintance of mine.”
“I’ve seen her at official functions from time to time,” Khamis Zeydan said. “Only ever really across a room.”
“But you’ve never been to see her at her home?”
They passed the first of the mansions and fell silent once more. Omar Yussef was accustomed to the poverty of his people and it shocked him that there were Palestinians with the resources to build such palaces. Their designs reminded him of the Taj Mahal, the Topkapi in Istanbul, and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. In the electric light shining from their tall windows, the grass threw off a hectic green like the Saudi flag. Elsewhere in Palestine, water had to be saved for the olive trees and the cabbages; here thin cypresses lined the lawns, a ravishing, wasteful opulence that was in contrast to the jagged rocks and garbage strewn over every open area in Nablus.
They came to Kanaan’s mansion, a rectangular three-story building with massive pillars topped by a Greek pediment. The house stood in a formal garden built into the slope of the ridge, its terraces supported by tall buttressing walls. A peacock fanned its tail on the floodlit lawn and strutted into the trees.
Khamis Zeydan pulled up and beckoned to a man in a leather jacket leaning against the gilded gate. The guard slouched toward them, spitting the shells of sunflower seeds into his palm. When Khamis Zeydan broke the wondering silence in the car, it was to answer the question Omar Yussef had asked him before they reached the row of mansions. “Here?” he said, looking along the avenue of cypresses that led to the house. “No, I haven’t been to see her here. I’ve never been anywhere like this.”
Chapter 11
A servant in a collarless blue tunic with gold buttons and a brocaded hem showed them into a spacious salon and tiptoed out as though he were getting away with some-thing. His dainty steps made a subdued patter on the pink marble.
Inlaid mother-of-pearl shone coral and white from the Syrian chairs, like teeth snarling through bared lips of teak. The wrought-iron coffee tables were patterned with Armenian ceramic tiles, figured with fruit and fish in yellow and brown. In the corner, a gaudy palm tree had been painted onto a thick board and cut out, so that it stood up like a six-foot exercise from a children’s book. The artist had signed the tree across the roots.
Omar Yussef gestured toward the painting of the palm tree. “Surely there’s room in here for a real one.”
“A real one wouldn’t cost a hundred grand.” Khamis Zeydan lit a cigarette. His good hand shook and he glanced at Omar Yussef to see if he had noticed.
To save his friend embarrassment, Omar Yussef turned to the door, his eyes tracing its arabesque relief. The little servant in the blue tunic opened the door and stood aside to allow a short woman in a pink suit to enter.
Liana reached out to stroke the polished surface of an art nouveau table as she came toward her guests. That gesture is like a gambler’s tell. She’s as nervous as my friend Abu Adel, Omar Yussef thought. She held Khamis Zeydan by the upper arms and brought him down for three kisses on the cheek, advanced a step toward Omar Yussef and offered him her hand.
Her eyes were deep, black and cool, like the eyes in an ancient Pharaoh’s portrait, and they were painted with the dramatic shades of green and blue the Egyptians used for the hieroglyphs of their tombs. That great beauty Cleopatra might have looked like Liana, Omar Yussef thought, had she lived longer, but no more wisely. Her hair was dyed black and rolled back in high lacquered waves, so that it resembled the shell of a snail. She kept her chin high. Omar Yussef wondered if that was out of a sense of superiority or to give the parallel wrinkles across her neck room to breathe.
Liana invited them to the ornate Syrian sofas before the picture window. Khamis Zeydan seemed so loath to sit that Omar Yussef pushed his jumpy friend gently into a chair. Another servant in an identical blue tunic brought coffee on a silver tray. He held out his hand and, with an encouraging smile, caught an inch of ash from Khamis Zeydan’s cigarette. He lifted a gold ashtray from one of the Armenian tables and set it next to the policeman’s coffee cup.
“I’m happy that you brought your friend to see my home, Abu Adel,” Liana said.
Khamis Zeydan grunted.
“You’re most welcome here, ustaz,” she said to Omar Yussef. “Consider it as your home and as if you were among your family.”
Omar Yussef was about to give the formal reply, when Khamis Zeydan spoke, louder than was necessary, as though he had to force the words out. “Are you glad I brought myself?”
“Abu Adel, I always want to see you. I wish you’d come often.”
“Really?” Khamis Zeydan sounded bitter.
Liana sucked in her cheeks, patiently. “Agreeable company is always a pleasure on this lonely hilltop.”
Khamis Zeydan stubbed out his cigarette and looked up at her. His blue eyes were sad and lost.
“My life here is like a dream,” Liana said. She fixed her eyes on Khamis Zeydan. “People always describe a pleasant experience as being like a dream. But how many of your good dreams do you remember? I seem to recall my night-mares much more clearly.”
Liana and the policeman stared at each other in silence.
Omar Yussef cleared his throat. “Perhaps people mean only that it’s a feeling they know is destined to pass quickly,” he said. “Like our memories of dreams, which are so vivid while we sleep, only to seem vague once we awake.”
“Are you a friend of Abu Adel’s from here in Nablus, ustaz?” Liana asked.
“From Bethlehem,” Omar Yussef said. “I’ve known Abu Adel since we were students together in Damascus. We renewed our friendship when he returned to Palestine to become police chief in Bethlehem after the peace agreement with Israel. We had lost touch during his period in Beirut.”
Khamis Zeydan and Liana locked eyes once more at the mention of the Lebanese capital. Omar Yussef bit the end of his tongue at his indelicacy.
“Abu Adel and I are in Nablus for the wedding of our young friend Sami Jaffari. He’s a policeman, but he’s also involved with the Fatah Party, so you may have heard of him.”
“I also will be attending that wedding,” Liana said. “I attend all the Fatah functions.”
“Your husband is an important figure in Fatah,” Khamis Zeydan said.
The woman looked at him with pity. “Have I become such a minor character that I wouldn’t receive any invitations if it weren’t for my husband?” She waited, but Khamis Zeydan kept his eyes on his ashtray. Liana turned to Omar Yussef. “We used to live closer to the town, but we built this house ten years ago. The views are wonderful, although it’s a little isolated. Few people come up here to the peak of Mount Jerizim.”
“I was up here only this morning,” Omar Yussef said.
Liana inclined her head to the side. One of her large silver earrings rattled into her leathery neck and she stroked the lapis scarab embedded in it with her index finger.