Friend of My Enemy

Chapter One

September 24, 2000

For Christina Goryeb it had been a week like many others. A morning talk show appearance on Monday in New York to attract interest for her latest book, Women of Palestine, Hope for the Future. A pair of closed-door evening fund raisers on Thursday and Friday in London and Rome for refugee children. In between she'd met with State Department officials about the current Arab-Israeli conflict, taught her classes in international relations and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Virginia and met with her boards of directors of foundations she served on in Washington, D.C.

She'd scheduled a visit to an orphanage in Jordan, but on impulse canceled it when she reached Rome. She hadn't thought beyond that. No one knew she was in Tel Aviv, not even her husband. She told the taxi driver to take her to the Institute for Biblical Archaeology.

It had been five years since she'd seen Chaim Asher, yet the memory of that man lingered in her thoughts like the fragrance of a fine wine. Five years earlier, she'd been drawn into his life. Now, it was happening again. Their love affair had been an aberration driven by shared danger. It was foolish to want to revisit that time.

Those days seemed so long ago, yet it seemed to her that nothing fundamental had changed in Israel. Civil war still simmered with Palestinians on the West Bank, while an embattled Israeli Prime Minister's hopes for peace foundered on the rocky shoals of Middle East politics. Arab and Jew still passed silently on the streets as if the other did not exist. Meanwhile, day laborers from Gaza still crowded like cattle into open trucks every morning to be driven to construction sites in Arab neighborhoods where they built new homes for Jews to live in. Israeli settlers down from their fortified hilltops in the West Bank to shop or work at their day jobs in the city, slung M-16 assault rifles on their shoulders for protection.

Once again, she read the letter in her hand, the one she'd read so many times in the past week.

"Do you remember your last law clerk, the old school teacher?" her Palestinian cook had written. "I have the sad duty to inform you he has died." Fatima included a short clipping from a back page of the Arabic daily al-Kuds. It said the body of Achmed Bikfaya, formerly a school teacher from Jenin, who'd also been employed by the noted Palestinian lawyer, Christina Goryeb, had been found hanging from a rope in her dusty Ramallah law office. A slip of paper in his pocket said "Here I once knew happiness." The article ended with "Mrs. Goryeb, who immigrated to the U.S. five years ago, has dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship."

This was absurd, she thought. Achmed Bikfaya was a fiction devised by Chaim Asher.

She had thought she no longer loved him.

After she'd fled Israel to live in the U.S., they'd exchanged letters, the kind of letters, old friends write each other, newsy and platonic without a hint of the old passion. Two months ago, out of the blue he'd sent her a post card showing the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.

"Remember--," he wrote.

That was where they'd made love for the last time.

"Always," she wrote back.

His letters had formerly been written in English, for the most part, their common neutral language. Now he wrote exclusively in Arabic, her language, no longer waiting for her response. His letters came every week, then every day, overflowing with yearning and adoration. She felt flattered but she was alarmed as well. There was something missing in these passionate letters--she didn't hear Chaim's steady voice in them, at least not the man she'd known. Instead, he complained that all his zest was gone, that he wasn't interested in his job anymore, or even in his life. And then he wrote that he had to see her. Either he would come to Virginia or she would go to Jerusalem. "You need to visit your family in Palestine. Ramallah, is now governed by the Palestine Authority. No one will harm you."

Immediately she regretted the impulse that had led her to encourage Chaim.

"Chaim," she wrote,"for the sake of my daughters, what happened between us is past and must never happen again. Let us remain good friends, always."

She expected a polite letter of apology, a pledge to never again let his feelings for her go beyond the bounds of friendship. A week went by and then another without a letter from Asher. One day she realized he'd never write her again and pushed thoughts of him out of her mind.

But when she got Fatima's letter telling her the old clerk, Bikfaya, had hung himself, she cried.

Had she been his only life line? She couldn't believe he'd kill himself over an old love affair. Besides his dedication to Israel wouldn't permit suicide. It would be desertion.

She wrote the Palestine Authority for details of "Bikfaya's" death. A courteous reply in Arabic came by return mail from a Captain Kabir. The Palestine Authority had no record of the incident described by Al-Kuds, he wrote. He had discussed the matter with the newspaper's editor and discovered the Bikfaya story was merely gossip from the souk that had been written up by a free lance reporter.

That "free lancer" knew things about her only Chaim Asher would know.

Had Chaim faked the story to lure her back? It was manipulative and oblique, but he was capable of both, especially if he'd become mentally unbalanced.

She had no idea how to contact him once she had arrived in Israel. For his mailing address he used a Tel Aviv post office box. She wrote him that she was coming but when he didn't meet her plane, she'd tried to find him at his old kibbutz. His friends said he had gone away but wouldn't tell her where or when.

Then she remembered his superior at the Institute. Mekor, a hard and cunning man, but perhaps in light of the past he would be sympathetic to her.

Christina stepped from her taxi into the hot suffocating Middle East sun and glared at the glass and concrete office tower on King Saul Boulevard. Two lines of Hebrew on a plaque at the entrance said Institute for Biblical Archaeology. The ugly, familiar knot twisted in her stomach, and she paused for a deep, calming breath before climbing the broad stairs of the Haddar Dafna Building.