Highlander - Donna Lettow [43]
Paris: The Present
The room was large, larger than her entire apartment back in Ramallah, and it commanded a lovely view of the Square Boucicaut just outside the Lutétia. Maral knew every inch of the view by heart, the way the light of the setting sun traveled across the marble fountain and played in the spurting waters, the patterns of the pair of pigeons nesting between the ears of a bronze horse bearing the effigy of some dead French king. She’d eaten most of her meals by these windows—but not too near, thank you, Farid—taking in as much of Paris as she could from the confines of the narrow panes of glass.
Art nouveau monopolized the decor of the room, a style she’d never been partial to. There was nothing homey about this place she was forced to call home. She knew she was supposed to consider herself fortunate. Paris hotel rooms were notoriously small—she heard the usually stalwart Assad complaining he was barely able to open his suitcase in the tiny room he’d been given. Part of her envied him his cozy accommodations. Her room was dominated by a huge bed hung with heavy draperies, a bed so tall a mahogany stairstep was provided. She found any bed lonely since Ali’s death, and this monster doubly so. When she was one and awake in the middle of the night, she felt very much like the princess and the pea, a nagging thought in the back of her mind that someday they’d discover she wasn’t a real princess and send her back to her classroom.
Maral had no delusions about why she’d been selected for the negotiating team. She was raw and untried, the junior member of the team, but she was secular and she was female, an important symbol to the Western world, which believed that all Palestinians were intractable religious fanatics with rags on their heads and automatic weapons in their hands. Token symbol or not, she was determined to make her presence felt. If true peace were ever to be created in her homeland, it would come not from the religious bickerings of the fanatics of either faith, but from those who could step back and see those seated on the other side of the table as people, not ideologies. And it would hold not because of posturing warriors showing off the size of their manhood, but because of women, Israeli women, Palestinian women, women sick of burying their husbands and their brothers and their sons, women who became mothers who would instill the message of peace in their children and their children’s children.
More than one of the old-school Palestinian diplomats she worked with called her naive, treated her like an impetuous daughter. They could patronize her all they wanted—she knew she was having an impact. Hers was the voice of reason that had kept them at the table when more extremist minds threatened to shatter the fragile understanding they’d managed to cobble together. Hers, the hand that had slipped what they dismissed as “womanly” concerns like education for the children and health care for the poor and displaced into a platform more concerned with the placement of guns and the movement of troops. As long as she knew Arafat supported her, she had no qualms against butting heads with the stodgiest of the traditionalists.
But it was lonely work. And lately, its only reward had been coming back to this lifeless room, after a long, hard day at the table, to watch the pigeons play in the square. The few times she’d been able to venture out into Paris shone like bright jewels in the bleak memory of the past two weeks of negotiations, and that mysterious Duncan MacLeod seemed to be at the heart of them.
She didn’t know what she was expecting when she called him. Just to hear his voice, really. Just to talk to someone who didn’t give a damn which side of Suleiman Street was the border or who would guard the Garden Tomb. When he said he would come to see her, her heart was lighter than it had been since she’d left Ramallah. She’d changed clothes twice since, and finally settled on a pair of tailored slacks and a silk tunic in shades of rust and cinnamon that she knew highlighted her skin and