Fractured Destinies

late John Littlehouse. The two men had served in their younger days in the British armed forces in Palestine, and they had both reached the rank of major. They had been brought together by both their military rank and the death they had escaped at the same moment: when the Jewish Irgun organization, under its leader Menachem Begin, blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem—used as headquarters by the British Mandate authorities—on 22 July 1946. Forty-one Palestinians had been killed, as well as twenty-eight British, seventeen Jews, and five people of other nationalities, and forty-five people had been injured in various ways. The two British officers had escaped from the incident, and new features of their relationship became apparent after the dust of death had settled. But fate, which had saved John from death during the great explosion, returned to frustrate his life’s key ambition, for he died before his daughter could marry Walid. Ivana inherited John’s possessions, including the house that she lived in, his black Mercedes, a sum of money, and the friendship of Byer, whom Ivana had gotten to know during one of her secret romantic meetings with John before she had left Palestine. He continued to remind her of the most beautiful days of her life, stolen from the period of the British Mandate, so she kept him beside her later, and entrusted him with her financial and legal affairs.

Walid and Julie shook hands in turn with the short man with the classic spectacles, then shook hands with his wife in a matter-of-fact way. Julie didn’t like Lynn, and had never understood her relationship with Ivana, beyond the fact that she was Byer’s wife. Lynn was mean, pretentious, and more grasping than a tabloid newspaper.

Julie hid her shock at Lynn being there and didn’t give anything away to upset Ivana. She calculated that her mother might have done this on purpose to publicize whatever took place that evening to the whole of British society.

Then Walid moved on, followed by Julie, and shook hands with Leah Portman, Ivana’s friend, the Jewish poetess to whom she had introduced them more than ten years previously. Although they were happy to know her, they were nervous at the presence of Kwaku, who had lived with her for years. They were both wary of developing a close friendship with him, for reasons that had some logic to them. Kwaku was a strange character, though he was nice enough—despite often seeming as obscure as a password, and as puzzling as a riddle, raising unconventional questions. That sometimes made Walid uneasy, though Julie sensed some exaggeration in his attitude and was more inclined to think that Kwaku was just nice. She thought that sitting with him once or twice a year added some enjoyment to the events of their life.

Kwaku talked about himself in elegant language, in tones of royalty. From time to time, hints of aristocratic attitudes flitted across his face, even when he was confessing to others that he had no roots himself. Walid remembered how, during dinner together at the Suq Moroccan restaurant in Covent Garden, he had told him and Julie a murky story about his parents, the details of which were difficult to grasp. He said that he was the son of a Nigerian father—whose religion was unknown—and an Argentinian Christian mother. His father had divorced his mother when he was five years old, so she had taken him to her family in Buenos Aires. But she hadn’t put up with being single for long; she had married a Mexican immigrant, who took them both with him to New York. His new stepfather didn’t put up with Kwaku’s presence for long, however, but threw him out of the house before he was ten. He had wandered for years before settling down as a worker in a fuel station.

Kwaku had a habit of giving away a lot of details about himself that he wasn’t obliged to relate, as when he confessed in front of Walid and Julie on another occasion that he had been born with one testicle, saying that this fact hadn’t worried Leah at all, because he didn’t need a second testicle to make love, and as for having children, she didn’t want them at all. At this point, Leah had laughed and praised his one testicle, saying that he was a rare man as a result. She had also confirmed what Kwaku had said about her not wanting children, claiming that if she’d really wanted children she would have had a whole battalion of them.

According to Kwaku’s revelations on that occasion, he had already had six children with a former wife, though he could no longer remember when he’d married her, or where and when he’d left her, or even his reasons for doing so. Or maybe he preferred to be evasive about a family that in practice no longer belonged to him, and perhaps had never really belonged to him at all.

But Leah loved Kwaku a lot, with his mysteriousness and his ambiguities whose complications were difficult to unravel. In fact, their first chance meeting had been as ambiguous as his personality. They were standing in a queue in front of a young check-out girl in the Sainsbury’s store in Holborn. She was in front of him, and he stared at her long, soft, blonde hair. His glances took in her shoulders, from which hung arms worthy of a dancer. Suddenly, as she stood there, Leah shuddered, and staggered backward a little. Kwaku instinctively put out his hands to catch her. In a few seconds, she was in a swoon in a pair of strong ebony arms. Her swoon didn’t cause much of a commotion, but a whisper went around those standing nearby. Kwaku asked the girl on the till for some water and a bottle of perfume. The young girl left her place behind the computer, another employee in the store ran to fetch a plastic water bottle, and a lady standing in the