On Deception

When I was a student, one of the ways that I paid the rent was to teach piano lessons. I didn't have a studio at home, so I went to people's homes. It happened that many of my students came from families that were fabulously wealthy - the kind that owned entire floors of a building, or even the whole building.

After I had been teaching for some time, I managed to work up the courage to ask one particular family why there were 4 CRS (French riot police) with Uzis who were guarding the building on the corner - 1 building away from theirs. Imagine my surprise when I found out that it was the home of Suya Arafat. Now, this was in 1995, well before the death of her famous husband. I was a little surprised, to say the least. I'm not sure if we even knew that Ibu Mazen was even married at this point, but we certainly knew that he had chosen to stay in Ramallah with the Palestinian people.