It's a second coming, mused Moses, studying the shesh-besh board. Three millennia ago there was the first coming when Joshua crossed the river from the east and had seven ram's horns sounded seven times while walking around the oasis of Jericho seven times. And so the walls fell, and the conquest of Jericho was Israel's first act in the promised land.
For me it was the Turks first, observed Abu Musa, also studying the shesh-besh board. Then after the Turks came the English and then the Hashemites and now the Israelis. In my three hundred years I have seen several proud conquerors come to Jericho in search of oranges in the lowest and oldest town on earth, but I suppose that's the nature of living in a desirable place. Rulers in Jerusalem and Damascus have traditionally turned their eyes this way, longing to escape those blustery cold winters they have up there. Didn't Herod and the Omayyad caliphs choose Jericho for their winter palaces? Further, Jericho is a crossing of history. To the east one thing, to the west another, to the north or south a third. Ideas and armies and caravans of believers have always passed this way on their relentless journeys to wherever it is they're going. We sit but fifteen miles from Jerusalem and a little more from Amman, and Jerusalem is midway between Amman, the ancient Greek city of Philadelphia, and the sea. Jerusalem is holy and biblical. Rabbat Ammon or Amman is where King David put Uriah the Hittite in the forefront of battle to be killed, so he might enjoy the dead man's wife Bathsheba, who gave the king a son called Solomon. Thus the mountains and the valley, the deserts and the sea, lust and wisdom and murder and empire, these various profane and sacred causes of man all find their crossroads in Jericho, which is why we grow oranges here. To refresh those who are forever passing through.
And yet nothing that happens today changes our yesterdays, mused Moses. The Mount of Temptation still rises above us to the west, the river where John the Baptist renewed souls still flows beside us to the east.
We are as well-situated today as ever for shesh-besh and holy matters. . . .
The dice clattered as the two men bent over the board,making their moves. Bell sipped arak and gazed through the bottom of his glass at his orange grove.
War gets no better with age, said Bell. My own war was fought mostly in the desert, away from towns and villages and innocent people, but that's the only good thing that can be said about it.
Also my war, observed Abu Musa. My part of it, at least, was fought entirely in the desert. We blew up trains amidst the sand dunes, little snorting trains puffing steam at an empty azure sky, quaint little antique trains chugging from nowhere to nowhere across an immensity of desolate wastes. In retrospect that can seem romantic, but in fact there's not a glimmer of romance in blowing things up.
True, said Bell. I have only to look in the mirror to be aware of that.
Now now, said Moses the Ethiopian, it won't do to have you two brooding over your dark pasts on such a warm and sunny June day. All of that was long ago for both of you, as was the stroke of a knife when I was a boy, making me into a eunuch. Once I yearned for a different kind of manhood, the usual kind, but as destiny would have it I've never taken part in war, nor could I. I'm just not warlike. So I ask myself, isn't that a goodness God has given me?
Abu Musa grinned across the board at Moses. Whatever your status as a warrior, he said, you're still an African giant who plays a fiendishly clever game of shesh-besh. And in any case the ceaseless conquest of the soul is a far more demanding campaign than that waged by any general, as we all know. So, O gentle giant, as two seasoned players in God's scheme let us now roll the dice in order that our friend the resident holy man can feel whatever it is he feels, and immortalize us with his thoughts. Bell? Immortalize away.
Moses the Ethiopian and his partner Moses the Arab have returned to their eternal game. . . .
Bell smiled as the dice clattered and his two friends bent over the board. Several times that afternoon Bell saw boots approach his front gate. Then a man would crouch there — a young Israeli soldier — and peer into the yard beneath the branches of the orange trees. As the young man gaped, his expression turned from curiosity to amazed disbelief. The first time it happened Bell quietly cleared his throat so his two friends would notice. They both looked up from the board and, along with Bell, pondered the soldier.
The conqueror looks stunned, observed Abu Musa.
Jericho has always been a strange place, mused Moses.
And less a conqueror than a frightened boy, said Bell. Like all conquerors, he wears the too-old face of a boy who has had to endure the unspeakable.
Bell raised his glass, toasting the startled young soldier, who stared a moment longer in wonder before disappearing. Certainly for the soldier they made a bizarre trio sitting on the dilapidated porch in the orange grove: a lean one-eyed European dressed in white with a glass of what looked like water in the air, while positioned over a shesh-besh board sat a huge elderly Arab in a pale blue galabieh, and an even more enormous chocolate-skinned giant in bright yellow robes.
And all three of these benign apparitions were gazing thoughtfully down at the soldier as if he were a petitioner come to call in heaven on the day of judgment, heaven that fateful day having taken on the appearance of a sweet-smelling stand of fruit trees where God had chosen to take His ease in a tripartite guise of diverse Selves, a threefold manner of presentation, the better to convey His pleasure at the handiwork of differing races He had created for His human family . . . light and dark and darker, dressed in white and pale blue and bright yellow to add a measure of gentle variety to His dream of an orange grove.
Ah yes, thought Bell. Races and wars and caravans of believers from the deserts and seas, with their armies of chance and their games of skill . . . all come to meet in an orange grove at the crossroads of Jericho.
The Holy Land, in other words. And also a fair enough assessment of the lowest and oldest town on earth, it seemed to him. Workable and adequate for the time being, at least until God did show His hand.
Part
2
ONE
The Arab village of el Azariya faces the rising sun from the eastern slopes of the Mount of Olives, away from Jerusalem on the Jericho road, clinging to the last patches of green where the Mediterranean finally loses hold of the land and the desert begins its eastern march to the Persian Gulf and the Hindu Kush. The village is small, perched on the very edge of the barren vistas that drop away to the plains of Jericho and the Dead Sea valley.
Two thousand years ago a poor religious teacher from the Galilee, Yeshua, was in the habit of staying with friends in the village when he journeyed south to visit Jerusalem. The friends he stayed with were two sisters and a brother called Mary and Martha and Lazarus. The present name of the village echoes in Arabic the name of this brother, a memory of the evening when Yeshua turned up to stay with his friends and was told by Mary and Martha that their brother had died four days before then, whereupon the visitor raised Lazarus from the dead in a miracle of guesthood.
In the time of Yeshua, or Jesus as he was later called by the Greeks, el Azariya was a Jewish village known as the encampment, Beit Haniya in Hebrew, from which its Western name of Bethany is derived.
Place is the beginning of memory. In both Hebrew and Arabic, Christians are called Nazarenes, people of Nazareth, after the village in the Galilee where Yeshua lived in obscurity until the age of thirty, before he became a wandering teacher during the last three years of his life. Thus near Jerusalem an encampment or outpost, a brother and a guest and a miracle, a mix of Greek and Hebrew and later Arabic . . . and the passage of two thousand years. As so often in the ancient Holy Land, even the name of the village of el Azariya resonates complexly in time, recalling how deep is the well of the past in a land where the voices of history forever call out with different memories for different peoples, memories which have become known as cultures or traditions, and thenceforth enshrined as religions.
With its lack of water el Azariya has always been a poor place, which is perhaps why Jesus preferred to spend his nights there or in the open on the Mount of Olives, rather than within the gates of Herod's grand city on the other side of the hill. The winter rains from the Mediterranean reach as far as Jerusalem but no farther, and to the east beyond el Azariya come the descending rock-hard fissures of crumbling time and relentless sun known as the Judean wilderness, which ends in the multicolored grandeur of the Dead Sea valley.
The Judean wilderness is no more than fifteen miles wide as the hawk flies, but because of its bleak and terrible landscape it has always been a place of refuge for those seeking safety or solitude. A few centuries after Jesus, ascetics living in its caves evolved the beginnings of the Christian monastic movement which was to become so powerful in the West. Before then Jews hid from Roman persecution in its caves while preparing their revolt, and a thousand years earlier King David fled into this same wilderness to escape the murderous designs of his son Absalom. Throughout the millennia, outlaws and prophets and kings and the wretched have all known the fiery chasms of its summers and the icy cold crevices of its winters.
Small though it is, in the midwifery of time the Judean wilderness has been one of the great birthing places of man's spirit. Out of its stark and stony reaches, through the mysteries of creation, vast events have been given to history. And the destiny of this particular desert has always been coupled to the dream of Jerusalem, joined at the Mount of Olives, as if men could not contemplate the idea of a Holy City without also facing a harsh wilderness of the soul hard beside it, the existence of one inexorably a part of the other.
***
Abu Musa had two great-nephews who were born and grew up in el Azariya, sons of a nephew who had been killed fighting the Jews in the 1948 war. At the time of their father's death the older boy was four and the other was still a baby. Their mother, alone, couldn't raise them both, so the older boy was taken in by the Greek monks who ran an orphanage in the village, connected to their monastery which honored the miracle of Lazarus. The older brother, Yousef, thus grew up as a Christian while the younger brother, Ali, remained a Moslem.
The chance separation caused other differences in their upbringing. Yousef became studious under the guidance of the Greek monks and learned Greek and English, eventually training as a schoolteacher. Ali lived the more traditional life of a village youth, working outdoors with his hands and his back, and would probably have ended as a laborer had not Yousef argued with their mother that more could be done. Because of his older brother's insistence, Ali became an electrician's helper for almost no pay. But in a few years, being a clever boy, he too was learning things and their mother was proud that her younger son also had the beginnings of a trade. Yousef, serious in manner, had taught himself early to seek out responsibility.
From the time they were children, Bell knew the boys as well as Abu Musa did, perhaps even better. All during their youths they were brought to Jericho at least once a season to stay with the family patriarch, Abu Musa, in order to listen to his wisdom and hear tales of cousins and uncles and ancestors, to experience the story of history and learn of their own place in it.
Abu Musa's method of passing on knowledge to the boys was in the wandering oral tradition, as befitted a man of the desert turned grower of fruit trees. Like a philosopher-king, Abu Musa ambled through his regular Jericho days with the two little boys at his heels, wide-eyed and silent, the smaller Ali clutching the older Yousef's hand for safety.
First thing every morning they visited Abu Musa's orange groves, where they examined the soil and the fruit and the blossoms while Abu Musa chatted on about the adventures of this or that relative who had lived in some distant era before the boys were born, in far-off Damascus or Beirut or Aqaba. Following Abu Musa's example, they dipped their fingers in the gurgling channels of water and found it sweet. Then it was time for a leisurely stroll around the central square with a stop for syrupy coffee and gossip for Abu Musa and sticky sweets for the boys, sitting at a little table in front of a coffeeshop under a towering sycamore tree, where the owner of the shop circled their table in an ancient ceremony of welcome, sprinkling water with his hand to lay the dust.
Camels and donkeys came by laden with bananas. The important men of the village salaamed up to Abu Musa to ask their questions of the day and receive advice. A baker brought an offering of hot sesame wafers for the boys. After holding court for an hour or more Abu Musa graciously distributed smiles all around and swayed off home to eat. Then he slept and the boys were free to explore his sheds and play in his water channels. When Abu Musa awoke there was more chatting under the trees before it was time to head for Bell's front porch and Abu Musa's afternoon shesh-besh session with the African giant in bright yellow robes, gentle Moses, who slipped the boys chunks of sugar cane when he embraced them. Sometimes the boys listened to the men on the porch and sometimes they wandered around the orange grove with Bell and ended up sitting under the grape arbor in back, where Bell told them tales of Egypt and India.
And at least once a year they were taken on those wondrous journeys down to the river in the magnificent steam coach driven by Moses. The boys stood in the rear compartment where Bell and Abu Musa sat, fearfully high above the ground and breathless with excitement, two sets of small eager hands gripping the polished woodwork and two solemn little faces peering over the side of the coach, dark eyes round and staring, silently watching the desert fly by.
Since the boys had always known Bell, they never thought his face ugly. As with the other wonders of their visits to Jericho, Bell was merely part of Abu Musa's mysterious domain, the timeless oasis of the family patriarch where brown-skinned genies and flying carpets and one-eyed holy men, where bubbling water and banana trees and sugar cane, where eternal rivers and fleet gazelles and the barren desert all had stately roles to play in the enchanting visions of a child's imagination.
When the boys were older they had more serious talks with Bell under his grape arbor, wide-ranging discussions on many things. Because Bell wasn't kin and also because he was a foreigner, they could be intimate with him in a way that was unthinkable with Abu Musa. Since the boys had no father they felt the need for this kind of friendship and Bell was always ready to give them his ear and his counsel, modestly as was his habit, speaking in a manner they could understand but without any trace of condescension. Abu Musa, for his part, was overjoyed at the boys' great love for his friend and Bell's love for them. When little Ali hugged Bell in some moment of passion, or when the older Yousef gravely made a comment in English and Bell replied in English with equal gravity, the old man's eyes brimmed with tears of pride.
How rich life is, he whispered to Moses across the shesh-besh board, watching the boys wander away with Bell on their roundabout route to the grape arbor.
Truly, murmured Moses. For God is ever-present if we but open our hearts to His grace.
Ali grew into a forceful young man, active and passionate with an ability to do anything with his hands. His dark eyes glittered when a problem was set before him, some object in need of repair. Quietly he studied the task, turning the object over and over in his hands, then flew at it and quickly made everything right, laughing happily as he finished the work with a triumphant flourish. Electricity was his trade, but for him it was just a way of feeling the world with his hands and making himself one with it.
Yousef's interests were more in a theoretical vein, less given to tangible matters than to speculation. He enjoyed his work as a schoolteacher and spent most of his free time reading in English, seeking Bell's advice for direction and discussing everything he read with him.
As if to emphasize the differences between the two brothers, Ali grew to be tall and thin and bony while Yousef was shorter and thicker in body, the one face lean and the other full. My son of the desert and my son of the town, as Abu Musa fondly described Ali and Yousef when they sat with him under the sycamore tree in the central square of Jericho, the two of them no longer boys but handsome young men ready to make their way in the world.
And then came the aftermath of the Six-Day War and it was Ali who was killed in a town and Yousef who went into the desert, a reversal of fate which would reach far into the future and change the lives of Assaf and Anna and Tajar in Jerusalem, of Abu Musa and Bell in Jericho, and even of Halim in Damascus.
TWO
The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964 under the patronage of Nasser of Egypt. In 1965 a sack with an explosive charge was found floating down a canal in northern Israel by an Israeli water engineer, having been placed in the canal by saboteurs who crossed over from Jordan on horseback. In Damascus a militant wing of the PLO calling itself el Fatah, the victorious, took credit for the sack in the waterway and announced it was the beginning of another kind of war against Israel.
A month after the Six-Day War the leaders of el Fatah moved into the territories lost by Jordan west of the river to begin a popular war of liberation. From the marketplace of the Arab city of Nablus, in biblical Samaria, they directed sabotage operations in Israel and tried to organize civil disobedience in the occupied territories.
But the PLO wasn't accepted then by the local Arabs. Its followers were unable to move through the villages as Mao Tse-tung said resistance fighters should move, as fish in water.
By the end of the year the attempt at popular resistance had failed and the PLO left the land and moved back into Jordan. There they set up bases near the border to strike across the river. When these bases were destroyed by Israeli raids, the PLO moved more deeply into Jordan and dispersed its forces in refugee camps and in Jordanian villages and towns, where they couldn't be easily targeted without causing heavy civilian casualties. This increased the PLO's safety but made it less effective for fighting. Having failed at a popular war in Palestine and at a war of attrition from neighboring Arab countries, the PLO turned to bombings and terror in Europe, in particular to hijacking planes in Europe.
At first the PLO concentrated on Israeli airliners. But when armed men were put on Israeli flights, the PLO
began hijacking European and American airliners. The campaign culminated in September 1970, when three hundred hostages from Swiss and American flights were taken to an airfield held by the PLO in Jordan.
King Hussein of Jordan had steadily been losing control of his country to the PLO. After the three hundred Swiss and American hostages were freed, the Jordanian army attacked the PLO bases in Jordan — Black September to the PLO — and drove their armed units out of the country into southern Lebanon. Syrian forces invaded Jordan but then pulled back when Israel made it clear it would oppose a Syrian attempt to overthrow Hussein.
Such was the course of history for the Palestinian national movement in the first years after the Six-Day War, a murky tale of violence and conflicting intrigues, of ruin and retreat and terror, made up of innumerable moments of hope and despair, disinterest and suffering.
***
Ali was one of those young men who heard the call of idealism in the summer after the Six-Day War.
Unknown to his brother, Ali joined a cell of el Fatah in east Jerusalem. The boys he dealt with were amateurs and their organization was inept. Ali at nineteen was among the older members of the cell. They met at night to design the acts that would lead to a better future, to plan liberation from the conqueror in passionate surges of commitment.
But Ali's role in history was over almost as soon as it began. His cell was raided one night and he tried to escape out the back of the building, firing a revolver which he didn't really know how to use. The exit was covered and he was shot, killed on the spot.
***
Yousef was so stunned by the suddenness of Ali's death he didn't know how to react. After the interrogations ended he went to sit in the church of the Greek monks who had educated him, the church dedicated to the miracle of Lazarus raised from the dead. There, alone and undisturbed, he could weep like a child and experience his feelings of loss, above all his emptiness. Their mother had died several years before, and Yousef had no one in the village to share his grief.
Yousef didn't pray in the church. He was too skeptical to be a follower of rites and rituals or a believer in divine mystery of any sort. The figure of Jesus had always been meaningful to him but in the simplicity of the Nazarene's life, not in the hierarchy of ceremony man had constructed from it. As with Mohammed or the Buddha or Moses, Jesus was to him a messenger and prophet of God, a bringer of the vision of man's better nature and a teacher of the great moral truths which would allow man to realize it. In this as in so many things, Yousef reflected the feelings of his own moral teacher — Bell.
For a long time Yousef was suspended in remembering. He hovered over his memories of Ali as a hummingbird hovers over a lemon tree and savors the mysteries of its blossoms, recalling his brother's passionate smiles and warm embraces and loving voice.
He could make no sense of Ali's death. Yousef believed in liberty and equality as much as anyone, and because of his reading in history he knew more about them than most people. But what did Ali's death, he kept asking himself, have to do with any of that? This pathetic attempt at conspiracy? These gestures of defiance and enthusiasm offered up in the company of some spellbound village boys beguiled by their own rhetoric? Ali had gone about reworking the future the way he would have gone about any childhood game, eyes glittering with confidence, ready to set things right with his very own hands and then exult in the triumph, as if history and wars and conflicting peoples, the whole enormity of memory, were no more complex than a little electric motor waiting to be undone and rewired by nimble fingers and a clever mind.
It was pathetic, futile. If only they had talked about it, thought Yousef. If only Ali had come to him and told him what he had in mind. Then they could have examined it together and Yousef could have helped his brother to see more, to grasp more, to do more.
The bell tolled above the church of Lazarus and the solemn Greek monks came and went leaving their trail of prayers and incense. The candles burned low and shadows flickered over the walls of the church as Yousef sat on in the half-darkness, remembering Ali.
He talked with the Greek fathers and heard their prayers, which brought him no solace. He raised his eyes and gazed at the painting of Jesus on the dome of the church, arms spread in hope in the role of the Paraclete, the comforter and intercessor. Jesus had walked in this village with friends. He had accepted their food and their water and even raised a brother among them from the dead. And it was in this poor place that Jesus had chosen to stay, not in glorious Jerusalem on the other side of the Mount of Olives.
Yousef left the church and took to wandering across the barren hills below el Azariya. All day and most of the night he sat out on the empty slopes in the fierce summer heat and the cool evenings looking down on the bare hills, watching some bird soar in the sunlight, alone in the still starry nights.
When he was able to face it he went down to Jericho to grieve with Abu Musa, with Bell, with Moses. Abu Musa burst into tears and gripped him tightly, holding him for long minutes.
Such a fine boy, sputtered Abu Musa. Such an excellent boy. So full of life and laughter and the good things of the earth, our passionate little Ali.
Bell, too, wept. Alone with Yousef under the grape arbor, he bowed his head and let the tears flow, his face a thousand years old in its grief, a timeless map of endurance as scarred and ravaged as the Judean wilderness itself.
Gentle Moses the Ethiopian also expressed his sorrow.
Each morning at four, said Moses, I sing the Psalms for our lost little brother. In my language the very act of prayer is known as to repeat David, to recite the Psalms, and this I do each morning in wonder and thanksgiving at the memory of our departed Ali.
Abu Musa sat hunched in his great bulk. To live, he murmured sadly, is to become expert in farewells.
I feel responsible for his death, said Yousef. I didn't talk with him enough and explore his concerns and help him consider what is and what might be done. It was all so pointless, so useless and to no end, but what can I do now? What can I do?
To each of the three men in Jericho, Yousef put this same question.
You can live honorably and according to your own inner voice, replied Abu Musa. Every man must do that and no man can do more.
I am a monk, said Moses, and I believe a man should seek God with all his heart and all his strength. Many are the ways to seek, but surely they all demand a broad-minded and merciful and humble spirit.
Words. Mere words to Yousef in his pain and suffering. But then Bell's reply seemed less elusive.
People only speak from what they know, said Bell, and we in turn only hear what is already shaping itself within us. Words are always pale reflections of what we feel, shallow and approximate, grossly inexact. At twenty-three you know farewells, but fortunately you haven't become expert in them yet. So for a while, Yousef, perhaps do nothing. I mean, make a point of doing nothing. Don't try to work things out or reach decisions. Let your feelings shift and your thoughts wander. Walk and sit and look at life going on around you. You can't join in it, I know that. So just watch and give yourself a period of doing nothing, three months or six months or whatever. Remind yourself that only regret gives nothing. It's always a sickly futile thing.
You're strong, turn away from it. Then when the time comes go back to teaching school. Do it out of habit, the way you walk down the street. Eventually, things will shape themselves within you. We can talk whenever you like and eventually words will have some meaning for you again. . . .
At the end of the summer Yousef went back to el Azariya. His inattention was still too great to allow him to read when he wasn't at school, so instead he wandered over the hills, looking down on the Judean wilderness and doing nothing as Bell had advised, waiting for his emptiness to subside.
***
That autumn a young stranger moved into el Azariya, a Jew who spoke perfect Arabic, a former Israeli soldier recuperating from wounds received in the June war. The stranger limped with a cane and moved his shoulders stiffly. In a few months he would be nineteen, the same age Ali had been. The stranger's name was Assaf.
The stranger was renting a small house at the end of the village. Each morning he limped over to the store to buy his food and each afternoon he went to sit alone in the coffeeshop. He was correct in his behavior and the villagers couldn't fault his manners. He greeted people when it was appropriate but waited for others to begin a conversation. When asked a question he answered directly.
He had been wounded in the night battle near Damascus Gate in east Jerusalem. A paratrooper. Shrapnel in his legs, his shoulder, his chest. His mother was from Egypt and his father, dead in the 1956 war, had been from Iraq. For his regular meals he ate olives and cheese and tomatoes and bread like everyone else, but he didn't eat much, perhaps because of his wounds. Once or twice a week he went off by bus to visit a hospital.
He had grown up in west Jerusalem. At set hours he limped up and down in front of his house, exercising his legs. A village carpenter rigged bars on ropes in his house so he could exercise his torso. He was quiet and reserved and seldom smiled. He drank neither beer nor arak. In a village as small as el Azariya, Yousef knew all about the young stranger.
Yousef often passed the stranger's house on his walks out of the village in the evening. The first few times he nodded or waved from a distance, then he greeted the stranger and exchanged a few words in passing.
On Friday, his day off, Yousef set out early in the morning to wander across the hills. The sun was just above the Moabite mountains on the far side of the Jordan Valley, the wilderness golden in the first light of day.
When Yousef went by that Friday the stranger was out in front of his house limping back and forth with his cane, exercising his legs.
The stranger smiled. Coffee for the traveler with the world at his feet? he offered.
Yousef accepted the offer and thanked the young man and walked ahead of him through the gate. Despite the early morning chill they sat in the front yard, where there was a sweeping view of the desert dropping away to the Jordan Valley.
It was the first of many visits Yousef made to Assaf's small house. In the beginning they were both careful not to talk about the war, but they couldn't ignore Assaf's wounds and soon Yousef had also spoken of Ali and his death. He had no idea what he was doing, concluded Yousef.
Nor did I that night on the road to Damascus Gate, said Assaf. You just keep pushing on until you're cut down. But now I have to make some sense of what happened, or not make sense of it but live with it anyway.
It was Assaf's wounds and Ali's death that made their friendship grow so quickly, so easily. They shared even more feelings than they knew. Both of them were desperate to reach out and be understood, to be forgiven, to find a way to go on. In their friendship they found the power of forgiveness, which was strengthened by the difference in their ages. Assaf became like a younger brother to Yousef. The need was great for both of them, and before the end of the year Yousef was brought to meet Anna in the old stone house on Ethiopia Street.
Anna liked Yousef. She found him thoughtful beyond his years, a serious young man who was having a beneficial effect on Assaf. She had been doubtful when Assaf said he wanted to live for a time in an Arab village near Jerusalem, while he was getting back the use of his arms and legs. But Tajar was strongly in favor of the idea and convinced Anna she should be too.
Right now, Tajar had said, anything he wants to do should be encouraged. Being on his own is good, living in a village is good. Of course you want to take care of him, but giving him encouragement is probably the best way to help.
Tajar stayed away when the two young men came to visit Anna. He felt it was important for her to be alone with Assaf and his friend. Anna came in from painting and served them one of her vegetable soups, which they gulped down, unused to such fine fare. Afterward, Yousef wandered around the room admiring Anna's landscapes.
They're wonderful, said Yousef. To me, such simplicity conveys great honesty. The hills around Jerusalem look exactly like that. The houses cling to the slopes and seem to grow right out of the rock, to be part of the hills.
Yousef stopped in front of a painting which showed some Arab women sitting under a tree, gathering olives. It was a monochrome rendered with severe economy, the only painting in the room with people in it.
You've just begun doing people? he asked.
Yes, said Anna. It's an experiment. I'm not really sure of them yet.
Yousef peered at the painting more closely. Landscape matters in ancient places, he said, but anyway, it's an experiment that's working. Your power of suggestion is truly extraordinary. Every line is specific but the effect is timeless.
He turned to Anna, smiling.
Someday your house will be a museum, he said. Cakes and coffee will be served on the balconies and people will come from far away to experience the beauty of Jerusalem through your eyes, the way it used to be. What a grand thing to be able to give so much, to leave so much behind you.
Anna smiled and Assaf laughed, the first time she had heard him laugh since the war. He's found a friend who helps him laugh, thought Anna. And we have Tajar to thank for seeing the good of his living alone.
After the visit to Anna there was a trip to Jericho, so Assaf could meet the formidable trio of wise men on Bell's front porch. Abu Musa was deeply pleased and showed it.
Nothing heals like love, he whispered to Moses over the shesh-besh board. How splendid that Yousef has found a brother when his heart aches. The two boys will make each other whole again. Each of them has much to give.
Bell agreed. After sitting with the young men under his grape arbor, he came away impressed with their devotion to one another.They're unalike in many ways, Bell said later, but so were Ali and Yousef. In any case, I imagine their friendship will be lasting and profound because of the way it came about.
And because Assaf is a Jew, added Abu Musa. In times like these, that's also something special.
Oh yes, that too, said Bell.
Jesus was a Jew and I'm a Christian, murmured Moses, so naturally I rejoice in brotherly love that's both lasting and profound. But perhaps the two of you already suspected that?
THREE
All the while Yousef was watching life go on around him, waiting to discover what course his own life would take. Assaf's companionship hastened the healing of the wounds in Yousef's heart. And as Yousef grew stronger in spirit, Assaf walked with greater confidence, his limp less pronounced.
Yousef talked with Assaf more than he ever had with his brother, as if to make up for that failure he blamed on himself and its terrible outcome. No feeling was too intimate for Yousef to lay bare to Assaf, who was eager to listen. For Assaf, listening to Yousef and understanding him became a way of escape from the alley of death, a kind of absolution from the horror he had survived when so many others hadn't.
As time went on Assaf felt Yousef's resolution growing. From the way Yousef talked Assaf knew his friend was nearing some decision having to do with himself and his people and the Palestinian cause. Yet Assaf also knew his friend wasn't warlike or fit for conspiracy. Yousef was a scholarly man, a dreamer and a thinker incapable of aggression. Killing was abhorrent to him and he would never hate nor fear enough to set aside his abhorrence. Significantly, when Yousef talked about himself and the Palestinian people, his thoughts always returned to his village, the poor place on the edge of the Judean wilderness where Jesus had chosen to stay with friends.
Assaf also came to realize how important the austere one-eyed man in Jericho had always been to Yousef.
Something in Bell's life, Bell's manner, Bell's ways, had an enormous hold on Yousef.
What is it exactly that appeals to you so much about Bell? Assaf once asked his friend. Yousef gave several answers, then admitted he had never been able to describe it adequately to himself.
It has to do with his calm, I suppose, said Yousef, and how he set about achieving it and did achieve it. To me, that seems a miraculous accomplishment. Of course I don't believe he's really a holy man the way Abu Musa does, but perhaps that's because we don't have that kind of faith today, Abu Musa's kind of faith, or at least I don't. There have been times when I wished I did, though. When I was a boy I used to marvel at the faith of the Greek fathers, and envy them for it, their absolute belief that what they were doing was the right thing to do. Bell has never had faith like that and he's not a religious man in that sense. Then too, there's his drinking and all it implies. Yet somehow despite all that, and despite his face or because of it, there's a grandeur to him. He denies it and always has, but you can't be around him without feeling it. As wise a man as Abu Musa senses it implicitly, and no one's shrewder than Abu Musa when it comes to human beings and what they're up to. Moses recognizes it too, and he's far more knowledgeable about people than you might suspect from being with him just once or twice. No, it's not a light matter, and the very fact that Bell has done what he's done, without a religious kind of faith, is what's so arresting about him. To me it's an astonishing mystery, intriguing and indefinable. Haunting, even. . . .
Assaf listened and nodded and felt he understood most of it. In his own manner Yousef was seeking Bell's way in life, and Yousef's period of doing nothing, as he called it, was the time needed to let that path reveal itself. As for Assaf, he was surprised by his own understanding. His grasp of Yousef's feelings was itself a step toward self-discovery, the sort of knowledge he might have expected to hear from Anna or Tajar in the past.
The winter turned blustery and cold. The sun was lost and the wind howled as thick clouds raced over the hills, bringing rain and more rain and an early darkness to the Mount of Olives. Yousef returned from his evening walks in the wastes laughing and stamping his feet, sweeping into Assaf's little outpost like some phantom from the wild desert night, his bulky shepherd's cloak heavy with rain and a pungent woolly smell of the sheepskins from which it was made. Together they huddled around Assaf's charcoal brazier where water steamed for coffee. Assaf dug chestnuts from the coals and they burned their fingers cracking them, then scooped up handfuls of fresh dates and drank more cups of syrupy sweet coffee, eating to keep warm as the wind blasted the slopes and screamed through the village. The door shook and the shutters rattled. They laughed and joked and told tales over the charcoal, facing each other in hats and scarves and sheepskins pulled tight against the icy drafts gusting through the room, their hands raised in front of them, warming at the fire.
A pair of open hands facing Assaf, facing Yousef. A palmist's indelible map of the lines of the heart, of the lines of the mind and destiny for the soothsayer in each of them to read by the firelight, one day to ponder.
And so without knowing it the two young friends came to memorize each other's fates down through those rainswept nights of midwinter where they escaped the darkness with warm words, sheltering in Assaf's house on the edge of the wilderness.
***
The first hamsin appears in the Eastern Mediterranean in March, a sudden false summer drifting up from the vast African and Asian deserts to the south. Invisible sand weighs the air and a dry heavy heat grips the land.
The sky turns thickly yellow, the sun is obscured, an unworldly glow suffuses the yellow heavens. After several days the hamsin lifts. The temperature tumbles back to March and the sky is cooly blue, only to be followed in a week or less by the unnatural heat, the stillness, the strange yellow glow of another hamsin.
Hamsin means fifty in Arabic, the number of days this season is said to last. Thus does the desert reassert its hold on the land and boldly lay claim to the sensuous habits of spring, vanquishing the stormy ways of a brief and foreign winter.
The Judean wilderness turns softly green in the spring and whole ranges are bright with wildflowers, gifts of the winter rains and a new sun. But the herbs and flowers and grasses have only a few weeks to complete their cycle of life and shed their seeds to another year, for in just such a time the earth is baked rock-hard once more as the sun hammers all growing things to dust.
The end of winter brought the end of the long evenings of communion between the two friends in Assaf's little house on the edge of el Azariya. Assaf now walked without a cane. When Yousef joined him in the evening they sat in front of Assaf's house, looking down on the desert. Yousef was both serene and excited, apparently having reached a decision about his future. But Yousef didn't speak of it and Assaf felt no need to question his friend. They both sensed it was something better left unsaid and instead they talked about Assaf's future. Yousef felt strongly that Assaf should go to university. As a wounded veteran his education would be paid for and Yousef thought it was too good an opportunity to miss.
They made more visits to Anna in the spring and also traveled down to Jericho. Anna didn't know it but Yousef was saying good-bye. Abu Musa sensed a farewell, but because the death of Ali was still too recent a loss to the old patriarch, he and Yousef didn't speak of it openly. With Bell, though, Assaf suspected that Yousef was more direct. When they were in Jericho, Yousef went off with Bell on his walks out of town at twilight while Assaf, using his leg as an excuse, stayed behind on Bell's front porch with the two shesh-besh players. Assaf knew without being told that Yousef was going away. It was just a question of when he was leaving and where he would go.
To the Eastern churches, Easter is alone in holiness. Christmas, unmentioned in the gospels and falling near the winter solstice, is to them perhaps a memory of some northern, pagan ceremony honoring the rebirth of the sun. But Easter, born of Jesus' trip to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover and forever linked to Passover through lunar calendars, celebrates the central mystery of Christianity, the resurrection to eternal life.
For the Greek fathers who maintain the church of Lazarus on the Mount of Olives, as for their brethren, forty days of fasting and prayer culminate in the midnight mass which welcomes Easter Sunday. Then, as the church bell tolls twelve in the deepness of the night, the bishop turns to face his congregation with a lighted candle and speaks the words Christ is risen. The church is dark. Each celebrant holds an unlit candle. From the one candle, the light and the promise spread.
When the words were spoken at midnight that Easter, Assaf was watching from the back of the Greek church in el Azariya. It was the first time he had attended a service in a church, and he went because Yousef asked him to come and he felt it was important to his friend. As it happened, it was also the last time he saw Yousef.
The chants and incense swirled for hours, then the church was darkened. The bell tolled, the words were said, the light spread until the whole dim church was flickering brightly. But when Assaf looked around for Yousef he could no longer see him. He waited outside while the church emptied but still there was no Yousef.
In that most precious of moments to the Greek fathers who had raised him, Yousef had paid a silent farewell to his village and slipped away in the darkness to pursue his destiny, gone to live in the caves and crevices of the Judean wilderness as other refugees in the Holy Land had done before him.
Yousef wasn't a man to take up arms and he never did. His cause was liberty and equality, rare facts in his part of the world and hardly known from the Eastern Mediterranean to the East China Sea, but no less desired for that. Yousef had become a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization and thereby a fugitive west of the Jordan River. During his early months in the wilderness he did provide tangible assistance to the PLO, acting as a guide to infiltrators and other fugitives. But soon his flight was too elusive even for that and he became simply a symbol of resistance, a solitary wanderer given to self-imposed exile in his own land.
As the months and years went by Yousef became the subject of stories, living alone as he did in the fiery chasms and icy caves of that desolate landscape, surviving in some meager way that only God could comprehend. Of course the wilderness wasn't truly deserted. Bedouin roamed the stark hills with their black tents and goatherd boys from the villages grazed their flocks deep in the wadis in all but the coldest weather.
Tales were brought back by those who sometimes caught sight of Yousef, or thought they did. He was said to move with the speed of the wind, a sharp small figure disappearing on the horizon at twilight, so quickly gone in the fast-falling desert night that the bedouin and goatherd boys couldn't be sure they had seen a man or a phantom, a man or an eerie trick of last light playing a final echo in a corner of the stony wastes. But mostly he wasn't seen and his presence was only sensed, for to the bedouin and goatherd boys Yousef was more a spirit than a man, to be known through a sudden, distant whirl of sand or an abrupt and peculiar whisper of wind.
Among them it became a custom to leave food and water for the invisible wanderer in some protected place, a sharing offered up after the manner of a portion for the prophet Elijah, to remind God of the dream which forever stirs in the barren places of the human soul. By way of these secret friends and their secret wishes, Yousef somehow survived in the wilderness and became a legend to the Arab villagers of Palestine, a fugitive whose silent desert voice spoke clearly to the hearts of many, a witness to the life and death and yearnings of his brother, an exile who went on gathering his spirit around him as a cloak woven from the stuff of myths, unshakable even in the fiercest summers and cruellest winters.
When Assaf told Anna what had become of Yousef, she wept. Such a thoughtful young man, she said, and so dear a friend to you, sweet one. Why does it have to be like this? Why can't he have a better life, our Yousef?
Tajar, on the other hand, was somber. He listened carefully to Assaf and his eyes turned far away, deep in thought. And so now Yousef also runs in the wilderness, he murmured, hiding and watching and guiding himself as best he can.
While in Jericho, Abu Musa let out a great sigh and bowed his head. Farewells and more farewells, he said to Moses the Ethiopian. What's the use of being a patriarch if you outlive your descendants?
When Assaf talked with Bell, he said he had suspected something like this might happen. Bell agreed with him. But perhaps it's just for a time, added Bell. Yousef only has to slip across the river to live a normal life again. His exile may not be forever.
Assaf took heart from the words because he also suspected Yousef was still seeing Bell. One of the familiar routes of Bell's walks near Jericho at twilight was to the ruins of Herod's winter palace, which lay at the foot of the wadi bounding the Mount of Temptation. There the runoff of the winter rains from the heights of Jerusalem had once fed Herod's pools and baths. The deep wadi could provide hiding places for a man coming down from the wilderness. Where the wadi entered the plains there was a banana plantation, and its thick low foliage was also a hiding place, right next to the ruins. On certain moonless nights Bell made a point of visiting the ruins, and sometimes he heard Yousef's voice calling to him from the shadows.
In the beginning Yousef turned up almost every month to see Bell. Later his visits were far less frequent. The shesh-besh players on Bell's front porch knew of the secret meetings and Assaf suspected them, although he never said anything about it. So perhaps it might have gone on like that for years if Yousef hadn't become determined to meet an even more legendary figure, the great friend of the Palestinian cause who was known as the conscience of the Arab revolution — the mysterious Halim from Damascus.
FOUR
The Runner operation entered a period of quiet after the Six-Day War. Before then the Runner had produced an enormous quantity of information on the fortifications of the Golan Heights. Now the Golan was in Israeli hands. The Runner himself was exhausted from the nonstop days and nights of those years. His clandestine back-up team in Syria and Beirut had worked to the limit, moving the Runner's material on secret routes from Damascus to the Mossad.
Tajar congratulated them all and arranged a schedule of lengthy vacations for them, keeping in place a network for minimum communications. The Runner was told to draw back from military affairs and concern himself with his civilian enterprises. In effect, he was to put intelligence aside for a time and act like a legitimate Syrian businessman.
Tajar had no difficulty persuading General Dror, the director of the Mossad, to accept this new tactic. The Runner and the back-up team were obviously in need of rest. Emotionally as well as physically, they were worn out. War hysteria had been rampant in Syria for months before June 1967, and defeat had brought rank instability in many Arab capitals. It was a dangerous moment for a deep-cover penetration. Complete inactivity was the only safe course for the operation, Tajar felt. There's going to be a lot of bloodletting in Damascus, Tajar told Dror, a regular night of the long knives. The army and the security services will be at each other's throats hunting out traitors to take the blame for what they all did wrong. Treachery is how the Arabs explain defeat. They don't really have another way to justify it to themselves. It's part of their method of self-delusion, their weakness for the abstract.
Dror smiled. Along with everyone else, he respected Tajar as the Mossad's senior expert on Arab countries.
He also admired Tajar's phenomenal success with the Runner operation. But as a pragmatic military man, Dror often found Tajar himself strangely abstract and incomprehensible. No one in his experience had ever devised plots as intricate as Tajar's. The Runner operation was already a dozen years old, a dozen years in the making, and Dror still wasn't sure he really knew where it was heading, even though he was the director of the Mossad and Tajar always seemed to be candid with him. Of course Tajar was quick to tell him what the operation's objectives were at any given moment, and the results invariably came in. But Dror sometimes felt lost all the same, as if he were a young lieutenant out tramping in the desert and Tajar were his bedouin guide signaling from the next rise in the distance. The guide got him where he was supposed to go but the route remained a mystery to him. Moreover, he never drew any nearer to the guide. Like any good bedouin tracker, Tajar was always up ahead signaling back to him, surveying a stretch of desert that Dror, the young lieutenant, hadn't come to yet.
Why do you think the Arabs are so given to abstractions? Dror asked.
Tajar moved his crippled legs with his hands. Ah well, he said, it's a very human characteristic, isn't it?
Something everyone has tucked away somewhere. Who wants to accept what's at hand, after all? The desert's a harsh place. Who wouldn't prefer to think about the oasis in the distance? Even if there isn't one, just more desert? Who knows? It may be that the Arabs originally picked up the habit from us. Mohammed was illiterate well into manhood and it seems to have made a profound impression on him that these odd people called Jews were always reading a book, their book, created for them, and gathering great sustenance from it. Furthermore, when faced with hardship and defeat these odd people called Jews were always saying, Next year in Jerusalem, when anyone could see there wasn't a hope under the sun of them being in Jerusalem next year. When in fact, like most people anytime, the Jews were exactly where they were going to be until they died. Lastly, to an illiterate but thoughtful man, what could be more abstract than this invincible, invisible world hidden in a book? Naturally Mohammed wanted to have his own, so he learned to read and in time God dictated the Koran to him. So that much of the matter may go all the way back to Mohammed. The difference then becomes, I suppose, whom you blame for not being where you'd like to be in life. We tend to blame ourselves when things go wrong, while the Arabs are more apt to blame the fellow who lives next door. Perhaps we do that because we've been aliens who haven't been living in our own country for several thousand years. But now that we're sitting in our own country and it's this year in Jerusalem and we're there, while the Palestinian Arabs are going into a diaspora, it may be that we're going to become more like them and they're going to become more like us. It's curious, isn't it, General, how human beings affect each other, even enemies. Or is it especially enemies?
Dror nodded and turned the conversation back to the Runner operation. Within the Mossad, Tajar was known as a friend of Arab culture who was severely disturbed by the extensive Arab territory that had come under Israeli control as a result of the Six-Day War. There was no arguing with Tajar on this subject and Dror preferred to keep away from it.
Then we agree, said Dror, that the Runner operation should be quiet for a time. What about the Runner himself?
I feel it's important that I sit with him, replied Tajar. I have to talk with him about his son, and then there's the whole question of the future. The last few years have been . . . a severe strain for the Runner.
When do you plan to see him?
Next month in Beirut, said Tajar.
Good. An in-depth assessment is important. I'd like him to go on, of course, but you'll have to be the judge of that.
Yes. We can talk about it when I get back, said Tajar, gathering his crippled legs together.
***
More than two years had passed since Tajar had seen Yossi. With the back-up team handling communications and the fortifications of the Golan Heights as its objective, the Runner operation had been clearly defined. Roles were precise and everyone knew what he had to do. The Runner himself was superbly methodical. His information fitted together and the maps, piece by piece, had grown more complete. Queries had been sent to the Runner, but as often as not he had already anticipated the Mossad's questions.
Most of Tajar's time, in fact, had been spent solving problems having to do with the functioning of the back-up team, whose work had to be continually adjusted in small ways to mesh with circumstances. In the end, due to Tajar's careful planning, the team had performed its tasks without error. The operation was tight and safe, deeply buried. Security was as strict as ever and only Tajar and General Dror knew the real identity of the Runner. To the members of Tajar's operational team the Runner was still a highly placed Arab in Damascus, a non-Syrian diplomat or military attaché whose sensitive role was of inestimable worth to Israel, to be protected at all costs.
As was his custom, Tajar treated the members of the Runner team as family, as his own sons and daughters. It was an old-fashioned way of running an operation, but with Tajar as clan chief it worked. Tajar's commandos, as they were known in the Mossad, were an elite within an elite, a long-range desert patrol operating behind enemy lines. They took orders only from Tajar, who reported directly to the chief of the Mossad.
Competence and loyalty were fierce among the commandos. Even if the Golan Heights hadn't been conquered in the Six-Day War, the commandos would never have doubted Tajar.
Besides security, there was a more subtle reason why Tajar hadn't met with Yossi in the period before the Six-Day War. By then Yossi had been in Damascus for over half a dozen years, or since the end of 1959.
Tajar knew it would be a crucial time in Yossi's life. Yossi would have been living his clandestine role long enough for the novelty of it to have become routine. The initial exhilaration and sense of secret power would falter, lapse, disappear. Yossi's son would come of age and leave home. And Yossi himself would turn forty, and age when a man was suddenly apt to realize he was where he was going in life.
Tajar knew Yossi well and sensed these were things Yossi would want to face in his own way. Long ago Tajar had come to call Yossi the Runner because of Yossi's experiences as a boy in Iraq, running alone across the desert to the town where he had worked as a bookkeeper. General Dror, and Little Aharon before him, had often found it uncanny how Tajar could always predict what the Runner would do in any given situation. How can you know that? Dror had once asked Tajar in disbelief. When we describe something accurately, replied Tajar, aren't we always describing ourselves?
So Tajar knew it would have been a time of profound change for Yossi in any case. And the suddenness of the 1967 war, and Assaf's wounds in the war and the dramatic outcome of the war for Israel and the Arab countries, were all factors in addition to that, making the changes for Yossi more acute, more complex.
Still, Tajar wasn't prepared for the Yossi who walked into the room at the safehouse in Beirut.
Yossi had aged ten years. His hair was almost completely white, making his skin look darker. He stood very erect and seemed taller than before, an illusion caused by his carriage and the sparse bony planes of his face, which was as lean as a bedouin's. His moustache was thick and black, suggesting a younger man who had once lived in this body, and a heavy line cut down each side of his face. But what was most remarkable about him was his eyes. They were deep-set and powerful, the eyes of a visionary. Tajar had never seen eyes that burned so deeply.
For a moment Tajar was stunned, so arresting was this face. It would have caused him to stop and stare, to wonder, no matter where he had met it. But then Yossi smiled and his teeth flashed and dozens of little lines danced around his eyes. It was an immensely appealing smile, even warmer and more inviting than Tajar remembered, and at once it transformed this formidable figure into the best friend a man could ever have.
Here was tenderness and confidence and strength, above all understanding. The deep lines in this face, Tajar realized, came from smiling.
They embraced warmly. Yossi stepped back and they gazed at each other with their arms clasped, holding on tightly with their hands, then hugged again. Tajar suddenly felt much older than he had a minute before then. He felt weak and clumsy, an awkward cripple, while Yossi was hard and strong, all muscle and bone.
How are you? they both said at once, feeling the breath of the other.
Blessed is the Name, they both answered, using that most Hebrew of expressions.
Once more they were standing apart, smiling and laughing as they held on with their hands and gazed at each other.
I've aged, said Yossi, but you look just the same.
Oh yes, said Tajar, I did all my aging when I banged up my legs. Now I don't get any older. I just lie in my hammock and watch the sky.
Yossi laughed. I remember that hammock of yours, he said. I have one of my own strung at the back of my garden in Damascus. People are always asking about it, they think it's a wonderful invention. I tell them it was a lazy habit I picked up in Argentina.
They laughed at the word lazy. Spoken by Yossi, it seemed a grandly exotic notion, for he had the wind-hardened look of a man who only rested while mounted on the back of his camel, an instant here and an instant there between the steps.
Tajar was abruptly serious. You are well? he asked, not referring to Yossi's physical state. Yossi thought for a moment. Still that utter sincerity, thought Tajar. Then Yossi's smile burst out and lit his face.
More than enough, replied Yossi. Like any desert traveler, naturally, I also seek the next oasis.
***
Their time together was brief in days and nights but exquisitely long in moments. For both of them it was a feast of memory to be savored and shared, with whole worlds of unknown sights and sounds to experience, to explore. And beyond all that were the nuances of feeling, those shadowy inner landscapes of the heart which could only be sensed when they were face to face.
They talked of Assaf and what he had gone through in the war, of his wounds and his recovery, his life in the Arab village of el Azariya and his friend the young Arab schoolteacher. Of Anna and her painting and the old stone house on Ethiopia Street where Assaf had grown up. Of Tajar and his snug cottage hidden behind the cactus and the rosebushes, the bushes still wildly out of control, the cottage still slowly crumbling at the end of its tangled, secluded compound.
They spoke of Jerusalem undivided now after the war, one city again, no longer separated by barbed wire and bunkers cutting across its stately hills.
Of the Mossad and Dror and Tajar's commandos, of Israel and the Arab territories occupied in the war.
Of the tiny settlement in the Negev where Yossi had met Anna, an army outpost now. Of the other settlement on the south coast where Yossi and Anna had lived by the sea after independence, a small city now.
So much has changed, said Yossi.
Oh yes, it happens quickly, said Tajar. The country grows, everything changes.
And Assaf is really taller than I am?
From only a little fellow, just imagine, said Tajar. He's at least an inch taller than you when he stands straight, which he's learning to do. The leg wounds held him back for a while but now he's overcoming that. A handsome young man who sometimes reminds me of Anna's brother, David. His good looks come from Anna, in other words. I know you wouldn't have it any other way. But his smile is yours, unmistakably. I always see you when he smiles and Anna also feels that. No wonder he's so independent, she says. That's the same smile we used to get in the Negev when we faced impossible odds and Yossi waved as he went off into the desert in another of his disguises. Who can resist it? she says. A smile like that is the hope of the world.
They spoke of Bell.
It's been over a year since I last saw him, said Yossi. I used to enjoy those visits to Jericho immensely, but then life became too hectic and I couldn't get away. And now, unfortunately, Jericho is on the wrong side of the river for me.
Tajar nodded. At the time of their meeting Assaf had only recently made the first of his trips with Yousef down to Jericho. Tajar explained Yousef's connection to Abu Musa, and through him to Bell.
So Assaf is also going to get to know Bell? said Yossi. Well it's not such an odd coincidence, really. Jericho hovers down there as a midway point on all the caravan routes, and the one-eyed hermit of Jericho has acquired quite a reputation over the years. You even hear people in Damascus speak of him from time to time, although not particularly the people I do business with. Bell is too out of the way for them. But if Assaf comes to enjoy the company of Abu Musa because of Yousef, that's certainly all for the best. Abu Musa's a marvellously clever old rogue. Have you ever met him?
No, said Tajar, for some curious reason I haven't. Neither him nor his partner at the gaming board, the giant called Moses the Ethiopian. Inexplicably and more's the loss, I've missed the antics of their forty-year shesh-besh game. But of course it's been decades since I knew Bell, in Egypt during the Second World War.
They talked of Damascus and Yossi's life in Damascus, or, rather, Halim's life in Damascus.
With its gardens and orchards, said Yossi, the city has great beauty. Then too, it has a river flowing through it and you know how special that is in this part of the world. When you have a river along with the desert you feel you have everything God can give. Unlike the Egyptians, though, the Syrians have never had the luxury of living off by themselves in history, so they have none of the easygoing habits that can bring. Every army from east or west, forever it seems, has conquered Damascus on its road to empire and people remember that, even if the memory is less than conscious. Intrigues and enemies and warring factions are what they've always known, that and an ability to survive which gives pride and also makes them wary, suspicious, shrewd, clever. They work hard and keep an eye over their shoulder. Some of the men I deal with are jackals, but no more than anyplace where life is difficult and power is hard to seize and dangerous to hold. The Syrians are many different peoples because of all the conquering armies, but even when people differ so much you're never far from those two fundamental lures of human nature, the river and the desert, with their opposing creeds and unresolvable promises. That's finally the struggle, I suppose, beyond empire and race and even beyond religion. Surely it has nothing to do with national boundaries. Since it's waged in each man's heart, in fact, how can there be an end to it? But for all that Damascus is still el Fayha, the fragrant, blessed with gardens and a river at the foot of its mountain on the transdesert routes of history.
Your days? asked Tajar. Your evenings?
Mostly I listen to people, said Yossi. The last few years I've been rushing around, but generally I spend more time in my garden. I do much of my business there. Meetings and appointments, it's my main office really.
You're able to relax then?
Oh yes. You know how it works out. A man who's doing well is expected to relax. That's what succeeding means, having more time to consider. It's the traditional way, as opposed to the Western or American way.
So it's become like that for me, and people telephone or just turn up and we sit under my fig tree.
Do you smoke? asked Tajar, meaning hashish.
Rarely, said Yossi. I don't feel the need for it as much as some do.
Women?
Only the ones you know about. Sociable affairs and fairly distant, but regular enough to keep my attention from wandering.
Does it cause any difficulty that you've never married?
None. Some do and some do not, as they say, and a man who's thoroughly dedicated to his work is considered the same as married anyway. When I first arrived friends used to bring along their unmarried sisters and nieces, but now I'm accepted as a man who lives alone and devotes his time to his work. The uncle who can help. Everyone feels easy with that and values it, too.
Finally, then, their conversations came around to Yossi's future and the future of the Runner operation.
In other words, said Tajar, what do you see for yourself now? What do you want? You know everyone at home has nothing but praise for you. The operation has been extraordinarily successful and your contribution is beyond all measure. If you want to come back and begin a new life, it can be done any way you wish.
Something quiet inside, or a different field and a new identity, anything. Or just living, if that appeals. You don't have to work. Dror is ready to go along with anything we come up with. I know you've considered all this, and of course we don't have to decide anything now. In a way the war is a turning point, for all of us and everything, but that doesn't have to be the case for the Runner operation. From everything you say and everything we know, the operation is as secure as ever. So you can also just live quietly in Damascus for a time, if that's what you want, and we can have this conversation again in six months. There's no hurry. We can bring an end to the life of the man known as Halim, now or later, without jeopardizing anything. It all depends on the way you feel.
I realize that, said Yossi, and of course I have thought a great deal about it. There were some hard times in the last few years, but I've gotten beyond the rough spots and what seems to have happened is that I've become Halim. With you I'm still Yossi, but it's more the way a person recalls his childhood, the person he used to be. He's still there inside me and always will be, but I've lived through several other lifetimes since then and in a way Yossi is foreign to me. A while ago you mentioned Anna's brother, David. Anna recalls him and you do, and Assaf must imagine him sometimes, and in that sense David still exists as much as anyone we think about, who may be as near as the next room. But in fact David's also been dead for twenty-five years, safe from harm and suffering, it's true, but also safe from change. Well that's something of the way I feel about Yossi. I miss him sometimes. It makes me sad to think of him sometimes. When you speak of Assaf's smile, for example, and how it reminds Anna of a young man in the desert long ago, slipping away with a wave from a tiny settlement that's now an army outpost . . . that makes me sad. When you said that my heart stumbled. I had to catch myself. For a moment it all came back and I felt lost, afraid. I was in the Negev again and leaving Anna, not knowing whether I'd get back and not knowing whether she'd still be there or still be alive if I did get back. Oh yes, I smiled then because it was all I had to give her. I was on my way to Gaza at night, across the open desert, so I smiled when I left her and our friends, pathetically standing guard duty around those little huts we had. But did she really think I preferred a cold desert night to lying in her arms? It's so strange what we know and don't know. Memory is strange and living through different lifetimes is strange and Bell is probably right. We add new vows to the old and forsake nothing and the soul becomes like the Holy City, the myth which is Jerusalem, a dream of ourselves which is forever unachievable, to be seen only by others, its wonders recounted to us in imaginary tales of distant places.
I understand that, said Tajar. And so?
Yossi smiled. Faced with Tajar and the past, there was still a touch of shyness in his smile, despite the hard years.
And so I'd prefer to live on as Halim in Damascus, said Yossi. I have no desire to see Jerusalem and be disappointed. When I was a child there were two mythical cities in my imagination, Jerusalem and Damascus. Because of circumstances I've come to know one of them, and one imaginary city is enough.
That's where my dream of myself is. As for the rest, I have my work and I'm good at it, it means something and I'm useful in it.
Tajar nodded. And someday? he asked.
Yossi smiled again. Well if someday ever comes around, he replied, then I may become a hermit like Bell.
Who isn't really a hermit, said Tajar.
That's right, added Yossi, and that's his secret. You and I know that, and the shesh-besh players know it, Moses the Arab and Moses the Ethiopian, but it's a well-kept secret all the same. Isn't it so, Tajar?
Yossi covered one eye with his hand and pushed the rest of his face out of shape, pretending to be Bell. Then he dropped his hands and looked deep into Tajar's eyes and laughed because of life and fate, and Tajar couldn't help but laugh with him, marveling all the while at Yossi's strength and determination and above all the immense distance he had traveled in the last two decades.
And so? asked Dror.
And so all together, said Tajar, it's an astonishing experience to sit with the Runner. He's confident and self-assured and knows what he's doing and why he's doing it. Despite the enormous strains of the last two years, he's become even more at ease with himself.
Problems?
I kept looking for them and at first it didn't make any sense to me, replied Tajar. Damascus? An environment as hostile as that for eight whole years? Then suddenly it did make sense to me. At that moment I accepted the fact that he's become a different person from the one I used to know.
Who has he become? asked Dror.
Halim. He has become Halim, said Tajar. It's not a fiction anymore, not a cover, not a role. Halim is real, Yossi has created him. It's uncanny. He's even become something of a mystic, which you'd expect from Halim.
Dror saw that Tajar was looking off into the distance, lost somewhere in thought. Certainly Tajar's comments weren't as startling to Dror as they seemed to be to Tajar, but then Dror often found Tajar himself to be something of a mystic.
You didn't expect this? asked Dror.
Tajar gave a roundabout reply, a little of this and a little of that. Since leaving Yossi in Beirut, he had been trying to answer that same question himself. He still wasn't sure how he felt, but probably he hadn't expected it. It was true that Tajar had never spent so many years in one cover role. Nor had he handled an agent, before Yossi, who had done so. It was a new experience for Tajar and perhaps that was why he felt a little uneasy, a little confused. What did it mean that Halim was real?
But there was no reason for Tajar to go into this with Dror. These were personal questions, part of the endless dialogue Tajar carried on between himself and himself. None of it affected Yossi's integrity as an agent or the Runner operation. If anything, Yossi's transformation improved the operation by making it more secure. The back-up team was something else, a separate matter. But if Halim was just Halim, how could he ever be caught? What was there to uncover?
So the Runner wants to stay on in Damascus, concluded Dror.
Exactly, said Tajar. It's agreed there will be little or no operational activity until the aftermath of the war settles down. In the meantime he'll carry on his legitimate businesses. We also agreed to meet again in six months'
time, more or less, to see where we go from there. But I don't foresee any change in his basic decision. He'll want to stay. By then the members of the back-up team will be ready for work again and we can reassign as necessary, depending on what we decide for the Runner.
Good, said Dror. And now you ought to take a little time off yourself. Will you be doing that?
Definitely, replied Tajar. My Greek needs improving. Homer is becoming incomprehensible to me.
FIVE
Tajar was back at work sooner than he expected. In the spring of 1968, about the time Yousef went into exile in the Judean wilderness, one of the commandos came to call on Tajar in his cottage behind the cactus and the rosebushes. A priority message had come through from the Runner in Damascus, alerting Tajar that a delivery of special significance was on its way. The material was due that night. The Runner had used an emergency procedure to signal Tajar and forward the material.
Tajar was waiting in the commandos' operation room when the delivery arrived at the Mossad near midnight.
He read through it and spent the rest of the night preparing a report for Dror. The Runner's material showed that the Soviet Union was taking on the PLO as a full-fledged client in terrorism. For the first time Israel had been made a primary target of the KGB, and the Syrians were to be the link.
***
Before the PLO was founded in 1964, Syrian intelligence had trained Palestinian saboteurs and directed their efforts against Israel. After the PLO was organized, Syrian intelligence was still the main source of arms and training for the PLO. But until the 1967 war, the PLO itself was a negligible factor in Arab policy against Israel. The Arab goal remained outright conquest, to overrun Israel on the battlefield with conventional armies, a continuation of the failed military campaigns of 1948.
The disastrous Arab defeat in the Six-Day War changed all this. Overt aggression was impossible, at least for a time, and the PLO became a more important instrument. Supporting the PLO cause was also the only policy uniting the various Arab countries, busy as they were uncovering treachery in their own ranks and more particularly among each other. Nasser, the former hero of the Arab world who had promised total victory over Israel and instead had delivered total defeat, was no longer everyone's leader. Syria went its own way and used the PLO less as a weapon against Israel than against its neighbor Jordan, where it saw a chance of overthrowing King Hussein and expanding Syria. The Syrian intelligence services, in any case, had always been more intricately involved than anyone else in manipulating the PLO for their own purposes.
The Runner's connection to the Palestinian cause preceded the founding of the PLO. Years earlier, at a time when there were no Palestinian organizations, Tajar had asked the Runner to make himself known in the Palestinian refugee camps. Little Aharon, then the director of the Mossad, had ridiculed the idea as another of Tajar's vague, impractical notions, part of Tajar's lifelong obsession with obscure Arab movements and causes. But Little Aharon had let Tajar have his way because the Runner was only newly arrived in Damascus and had the beginnings of some valuable contacts in the Syrian army.
Thus the Runner's Palestinian connections were profound. The young men he had befriended in the refugee camps were now in positions of importance in the PLO. The man from Damascus known as Halim had been one of their first supporters and advisers, a friend whose garden and money and influence had always been available to them during the empty years. Furthermore, Halim's support was pure. He wasn't an officer of Syrian intelligence who paid them to do work useful only to Syria. Halim had a conscience and was incorruptible. He was a Syrian patriot whose true goal was the Arab revolution.
Early in 1968 rumors began to reach the Mossad that the KGB was taking a closer look at the PLO, through the KGB sections that worked with Syrian intelligence in Damascus. The KGB obviously had a new interest in the PLO, but the Mossad didn't know what form this interest would take. In the material sent to Tajar, the Runner documented the KGB's preparations for a PLO terrorist campaign. A new KGB section was being set up in Damascus to recruit PLO agents for terrorist training in the Soviet Union. Terrorist cells would then be grouped, armed, financed, and directed by the KGB. The Runner provided detailed information on the new KGB section in Damascus, including the names of KGB case officers and PLO recruits. From other sources the Mossad was able to determine that these terrorist cells would operate mostly in Western Europe, an area of far more interest to the Russians than Jordan or Israel or the Arab villages on the west bank of the river, between Jordan and Israel.
For the Mossad, it was a momentous discovery. Dror called the prime minister and there was a meeting in the prime minister's office. When Dror returned to the Mossad late that evening, Tajar was waiting for him.
A somber affair, said Dror. No one underestimates the power of the KGB. We'll be talking to the Americans, but the feeling is we'll have to go it alone for a time.
A time? said Tajar.
Years, probably. We have the proof the KGB is behind it but we can't divulge it, not even to the Americans. I spoke to the prime minister privately and he's adamant that the Runner's material is too sensitive to be shared with anyone. We can't take a chance on compromising the Runner, and if we control his material we can be sure that doesn't happen. The KGB operation is to be run from Damascus and we'll never have anyone so deeply buried there as the Runner. Security has to be tighter than ever. Having the Syrian security agencies as your enemy is one thing. Working against the KGB, in a place as hostile as Damascus, is quite another. So the Americans aren't going to be told how we get our information, and that means they won't trust it one hundred percent. They'll think we're trying to push them into helping us fight our war against the PLO.
Of course they'll help, but not all the way, and what's worse, the intelligence services in Europe will be far less helpful. What do they care about the PLO's squabble with us? Nasty, yes, but also Arab-Jewish business, sandy Middle Eastern business, so why not let the Arabs and Israelis kill each other and work it out? That's the way the European services will see it. They won't want to get involved, even though most of the terrorism will be taking place in Europe. It's clear the KGB is going to work very hard to make this look like strictly the PLO against Jewish targets. So the Europeans will protect themselves and their oil supplies by staying out of it. And if there is a particularly vicious incident involving non-Jews, the PLO will simply say it was the work of some dissident group. The KGB's good at that, and the Europeans will want to believe it anyway.
Tajar agreed. The KGB would keep its role hidden by working through the Syrians, and the Runner's position in Damascus was too sensitive, now, to be shared with anyone. Eventually there would be other sources of information on the terrorist campaign, in the Mossad and elsewhere, and eventually some of them might become as important as the Runner. But for the time being Israel would have to face the terrorism alone, and the Mossad would have to counter it alone. The KGB knew all this, everything except the fact that the Runner existed. In Damascus, especially, the center of their operation, they would be watching everyone who could conceivably be harmful to them. Certainly they wouldn't just rely on the Syrians to safeguard a major KGB
operation aimed at Europe.
The new problems for Tajar were vast, intricate, complex. For the Runner the danger was great. As Dror had said, no one underestimated the KGB and its immense resources. With careful planning the KGB would be able to use the PLO for years. The Third World, oil, anti-Semitism — the KGB had many factors to play upon with an instrument such as the PLO.
Tajar had another meeting scheduled with the Runner in Beirut, the follow-up to their first meeting after the Six-Day War. Now he cancelled this second meeting so he could work out a new procedure, taking even greater precautions. Not surprisingly, the Runner had already suggested this in the message that came in with his special material.
Tajar had to rework the commandos' functions to reflect the new involvement of the KGB. Above all, he was thankful that Halim and not Yossi was in Damascus, a man who was not only strong and self-assured, but real.
Real?
Tajar still hadn't come to terms with that idea, that fact. The commandos sometimes noticed a distant look in his eyes and assumed it was his preoccupation with the details of their new assignments. But in fact Tajar was still disturbed by Yossi's transformation into Halim. Having planned it, he understood it. Yet even he wasn't quite sure, now, where it would lead.
How far, he wondered, could a man really go in creating himself? How far, in other words, could the Runner run?
SIX
It was Abu Musa, especially, who urged Assaf to continue to visit Jericho after Yousef disappeared. He had developed a great fondness for Assaf, whose presence relieved the pain he felt for the lost company of Ali and Yousef.
Come bring us tales of mythical Jerusalem, he said to Assaf. The boys used to do that and we need it down here. Otherwise, Bell and Moses and I tend to succumb to the orange blossoms and flowers and live in a jasmine blur of eternal summer . . . unmindful that the world is not a dream, forgetful that the passage of days is not merely the rhythmic click of a shesh-besh game. Up there on the mountain of Jerusalem you have sharp winds and turbulence and raucous blustery noise. Won't you bring us news of this so I can shine as a knowledgeable patriarch when taking my morning coffee in Jericho's marketplace? Of course Jerusalem is a new place when compared to our serene ancient sun down here, but I for one like to keep in touch with the current fashions of men. By which I mean the latest religions and empires and so forth, whose followers are undoubtedly holding forth with fervent self-regard up there in the Holy City.
Or put another way, whose empire is it that now sways the world? asked Moses the Ethiopian, quoting the question asked nearly two millennia ago by St. Paul of Thebes, at the age of one hundred and thirteen, when speaking to a younger anchorite who had arrived more recently in the desert, St. Anthony, aged ninety.
Bell smiled at his friends and walked with Assaf from the porch to the gate.
Would it be all right if I did come to call now and then? asked Assaf.
We would be hurt if you didn't, said Bell. We miss Ali and Yousef and it makes a difference when you're here.
By the gate Bell pointed at Assaf's sandaled feet.
I know these now, said Bell. After years of sitting on my front porch and gazing out under the orange trees, I'm apt to recognize people by their feet. Abu Musa senses their hearts and Moses, well, he plucks their beings straight from the sunlight. So do come to see us whenever you can.
Assaf thanked Bell and agreed to come. With Yousef gone, he felt a growing kinship with the trio of wise men on Bell's front porch.
***
That summer Assaf gave up his small house on the edge of the Judean desert. It saddened him to be in el Azariya without Yousef, so he left the village and moved back to Anna's old stone house on Ethiopia Street.
His interest now was history, a passion he had picked up from Yousef. In the autumn he would begin studies at Hebrew University on Mt. Scopus, which he could see from the balcony in Anna's house where he spent all his time reading about the past.
Between Assaf's balcony and Mt. Scopus lay the valley where he had fought on a June night just over a year ago, the low ground of the Wadi Joz and the area known as Sheik Jarrah, which ran east to Damascus Gate in the Old City. Sheik Jarrah was said to have been chief surgeon to the armies of Salah al-din, the great Kurdish warrior who defeated the Crusaders in the Middle Ages and drove them from the Holy Land. The call of the muezzin from the mosque of Sheik Jarrah reached Assaf clearly, sometimes mixed with another inside Damascus Gate, depending on the wind.
At regular hours the Moslem calls to prayer, beginning with Allah'hu akbar, God is great, echoed up to Assaf's balcony across the former no-man's-land and caused him to lose his place in his book, to raise his eyes and daydream as he read of Crusader or Roman or Babylonian armies advancing to conquer Jerusalem on that track of low ground a thousand and two thousand and twenty-five hundred years ago.
The Israeli paratroopers in the Six-Day War had followed exactly the same route as all those other armies whose conquests of Jerusalem had been equally momentous events in other ages, in the make-believe of once upon a time, in all those distant eras now long since lost in the swirl of history. So for Assaf on his balcony above Ethiopia Street, such were the humbling lessons of Jerusalem and conquest, Jerusalem and time, as he studied and read and gazed out at the Old City, musing on the mirage of the present which was forever being born of the mythology of the past. And yet it was his history nonetheless, and his city's history
— still the indelible mystery of place and man in it.
From his balcony he also listened to the grave ancient chants of his neighbors, the dignified Ethiopian monks across the street, whose solemn sing-song prayers soared above their lemon and cypress trees in the golden light of summer afternoons. Twice a day at four in the morning and again at four in the afternoon a bell drew the monks from their cells to the incense-shadowed vastness of their round stone church with its great purple-black dome, where they stood leaning on staffs and swaying like stately ghosts to the rhythms of their chants, so exotic and primitive and soothing, a timeless interlude for the hidden courtyards on Ethiopia Street. At other hours an elderly lone monk might circle the church reciting devotional poems in liturgical language, the low hum of his archaic dialects as persistent as a bee busily at work in the shade.
An order of young French nuns also lived on Ethiopia Street, and in the reverent moments when the light of day faded over Jerusalem their angelic songs of prayer would suddenly pierce the air with breathtaking clarity.
The young nuns sang with an exquisite beauty, with the very grace of nature itself and a promise of holiness like no other. To Assaf, indeed, it seemed the purest human sound God had ever made.
***
Underlying the allure of the past for Assaf was an irresistible fascination with the life of his dead uncle, Anna's brother David, who had been killed in Cairo during the Second World War. Unlike his father, whom Assaf remembered with great clarity, his uncle remained a mystery to him. Anna had often spoken of her brother when Assaf was growing up, giving the impression that he wasn't dead so much as distant, gone to live in another country. This was particularly true after Yossi was killed. But to Assaf the life of his father had a meaning and a finality that his uncle's never could have, because he hadn't known him.
From the mixture of admiration and love and small detail with which a sister remembers her older brother, her companion in childhood, Assaf knew a great deal about his uncle. He also knew that he resembled his uncle in appearance and that his manner often reminded Anna of her brother. Yet somehow Anna's recollections of her brother were so deeply personal, so given to intimate memories of their childhood together, that Assaf never quite felt he understood his uncle as a man. The house and the street and the neighborhood in Cairo which Anna sensed so strongly — all of this was foreign to Assaf. Now that he himself was a young man he couldn't picture his uncle as he wanted to: not as his mother's older brother, the boy his mother grew up with, but as a separate person one might meet or see anywhere.
What kind of man had his uncle been? In seeking an answer to that, Assaf turned to Tajar.
Ah well, said Tajar, I only wish I could tell you more. I didn't know David well and what I recall I've already mentioned at one time or another. He was serious and dedicated but he obviously wasn't meant for undercover work. I always had that impression of him. The demands of a double life made him uneasy. If he'd been able to stick with smuggling Jews out of Egypt it might have gone all right, but when he got involved with deeper things he was over his head. He didn't have the outlook or training for that sort of business. But then he got caught up, drawn in, and it was too much.
Did you know what the deeper things were? asked Assaf.
Not in any specific way, replied Tajar, but later in the war I came to have a vague notion of what had been involved. It was what we'd call espionage, no question about it, and that's how David got into trouble. You have to remember that Rommel and the Germans seemed very close to overrunning Egypt and seizing the canal, and the British were desperate. Many Egyptians favored the Germans from a nationalist point of view, to get the British out, and Cairo was crowded with refugees from Europe. So there were innumerable cells and obscure organizations all carrying on their own secret causes. Men moved back and forth in disguises and there were British and German penetrations everywhere and informers up and down the line. And the tank battles were very close, only hours away in the desert. The lines changed constantly and units were destroyed or disappeared. There was also traffic to and from Europe, especially Greece, fast boats and clandestine air drops. So what it amounted to in Cairo was chaos, a very dangerous kind of chaos for anyone involved in espionage. And of course it was easy to become involved without knowing it, which is what happened to David. He was on the edge of something. He wasn't really a participant himself, but through others he was connected to a maze, and somewhere in that maze there was extremely vital information. Or an extremely important agent, either to the British or the Germans, and as a result David was killed.
It seems hopelessly blurred and indistinct, said Assaf. I can't get ahold of it. Or of him.
True enough, replied Tajar. History is often that way. We only pretend it's clear in retrospect. There are always conflicting truths and especially that immense confusion, that chaos. Add to it the cross purposes of war where there are never two sides or a dozen sides but a hundred and a thousand sides from which people pursue their bewildering variety of causes, each one vital to them, each one worth enormous sacrifices, and then beneath those outward causes consider the conscious outwitting of others through pretense — what we today know as espionage — and you have the constantly shifting images of a tapestry we call history. Each of us, in fact, creates history. Each of us decides what was, what used to be. Anna knew David in a certain way and she clings to that and insists upon it and of course she's right, it's right, from her point of view. He was her brother and she grew up with him and David was this and that and such and so. For her, it's as simple as that. But it can't be that way for you or me or for anyone else. I have an impression of David which I recall from having seen him a few times in certain circumstances. But perhaps he was in a particular mood when I happened to see him. Or perhaps he was thinking about something I didn't know about. Perhaps his words and his manner had nothing to do with what I thought I heard and saw. Who can say? We know, well, so very few people in our lives.
Assaf frowned. Then he smiled.
You make it sound nearly impossible, he said.
Looking back, it is, said Tajar. Which of course is why the past, history, is so intriguing. We know how much it could explain to us if only we could unravel its secrets. Tell me, why is it that your uncle interests you so much?
Because Anna says I remind her of him, replied Assaf. And because if I knew more about him, then I'd know how I resemble him and how I'm different.
How you're unique? suggested Tajar.
Yes, I suppose that's really it, isn't it? It's another way to find out who I am.
So David seems to be the key to that precisely because he is such a mystery, said Tajar. And also, perhaps, because he was killed a quarter of a century ago in Cairo, a place and a time which are also a mystery to you. But what about your father? What of Yossi? Is he less a mystery to you?
It seems so, replied Assaf.
Why?
Because I feel I know him much better. Because everything about him is so familiar to me. Am I wrong, though? I was only eight when he died and you were his best friend. Do I see him clearly? Was he as I remember him?
Oh yes, certainly he was, said Tajar. I only wanted to point out that the apparent mysteries of the past are not always as enlightening as we like to think. My own feeling is that David, now, can't tell you what you want to know about yourself. Despite Anna's recollections of him, or my own.
Assaf laughed.
You're contradicting yourself again, he said. If the past is intriguing because it's important, why shouldn't I pursue it?
Tajar also laughed.
Exactly, he said. But can its mysteries ever compare to what goes on around us today? As for contradicting yourself, welcome it always as putting you closer to the truth. The tapestry shifts from moment to moment, just as the unchanging desert never stops changing.
SEVEN
I find it strange all the same, Tajar said to Anna later. Why should a vigorous young man with his whole life ahead of him be more obsessed by the past than a creaky, battered old camel like me? It's upside down, backwards. I urge Assaf to seize today and he nods sagely and goes on to ponder what was and what might have been. Does that make sense to you?
Anna smiled. I guess it has to, she said. He doesn't have a past or much of one, so naturally he peers in that direction to help him find his whereabouts. If you and I don't look back it's because we know what we'll see.
And also because we've already done that enough.
Tajar moved his crippled legs with his hands to a more comfortable position. As so often, they were sitting on Anna's balcony and gazing down on the courtyard crowded with flowers.
I suppose you're right, he said. Anyway, I've never been cut out to be a mother. I don't have the patience.
Anna laughed. I don't think God or the state ever intended you to be a mother, she said. But you do have patience, much more than most people. To me, the important thing about Assaf is that he's become so outgoing. He takes far more pleasure in people than he ever did, even before he was wounded. When friends of mine are here he wanders in and laughs and tells stories and is actually charming. People remark upon it.
They notice how he has changed. Deep down he's as serious as ever, but he gets along with people now and that's just wonderful. It's because of Yousef, mostly. Knowing Yousef set him to thinking in so many ways.
He's come alive since then.
Anna paused and looked down at her hands. Her voice was soft, uneasy.
Our poor Yousef. Has anything? . . .
No, sadly, replied Tajar. There's been no news at all, I'm afraid.
Yousef's self-imposed exile was a painful subject for Anna. She became silent and withdrawn when she thought of it, for it was all too easy for her to imagine Assaf having done something like that if the circumstances had been different. All these years later, as Tajar knew, Anna still recalled how her brother had retreated into himself when faced with a world that was too much for him, and the memory hurt her even now. She couldn't bear to think of her son closing himself off that way, which was exactly what she had feared might happen after Assaf was wounded. His deliverance from that, by way of Yousef, caused her heart to ache all the more for the lost one — Yousef — since it brought a measure of shame to the joy she felt. To Anna, Assaf's new success with people seemed inextricably linked to the suffering of another, and that she found intolerable.
Tajar understood this.
Look, he said, it's just not so that what Yousef has done is connected to Assaf. Yousef would have done it anyway, whether he'd met Assaf or not. His exile has to do with the Six-Day War and the PLO and Jews and Arabs not living together in Palestine, and the grand city of Jerusalem and its poor neighbor on the other side of the Mount of Olives, his own tattered little village of el Azariya, and with his brother's senseless death and his need to do something after it that would count with himself. Those are the things, the facts, that influenced Yousef to do what he did. Assaf's friendship only added to Yousef. It gave to Yousef. It didn't take anything from him.
And yet their destinies are linked now, Anna said softly. They have to be . . . how can it be otherwise? I feel it because I know Assaf feels it, so what do facts matter? Assaf visits Jericho more than ever, and what are those visits but a pilgrimage to his common ground with Yousef? To a place they shared and do share, Assaf now and Yousef in memory, down there near the river on the other side of the Judean desert. Isn't that what Jericho and the house in the orange grove have become for Assaf . . . a place of pilgrimage?
***
After leaving Anna that evening Tajar shuffled back to his cottage at the end of the wildly overgrown compound and stretched out in his hammock beside the rosebushes. Wrapped in blankets against the summer chill, he gazed up at the starry night over Jerusalem and tried to put his feelings in order. He was thinking mostly of Yousef and Anna and Assaf, but his thoughts kept drifting away to Jericho and the house in the orange grove
. . . Bell's house.
Soon after Yousef disappeared, Tajar had put a permanent tracer on him because of his friendship with Assaf.
When the Shin Bet or the border police acquired information on Yousef, it was forwarded at once to Tajar. The security services had no idea why someone in the Mossad could be interested in a man as low-level and inconsequential as Yousef, a former village schoolteacher in hiding, a nominal member of the PLO who wouldn't take up arms. Yousef's name was buried in a long list of PLO supporters whose routine activities were reported to the Mossad, when there was anything to report. Of course the security services would have been far more interested in Yousef's quixotic behavior if they had known their information on him was going to someone as important as Tajar. But that was the last thing Tajar wanted. Even the commandos, who logged most of Tajar's communications within the Mossad, didn't know about the tracer on Yousef. Those reports, meager as they were, reached Tajar by a different route.
Subject said to be living in caves east of Hebron.
Subject said to have friends among the bedouin, or among the village boys, who cache small amounts of food for him when grazing their flocks.
Subject said to have been living in the southern Judean desert during the middle of the month.
Always vague and fragmentary accounts. Never an actual sighting or an actual contact, only hearsay and rumors from the villages on the edge of the desert. But for Tajar that in itself was remarkable, for it meant Yousef was adapting quickly to his fugitive life. He was learning to survive in the desert as an unseen presence and Tajar respected that. Inevitably, perhaps, it also reminded Tajar of the special talents of the Runner.
Tajar understood well enough the attraction of Jericho for Assaf now that Yousef was gone. Indeed, Tajar himself was strongly attracted to the house in the orange grove, although for different reasons. Soon after the Six-Day War Tajar had planned to pay a visit to Bell, hoping to renew their acquaintance, but then Assaf's friendship with Yousef had intervened and Assaf had met Abu Musa and Bell, which complicated everything.
The Runner was now on the other side of the border from Jericho and could no longer go there, but professional judgment told Tajar the only safe course was caution. Reluctantly, he put aside for a time his desire to appear at Bell's front gate.
Then came the astonishing revelation that Anna also knew Bell.
Tajar had never suspected that Anna might connect the one-eyed hermit of Jericho with the former British intelligence officer who had helped her in Cairo after David was killed, who had also provided her with papers to come to Palestine. Bell had gone by a different name in Egypt and had lived in Jerusalem for only a short time after the world war, obscurely and quietly, before moving down to Jericho. For nineteen years Jericho had been part of Jordan and there was no reason why Anna should know who Bell was. Before 1967 the one-eyed hermit's reputation had existed on the other side of the border, on the other side of no-man's-land, and it wasn't something Anna could have heard about in west Jerusalem. Tajar knew about Bell because of intelligence files, because he had always been interested in Bell and had made a point of keeping track of the former head of the notorious Monastery in Egypt. But no ordinary Israeli could know anything about Bell.
Bell, after all, had buried his past life, his clandestine life in espionage, with great care. Not even Abu Musa knew anything about it.
***
The story came out when Anna told Tajar of Assaf's first visit to the house in the orange grove in Jericho.
Anna had paused then to smile at Tajar.
The hermit Assaf speaks of, she said, is the man who did everything for me in Cairo. But since it's your business to know things, you've probably known that all along. Have you?
Tajar was astounded. Well . . . yes, he replied. As a matter of fact, I did know it. But it amazes me that you do, because his past is a very well-kept secret. Once he left Egypt, Bell, as he has called himself since then, went out of his way to put his old life behind him. And I'd say he has had great success in doing just that.
You knew him in Cairo, didn't you? asked Anna. Through your work then?
That's right.
And he was important, wasn't he?
Oh yes. Very.
I've always thought he must have been, said Anna. And I've always imagined you must have known him, even though I've never said anything about it. I asked him once, later, why he had done so much for me in Cairo. I knew it was connected to David but not how, exactly. He wouldn't talk much about it, or he couldn't, but he said there had been a terrible mistake with David and that was why he did what he did for me. It touched me so deeply, looking back, his caring that way and taking the time to do something about it. Cairo was such absolute chaos then, and for a man as important as he seemed to be to come on his own to find me . . . well, he could have sent someone but he didn't. He came himself. He was the first person to come, you know. I was alone in the house with all the doors and shutters locked when he turned up to help me. I was lying in the corridor downstairs near the back door, the door to the courtyard. The floor was stone. It was hard and cold and dark and I was terrified, half out of my mind. There was nothing left, just nothing. Somehow he got into the house and lit a candle and all at once there was his face above me in the darkness . . . life, and what a face. He brought me back from the dead and I've never forgotten any of it. . . .
Even now, all these years later, Anna shuddered at the memory of that darkness and terror when she had thought she was slipping into madness. Her hands came up in front of her in a pathetic involuntary motion.
Protection against the darkness? A plea to the angel of death to be merciful? She gripped her arms and tightened her fists, forcing down the fear and memory from long ago. After a moment the shudder passed.
Quietly, she resumed her account.
So with his help I came to Palestine, she said. Then one winter after the world war ended I was walking down a street in Jerusalem, not far from here. The street was narrow and it was raining hard and blowing and I was struggling along with my head down against the wind, all wrapped up so I couldn't see much of anything. A car came along and I had to get out of the street because it was so narrow, so I pushed into a doorway and there was a man doing the same thing beside me. He was coming from the other direction and if it hadn't been for the car right at that moment we wouldn't have seen each other's face, just each other's feet slogging by in the rain. But we both looked up to find a place to push into and there he was. It was him, with most of his face hidden by a scarf and a hat and his coat collar. You can imagine my shock. I hadn't seen him since Cairo and I had no idea who he really was. I didn't even know his name and of course I didn't know what had become of him. We just stood there staring at each other.
Anna fell silent. Suddenly she smiled.
That face, she said. How could anyone ever pretend to act in a normal way with a face like that just there all at once in front of you? No one in the world has a face like that.
Anna went on smiling, a gentle smile.
It's like a mask, she said. Some inhuman kind of mask that's so extreme and unlikely you can't believe it at first. That great bulging staring single eye, and the bulging black eye patch, and the scars and all the rest of it. It's a face you have to be warned about, to prepare yourself for, otherwise you just stare and stare because it's like nothing you've ever seen. Now I can smile about it because I came to know what was beneath that mask, but I couldn't then. His face paralyzed me then. And meeting him like that, both of us drenched with the water streaming off us, huddling in a doorway . . . it was absurd and ludicrous and wonderful, and fearful and joyous and ridiculously awkward all at the same moment, just everything. I was paralyzed and my heart leapt, both at once. But I'm afraid I'm making no sense at all, trying to describe it all these years later. . . .
They stood in the doorway until finally one of them suggested they get out of the rain. Bell, for that was his name now, lived nearby and offered coffee and a fire. They went to his small apartment where the rooms were half underground with walls of stone several feet thick, the broad windowsills on a level with the garden outside, a snug and cozy retreat on such a blustery winter afternoon. Bell poured brandy and built a fire in the stove and soon they were warm in front of it.
The rooms were heaped with books. Bell was studying Arabic, he said. He read and did little else. He had some disability pay from the war and intended to live on it, to begin a new life in some remote corner.
Anna told him of her own years since Cairo, of her wanderings in Palestine. Bell was reticent, polite, sometimes shy. He wanted to be cordial but it was apparent he hadn't put his old life behind him and didn't know how to behave with Anna, who in a way was from that old life. Yet she wasn't really a part of it and Bell had nothing to fear from her. To reassure him, she promised at once never to say anything about having known him in Cairo.
But no, then she realized it was his own face that was making him reticent and fearful. He didn't seem to know how to behave with a young woman. From what he said she gathered he had no friends in Jerusalem and saw almost no one other than the Arab scholar who came to tutor him. In Cairo she had thought he was important, but now she realized he had probably been much more important than she had imagined. Without an official position and the status that went with it, and the automatic relationships that went with it, he didn't know how to act, especially with a young woman. He was unsure of himself, even lost. Alone now with his face, with his freedom, he hadn't yet learned how to make his way.
The rain splashed on the windows and they drank more brandy and became lovers that afternoon. Far more than him, it was Anna's doing. She had much to thank him for, more than she ever could, but there was also something beyond even that. So seldom could one make a profound difference in the life of another, and Anna sensed she had that gift then, for in his way he was as alone and fearful as she had once been in Cairo. As they lay in front of the little stove and the rain beat down in the half-light turning to darkness, Bell told her as much. Since the shattering of his face, he said, it was the first time he had been with a woman in a regular way, as if he were just a man who could meet someone and. . . .
They saw each other for several weeks. Anna came to him every afternoon and stayed through the night and it never seemed to stop raining the whole time they were together. Love was the delicious smell of olive wood smoke and rain softly beating down outside on the garden above them, and brandy and an early darkness and a warm cheery stove hidden away from the world for long tender evenings. Then she was busy for a few days, and when she came again Bell said he had decided to move to Jericho. He had found his remote corner of the world, he said. They held each other and Bell smiled. A warm smile. Anna knew his face by then. . . .
So that's what he did, she told Tajar. Then not long after that I left Jerusalem too, and found my way down to the Negev. And the British were leaving Palestine and the Arab countries invaded, and a new life began for me as well. I've never told anyone about it, not even Yossi. There seemed no reason to. It was a long time ago, twenty years ago, and it was a few weeks that belonged to two people. Since then I've never heard from Bell, or of him, not until Assaf came back from Jericho with his story of the three wise men and the house in the orange grove, with its forty-year shesh-besh game and a one-eyed holy man who oversees it with a glass of arak in his claw.
I don't doubt Bell knows Assaf is my son, said Anna. One of them down there must have asked Assaf about his background, or Yousef could have talked about me or whatever, and Bell would have realized who Assaf is, I'm sure. Not that he'd say anything about it. But it's strange looking back, isn't it? It seems we all have these rare and beautiful moments hidden away within us, turnings we could have taken in life but somehow . .
. didn't. Once or twice during those few weeks with Bell, you see, we both considered . . . well what? A life together? We didn't come out and say it in so many words, but it was there in front of us, seriously so. And if we had decided to try that, given his nature and mine, it probably would have gone on for a lifetime. As it happened the time wasn't right then, or so we thought. He needed to be sure of himself and to know he could manage on his own with his face, although I never had any doubts about that. And I thought I still needed to be able to wander, to be free to move around and find myself, although it couldn't have been so very important to me because soon after that I ended my wandering, with Yossi.
What's strange about it to me now, said Anna, is that I know it could have worked with Bell. Oh yes, it could have worked and all the years would have been very different. Not better, but different. And how true it is that the turnings on the path are often so subtle, so unsuspected at the time, that we pass them by with a wave and a smile and a near arrogant ease. Yet when we look back in life the reasons for our choices seem unbearably flimsy and silly, which is confusing and even frightening. A totally different life which could have worked just as well as the one we have? That's something none of us likes to think about. Instead, we try mightily to forget our other worlds that might have been, and with good reason. But all the same those rare and beautiful moments from the past live on within us, no farther away than the smell of an olive wood fire or the sound of rain beating softly on a garden, time's unquiet ghosts, haunting our memories with secret whispers of what if? . . .
***
Tajar lay in his hammock that summer night, gazing up at the stars above his cottage. Once long ago Anna had told him there were three men who counted in her life, himself and Yossi and one other. Now he knew who that third man was and it didn't surprise him. Bell's was a powerful life, lived deeply. That Anna had felt it so long ago only showed how deeply her own feelings ran.
Her memories of Bell and the fondness of her recollections set Tajar to thinking in many ways. There was no question he had always loved Anna. He knew that. And everything she now said about Bell also applied to him and was meant for him. He and Anna had shared those rare and beautiful moments of which she spoke.
They both were aware of that, and what if? . . .
Years ago when they met, Anna was wandering and Tajar was energetic and ambitious in his work. They knew each other and parted, with a wave and a smile. Then later they met again after she had married Yossi, and all that was to be came about.
Of course they were still together in other ways and shared many of the things a man and a woman could have. Not the same roof, it was true, and not sexual love . . . an automobile accident had seen to that. But they were much closer than many people who were married. And yet, what if he'd had the sense and the wisdom to try to make it permanent with Anna the first time they'd met? Wouldn't their life together be even richer now?
As she said, it was confusing to think about such things and more than a little frightening. With Bell, if she'd made that decision, her life would have turned out very differently. But not so with him. With him it probably would have become much as it was now, the two of them living in Jerusalem with Tajar having his work and Anna her painting, perhaps a hammock strung on one of the balconies of the old stone house on Ethiopia Street, or in the courtyard below with the flowers. . . .
Tajar's eyes flew open. He was looking up at a vast sky of stars. He had been drifting off to sleep in his hammock when suddenly he had thought of Assaf. All of this had started with Assaf's passion for the past and its secrets, with Assaf's interest in his uncle in Cairo during the world war and his trips to Jericho after another war a quarter of a century later, where he had met Bell who was linked to everyone, past and present.
But would there even have been an Assaf if Anna, if Tajar, if Bell, if Yossi? . . .
Tajar laughed, gazing up at the Jerusalem night. How wonderful were the young with their limitless belief in what might be. So grandly did they believe they could even go beyond it and make-believe, truly conjuring up the might-have-been in all its splendid glory.
What a magnificent gift, thought Tajar. What joyous folly. Just by being, Assaf has told me extraordinary things about myself, and about Anna and me and the past, and especially and above all about right now.
And Bell?
Yes, more than ever Tajar wanted to see Bell. He still thought some time should pass before he made his journey to Jericho, but inevitably he would do it. They were connected in too many ways for it not to come to pass.
EIGHT
After Little Aharon's reign of more than a dozen years as director of the Mossad, it had been decided that five years was an appropriate term for the chief of intelligence. As General Dror's term came to an end, many in the Mossad hoped one of their own senior executives would be chosen to succeed him.
Tajar never considered this a possibility, nor did he think it was in the Mossad's best interests. The army's influence had greatly increased since the Six-Day War, and Tajar felt a civilian director would be at a disadvantage dealing with the prestigious generals and former generals who were now so powerful in government. Dror stayed on longer than expected as the generals and former generals maneuvered against each other, promoting their various candidates as his replacement. In the end a general was chosen, but the choice surprised them all. General Ben-Zvi, on the verge of retirement, was as astonished as anyone by his appointment. He had no experience in intelligence and was not the sort of fighting general for which the army was famous. By any standard, in fact, Ben-Zvi was the least glamorous of Israeli generals. Most of his career had been spent in staff positions, particularly in training, then during the Six-Day War he was on assignment in Europe as a military attaché. As the other generals joked, for a professional officer not to have fought in the Six-Day War was akin to a man not consummating his marriage.
The prime minister had outmaneuvered his powerful generals, yet the army couldn't complain because Ben-Zvi was one of their own. There was disappointment within the Mossad but none of the enormous internal turmoil that had accompanied Dror's appointment the last time around. Tajar, in any case, saw wisdom in the selection. Quoting Ben-Gurion, he said it was a tragedy that Israel's generals had begun to think of themselves as generals. Ben-Zvi's lack of swagger would serve the Mossad well, he felt. He even admired the fact that Ben-Zvi wasn't a military hero.
On the other hand, Ben-Zvi was a conscientious officer who believed in professionalism. He worked night and day at the Mossad to master his job and combat the new kind of secret warfare faced by Israel: the international terrorism of the PLO, backed by the KGB. He wanted to draw the best he could from his staff and delegate authority when possible, but only after he knew what was involved. Having been a trainer, he valued instruction and was quick to recognize Tajar's immense experience and unique skills.
By then a mystique had grown up around Tajar in the Mossad. He was a legend even to those who had only the vaguest notions of the Runner operation. To the few senior executives who did know something about the operation, the legend was firmly based in fact. And to the director of the Mossad, the only man beside Tajar who knew the true identity of the Runner, the fact that the Runner was an Israeli seemed a near superhuman accomplishment.
But for most of Tajar's admirers the mystique was more general than that. Tajar, after all, was a man from Little Aharon's generation whose preeminence went back even further than Little Aharon's. As time went on Tajar's importance during the pre-independence years continued to be revealed in memoirs and histories. In 1945, for example, when Ben-Gurion went to New York to ask a handful of influential American Jews to begin raising money for the coming struggle in Palestine, he took only two men with him to help him explain his case at that historic August meeting in Manhattan: his treasurer at the Jewish Agency and Tajar, his expert on Arab countries. And when Ben-Gurion needed a man to negotiate in trust and secrecy with Emir Abdullah of Transjordan in 1948, it was Tajar who drove alone at night through Jericho to the villa of the emir, King Hussein's grandfather.
Further, many of the senior men in the Mossad were former Tajar commandos of another era, selected and trained by Tajar decades ago when he was all the country-to-be had in the way of a foreign intelligence service. Yet Tajar still wasn't so very old, only in his early fifties, which showed what awesome responsibilities men had taken upon themselves, at an early age, in order to create the state.
Thus it was only natural that General Ben-Zvi, even more than Dror before him, needed what Tajar had to offer.
So Tajar in his quiet way became Ben-Zvi's unofficial instructor and adviser, the trainer's trainer, working behind the scenes to make the studious general a master in Israel's lonely new secret war. Ben-Zvi was in the habit of working late at night in his office, reading reports, and that was when Tajar dropped in to talk with him. Ben-Zvi knew Tajar made his visits at night in order to be inconspicuous, so that his appearances would attract as little notice as possible within the Mossad. Tajar was always the modest tutor, and he didn't want to embarrass Ben-Zvi by drawing attention to himself.
Besides, said Tajar, smiling, you have decisions to make in daylight. Only at night is there a moment to reflect and ponder.
Sometimes they talked for an hour or more, sometimes less. If some specific problem was troubling Ben-Zvi, Tajar might recall a case from the past that seemed similar. Or he might suggest someone Ben-Zvi could discuss the matter with, or simply ruminate on the alternatives as he saw them. Tajar was careful to stay away from solutions and always stopped short of suggesting courses of action, for as he said, it was Ben-Zvi who had to be the director. At the same time he often consoled Ben-Zvi, since the general was apt to take his failures deeply to heart.
Ours is a profession of failure, Tajar told him. Unlike paratroopers, we don't drop out of the sky and storm positions and then raise our flag in triumph. It's not land we deal with, it's just people. So if you think of it as a sad profession, you won't be so disappointed. Orwell said that any life when seen from the inside is simply a series of defeats. Well that's the only way we do see life: from the inside. Appearances are for others, our work is to get at the truth. But recall that in order to get at the truth, we have to deal far more deeply in subterfuge than society's criminals. That's the sadness and it takes a strong man to rise above it and not be dead inside. Others peddle cynicism and hatred but we can't afford to. You can't afford to. So when you come across a man without feelings, pack him off to retirement on a kibbutz where he can raise vegetables, because that's what he understands. . . .
Along with death and hatred, there were many failures for the Mossad during those years when the PLO's terrorist campaign was at its height. Or at least the terrorists were able to continue with their terror, especially in Europe. The only real way to combat it was by building up files on the terrorist cells with the aim of penetrating them, and that kind of work took immense time and effort.
For years there was no cooperation from the West European countries in combating the terror. As long as the campaign appeared to be merely the PLO against Israel, Arabs killing Jews, the Europeans refused to help. Oil above all, but also Third World opinion and the propaganda and manipulations of the KGB — there were many reasons why the Europeans wanted to stay out of the conflict, as Dror had predicted.
Eventually the European attitude changed, as the Mossad was able to document the KGB's role in the terror and the PLO's connection to European terrorist cells. This was especially true after an Israeli commando raid on PLO offices in Beirut in the spring of 1973, when files were captured linking the KGB through the PLO to an international terrorist network, with detailed descriptions of money and arms, contact men and future plans. Ironically, these files captured by the Israelis helped a number of moderate Arab governments and leaders to survive, when information on terrorist networks in their countries was passed along to them by the CIA, the information having been given to the CIA by the Mossad for that purpose.
***
The Runner operation, overall, turned out to be less vital against the terrorists than Tajar had expected. In the beginning the Runner provided crucial information on the KGB's involvement with the PLO, but before long the KGB moved its control of the terrorist campaign from Damascus to the island of Cyprus. The Russians found there were too many security leaks within the PLO in Damascus, where the Syrians had long been accustomed to running PLO factions for their own ends. But Cyprus had a weak government and its Greek and Turkish populations were always close to civil war, backed by agents from mainland Greece and Turkey, so for the KGB it was a convenient transit point from which to direct terrorist traffic between Europe and the main PLO training camps in Lebanon.
An ideal gathering ground for jackals, as Tajar told Ben-Zvi. No bomb thrower could possibly look out of place in Cyprus, no matter what his cause or nationality.
The Runner himself seemed to slip into a kind of malaise during those years. Or so Tajar secretly felt, without confiding his concern to anyone.
The Runner was still a steady source of high-level information on the Syrian government and Syrian intentions, and Ben-Zvi had nothing but admiration for the Runner and for Tajar's handling of the case. To him the operation was the very essence of successful espionage, a model of careful planning over a long period of time, its accomplishments the standard by which any penetration was to be measured.
But the working objectives of the Mossad had gradually changed since the Six-Day War. On the tactical level there was the constant preoccupation with the details of the terrorist cells, their potential targets and routes of supply and command, a quest which led from Beirut and the PLO camps in Lebanon to Cyprus, and from there to Europe. And on the strategic level the emphasis had shifted to nuclear power and the build-up of the Arab air forces by the Soviet Union, highly technical intelligence that was beyond the scope of the Runner operation. In those subjects as well, the quest for information was often outside the Middle East, in both East and West Europe and in the CIA satellites circling the earth.
Or perhaps Tajar only imagined that the Runner was undergoing a period of malaise when he met with Yossi at safehouses in Beirut. It might have been that the frustrations everyone felt at home in dealing with the terrorists, or even his own sense of lessened responsibility, were causing him to see an uneasiness in Yossi which in fact wasn't there. Expectations had been great after the total victory of the Six-Day War, and now nothing seemed to be coming from them. Or rather, the security and hope for a better future weren't coming about. Yossi had never been as dazzled as most Israelis by the outcome of the war, although perhaps more so than Tajar because of his own enormous contribution to it. But now, little by little, it seemed that Yossi was becoming as deeply troubled as Tajar over the future.
Yossi's mood disturbed Tajar but he was careful not to show it at their infrequent meetings in Beirut. His task was to encourage Yossi and that was what he did, subtly, in many little ways. From long experience Tajar knew even better than Yossi that a feeling of futility was the most dangerous enemy of all to the operation. In his own mind at least Yossi could never simply stand still, never just remain in place, because that wasn't part of the life the two of them had created for the Runner. It was the nature of the operation that the Runner had to keep on running.
So the bombings and murders and hijackings went on and on with a few terrorists sometimes able to seize the attention of much of the world, as they did when they killed Israel's Olympic athletes at Munich in 1972, with only a minor and bumbling show of resistance on the part of the Germans. That terrorist group was known as Black September, named after the month when Jordan's Arab Legion had expelled the PLO from Jordan in a particularly bloody campaign of Arab against Arab.
But to Tajar the most gruesome episode of all was the massacre at Lod airport in May of that year, when three young Japanese men flew into Israel on an Air France plane from Rome, opened their suitcases and threw grenades and fired automatic weapons at random around the arrival hall of the airport, killing and wounding over a hundred passengers.
The Japanese belonged to a tiny terrorist group grandly called the Red Army, of no consequence at all in Japan, which had come halfway around the world to carry out a suicide mission for Black September. The majority of those killed at the airport were Puerto Rican pilgrims, Roman Catholics on a visit to the Christian sites in the Holy Land. The one Japanese who survived, in explaining himself, said he had wanted to become a star in the heavens, visible in the night sky throughout eternity.
Japanese idealists massacring Puerto Rican pilgrims in Israel? In the name of revenge by Palestinian Arabs against Jordanian Arabs? In the hope of becoming a star in the heavens?
Another demented, grotesque act using the cause of human dignity as a mask for madness. Even given man's sad weakness for self-delusion and the clever manipulations of the KGB, the evidence of darkness and insanity in human affairs sometimes seemed overpowering to Tajar.
NINE
Bell's morning walks began at first light. He could no longer go all the way down to the river now that it was the border between Jordan and Israel, but he still set out east each morning to cross the parched empty plains of Jericho, the Dead Sea shimmering off to his right and the dark mass of the hills of Moab looming high in front of him on the far side of the valley. Just before the wire fence of the military zone, he turned north on the second leg of his circle and walked up the valley parallel with the river. The first rays of the new sun were breaking over the Moabite hills when he turned again, west this time. The sun bathed his back with a gentle warmth as he made his way home toward Jericho's lush greenery, the jagged heights of the Judean desert softly pink and glowing beyond the oasis. Bell walked at a brisk pace, savoring the ancient beauty and moods of that wild, haunting landscape.
His walks lasted about two hours. When he got home he showered and ate and washed out his laundry from the previous day, then settled into his chair on the front porch with a large glass of Turkish coffee. The orange grove was already buzzing with its characteristic morning hum at that early hour, the insects busily at work before the sun drew high.
Bell always passed one or two Israeli patrols on his morning walks, open command cars with mounted machine guns driving near the border where the soldiers checked the swept sand beside the wire fence, looking for footprints or other signs of a clandestine crossing during the night. The soldiers waved to Bell and he waved back, for they were as familiar with his routine as he was with theirs. Every few weeks a command car veered off its course to approach him and Bell had a short talk with the soldiers. They were reservists, none too young, serving on their yearly call-up. A visit from a command car only meant that a new sergeant had arrived for duty on the sector and was checking things out for himself.
The new soldiers who hadn't seen Bell close-up tended to stare, unable to hide their morbid fascination with his face. Those who had seen him before made a point of studying the surrounding desert. One of the soldiers always spoke Arabic, so that was the language Bell used. But if a sergeant addressed him in English, Bell answered in English. The interviews were brief and polite. Anyone who did duty near Jericho soon came to know Bell and was able to recognize him from a distance.
The border had been dangerous once, but not seriously so since the Jordanian army had fought and expelled the PLO from Jordan in 1970. When there were infiltrators now they were generally men who were trying to avoid the Jordanians as much as the Israelis. The bridges near Jericho carried a great amount of legal traffic back and forth across the river between the east and west banks, all Arab, but there were always men who didn't want to face policemen of any kind, as at most borders.
Most mornings after coffee Bell read straight through to noon, but there were days when some curious memory came to him on his walk and he found the hours slipping away as he sat with an open book in his lap, pondering a distant episode in his life.
It had been like that this morning. He was out in the desert and had just turned north on his circle route when a command car passed to the east, near the border. A wave from a soldier, Bell waved back. The dust in the wake of the command car disappeared over a rise and Bell suddenly thought of Stern, a man who had been dead nearly thirty years. For the rest of the walk Bell had noticed almost nothing of the hills and the valley and the light, so intense were his memories of Stern all at once. He thought about that now as he relaxed on his porch, listening to the hum of his orange grove.
During the Second World War in Egypt when Bell had been in command of the Monastery, Stern had been his most valuable agent. Stern was a gifted man of many disguises, able to go anywhere, and it was because of him that Anna's brother had been killed. Stern had been a friend of their family in Cairo, of David and Anna and more particularly of their father before them. There was never any professional connection between David and Stern, but a mistake had been made in the Monastery and someone had assumed there was a professional connection, so David had been run down by a lorry in Cairo at the time when Stern was also killed.
Bell had greatly respected and admired Stern. He had never met David nor even known who David was until after his death. But because of his feelings for Stern, Bell had gone out of his way to help David's sister after Stern and David were killed. And after the war that had led to his few weeks with Anna in Jerusalem, which in turn had brought him to Jericho.
During his brief time with Anna in Jerusalem, Bell hadn't dared to let himself think there might be something more for the two of them. He was too afraid then of his face and his freedom to imagine her love could be anything but the paying of a debt, a young woman's way of escaping the ugly memories of her past, perhaps by embracing ugliness itself for a moment. Thus Bell, lacking the courage to hope, had turned his back on Anna and left Jerusalem, running away out of fear to seclusion and Jericho and a life of obscurity on the edge of the desert.
Well, it was simple enough, he thought now. Anna was often on his mind these days because of Assaf. And so in the desert that morning his memory had abruptly tumbled back through the years to Stern, all the way back to Egypt and the Monastery where it had actually begun for Anna and him, although neither of them had known then that it was a beginning, so long ago in Cairo.
Stern . . . Anna . . . secret histories.
I suppose we all have them tucked away inside somewhere, thought Bell, these precious and secret events with their secret beginnings. Understanding as little as we do, we always seem to be connected to others in ways we never suspect, in a sweep of time we can't fathom, in moments we're only able to recognize years later. As if for each of us the important things in life become but one single story in the end, one beautiful secret dream we grasp too late.
Bell smiled at his abstractions, at the way he was trying to make sense out of the secret histories he carried within him. Or is it just that I grow old? he wondered. Is it just that all these years later I still can't forgive myself for leaving Anna and Jerusalem?
Regret? thought Bell. The utterly useless pain of recalling lost chance and lost opportunity? Surely I should know better than that by now.
And yet the folly of losing Anna and going off to live alone sometimes seemed so incalculable to Bell, such a monstrous insult to life, that the sacrilege of it overwhelmed him and drove him to a bleak despair which no amount of atonement could lessen. For years he had lived as a recluse and yet his turning away from the woman he loved had been entirely his own doing, and the humiliation it had caused him ever since then had come only from his own self-loathing.
Yes, and what was the use in the end of blaming it on his face? On fate? On the chance catastrophe of a spyglass once held to his eye and struck by a bullet, shattering his face and his faith in life, in himself? What excuse was that for turning away from love?
It was infinitely sad to Bell, for sometimes it did seem to him that all the moments in life were one and that a man had but one chance to make the world within himself as he wanted it to be, as it should be, as it was right for it to be. And in that, he knew, he had failed completely.
Anna, he thought. If only I'd had the courage years ago. . . .
***
Assaf took a degree in history at Hebrew University and went on to graduate studies. He still visited Jericho once or twice a month and spent even more time there in the winter, when the seductive ways of the sunny oasis were especially appealing. He had his own room now at Abu Musa's where he kept books and clothes, coming and going as he pleased, reading and walking down Jericho's dusty lanes and working in Abu Musa's orange groves, where he repaired the waterways of sun-baked mud.
Abu Musa was overjoyed with the arrangement. He was careful not to interfere with Assaf's freedom, but there was always time in the course of the day for the two of them to be together. In the late afternoon Assaf accompanied the old Arab to the daily shesh-besh sessions on Bell's front porch, where Assaf sat and talked with Bell or listened with Bell to the rambling monologues carried on by the two players. Ever serious and now scholarly as well, Assaf took great pleasure in the far-ranging subjects conjured up with such ease by his three friends.
But it was Abu Musa, in particular, who devoted himself to Assaf. All the knowledge of his long life now seemed dedicated to Assaf, who filled the need in Abu Musa's affections for the innumerable young people of his family from whom he had been separated over the years.
The boy is a blessing in my old age, Abu Musa confided to Bell. Not until Ali was killed and Yousef went away did I realize how seldom we speak in life and how little we say. Why, my friend? Why is age so reticent? When I was young I yearned to hear and know of life and yet so little was said to me, I realized later. My wife's father was a great friend and we were close and he told me many things, but how much more he could have told me. He was a man who had done everything a man can do, yet he never really let flow the depths of his being to me. And why? Because he felt it would have been unseemly? Because of his position and mine? Because he was a great desert chieftain and had to take care that I could always respect him? No sign of weakness, therefore? No hint that he was anything less than wise and strong? A terrible mistake, I tell you, the same mistake I made with Ali and Yousef and won't make again with Assaf. I ask you, what do I have to hide? The fact that I'm not half the man I wanted to be? The fact that these little pieces of wisdom I string together add up to not much at all? The fact that the respected village patriarch solemnly pondering his coffee in the marketplace can't help but recognize an unmistakable kinship with every passing fool of his era?
They've endured. That's what the fool and the patriarch have in common and that's what they represent, and all else is incidental.
Abu Musa's great body shook with laughter.
And so I've put an end to mystery and silent cunning in my old age, he said to Bell. Every pathetic feeling of mine I will lay bare to the young traveler Assaf and he can make of them what he will, knowing that at least one desert wayfarer has told him all there is to tell about one oasis.
***
Of Yousef, however, Bell said little. Abu Musa knew Yousef wanted it that way so his life as a fugitive would cause no harm and as little suffering as possible to others. And to Assaf, Bell said nothing at all about Yousef. In their own ways they all understood the burden of knowledge Bell carried because Bell had always been special in Yousef's life, and because Bell was a foreigner, neither an Arab nor a Jew, and also simply because Bell was Bell.
On moonless nights Yousef still came to the ruins of Herod's winter palace on the outskirts of Jericho, sneaking down the wadi to the banana plantation and crossing into the ruins to see Bell, although he came less frequently as the years went by. Yousef's appearance had changed so much the others probably wouldn't have recognized him. Now he was very thin and worn, as slight a figure as Ali had been in his youth.
He moved lightly, like a desert animal, and every sound in the darkness had a meaning to him. A stirring as soft as a breeze in the night and suddenly a presence would be crouching behind a rock near the spot where Bell sat looking out over the plains from a corner of the ruins. The presence waited for whole minutes and drifted closer, still invisible in the darkness to anyone but Bell. When finally the desert creature spoke his voice was so quiet Bell had to strain to hear him.
So it went season after season and year after year. Yousef liked to hear of the doings of his friends, what Abu Musa and Moses the Ethiopian were discussing during their shesh-besh games and what Assaf was studying and what Bell was reading on his front porch in the mornings. Yousef spoke readily enough of himself when Bell asked him questions, but it was Bell who did most of the talking because Yousef was unused to it. His life in the desert had accustomed him to listening, as Bell understood.
Bell often thought what a strange life it must be. The region where Yousef spent much of the year was in the vicinity of the Wadi Kidron, one of the deepest of the ravines that wound down through the Judean wilderness to the Dead Sea. The wadi began as the Kidron Valley just below the eastern walls of Jerusalem, the valley that separated the Old City from the Mount of Olives. From there it curved south and east, cutting ever more sharply down through the hills and the desert, a ravine of high precipices and many inaccessible caves, so fiercely hot in the summer months it was known to the bedouin as the Wadi el Nar, the wadi of fire. Centuries ago it had served as a route for travelers journeying up to Jerusalem from the Jordan Valley: an east-west traverse between the Way of the Kings up the valley floor and the Way of the Patriarchs stretching up the central ridge of the land from Hebron through Jerusalem to Samaria. The crumbling remnants of ruined monasteries overlooked its deep barren gorges and the hovels of forgotten anchorites were hidden away in its ancient cliffs.
Living in such a place, it was no wonder Yousef seldom talked when he met Bell. With that vastness of solitude around him day after day and night after night, with the intense cold of the desert winters and the awesome heat of the summers and the spirits of other eras as his only companions in the wadi of fire, it was no wonder that Yousef had grown accustomed to listening.
How many interminable hours of sunlight are there in such a place? wondered Bell. How much darkness in even one night? It must be a kind of eternity he lives in, a realm of dreams and visions that the rest of us sense for only the briefest of moments in the course of our weeks and months. Wholly another world and existence, conceived in a multitude of time as infinite as the stars.
Do you see an end to your life in the wilderness? Bell once asked him, in the spring of 1973 after Yousef had been living as a fugitive for a full five years.
Yousef was silent for a time. I don't really know about that, he finally replied. But I have decided there's a man I'd like to meet to talk about it. He has a great reputation among some of our people and I believe you used to know him. A Syrian. Halim is his name. He lives in Damascus.
Yes, I did know him, said Bell. Not well, but what I saw of him was impressive. Does that mean, then, you'll be leaving the desert and crossing the river?
Not right away, replied Yousef. I don't even know yet whether he'll agree to meet me. But if he would, then we'll see. There's no hurry about it, there's no hurry about anything I do. But you'll know first if I decide to cross the border.
It would be a great relief to Abu Musa, said Bell.
I know, whispered Yousef, and went on to ask about Assaf and the shesh-besh games and the books Bell had been reading since their last meeting in the ruins of Herod's winter palace.
***
Bell was excited that Yousef was at least considering an end to his exile in the desert, the first sign in five years that he was having a change of heart. Bell realized the news was meager and tentative and perhaps more of a hope on his part than anything else, but he still wanted to share it with Abu Musa and Moses. This he did the next afternoon when the three of them were alone on his front porch.
Moses looked up at once from the shesh-besh board and smiled and nodded in encouragement at Bell. Abu Musa, however, turned away from the board and busied himself for a time with his waterpipe, which had gone out. A somber mood seemed to have come over him, which surprised Bell.
Of course it's still too soon to know what will come of it, ventured Bell.
Abu Musa fumbled a while longer with his waterpipe and finally gave it up. He sighed and gripped his hands together in his lap.
It may be too soon to know, said Abu Musa, or it may be that the affair has gone on too long already. You don't hear as many tales from the local coffeeshops as I do, my friend. Do you know what the villagers in the hills are saying of our Yousef? They call him a man who casts a long shadow in the moonlight. You see Yousef on nights when there is no moon, on nights when it's dark, or so I imagine. And if you do you miss that aspect of him. You don't see his shadow in the moonlight.
Bell wasn't sure what Abu Musa meant by his allusion to Yousef's shadow in the moonlight, which of course he never did see. As well as he knew Abu Musa, the old Arab's elliptical desert imagery could still elude him sometimes. He said as much now.
Abu Musa sighed again and gripped his hands more tightly together. Oh well, he said, it's just that for most of us life is such an ordinary matter. Day in and day out that's what we know, a persistent ordinariness which is sometimes tedious but which is also reassuring in the end. For some, though, it's not that way and so it may be with our Yousef. I would rather that he still be flesh and blood and not a shadowy promise of redemption that lives in the moonlight of people's dreams. Oh yes, I would dearly prefer it but I am but one man with my own hopes, and you are, and Yousef I fear has gone beyond all this and become something else to many people. Become what? A myth in the hills? A myth of the desert up there? Perhaps, and perhaps even a holy man of sorts. . . . To my mind a holy man who drinks is fine. The drinking merely means he is still a man while pursuing his holiness, a sensible approach to an admirable vocation. And I don't mean to say Yousef sought what he has become. He was always a modest and well-balanced young man and I don't believe for a moment he had this in mind when he went into the desert. But this is five years later, and don't you realize what it has cost him to live alone up there in eternity?
Abu Musa sadly shook his head.
Everything, he said. Quite simply it has cost him his whole life. And I don't mean he has gone mad, although it must be like that in a way, existing as he does in another time and dimension, on a different planet circling a different sun, lost somewhere in the stars. . . .
Abruptly Abu Musa reached out and clutched Bell's good hand in both of his own. He held on tightly, tears in his eyes.
Don't wish too hard for what cannot be, he said. It's good and right for a holy man to believe more than the rest of us, that's what makes him what he is. And you believe in Yousef because you love him and have always loved him, ever since he was a child wrapping his arms around your knees to hold himself up. But you must accept the fact that Yousef is gone and will never come back. Never. He couldn't even if he wanted to.
He's elsewhere now and the villagers in the hills have their beautiful dream of him, a dream of hope and freedom and redemption. Their Yousef now. Not ours. . . .
Abu Musa still gripped Bell's hand, overcome with sadness. In the silence that followed, Moses the Ethiopian slowly lumbered to his feet and rearranged his bright yellow robes with great ceremony. Just as slowly he seated himself again on his bench and fell to studying the shesh-besh board.
A dream such as that, he murmured to himself, must also have been known in those villages two thousand years ago, when Jesus stood on the Mount of Temptation and turned his back on Jericho. But perhaps that's always so in a place as ancient as this, where memories and oranges ripen inseparably in the sun.
TEN
Nineteen seventy-three was a disastrous year for the Israelis. With a fearful sense of inevitability, Tajar watched fortune scatter the seasons with an abandon that allowed nothing to go right. To him it was as if some elemental force in the cause of nations had shifted momentum and was driving silent winds across the land, reworking fate and creating new designs for the secret structures of time. After all the years of struggle he sometimes thought he could sense invisible danger as an animal does, and now his very fingers seemed to feel it whispering to him in the glancing touch of a doorknob, in the heavy grip of his crutches, in the worn smooth stones of Jerusalem when he stopped and rested his fingertips on an ancient wall and closed his eyes and listened.
Tajar had a curious experience that spring.
One still Sabbath morning he was lying in his hammock in the clearing beside his low stone house, far back in the overgrown compound where he lived hidden from the world behind a tangle of wild rosebushes and the giant cactus which reared across the entrance of his tumble-down gate. He had a book in his hand but he wasn't reading. He was gazing up at the fresh spring sunshine spilling through the cypress and olive trees, feeling strangely distant from even the slumbering quiet of Jerusalem, when all at once his eye caught the movement of a butterfly shooting past overhead. Another butterfly fluttered quickly by and another, both identical to the first. They were neither large nor small and of commonplace coloring, orange or yellow with black markings.
Again a single butterfly shot past, again followed by a cluster of three or four. He looked more closely and decided the color was definitely orange. Idly he watched the procession of butterflies repeat itself, then suddenly realized it was a procession and wasn't ending.
He sat up in the hammock and stared. Still the butterflies kept coming, dozens of them jerkily fluttering past him on the same course, seemingly caught in a narrow stream of swift-flowing wind. But there was no wind.
The air was utterly still. And the butterflies all came in a line from the same direction, from the far end of the compound where the gate was, skimming along above the rosebushes and shooting over his hammock and flittering away out of sight beyond his house, a steady flow of them on and on, now one or two and now a cluster, not a single butterfly deviating from the mysterious tunnel devised for them through the sunshine.
Tajar was astonished. He had never seen anything like it. For whole minutes the butterflies went shooting by like a flock of migrating birds, hundreds of them bending their erratic flight to a course, then the stunningly beautiful procession ended as abruptly as it had begun. The stream of butterflies vanished and there was not even one stray orange fantasy in the air overhead, fluttering with black markings across the clearing above his hammock, inscrutably pursuing the route from south to north up the length of his compound.
Tajar found it disturbing, unfathomable. Butterflies were notorious for directionless, patternless flight. Where had they come from and why? Where were they going?
The butterflies made Tajar uneasy that spring day. Later he told Anna about it and she too was astonished, though less mystified than he was. To her it seemed only a wondrous and beautiful event, inexplicable certainly, remarkable because it was so far from the ordinary.
But for Tajar this chance glimpse at the incomprehensible counterorder of the universe was truly startling, far more so than any random clash of chaos could have been behind the tangle of wild rosebushes in his walled compound, where a huge ancient cactus guarded the gate with a thousand sharp swords.
***
The major ambition of the Egyptian leader Sadat, as he always said, was to make up for the humiliation suffered by Egypt and the Arabs in the Six-Day War. The war fought in October 1973 did that.
It wasn't a military victory for the Egyptians and the Syrians. After some initial advances on the battlefield the two Arab armies lost. Egypt conquered six miles of desert along part of the Suez Canal and Syria gave ground. Success swung away from the Arabs long before the end of the fighting, when Israeli tanks were twenty-five miles from Damascus and forty-five miles from Cairo. But wars are measured in more than ground, and the Arabs felt triumphant because they proved they could fight. In Israel, there was a brutal end to the euphoria that had followed the Six Days of victory and creation the last time around.
The new war began on the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the Jewish year. By tradition Yom Kippur marks the day when the ancient Israelites received the second Tablets of the Law and thereby knew they were forgiven for the sin of worshiping the golden calf. It is a day of repentance, of fasting and prayer and meditation, with the intent of receiving the forgiveness of one's fellow man, which in turn will allow the forgiveness of God. It addresses man's weakness and ability to envision the ideal, and celebrates God's help to the penitent.
Israel has a small standing army and can only fight a war after calling up its reserves, in which all men serve until the age of fifty. In such a small country mobilization is enormously disruptive. In May 1973, after the Israeli commando raid on the PLO in Beirut, the PLO attacked the Lebanese army and for a time it looked as if the Syrians might invade Lebanon to assist the PLO. Military intelligence in Israel was against mobilization but the army issued a call-up, which turned out to be unnecessary.
In July 1973 the Mossad was overtaken by a terrible blunder. A Mossad team, on the trail of the PLO terrorist responsible for the Olympic massacre in Munich, was led to the small Norwegian town of Lillehammer where it killed a Moroccan waiter, the wrong man. Norwegian police arrested those involved, the first incontrovertible evidence that Israeli assassination teams were operating against terrorist leaders of the PLO. The affair was given publicity and the Mossad was in trouble at home.
In September 1973 a train carrying Russian Jews emigrating to Israel was hijacked by PLO terrorists in Czechoslovakia, creating great turmoil in Israel. The PLO unit was one of those run by Syrian intelligence.
The Egyptian army always held its annual training maneuvers in the autumn. In September the Egyptian army was on the move beyond the Suez Canal, which had been the border with Israel since the Six-Day War. In the north on the Syrian front there was also activity, but Israeli military intelligence did not foresee war. In its opinion the Egyptians were on their annual autumn maneuvers and the Syrians were engaged in defensive arrangements.
In October 1973 the Egyptians and Syrians had surprise on their side for the first time. Their lines of supply were short, both along the canal and on the Golan Heights. They had the initiative and their motivation was to recapture their own territory lost in 1967. This time Israeli forces had to cross the Sinai to reach the southern front, but Israel's military leaders were contemptuous of the Arabs' ability to wage war. Israeli military intelligence was convinced the Arabs wouldn't go to war unless they were first able to strike at Israel's airfields, as the Israelis had done against Egyptian airfields in 1967, since tank warfare in open country depends on control of the air. Israeli intelligence was aware the Russians had supplied the Egyptians and Syrians with new kinds of antiaircraft missiles, but they didn't rate these weapons very highly.
All together, it was a massive failure of Israeli military intelligence, combined with overconfidence on one side and clever planning on the other. Despite the many signs of war, Israel didn't call up its reserves in October as it had in May.
War began on the afternoon of the Day of Atonement, October 6 that year, when there was complete quiet in Israel. A thousand Egyptian artillery pieces opened up a bombardment along the Suez Canal and 8,000
Egyptian infantrymen crossed the canal in rubber dinghies. Opposing them in the fortifications of the Bar-Lev line were 600 reservists of the Jerusalem Brigade, who were not even on alert. The Egyptians overran the line and that night moved five divisions of troops and 500 tanks and a forward missile defense system over to the east bank of the canal. That same afternoon in the north, on the narrow front of the Golan Heights, the Syrians attacked with more tanks than the Germans had used in Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of Russia in 1941.
Tajar always felt useless when war came. He could find ways to keep busy by helping others at the Mossad, but his own work was entirely in preparation for war, and when war broke out he could only sit and be anxious and wait for rumors and messages from the battlefields like everyone else.
The news that October was horrible. The Sinai provided protection in the south, at least to those who weren't near the canal, but the Israelis couldn't afford to give up land in the north or the Syrians would be in Israel itself, the plains of Galilee open to them. So the Israelis stood their ground on the Golan and whole units disappeared in the first hours of battle, swallowed up by the massive assault of Syrian tanks.
For Tajar, war was also the time when he recalled his earliest years growing up in Jerusalem with his brothers and sisters. He thought of them at other times but never in the same obsessive, intense way. Again and again whole incidents would suddenly flash before his eyes with startling clarity. Why did those images recur at these moments? What trick of the brain abruptly resurrected such long forgotten sensations? The process obeyed some primitive surge from deep in his being. He tried to concentrate on the work at hand but the recesses of memory compulsively thrust him back in time, as if to remind him how vast was the sweep of life and to reaffirm it, instantly and forever, in the hours of death.
They had been a large family, six children in all, Tajar the youngest. Perhaps there had sometimes been strife and acrimony but he didn't remember that, or at least it wasn't the sense of his memories. What he recalled was warmth and well-being and the protection of his brothers and sisters, who would never let any harm come to him. He was small in these scenes, only four or five. His brothers and sisters seemed twice as tall as he was and were therefore powerful guardians against the dangers of the world. Sometimes the whole family was on a picnic outside the walls of the Old City, sitting together in the evening on the slope of a hill, escaping the summer heat of the narrow alleys of Jerusalem. There were always ruins for him and his brothers to play in and perhaps some British officers might come prancing by on their horses, saluting the boys. Or it was winter and everyone was sitting around in the kitchen and the living room, reading and doing lessons, the only sounds the shuffle of pages and the rhythmic click of his mother's knitting needles.
Darkness came early in the winter and everyone read, warmed by the tea his sisters made, all of them bending over their books and dreaming of the Holy City, of the land of Israel and Jerusalem and someday.
There had been little money but he had never gone to bed hungry. Their house was small, with one room for the boys to sleep in and one for the girls. Later a tiny storeroom was turned into a private room for his eldest brother, a great event the children all took pride in because it showed how much there was to look forward to when you grew up.
All of this had been a few years after the First World War when Tajar was four or five, when Turkish rule had just ended in Palestine and a new era of progress and hope had begun with the British. Now Israel was fighting its fourth war and Tajar's mother and father and all his brothers and sisters were long since dead.
When you grew up the youngest in a family, it was strange to find yourself always the oldest person in the room, as Tajar did at the Mossad. Like warfare, espionage was for young men. It consumed your ideals and burned you out. But for an automobile accident that had made him a cripple, Tajar would have been burned out by now. As it was he sat uselessly at his desk and felt sick at heart as the young men of his country hurried off to the fronts in the north and the south.
Hurrying. . . to what?
At night in Jerusalem, driving through deserted streets a few hours before dawn, Tajar had seen a young soldier hurrying along in the darkness. He was a reservist in uniform with his rifle and dufflebag slung over his shoulders, one hand gripping each strap as he rushed along with his head down, on his way to meet some bus or car that would take him to his unit at the front. Was the boy old enough to have fought as well in the last war, Assaf's war? Chance ruled the world. If the boy was twenty-four he had fought in the last war. If he was twenty-three, this was his first war. In any case he was young and intent, hurrying. Tears rose in Tajar's throat and he found himself choking at the sight of the boy hurrying alone in the darkness and silence of the deserted streets . . . O God have mercy, to what?
On the first afternoon of the war the Israelis lost forty planes to the new Russian missiles, mostly over the Golan Heights. Overall the odds on the ground, initially, were ten or twelve to one in favor of the Syrians, far more in the case of the Egyptians. The Syrians reached their maximum penetration in less than forty-eight hours and after that were driven back. But the situation on the Golan was so desperate in the beginning that Israeli tanks were sent up singly to fight on the plateau, without forming units, as soon as crews of reservists arrived to man them. Two Iraqi armored divisions and a Jordanian armored brigade joined the Syrians, but on the fourth day of the war the Syrians had been driven out of the Golan. On the sixth day Israeli counterattacks were launched into Syria itself.
The Israeli counteroffensive against the Egyptians took longer because of the intervening mass of the Sinai.
On the ninth day of the war more tanks were engaged along the Suez Canal than the 1,600 British and German and Italian tanks that had fought at El Alamein, two hundred miles to the west during that same month in 1942. On the eleventh day of the war the first Israeli paratroopers crossed the canal into Egypt. By then the Egyptian Third Army was cut off and trapped in the Sinai.
***
As was customary, the United States and the Soviet Union eventually brought an end to the war.
In terms of land, given the inferiority of Egyptian and Syrian air power and their reliance on defensive antiaircraft missiles, it was unlikely the Arabs ever thought they would carry the war into Israel. At most they could have hoped to recapture some of the territory they lost in 1967, on the Golan Heights and in the Sinai.
In this the Syrians failed completely. The Egyptians managed to hold two shallow bridgeheads east of the canal, while losing a pocket west of the canal.
But in other ways the Arabs knew success. They fought hard and inflicted heavy casualties, proving to themselves that Israel on the battlefield was not the invincible force it had appeared to be in 1967. In Egypt the war was celebrated as a great victory.
The destruction on the battlefield in less than three weeks was immense. The dead were over seven times greater on the Arab side, but for Israel with its small population the cost was enormous. In eighteen days of fighting the Israeli dead, relative to population, were nearly half of what the United States suffered in all of the Second World War.
And for the United States and the Soviet Union, thought Tajar, it was also an opportunity to test their new weapons on the battlefield. To see how well their new weapons killed, much as outside powers had done during the Spanish civil war. For the big and the powerful, it was always easy enough to find new killing grounds where others would do the dying for them.
And so another war, thought Tajar. Disaster for Israel, new pride for the Arabs, a chance for the superpowers to play with destruction — and an intolerable slaughter for everyone, an appalling squandering of ingenuity and promise for all mankind.
Where is the last war? Assaf had once asked when he lay ripped and mangled in a hospital, recalling the terrified words of a little girl who had huddled in a corner beside her family as the shells shrieked overhead: I'm so frightened. This is my first war.
What's the matter with people? Assaf had asked. What's wrong with their hearts and their minds? This isn't survival or life or anything at all a man can speak about. It's just horror. War. . . .
Alone in Jerusalem, alone at the back of the compound of wild rosebushes guarded by a giant ancient cactus, Tajar sat in his small stone house, his spirit crushed. When the new war finally ended he had come back here and hidden himself away so no one would witness his despair and his longing, his indescribable agony. But now, alone at last after the shattering days of horror and waiting and hoping, of praying for his brothers and sons and nephews, he let his heart go and wept for all his friends through the years who were no more, for all the brave young men who had gone to war after war decade after decade, who had gone and gone and gone and would never come back.
Inconsolable, alone, Tajar wept and wept, hidden away by himself because it was strength people needed from him, now and always. The strength of belief and courage and hope, the strength to dream of what could be.
Oh yes, the dream.
Because people counted on Tajar and he knew that. The living counted on him, but no more so than the fallen. After all, if the survivors didn't believe, who was there? What was there? And what then would become of the dream?
Part
3
ONE
For many years until he was brutally killed in the sordid tribal warfare of Lebanon, the little journalist Ziad was Halim's closest friend in Damascus. A Syrian by profession as much as by act of God, as he was fond of joking in the coffeehouses, nervous and smiling and ever brash as he sank more deeply into failure, Ziad was never able to achieve his lifelong dream of escaping his homeland. The great capitals of Europe were always his secret goal, above all the glittering wonders of Paris. But circumstances trapped him early in life and chance receded, and like any man with too weak a grip on hope he sank back into what he already knew and made a routine of it.
Europe was his eternal over there, an unreachable land of freedom far from the stifling clutter which was his real lot in the world. Halim — who was still Yossi undercover in the beginning — would have loved him as a friend no matter where they had met and under whatever conditions. For despite all his faults Ziad was a peculiarly lovable man, although perhaps an outsider like Yossi was better able to see that.
Yet circumstances counted in any friendship and particularly for someone as isolated as Yossi had been when he first arrived in Damascus, struggling to make a place for himself in a dangerous enemy capital.
There was no way he could ever forget all the help Ziad had been to him then, nor could Ziad himself ever realize the extent of his gifts to Halim, for the simple reason that Halim could never speak of them. It was what Tajar would one day refer to, in consoling Yossi after Ziad's terrible death, as the lost factor of friendships in the world of intelligence. Or what Abu Musa in Jericho, going beyond espionage to more fundamental failings of human nature as he saw them, had once referred to in Halim's presence as the pitiful silence of the human heart.
The hard facts of the matter were that Ziad made very real contributions to the early achievements of the Runner operation, without ever knowing it. Through Ziad's ridiculous posturing in the coffeehouses, Halim first made the acquaintance of the vain young lieutenant who was the nephew of the Syrian army's chief-of-staff.
Through Ziad's desperate attempts at womanizing, Halim became a close friend of the colonel in command of Syria's paratroop brigade on the Golan Heights. And eventually through Ziad he also came to know the Syrian minister of information, a rigorous intellectual who could open almost any door in those days. But for Halim there would always be another dimension to the closeness he felt for his great friend: the small, strictly personal things Ziad had done for him when Yossi was newly arrived in Damascus and groping inside himself, truly alone and truly frightened.
Halim met Ziad on his first exploratory trip to Syria from Argentina, the visit that was supposed to decide whether he would move to Damascus to go into business. The editor of an Arab weekly in Buenos Aires had given Halim the name of a nephew who worked as a journalist in Damascus. The nephew took Halim to a coffeehouse where journalists gathered and there, among other acquaintances who greeted them, a small and noisy man sat down at their table.
This was Ziad. When he heard Halim was from Argentina he immediately began calling him gaucho. Several days later he found Halim sitting alone in the same coffeehouse and joined him without being asked. He was loud and boastful and seemed to have a small man's need for making his presence felt. He dismissed Argentina as backward . . . the place where the devil lost his poncho. Isn't that the expression you use down there for a totally useless corner of the earth?
Ziad had a superficial knowledge of many things. He lectured Halim on the politics of South America and then launched into a detailed account of the sexual practices of an Indian tribe in Brazil, his voice rising. He was vulgar and crass and so busy spewing out opinions that saliva collected at the corners of his mouth, yet no one at the other tables took any notice of him. Only once did he interrupt his noisy recital of his own prejudices and that was to ask Halim what he thought of a certain French painter. Halim had never heard of the man. So this was Ziad in his coffeehouse role — a pathetic buffoon, a shabby clown promoting himself.
Or at least that was the way he acted when confronted by a stranger like Halim, a man who had actually been somewhere in the world and done something. But when he was alone with Halim he was very different.
Then he dropped his public pose and became quiet and thoughtful and morose. In only a short time Halim came to know Ziad well on their walks along the river, and he wasn't surprised to learn that the little journalist was a sad and vulnerable man.
Ziad was a few years younger than Yossi, therefore a few years older than Halim, according to the biography put together by Tajar. His background was as poor as Yossi's, although for a time it looked as if he too might rise above it as Yossi had done. Like Yossi, he was the only surviving child in his family. Disease had carried off the others. His father and mother had run a fruit and vegetable stand in the Hamdia souk, the traditional Oriental bazaar in the old section of Damascus. They had gone out before dawn to acquire their produce from peasant dealers, then haggled at their stand all day and into the evening with customers who demanded a discount and threatened to go next door.
A few piastres gained here, a few lost there. It was numbing and brutal work that always required a smile, a deferential politeness. Ziad said he never remembered seeing his father and mother when they weren't exhausted. The drooping eyes, the permanent slump to the shoulders, the old rough hands which were always busy stripping decaying layers off green vegetables to get at a core that could be sold. It just never ended for them, he told Halim.
For their son they naturally hoped for a better life. Ziad was clever and was able to get into a French school run by Catholic fathers, though he was a Sunni Moslem. From the French school he was able to enter the University of Damascus to study law. It was a time of political turmoil and young Ziad became involved with the radical activities of the emerging Baath Party, which advocated social reform and made a special appeal to the new educated classes. The army revolted and one coup followed another. Ziad was suspended from the university, then expelled. He drifted into journalism, which he had been doing part time for the party. His father died, embittered and unreconciled to his son's failures. Overnight his mother became ancient and half-senile, fearful of crowds and afraid to leave the semidarkness of their tiny cavelike apartment above the souk, which was unbearably hot in the summer and icily cold in the winter.
For years his mother lived on alone in her dismal room, supported by Ziad, who came by several times a week to cook her hot meals in the late afternoon before he went out drinking. She was too frugal to use the new lamp he had bought her. He would find her huddled in a corner like some terrified nocturnal animal, buried away in the shadows under a heap of tattered shawls, his gifts of blankets and a fan and a heater and warm clothes carefully packed away in a cupboard, an old woman with only half a mind who muttered to herself about vegetables.
Once, much later, Ziad took Halim to see these rooms in the souk where he had grown up. They left the alleys of busy shops and made their way back through filthy stone tunnels worn down by centuries of squalid poverty, crept up a narrow stone stairway that was so steep it was more like a ladder twisting and turning between old walls in darkness, the crevices stinking of urine and rotting animal flesh. Finally they came to a low door and Ziad knocked, announced himself, fitted a key. The door opened and they stepped forward.
Halim could make out nothing in the shadows. And then all at once a ghastly light lit the cave where they stood, dead white and flat, remorseless. Ziad had turned on the switch by the door as they entered.
The light was neon because neon was cheaper, the original light put in by Ziad's father. The single neon bar hung from the center of the low ceiling and lit the dreary room without depth or contours, a horrible macabre moment. Halim was stunned. In the corner two eyes and a creature cowering under a pile of rags — his friend's mother. Only a short distance away, the seething noisy alleys of the souk where crowds pushed and shouted and every manner of thing was for sale. And here above the alleys this cave of silence, impenetrable in its waste and sorrow. Nothing seemed alive in such a light. It was the illumination of nightmares and death.
Welcome to my secret past, said Ziad. This is my mother and this is where I learned to dream of the world.
****
Because he spoke French and read French newspapers, Ziad liked to think of himself as much better informed than the average journalist in Damascus. He fancied himself a theorist of international politics and was always working his ideas into conversations by drawing grand designs in the air with his busy fingers, here a great power, there a plot. He bought his French newspapers secondhand from clerks who worked in hotels where French travelers stayed. He always had a French newspaper under his arm when making his rounds of the coffeehouses, but since the front-page news was old by then he had the newspaper folded to an inside page of commentary. Interesting piece on the Congo, he would say as he slipped into a chair, adding cryptically: I'm making some notes. Later he resold the newspapers to students at his old school.
Ziad was at his strongest when lecturing bored acquaintances in a coffeehouse. The folly of human affairs was obvious to him then and his face had the worldly grin of an ancient Greek mask of comedy. But if asked a question on the Congo, the mirthless laughter in his eyes betrayed him. His expression turned brittle and he covered his fear by getting his hand up in front of his face and sucking deeply on his cigarette. He needed time to think. What should he say? He threw back his head and blew a long stream of smoke toward the ceiling. Despite the maneuver, Halim had the indelible impression of his friend's face abruptly cast in the other extreme of classical drama, a rigid mask of tragedy. But in only an instant Ziad had recovered, and whether his answer was inadequate or ridiculous didn't matter. Once again he was rushing on in a headlong tumble of words, grinning and talking and talking, desperate to fill the silence inside himself.
When Halim first met him Ziad was prospering in a minor way as a journalist. Or at least he seemed as close to it as he would ever come in the corrupt crosscurrents of bribery and scandal that passed for journalism in Damascus, where every newspaper was the tool of a political party and some loose amalgam of commercial interests, whose enemies it viciously attacked day after day while negotiating with those same enemies, through intermediaries, for a sweeping reversal of editorial policy in exchange for money.
In case things turn out differently tomorrow, Ziad said to Halim. It's just the traditional Levantine sense of contingency. Why be caught publishing yesterday's truths about today's national heroes and saviors, when we all know they're going to turn out to be tomorrow's unscrupulous villains and national traitors? It's no secret you can't run a newspaper that way. In a way it's even fair. Everyone on the outside gets a chance to buy success, and everyone on the inside gets a chance to sell out his friends and principles. And the public, or at least those who remember yesterday, get a chance to read about it and be entertained.
They were out on one of their walks by the river, crossing the Nabek Bridge in the middle of Damascus. The bridge was packed with ancient overflowing buses and old French taxicabs and donkeys pulling carts, with men carrying huge loads on their backs and women selling flowers. People hurried through the dust and the noise and the clatter, their eyes intent on the far shore. Ziad pulled Halim over to the railing and gestured at the muddy river, then at the city.
But you, gaucho, how are you going to know the way things work? asked Ziad. You left Syria at the age of three and you made your way well enough in Argentina, but this isn't a place where laborers eat steaks twice a day. Oh they warned you in Argentina, I know. No pampas and no beef over there, they said, just politics and people. Too much of the one and too many of the other, they said, laughing, and you laughed with them.
Because at the same time they were also telling you other stories, weren't they, gaucho? The old men became sentimental and never tired of recalling their beautiful memories. Nostalgic in their faraway land, faces glowing, they described the summer nights of their childhoods when all of Damascus seemed to drift down here to picnic on the banks of the Barada, to lounge on the shores of the river and forget the heat of the day, children playing under the trees in the shadows and lights twinkling on the water and cool breezes whispering up where family and friends were gathered around for long pleasant evenings. Oh just lovely memories when they recalled their homeland. But they don't come back, gaucho, do they? Idle memories are enough for them over there, where pampas and beef mean a man can make a life with only hard work and honest labor.
Of course they admired your idealism and wished you every success, said Ziad. Why shouldn't they? So all your life you've heard these lovely stories about your homeland and wondered about it, and what did it matter that it might be more difficult over here, where there's just politics and people. Worthwhile things are difficult.
You're young and you've already achieved success in the New World, so why not the Old? Why not Syria?
But what do you know about it, gaucho? Do you have any idea what an Alawite or an Ismaili or a Shiite is saying this month beneath what he appears to be saying? Do you know the way the Kurds or the Druse or the Armenians or the Orthodox or the Assyrians are getting along with any of these others this week, and why? Or who's with the Egyptians at the moment and who's against them among the older nationalist groups or the civilian and military wings of the Baath, or the various factions of the army, and why? Because it doesn't really matter so much what they're up to, as why they're up to it. It's the why that's going to affect what happens next week. And all these rivalries and jealousies and alliances are going somewhere, just as the people and buses and carts on this bridge are going somewhere, intent and hurrying. But where?
And even a coffeehouse is never just a coffeehouse, said Ziad. It's a secret society where alert and suspicious members meet to exchange information and get a sense of shifting fortune. You're a Syrian and a Sunni by birth, gaucho, and no doubt that seemed a long-lost identity to you over there in Buenos Aires, a birthright that would provide you with a place in Damascus. But it's just not so. You'll need to be much more, to know much more, in order to go into business here. Syria is a land of ancient fragments, chaos remembered, a primeval place of fanatical discord. Our great gifts to early Christianity were those strange men like St. Simeon Stylites who erected pillars off in the desert and stood on top of them for fifty years, day and night and winter and summer. What possessed them? Is there anything men won't do? It's the Syrian disease and people are like that in this part of the world. They hold onto things. If a prejudice was good enough for the fifth century, it's good enough for us. The more heretical the belief, the more we embrace it.
Schismatic Moslem sects have always thrived here. We still have Nestorians and Chaldeans, Christian sects that are so obscure no one else in the world has heard of them for fifteen hundred years. There are even people whose common tongue is still Aramaic, the language of Jesus.
So perhaps back there in Argentina you thought you had an identity as a Sunni and a Syrian, said Ziad. And no doubt you thought you could come over here and rediscover it. But identities change when we cross oceans. Don't you know that, gaucho? Here, you're not what you were back there. Here, there's not enough to go around and never will be. It's a poor country with too many tribes and too many religions in too many variations, without oil, without pampas, with a few fruit and olive trees and too much desert . . . just people and politics, as they told you in Argentina.
Ziad laughed. He took Halim's arm and they left the railing overlooking the river, falling in with the busy crowds swarming across the bridge. Still holding Halim's arm and steering him between the carts and people, Ziad went up on tiptoe and stretched his neck to whisper in Halim's ear.
Of course I could begin to tell you about it, whispered Ziad. That's my business, my profession: how it all works. So if you still want to leave Argentina and move to Damascus, I can show you how to get started.
***
Halim was wary of Ziad in the beginning. It was Tajar who overcame his reluctance at their subsequent meeting in Geneva, when Yossi was returning to Buenos Aires to conclude his affairs there. Yossi was simply being overcautious, Tajar thought, now that the time had finally come for the Runner to move to Damascus.
I'm sure there's nothing to fear, Tajar said in Geneva. Let our little journalist friend help. Open up to him.
You're apprehensive and that's natural, but you don't have to underestimate yourself. Ziad obviously respects you, Yossi, and my own feeling is that he's fascinated by what Halim intends to do, wants to do, imagines he can do. In you he sees things he misses in himself, and there's no question he can help you in a very practical way right now. He dramatizes matters to emphasize his own importance, his value to you, but that's all right. You can always distance yourself from him later. By helping you he'll be boosting his self-esteem, which is the point of it for him, I imagine. You'll be doing him a favor by letting him help you. A man like that must suspect even now that he's never going to go very far in the world, but he feels you may.
Anyway, it's not material things that concern him with you, said Tajar. Your eventual success in Damascus as a businessman, as a man who knows people who count and moves among them, all that is too far away for him to think about, inconceivably far away. Life for him is week to week. A month from now the army may have revolted again and there may be another government. That's the way it is in his world. He doesn't know long-term. How can he?
So his interest in you is personal, said Tajar. If he were thinking about bettering himself and promoting his career, he'd be spending his extra time in Baath politics. But the fact is he doesn't. The fact is he would rather spend his extra time with you. Why? Because he's intrigued by the whole idea of the mad gaucho from Argentina. Because he knows himself and knows he'll never be mad or a gaucho, an adventurer from some distant foreign place, some exotic faraway culture, taking a chance. Because he knows he's sane and reasonable and a little timid, which is to say ordinary. The way you've described him tells me we see him in the same way. He's a little man with good perceptions and talent, trapped in a place where that's not enough.
Likable, harmless, useful. I've known men like him before, in Damascus and elsewhere.
I'm sure, replied Yossi, thoughtfully.
What is it? asked Tajar.
Oh, I was thinking of Argentina, said Yossi. When my Syrian acquaintances there used to speak of life being hard in Syria, because it's a poor country, there was often a hint of something more in their voices. A suggestion meant for me perhaps, an unspoken word, a perception they shared, looking back. Not something they wanted to say out loud because that would have meant demeaning their homeland and their memories. I felt it on this trip, especially when I was with Ziad. Ruthless was that unspoken word. You have to be that way to succeed in such a place, when you're born there and grow up there, and Ziad doesn't have it. He lacks it entirely.
Oh well, ordinary for his time and place, like most people, said Tajar. Of course I wouldn't imagine he'll go very far. But then most people don't . . . anywhere, do they?
TWO
The first years of the Runner operation in Damascus were devoted to Halim establishing his export business.
With his introductions from Syrian businessmen in Buenos Aires and his Swiss letters of credit, he had no difficulty putting together shipments of leather goods and obtaining export licenses. The shipments went off to Belgium and more orders came in.
Halim worked alone in his business, using the small hotel where he lived as his office. The hotel occupied the top floor of a large building off Martyrs' Square in the center of downtown Damascus. It was not yet a big city but it was growing rapidly, in confusion, and private flats and commercial and government offices tended to be all crowded together in the same buildings. Construction was haphazard after the Second World War and new Damascus was as much a hodgepodge as the old. Halim's building was typical with shops and coffeehouses on the ground floor, the offices of dentists and lawyers and small businesses and municipal departments on the two floors above that, then three floors of apartments where families lived, with the hotel on the top floor.The same two creaking cage-lifts serviced all the floors, so every manner of person could be found coming in and out of the building. The lifts were at the end of a cavernous entrance hall, poorly lit, and people tended to slink through this near-darkness like fugitives, no matter how confidently they entered from the bright sunlight. Far back in the gloom an elderly guard reigned from his perch on a high stool. The guard wore a vague khaki uniform and was armed with a Mauser, a huge antique rifle from the time of the Ottoman Turks. The rifle was merely ceremonial: a shiny brass plug with a red tassel was fitted into the end of the barrel. But this was the guard's undisputed domain and here he ruled with the ill-humor of a stranded Tatar horseman, gruffly directing a band of ragged urchins who fetched coffee and ran errands for the offices upstairs.
Only Syrians stayed at the hotel. The bedrooms were comfortable, even spacious, and a few were occupied by old women who lived there permanently and spoke French more often than Arabic. But most of the guests were men from the provinces with business to do in the capital, or people visiting relatives. The polite deskmen were careful with messages, and the younger bartenders were ready to provide discreet information on women and gold and hashish.
Halim often worked on one of the balconies outside the public rooms of the hotel, where he could do his correspondence and bookkeeping while looking down on courtyards with palm trees and banks of flowers, a low red-tiled roof somewhere among them. The streets near Martyrs' Square were always noisy and crowded but there were also grand old houses with overgrown gardens hidden away between the newer buildings, and the balconies of Halim's hotel offered a glimpse of these graceful memories of an older Damascus.
Ziad pretended to find Halim's living arrangements insufferably bourgeois. Secretly, though, he liked the peaceful comfort of the hotel, exotically named the Brittany, which was far removed from the hectic coffeehouse scheming he lived in so much of the time. Halim would still be at work when Ziad arrived at the end of the afternoon. Ziad would poke his head through the beaded curtain separating the barroom from the balcony and announce himself, then settle into a leather armchair and order Scotch. Ziad loved Scotch but he could never afford to buy it. Here it went on Halim's bill. The bar was a sedate room with wood paneling and potted plants and a ceiling fan. There were also free bowls of peanuts. Ziad sat in splendor with his French newspaper open on his lap, watching the sinking sun through the windows and feeling himself a man of the world.
A second bowl of peanuts arrived with Ziad's second Scotch. By then Halim was gathering up his paperwork and soon it was time for them to go out and roam the city, to visit coffeehouses and meet people and take long walks, ending up at some restaurant Ziad knew.
On other evenings Halim generally ate in the hotel dining room. It was astonishing how many friends he made there in a short time, men of different backgrounds from different parts of Syria. In many ways, Tajar had told Yossi, your first year in Damascus will decide everything. People get an idea of someone and it lasts.
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