Jericho Mosaic

Tajar laughed merrily, impish to the end.

But poor Anna, he added with feeling. Success is truly a burden to her. She welcomes the recognition but she'll always be uncomfortable with strangers. They think she's withdrawn and aloof when she's just being shy. . . .

Tajar also had good things to say about Assaf and his Abigail. After a difficult time they seemed closer than ever, even though Assaf still longed to have a child with her and Abigail was still opposed to marriage.

She and Anna have become great friends and surely that's good, said Tajar. She also likes to talk to me for some reason. We have long intimate discussions on Anna's balcony when Anna's working. I guess I'm something of a key to Assaf's past for her. She asks about you and Anna's brother David, and I'm supposed to unlock all the secrets about how Assaf became what he is. I tell her there are no secrets about that and Assaf is still her best source, but she thinks I'm just being inscrutable and finds some other way to question me. I like her more and more. Of course she has fears to overcome, unlike the rest of us at that age, or this age. . . .

Bell also came into the conversation along with the shesh-besh partners who haunted his front porch, Abu Musa and Moses the Ethiopian, and Assaf's unfortunate schoolteacher friend from after the Six-Day War, Yousef, who was still a fugitive somewhere in the caves of the Judean wilderness. They spoke of many things from the past but not of the future. Yossi gently hinted it wasn't a time for that. He would have the rest granted him by Colonel Jundi, then they would see.

Tajar felt this was just as well. Certainly he had no desire to discuss what the next months would bring in Lebanon. The Runner's reports had all gone to the director of the Mossad, but what did it matter? The course was set and Israel's grand plan for Lebanon was under way. There was to be an end to the Palestinian nationalist cause and Naji was to be Lebanon's new national savior.

So Tajar and the Runner talked of where they had been, not where they were going. Yossi preferred it that way and Tajar, for his part, was encouraged by the Runner's quiet strength. Characteristically, Yossi left him that night near the coast with a smile and a wave which warmed Tajar's heart.

At least he has survived the dreadful years in Lebanon with his spirit whole, thought Tajar. At least there's that.

TWELVE

Halim spent most of his time that spring sitting under the fig tree at the end of his garden, watching the tangled vines and bushes and trees come to life. Of all the trees, the fig grew its leaves in the most peculiar way. One tiny leaf appeared at the very tip of each of the larger branches, perhaps a few dozen in all. After several days a small green bud thrust out at the base of each single leaf, a messenger for the future fruit.

Then rapidly in the next days the vivid greenery burst out from the ends of the branches and marched in triumph back toward its source, the grayish-black tree trunk of winter.

***

He had an extremely erotic affair with a young Italian woman which lasted a few weekends. She was younger than Assaf, still in her twenties. She worked for an airline and would arrive at his door in her uniform, demanding no more than a bath and some hashish to smoke, then they would make love all weekend. They also made love under the fig tree when its leaves became full. Once she had lounged there laughing and naked in the golden light of late afternoon, redolent with love's smells, and raised a languid hand to the tree's hard little fruits.

Do you know what fig is slang for in Italian? she asked. No? A wise man's breakfast. . . .

Even while it lasted he thought of her as the Italian woman, which was how Ziad would have referred to this magnificent creature. It was a Ziad kind of fantasy, a daydream of a ravishing young woman from Europe who flew into his life as if by magic, who was convulsed by sex and wanted nothing but sexual excess for the short time she was with him. An affair without prologue or consequence, without explanation, an abandoned celebration of lust that would have reaffirmed all of Ziad's glorious fantasies on the erotic possibilities of life, on the irresistible nature of lovemaking, on the final triumph of joyous bold sex over loneliness, an erotic feast that was always just here while it lasted and always just for now.

After a few weekends she left to fly a different route elsewhere. A slip of paper arrived in an envelope with a drawing of a fig tree and a sun and a moon above it. In the upper corner an airplane sped away, trailing tears.

She hadn't written any words and there was no signature.

As brief as it was, he knew he could have loved this wonderful young woman. A woman who was capable of giving so much, whatever the circumstances, was a rarity to be treasured. If he had met her a year ago or six months ago, who knew what might have come of it? But he had met her exactly when he did. Why? Because she sensed her abandon was safe with him? Without a future to study it, to understand it and reduce it? Was perfection only there when you disregarded it and considered nothing, calculated nothing, weighed nothing?

Clever people and grocers, she had said, weigh everything.

An idyll in the grand manner, then, a perfect sexual encounter. The Italian woman come and gone, and a last banquet of sensuality . . . Ziad's exquisite daydream briefly made real under Halim's fig tree.

What a superb taste of life. He smiled at the splendor of it.

***

Out of habit he continued to rise early, even though he seldom left his house and garden. One morning at first light he wandered out into the garden and found a dead man.

The man was sitting under the fig tree where the garden furniture was. He wore a greasy cloth cap pulled down tight on his head and a ragged winter overcoat buttoned up to his neck. His trousers were rolled up to his knees, leaving his thin legs bare. He wore no socks and his tattered shoes were huge, without laces. The tongues of the shoes curled up and the soles curled down, making the shoes look like a clown's prop from a circus. The man's eyes were closed and his face was frowning as if he were deep in thought, but the unnatural pose of his body left no doubt he was dead. Halim telephoned the police.

The odd thing was he knew the man, or knew him by sight just as thousands of people did. For years he had seen this tall thin derelict haunting the sidewalks of downtown Damascus, often near the central post office.

He was a stooped man with nervous eyes who was always peering intently down the street. He dressed the same in summer and winter and seemed oblivious to anything around him except a smile, which caught his attention at once if he thought it was directed at him. Then he grew agitated and muttered angrily. But when he was ignored he became calm again.

The derelict's heavy overcoat looked grotesque in the stifling heat of summer, the exposed gray flesh of his legs painfully cold in the hard wind and rain of winter. People learned to walk past him without disturbing him.

He hovered close to buildings and gave the impression that he was about to make a decision to break away and head off down the sidewalk. Sometimes he even took a few forceful steps forward, gazing intently into the distance. But ten minutes or two hours later he was still in the same place, doing exactly the same thing.

Like other people Halim assumed someone looked after him because he was more or less clean, except in winter when his bare legs were caked with mud.

The police were apologetic when they arrived to remove the body. They said the derelict normally kept to the busier downtown streets during the day because he liked to be among people who were hurrying in every direction. Then when it grew dark he went straight home to his slum, bothering no one. He was a harmless man who had been deranged for years, cared for by his sister.

Later that morning Halim received a telephone call from the district police superintendent, a friend, who said it was very unusual for the derelict to have strayed into a good residential area. As for him climbing over Halim's wall to sit down and die in the garden, well, there was no explaining that. Some manner of breeze in the mind of God, as the old saying put it. The superintendent also apologized for the awkward incident.

***

Halim often thought of Bell that spring. More and more he had come to admire Bell's achievements as a man, his humility and wisdom and acceptance of himself despite his horrible disfigurement. The fact that Bell hadn't intended to become what he did in no way lessened the accomplishment.

If Halim had been given a choice now to be positioned anywhere he wanted in life, he would have chosen himself as he was, making a new start in Bell's house with the young Italian woman. Yes, why not perfection? Why not everything? He would have feasted on the fruits of life and sat on Bell's front porch, in Bell's orange grove with its dust and sunlight and hum of insects in the morning, with that magnificent woman singing somewhere nearby.

Certainly he would have chosen Jericho, not Jerusalem and not Damascus.

When he was a child growing up in a village near the Euphrates, both Jerusalem and Damascus had been mythical cities to him. Now at the other end of life, knowing one of them was enough. A man heard many myths but lived only one in the end.

Jericho, still and always, was a different sort of place. Jericho had never had great temples or been the throne of empires. Armies ignored it and aspiring tribes passed it by. Conquerors searched elsewhere. Of all the dreams of man it was the oldest. It was the kind of place, valuable for its balsams, that Mark Antony would present as a love-token to Cleopatra, who would then turn around and rent it for a good price to Herod, who enjoyed it for its sun. Herod had wanted to escape the winter rain and cold of Jerusalem. Mark Antony was thinking of empires and Cleopatra of rent and meanwhile Jericho slumbered on, an oasis in the Great Rift of the world's affairs where one millennium was not so very different from another.

After all, a town that was ten thousand years old didn't have to concern itself with passing fancies. Jerusalem and Damascus with their mighty deeds and ruins, their mighty passions and vigorous causes, went back not half so far in time.

***

Thinking of Bell and Jericho also led him to think of Bell's surrogate son, Yousef, the young Arab schoolteacher who had befriended Assaf for one autumn and winter and spring after the Six-Day War. Since then Yousef had been a fugitive hiding in the Judean wilderness, an exile in his own land, an idealist who had sought this wholly personal and futile way to live the cause of his people in freedom. For all that time, nearly fifteen years, Yousef had done nothing but survive in the wilderness, hiding in caves and wadis and never lifting a hand toward anyone, almost never seen. By now he would surely have to be a little mad, touched by the awesome extremes of solitude in those desolate wastes.

In the security reports submitted to Tajar by the Shin Bet, Yousef was referred to as the green man, the code name given him long ago by Tajar. The green man was a traditional Arab name for the prophet Elijah. At the time Tajar assigned the code name it had been a quiet tribute to an unusual friendship, and a suggestion of the spiritual nature of Yousef's gift to Assaf after Assaf suffered his near-fatal wounds of the soul in the Six-Day War. To the Shin Bet the green man was a crazed Palestinian hermit of no operational interest whatsoever, whom they occasionally heard about third- or fourth-hand, via their informers. When they did hear news they passed along the report to the Mossad, as requested, wondering how even a low-level desk man in the Mossad could be concerned with such a totally useless figure. If they had suspected the recipient of their infrequent reports on the green man was a man as important as Tajar, they would have been astounded. But within the Mossad Tajar kept his interest in Yousef hidden, and only Tajar and Yossi had ever been aware of the private significance of the code name.

During their last meeting near Beirut, Tajar had mentioned how this code name from another era had strangely acquired a reality of its own. For it seemed that in the Arab villages near the Judeah wilderness, the fugitive Yousef had in fact come to represent a kind of Elijah to some of the more superstitious villagers, an elusive spirit in the wastes for whom children left tiny caches of food in secret places when they were out tending their flocks of goats.

***

Halim smiled. He poured himself more brandy under the fig tree. Tajar's long-ago code name for Yousef had reminded him of Tajar's habit of suddenly dipping into history without warning, without preface. Tajar had always been famous for that. Sometimes when he first mentioned something you couldn't quite be sure whether he was referring to yesterday or to a thousand years ago.

The green man, Elijah, wandering the Judean wilderness in this day and age?

It sounded odd to Halim but it had always been Tajar's own particular way of recognizing things, of giving them a shape and a size that made sense to him. Of course memory was also like that, as Tajar liked to point out.

It's as free and erratic as a butterfly . . . Tajar's phrase.

Once in Geneva two decades ago, in the middle of a discussion on dead drops in Damascus, Tajar had abruptly begun talking about the pyramids of Egypt. Yossi had listened to him in astonishment. What was the connection? What had sent Tajar careening off to Egypt? Had he suddenly thought of the pyramids as history's ultimate dead drop? Solid stone proof of man's insatiable desire to have a secure secret place, at last, to hide in? Tajar, meanwhile, had gone on to marvel over a statue of Cheops he had seen in the museum in Cairo, the only known representation of the pharaoh who had built the Great Pyramid as his mausoleum.

According to Tajar the statue of Cheops was tiny, no bigger than a man's finger.

Just imagine it, Tajar had said. In the desert the Great Pyramid, six million tons of fitted stone perfectly piled into place, immense and incomprehensible. And in a museum five thousand years later, this minuscule presentation of its creator. Alas for poor Cheops. He wanted to be remembered as the weightiest king in the history of the world, but as it turned out some minor craftsman undid him with an hour's work. We see him.

And there he is, as big as a finger but no bigger. . . .

Halim smiled under his fig tree. He remembered laughing in Geneva and asking Tajar what on earth had caused him to think of Cheops in the middle of a discussion on dead drops. Tajar had said something, but he couldn't recall his fanciful explanation now.

***

Memory . . . Tajar's butterflies.

There in his garden that spring Halim was trying very hard to see the Runner's life as right in the end. He knew the Runner's days in Damascus were over. He had accomplished much but the Runner's role was for running, and Halim knew he had already pushed his endurance more than enough. It was a younger man's vocation which demanded a young man's eye and skill. Spies didn't grow old in their work. They went inside like Tajar or found an oasis on the edge of the desert like Bell, or died with their mask on like Ziad. But where could he go?

He felt like Bell at the end of the Second World War — a man without a country. Bell was English but he had never really lived in England. He had grown up in India but then his past had been denied to him and he couldn't go back there because of race and war and circumstance.

Israel wasn't Halim's home. Even when he had lived in Israel he had felt out of place, and how much truer that would be now after nearly twenty-five years as an Arab in Damascus. He had served Israel with honesty but Israel as an idea, a concept, perhaps as Bell had served England while living in India and Egypt. For Bell, that hadn't meant there was an England to go back to.

Where then? Some Arab community in South America? In North America? Sitting with the other old men in an Arab coffeehouse on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, playing shesh-besh and reminiscing about the old country? Recalling Tajar's humor and sneaking off one afternoon a week to ride a subway to a Jewish neighborhood of Brooklyn where he could back some frightened schoolboys into a corner and whisper to them with wild eyes, like some mad ancient mariner off the docks: Listen, I was the greatest secret agent the Mossad ever had, let me tell you my tale? . . .

He laughed at himself. It was marvellously ridiculous, and also sad and hopeless. But what then? A new identity and a new life in Hong Kong? A new identity and a new life in New Mexico? On the edge of the Gobi desert? On a hillside in the Hindu Kush?

He was trying hard to make light of the end of his role as the Runner. He was trying to believe he might be going somewhere — not just leaving Damascus and this house and this garden. He had known profound friendships over the years and he wanted very much to honor Tajar and Ziad as they deserved to be honored, and not to feel regret or sorrow. All the choices had always been his, so regret and sorrow were wrong. A smile and a wave was the way to honor his friends, but he also knew these gestures had to be real.

To honor them he had to honor himself, which was the hardest thing for any man to do alone in the end. Tajar did it but he wasn't alone. He had Anna and Assaf and Abigail. Bell managed it but he wasn't quite alone. He had Abu Musa and Moses the Ethiopian. Ziad hadn't managed it, and he had been alone.

***

The green man.

The idea came to him between Cheops and Herod. Merely a glimpse of an idea at first, a suggestion which slowly took shape. In his garden beneath the fig tree that spring, between Cheops and Herod: the green man.

There was a majestic simplicity to it. In fact Yousef had always wanted to meet him. The obscure fugitive who lived like an animal in the wilderness had always yearned to meet the revered visionary from Damascus: Halim the incorruptible one, the conscience of the Palestinian cause.

Over the years men from the West Bank had turned up in Halim's garden with Yousef's humble request. They weren't sophisticated men. They were men from villages near the Judean wilderness who respected Yousef's reputation, such as it was. They were simple farmers and goatherds to whom the fugitive Yousef meant something. To them Yousef was a symbol of freedom, a spirit of resistance. All these years Yousef had never left the land, never forsaken it, but he was willing to do so and cross the Jordan to the east if it meant he could meet Halim.

It was strange, thought Halim. Subterfuge was strange, and illusion and reality and myth, and love. Tajar had always said the Runner had to be a genuine idealist in order to succeed in Damascus, and so he had been and so he had succeeded. Yet Yousef was also a genuine idealist, although of a completely different sort.

Much had come from the Runner's idealism. Had anything come from Yousef's?

A little perhaps. In a few poor villages of Palestine, some Arab children dreamed as a result of Yousef. He gave them a kind of hope, and a hope and a dream were always a hope and a dream. The green man? Elijah?

Something might come of it someday, who could say. . . .

The idea shaped itself slowly, over brandy, in his garden beneath the fig tree. First he decided he would meet Yousef. Then he decided the place to do that was not on the Jordanian side of the river, but in Israel. He would cross the river to the plains of Jericho: the spy who came home to the promised land.

That part of it amused him. Not even Moses had managed to make that crossing. God had said no to Moses.

Moses had already come far enough. He had journeyed long and well through the wilderness, but here was an end to his wanderings: a view of the promised land. . . .

So the Runner would stand on one of the mountains of Moab and look down on the valley and the river to the west, and when darkness came he would slip across the river to the plains of Jericho. Yousef had pledged himself never to forsake his homeland, and Halim would honor that pledge by going over to meet him on the other side, Yousef's side. It would also be a way to honor Yousef for what he had once done for Assaf. The finer meanings of all this would be unknown to Yousef, but that didn't matter. Halim was doing it for himself.

Tajar would also understand this final gesture.

Halim even knew where he and Yousef could meet. There was a small, abandoned Ethiopian monastery on the banks of the river. As a child Yousef had gone there for picnics with his brother Ali, now dead, and with Bell and Abu Musa and Moses the Ethiopian. There the Runner and the green man would sit in the darkness and rejoice at the end of their long journeys through the wilderness. And since they would both be at home on the plains of Jericho, together on the promised side of the river, neither of them would ever have to set out again. Halim made a telephone call. A Palestinian friend was to come by that evening. Once the message got through to Yousef, the reply would come back to him quickly in Damascus. He only hoped it could be arranged before summer, so he wouldn't have to hear about Lebanon.

THIRTEEN

Bell had seldom seen Yousef during the last decade. Once a year on a moonless night Yousef might turn up in the ruins of Herod's winter palace on the outskirts of Jericho, a silent ghost in the darkness. The rest of the time Yousef kept to his caves up in the wilderness, hiding far back in the deeper ravines and the more inaccessible wadis.

Yousef went barefoot and was pitifully thin under his rags. He had lost most of his teeth which gave him the gaunt sunken look of a man without flesh. His legs and arms were covered with running sores, infected bites from the minute creatures that gnawed on him in the caves where he lived. He was not so nimble now but always alert, like an animal, his gaze suggesting a simpleminded attention. To Bell, he looked a generation or two older than Assaf. Sadly, Abu Musa had been right. The Yousef they knew had been lost to them long ago.

When Bell saw him that spring — the spring before Israel went to war in Lebanon — Yousef talked much more than he usually did. He also asked questions about Jericho, about the fields under cultivation toward the river, about military patrols along the border. He even reminisced about the wonderful excursions they had all once made together down to the little Ethiopian hermitage on the river, floating in eerie silence across the plains in the grand old steam-powered touring car driven by Moses in his flowing yellow robes and racing goggles, those trips likened by Bell to a journey on a flying carpet. There by the hermitage, Ali and Yousef had played in the water for hours under the watchful eye of Abu Musa, while Bell daydreamed over a book, until Moses finally finished his duties around the place and they all sat down to an epic picnic on the banks of the Jordan. For a moment Bell's heart leapt at these fond memories. Was Yousef at last thinking of leaving the wilderness?

But no, he had promised to tell Bell before doing that and there was no hint of such a decision. It was just a sudden stirring of nostalgia, thought Bell, as he watched Yousef begin the long climb up to the desolate hills.

And so Bell left the ruins of Herod's winter palace and wearily made his way back to his orange grove, the bleaker vistas of his life hard upon him as they always were when he saw Yousef.

***

That spring was a gloomy time for Tajar. Israel was preparing to go to war and all the Mossad's resources were directed toward Lebanon. An apocalyptic sense of purpose had seized the government, which seemed mesmerized by the ease with which it was going to achieve so much at a single blow.

Tajar opposed the invasion and was so outspoken he was excluded from almost everything in the Mossad.

Even the Runner's reports were not highly regarded, perhaps because they reinforced Tajar's arguments. The Runner said flatly that the Syrians would never allow the Maronite Christians to dominate Lebanon. But the answer to that was that the Syrians could do nothing about it because Israel was far stronger than Syria, army to army. In any case, like Tajar, the Runner was sometimes known to see things from an Arab perspective and there was no place for that now.

The Mossad sent teams of agents in and out of Beirut and Tajar was kept away from planning. Ignored and isolated, he retreated more than ever to Jericho and the unworldly serenity of Bell's orange grove.

***

Early in June, late in the afternoon, a bedouin boy was scrambling up a ravine in the Moabite mountains of Jordan, overlooking the Jordan Valley. Every few moments the boy stopped to peer and to listen. During the long day when the sun stood still above the barren plains of Jericho, there was never any danger of a goat straying. But as soon as the sun stirred from its throne above the valley and edged westward, then an animal might wander and lose itself, lured by the instinct of return — to a place, even an imagined place, what men called home, all animals felt it — an instinct which had been obscurely triggered by this tiny promise that darkness was coming.

His grandfather had taught him that. The boy moved nimbly up the ravine. He had been out on these slopes with his family's black goats for over eleven hours. The walk from the tent to the east, begun at first light, had taken another two hours. The animals had been fresh and hungry then and it would take longer to lead them back, but he wasn't worried yet. There was still time to find the lost one and be home by nightfall. She had strayed before and he knew her ways.

The boy encouraged himself by dreaming of adventure. Miracles could happen in this valley. When his grandfather was a young man, a bedouin boy in the hills across the valley had sought a lost goat and discovered a cave with ancient earthenware jars protruding from the dust. The jars had contained not gold but something which turned out to be even more valuable — brittle parchment with strange writing on it. That goatherd boy had broken off a piece of the writing and taken it with him. The fragment found its way to more and more important people and eventually the boy's family was made rich through his discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. That was in his grandfather's time. Who could say what might happen in his?

The boy stopped dead. He was peering down into a smaller ravine and saw there a man who was just sitting, gazing west out over the valley. The man looked like a bedouin, a very poor bedouin, ragged and dusty as if he had been living alone in the wilderness for a long time. The boy's first impression was that the stranger was a fugitive. He knew who was to be seen in these parts and this man didn't belong. It even flashed through the boy's mind that this might be the fabled green man, a wild creature of the wastes of whom he had heard, an unworldly presence who was both spirit and holy man. The green man was said to dwell on the other side of the valley in the mountains to the west, but who could be sure where a spirit wandered? Perhaps he had flown over here during the night.

The boy stared only a moment. Whether this was the green man or not, the boy knew better than to approach strangers in these gullies. The border with Israel was just down below. A fugitive who sat in the mountains of Jordan so close to the border, looking west toward Palestine as if waiting for darkness, was enough reason not to search here for the missing goat. The second miracle of the Dead Sea Scrolls would have to wait for another day. This wasn't the time to discover ancient fragments of history more precious than gold.

Silently the boy withdrew, backing down the way he had come. . . .

In fact the stranger had seen the boy's flock earlier and knew there was nothing to fear. A bedouin child tending goats would keep well away and speak of what he had seen only to his family, that night. Such was the rule for the children of nomads near dangerous enemy borders.

The stranger would have been taken for a bedouin by anyone, but his age betrayed him as a man out of place. The white stubble of a beard stood out on his lean dark face. To the boy this had given the stranger the desperate look of a fugitive, although actually it served to soften the man's gaunt, weary features. But in any case he was out of place in these ravines, whichever desert he was from, since only goats wandered here without a secret purpose and only children minded them.

As for the stranger himself, he wasn't feeling at all out of place but that was because he was gazing across the great empty valley at the green patch on its far side, imagining he was there. The green patch was the oasis of Jericho with its luxuriant fruit trees and cascading flowers, a little up the valley at the foot of the opposing range of mountains, which marked the easterly reaches of the Judean wilderness. He had chosen this sheltered lookout because he could view the oasis from here without having the glare of the Dead Sea in his eyes. Now the sun was sinking toward the far horizon and casting shadows of the wilderness back over the lifeless deep-blue waters, but earlier the sea had been a mirror too brilliant to behold. And this perch in the hills of Moab was also directly above a certain spot — two small huts invisible from here — which lay hidden within the thin line of green foliage winding down the middle of the pale barren valley to the Dead Sea, the banks of the little stream which was itself the border. Now the vast empty plains were also coming alive with subtle shades of color as the sun sank lower and gave the magical oasis in the distance an even more intensely green hue in the day's afterglow.

He thought of it that way — a magical oasis. Green was the color of Jericho, of the Prophet's banner and paradise. And it was none other than Jericho that Satan had spread before Jesus to tempt him in the wilderness, as Abu Musa was so fond of recalling.

Give pause, Abu Musa would say, looking up from the shesh-besh game on Bell's front porch. How could it be that Satan hoped to win the soul of Jesus by offering him Jericho? Why didn't Satan offer Rome and Persia and the other great empires? But the answer must be obvious. In those days serious people must have been much more like me, intent on the real fruits of life. So there was the choice of choices two thousand years ago. Did one choose Jericho or eternal life? Which was it to be?

A familiar portent, a sparkle of devilish joy, would creep into Abu Musa's eyes . . . But might they not be the same thing? he would whisper. Isn't that also a possibility? And are you now thinking we may be in deep sand here? Well it's true we are, just as Jesus was when he was standing up on the Mount of Temptation behind us. And Jesus had to choose then and we have to choose now but I insist on choosing both, on having all of it, because to me eternity and a life lived in Jericho are one and the same, deliciously so. . . .

Whereupon a massive grin would erupt on Abu Musa's old face and his huge body would heave with silent laughter, while Bell raised his glass in salute to homegrown theology, and Moses the Ethiopian smiled benignly and went on sniffing a fragrance of jasmine that was passing his way. . . .

The sun had slipped below the horizon on the far side of the valley. These rich memories of Bell's front porch, of Bell and Abu Musa and Moses, had never been more vivid to him. He could feel these memories in a thousand different ways. Jericho's greenery had turned dark and somber in the twilight beyond the desolate plains. And so what did Jericho mean to him, finally?

Bell's life, of course. He knew that was what he had always wanted in the end, but it was too late for that now. He had gone too far, too long. He had missed somehow and would never know Bell's life. Once long ago there had been exhilaration and success, a very grand success in the Six Days of creation. And then there had been despair which he had overcome, and sadness and loss and all of it come to this — a dream of Jericho glimpsed from afar. From empty verandahs through long days and nights that spring, since the death of Ziad at the end of winter, he had looked down into the tangled gardens of memory and seen the broken statues of his life, solitary and silent and discolored by time, a mystic's solemn companions.

So perhaps it was as Ziad had often claimed and there was far more than just a touch of the mystic to him.

Perhaps that had even been necessary in order for him to have been the Runner. Mysteries and mysticism and espionage, esoteric codes and rituals and undeciphered identities, unsuspected rites — weren't such things always likely to travel together in the mythical caravans of these ancient lands? He thought of Bell and his long-ago Monastery in Egypt, where Bell had been the enigmatic grand master of the secretive Monks and Tajar had been one of the novitiates. I see your role in Damascus as that of a working mystic, Tajar had once said to the Runner.

He thought of Ziad's wistful smile and his sad dreams of a longed for, an eternal over there. . . . If it works it can go on forever, Tajar had said to the Runner in another lifetime, when he was young, and certainly it had looked like forever then.

Night fell. Darkness graced the ravine, the hillside, the mountains of Moab. Night was a welcome friend come to hide the expanse of barren desert stretching between him and the distant lights of tiny Jericho, that beautiful dream in the moonless deep of the immense chasm at his feet. It was time now and he left his perch, his lookout, to make his way down to the valley floor. He went with great care. There was an exact route to follow and he had to move swiftly without delay, without a wrong turn. He reached the dry cracked plains and hurried on.

Once he thought he heard a muffled beat whispering to him in the dark stillness. Could it be the famous drum of Moses the Ethiopian thumping in the night, carried on some errant breeze from Jericho? But no, that was impossible. Jericho still lay miles away and Moses's little chapel was in the very heart of the oasis. Even if Moses were beating his drum in Jericho the dense fruit trees would absorb its rhythms. It was his own heart he heard as he trotted over the wastes.

The low line of foliage, with the stream and the border, lay ahead. He had but to cross it and make his way a few hundred yards upstream to reach the spot where the small huts stood, the place where Yousef had been brought for picnics as a child. He admired and pitied Yousef and had much to thank him for. His own son was whole because of Yousef, who had lived with a purity he himself had only pretended to. But of course accomplishing things was partly pretense, and purity was also a kind of madness. What he wanted tonight was to bind his existence to Yousef and unite their secret purposes. That this had to happen in death would be their own private breach of time, not suicide but a final and necessary transverse of identity. That he was making the decision for both of them was as it must be. He couldn't avoid it. So here was the last border, the final crossing, and it wasn't for innocents. It seemed unlikely they would have more than a minute or two together, if they were able to meet at all. But if he actually did reach that poor confused soul he would take his hand and tell him that his own real name was also Yosef, which was only the beginning of an astonishing secret history they shared, a tumultuous tale if they but had time to recount it. . . .

He waded into the water, walked the few yards across, climbed up the other bank.

The Jordan. He had crossed the river and here was the promised land. On these same desolate plains of Jericho, long ago, the prophet Elijah had left behind the secret despair of his fate and risen to eternity in a chariot of fire, a whirlwind into heaven.

He hadn't gone very far upstream when he heard the engine of a desert vehicle. It didn't sound far away but perhaps he had heard it before and willed himself to ignore it. At that moment a searchlight must have been switched on as the vehicle churned forward, the beam pointed down to sweep the gullies and reflecting off the sand, for all at once an eerie glow leapt up over the landscape in front of him. The glow was diffuse and illusionary, not penetrating the darkness overhead but clinging close to the earth as if the desert were surrendering a host of pale memories to the night, a last remnant of sun-wracked noons. He even stopped moving for an instant, so hypnotizing was this haunting illumination with its looming shapes and dancing shadows. But now the dance suddenly quickened as the eerie glow gathered strength, and he began to run and run harder and harder, flying over the earth.

There were shouts off to his left and he saw the first of the little huts which stood by the shore upstream. A figure, an unworldly ghostlike figure, emerged in the uncanny glow beside the hut. It was Yousef, that strange apparition from the Judean wilderness, and he was looking around the clearing with a childlike curiosity, bewildered and frightened, not knowing what to do. The warning shouts were closer and louder, the glow to the land swelled brighter. There were also sharp thuds off in the darkness, what might have been warning shots at the stars. As he ran he smiled and waved at the ghostly figure and Yousef must have understood something, for he too seemed to smile as he came around in front of the hut. Yossi ran even harder and called out the single word of recognition, his final cry — their name, the man they both were — here at the end of time on the edge of the promised land, waved and smiled and raced on, but he was still only running toward the hut when the first burst of bullets chattered out of the night.

He stumbled, saw Yousef smile, then nothing. Yousef, confused, a ghost with welcoming arms stretched wide in the pale night light, almost reached him. But then another burst of small flames chattered from the darkness and the ghost shuddered, knelt, settled lightly in a fluttering of rags a few yards away as a last bullet ticked at the dust between the two crumpled bodies, beside the little stream trickling down to the Dead Sea.

***

One evening at the beginning of June Tajar was visiting Bell when a jeep drew up outside Bell's gate. It was a moonless night and they had just finished another of Bell's superb curry dinners. The two of them were still sitting at the table, facing each other in the candlelight. Bell was talking about India. He knew Tajar's gloomy mood those days and suspected it had something to do with Lebanon, so as best he could he distracted his friend. The arrival of a jeep at the gate didn't surprise Bell, although it had never happened before. Bell had no telephone and obviously Tajar would have to leave his whereabouts known to someone.

The gate clanged and they heard a man advancing through the orange grove. Tajar only had time to reach for his crutches, not to rise, before there were steps on the porch and the man appeared in the doorway. He was a young army captain in fatigues, armed. He glanced at Bell and addressed Tajar.

A call from one of your men, sir. The green man has been killed near here at the border. Near the river, by one of our patrols.

What? Trying to cross over to Jordan?

It seems not but there was a mix-up. Another man was killed with him and that one had come across — from Jordan — which is what caused the mix-up. A Syrian, apparently.

Bell saw his friend's eyes open in horror.

A Syrian? How do they know?

He was carrying papers, replied the young officer. I can —

Tajar was heaving himself up on his crutches. His bench went over with a crash and he was hobbling toward the door. The officer disappeared ahead of him and Bell heard the gate clang, the jeep drive away. It had all happened in a minute or two.

Bell sat for a time and then began clearing away the dishes. He washed them and cleaned up in the kitchen, put the food away, started to boil coffee and then thought better of it. Usually he went to his grape arbor after dinner but tonight he returned to the front porch and sat in his chair with a glass of arak, the decanter on the table beside him. Not that he expected to see Tajar again that night but he felt his place was here, facing the orange grove and the front gate and the road. It was a silent night of stars and the gentlest of summer breezes.

The green man . . . Elijah?

That had to be Tajar's code name for Yousef, of course. The ghost of Yousef gone at last, released from his suffering in the wilderness by a mix-up near the border, near the river, shot by an Israeli army patrol. That was why Yousef had asked Bell questions about the land near the river and border patrols, because he had intended to go there.

And a Syrian killed with him by the river?

For some reason Bell was sure that could only be Halim, the man Yousef had always hoped to meet someday, the mysterious adventurer from Damascus who had once spent long twilights with Bell beside the beautiful mosaic in the ruins of the winter palace of the Omayyad caliphs.

The look of horror in Tajar's eyes?

Yes, there was no doubt in Bell's mind that Halim had secretly been Tajar's man. And chance and fate and desire — who knew in what combination? — had brought Halim across the river to meet Yousef on the plains of Jericho, where they had both been killed.

Bell raised his glass and gazed through the clear liquid at his orange grove. And to think he had once linked these three men in an illusionary chain of being . . . poor Yousef, poor Halim, poor Tajar.

Gazing through his arak, Bell thought of the ancient Egyptian belief that to repeat the name of one who is dead is to cause him to live again.

FOURTEEN

Nearly three decades had passed since Tajar had conceived the beginnings of his audacious master plan for the Runner operation and taken the first quiet steps to set it on its course. Years had gone by before the vast scope of the plan had become apparent and even then only four men, the directors of the Mossad past and present, had shared the intricacies of the operation with Tajar: Little Aharon, Tajar's competitor in the Mossad at the beginning, Generals Dror and Ben-Zvi, and now General Reuvah. The Runner operation had been the most ambitious penetration in the history of Israeli intelligence. For nearly twenty-five years the Runner had been an influential citizen of Damascus, respected as a Syrian patriot, admired as an Arab visionary. The operation was also the most closely guarded secret in the history of Israeli espionage. Only the four directors of the Mossad had ever known, with Tajar, the true identity of the Runner — that he was an Israeli, an immigrant from Iraq who had learned to pass as an Arab, a soldier who had distinguished himself in the 1948

war when the state was founded.

Tajar had spent the days after the Runner's death gathering facts from the Shin Bet, the border police, the soldiers involved in the shooting. Still shaken and somber, still crushed by the enormity of his loss, he sat in the office of the director of the Mossad one night, alone with the director.

General Reuvah was a blunt squat man of great tenacity, a former paratrooper and hero from the Yom Kippur War, when he had fought on the Golan Heights against the Syrians. Like Colonel Jundi, he had distinguished himself as a tank commander in that war. Tajar had never worked out a common ground for friendship with General Reuvah, perhaps because they differed too widely in their views, perhaps simply because Tajar was beginning to find unbridgeable the gap between himself and these younger and younger generals.

General Reuvah had never disguised his lack of sympathy for Tajar's ways, nor Tajar his disagreements with the general. But the general did understand death all too well, particularly the deaths of comrades who were also friends. And the Runner had been the Runner, Tajar's magnificent and unique creation from long ago, so there was much to unite them that evening. Indeed, all at once they both felt extremely close to each other —

and lonely. They also knew that as unlike as they were, a powerful bond would always exist between them.

Of the facts, there was little to say. Certainly there had been a mix-up and it was always better to sit down and ask questions, if that could be done. But a border at night? The sensors picking up a figure moving through the Israeli no-man's-land toward the river? Another figure moving through no-man's-land on the other side of the river and then crossing the Jordan into Israel? A patrol dispatched and warning shouts in the darkness, warning shots in the darkness, men running in the darkness? . . . No, there was nothing to say about that other than to ask one simple question: what was the Runner doing on the plains of Jericho? So they put aside the facts from that fatal night and instead talked about the Runner, or rather the general quietly asked questions and Tajar talked about the Runner.

And when you saw him in Lebanon the last time? . . .

Yes, it's easy enough now to imagine I saw things and ignored them because I preferred to, for both our sakes. The signs were there — aren't they always in retrospect? Of course we had talked about him leaving Damascus someday and where he might go and what he might do. It's true he never thought of coming back to Israel to live. He thought in terms of a visit perhaps, then going on somewhere else to live, somewhere so far away and foreign to him that he could always be a stranger and never have to fit in. As for t he green man, Yousef, the Runner had known about him for years, ever since Yousef and his son became friends after the Six-Day War. Yousef had always wanted to meet him. It was Yousef's great dream and there's no question he would have tried to cross the river to fulfill it, if he had been asked to.

But instead? . . .

Yes, instead the Runner came over to our side. The meeting was obviously going to be in that little abandoned monastery, or hermitage, beside the river. Just a few huts, really. The property still belongs to the Ethiopian church. An ancient anchorite lived there for decades. Do you know the story?

No.

The anchorite was an Ethiopian monk who had lived beside the river since Turkish times, said Tajar. After the Six-Day War the army moved him out. Abba Avraham was the anchorite's name, mostly deaf and so shrunken with age he was little bigger than a child. Close to a hundred, by all accounts. He chanted prayers through all his waking hours, rather loudly because he was deaf. I'm told you always knew when he was nearby because he sounded like a gently buzzing bee. The army took him to the Ethiopian monastery in Jericho where a couple of monks were living, but the next day he was gone. During the night he had walked back to his hut beside the river. An officer tried to explain to him that the river was now a border, a military area and out-of-bounds, but ancient Abba Avraham wasn't having any of it. All he knew was that his tiny hut beside the river was his place in the world. John had baptized Jesus there and that was where he belonged.

The Ethiopian monk in charge in Jericho, a giant old eunuch called Moses, pleaded with the anchorite and all went well for a time. It seemed ancient Abba Avraham would stay in Jericho. But then one morning he turned up missing again and sure enough a patrol found him collapsed out in the desert, buzzing very weakly, half-dead from exhaustion, on his way back to the river. Moses was in tears. I can't lock him up, he said, and if I don't he'll just keep trying to go back until it kills him. Well as it happened ancient Abba Avraham didn't recover from that last trek. He was mostly unconscious when they brought him back to Jericho and a few days later he died . . . trailing his hand in a pan of water which Moses had placed beside his cot. In his mind anyway, Abba Avraham's mind, he had gone to heaven straight from the banks of his holy river. With Moses's help, of course.

It sounds like a tale from some other age, said General Reuvah.

Yes it does, replied Tajar. And so the Runner decided to come over to our side for his meeting with Yousef, a matter of only a few yards, after all. The river isn't much of anything at that point. In fact I've never known anyone who wasn't astonished at seeing the Jordan for the first time. To be so small, just a quiet little stream a few yards across and shallow and warm, and yet to be so famous. It's always imagined quite differently, as a great river, and the crossing of it surely a momentous event. Chills the body but not the soul, hallelujah —

as the American song says, getting it exactly backward. And so the Runner wanted to cross it and he did, and he even carried papers with him to show he was a Syrian . . . if anything happened.

If anything happened. Tajar had added those words in a whisper. Now he bent his head, looking down at his hands. The general waited a moment before speaking, and when he did it was as if he were speaking to himself.

I assume he knew about our sensors, said the general. He would have to have known about borders.

Tajar still gazed at his own hands. Of course the Runner had known about borders. That was his profession.

And he had known sensors sounded alarms that brought soldiers. He had also known Jericho was only fifteen miles from Jerusalem and that the border near Jericho was therefore very tightly guarded. . . . And at night?

With troops dispatched immediately? It could only mean sure bursts from automatic weapons if an infiltrator didn't stop at once, as ordered. No one could expect to cross the river there by chance, to trespass without the full, expected response.

Oh yes he knew about borders, replied Tajar. And he knew about that one.

Again the general paused before speaking.

Perhaps what we call in the army the silently wounded, he said. I've seen good men go on for years and then suddenly for no reason, what appears to be no reason. . . . But it's foolish for me to speculate about the Runner. I never even met the man and you knew him . . . well, forever. No one else ever really knew him at all.

Not for thirty years anyway.

Tajar nodded. He gripped his hands together and gathered his strength, pushing on. He mentioned Anna and Assaf and talked for a while about both of them.

It's up to you, said General Reuvah. If you want to talk to them you can, but of course they can never share the secret with anyone. Do what you think is best, just let me know what you decide. No one else is going to know and nothing will ever be said from here about the existence of the Runner, or the fact that there ever was a Runner operation. Officially and unofficially: nothing. There'll be some talk within the agency about a mysterious operation having ended, and a few of our most knowledgeable people may discreetly try to find out which important Arab diplomat has been dismissed lately, or has retired or dropped out for some other reason. But even within our security services no one knows the identity of the Syrian who was killed with the green man, nor will they try to find out, since we took over the case immediately and the green man was no one of importance to them. So on our side, nothing. An end. The security services in Damascus will want to find out what happened to Halim and they will. They'll find out he went to meet Yousef across the river, and they'll see it as another of his quixotic gestures on behalf of the Palestinians. He covered himself in Damascus, dropped hints as we know and said things, particularly about his despair with Lebanon. So now, for them, this will only add to the legend that Halim was the true conscience of the Arab cause. In a way he always prepared them for something like this. His refusal to get involved in factions, staying above that and then deciding all at once to cross the river to meet someone as inconsequential as Yousef — it will all fit for the Syrians, Halim being Halim right to the end. What an extraordinary agent he was, just perfect in his disguise. Even when he decided . . . to do this, he prepared it and covered it and made it seem natural and plausible, inevitable even. Yes, that's what would strike me if I were a Syrian intelligence officer reviewing the life and death of Halim. The inevitability of it.

Tajar looked up from his hands. The general was saying all this because he deeply felt the need to talk about the Runner, to praise and honor and remember him. And since he couldn't speak of Yossi as a man and a friend, he did the next best thing and praised and honored him as a professional. Tajar realized this. To him these thoughts could have sounded crude and belittling, but he recognized General Reuvah's good intentions.

He was also grateful the general had so carefully avoided dwelling on the one simple question concerning the Runner's entry onto the plains of Jericho. For there was no answer to it except that this had been the view given to Moses three millennia ago, his glimpse of the promised land which God had said he could never enter.

They talked for a long time. Eventually Tajar gathered up his crutches and pulled himself to his feet. He would be leaving the Mossad now, his work done. Yossi's grand rabbi of intelligence was retiring. To others in his work Tajar had always appeared to be the fortunate one, the gifted and the blessed. He was a legend without rival, the patriarch of Israeli intelligence, the incomparable survivor whose mysterious trail spanned nearly half a century of success and adventure, stretching all the way back to Baghdad in 1936. There were tears in the general's eyes as he stepped forward to embrace this small crippled figure, so weighed down with grief.

The Runner was the most valuable agent Israel ever had, said the general.

Oh yes, whispered Tajar. . . . He was that too.

***

It was a quiet June evening when Tajar sat down with Anna and Assaf in the spacious high-ceiling room of the old stone house on Ethiopia Street, and there recounted the story of Yossi's secret journey through the years, beginning in Argentina a quarter of a century ago. Tajar spoke by candlelight, slowly and lovingly going into detail as best he could, careful to dwell on small moments which might help them recognize Yossi from their memories, bringing to life in the shadows these echoes of Yossi's dedication and struggle, his lonely triumphs and far more lonely defeats, from the grand successes before the Six-Day War to the growing darkness of the later years, a steady advance in the footprints of time which had finally ended in a fatal crossing of the Jordan to meet Yousef on the plains of Jericho.

Neither Anna nor Assaf interrupted him during all this long tale. When he was finished Anna rose and went to stand in the doorway to the balcony, her back to the room, looking out at the night. Assaf seemed to have a thousand questions at first, but soon he too sought refuge in silence, the enormity of these revelations far beyond the grasp of a moment.

After a time Tajar went off to the kitchen to make coffee. Assaf followed him down the corridor to bring it in.

On the way back from the kitchen, carrying the three little cups on a tray, Assaf stopped in the middle of the great room to stare with a quizzical expression at the candlelit photograph of Yossi on Anna's desk, over by the balcony window, trying to comprehend a small part of what he had heard. Tajar, hobbling along behind him, paused to follow his gaze. It was the photograph of Yossi in his paratrooper uniform at the age of twenty-nine, handsome and smiling somewhere in the desert, taken a month before the 1956 war broke out and Yossi was supposedly killed in the Mitla Pass in the Sinai. At that moment Anna turned in the balcony doorway and smiled at them both, a strangely enigmatic smile in the candlelight. Her hands came up as if to welcome the two men, or to hold them.

Assaf with his offering on a tray and the solemn figure of Tajar leaning on his crutches, Anna smiling and reaching out, the photograph off to the side between them: for a long moment the three of them stood motionless in these attitudes, facing each other and memory, silently fixed for all time in the large airy room they all loved, a grave and ancient tableau as if from some dimly remembered rite.

It was Anna who broke the silence.

You see it doesn't surprise me in a way, she said. Tonight we've heard nothing but fantastical things, a kind of display of magic. And yet in a way none of it surprises me because everyday . . . so seldom do we know the worlds where we walk.

Tajar and Assaf weren't aware of it but these were Yossi's words which Anna was resurrecting, spoken long ago when he and Anna had sat on a little desert hill watching the sunrise in the Negev, sifting through their fingers the riverborne, seaborne, wind-driven sand which had come all the way from the upper Nile to lie at their feet, the two of them rejoicing in that quiet place at the dawn of the world.

FIFTEEN

That summer Israel went to war in Lebanon and Bell died with his eye open, sitting on his front porch gazing at the dust and oranges of his life. Abu Musa found him.

Late one afternoon the old Arab turned up at the regular time, wheezing and sputtering as he gave Bell's gate a kick and sent it clanging open on its hinges — his usual warning to Bell that the drowsy siesta hours were giving way to the demands of serious shesh-besh and society, to inscrutable Ethiopian chants and clouds of hashish smoke and interminable monologues on a princess and God and a holy river, on lust and castles in the sky and all manner of growing things.

Yes, the social hour in Jericho. Scandal and gossip and disreputable intellectual mayhem in the lowest and oldest village on earth. Surely no self-respecting holy man could survive without it?

Cradled in Abu Musa's arm were masses of bright red mangoes, oozing and sticky with juices, fresh from one of his trees. Bell liked to claim that the ambrosia of the ancient Greeks, the food of the gods of Olympus, had in fact been nothing more unworldly than ripe juicy mangoes. Was it true? But if the ancient Greeks had really been so dedicated in their quest for knowledge, thought Abu Musa, why hadn't they settled down right here to eat ambrosia while working out their laws of man and nature, their philosophies and sciences and their epics of tragedy and comedy? If they were so wise, why had they left Jericho and pushed on east dreaming of Persian and Indian and Bactrian empires? Pure folly and so much for the Greeks. Because in matters of knowledge, obviously, a man could go no deeper than the lowest and the oldest, which in fact was right here.

Around his ample stomach, Abu Musa's pale blue galabieh was darkly stained from the juices of the mangoes cradled in his arm. At the end of his arm, in his hand, blossomed an orange-red fistful of fiery flamboyants, also from one of his trees. Abu Musa was never quite sure which one of the three kings of the Orient he was meant to represent in Bell's abstruse scheme of things — who could fathom a holy man's thoughts? But he never doubted he was a king and was always careful to arrive for the social hour bearing gifts for the other two kings, who would be grateful and thank him for them. Then Bell would slice mangoes and Moses would delicately arrange flamboyants behind his ears, framing his huge chocolate face in an orange-red halo, and while they were busy with these matters he himself would be free to launch another fascinating account of his day in Jericho.

Today he was feeling especially fine because he had been visited by a mysterious and complex dream during his siesta, a beautiful dream incorporating large parts of his life and filled with symbols and grand events and sensuous delights, a dream of fruit trees and lions and gazelles and many colors, of vast deserts and a distant oasis and all of it never ending . . . even now it puffed him up to think of it. Abu Musa's heart glowed.

How many refills of his nargileh would it take just to begin such a tale?

Bell's gate clanged open and Abu Musa's eyes narrowed with cunning. Perhaps he should tantalize his two friends? Merely hint at the splendors of his dream and spread the telling of it out over a week? But might not there be other dreams between now and then? Was it wise to wait and fall behind? Or would either of his friends even tolerate delay once he had fired their imaginations? He could see Moses gently nodding on the other side of the shesh-besh board, pretending to chant prayers under his breath while he was secretly gulping down every word. And he could see Bell smiling beside them in his tattered chair, pretending to daydream with a glass of arak while secretly listening for every exciting new turn of events. They would insist, of course. They would demand to hear, immediately, the entire intriguing drama of his dream from beginning to end.

Abu Musa was sweating heavily. Even in the late afternoon the summer heat was ferocious out there in the sun by the gate. Wheezing and plotting and smiling to himself with his armload of mangoes and flamboyants, he wallowed into the hermit's compound and went crashing through the orange grove with his head down, to emerge in the clearing in front of the porch. Here, over the years, he had been known to break into wild dances when his joy and his sorrow were too great for words. How well he knew this clearing.

He raised his head. Bell was looking at him and smiling, lean and austere in white and sitting where he always sat on his porch, the claw of his bad hand gripping a half-empty glass of arak and resting on the table, which was cluttered with the usual bowls of fruit and piles of worn books and the two decanters of what looked like water to prevent dehydration. Abu Musa beamed and was about to shout a greeting when an invisible blow struck him.

Bell's eye. There was no life in Bell's eye.

He tiptoed up to the porch and placed his armload of fruit and flowers on the table. He raised Bell's hand from his lap, his good hand, and held it, feeling for a heartbeat, then gently replaced it. He passed his fingers over Bell's face, closing the single eye. A great sob escaped him. He clutched his chest and staggered back into the clearing in front of the porch, where he fell to his knees. Still Bell sat facing the orange grove, smiling and gripping his glass, his eye now closed. Abu Musa moaned and swayed back and forth on his knees, raising his head and lowering it, his hands groping in the dust and throwing dust over his head, more and more dust to mix in the fading sunlight with his anguish and tears and soft cries.

Before long the gigantic shape of Moses the Ethiopian arrived in bright yellow robes to cast a shadow over the clearing. Moses let out a huge yelp and at once whispered praise to God and thanksgiving to God for the infinite variety of His gifts, His blessings. Then solemnly Moses began to chant the Psalms, repeating David as it was known in his language, and with Moses chanting in the darkness and Abu Musa kneeling and moaning and throwing dust over himself, so it went on and on in the gentle embrace of the summer night.

SIXTEEN

His heart just stopped, Abu Musa said to Assaf. At some moment very soon before I turned up he took a sip from his glass and put it down on the table, thought of something and smiled and . . . went. Moses is inconsolable, sentimental old monk that he is. He insisted there be a service. Is that proper, I said, with the body already gone and buried? But Moses insisted and you know how he is when he decides something —

immovable. He's so big, a fact of nature like a mountain or a desert. He just sits there and refuses to budge.

Most of the time he's content to let his mind drift along with his chants, mulling over his memories of his little princess and his dreams of a holy river nearby, even if it is inaccessible. But this time he wouldn't be deterred and there was no arguing with him. A service for Bell, he said, and on his front porch, and either you beat the drum or I'll hire a pair of ragamuffins off the street to do it. Well what could I say? I knew it was all decided because when Moses gets it into his head to break out his great African drum, we will have drumming.

The drum Abu Musa was referring to — known to everyone in Jericho as Moses's heartbeat — had been brought to the Holy Land from Ethiopia by the tiny Ethiopian princess who had also brought Moses himself to the Holy Land. It was long and thick and handsome with the shape of a hollowed-out tree trunk, from which such drums must once have been made. Stretched hides were lashed over its ends and the smooth wooden sides were intricately decorated with abstract designs painted in red and green and gold, Ethiopia's national colors. A tall man with long arms could just manage to sit with the drum across his lap, one end of the drum resting on the ground, and thump both drumheads with the open palms of his hands — two thumps with the right hand followed by one with the left hand was the usual beat . . . thump-thump boom. The great drum was primitive in appearance and Moses claimed its shape and design hadn't changed in thousands of years.

No question about that, Abu Musa had once whispered to Bell with a wicked gleam in his eye. Of course its shape hasn't changed in thousands of years, but I don't think primitive is the word to describe it. Basic would be more like it. Moses is much too spiritual to know what he has there, but that drum's not fooling me. Nor, I suspect, did his little princess have any doubts about what it represented. That thing gives a shape to little boys' dreams, little girls' too. Call it the staff or rod of life or call it the tree or drum of life, what does it matter?

In any case, call it life. Without that none of us would be here. Long and thick and handsome and booming?

Ah, how well I know it. The thought of it, the fact of it, the meaning and memory of it, plagues my days and haunts my nights. Moses doesn't realize how fortunate he is to be able to devote his energies to higher realms. He chants to it, but the rest of us? But for that thing, I could have been a saint. . . .

The great drum was used only on the most sacred Ethiopian Christian feast days, and even then few people ever saw it except for Moses and his two or three elderly fellow monks, only heard its dull throb swelling out into the night from the Ethiopian chapel next door to Bell's house. On those special nights all of Jericho would quietly pulsate in the darkness for hours, from sundown until first light, and everyone would sleep especially well because the primeval rhythms of the drum were exactly what sleep required. Clever rogues, these Ethiopians, Abu Musa used to say. Their muffled thump-thump booms in the night take us all back to better times, reminding us of the blissful eternity we once spent dozing away in our mothers' wombs, before all our troubles began.

So Moses's service for Bell was planned and announced and the day came, and a small crowd of Bell's friends and neighbors from Jericho gathered in his orange grove, where they sat scattered around under the trees in the shade. Assaf and Tajar were there, and even Abigail and Anna. Bell's front porch looked the same as it had when Bell was alive. The doors and windows of the little bungalow were all open and deep shadows stirred inside the rooms. Bell's old straw hat lay in his tattered chair on the porch, and it was in front of this chair that Moses had positioned himself in the clearing. There he stood in his bright yellow robes with his congregation spread out behind him, leaning on a tall staff with a mass of flamboyants tucked behind his ears, monotonously chanting above the beat of the drum.

Moses was chanting in Ge'ez, the ancient language of his church's liturgy, and naturally no one could understand him. Before the service Abu Musa had suggested that perhaps, just this once, Moses might chant in Arabic. Otherwise no one will have any idea what you're up to, Abu Musa had said, and Bell didn't know Ge'ez, so wouldn't Arabic make more sense? But Moses, always self-assured in matters of prayer, had replied with a broad smile and a quotation: Religions in general tend to be in foreign and archaic tongues —

who said that? Bell said it, Abu Musa reluctantly had to admit, thereby resigning himself to hours of incomprehensible Ge'ez, which was surely as foreign and archaic a language as anyone in the orange grove was ever likely to hear.

Abu Musa had started out on the drum, sitting near Moses's feet in the clearing in front of the porch, but after a while he caught the eye of a tall young man from the village who came over to relieve him. Beating the drum was hypnotic work, Abu Musa had found. Moses might be used to it, but Moses was a monk and this sort of thing was his business. For Abu Musa the regular beat of the drum was profoundly sleep-inducing. Again and again he had found himself nodding off as he thumped away, slipping back into a dreamy paradise aided by Moses's monotonously soothing chant. Clearly it wouldn't do. No one understood Moses's chants but everyone understood a drum beat. He got the young man to relieve him, lumbered to his feet and staggered back into the shade of the orange grove, sweating heavily. He rested on a tree and wiped his face with the sleeve of his galabieh. Many of the people in the orange grove already seemed fast asleep, lying stretched out facing the porch with their backs propped up against the trees. Did Moses know? wondered Abu Musa.

Would he care? Would Bell?

Next to Abu Musa stood the small man on crutches who had become so friendly with Bell during the last years. Assaf had introduced them that morning but they hadn't yet really had a chance to talk. The small man was about half Abu Musa's size. Now he gestured toward the people asleep under the orange trees and whispered up at Abu Musa.

It seems thoughtful prayer and sleep have much in common, he said.

It's true, Abu Musa whispered back. Bell used to say the same thing. Serenity, prayer, peace of mind, sleep

— they all partake of the same gentle breeze, he used to say. But I hope you don't find this scandalous. Are you Christian?

No, whispered Tajar.

Good. I mean I can't imagine what a Christian would make of this service Moses is putting on. Facing the porch like this as if it were an altar, and specifically facing Bell's old straw hat in that shabby chair as if it were a chalice. Surely it must be sacrilegious. I don't know what's gotten into Moses. Do you think any of this is allowed? Mightn't a flight of Christian saints swoop down and whisk us off to Purgatory? Mightn't the Pope? Oh dear.

It may be an Ethiopian variation, whispered Tajar. A vestige from the African past. Old beliefs live on, don't they? Even in distant lands?

I hope you're right, whispered Abu Musa. I wouldn't like to think that Moses, at his age, could be getting himself into trouble with his superiors. He's too old to be going off on his own and founding a new religion.

Once upon a time, perhaps, when he first put on his racing goggles and got behind the wheel of that enormous touring car with the Lion of Judah on its prow. If he had decided then to set out on his own across the desert, who can say? But that was centuries ago when his little princess was still alive and he was young with his life ahead of him. It's best to be young, I always say, when founding a new religion.

He's the biggest man I've ever seen, whispered Tajar.

Also the most determined, replied Abu Musa. It's very dangerous to play shesh-besh with him. Eunuchs have extraordinary powers of concentration which become dispersed in the rest of us through sexual innuendo.

I see. And what will become of your shesh-besh games now?

We intend to go on playing, whispered Abu Musa. Moses is adamant about it. Every afternoon we'll turn up here at the regular time and sit on Bell's front porch and play. Of course our conversations won't be the same because Moses always believes anything I tell him and I always believe anything he tells me. It was Bell who asked questions and straightened us out.

Abu Musa wiped his face with his sleeve. The sweat was still pouring off him.

It must be hot work beating a drum in Jericho today, whispered Tajar.

Today or any day, agreed Abu Musa. But when you live in the lowest and oldest village on earth, you have to expect some heat. You don't look so young yourself. Do you understand dreams?

A bit. What kind are we referring to?

The ones that come during sleep, whispered Abu Musa, bending down more to get his mouth closer to the ear of the little man on crutches. Once more Abu Musa mopped his face.

This heat, whispered Tajar. But dreams, you say?

Yes. You see I had one the day Bell died.

Ah.

During my siesta that afternoon. I was on my way here, hurrying over to tell Bell and Moses about the dream, when I found him. He was sitting right where you now see his hat, sitting and smiling with a glass of arak in his hand and gazing out at the orange grove, at just about the spot where we're standing now. It was uncanny. He looked exactly the way he always looked.

Ah.

A thin man, Bell, and he always sat very erect. I could never understand why he was so thin when he ate so much. Those immense curry dinners, for example. You know about them. He served them to you, he served them to me and Moses, he served them to Assaf and to others in the past.

Others?

There was his Syrian friend some years back, the man from Damascus. Bell also made curry dinners for him.

And after that, almost every week it seemed, there was the Indian trader passing through. Before you turned up in Bell's life, of course, and took the trader's place.

He once told me about an Indian trader, whispered Tajar, but I thought the trader was imaginary. I also thought he was speaking about something that might have happened two thousand years ago. Was there really an Indian trader?

Abu Musa nodded thoughtfully and wiped his face with his sleeve, still bending down to keep his head close to Tajar, who craned upward. The buzz of their whispering voices was easily hidden by the incessant beat of the drum and Moses's powerful chant, by the hum of insects in the orange grove and the gentle snores rising from the spectators asleep under the trees.

Assuredly the Indian trader did exist, whispered Abu Musa. Not for us to see him but in Bell's mind. Once a week Bell would announce that the Indian trader was due that night and excuse himself early from the social hour, to go into his kitchen to make preparations.

Ah, I see.

Thump-thump boom.

To make curries, in other words, which he would then eat alone, in the company of the Indian trader who existed in his mind. And you know how he ate when one of his curry dinners was in front of him: like a camel that had been lost in the wilderness for forty years. So I always asked myself, why did he remain thin?

And the answer?

A mystery to the end, whispered Abu Musa. One of God's mysterious gifts to a holy man. And there were other mysteries. My dream the day he died, for example. The very afternoon he died. It might even have been no more than a few moments before he died. There is a rumor that we sometimes have a vision before we die and in this vision our entire life passes before us in an instant, which is perhaps the instant it took us to live it. For one moment, in other words, we are given to see everything, all we are and were and have done and have been. Are you familiar with this rumor?

Yes.

Well that's what happened to me, whispered Abu Musa. I had that kind of utterly comprehensive dream and hurried over to tell Bell and Moses about it, to enlist their help in explaining it to me — not realizing at the time that it was a dream to sum up a life — and what did I find? I found Bell smiling as if a pleasant thought had just come to him . . . smiling and dead, so I closed his eye. Only later, after reconsidering it, did I realize the dream was his, not mine. It was his life I had seen in its entirety, not my own, which was why so much of the dream had seemed mysterious to me and slightly askew. So that's a more important mystery. Death came to him but the dream came to me. Nor is that all. The day after Bell's death I told Moses about my curious dream, and it turned out that exactly the same thing had happened to him.

Thump-thump boom.

What? You mean Moses also dreamed Bell's life? whispered Tajar.

Abu Musa smiled and mopped his face. So Moses claims, he whispered, but he might just be following my lead. In spiritual matters our monkish Moses has always been notoriously susceptible to suggestion, including his own. Just look at this service he's putting on for Bell. Wouldn't any serious Christian be scandalized by it?

I'm not so sure anyone would find it amiss, whispered Tajar. And in any case I like it. I like the drum and Moses's chants, and I like the people dozing under the trees. Everyone seems to be enjoying himself and that's a fine tribute to Bell. In fact, I feel nothing but elation.

Abu Musa's eyes flashed. An immense warm smile burst over his dripping, sweaty face.

But that's wonderful, he whispered. I like it too and elation is just the right word. And we feel this way, you and I, because we have both had the vast good fortune to have known this compassionate, genuine, hard-drinking holy man whom we are here to honor. Surely God has never fashioned finer handiwork, don't you agree? But come now, at once.

Where?

Abu Musa had seized Tajar by the shoulder and was propelling him out of the shade and into the clearing.

The dazed youth on the drum had been relieved by another dazed youth who thumped on. Moses also droned on and most of the friends and neighbors in the orange grove were now definitely asleep. Tajar looked over his shoulder and saw Anna sitting with Abigail and Assaf under a tree near the gate, watching him with startled eyes. Abu Musa dragged him right up beside Moses.

Welcome him, he's one of us, whispered Abu Musa, tugging Moses's robes.

Moses broke off his chant and turned and smiled. He reached down and put his hands under Tajar's arms and lifted him up off the ground as if he were a child, raising him up in the air to his own eye level. Tajar's crutches dangled at the ends of his arms. Moses pulled Tajar in and hugged him and noisily placed a kiss on each side of his face.

Welcome, said Moses, beaming. Then he lowered Tajar down to the ground and turned back to face the porch and the tattered chair and Bell's old straw hat, resuming his chant. Abu Musa nodded happily and sat down at Moses's feet, once more taking his place at the drum. Tajar hobbled out of the clearing and through the shade of the orange grove toward Anna and Abigail and Assaf, who were all silently clapping. Anna held his hand when he sat down beside her.

Bravo, she whispered. But what did all that mean? It looked like some special little ceremony. Have you joined something?

Tajar nodded, smiling.

It seems I've become the third partner of a shesh-besh game, he said. I watch and they play. I also comment on what they say. Now and then I turn up here and sit on the porch with them.

Is that all?

All? But the game has no end, Anna. Don't you see? I've been invited to become part of Jericho time.

***

Later Abu Musa came to join them where they sat under the trees near the gate. He was happy they were all there and especially thankful that Anna had come. After chatting for a while he gestured toward the clearing and the front porch.

Look here, he said, you might as well just drift away whenever the spirit moves you. There's no logical time to leave a ceremony like this. Tales may have a beginning and a middle and an end but life in Jericho doesn't, and especially a celebration staged by Moses. When Moses casts a spell over Jericho his chanting has a way of going on and on like his favorite holy river. No doubt there'll be a subtle transformation from one thing to another at some obscure hour today or tomorrow or the day after that — but who can say when it will come? I'm sure Moses himself doesn't know. I'll be sitting at the drum thumping away when I begin to sense that something has changed, that the world is not quite the same as it used to be. And then I'll notice, say, that the insects seem to be humming more loudly in the orange grove than they were. Has my hearing suddenly improved because I'm young again? Am I less dazed than before? But no. I'll look up and notice that Moses's lips are no longer moving, that instead he's just standing there leaning on his staff, pondering the old straw hat in Bell's chair. By God, I'll think, that's why the humming seems louder, because Moses is no longer chanting. So I'll know it's time to give the drum a particularly forceful whack and that will be the end of it, the final end of the whole affair. Like Moses, I'll be left limp and tired and elated and satisfied, gazing at the old straw hat in Bell's chair, and so it goes. Life, Bell, a day in Jericho . . . ah yes, and so it goes. Our great friend will have been given a send-off fit for a holy man, Jericho style, and Moses and I will both feel good about it because we dearly loved him. . . . And our friends and neighbors here? These people who are happily asleep under Bell's orange trees? Well in due time they'll rouse themselves as if from a dream, today or tomorrow or the day after that, and stretch their arms and legs and wander home and eat a meal as the sun is setting, and water their fruit trees and stroke the heads of their children or their children's children and say good night and go to bed, where some of them will conceive new life while others give birth and still others breathe a final sigh, and all the while I'll be beating the drum and Moses will be chanting in his incomprehensible Ge'ez and everyone in Jericho will be feeling especially good about everything. But fear not.

I'm clever and I've bribed some of the local youths to stay on and share the vigil on the drum with me, so all's well. I'll be able to nap a bit and still do my share of the thumping and our holy man will be properly honored in Jericho. . . .

Abu Musa laughed at the end of his softly spoken speech. But before you leave, he added to Assaf, do take your family for a turn around the village. Surely that's the right way to remember Bell.

Joyously smiling and waving and scratching himself and wiping his face with his sleeve — all of these things at once — Abu Musa said good-bye to them at the gate. Abigail knew Jericho from her visits with Assaf but it was all new to Anna, who had always avoided it when Bell was alive. So Assaf, who was driving, decided to follow Abu Musa's advice and take them on a tour. Just up the road from Bell's house they passed the tel where archaeologists had excavated Jericho's huge round stone watchtower, ten thousand years old and the most impressive ancient structure in the world, standing now in a deep pit far below the earth's surface, witness to time's accumulations and the drifting sands of millennia. Across from the tel bubbled Elisha's spring, the source of Jericho's water and the cause of its orchards and flowers. On the outskirts of the village they stopped at the famous ruins of the Omayyad winter palace so Anna could see its exquisite mosaic with the pomegranate tree and the three gazelles and the lion, the ferocious and gentle image of life that had always haunted Yossi. Then Assaf drove slowly through the back roads of the village, down dusty lanes beneath thick greenery, between tumble-down houses half-hidden by fruit trees and banks of flowers and crumbling walls and gates. Tajar smiled and smiled, holding Anna's hand in the back seat.

What a strange and beautiful little place it is, said Anna. So lush and effortless in its splendor but only as far as the water reaches, and then nothing. Nothing but empty desert, a different beauty, stark and pure. You can't escape the contrasts of life here, not for a moment. Seeing Jericho like this, it's not difficult to understand how we have arrived at so many of our dreams.

Assaf nodded and Tajar went on smiling, both of them pleased that she was at last sharing Jericho with them. Abigail was also smiling as she gazed out the window, preoccupied by private thoughts.

Once more they lapsed into silence. The mood deepened as they emerged from the dusty green tunnels and Assaf drove slowly west out of the oasis, climbing above Jericho toward the foothills of the Judean wilderness where the sun was sinking, already casting the first shadows of twilight. Assaf's dirt road gave way to a desert track. He turned off it and they bumped along over hard sand, coming to a stop near the edge of a wadi. The wadi was broad and shallow as it entered the desert plains, but above them it deepened into a steep ravine where it cut upward into the rising wastelands to the west. Jericho lay below them now.

Scattered ruins lined the earth near the wadi, the stones worn and bleached white by the sun, what had once been Herod's winter palace. Here great ornamental pools had shimmered in the sun two thousand years ago, when the palace had straddled the wadi and the runoff of the winter rains from the mountains had fed magnificent fountains.

They were above the plains with a view not only of Jericho but of the whole Jordan Valley. To the south in the distance the Dead Sea glistened blue and empty, and to the east across the valley the long ridge of the hills of Moab reared pink and purple and mysterious in the late afternoon sun. The silence was complete as they got out of the car to enjoy the view. Anna roamed by herself over to the edge of the wadi. Down below was a bedouin tent with its sides opened to the breezes, little children playing and dogs and chickens poking around, the few camels of the family grazing nearby on the parched land. Across the wadi a small mosque stood amidst a cluster of mud-brick houses, its thin brown minaret rising straight and true against the awesome blue sweep of the sky. Banana trees grew along the far side of the wadi. Farther up in the sandy hills a string of tiny black dots stretched over the wastes — the family's herd of black goats being led down the mountain by one of the older children.

Surely much of this scene hasn't changed in thousands and thousands of years, thought Anna. It was here long before the palace was built and it's still here, long after the ruins have returned to the desert.

She walked along the edge of the wadi, entranced by the grandeur of the view and the placid routine of the bedouin family down below. They didn't have a view down there, but the wadi provided some meager vegetation for the camels. The family was preparing for night and they would all be asleep soon after darkness came, guarded by their watchful dogs. The camels were already seeking out a place to kneel not far from the tent, their spindly front legs collapsing first and then their hind legs as they awkwardly lowered themselves onto their bellies for the night, the young one close to the mother, the male a little to the rear protecting the calf from the other side. They had arranged themselves so that they faced exactly east, awaiting tomorrow's light. Did they always sleep that way? she wondered. They were unfettered and untied because they wouldn't wander in the darkness and no man would steal a camel. From high up the mountain the string of tiny black dots wound nearer. Now she could make out the small figure of a child running along with the goats, leaping down the hillside after a long summer day in the wilderness. How welcome the open tent must look from up there. How good to be coming home at last. And dogs and chickens and camels and a whole family moving around near the tent . . . surely a joyous moment for the child running down the mountain in the shadows.

Anna too felt great joy then. She was happy with her family and happy with all of it, at peace with herself. She hadn't seen Assaf so lighthearted in years, and Abigail simply glowed in the rich afternoon sun. And Tajar was so proud to be invited to visit the shesh-besh games on Bell's front porch. . . . Yes, there were wonderful times in life, moments of breathtaking beauty.

Assaf was calling to her. She walked back to the blanket where Abigail had laid out their late picnic of olives and tomatoes and cheeses and bread, grapes and peaches and figs. They feasted looking out over the valley, over the intensely green oasis of Jericho and the desolate plains surrounding it, facing east like the camels with the Moabite hills across the way and the Dead Sea off to the south, watching the colors of the world change as the sun sank behind them and offered these final glimpses of a glorious summer twilight over the desert.

As the feast ended Abigail made her announcement. She was going to have Assaf's child. Anna tried to hold back her tears but the tears came anyway. Certainly it was joy she felt, but there was also sadness in her heart. Assaf put his arm around her to comfort her. Tajar made a gesture and Abigail and Assaf left them for a few minutes to wander over near the wadi. Tajar took Anna's hand.

I didn't want to say it in front of them, whispered Anna, but I couldn't help thinking of all the things this unborn child will have to go through someday. It just seemed to overwhelm me for a moment. The things we come to know in time . . . the endless farewells of life. You understand, don't you?

Tajar squeezed her hand. Oh yes, he said. Memory we call it, you and I . . . and yes, dear Anna, I do understand.

The hills across the valley dimmed with the last of the day's light. Anna wiped her eyes and looked up. She was smiling now and Tajar smiled with her. He waved for Abigail and Assaf to come back.

And now, dearest Anna, he said, isn't it time for us to make our way up the mountain to our mythical city . . .

our beautiful and imaginary and oh-so-real Jerusalem?