Jericho Mosaic

Part 1

ONE

Jerusalem in the early twentieth century was a vibrant little city only newly awakened from medieval obscurity by the coming of the British at the end of the First World War — a dream from antiquity suddenly stirring to life after four hundred years of slumber under the stupefying decadence of the Ottoman Empire. With their penchant for order and proper hygiene, the British briskly built hydraulic works and piped fresh water up to Jerusalem, but many people in the walled Old City still drank from the cisterns of the past, those underground reservoirs from other ages which never saw the light of day. For Jerusalem was a place where many eras still crowded together, and where no event from history was too remote for a morning's gossip, since the very ruins of that event might well be providing shade for the day's transactions of commerce and hope.

Stately Nubian doormen reigned in splendid solemnity at the entrances of hotels. Wily merchants hovered in dim shops fingering the purses on their sleek bellies, waiting with patience for fate and guides to bring them their quota of fools who would be as deaf as they were to the cries of beggars and holy men.

Preceded by a shabbily uniformed kavass clearing a way with his thumping staff, Turkish grandees in red tarbooshes swayed by to assignations in flowering courtyards, already glassy-eyed from a nargileh or two of hashish at breakfast. Fierce bedouin and European travelers haggled side by side over bunches of garlic and sacks of dates, and over ancient coins bearing pale green profiles of Alexander the Great or some heavy-nosed emperor of Rome or Byzantium.

Black-robed monks of a dozen nationalities swirled down alleys in peaked headdresses and round and flat hats, disappearing along arcane routes devised in the Middle Ages, the Red and White monks of the Russian church looking particularly frenzied as they delved ever deeper into the plots and counterplots of their twentieth-century revolution at home.

The poor and the blind wandered among delirious lost pilgrims seeking the sites of old. Cripples in carts peered up from the cobblestones as men chanted allegiance to obscure causes or dropped to their knees in an ecstasy of prayer, or shouted out the virtues of the pots and beads and rags they had for sale.

In the Muristan where the Crusader Knights of St. John had been quartered and where the Roman Forum had once stood, stringed orchestras played in front of shops to attract customers. And everywhere in the dark recesses of the bazaars there were reaching and gesturing hands and wild rumors of forgotten magnificence being whispered into eager ears, as Jerusalem seethed again with merchandise and fervor after a drowsy sleep of centuries.

For Tajar as a boy it was a time to run through alleys and over rooftops, to hide in corners and listen to old men recall distant memories and young men dream of new dawns of glory. In the early mornings he wandered down the narrow street called el Wad near the Temple Mount, once a Jebusite donkey path and the oldest road in the Old City. And in the cool of the evenings he tarried beside the Gihon spring, beyond the walls of the city since King David's time but the original source of Jerusalem whose perennial waters first caused a town to take root on the spot, the area around the spring later to become renowned as King Solomon's rose gardens, the sacred place where perfume and incense plants were grown for the king's grand new Temple on the hill above, from seeds first brought to the king and the land by the dusky Queen of Sheba.

And so Tajar wandered back and forth through history. Being holy, Jerusalem was an endless source of myth. There were legends of intriguing mystery, such as the tale that described the original Bible having been miraculously discovered in the nineteenth century buried in a monastery deep in the Sinai, only to be secretly reburied later in Jerusalem out of fear and piety in the cause of faith, because this original Bible had turned out to be a stunningly dangerous document which denied every religious truth ever held by anyone.

And there were stories of fabulous adventure, such as the shadowy accounts of a long-term poker game which had begun in Jerusalem after the First World War and was still in progress in the back room of an antiquities dealer's shop somewhere in the Old City, a game destined to run a dozen years, it was said, its three permanent members a Moslem and a Christian and a Jew, the secret stakes of the game nothing less than control of Jerusalem itself.

Arabs and Jews and Greeks and Armenians and Europeans — Tajar learned all their languages and glimpsed all their visions of the Holy City where the patriarch-shepherd Abraham had come four millennia ago to seek the blessing of Melchizedek, mythical priest-king of the ancient Jebusite city of Jerusalem.

Tajar spied out the hidden byways of the bazaars and the dazzling silences of the great sun-washed courtyards with their towers and domes and minarets, endlessly exploring the multitude of worlds around every corner and the multiplicity of ways and tongues and costumes which were the very heart of his ancient walled city. Above all he loved being different people at different moments, imagining secret lives for himself, imagining himself to be all the men whose paths he crossed.

He had a game which he called listening to the stones of Jerusalem. He would stop somewhere and turn his back on the crowds and close his eyes and rest his hands on a weathered stone, a wall or an abutment or arch, and soon he would find himself slipping back in time to some distant era, feeling its life surge around him and hearing its sounds and tasting its smells, so clearly the stones seemed to be whispering to him through his fingertips.

Anna smiled when he described that childhood game to her years later. She smiled and nodded in recognition at those sensations of his from long ago.

So that's where your sensualism began, she said to him, laughing. And it was true that Tajar always took enormous pleasure in textures and tastes and colors. He loved to touch things with his hands, to feel them with his fingers.

Once when he went to make coffee in Anna's house and she waited and waited and too much time had passed, she found him in the kitchen dreamily dipping his hand in and out of the jar of coffee beans, stroking the beans and letting them run through his fingers, oblivious to where he was and what he was supposed to be doing. So perhaps it was as Anna suspected, and his mystical love as a boy for the stones of Jerusalem gave him a vision that guided his entire life.

In any case, Tajar's sensual pleasure in textures and colors and his love of ideas, his delight in multiple ways and languages and especially his boyhood games of pretending, all were to provide him with a very special role in the building of his homeland. The grand rabbi of espionage, Yossi would one day call him, at a meeting of theirs in Geneva. And although Yossi laughed when he made the remark, it was no less true.

Tajar was the first director of the Mossad, its founder, and in fact his exceptional talent for secret worlds was wholly natural to him, a result of having grown up in Jerusalem at a time when all its races and tongues mingled freely, before the strife of later years caused the various communities to withdraw and isolate themselves one from the other.

Tajar had been born in Jerusalem, the son and grandson of rabbis who had also been born in Jerusalem.

From the beginning ideas filled his days and Tajar could never escape them. A desert windstorm of ideas was forever swirling inside his brain and hurling him this way and that, obscuring the sun and revealing its brilliance and tossing up bits of stinging sand, tearing loose the tents of shelter and carrying off certainty and reshaping the hard wounded lines of the Judean hills from one day to the next, a never-ending struggle in his heart for recognition between man and nature, between man and his own nature, between the world and an immutable divine presence which never stopped changing.

A struggle called history, the human soul, God. A way of wrestling with life, deep in his heart, which was also his own way of rejoicing in the gifts of his fathers, those erudite men who had struggled for air in the real Jerusalem of oppression and squalor under the Turks, while dreaming of a heavenly city.

Not surprisingly, Tajar found his vocation early in life. His first foray into professional secrecy was as a very young man in Baghdad in the 1930s. He went there ostensibly as a teacher and journalist but actually he was working for Shai, the Zionist intelligence network run by the Haganah in Palestine. He traveled widely in Iraq and also crossed over to Iran, picking up more Arab dialects along the way as well as learning Kurdish and Persian. By chance he even visited the dusty little town near Baghdad where Yossi, as a very young bookkeeper, was to add up figures in a ledger after running across the desert every afternoon.

Tajar knew it was a life meant for him. Before the Second World War he served in different roles in Syria and Turkey and Lebanon. When the war came he was in Cairo, working with the British to organize Jewish commando operations in the Balkans and Jewish agents behind German lines in North Africa, but also serving Shai's interests all the while.

It was then that he had been in contact with Anna's brother, although Anna had never been aware of the connection. It was also then that he had come to know the one-eyed British officer with the disfigured face who was so helpful to Anna after her brother was killed. And Tajar had gone on many special operations himself during those years, in Greece and Turkey and as always in Arab countries, carrying out missions for the British while pursuing his own work.

When the Second World War ended Tajar was an important man in Jewish Palestine. No other native of the Middle East had more experience in intelligence than he did. He traveled in America arranging for arms to be smuggled to Palestine, then negotiated secretly in Arab countries during the struggle for independence. But when Israel was founded, Tajar was chief of its intelligence service for only a short time. His preeminence slipped and soon the son of another rabbi, from the Ukraine, became the head of the Mossad.

In a way it was precisely Tajar's brilliance with ideas that caused him to lose out. He was a superb agent but quite hopeless when it came to administering a government agency. His mind ranged in every direction at once and he tended to run his office out of his pocket and memory. Field work and improvising on the spot were what he understood, not budgets and committees and overseeing an arm of the civil service among competing bureaucracies.

There were also some who thought he might have lost the top Mossad position because he was an Oriental.

Those in power in Israel were almost all from Eastern Europe, and perhaps they felt more comfortable with someone of their own background in charge of the country's intelligence service. But Tajar himself, with characteristic generosity, refused to see it that way. The man who replaced him, whom he along with everyone else respected, had worked entirely within the country over the years while Tajar had served mostly abroad. So Tajar felt it was a case of familiarity. Intimacy couldn't help but count within a small leadership. It was only human nature that it should, particularly when it came to the man who controlled the country's secret intelligence service. And of course Tajar knew he had always had a reputation for being out there somewhere, alone, working by himself in the Arab world.

All the same he was deeply disappointed and there was no way he could deny his profound sense of failure, at least to himself. With others he made a great effort not to show his disappointment. Only Yossi would one day know the truth, and that was years later.

Not that Tajar's feeling of failure mattered, as it turned out.

Worry's useless because we always have the wrong thing in mind, he once said to Anna. That day, which was a fine spring day of sunshine, I was worrying about whether we'd get just a little more rain before the summer arrived for good. Because if not, would there be enough water for the tomatoes to grow? Tomatoes were on my mind, you see.

That day was the day a few years after independence when a decrepit vegetable truck wandered into the path of Tajar's oncoming car on a road near Tel Aviv, destroying the car and smashing Tajar below the waist. They had to cut him out of the wreck with an acetylene torch and for a time it was doubtful whether he would live.

Then it was a question of what there would be left of him below the waist. But the doctors worked miracles and salvaged his legs, partially. While recuperating, he pursued a childhood dream by teaching himself ancient Greek in order to hear the words of Homer.

Eventually he was able to go back to work in the Mossad as an operations officer. But he moved with difficulty, a cripple who walked mostly with his arms, bent forward from the waist, supporting himself on aluminum crutches that he held with his hands. Thick braces reached up above the hand grips and encircled his forearms to balance his weight.

Now he trained and directed younger men in the Mossad to do what he had once done. His specialty was penetrating Arab countries and in that kind of operation no one could match his skill. Tajar had been there, after all, and knew exactly what his agents had to face. Without a second thought he could describe the street corners in a Syrian town or the cast of a remote stretch of hills in Iraq at twilight, or the homely manners of a farmer who kept an orchard on the outskirts of a village in Jordan. Because of his great knowledge he bred a special confidence in his men. Their reverence for him as a leader went beyond trust and was more like faith in a religious mystery, which led to exceptional daring on their part. Your mind is your weapon, Tajar told them, and with it you can do anything.

Tajar loved his agents and lived their dangers and fears as his own. His agents were truly extensions of him, part of his heart and part of that wrestling with life which for him was the only way a man could know he existed. And of course it was on the strength of his teaching that his men were able to cross borders and cultures and carry out his daring operations with so much success.

As for Anna, she knew nothing of Tajar's other life in espionage. She knew only that he had some quietly confidential role in the defense ministry which he never talked about, that he worked extremely long hours week after week and year after year, that he seemed conversant with everything under the sun, that he was often impish and playful and given to droll merriment, that he loved to laugh and was easily moved to tears, that he ate huge quantities of raw vegetables and fruit and leban with enormous gusto, that he revered the soups she had learned to make as a girl in Cairo, and that no matter how busy he might be he was always there if she needed him, with encouragement and strength and wisdom, with kind words and thoughtful smiles.

Being with Tajar was being with many men, because he was exuberant and sensitive and lived life to the fullest. Anna found him a rare and immensely lovable friend, simple and complex at the same time, a man who had learned to reach deep into his days and draw great riches from them. Oh yes, truly spectacular riches. The simplest things glittered in Tajar's hands.

TWO

The street where Anna grew up in Cairo was so crowded and narrow the roofs nearly touched overhead. The houses were also narrow and of the nineteenth century, their upper stories serving as living quarters for the families who ran the cavernous shops below, Egyptians and Greeks and Syrians side by side, and Armenians and Jews and an occasional Italian or Persian or Turk. During the day there was a constant clatter of donkeys and carts on the cobblestones, men shouting and hawking wares and a bustle of people poking and sniffing goods in the half-light of dust and raucous cries. But then at night the alley became a dark silent tunnel, where the shops were locked and the families retreated to their back courtyards and the shuttered upper rooms of their private lives.

Sounds that lived in the shadows were the memories of her childhood. Because it was Egypt, perhaps, where the sun never wavered and the sky was unchanging and featureless, forever a flat brilliant light without echoes which hid nothing and therefore gave nothing. In a land where rain never came and no cloud wandered there were hesitant scrapings beneath the eaves and the creak of shutters, a shuffle of wind and the distant whispers of corridors. Or the mysteries of a key stirring in an invisible lock.

So it was in Anna's world where shadowy clues rose like quiet footfalls from the corners of life, the restless sounds of other lives lived just out of sight, rich in suggestion yet beyond her grasp. Later this mood was inevitably deepened by her brother's clandestine life with its secret meetings and the secret names whispered at night in the darkness of their narrow Cairo courtyard — memories not quite from Anna's childhood but still early and unforgettable omens.

Her family's shop was one of many on the street that still displayed its original sign from the nineteenth century. It was an optical shop, opened by Anna's great-grandfather who had gone on to make a fortune speculating in cotton, which her grandfather later squandered in more speculation. Then her father, a soldier in the forces of General Allenby during the First World War, was killed in the British campaign to take Jerusalem from the Turks. Her brother David always thought he could remember their father but Anna had been born after his death, at home in the bedroom overlooking the courtyard.

What Anna and her brother did remember from those early years was being alone. Their mother went off to work each day and they were looked after by a succession of women who were even poorer than they were.

When her brother was old enough he went to work after school as an apprentice to the elderly optician who rented the shop, learning their great-grandfather's trade. It was Anna's responsibility after school to keep the house and shop in order. She stood very straight and grew to be a tall handsome girl with long black hair, but it was her brother people noticed when their mother took them for walks along the Nile on holidays.

That's always the way, laughed their mother, buying them sunflower seeds to eat in the park. The son gets the beautiful eyelashes so he can learn they mean nothing, and the daughter is spared such illusions to help her find the true life within.

Their mother died before the Second World War. Anna's brother was still very young then but he was already secretly working for Shai. Cairo was an important center for their clandestine activities because British headquarters for the region were there, and Britain controlled Palestine under its Mandate from the First World War. Anna helped her brother as best she could but the dangers grew much worse after the Germans invaded North Africa in 1941. Those were terrible days for two young Jews in Cairo, with the Germans advancing from victory to victory in the desert and refugees bringing ever new accounts of the horrors in Europe.

Four generations of her family's life on the narrow street came to an end on a June night in 1942, when her brother didn't return from one of his secret meetings. The next day she learned he had been killed, run down by a lorry in what the police described as an accident. Anna had no other family. She knew her brother's death wasn't an accident and for a time she thought she was losing her mind. She locked all the doors and shutters of the house and went around shrieking in the darkness.

The first person who came to help her was an utter stranger, an Englishman. Somehow he got into the house and found her crumpled on the stone floor beside the door to the courtyard. His voice gently called to her in the darkness, then he lit a candle and she saw he only had one eye. A bulky black patch covered his other eye and his twisted face was grotesquely shaped. It all seemed a monstrous dream to Anna, a nightmare of ugly shadows. But when the man put his arms around her to raise her, she knew how real it was. She had soiled herself on the stones where she lay, lost near the courtyard door in the house of her birth.

Years were to pass before she came to know this mysterious one-eyed man who was to be such an important part of her life. At the time she only wanted to escape from the house and from Cairo and the Englishman helped her in many ways, above all by providing her with papers for Palestine. She knew he must be connected to British intelligence and was helping her because of her brother, but she was too overwhelmed by grief and fear to make any sense out of what he was doing. Escape was all that mattered to her.

Anna was twenty-three when she left Egypt. The tanks of the German Afrika Korps were little more than fifty miles from Alexandria. The British fleet had already sailed for the safety of Haifa and British military and civilian staffs were being evacuated from Cairo. Long columns of trucks wound away into the Sinai, an exodus heading north and east toward Palestine.

THREE

Palestine was a drastic change from Egypt, which made it easier for Anna. She was even grateful it was such a primitive place with nothing to remind her of the sophistication of Cairo, where different cultures had lived together for centuries. In Palestine every group distrusted every other: the Moslem and Christian Arabs, the Oriental and European Jews, the British. Only from the outside when faced by enemies did any one of them appear to be a community. As soon as she got to know them she saw how divisive they were among their own kind, with a hundred conflicting views about who they were and what they should be doing against the others. It was all a bewildering kind of confusion with turmoil everywhere.

A time of wandering and seeking, it seemed to Anna. Not unlike the way it must have been three thousand years ago, she thought, when Joshua led the twelve tribes out of the wilderness and they first caught sight of the plains of Jericho beyond the Jordan, and every man had his own vision of the promises to be found on the far side of the river.

She made no effort to find a place for herself during those first years in Palestine. Instead she wandered from the towns to the settlements and back again, a period here and an interval there, always moving even if it was only a few miles away, never staying long enough in one place to become part of a way of life. She had been trained as a teacher in Cairo, and it was easy enough to support herself with substitute and part-time work. In any case people came and went in the chaos of war and her restlessness was unremarkable.

Nor was it difficult for a young woman to find a room in some new place. There were many men in her life then, and perhaps what she liked most about those brief and intense affairs was lying in bed late at night and listening to her lovers talk about themselves, gaining what seemed to her a vast knowledge of the dreams and fears that haunted men's lives. To Anna, those intimate encounters so quickly come and gone were a way of avoiding intimacy with herself, a way of feeling close to life without opening herself to its dangers. For she was still fleeing, she knew, still trying to escape the narrow street in Cairo with its crowded memories.

The Russians advanced on Berlin and the world war drew to an end. More Jewish refugees arrived in Palestine from Europe and elsewhere in the Middle East, many on clandestine routes. After a period in Jerusalem Anna left the strife of the cities and towns, seeking smaller settlements. Her way led south to the desert and it was there in the Negev, not far from the Egyptian border, that she found herself when the fighting broke out between the Arabs and the Jews, even before the British left Palestine.

It was also there that she met Yossi, one of the handful of Palmach soldiers sent by the central Jewish command to help them defend their isolated settlement. Everyone in the settlement dug trenches and learned to stand guard duty, but the young Palmach commandos were the elite among them because they had received real training in warfare.

Yossi was a handsome man whose lean dark body glistened in the desert sun. To her he looked more like an Arab than a Jew, and she wasn't surprised to learn he was from Iraq. When they were alone he spoke Arabic with her. His beautiful smiles burst upon her with a flash of teeth and she laughed at that, recalling the ways of her Arab friends in Cairo.

The little ones don't understand, Yossi said to her one day, referring to the settlers who were from Europe.

They want to be good Jewish farmers but that won't help us when the British leave and the Arab armies attack. With only twenty-five defenders, women and men, and the roads controlled by the Arabs, we haven't a chance out here. We're too far away.

What then? she asked. What will become of us?

Oh we'll use our few rifles and throw some bottles of petrol and then we'll try to get out at night. It's the resistance itself that's important, you know they think Jews never fight. They're out for plunder and picking grapes and we've got to show them it's not like that here. The Egyptian soldiers have a mad idea of the good times ahead, so resistance of any kind will frighten them. They'll take our sandy little hilltop but then they'll look around at these makeshift desert huts and say, Why in the name of God are the Jews fighting over this?

And if they fight like that here, how will it be farther north when they're defending real land, real houses? Have the Jews all gone crazy?

And that's how we'll win with a few old rifles and some bottles of petrol, said Yossi, confident and strong with his radiant smile.

Yossi's knowledge of the Egyptian soldiers was firsthand. One of his duties for the Palmach was intelligence and he often disappeared at night, disguised as an Arab, going off toward Gaza where the main Egyptian forces were quartered on the coast near the border. A few days later he would turn up again at the settlement, exhausted and exhilarated from his secret journeys through the desert, and go to work sending his information north on the settlement radio.

On the evenings of his return Anna rearranged her guard duty and she and Yossi were alone in one of the huts. He was younger than she was and perhaps it was the remoteness of her life there, or the knowledge that the settlement would soon fall, but it seemed to her she had never known a man quite like Yossi, so sure of himself in his gentle way and so at ease in the wind-driven desert nights that brought fear to everyone else.

Then too, there was no need to think of ending anything withYossi because in a day or two he would be gone again anyway, off on another secret mission across the desert.

In the morning sun they sometimes had a moment to sit on a rise of sand and enjoy the silence of a new day coming to the magnificent desert landscapes. Yossi would be thoughtful, gazing at the sand sifting through his fingers.

Just imagine, he said. Some of these glittering particles come all the way from the upper Nile. The river carries the sand three thousand miles to the sea, then the currents bring it to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean and the winds carry it over here. So seldom do we know the worlds we walk. Isn't it true, Anna?

That winter and spring they beat off attacks by Arab irregulars. At the end of spring the British withdrew from Palestine and Israel declared itself a nation. The armies of five Arab countries invaded, with the Egyptian army advancing into the Negev and up the coast from Gaza. When the settlement was attacked, Yossi and the others used up all their ammunition in a single day of fighting. After dark they abandoned the settlement, dragging the wounded, and set out north across the Negev with Yossi acting as guide for the little band of survivors. Before dawn he hid them at the foot of a cliff and went off alone disguised as an Arab in the direction of the Egyptian forces in Beersheva. That night Anna and the others traveled again, without Yossi, and reached the safety of a larger settlement in the northern Negev.

A month later, when there was a lull in the fighting, Yossi was able to find Anna.

It's working, he said. The Egyptians have stopped advancing and are digging in. Soon we'll hit back between their positions and even things up a bit.

Yossi laughed and rushed back to the front and the war for independence went better, against all odds. When she saw him that summer he was bursting with success and exuberant plans. He wanted to marry her and it was also what she wanted. She was six or seven years older than he was and sometimes she worried about that, but she loved him and she also knew her old life was behind her now, as much a part of the past as the Palestine of British days. She was used to more sudden changes in life but these feelings had come to her slowly, over time in the isolation of the Negev, beginning even before she met Yossi.

Nor was it because of their child that she was choosing a life with Yossi. She had already decided to have the child if she could, no matter what happened to Yossi. So when he came to her in the summer and their love was more intense than ever, it all seemed clear to Anna. Still, only after the decisions were made did she tell him she was carrying his child. Yossi listened to her and smiled and smiled, overwhelmed with pride and wonder.

My mysterious and lovely Anna, he kept whispering late at night. My infinitely mysterious Anna. . . .

He whispered in Arabic as they often did when making love. In a way it seemed strange and they laughed at it sometimes. But there was also no denying the sounds had an intimacy that was precious to both of them, recalling their first nights together in the desert as well as more distant bonds from both their childhoods.

***

Yossi was twenty-two when their son was born toward the end of 1948. After the war they lived on the coast in the south in order to be near the Negev, which they both loved. Yossi took courses at night and tried several different jobs. He was good at mathematics and physics and for a time he thought he might become an engineer, but nothing seemed to work out for him and eventually he went back into the army, training as a paratrooper. He was away for periods of time at one post or another and Anna returned to teaching when the baby was old enough. Yossi seemed unsure of himself, preoccupied and moody. His silences deepened when he was home and a distance grew between them.

At first Anna told herself it was simply because of his age that he was finding it difficult to adjust to a settled life. But as time passed she had to admit there was more to it than that, for she also knew Yossi was a solitary man who had always lived inside himself.

Yossi had grown up in a village near Baghdad, the only child to live beyond infancy in a family with little money. Being poor meant assuming responsibilities, and Yossi had cared for the family's animals while going to school, along with working outside the house from an early age, first in his father's small shop and later as an apprentice bookkeeper in the nearest town. He was studious and reserved and devout, and for several years he thought he wanted to become a rabbi when he grew up. Since he was always busy going from one responsibility to another, he could only find time for himself by constructing an inner world. His classmates liked him but they also recognized his strangeness, the differences that set him apart. At school he retreated to the edge of the yard between classes and read while the other children played, then worked in his father's shop in the afternoon with a book propped open on the counter. Even as a young child he never had the luxury of doing only one thing at a time, so he learned early to treasure the secret adventures of imagination.

When he was older there were the daily cross-country trips to the town where he bent over a ledger for hours in a dusty little office, writing figures in columns and methodically making sense of them. How he loved those long private journeys through the countryside on unmarked paths which he alone understood. No matter how many times he made the trip, he told Anna, it was always a landscape of make-believe and the great joy of his youth. Out there in the deserts and fields, at last, he was free and there was nothing to hold him back. On the way to the town he ran and ran, memorizing a thousand details as the panorama flashed by in the sun, running and running until his chest ached and his heart tore at him, for no other reason than the joy of feeling himself. Then later, going home after the long quiet hours at the ledger, he traveled slowly in the twilight to spy out what he had missed in the land and to see what had changed, a boyish game of learning to sense the world which strengthened his already profound imagination and gathered it around him like a cloak, against the cool darkness of stars and night.

Yet despite these early experiences of aloneness and duty and secret escape, or perhaps because of them, Yossi was a man of great charm, as no one knew better than Anna. He was often withdrawn and quiet, even shy in manner, but when he spoke it was with the passion of true feelings. And he acted with the dignity of his solitude, and of course he was handsome. So one way or another, everyone took to Yossi. Anna had never known a man or a woman who wasn't attracted to him. But unhappily she now knew he would have to make many more journeys alone before he found a way to live with himself and others. She wasn't angry with what had happened, only sad. In the chaos of war, she realized, some things had seemed clearer than they were.

She was also reluctant to admit that Yossi's strength and courage at the little desert settlement during the war had probably made her think of her brother, and that in turning to Yossi then she had been seeking a kind of shelter she had known in childhood. This saddened her even more because it meant she hadn't traveled as far as she thought during those first restless years in Palestine. Even now when she was in her thirties, the shadows from the house on the narrow street in Cairo were still with her.

Before it ended with Yossi she had long talks with their closest friend — Tajar, who was several years older than Anna and who had helped Yossi get back into the army when his various jobs had come to nothing.

Tajar listened to her and shook his head. Once, briefly, he and Anna had been lovers in Jerusalem before she went south to the Negev and met Yossi, but now Tajar's friendship was equally strong with both of them. To Yossi, in fact, he had become almost an older brother. Tajar was a practical man, blunt and unmarried, dedicated to his work for the government.

It's not your fault, Anna, said Tajar. It's no one's fault and you shouldn't take it on yourself. Of course you feel you've failed, so does Yossi. But it was an understandable mistake and you're both still young. You can do other things, start again, make a new life. I love and admire Yossi, you know that, but I also suspect he's not a man to be a regular husband and father. Not now anyway, and maybe never. We both know there's a part of him that lives alone and he knows it too. No one's to blame but that's the way it is and we have to recognize what is in life. You fell in love with a man who was strong and laughed and ran free in the desert, and that's still what he is so you weren't wrong. You weren't then and you aren't now and you shouldn't blame yourself.

It's not that easy, said Anna.

No of course it's not, replied Tajar. You have a son and everything I've said is no more than words. Living life day in and day out is something else.

Day in, day out, thought Anna. Finally she and Yossi decided on a divorce. He was very tender with her then, with that wistful manner that often came over him.

I know you're right, he said. I know it's no good like this for either of us, or for our child. Maybe I was just too young. We tried but . . . well, it just hasn't worked.

We didn't try hard enough, said Anna, tears running down her face. No one ever tries hard enough and so many beautiful things are lost. Irreplaceable things . . . the treasures of our lives.

***

All during those years there was enormous turmoil in the Middle East, with huge displacements of population.

After the First World War it had been Greeks and Turks who were displaced and now it was the turn of Jews and Arabs. Nearly a million Jews left Moslem countries, about 700,000 of them going to Israel, and 600,000

Arabs left Israel for Moslem countries.

There were also constant bombings and murders carried out by Arab infiltrators crossing over from the Egyptian positions in the Gaza strip on the coast. In the autumn of 1956, Israeli tanks struck across the border and raced into the desert against the Egyptian army. During the eight days of the Sinai campaign the Israeli armored columns conquered the entire Sinai peninsula, but they soon had to withdraw because of combined American and Russian pressure at the United Nations.

Anna and Yossi's son was then almost eight. It was a clear autumn afternoon when Anna took him for a walk along the beach to tell him what she had learned from Tajar that morning.

Yossi was among the fallen. He had been killed while serving with the paratroop battalion in the western Sinai, caught in the crossfire of an Egyptian ambush at the Mitla Pass.

Yossi had died a hero's death and Anna took their son to the funeral. Tajar, ever loyal and strong, arranged everything and stood beside the two of them. But a part of Anna could never accept the fact that Yossi was dead. In her dreams she still saw him as he had been when they first met, a handsome young man with a beautiful smile, laughing, disappearing into the desert disguised as an Arab.

She said nothing about this to anyone, not even Tajar. But it didn't really surprise her years later when she learned that Yossi hadn't actually died in the Sinai, that instead he had gone away to pursue a secret and solitary life in the most ancient of all Arab capitals. For by then, through herself as well as her son, Anna knew much more about the strange ways the past can go on living in other lives, reworking destinies through dream and memory with those same soft echoes of time she herself had once heard in the shadows of childhood.

FOUR

From the moment Tajar met Yossi, he suspected Yossi would one day become the most unusual agent he would ever know. Everything about Yossi suggested it. Yossi had an astonishing visual memory that went far beyond the photographic. It was the atmosphere of a scene that he remembered, almost its shape in time.

Details of objects and movement all flowed from this unique sense of moment, a configuration which time never repeated. It was a way of observing the world that Tajar worked hard to instill in his agents, but with Yossi it was simply the way he saw things. Tajar thought of Yossi as a boy running across the fields to the town where he worked in the afternoons, recording every scene to the rhythm of his heart, free at last to play his own childhood game of recognition.

Yossi also had a touch of self-denial about him, an abstemious quality. He felt very strongly the allure of the world's colors and sounds and textures but he always kept them at a slight distance, so as not to be seduced by them. If anything, this heightened his perceptions. He grasped the essentials of a moment but was not quite a part of them.

Tajar thought of Yossi on the edge of the schoolyard as a child, reading while the other children played. Of Yossi in his father's shop with a book propped open on the counter, one eye for himself as the customers milled and gossiped. Of Yossi's religious inclinations as a boy when he had thought of becoming a rabbi.

And Yossi was quick and alert and intelligent, and above all he was a secret adventurer. The happiest moments of my childhood were what Yossi called those times when he had run free across the desert in the glaring sun of the afternoon, to return home more slowly as the twilight turned to stars and still night. And of course there were his experiences as a young man in the Palmach during the war for independence, when he had crossed the Negev disguised as a bedouin, to penetrate the Egyptian positions along the coast and mix with the Egyptian soldiers in Gaza.

How did you feel when you made those trips? Tajar asked him. And Yossi laughed merrily in reply as Anna listened to the conversation between her husband and their friend.

That's exactly how he felt, she said to Tajar with a smile, as she chopped vegetables for their dinner. He was always laughing because it was always a game to him, more of the running game from his childhood with the added excitement of a costume and a secret purpose to it all, a tattered keffiyeh and a filthy bedouin's cloak and some new accent he was trying out. A different tribe every time because it was more fun that way, more challenging and dangerous. Admit that you loved the thrill of it, Yossi.

Oh I did, said Yossi, still laughing as he leapt to his feet and put his arms around Anna from behind. It was a game and of course I loved it and the only thing I loved more was coming back to you. Admit that you never had a wink of sleep the nights I got back.

The wildly romantic sheik, shrieked Anna as he tickled her, stealing into my tent at dusk straight from the exotic delights of dusty Gaza. That's enough now from the two of you or we'll never have any dinner to eat. . .

.

Anna had been reluctant to admit that the Yossi she loved wasn't fitted for a settled life as a husband and father, but Tajar had been aware of it from the very beginning. It was no surprise to him that Yossi could find nothing for himself once the war was over and he was a civilian trying to live with the concerns of an everyday life. Yossi simply didn't have the temperament for that. His talents were elsewhere and he couldn't help but fail in the regular world.

Unlike Tajar, Yossi was a genuine solitary and his inner needs could only become more demanding as he grew older. Tajar needed to be with others and loved communing with people he felt close to. Without that, life was drab to him and he lacked peace of mind. But it wasn't that way for Yossi. In Yossi's heart there were vast landscapes where he would always roam alone, no matter what kind of life he lived outwardly.

Tajar saw this in Yossi. Born in different circumstances, in another era, Yossi might have adopted a life of religious seclusion, or perhaps some secular version of it, if that had been more in keeping with the age. Tajar could easily imagine Yossi as an explorer in the nineteenth century, one of those driven men who had gone off to march alone through deserts and jungles in search of the source of the Nile or the remnants of a lost civilization. Or in the Middle Ages he could have been one of those itinerant men who called themselves merchants and turned up with caravans from time to time at the barbarous outposts in Central Asia, while pursuing an interminable journey on the ancient silk route to China. Or earlier still, in the first centuries of the common era, he might have been one of those visionaries who took themselves off to the Egyptian desert to live alone for decades in a tiny cave, after the manner of St. Anthony, to sound the dimensions of their souls and ostensibly give shape to a new religion — the desert fathers, as they were known to a millennium of Christian scholars.

So circumstances and eras changed but Yossi was still an authentic solitary. And Tajar, with his special knowledge of the secret ways of secret worlds, was quick to recognize it long before Anna or even Yossi suspected the truth.

A decrepit vegetable truck had ended Tajar's days as a master of disguise, but in Yossi he had found a man who could do more than he ever had. With Tajar planning for him and supporting him, Yossi could in fact live the dream that Tajar had only imagined as a boy running through the bazaars and courtyards of the Holy City, listening to the stones of Jerusalem.

***

Tajar was patient.

When he and Yossi met in the early 1950s, after Tajar had learned to walk again and had gone back to work in the Mossad, Yossi was still a young man in his middle twenties, about ten years younger than Tajar. For other young men that would have been the right age to begin training for a deep-cover role, but Tajar thought Yossi was so exceptional that only a very special career could match his talents. And for that he needed maturity, Tajar decided. Tajar wanted Yossi to know himself well, to be sure of himself.

Yossi had always wanted to go back into intelligence, but in those days a young man couldn't choose the Mossad, the Mossad chose him. When Yossi's efforts at civilian work came to nothing, Tajar found him a job with the army, translating Arabic documents, which Yossi was able to combine with service in the paratroopers to keep himself active. Yossi was deeply dissatisfied with his life and he and Anna drifted apart.

More than ever Yossi wanted to get into covert operations but still Tajar hesitated, waiting for the right moment, some final break in Yossi's life.

Tajar didn't know what form it would take but he was sure it would come and it did, after Yossi and Anna were divorced. One evening he was sitting alone with Yossi by the shore, talking and looking out to sea, when Yossi confessed he didn't want to go on living in Israel. He was a devout Jew and believed in the state and its destiny, but it wasn't a place where he felt at home. Yossi tried to explain his reasons for wanting to leave, which had to do with the strangeness of the society and the ways of the country being foreign to him, by which he meant Western. Most of what he said Tajar already knew, as did Anna, for Yossi had always been frank with both of them. But the idea of not living in Israel was new and momentous.

What do all these feelings of mine come down to? said Yossi. That I was born in a different place, that's all.

That I learned to live differently when I was young.

Among Arabs, said Tajar.

If you want to put it that way, replied Yossi.

As a Jew among Arabs, added Tajar. As a person who is different and doesn't belong, who can never belong.

Of course being different and not belonging can also be an adventure to young men, just as having a secret identity is an adventure. There's power and a sense of power in secret knowledge. But how long would it be before you decided you wanted to come home?

That's just it, replied Yossi. I'm almost thirty, old enough to know who I am, and I don't feel this is home. I can't find any work that interests me. I can't settle down. Of course I know it's impossible to live in an Arab country now. The antagonism is too great. But I also know I don't want to live here, so I feel lost. I don't know what to do.

I understand, said Tajar, and I think we can find a solution that's not only interesting and challenging but useful. Extremely useful. What I have in mind is working for an ideal. When we have an ideal we strive for, it never has to fail, does it? It can live pure and real in our hearts, beyond change and decay, and what could be finer in a man's life than that? Think of how Jerusalem appears to those who imagine it from afar. It shines and it shines through the ages, an exquisite dream of redemption and hope off on top of its mountain . . . our Holy City.

Tajar laughed.

And more, he added, not just ours. Everyone's Holy City. Certainly that complicates life but it also makes life fascinating. We'll have to talk more about it, Yossi. In fact, just tonight all at once, we seem to have a great deal of talking to do.

Tajar had been refining his plan for several years. It was extraordinarily complex but by laboring over its details he was able to make it appear an unremarkable sequence for a deep-cover penetration, its steps straightforward and logical and the inevitability of its true goal still far in the future.

True, Yossi's training lasted much longer than usual, well over two years. He had to learn the regular techniques of espionage. He had to learn Spanish. He had to learn the intricacies of Islam so that he could appear to have been born and reared a Moslem. And he had to learn all the other attributes that went with the past life Tajar had constructed for him. There were also lengthy training missions abroad, in Beirut and Cairo and Europe, for the passage of time itself was a secret instrument in Tajar's plan. Yossi's adjustment to his new life had to be complete because the transition was to be permanent.

Of course Tajar kept this ultimate truth strictly to himself. Yossi suspected it and hoped it would be so, but certainly no one else in the Mossad could have foreseen such a future for an Israeli: an agent who was to penetrate Arab culture so deeply he would never come back.

Near the end of Yossi's training by the Mossad, the 1956 war broke out in the Sinai. Yossi's death, while he was on a special mission with the paratroopers, was documented and announced and surprised no one who had known him in civilian life or in the army, or even in the Mossad. Only Anna had her wistful dreams which she kept to herself. In the Mossad itself Yossi no longer existed and the secret identity of the Runner, as he was to be known henceforth in reports, was now limited to Tajar as his operations officer and the man Tajar reported to directly, the chief of the Mossad.

Early the following year Tajar began to receive progress reports from Buenos Aires where the Runner was living quietly, perfecting his Argentine accent and his knowledge of the city and its large Arab community.

After about six months in Buenos Aires, the Runner was at last ready to emerge in the new persona Tajar had so elaborately planned for him over the years.

Yossi's name was now Halim and he was a young Syrian businessman. In the following weeks he went about meeting people and making new contacts in Buenos Aires in a natural way, in the course of expanding the small export-import concern he had recently inherited.

The business itself was well established, having been founded by a cousin of Halim's before the Second World War. Halim's family had left Syria when he was three and moved to Iraq, where they made a bare living as petty tradesmen. The cousin in Argentina, related to Halim's mother, wrote to the family of the opportunities to be found in Buenos Aires and offered to help. When he was fifteen Halim traveled alone to Buenos Aires, paid for by the cousin, and went to work as an apprentice bookkeeper in the cousin's small company. The cousin was an elderly widower, thoughtful and kind, a second father to Halim. He had many ideas for expanding his trade to North America but felt he was too old to get them going. Halim learned the business and inherited the company upon the cousin's death. He put the old man's ideas to work and in time began to make a great deal of money.

Poverty and hard work, family loyalty, crossing oceans at an early age and faithfully serving one's elders —

these things were well understood in the Syrian community in Buenos Aires. So Halim came to be admired and respected and not just for his success in business. He was a man of great charm and people took to him instinctively because of his modesty and sincerity and goodwill. He was reticent about his accomplishments, even shy, and when people praised his success he always spoke with passion of the wise and kindly cousin who had given him his start and been a second father to him, and whose ideas he had used in building his business.

There was no guile or arrogance in Halim, only a quiet self-assurance and a direct open way of speaking which inevitably invited confidence. And he was always generous in his friendships in many thoughtful ways, and he was also a patriot. He even talked of returning to Syria one day and helping to build a better country, now that he had succeeded so well in the new world.

Ah Halim, his friends said affectionately, you're a true idealist who'll put the rest of us to shame. But if you go back to Syria what will you export? All they have is politics and people, there's no pampas and no beef. What could you find to sell?

These conversations often came over games of shesh-besh, the Arab name for backgammon, which the Arabs of Buenos Aires played incessantly in their clubs and cafés, as addicted to it as their cousins in the Middle East. In answer Halim flashed his handsome smile. He threw the dice and laughed.

Why not shesh-besh? he asked. I'll export sets to Europe and make it the pastime of all the little old ladies.

Why not? It's an Arab game they ought to know about. Skill and chance in equal measure, just like life. . . .

Older people, in particular, were struck by Halim's tact and understanding of human character, which were very impressive for a man his age. According to the biography Tajar had constructed for Halim, he was five years younger than Yossi had been, or only about twenty-seven when he began to move around in Buenos Aires and become well-known in the Syrian community. Yossi had always had a youthful appearance and Halim's age seemed exactly right for him: a handsome young man who wore an attractive moustache in the Arab manner to give his youthful face a touch of maturity, which was helpful in business.

In fact there were several reasons why Tajar had made Halim younger than Yossi. For one, it explained why Halim hadn't appeared earlier in the Arab men's clubs and cafés in Buenos Aires, since that wasn't acceptable until a certain age. And for another, it gave Halim fewer years to account for in his life, especially the years when he had been in the army and in training for the Mossad. But there was also a more subtle reason.

Tajar had learned that a young man with knowledge beyond his years had a natural appeal to men with more experience, who were also the men with power and influence. Somehow there was a slight psychological shift on the older man's part, perhaps caused by a sense of flattery. In any case it tended to enhance communion and lead to a sharing of personal beliefs by the older man, as Tajar had discovered on his secret missions for the British during the war. Tajar had learned this psychological device from none other than Anna's benefactor in Cairo, the one-eyed British officer who had taught him so many clever truths about the details of espionage, techniques for which Tajar himself was famous in the Mossad. And now this small detail that Tajar had learned years ago from the one-eyed Englishman, in Cairo, was to give Halim a stunning opportunity for entering Damascus with important connections.

One of Halim's shesh-besh partners was the general who was Syria's military attaché in Buenos Aires, a position of no significance. The general had been shipped into exile because his political faction was out of favor in Damascus. Disgruntled and restless, the general found Halim a sympathetic listener to all his troubles. And when Halim began to talk about taking an exploratory business trip to Syria to see if he could find a place for himself, the general naturally offered letters of introduction.

Thus a year and a half after his arrival in Argentina, the Runner was on his way to Damascus for the first time.

Tajar flew to Geneva to meet him.

***

Tajar and Yossi were overjoyed to see each other and to be together again. They hugged when they met and parted at the safehouse near Geneva, where they talked and talked for hours every day.

I've never seen you looking so well, said Tajar. The moustache gives you a most distinguished air, very proper and very purposeful. But how do you feel now that you're finally on your way?

The way I did when I was a boy, replied Yossi, bursting with smiles. It's like those times when I used to set out after school to go to work in the next town, and I ran and ran across the fields and the desert knowing it was all there waiting for me to discover it, running alone as fast as the wind until my chest ached and wanting it to ache so I could feel myself more, seeing life and breathing it and gulping down all of creation. Alive.

That's how I feel.

Ah yes, murmured Tajar, adjusting his stiff painful legs in front of his chair. Just so, my friend, and may it always be so, insh'allah. God willing.

***

The patriot Halim, successful in the new world and absent from his native land since the age of three, found Damascus very much to his liking. The friends of the general were helpful and Halim decided to move to Damascus and establish an export-import business. In Europe he had already made some promising business contacts. He returned to Argentina to close out his affairs and to transfer his funds to Switzerland.

The general in Buenos Aires was pleased with his young friend's decision.

May I follow you soon, said the general, raising a toast at the farewell party he gave for Halim.

And for the good of our country, replied Halim, may it be very soon, insh'allah.

***

The general's faction was the Baath or Arab Renaissance party, which combined radical nationalism with a policy of social reform. It was influential in the Syrian army but still far from power.

So you mustn't be too closely identified with your friend the general, warned Tajar, when he met Yossi again in Europe. There's no way of knowing how the Baath will fare, and if the general loses out you don't want to lose out with him. In fact there's only one way for you to survive in a thieves' den like Damascus, Tajar went on, and that's not only to be incorruptible, but to be known as incorruptible. You're in business, you're a practical man and a patriot and you must never be associated with any political group. The Arab renaissance? Good. That's exactly what you want and you want nothing more and nothing for yourself. You're the conscience of the revolution and you live for an ideal and politics is for others. It's your country you serve, Syria, and of that there can be no doubt. Will it help Syria? That's the question you must always ask yourself, and them, when friends want you to do something or ask for advice or support or money. Is it in the cause of the Arab revolution? Does it serve the real Arab renaissance? And always at the same moment — is it right? Is it true? Is it the Arab way? A conscience, my friend, that's what you must be: strong and incorruptible. The rest is for the others who will come and go in Damascus, gaining power for a time and losing it as the captains become colonels and overthrow the generals and are overthrown in turn by new captains becoming colonels, the way it always is when the military schemes and runs things. But a conscience doesn't scheme. It feels. And that's how you will last in a den of thieves and connivers and money makers and power seekers. As a vision, an idea in the heart. Indefinable. Like our fathers, Yossi, with their dream of Zion and their vision of Jerusalem. And there's nothing foreign about that to any man. Secretly, all human beings dream. Even thieves and connivers have that hidden place in their hearts.

***

Halim set up his business in Damascus and began exporting leather goods and jewelry to Europe. Soon he added shesh-besh sets and tables, which became his most profitable product. His new friends in Damascus were helpful and he had good contacts in Europe, especially in Belgium. His business flourished and once or twice a year he traveled to Europe.

At home in Damascus, meanwhile, Halim continued to live quietly, an unassuming and charming and modest man, a patriot with a growing circle of acquaintances. In Syria it was a time of rampant instability as the country broke out of its union with Egypt. There was one coup d'etat after another and the Baath party gradually strengthened its hold on the army. Then in 1963 the Baath seized power outright and the new ruler of Syria was the general who had once been a military attaché in Buenos Aires, Halim's former shesh-besh partner.

FIVE

During that time the most important struggles over the Runner's fate didn't take place in Syria but in the headquarters of the Mossad, between Tajar and his superior, the only two men who knew the identity of the Runner and the details of the Runner operation. Their disagreements were fundamental and unresolvable and concerned the very nature of the operation. Tajar saw the Runner as a long-term asset who would acquire his worth only after years of being in place, while the chief of the Mossad felt there was more use to be made of the Runner now. Long-term and now were terms that constantly changed and their arguments took many forms.

The argument might have seemed to be simply the traditional one between an operations officer and the man above him who paid the bureaucratic bills: the operations officer wanted to protect his agent and keep him from danger, and his superior wanted more immediate results from investments made in time and money. But Tajar's great experience, and the fact that he himself had once briefly been chief of the Mossad, made the issue far more complex than that, as both men recognized. Not only careers and roles and self-respect were involved, but history and philosophies.

The son of the rabbi from the Ukraine who was the chief of the Mossad had acquired his intelligence experience inside Israel, unlike Tajar. Little Aharon, as he was called, was a short stocky man of immense energy who did nothing in life but work at his job. He had made his start as a policeman and become a counterintelligence expert for Shai during the British Mandate, later expanding this position to counterespionage against the Jewish Revisionists and their right-wing cells. After independence, on orders from the prime minister, he disarmed the right-wing Jewish underground and became even more powerful in the government. He was a brilliant, ruthless man who knew how to run an organization and get things done.

His first serious clash with Tajar over the Runner operation came when it was time for the Runner to take up residency in Damascus. Tajar insisted that the Runner shouldn't report by secret radio, which was standard procedure for agents then and also their greatest risk. Instead, Tajar wanted the Runner to use false bottoms in the shesh-besh tables he sent to Europe for his reports. An agent who didn't use a radio was in a different category, by definition, with different goals. Tajar won that round of long-term over now, as he won several others. But in 1963 when the Runner's former shesh-besh partner from Buenos Aires became the president of Syria, Little Aharon exploded.

This is preposterous, he shouted at Tajar. The Runner's in a position to tell us almost anything. Why won't you put him on the general and let him tell us what is going on?

But what happens when there's another coup? replied Tajar. Even if the Baath stays in power, it's almost certain the general won't. He's just the first man out of their pack. Who comes next?

And what if there's going to be a war tomorrow? shouted Little Aharon. The Runner can't even tell us. It's madness.

No, it's wisdom, replied Tajar. If there's going to be a war tomorrow someone else can tell us. We have other people for that. The Runner's time will come but it's not yet. I want him to last.

Little Aharon frowned. To last, he thought. Yes, of course you want him to last. He's your hope and your dream, all you've got.

Tajar sat facing him, adamant, using his hands to rearrange his crippled legs. In a way Little Aharon pitied Tajar, and Tajar knew that. Little Aharon, after all, had captured Eichmann in Argentina and obtained, for the West, Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing the crimes of the Stalin era in the Soviet Union. He had an international reputation in intelligence and was famous among the powerful. When professionals in other capitals thought of the Mossad, they thought of Little Aharon, who was the Mossad to them. Yet at the end of the war it was Tajar who had been the one with fame and power and promise. Why shouldn't Little Aharon give in to him now over one agent? One operation?

Look, said Little Aharon, if you won't have the Runner jumping into bed with the general, at least give me something new. Some way I can tell myself the operation is going forward.

Two things, replied Tajar at once. I'll have him move closer to Syrian armaments and also to the Palestinian refugees.

Little Aharon looked down at his desk and at the crippled legs stretched out on the far side of it. Syria's armaments came from the Soviet Union, so that offer was something. But the activities of the Palestinian refugees were close to nonexistent, so that amounted to nothing at all. One offer of hard facts, another of the Runner skulking around in the desert disguised as an Arab. Sadly, he thought, Tajar was a prisoner of his own past. What had worked for him once he went on dreaming would work for him again. He was an idealist and a romantic who didn't understand change. He kept trying to do the same things over and over again, living in ideas and hope and cut off from change by his own imagination — and by an automobile accident. No one was better at the mechanics of infiltrating agents into Arab countries and supporting them once they were there. But when it came to goals, he kept slipping back into the past.

Little Aharon did some more shouting but his heart wasn't in it. In the end he decided to let Tajar have his way with the Runner.

All right, Little Aharon said finally. The Runner concentrates on Syrian armaments and Palestinian refugees and not the president . . . for the time being.

***

Tajar was triumphant. He knew it was the most important decision ever made in the Runner operation. It would take still more time but slowly, methodically, he was giving the operation the shape he wanted. Not even Little Aharon could suspect how long-term his goals really were. And except for the Runner himself, no one else knew enough about the operation to be able to judge it.

What Tajar had been planning for so long was no less than the ultimate penetration of an enemy nation. The Runner would go on for years acquiring power and influence in Syria until one day he would be one of the most important men in the country. But at the same time he would never be simply an agent, a Syrian who worked for a foreign country. Foreign agents worked for money or power or out of faith or ideology, but they were always still foreign agents and the Runner would never be that. The Runner would be a Syrian who was also secretly an Israeli, his motivation and devotion forever beyond question. And that ultimate achievement in espionage, to Tajar's knowledge, had never been accomplished anywhere before, by anyone.

***

We have two new directions to explore, Tajar said to Yossi when next they met in Europe. The first is the armaments business. It would be useful if you could think of a way to get into repair work. In a very small way to begin with, you understand. Nothing glamorous or dramatic but something quite ordinary, such as armored personnel carriers. They're always being modified this way or that, not the heavy work but little things. Rods and gadgets, the seats or the exhaust system, anything. I've looked at the work our people do and it doesn't require an engineer, just some competent machinists and a man overseeing them. Most of it is regular business. You call in a technician to design a fitting or a tool when you need to, give your customers good service and make sense of the books. The army supply officers get used to dealing with you, they know they can count on you and ask you to take on a little more, perhaps. In time it can grow.

And I know you like that sort of thing, added Tajar, because once you thought of being an engineer.

Yossi laughed. It sounds easy enough, he said. And the other new direction?

The Palestinian refugee camps, replied Tajar. Now that the Syrians are starting to organize and arm a few Palestinian groups, it would probably be wise for you to get started with them. It's patriotic and it's in the Arab cause and it would give you a chance to get out of Damascus and taste some desert air. There's that side to you too and you can't spend all your time over ledgers and talking to people in cafés or on strolls by the river.

And the general? asked Yossi.

After this general there will be another general, replied Tajar, and then another and another. But armaments and Palestinians, I suspect, will be with us much longer than any of them.

He always beat me at shesh-besh anyway, said Yossi.

I don't believe that.

Out of design, of course.

Ah, now that I do believe, replied Tajar, smiling, and went on to other matters.

***

A Syrian army officer asked Halim to say a few words to the president about a personal matter. Others approached him with propositions for smuggling or special contracts or to serve as an intermediary with more senior officers who were Halim's friends. But with honesty and gentleness Halim always turned aside these opportunities for making men indebted to him.

Only ideals will sway him, it was said in Damascus as his reputation grew and he became known as a man of vision — the incorruptible one.

***

As a boy growing up with Arab ways, long before he became Halim, Yossi had dreamed of the fabled place known as Damascus, a source of myth and wonder from his childhood which would always exist beyond time and stone. An imaginary city to him, like Jerusalem.

Damascus the fair, city of many pillars, the pearl of the East and the gateway to Mecca, where for centuries the caravans of the faithful had set out on the haj to cross the desert. A city of many moods but known above all as el Fayha, the fragrant, from its innumerable gardens and orchards.

Astride its river at the foot of a mountain where it nestled against a harsh landscape, a transdesert route from antiquity at the confluence of Asia and Europe and Africa, which was unique even in the ancient Middle East.

For unlike any other city on earth, Damascus had never known obscurity in all its four thousand years of history. Instead, it had been preeminent to every empire that had ever held sway in the Fertile Crescent, Egyptian and Hittite and Babylonian and Assyrian, Persian and Greek and Roman and Arab, Seljuk and Mongol and Mameluke and Turkish.

Always important, forever destroyed and rebuilt, famous for its apricots and grapes and melons, its damask silk which was brought to Europe by the Crusaders and its figs and pistachios which the Romans transplanted around the Mediterranean as a far-flung gift from the Damascenes, worshipper once of Adad the storm-god and later a flourishing center of Christianity and Islam, holy to Christians because of the conversion of St. Paul and holy to Moslems as the burial site of Salah al-din, the great Kurdish warrior who defeated the Crusaders. With its luxuriant gardens and orchards, its old walled city to the south of the river and its new quarters to the north along shady avenues, the ancient beauty of Damascus reached back in history to the very birth of towns, recalling man's earliest dreams of an earthly paradise on the edge of the desert.

Halim loved the city and always felt these past worlds adding new dimensions to his life in Damascus, where the inhabitant's subtle sense of time also allowed him to find a place in his days for the distant persona of Yossi. Thus when Halim wished to strengthen himself by giving voice to his attachment to Tajar and the present, he talked to some Syrian friend about the kindly, thoughtful widower-cousin in Argentina who had given him his start in life and had taught him so much.

I owe everything to that man. His ideas, his very being, run in my veins and sustain me, Halim said truthfully, with complete conviction.

And when he met with his new Palestinian contacts and talked about their humiliation and anger and their national destiny, their fight for a homeland, his own childhood dreams fired his words with a passion no one could mistake. I know exactly how you feel, Halim told them, and the depth of his feelings could not help but make a powerful impression upon his listeners. Indeed, it was the intensity of Halim's vision that set him apart.

All this Tajar had foreseen. All this Tajar had carefully planned and made part of Yossi's training when the two of them were transforming Yossi into the patriot Halim, whose success would always depend on the sincerity of his feelings. For that was the heart of the Runner operation, although only Tajar and Halim truly understood it: the Runner would succeed because Halim was genuine.

Having been in Damascus a half-dozen years, Halim was completely at ease with his life there. It was then that Tajar decided it might be useful to add another dimension to the Runner's life. He discussed it with Yossi when they met in Belgium and told him something about the man he wanted Yossi to meet — an Englishman. Tajar was suggesting the connection, he said, not for any professional reasons, for the Englishman would never be of use to Yossi in an operational way. Rather, it was strictly for personal reasons.

To give you a different dimension of time, perhaps, said Tajar with a smile.

Yossi was intrigued. Then you know this man yourself? he asked.

Oh yes, replied Tajar. Once upon a time, in fact, he taught me much of what I know about our business. And oddly enough, he also knew Anna briefly, long ago.

Yossi turned serious. That is another dimension of time, he said. And what's the name of this mysterious Englishman?

He calls himself Bell, replied Tajar.

The man in Jericho?

Yes.

Yossi nodded thoughtfully. I've heard of him, he said.

SIX

In the early morning stillness of what he liked to call his north verandah, actually a warped wooden platform with a tin roof outside the front door of his dilapidated bungalow, the one-eyed English hermit of Jericho sat gazing at the luxuriant shade beneath his orange trees, studying the patterns of sunlight glaring on the hard mud. Ants worked busily moving bits of straw in and out of the small patches of brightness, so diligent in their unending tasks he sometimes imagined he could hear them. But in fact the whirring hum of early mornings came from higher up in the trees where thousands of tiny insects were beating their wings in joy at having found an oasis of paradise, an intoxicating garden of orange fragrance in the middle of the lifeless desert around Jericho.

The orange grove spread out on all sides of his bungalow, guarding his privacy. There was an open space near the back door where he could sit at night if he wanted to look at the stars, and next to it a grape arbor, the south patio as he called it, where he could sit during the day if he wanted to see no one at all. But generally he spent his mornings on the front porch — the north verandah — with its view of the dirt road beyond the orange grove. He had some benches and his most comfortable reading chair on the porch, and a table with its customary piles of fruit and books and two identical decanters of what looked like water to prevent dehydration, one decanter filled with water and the other with arak.

So for Bell, a man with a horribly disfigured face who had long ago retired from the devious world of espionage, mornings on his north verandah contained the essentials of life.

The bungalow itself, like most houses in Jericho, was a rambling one-story affair of mud-brick covered by plaster, painted with some faint color which had quickly faded away to indeterminate pastel. A rainstorm would have washed the whole place away in an hour, but of course it never really rained in Jericho. Instead, once or twice a winter, the sky clouded over and a vague misty substance brushed against people's faces, causing no end of wonder and a solemn rearrangement of greetings for several days.

Rain, a man would gravely say upon meeting his neighbor. Rain, by the will of God, came the equally grave reply.

Bell's rooms were sparsely furnished. There were some tables and benches and chairs, a cot here and there and bookcases fashioned from wooden crates hanging on the walls. The ceilings were high and it was always breezy inside the house because the fierce sun ate up the air it touched, causing turbulences where it didn't reach. From the road, beneath the thick foliage of the orange trees, only small children and donkeys could see Bell on his front porch. Callers, jingling the bell at the rusty wrought-iron gate, he came to recognize by the lower halves of their bodies and particularly by their sandaled feet.

What arcane arts we arrive at in life, thought Bell, inwardly smiling as he grew familiar over time with the idiosyncrasies of his friends' feet planted inside the gate.

Bell could never smile in a normal way because his face was a mask built by surgeons. A bullet had once shattered a spyglass he was looking through, driving metal and glass fragments into his face and ripping away an eye and most of his features. So in a way he was fortunate to have anything at all resembling a face.

The shattering spyglass had also torn apart his hand that was holding it. The best the surgeons had been able to do with that, using grafted skin and metal inserts, was to reconstruct a permanently rigid claw which was half-closed and half-open, a kind of tool for holding things. Bell made use of this ugly claw of a hand by wrapping it around a glass of arak, which was also a more or less permanent fixture with him.

No one in Jericho and few people anywhere knew that Bell had been a man of great power in the Middle East during the Second World War, when he had headed an elite British intelligence unit in Egypt, mysteriously known as the Monastery because its headquarters were hidden away in an ancient abandoned monastery in the desert. Bell's agents, inevitably referred to as Monks and famous for their elaborate disguises, had operated behind German lines and among German sympathizers in many Arab countries. So effective were the Monks that their anonymous leader had become an awesome legend to intelligence experts in London.

Yet Bell himself, who had gone by another name then, had managed to keep his identity secret even within his own organization. Most of the Monks had thought the withdrawn man with the claw and the war-blasted face was no more than a minor aide to the ruthless colonel who apparently ran the Monastery — actually Bell's second-in-command.

No sooner had the North African campaign ended than the Monastery was disbanded by order of the highest authority in London, partly out of professional jealousy and competitive maneuverings within the War Office, partly because of an unspoken fear that the Monastery's uncanny ability to penetrate almost any target was considered too dangerous in all but the most extreme of wartime emergencies. For by then, justifiably or not, the Monks had acquired a reputation for being able to go almost anywhere and do almost anything.

The brilliant leader of the Monastery was offered an important staff position in London which he firmly refused, arguing that he was emotionally exhausted and not equipped in any case for the usual promotions of government. Instead, he offered to work in a lesser role in Cairo until the end of the war, when he would retire in the Middle East on disability pay. With a tired voice and his customary self-irony, Bell gestured at his bulging black eye patch with his twisted claw.

Some of us are never meant to be more than field hands, he said. And an empire, no doubt, always has forgotten corners for its honored cripples.

To his superiors in the War Office, Bell seemed much too young to be ending such a successful career. But the fact that he had been born and brought up in India and had never really lived in England, together with his face, was enough to convince even the most skeptical generals in the War Office that they had to respect his wishes and not bring him back to London. Indeed, Bell's face had always been indisputable proof of his sincerity. There was simply no arguing with that grotesque misshapen affliction with which he looked upon the world, the most terrible face anyone had ever seen.

Bell took advantage of his free time in Cairo by studying Arabic. When the war was over in Europe he retired on disability pay and changed his name and moved to Jerusalem, where he continued to improve his Arabic.

Of course he knew his former colleagues in British intelligence were keeping an eye on him. That was only to be expected. One of the reasons he had chosen British Palestine was to make it easier for them to watch him. For the same reason he later decided to move to Jordan when the British Mandate in Palestine was coming to an end, since the British had created the country of Jordan out of the larger, eastern part of Palestine and operated quite freely there. Because of his face Bell had always been extremely sensitive to the feelings of others and he felt certain he couldn't cause anyone trouble in that little bedouin kingdom: a war-torn English expatriate quietly going to seed in some out-of-the-way place on the edge of the desert.

Bell found his forgotten corner of empire on a journey east one blustery winter day when he set out from the heights of Jerusalem to walk down through the wilderness of the Judean hills, down and down through the dry barren wastes. And then he caught sight of Jericho deep in the Jordan rift. With its flaring tropical flowers overhanging silent dusty lanes, its tall stately date-palms and cascading jasmine and tumbling walls of bougainvillea, its waterways and gurgling springs and fiery flamboyants bursting against a sun-washed sky, the little Arab village seemed no less than a miracle on the lifeless plain north of the Dead Sea. So small and intensely green in the haze, the lush oasis of Jericho struck Bell as the very mirage of his dreams, truly the Prophet's vision of paradise in a desert of eternal summer. From the lookout claimed by tradition to be the Mount of Temptation on which the devil had spread before Jesus the good things of the earth, Bell feasted his single eye upon Jericho. Later that same week, with an excitement unknown to him since the loss of his face, he moved his few belongings down the cold windy mountain from Jerusalem.

***

In Jericho Bell walked and read and kept to himself, sipped arak and learned about orange trees. He also learned more about the town.

Presented long ago as a love-token to Cleopatra, as a gift from Mark Antony to his Egyptian queen of infinite variety who had then turned around and rented it to Herod for a good price, famous in antiquity for its balsam and henna and myrrh and saffron and balm of Gilead, the town of palms of the ancients was fed by water that went underground on the ridge of Jerusalem and found its way down beneath the desolate sweep of the Judean wilderness to gush forth in springs, miraculously, on the spot where Jericho had existed for ten thousand years, far longer than any other town ever built by man.

Because of the heat Bell got into the habit of always wearing white in Jericho, white cotton trousers and loose white blouses which he washed out every day and hung beside his grape arbor. As a foreigner he was an object of curiosity, but not overly so. With the Mount of Temptation standing nearby, and also the stretch of the Jordan River where John the Baptist had wandered and listened to God — and taken up the ancient Eastern practice of purifying his friends and others by dunking them in the tepid river water, including his cousin Jesus — there had been Christian monks around Jericho for the last two millennia, desert outcroppings of poor Greeks and Copts and Syrians and Ethiopians tending their holy concerns.

Bell was different because of his face, and at first the villagers shunned him out of fear of his single eye — the evil eye to them — turning away when he passed and hiding their children and refusing to look at him. But he was used to this and made no effort to impose himself, having long ago acquired a profound inner solitude. In fact he went out of his way to shield the villagers from the ruin of his face and the single eye, always wearing a drooping straw hat when he left his orange grove and keeping his head down when he walked in town, even addressing the floor in shops so that his face would remain covered.

These were the ways of a humble man, people realized, and in time the villagers came to accept Bell as part of their shade and sunlight and flowers — the foreign hermit with the terrible God-inflicted face, thin and silent and withdrawn, an apparition in white quietly passing the days behind his orange trees.

***

Bell had been in Jericho about a dozen years when his dramatic transfiguration took place. Before that time he had gradually become part of the unfathomable landscape of life, but then all at once a startling revelation gripped the villagers: Bell hadn't aged a day in twelve years. The austere one-eyed hermit looked exactly the same as when he first set foot in Jericho.

It took some time to grasp the magnitude of this discovery in a place where eternal summer caused all things to age more quickly than elsewhere. The flowers never stopped blooming in Jericho and the fruit trees never stopped bearing, but it was also true that the fierce sun took what it gave and decay was every bit as rampant as growth. In a matter of months a new house or a new dusty lane looked as if it had already been standing in neglect for half a century. And people, burning dark and wrinkled in the desert sun, moved rapidly through the stages of life to become slow-moving ancients at an early age, retiring to sit in the shade of memory while directing their grandchildren to open the water channels and flood the fruit trees, when the time was right and memory spoke.

But unlike every other thing in Jericho, Bell didn't age. His erect thin body was still the same and his drooping straw hat was the same and he still went for the same long walks in the desert at dawn and at twilight, a silent white figure off in the distance, alone with his thoughts. Above all, what everyone now talked about was the unchanging state of Bell's terrible face.

Bell's face couldn't change because the shattered bone and muscle had long ago been worked into a rigid mask by surgeons. Those were the medical facts of the matter. But the villagers understood growth and decay much better than surgery, and to them Bell's face never changed because it bore the special mark of God, a sign of that profound inner peace which was the ultimate treasure of every man's soul.

Thus subtly, in time, horror was transformed into beauty and Bell's monstrous affliction became a cause for reverence in Jericho. The idea shaped itself slowly in the shade of the village but eventually everyone sensed the unmistakable truth. The austere foreign hermit was touched by God and immutable, beyond the fingers of decay that turned even the rocks of the desert to dust. The white he wore signified purity of heart and his round single eye, once feared as evil, was now recognized as a sign of the divine presence that penetrated men's souls, the all-seeing eye of heaven.

In the minds of the villagers Bell had become a holy man, in other words, and from then on his gaze and his greeting were revered as blessings.

Beyond Jericho the myth of the one-eyed English hermit continued to acquire ever more fantastic dimensions through the years. No rumor was too extreme to find its way into the fanciful legends that foreign travelers heard repeated with awe in Amman, the desert capital of Jordan.

Nor was official interest in Bell at an end. Two decades after the world war an officer from the British embassy in Amman still journeyed down to Jericho once a year to spend a day at Bell's cottage, ostensibly to inquire after his welfare but in fact to write a detailed report on his state of mind and his habits. For it seemed there were still those in London who were curious about the recluse who had once been the brilliant leader of the anonymous Monks in Egypt.

Bell accepted these official intrusions gracefully, answering questions as best as he could and withholding nothing he felt might be of interest. As the years passed these visits were made by younger men who were unaware of Bell's role in the world war and knew only the mythical Bell of the stories told in Amman — the eccentric English recluse with the appalling wreckage of a face who lived a life of asceticism and alcohol eight hundred feet below sea level, in a town that was ten thousand years old, reading and drinking and refining his soul in the heavy sun of Jericho. So perhaps it was only to be expected that these young officials occasionally let slip some wild piece of hearsay while eliciting information on Bell's front porch, blurting out the latest rumor then making the rounds in the capital of Jordan: And is it also true, sir, that you've existed on nothing but mangoes and arak for the last ten years?

Bell's guest would be sitting poised on the bench beside the front door, notebook and pen in hand, hopelessly mesmerized by the inhuman mask of Bell's face. On the table were Bell's customary two decanters and the usual piles of fruit and books. Bell listened to the insects humming in the orange trees and a twisted look of conspiracy came over his face, an expression Abu Musa or Moses the Ethiopian would have recognized as a gentle smile.

No, it's not true, replied Bell. In fact I've revived the ancient Gnostic rite of eating fresh figs on the night of each new moon. Ripe, sticky, juicy fresh figs, a great basket of them for ceremonial reasons. More than enough to keep a man in visions of ecstasy for an entire month.

SEVEN

No one in Jericho was happier with Bell's miraculous transfiguration than his great friend and admirer, Abu Musa, a patriarch of the village who had innumerable cousins and nephews and nieces, and great-nephews and great-nieces, scattered around the Middle East. Although a grower of fruit trees in Jericho for many decades, Abu Musa was a man with another past. Early in the century he had ridden with the forces of Lawrence of Arabia, triumphantly blowing up Turkish trains in the deserts between Damascus and Medina, and he had never forgotten his spectacular adventures with that famous Englishman. Through some strange quirk of the years the old Arab still associated the English with romantic destruction, with dynamite exploding in barren places in a noble cause, and thus Bell's ruined face to him was a guide to heroic memories and the glories of his own extravagant youth.

Or at least that was the way Abu Musa explained his feelings of friendship for Bell, conjuring up a chaotic imagery which was typical of the old Arab's abstruse mixtures of time and nostalgia and fact, an airy heartfelt exuberance that was as inaccessible to reason as the shifting patterns of sunlight beneath the orange trees in Bell's front yard. For the truth was simply that Abu Musa enjoyed Bell's company. Like Bell, he was a thoughtful man who pondered the world from a distance, and so the two men had much in common.

Abu Musa had discovered Jericho in much the same way as Bell. After his own world war, the first one, like Bell but journeying in the opposite direction, heading west from the deserts on the other side of the Jordan River, Abu Musa had glimpsed Jericho from the heights of Moab one winter and decided it was the place where he should spend his life. When Bell turned up in the village three decades later, Abu Musa sold him a house and under the pretense of giving advice on orange trees, which required lengthy discussions in the shade, he became a regular visitor to Bell's north verandah. Their friendship flourished and Abu Musa soon became Bell's advocate and protector in Jericho.

It was Abu Musa, not surprisingly, who planted the first suggestions around the village as to the secret meaning of Bell's face, when he thought it was time for that miracle to be revealed. Abu Musa believed divine revelation sometimes needed a human nudge, perhaps as a railway in the desert sometimes needed dynamite, so he had gone around delicately placing hints in coffeeshops in order to acquire for Bell the status he felt his friend deserved — that of holy man. This he admitted to Bell only after his secret campaign was well under way. As usual the two of them were sitting on Bell's front porch that day, Bell sipping arak while Abu Musa puffed away on the nargileh he kept there.

A shameless deception, said Bell, with a sneer of contempt, which was the way his face showed affection.

Abu Musa nodded happily, his thick white moustache rising and falling as his waterpipe gurgled and bubbled.

He was a tall heavy man whose voluminous, light-blue galabieh made him look even larger than he was, as massive as a bank of faded morning glories spread over Bell's front porch, where he half-reclined on a bench propped against the wall of the house. In answer Abu Musa waved the mouthpiece of his nargileh in the air, composing an indecipherable script from the whiffs of smoke, perhaps a quotation from the Koran or an obscure reference from the Thousand and One Nights. Sometimes the smoke had the smell of tobacco and sometimes of hashish, depending on Abu Musa's mood.

No deception on my part, mused Abu Musa. I was just tired of seeing you hide behind that tattered straw hat of yours. At a certain age a man must step out in the open and declare himself, and there was no question in my mind that you'd been hiding long enough. So I asked myself, Who is Bell really? What are we to make of him in Jericho? And the answer I heard in my heart was as clear as the peaks of the Moabite hills at sunrise.

Surely he's a holy man. Doesn't he have all the attributes? And if that's the situation, I thought, wouldn't it be better for people to recognize the truth? So I whispered a suggestion here and there and now people are beginning to grasp the truth, God willing.

Bell laughed, sensing more devious schemes at work. A holy man who drinks all day? he asked.

Once more Abu Musa majestically scattered smoke, wafting aloft the mouthpiece of his nargileh as if he were a magician dispensing illusions with a wand.

My friend, he murmured, we live in the lowest and oldest town on earth, far below sea level where facts and the air lie heavy and have done so for ten millennia, much nearer the core of the world than people elsewhere.

Who can be concerned with a little sipping in such an ancient dry hot place? And anyway, no one's claiming you're a saint, just holy. Of course while I was thinking my thoughts back then I also asked myself why I spend so much time on your porch talking and talking and talking, and listening. According to Jericho time I'm nearly three hundred years old, counting four summers and therefore four years for each one on a normal calendar, and it's inconceivable I should be a fool at such an advanced age. No, impossible, surely I should be wise with so many years behind me, God willing. And so? And so I considered these flowers within my head and decided the reason I like to sit here and talk and talk with you, and listen, is because I'm in the company of a holy man with whom such things are right and good and the one true way of the one true God.

Don't you see? It's all very clear when you think about it.

Bell laughed again. Well it was clear enough, he thought, given Jericho time and his friend's logic. Why shouldn't a three-hundred-year-old patriarch assign himself grand motives for his everyday habits?

But Bell also sensed the old Arab was only partly joking and that disturbed him, because Bell knew there was nothing admirable about his retreat from the world, which was caused solely by his unbearable ugliness.

He knew he was a drunkard and a coward who was terrified by the horror of his own face, which to him was a brutal cause for shame, a mark of his utter uselessness as a human being. Indeed, Bell sometimes felt he wasn't even qualified to be called human. Others might think he acted out of humility, but to Bell his ways weren't those of humility but of abject humiliation. No one could ever know what the horror of his face meant

— to him.

For a time, it was true, he had tried to hide reality from himself in the secret conceits of espionage. But all of that clever subterfuge had ended long ago in the Monastery in Egypt. By becoming a recluse in Jericho he had intended to render his soul naked through a life without visible purpose, and the reverence he now saw in people's eyes was causing him a new agony of self-doubt, because he felt he was slipping back into deception. Even the respect shown him by Abu Musa was painful in a way it had never been before.

Bell abhorred deception because of his face. But he also loved Abu Musa and was always careful to hide his pain, for the simple reason that he felt it was his to bear and shouldn't be inflicted on others.

***

Besides Abu Musa, the only regular visitor to Bell's north verandah was his neighbor from the adjoining orange grove, a eunuch and monk who was the biggest man anyone had ever seen. Even Abu Musa looked small when standing next to the great chocolate bulk of Moses the Ethiopian, a resident of Jericho since Turkish times.

The giant had arrived in Palestine early in the century, a retainer to an elderly Ethiopian princess who had come to the Holy Land to live out her last days in pious Christian seclusion. After a few winters on the windy heights of Jerusalem the princess had drifted down to Jericho, where the perpetual warmth was more to her liking. She built a small bungalow and a private chapel in the middle of an orange grove and there devoted her days to prayer and contemplation. Her royal retinue, a half-dozen monks and nuns, had their tasks to perform and saw to her needs. Moses was the youngest among them and it was his duty to sit by the gate of the orange grove and guard the solitude of her tiny estate. This he did from first light to last, wearing the brilliant yellow robes of his native land while positioned beneath a royal poinciana or flamboyant tree. The combination of colors thereby presented to passing villagers was startling even for Jericho — bright yellow and gleaming chocolate, flaming orange-red and deep green. Moses took his role as gatekeeper seriously and managed never to smile while the princess lived, but he also utterly failed to look fierce because he was such a gentle young man by nature.

Once a week the princess had gone into town to select the hot peppers that were used in such abundance in her dishes. She did this with great care, feeling and sniffing each pepper, accompanied on her shopping excursions by a nun-in-waiting and by Moses, who towered along behind the two elderly women delicately holding a parasol over their heads, by his sheer size enforcing an air of decorum where they passed.

On one such occasion a camel in the marketplace had suddenly taken a manic turn and come charging toward the princess, legs flailing, dangerously out of control. Moses, murmured the little princess. Whereupon the giant, without lowering the parasol that shaded his mistress, stepped in front of the crazed beast and reached an arm over its neck and shoulders and gave the camel a heave that spun it up and over and dropped it on its back in the dust. The frothing camel was so surprised it lay with all four legs churning busily in the air, as if it thought it had broken free from the earth and was flying. At the same moment the camel's heavy upper lip fell back to produce a demented upside-down grin, quite friendly. The giant smiled in return and the noble procession proceeded on its way, and thereafter the fearsome strength of Moses was public knowledge.

When the princess finally died she left her property in Jericho to the Ethiopian church in Jerusalem, to serve as a monastery. Naturally Moses stayed on in monastic retirement in the orange grove next to Bell's, a soft-spoken man of kindly humor given to wide smiles now that he no longer had to perform duties as a gatekeeper. He and Abu Musa had gotten into the habit of playing shesh-besh every day, either in the late afternoon or early evening, and when Bell became their friend they moved their game to his front porch, which was convenient for everyone. Bell himself never played, preferring to relax in his chair as he sipped arak and listened to their conversations.

These leisurely sessions over the shesh-besh board, Bell noticed, had a peculiar way of exploring the universe without appearing to do so. Each of the two players, the elderly Arab and the elderly Ethiopian, merely related his thoughts of the day between throws of the dice, without apparently commenting on what the other said. The shesh-besh games had been going on for forty years, however, and Bell was forever amazed at this unsurpassed method of friendship the two men had devised for themselves. Moses the Ethiopian tended to talk about God and the river Jordan and his departed princess, while Moses the Arab talked about flowers and fruit trees and hashish. But somehow, in one guise or another, most of human experience seemed to find its way into their rambling monologues, which for Bell were thereby transformed into comprehensive philosophies of the highest order.

In addition to the small estate next to Bell's orange grove, the princess had owned a bungalow down beside the Jordan where she retired on certain Christian feast days, to pray on the banks of the river and wade in the water in the spirit of John the Baptist. When she died this property was also bequeathed to the church. An ancient Ethiopian monk lived alone in the bungalow as an anchorite, a tiny frail man, mostly deaf, who had shrunk with the years until he was little bigger than a child. One of Moses's duties was to go down to the river every few weeks to visit the anchorite, to bring the man the few vegetables he required and keep the place in good repair.

For these excursions Moses made use of the dead princess's elegant steam coach, an open touring vehicle from the experimental days of the automobile, specially built in Italy for the princess early in the century. She had chosen a steam-driven automobile after having been advised that gasoline, then rare, might be hard to come by in the Middle East. Wood fired the steamer's boiler and Moses preferred olive wood, following the tradition of professional bakers of bread in the Middle East who always used olive wood in their ovens, because of its superior scent and slow even heat.

The coach was a baroque masterpiece. Despite its great age it appeared almost new, for in all its many decades it had made only one crosscountry jaunt of consequence, the triumphant journey from its point of delivery at the port of Jaffa up the hills to Jerusalem, and from Jerusalem down the hills to Jericho. Thereafter it had only been used for the occasional trip over to the Jordan River and back, a matter of a few miles, and the fiercely dry air of Jericho had preserved it as easily as if it were just another paleolithic artifact.

Reflecting its era and an Italian concept of Ethiopian princessly grandeur, the steamer resembled a huge horseless carriage fit for a coronation. A gigantic wooden statue of the Lion of Judah, symbol of the Ethiopian royal house, reared at the front of the coach. The carriage itself was all polished woodwork and shiny black leather with gleaming brass fittings, standing on wooden-spoked wheels half as tall as a man. Fold-down steps gave access to the lofty perch in front for the driver and the spacious cockpit in back for the passengers. An array of thick leather belts strapped down the barrel-shaped hood over the steam engine, as if the forces hidden beneath the hood were so dangerous they might try to break out at any moment. And a long menacing whip stood in a holder beside the driver's seat, on guard and ready to beat back any beast of the field or jungle which foolishly got in the way of the steamer.

To have some company and make a day of the outings, Moses took Abu Musa and Bell with him on his trips down to the river. The day began before first light with the sound of wood being chopped — Moses preparing his fuel for the excursion. In due time he fired up the boiler and the magnificent coach came rolling around the corner to Bell's front gate, where Abu Musa and Bell were waiting. Moses always wore racing goggles when he was at the wheel, his bright yellow robes gusting dramatically in the early morning sun.

All three men waved in greeting and Abu Musa and Bell climbed aboard. Moses filled the entire front seat so his two friends sat in back. Bell, thin and austere in white, pressed himself into a corner and held down his floppy straw hat with the claw of his bad hand. Abu Musa spread himself and his pale blue galabieh over the rest of the seat, a dazzling white keffiyeh on his head for the occasion, set at a rakish angle above his hawklike face.

Are we ready? boomed Moses, studying the gauges in front of him.

Check, replied Bell. Onward, roared Abu Musa.

Moses turned valves and pulled levers and with a whoosh they glided away. Driving was a solemn concern to Moses and he peered intently through his goggles at the road ahead, maneuvering with care and continually tooting the rubber bulb of the hand-horn to alert stray goats and children. Bell sat stiffly erect in his corner but Abu Musa swayed from side to side and merrily waved to everyone they passed, in the manner of some benign desert chieftain reviewing his slaves.

After a stately turn around the dusty central square, where they scattered chickens and raised a chorus of ululations, they headed out of town past the fruit trees and the banana plantations to the edge of the cultivated lands. Once civilization was behind them Moses let fly with the valves and the levers and the coach shot forward, gaining speed on the flat wastes of the plains of Jericho, the expanse of the Dead Sea shimmering deep blue off to the right, the high ridge of the Moabite hills looming up in the distance in front of them, the thin line of green which marked the banks of the river directly ahead.

An advantage of the steamer's engine was its lack of noise, so they floated across the desolate landscape in near-silence, not even disturbing the gazelles in the desert where they passed. It was a sensation of flying, thought Bell, of swooping along a few yards above the earth with all the carefree grace of a bird.

A journey on a magic carpet, Abu Musa called the trip, and the silence of the smooth ride was so eerie Bell sometimes wondered if he hadn't been transported across the centuries to some ageless tale from the Thousand and One Nights.

They floated up to the banks of the river and came to rest near the bungalow. Moses went to find the anchorite and to see to his duties around the place, while Abu Musa and Bell sought out a shady grove beside the water. Bell usually brought a book with him as cover for the hours of daydreaming ahead. But Abu Musa, decisively shameless in old age, at once hoisted up the skirts of his galabieh and went wading boldly into the shallows to amble away the entire morning, playing with sticks and squealing and launching toy rafts on the currents, as delighted in the miracle of flowing water as the youngest of his great-nephews would have been.

Toward noon, his labors done, Moses joined them on the river bank with the picnic hamper packed by Abu Musa. With their feet dangling in the water they feasted in the shade, devouring pots of thick goat's cheese flavored with pepper and olive oil, whole onions and tomatoes and cucumbers and ragged hunks of coarse chewy bread, the rich fare washed down with quantities of fiery arak. After lunch Abu Musa and Bell slept, to awake much later to the haunting strains of an Ethiopian chant and the thump of an African drum drifting down from upstream, where Moses and the shy anchorite were conducting an impromptu service of prayer on the shores of their holy river, far from home.

All too soon came the silent journey back to Jericho, across the stark somber valley in the spreading twilight.

Their magic carpet flew west toward the purple Judean hills and the orange-red sky glowing with memories of the fast-falling sun, the moon and the evening star already fixed in their places for the long night ahead. To Bell that was always the magical time in the desert, when the sun finally sank beneath the hills and the land softened into a thousand colors for a few brief moments, as the sands and the dark sea prepared to receive the full might of another vast starry night over Jericho.

On the evenings of their excursions to the river there was never a shesh-besh game on Bell's front porch. The friends were exhausted from their day's journey and retired early to their separate concerns. Moses to chant prayers in his monastery chapel for the soul of the anchorite who dwelled by the river. Abu Musa to recount his splendid knee-deep adventures with rafts and currents to a crowd of sleepy children. And Bell to sit beside his grape arbor and gaze for hours at the night sky from his still point in eternity, once more a witness to the entire universe laid bare to the eye of man in all its incomprehensible glory, utter joy in his heart at the beauty of the world.

EIGHT

It was around the middle 1960s that Bell got to know Halim, the mysterious and appealing adventurer from Damascus. When strangers turned up in Jericho and wanted to see Bell, it was common practice for them to pay a call first on the man known locally as his protector, Abu Musa. Without an introduction from Abu Musa the hermit generally remained inaccessible, not for a passing word or two but certainly for a more meaningful visit. Abu Musa took his role seriously and guarded his friend's privacy with vigor, turning away the merely curious with consolatory tales of antique Turkish trains blowing up in the wastes. So Bell was surprised when Abu Musa suddenly began insisting he meet this man called Halim whom Abu Musa didn't really seem to know.

At first I thought he was a Palestinian with Syrian connections, said Abu Musa, but then I decided he must be a Syrian with Palestinian connections. His accent and manner tend to move back and forth as it suits him, now Palestinian, now Syrian. He is Syrian after all, as it turns out, but he's also much more, a kind of conscience for the Arab world, a visionary and a man of ideas who's above any one nation or cause. A remarkable man for one so young, great things will come of him. Men look to him instinctively and perhaps he's already a secret leader, who can say.

Bell laughed. It didn't make any sense to him. And how do you know him? he asked.

Through a cousin in Damascus, replied Abu Musa, puffing his waterpipe. Oh he comes very highly recommended, but that's not the point. The way he talks is the point, and his eyes and his smile and his grasp of people and events. Men like Halim are rare, as rare in their way as you are.

Why does he come to Jericho? asked Bell.

To visit the refugee camps outside of town, replied Abu Musa. He has contacts there, naturally. Such a man would have contacts everywhere, it's only to be expected.

Is he political then? asked Bell.

In some manner, I suspect, although I don't know anything about that, nor do I care. I would say, rather, that he's very deep into the affairs of men in all ways.

This time Bell didn't laugh. Instead he nodded, thoughtful, perplexed by Abu Musa's enthusiasm. It was true that Abu Musa had no interest in politics and usually avoided men who were involved in politics.

I turn my back on all of them, Abu Musa often said. They disgust me because they haven't learned the simplest truths yet. Having lived for three hundred years in our Jericho time, I know man's political endeavors are devious and futile and completely without merit when compared to even one flowering fruit tree, which is truly a boundless philosophical subject. . . .

Yet somehow the stranger from Syria had made a powerful impression on Abu Musa. Why did he so much want Bell to meet the man? Was it because he felt the Syrian was a visionary, and therefore perhaps a seeker on his way to becoming holy? Was the purpose of their meeting in order for the man to be instructed in some unknown way in the shadowy and undefined vocation Abu Musa had conjured up for Bell?

These thoughts made Bell uneasy as he was always made uneasy by any reference, other than in jest, to Abu Musa's belief that Bell actually was a holy man. Abu Musa's faith in Bell wounded him because he knew he wasn't worthy of it. But at the same time he couldn't ignore Abu Musa's request, no matter how much it discomforted him. They were too close for that and the old Arab's friendship was too precious.

Bell spoke directly. And why must I meet this Halim? he asked.

Above all because he wants it so much, replied Abu Musa. He's heard about you and feels he must meet you. He needs that, he says. And why? Ah, but the why is not for me to know and perhaps not even for you to know. What is true is that a holy man sometimes has special obligations, to others even more than to himself.

Bell nodded. So it was as he had suspected, he thought. The meeting did have to do with Abu Musa's belief that Bell was a holy man.

Abruptly Abu Musa leaned forward, his face grave as he gazed at Bell My friend, murmured Abu Musa. We leave only one thing behind in the world and that is love. This Halim is a serious man and he says he needs to meet you, so just meet him once for my sake. Then, if you don't care for him . . . but of course you will. No one can help but like Halim. A rare man, like you.

Perhaps a secret leader, Abu Musa had said. Halim was a generation younger than Bell in appearance. Abu Musa obviously knew nothing about it but Bell suspected from the beginning that the Syrian was involved in espionage, an easy assumption for Bell given Halim's self-assurance and knowledge and his frequent trips from Damascus to the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. What Bell couldn't understand was why a Syrian agent had sought him out. What use could he be to Halim? What could Halim possibly need from a recluse who saw almost no one?

Still, he enjoyed Halim's company every bit as much as Abu Musa said he would. When Halim was in Jericho he took to joining Bell on Bell's long walks in the desert at dawn or at twilight. At dawn they walked east, down through the wastes to the Jordan River and back. At twilight they were apt to go in the other direction, over to the western foothills where the wadis began winding up through the Judean wilderness toward the heights of Jerusalem. The ruins of Herod's winter palace lay at the foot of one of the wadis, and Bell often went there to watch the last of the day's light linger on the Moabite hills across the valley. Or they might find their way to the ruins of the other winter palace to be found on the outskirts of Jericho, the one built by the Omayyad caliphs of Damascus some seven centuries after Herod's time. Bell had long been in the habit of wandering among these ruins at sunset and finding a perch where he could watch the darkness descend over the plains of Jericho and the Dead Sea in the distance.

Why in these ruins? asked Halim.

Because they suggest humility, replied Bell in answer to the question about his feelings.

And so it went for much of the time when they were together. Halim asked questions about why Bell did what he did, even the simplest things, much as if he were a disciple who had come to learn. That was the impression Bell had and it was close to the truth, as Bell discovered one night when they were sitting together in the ruins of the Omayyad palace. Halim was smoking and Bell was sipping from the small flask he always carried on his walks, when Halim happened to observe that old Abu Musa actually did believe Bell was a holy man. Bell laughed harshly, mocking himself. With a gesture of despair, he held up his flask in the moonlight.

Oh I know nothing's that simple, said Halim. I know because I once met a man in Damascus, a man about your age, dead now, who was in the Monastery in Egypt during the world war.

And so? murmured Bell, suddenly alert at this unexpected reference to long-dead, secret information.

Well that's all, replied Halim. But naturally I'm curious about what happens to a man after he gives up the monastic life. How he goes on, if he does.

Oh I see, said Bell. Well I suppose what often happens is that such a man merely adds more vows to those he has already made.

Halim smiled at the cryptic answer and they both fell silent as if a great deal had already been said, which of course it had. The Monastery in Egypt during the world war and Bell a part of it? How could Halim have learned about that?

Bell was intrigued and more. He put away his flask and got to his feet. It was time to return to the village but someday, he suspected, he would come to know much more about this visionary from Damascus with his mysteriously appealing manner.

NINE

When Anna looked back over the years when her son was growing up, it was easy to see how much time she had squandered dreaming of worlds that didn't exist. It was a habit that had been with her since childhood, a will to find comfort in the shadowy echoes of imaginary worlds where time was kindly and took nothing, only gave, and there was no need to face the losses of life, that stark Egyptian sun of regret whose glare never wavered.

Echoes, time passing, years gone. . . . It terrified her how life crept by for whole months and years in meaningless routines, only to be cut short by some pitiless insight which shattered the rhythms and revealed them to be no more than a pathetic escape from lost moments. Season after season, day after day, there was always so much to do. Yet suddenly Assaf was five, suddenly Yossi was dead, suddenly she was forty and more and Assaf at thirteen was reading the words from the books of Moses that announced the symbolic coming of his manhood, his turning away from her. So quickly they came, these abrupt moments that pierced her heart and wrenched her out of a kind of time that she preferred to think was everlasting, much as she had felt life's echoes on the narrow street in Cairo — in her childhood — would be everlasting.

She had always thought she would remarry someday, at least vaguely she had thought so. Certainly she had nothing against the idea, and it seemed a natural thing for a woman her age with a young son. Her friends had assumed she would remarry and Tajar, ever loyal, had brought along suitable men on his visits from time to time, or contrived to have them turn up when he and Anna were meeting somewhere. She had affairs with some of them and others became friends, but somehow it never got around to marriage. For a while her memory of Yossi was the reason she gave herself, and later of course there was Assaf and his upbringing and her busy life as a teacher and mother. But Tajar in his blunt way would have none of these excuses.

Although committed to living alone himself — I've always been a misplaced bedouin tracker, he liked to say

— he didn't feel it was a life for Anna, and every so often he put his hand on hers and spoke his heart.

My lovely Anna, he said, time is passing and I fear God is sad. Don't you sense it?

Anna smiled. And why is that? she asked.

For the simplest of reasons, said Tajar. God has a very big heart, but there is one thing that gnaws even at Him and that is when a woman withholds her beauty from the world. I know because a wise old Arab told me.

Not only is it a waste of God's bounty, it leads to disharmony. Men go crazy when there is a beautiful widow around, women go crazy too. Everyone is uneasy and has to stop beside the road to see what might happen next. Nothing can get done and there's turmoil everywhere and God is sad and even I am sad. Shouldn't there be just a hint of a permanent man in your life by now?

Anna laughed and mentioned the usual things.

No no no, replied Tajar. Forgive me, but even though everything you say is true and real, what does it matter?

Yossi always hoped you would remarry someday, he told both of us that long ago. And Assaf, like any boy, would be better off with a father, even a makeshift step-father. And you would be helping society enormously by not causing these terrible disruptions every time we walk into a café. People look at me with loathing and disgust, don't you see it? How can it be, they ask themselves, that this crippled old pervert has such a handsome young woman in his grasp? Is nothing as it should be in the world? That's what they think as they seethe with secret discontent, and why, Anna? Because you haven't met the right man yet? No, I don't believe it. You have to risk life and take the chance and seize it, as frightening and disappointing as it is. It's foolish to let the years go by like a dream, always living in the shadows and echoes of things. Life is disappointment and only dreams are not, but it's the very tension in that, in those failed longings of ours, that becomes the music of the human soul. What use can there be in denying time's counterpoint? . . .

So Tajar went on in jest and eloquence over the years. He was always a wise and loyal friend to Anna, forever helping her in countless ways. He even became a kind of uncle to Assaf. Yet somehow Anna's moments of reflections slipped by and she didn't remarry. Instead time slipped away and she turned forty.

***

One important thing she did do during those years was move to Jerusalem soon after Yossi's death. Thus Assaf grew up in a city divided between its Arab and Jewish neighbors, between its old and new parts, and that was to have far-reaching effects on his life.

Even as a girl in Egypt, Anna had dreamed of living in Jerusalem. Her brother had always talked of going there someday and her father, after all, had been killed in the campaign to take the city, fighting with the British forces against the Turks in the First World War.

Anna first saw Jerusalem when she was moving restlessly from place to place in Palestine during the Second World War, when the city was undivided and its various quarters were open to every wanderer. From the very first moment she was captivated by the ancient walled city with its sense of mystical hope and its haunting beauty: the clarity of the light on its domes and minarets, the subtle colors of its living stone, the mysteries of a glorious past which could never be obscured by the ruins of time. To her it was a vibrant silent dream of a city, its narrow alleys a maze of man's strivings through the ages where even the smallest corner guarded a hoard of secret history, a treasure of secret tales only fitfully at rest in the dust of millennia. For Anna it was a city like no other, and she resolved when first she saw it to live there someday.

Not the sad end of her marriage but Yossi's death in the Sinai was what decided Anna that someday had come. When she told Tajar of her decision to move to Jerusalem he was naturally enthusiastic, since he had grown up there and loved the city more than any place on earth.

At last, said Tajar happily. Of course, my dear Anna, what could be better? It's as if you've been circling Jerusalem all these years the way a bird in the desert circles an oasis before swooping down to the life-giving water. A city of sunlit stones, Anna, and there are faces in the stones of Jerusalem which you will learn to see as you walk its worn gentle hills. The faces of many races and believers, make no mistake, but especially of our people who went up there so long ago to seek what has no end. And there our prophets looked into their hearts to glimpse the unseeable, diviners for the entire race of man and seers of all time on those ancient slopes. Oh yes, Anna, there are faces in the stones of Jerusalem and Assaf will grow up carrying them in his heart. A wise decision. It's so right, so very good. . . .

Tajar helped her find a place to live on a short narrow road called Ethiopia Street, a twisting secluded lane which he claimed was the most beautiful street in Jerusalem. The solid old stone houses with their red-tiled roofs, built by wealthy Arab effendis in the nineteenth century, were set at odd angles in courtyards amidst cypress and fruit trees, behind high stone walls running the length of Ethiopia Street. Flowers and arches cascaded everywhere. Anna had the second floor of a large stone house, reached through an echoing stone corridor that led in from the street to an outside stone stairway which then climbed and turned in the sunlight through banks of bougainvillea, a light and airy place of tall windows and window-doors opening onto wrought-iron balconies, overlooking her courtyard. It was an enchanting house to Anna. Every turn and window proffered an unexpected view, never failing to surprise her with its beauty, with great gusts of warm sunlight swirling through the rooms and deep corners of cool shade.

The winding little street was not far from a slope that led down to the barren, blasted strip of no-man's-land which had divided the city into east and west since 1948, separating Arab and Jewish Jerusalem. She could see the Old City to the east from her house, but not the valley where no-man's-land ran. Yet in fact the border was so near there were bullet marks in the dome of the Ethiopian Church across the street from her house, left over from the 1948 war.

All the better that it's so close to the border, Tajar had said when first he took her to see the house. The call of the muezzin from Damascus Gate in the Old City will float up to you on still afternoons, the bells of the Holy Sepulchre will sound in the darkness, and little Assaf will hear all the wondrous sounds of our Holy City, even in his sleep. . . .

Anna loved her old stone house with its courtyard and flowers and fruit trees and balconies, hidden away behind high stone walls. She loved it so much she wanted to express the beauty she felt, and it was there, on those balconies, that she first began to paint the scenes of Jerusalem which would one day make her famous.

Assaf, too, felt the beauty of Ethiopia Street. But it was its closeness to the mystery of the Old City, as Tajar had foreseen, that was to be particularly important in his young life.

TEN

For Assaf, the image he held of his father never flared or dimmed with the seasons of a boy's growth, never tumbled through the reflections cast by life's day-to-day mirrors, never blurred in the bewildering confusions of childhood. Instead, unshadowed by age and untouched by a human voice or hand, the vision shined pure and immutable, a presence forever shaping his life in unseen ways.

In the visible world of Ethiopia Street and the new world for him of Jerusalem, Assaf clung close to Anna at first. He missed Yossi's warmth and love and the wound never quite healed despite the passage of time.

Inevitably, life seemed incomplete to him and he was always looking for something he couldn't find in the airy rooms of the old stone house, or off on a balcony where the boughs of the cypress trees sighed, or deep in a corner of the courtyard amidst the vines and bright flowers.

His father's death as a hero in battle marked Assaf as special among his classmates at school, as it did for their parents and also for the neighbors on Ethiopia Street. In games and on school outings and in the homes of others, Assaf was always given a central role and an added measure of sympathy, out of honor to his father's place among the fallen. Aware of this special concern for her son, Anna reacted by sometimes being too strict with him. She wanted to provide the discipline he needed but then, feeling remorse, she would relent and let him have his way. In retrospect, she thought herself too strict on unimportant things and too lenient in bigger matters. Somehow it seemed impossible to achieve a sensible balance that would work for both her and Assaf.

Still, she made a great effort to speak frankly with Assaf and explain her actions. He never complained when she did that. Sometimes she wished he would. But instead he seemed to accept what she said as a far more mature person might, because he understood she could only do what she was capable of doing, or perhaps because he was so close to her in his heart that he sensed the helplessness she felt in wanting to do more and be more, to be both mother and father to him and, indeed, to be all those other family members which some boys had and he didn't.

This intense closeness between them had always been evident to Anna, and the divorce and Yossi's death had only deepened what was already there. There were times when Anna truly regretted how much they were alike in temperament, in manner, in feeling. Because it led to a great sharing between them, even when it was unspoken, and she feared in some obscure way that by sharing so much with her son she might be depriving him of his childhood, burdening him with a knowledge beyond his years and denying him childhood's richest gift, that bounty of glowing, joyful memories which could forever be cherished later in life. But Anna's own childhood had been neither lighthearted nor carefree, with her brother her only companion for much of it, and there was no way to know how Assaf's life on Ethiopia Street would have been different had Yossi lived and been part of it, even if only from a distance.

At home Assaf tended to be a quiet, dreamy boy whose fingers worked restlessly while his mind wandered elsewhere. When Anna went out to paint in the afternoons, Assaf sometimes went with her. She would find some peaceful spot in an olive grove and quickly fall under the spell of her work, while Assaf roamed the hillside and explored the crevices in the parched stony land. For hours he would play alone and amuse himself, much as she had done as a child, but it pleased her immensely that he had the sunlit slopes of Jerusalem for his playing fields, rather than the dark narrow rooms on a crowded street which she had known in Cairo.

Assaf gathered rocks and built strange structures, imagining castles and moats and causeways. Or he returned proudly with slivers of pottery to show her, a curved surface or broken handle for her to admire, some secret remnant of Jerusalem's long history which he had recovered from its hiding place in the rocks and crevices.

But if there were a view of the Old City from the hillside where she had led him, Assaf often sat down and did nothing. Then, for an entire afternoon, he would be content merely to sit and gaze through the silver-green leaves of the olive trees at the massive walls in the distance, entranced by the majestic splendors of that ancient mirage which floated so mysteriously on the far side of the valleys, the domes and towers and minarets of Jerusalem lightly adrift in the heavens on the haze of a summer day.

Assaf could also see the Old City from the balcony of his room. When she came to put him to bed in the evening, Anna sometimes found him sitting out there in the shadows, gazing east at the yearning nighttide fingers of the Old City, those same towers and minarets now darkly set against the stars. Anna sat down beside him and held him.

It's beautiful, isn't it, she whispered. So exquisitely beautiful. Nothing in the world can compare to it.

And it's so very close, whispered Assaf. How long would it take us to walk there, if we could?

Ten minutes, no more. Out to the end of Ethiopia Street and down the Street of the Prophets and across a flat space and there we would be right in front of Damascus Gate, which has that name because the ancient road to Damascus begins there. The great golden dome rising above Damascus Gate, beyond it really, is the Mosque of the Dome of the Rock, the rock which was called the threshing-floor of Araunah the Jebusite when King David first came to Jerusalem and made it his capital, the place where Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac and where Solomon raised the Temple and where Mohammed is said to have mounted his horse to ascend to heaven, a great broad rock which is the heart of the Temple Mount. And on one side of the Temple Mount is the retaining wall known as the Western Wall where our people have prayed for two thousand years, since the Second Temple was destroyed. And to the right of Damascus Gate are the two domes of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and in between and all around are the minarets and spires of the other churches and mosques.

Assaf nodded. He knew all this by heart but never tired of hearing it repeated.

And are the alleys of the Old City the way Tajar describes them? he asked. Are there really so many different peoples speaking so many different languages and living in a dozen different eras? Two dozen different eras?

Anna smiled at these words of Tajar repeated so exactly by her son.

Oh yes, she said, it never really changes. It was still like that when I went there before the city was divided.

Someday I'll go to the Old City, said Assaf.

I hope so, sweet one. When there's peace you'll go. But what do you think when you look at it now?

I think of father, said Assaf. I want to go there for him because he never could. I want to stand at the Wall and say his name and repeat his name so God will know I came for him. To the Wall, the place, for him.

***

Surely it's good, Anna, said Tajar. It's right for him to think of Yossi as he longs for our City of Peace. It's only as it should be. Nothing could be better for Assaf than to be growing up in Jerusalem. And peace will come, you know. There won't always be a divided Jerusalem and an ugly no-man's-land between us and the Old City. We've negotiated with the Jordanians before and it will happen again. A little time is all we need. You'll see. . . .

When Assaf was growing up he heard many stories about his father, lovingly retold by Anna and Tajar.

Yossi as a boy in Iraq, for one. Yossi leaving his village every afternoon to run across the fields and the desert to the town where he had worked as a bookkeeper, running and running as fast as the wind, seeing and feeling everything. This memory from his father's life became so deeply embedded in Assaf that he himself had to live it out in some way, which was how his dangerous trek to Petra came about.

A strange dream, the ruins of Petra, and Assaf wasn't alone in feeling its lure.

***

The desert capital of the vanished people known as the Nabataeans lay in the biblical land of Edom south of the Dead Sea, about fifteen miles east of the Israeli border near the Wadi Musa, one of the traditional sites where Moses struck the rock and water gushed forth. From Petra, some two millennia ago, the Nabataeans controlled the trade which brought spices from India and Africa to the Gulf of Aqaba, and thence by caravan up the Great Rift to Damascus in the north, and across the Negev in the west to Gaza, on the old route of frankincense and myrrh to the shores of the Mediterranean.

Herod's mother was a noblewoman of Petra. Both accessible and secluded in ancient times, its valley was enclosed by cliffs of red and purple sandstone eroded into fantastic shapes and displaying towering rock-cut temples and tombs with columned façades, so huge they appeared to be deserted palaces fashioned by a forgotten race of giants. It was an eerily romantic place which was lost to history before the Middle Ages and only rediscovered when the Swiss explorer Burckhardt passed that way in the nineteenth century and wrote his famous description of Petra: a rose-red city half as old as time.

For Assaf as for other young Israelis, the dream of seeing forbidden Petra became one of those symbolic journeys that can haunt the youthful adventurers of a generation, a way of breaking out of history's confines through a near-mystical trial of courage and daring.

The journey through enemy territory could only be made at night. During the day the intruder had to hide in caves or crevices. Jordanian army patrols roamed near the border, and there were wandering bedouin who would report a hiding place or a footprint. The land was stark and lifeless, deeply cut by the erosions of thousands of years. If there was enough moonlight to illuminate the jagged terrain, then there was also enough light for a lone figure to be visible from a great distance.

There was no easy way to reach Petra. Even if the route hadn't traversed enemy territory it would have been an arduous desert crossing in darkness. And with Jordanian patrols and hostile bedouin out hunting and waiting in ambush, the dangers of the journey were extreme.

Nor was any practical purpose served. It was an act of pure bravado to cover that dangerous distance merely to gaze down on the ruins of Petra for a minute or two, from some crag, before turning back. But of course the appeal of the adventure was precisely its purity.

Some never found the ruins and others never came back, but for those who reached Petra and did return there was a singular sense of triumph. He's been to Petra, people whispered. A young aspirant to the Mossad, those elite of the elite, was sometimes casually asked by an interviewer: Have you been to Petra?

Before long a popular song about the forbidden journey to Petra was banned by the Israeli government, so seductive was the lure of this lost city to the young.

Assaf was one of the lucky ones who succeeded. He was only fifteen at the time, younger than most. An Israeli army patrol picked him up when he crossed back over the border just before dawn. Anna was severely shaken by the news and turned to Tajar, who left at once to drive down to the army post in the Negev where Assaf was being held. During the drive Tajar thought of many things he could say to Assaf but rejected them all. In the end, when he arrived at the army post, he led Assaf to the side of a hill and sat with him in silence, looking out over the desert in the direction of Petra.

At fifteen, Assaf was already as tall as Yossi and as darkly handsome. He had a quiet and thoughtful manner which resembled his father's reticent charm, but he was less spontaneous with his feelings and given to a kind of solemnity unusual in one so young. Tajar saw aspects of Yossi in his son, but the boy's reserved nature also reminded him of Assaf's uncle, David, Anna's dead brother. Assaf's dignity mixed with melancholy, in fact, was exactly what Tajar recalled of David when he had known him in Cairo during the world war.

Anna also recognized this resemblance and had spoken of it to Tajar, who accepted what she said without mentioning that he readily saw the similarities himself. For Anna was still unaware that Tajar had once known her dead brother. When Tajar met Anna after the world war he didn't say anything about her brother, because he didn't want to cause her pain by reopening the past. Then later there seemed no reason to bring up the matter. Now Tajar was sorry he lacked this additional bond of kinship with Anna and her son. It might be especially helpful to Assaf, he thought, and he decided to speak with Anna about it as soon as he could. But that was for the future, when the shock of the Petra adventure was behind her.

After sitting with Assaf in silence for a time, Tajar found he didn't want to say anything so much as to listen.

As for Assaf, he was more frightened in a way of Tajar, the known, than he had been of the unknown during his days and nights on the journey to Petra. Finally, nervously, Assaf spoke up and admitted as much. He also mentioned Anna.

She's deeply disturbed, said Tajar. Show her as much love as you can when you see her, and remember, she takes no pride in what you've done. She can't. You're her only child and to her the trip was dangerous and pointless and nothing else.

Assaf gazed down at the sand, sifting it through his fingers.

And you, Tajar? How do you feel about it? he asked softly in Arabic, a form of intimacy between them since Assaf's earliest childhood.

I feel it was dangerous and pointless and also that what's done is done, replied Tajar. So what I want now is for you to tell me about the trip. What and where and how, and the ruins, and everything you saw and felt from the moment you crossed the border until the moment you returned. I want to hear it all so I can tell you what you might have done better. The ancient, colossal ruins of Petra glimpsed for a moment beneath the stars? What are they, Assaf, but an exquisite fantasy? An illusion and a dream and a way station of the soul? Of course the journey is always what counts, sweet one, the journey and nothing more. You know that now and it's an impressive piece of wisdom to have learned at your age. So tell me about it, every detail.

Solemnly Assaf did as he was asked. He had always felt close to Tajar but never closer than that afternoon when they sat together on a hill in the Negev, gazing across the desert, and Assaf talked of his secret journey into his heart to see the mysterious ruins of Petra by starlight, to behold the ancient wonders of that unforgotten lost city of caravans somewhere to the east — a dream and an illusion which Tajar knew from the very beginning could only be connected in Assaf's mind to the Old City of Jerusalem, always so close to Assaf when he was growing up yet always just over there beyond reach, a dream on the other side of the valley.

***

A few years later Tajar sat with Anna on her balcony one cold winter day in Jerusalem, the two of them bundled up against the weather. The heavy sky was gray and threatening but even when it rained they often sat on the balcony, looking down on the courtyard with its lemon and cypress and fig trees. It was December 1966, the month of Assaf's eighteenth birthday when he would go off to begin his military service. That morning he had told Anna he was volunteering for the paratroop brigade, an elite unit which took the most casualties in time of war.

Tajar rose when Anna told him the news and hobbled inside and returned to the balcony with a framed photograph, which he placed on the table. It was a photograph of Yossi at the age of twenty-nine, in a paratrooper's uniform 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. A photograph of a handsome and dashing young officer who would never age, who always smiled and was eternally a hero — the image of his father that Assaf had lived with since the age of eight.

Tajar looked at the photograph and sighed.

Ah yes, he said. All these years this has been sitting on your desk, Anna, so how could we have expected anything else?

ELEVEN

The Runner operation grew significantly in the middle 1960s. More and more information flowed into the Mossad from Damascus. Equally important from Tajar's point of view, there was now a back-up team supporting the Runner from Beirut and even in Damascus itself. The team eased Tajar's tasks and greatly strengthened the security of the operation. Tajar had always hoped to have such a team someday.

Communicating with a deep-cover agent and receiving his material was by far the greatest danger to any long-term penetration. With a back-up team of professionals handling communications, while the identity of the Runner remained unknown to them, everything was simpler and safer. Of course putting such a team in the field was expensive and difficult in itself, and the operation had to justify the additional support it entailed.

Tajar had made plans for such a team long ago, but the opportunity for setting it up came sooner than he expected with the downfall of Little Aharon.

For more than a dozen years the rabbi's son from the Ukraine had run the Mossad as his own private fiefdom.

Except for the few months right at the beginning when Tajar was in charge, the Mossad had never known another director. Through hard work and an emphasis on personal loyalty, Little Aharon had taken over a small country's intelligence effort and built an international reputation for the Mossad. His successes were legendary. And because the Mossad was small, Little Aharon had always been able to run it as a family.

There was no real command structure and little in the way of operational procedures. Instead there were Little Aharon and those who worked for him.

But as admired and powerful as Little Aharon was, and as ruthless, he was unable to survive the political upheavals that came with the decline in fortune of the country's founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, who had often used Little Aharon as a troubleshooter in domestic affairs. Over the years Little Aharon had made many enemies. As Ben-Gurion faltered and finally went off to retirement in the Negev, those opposed to Little Aharon eased him out of the Mossad. For the Mossad without Little Aharon, as for the country without Ben-Gurion, it was the end of an era.

Military intelligence had always been the junior partner in Israeli intelligence. The director of military intelligence reported to the army chief of staff while the director of the Mossad reported directly to the prime minister. After Little Aharon's downfall, the man picked to replace him at the Mossad was the army officer who ran military intelligence, General Dror, once a flamboyant battlefield commander.

General Dror had been the army's second-ranking officer during the Sinai war in 1956, and he might have become chief of staff had he not believed so strongly that a general's place was with his men. He took a paratroop refresher course after the 1956 war, and his parachute failed to open all the way on a jump. General Dror survived, barely, and spent eighteen months in a hospital. His days as a field commander were over but eventually he was brought back into the army as chief of military intelligence. Subsequently he became the focal point for those in the government, particularly those in the army, who were opposed to Little Aharon's power and the way he used it.

As director of the Mossad, Dror began to make changes to tighten it as an organization. Immediately he was faced with a revolt. Many of the Mossad's senior members threatened to resign and others withheld information from him. The father figure had gone and the family was angry. Inevitably, Little Aharon's men saw General Dror's appointment as a takeover by the military.

To Tajar, the whole affair was deeply ironic. Years ago he himself had lost out as chief of the Mossad because he wasn't considered as capable as Little Aharon of administering a government agency, because he took too personal an interest in his agents, because he ran operations in an old-fashioned way out of his pocket. Now Little Aharon was being accused of these same faults by the more efficient and better organized men Dror had brought with him from the army. A further irony was Dror's near-fatal parachute accident. But for that accident Dror would still be an army field commander, probably chief of staff. And but for his own near-fatal automobile accident years ago, Tajar himself would still be in operations in the field, not overseeing them.

One of the criticisms of Little Aharon was that he had ignored day-to-day intelligence from the neighboring Arab states, which the army needed, in favor of more glamorous operations in Europe and elsewhere. Dror meant to correct this by reshaping the Mossad and redefining its priorities. As it happened, Tajar was the Mossad's leading expert on penetrating Arab countries. He also ran one of the Mossad's most effective Arab penetrations, and against its most militant neighbor: the Runner operation in Damascus. Lastly, Tajar was an old hand from Little Aharon's generation. His experience went back even farther than Little Aharon's and his expertise was impeccable. No one was more respected among the senior executives of the Mossad.

For a variety of reasons, then, Tajar was a natural ally for Dror to turn to in his new job. Tajar recognized this and decided to make use of the circumstances that had come his way.

Suddenly I seem to be back in favor at work, Tajar told Anna. Is it possible that if you survive long enough your ideas come back into fashion, the way old clothes do?

Anna laughed. She knew Tajar worked for the ministry of defense, perhaps in military planning, but she wasn't aware he was connected specifically with intelligence. Or at least that's what she told herself. Tajar never talked about the nature of his work and she preferred not to speculate on it. Since the death of her brother long ago in Cairo, intelligence had always been a painful subject to her. Tajar knew this and avoided it.

Well I suppose it's possible, said Anna. It happens in other things, why not in ideas?

It's an odd one for me all the same, said Tajar. I'm much more used to being considered an old crank who was born before the flood. I'll have to be careful not to let it go to my head. It's almost enough to make me feel young again.

They were sitting on Anna's balcony watching a fierce spring downpour soak the flowers in the courtyard, the sweep of the rain softened by thousands of tiny fingers on the cypress trees. Tajar hummed his way through an old song and Anna smiled wistfully, her eyes far away. The song had been popular when she first met Yossi on the little settlement in the Negev, during the war for independence.

Another world, she reminded herself. Another world that's gone and no longer exists except in memory.

***

Dror sensed at once that Tajar's support for him within the Mossad hinged on the Runner operation, because it was the only important operation Dror had no trouble getting his hands on. Elsewhere, in other cases, essential details were withheld or buried and Dror had to dig to uncover them. But Tajar was lucid and straightforward when he briefed Dror on the Runner operation. Obviously Tajar wanted the new director to appreciate the value of the operation, to invest in it and make it his own.

It was also apparent to Dror that Tajar was almost alone among the senior Mossad executives in not feeling threatened by the appointment of an army officer as director. Tajar made this clear by always referring to Dror in an easy manner as the general, to his face, the only senior executive who did so. To others Dror was a general only behind his back. Given the atmosphere of the Mossad after Little Aharon's downfall, this habit of Tajar's never seemed to emphasize Dror's seniority but rather, in some subtle way, had the opposite effect of expressing an equality of feeling between the two men. Dror knew that Tajar had always stood alone, that he was unattached to any particular doctrine and without ambitions for himself. His concerns revolved entirely around the Runner operation.

In any case, Dror had a high opinion of the Runner operation from the very beginning. It was an extremely clever long-range penetration, meticulously planned at every stage, each aspect of its development exactly fitted to the personality and character of the Runner himself. Dror admired this careful planning and was quick to tell Tajar that he did. It was the kind of planning that won wars, he said.

In particular, Dror was struck by the Runner's recent involvement in the repair of Syrian armored vehicles. It was nuts-and-bolts work, but to a military man the opportunities inherent in it were intriguing. And at that point in his briefing, curiously enough, Tajar all at once lost his place in his files and began rummaging through papers, giving Dror a chance to let his imagination roam.

For years the Syrians with the help of the Soviet Union had been constructing a vast series of fortifications on the Golan Heights, most of them underground and invulnerable to air attack. These self-sustaining concrete bunkers and gun emplacements went on for miles surrounded by hidden tank traps, a massive in-depth defense that was a kind of modern Maginot Line. But in Israel's case there was no question of ever being able to go around the fortifications, the way German panzer divisions had swept around the flanks of the Maginot line during the invasion of France in the Second World War. The nature of the terrain in the upper Galilee denied that possibility. It was direct shelling from the Golan that continually caused Israeli casualties in the settlements of the Galilee. In any future war against Syria the Golan Heights could only be assaulted directly, from the bottom straight up the steep slopes and then on and on through those miles of buried emplacements. Most military planners, and not only in Israel, thought a direct assault was impossible. To get through the maze without being cut to pieces, an assault force would have to have extraordinarily detailed information on the exact location and strength of the entire network of in-depth fortifications.

When Dror finally mentioned the Golan, Tajar stopped shuffling papers. He looked up and nodded. The two men were alone in Dror's office.

What we're talking about now, said Tajar, is a very great quantity of information. First the Runner would have to get his hands on it, then he would have to ship it to us. The task would take several years, with the Runner concentrating on one section of the front after another, or however he could manage it, and all the while the flow of physical material would be enormous. He'd have to map out the entire complex because the Golan's a mosaic, integrated, and even a number of pieces wouldn't provide what's needed.

Could he get the information? asked Dror.

I think he could, replied Tajar. Both the commander of the Syrian paratroop brigade and the Syrian minister of information are personal friends. The nephew of the Syrian chief of staff, a junior officer who spends a lot of time on the Golan is a close personal friend. And there are others. The Runner has the right military connections and the repair work he does increases his access. But he'd need a back-up team to move the material for him, so he could devote himself to acquiring it. He can't do both. No one working alone, in a place as hostile as Damascus, could move that much material. And anyway, communicating via Europe the way we've been doing was never meant to accommodate an assignment such as this.

What kind of a team? asked Dror.

Professionals with experience in Arab countries, replied Tajar. Mostly working out of Beirut but with several of them resident in Damascus. They won't know who the Runner is and he won't know who they are, and they'll never meet. It's the only secure way to move so much material.

Dror nodded, smiling. Do you have some people in mind? he asked.

By chance I do, replied Tajar. Several other operations will have to be readjusted because some of the men are already on assignment abroad, but that can be worked out. As soon as the men are back here I'll begin training them for exactly what's required. They should be Runner specialists from now on and the Runner operation should take priority for them.

Do you have a timetable? asked Dror.

And a tentative cost sheet, replied Tajar, pulling out papers and putting them on the table. We should begin by bringing the future members of the team in from the field immediately. Later this month I'll see the Runner in Belgium and he and I, together, will work out the functioning of the team. In less than six months you can expect to see results. The Runner's fast, General, as you'll discover. In fact he works miracles. . . .

Dror was known for his daring as well as his careful planning. Tajar was given his hand-picked team. As before, only Tajar and the director of the Mossad knew the true identity of the Runner. The members of the back-up team were led to believe the Runner was an Arab but not a Syrian national, perhaps a military attaché or a diplomat on assignment in Damascus, in any case a man in an extremely sensitive position.

Security would be complete, with Tajar himself overseeing every detail.

***

When Tajar told Yossi the news in Belgium, they both took pride in the moment. Yossi knew the significance of the Golan Heights and was deeply pleased their work was taking this specific course. Mapping the Golan would be an immense undertaking, of enormous value to Israel and precisely the kind of task for which they had waited so long.

This is it, isn't it, said Yossi with enthusiasm. Now at last — this is it. Everything we've always prepared for.

Yes, this is it, replied Tajar. And with a team behind you to take care of all the logistics, now at last you can raise your eyes to the horizon and truly fly like the wind.

Yossi nodded. And remember every detail where I pass, he said, just as I did when I was a boy running across the desert.

Just so. The Runner even then, mused Tajar. But I suspect life is often like that, secretly. Finding our true way is perhaps no more than being what we have always been . . . but with eyes that see. And in that you're fortunate, Yossi, because you go much farther than most people ever can. Few people see as much of where they pass in life as you do. I know, because I once lived that way myself. Often it can seem isolating, and it is, but the isolation is no greater than anyone else's, really. It's just that other people aren't so aware of it, the way they're not aware of so many things. But intensity, eyes that see . . . well, it's exhilarating beyond all else and once you taste the drug you can never give it up because it's the ultimate addiction in life. . . .

Living. Now. Knowing it.

You miss it so much, don't you, said Yossi.

I do, replied Tajar. But I also have you and that's a great gift. It's true these two legs of mine are ugly and stiff and awkward, twisted pieces of smashed flesh and bone that barely carry me from one place to another, but in my mind I can run with you and see what you see and feel what you feel and that's a very grand thing. So do it all, Yossi. Do it for yourself and that will also be doing it for me, and more. Every bird that flies is a joy for God to behold. . . .

***

He's confident, Tajar told Dror upon his return from Belgium. He doesn't see any insurmountable difficulties.

The next step is for me to work with the team, then move them into place as soon as we're ready.

In the beginning Tajar often brought back the members of the team from Beirut, and once or twice from Damascus, in order to question them at length in person. He wanted to know exactly what they saw and felt and suspected, and what he learned encouraged him. The Runner was protected, safe as never before. The operation was proceeding smoothly on its new course.

As for Dror, he was discovering that the Runner could indeed work miracles.

TWELVE

In 1966 there was another army coup in Syria and a more extremist military government took power. In the spring of 1967 Syria began pushing Egypt toward a new war with Israel. The Egyptian leader Nasser, the hero of the Arab world, asked the United Nations to withdraw its troops from the Sinai and the United Nations did so. Swept along by his own and other Arab propaganda, Nasser lost control of events and massed a thousand tanks in the Sinai near the Egyptian border with Israel, then blockaded the Gulf of Aqaba, closing Israel's outlet to the Red Sea and the east. Syria and Jordan and Iraq were on a war footing and military units arrived from Algeria and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

Israel faced an Arab force of two thousand tanks, seven hundred frontline aircraft, and two hundred and fifty thousand troops. The leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization made his famous statement that the Arabs would throw Israel into the sea.

On the morning of June 5, 1967, Israeli planes destroyed most of the Egyptian air force on the ground and the Six-Day War began.

***

On the morning of June 5, Assaf's paratroop battalion was waiting in an orange grove near an airfield in the south. The rumor was that they would be dropped that night on el Arish, the Egyptian town not far from the border on the Mediterranean, to gain a bridgehead and await Israeli tanks striking across the border into the Sinai. But by early afternoon their orders had changed. The breakthrough toward el Arish was going so swiftly there was no need of a paratroop drop behind enemy lines. Instead they left their parachute gear and got on buses to go to the Jerusalem front, where the Jordanians, already on the attack, had taken United Nations headquarters and were shelling the coastal plain in the center of the country.

They were shelled all the way up the narrow corridor to Jerusalem, which had been the Israelis' only access to the city since 1948. The confusion on the road was enormous. Israeli units were fighting the Jordanians on both sides of the corridor while Israeli supply trucks and infantry wound up the road trying to reach the city.

The bombardment was continuous. Night came, increasing the confusion. As they drew near Jerusalem after dark the shelling intensified. The Jordanians held the heights around the city and were bombarding Jewish Jerusalem with mortars and artillery.

Assaf's bus lost its way in the darkness and they arrived in the city late, after the paratroop battalions had already gone into battle a few hours after midnight. Assaf and the others left the bus and began running through the city in search of their units. The streets were deserted and no lights showed in the houses, but shells were dropping everywhere. They guessed where the fighting was from the intensity of the explosions and the tracers crossing the sky and headed in that direction.

The streets were familiar to Assaf because in fact the main fighting was not far from the old stone house where he had grown up on Ethiopia Street. The paratroop battalions, it turned out, had been sent on a night attack against the most heavily fortified Jordanian positions in the divided city, a complex of bunkers known as Ammunition Hill, which lay just to the north of no-man's-land and Assaf's house. At the same time another paratroop attack had been launched to the east directly across no-man's-land, toward the center of Arab Jerusalem in the valley below Assaf's house.

When the alleys became unfamiliar Assaf realized he was close to no-man's-land, but the fighting was still up ahead of him so he knew the paratroopers must have already opened a breach in the Jordanian lines. He stumbled around a wall and came upon a unit of recoilless guns mounted on jeeps which was supporting the breakthrough. They told him his battalion was in the breach up ahead. Many wounded paratroopers, some from his unit, lay in the street waiting to be evacuated.

Suddenly the area was lit up by tracers and a mortar shell fell between the jeeps, blowing one of them into the air and killing some men and wounding others and further wounding those who lay on the ground. He helped pull the wounded into buildings and helped bandage them and then moved on toward the sound of the heaviest firing, where he knew the breach had to be.

Men were rushing in every direction through the smoke and the flames and the darkness, trying to find their units and bringing up guns and ammunition and carrying back the wounded. He kept asking for his company but no one knew where it was. Shells exploded everywhere as the Jordanians poured out artillery fire from their positions along the ridges to the north and the east, trying to break the night attack on the low ground through no-man's-land.

Men were hit by shrapnel, fell, got up and ran again or lay still. It was a chaos of screams and shouts and explosions and shrapnel, of pulling back the wounded and rushing forward into more flames and explosions and shrapnel. Assaf never stopped running and crouching and running, pushing on toward the main fighting.

He had passed dozens of dead and wounded paratroopers before he saw a Jordanian soldier for the first time, dead, lying beside a machine gun with two dead paratroopers a few yards away.

To open a breach, the assault units had to break through five lines of barbed-wire fences and mines before they reached the first Jordanian bunkers. Beyond that front line of bunkers were more bunkers and connecting trenches and fortified gun emplacements between stone houses and stone walls. The fighting went on in the trenches and alleys and houses, behind the walls and on the roofs and in the cellars. Bunkers and houses were taken two or three times as one paratroop platoon after another fought its way through the breach and the Jordanians moved back through the trenches into the houses, which came to have names of their own for the paratroopers: the house of the burning roof, the house with the pillars, the house of the yard.

More and more wounded paratroopers were being brought back from the area around the breach. By four o'clock in the morning dawn was beginning to break, but black clouds of smoke from the mortar barrages still covered the breakthrough area and kept out the daylight. This was a help to the paratroopers because they couldn't be seen from the Jordanian bunkers, and also a danger because it became more difficult to pinpoint enemy fire from the flashes the guns made in darkness.

Assaf was through the breach now, beyond the area of barbed wire and mines and the open fields of fire, among the squat stone houses of Arab Jerusalem which lay to the north of the Old City. He had fallen in with a platoon from another company in his battalion which was moving south along a narrow street, keeping close to the stone walls on each side of the road and fighting from house to house.

As they passed the gate to the house of the yard, which had already been cleaned out twice, firing burst out at them and two paratroopers near Assaf were hit. The platoon commander pulled one of the men back behind the wall. He seemed to be dead. The other man who had been hit managed to crawl through the gate to a hut just inside. He was spitting blood and appeared to be dying.

Assaf and another paratrooper ran through the gate into the yard, throwing grenades and firing their Uzis to cover the man in the hut. A third paratrooper was firing into the yard from across the road.

There was a Jordanian soldier firing from a trench in the yard, another Jordanian firing from a corner of the house, and a third firing from the second story. A grenade exploded against the wall of the house and the soldier on the second story disappeared. A grenade exploded in the opening of the trench and the Jordanian there disappeared. The firing stopped from the corner of the house and they went back to the hut by the gate, where the wounded paratrooper was already dead.

The platoon moved on up the road in the darkness, shrinking in size as it advanced and men were wounded or left behind clearing out houses. The large YMCA building of Arab Jerusalem appeared on their right.

Paratroop units had already passed it but now a machine gun was firing at them from the upper stories.

Assaf and some other paratroopers raced across to the door and went in. They passed a dying Jordanian soldier lying on the stairs. A burst came from somewhere and hit the paratrooper beside Assaf in the thigh.

They went up the stairs and divided, two paratroopers down the right wing, Assaf down the left. They faced long dark passages with rooms opening onto them from both sides. They had to check each room, open the door, burst in.

Assaf burst into a room with his Uzi at his hip and caught a glimpse of a terrifying enemy facing him, features distorted and blackened, a weapon at his side, ready to kill. He fired a burst and a mirror shattered in front of him. Do I really look like that? he thought.

There was no one on the floor. They crept up the stairs to the next floor and a burst of automatic fire came down the stairwell from the attic, hitting one of the paratroopers in the shoulder and hand. Now there was only Assaf and one other paratrooper. They didn't dare throw a grenade up the stairs in case it rolled back down on them, and they didn't think just the two of them could go up the stairs against a man armed with a machine gun.

Assaf went to a window to see if he could signal for help and was immediately fired upon by paratroopers down below and by Jordanians farther up the street. Just then a tank shell shook the building, fired from one of the Israeli tanks that had finished on Ammunition Hill and had come down to join the paratroopers advancing toward the Old City.

Assaf and the other paratrooper decided not to try the attic alone. They took their wounded comrade and made their way back down the stairs to the ground floor. The paratrooper who had been wounded when they entered the building, near the front door, had already been carried away. When they came outside they saw their tank up the street, firing its cannon at the top of the building.

The advance was pinned down at the next strongpoint, a mosque which was right across the street from the American Consulate of East Jerusalem. The paratroopers were trying to fight their way past the mosque, along an alley that would come to be called the alley of death. Unknown to the paratroopers, a network of trenches and bunkers ran through the open area beside the mosque right up to the end of the alley, which also had a concrete bunker running along its entire length.

An anti-tank grenade knocked out the Jordanians who were firing from the top of the minaret. A makeshift squad of paratroopers, Assaf among them, was put together for another charge up the alley. As soon as they entered it they came under deadly fire. Grenades were thrown at them and splinters of rock flew through the air.

The officer leading the squad was killed, then the paratrooper behind the officer was killed. The whole line of paratroopers in front of Assaf was falling and dropping. Suddenly Assaf felt an intense burning in his chest and one of his legs went out from under him. He landed hard and men were running over him, continuing the attack, rushing up the alley through the smoke and the flames and explosions and shrapnel. The burning sensation in Assaf's chest was overpowering. A boot drove into his back. Darkness came over him and he remembered nothing after that.

***

Eventually Assaf had found his battalion but not his company. He had done all his fighting with another company, which had lost its way in the night assault. The company had fought its way up the wrong street in Arab Jerusalem, but it made little difference because the area was so small. They were supposed to be on the street that led to Herod's Gate in the Old City, while in fact they were on the street that led to Damascus Gate, a little to the south. The alley of death where Assaf was wounded was very close to the Old City, no more than four hundred yards from Damascus Gate.

By seven in the morning the assault was over and the paratroopers occupied all the buildings facing the walls of the Old City from the north. The fierce night attack had carried them the length of Arab Jerusalem. There were still Jordanian positions on the ridges east of the city, so another day was to pass before the colonel in command of the paratroopers led his men through Lion's Gate, the same northern approach that had been used by the Babylonians and Romans and Crusaders in taking Jerusalem. The Old City itself passed to the Israelis without any organized resistance within the walls.

The Old City was taken on the third day of the war. The Jordanians had been beaten back along the central front and were retreating to the east bank of the Jordan River. On the fourth day of the war Israeli armored units reached the Suez Canal, trapping what was left of the Egyptian army in the wastes of the Sinai. The paratroop battalions in Jerusalem were put on buses again and sent north, along with all other available troops from the southern and central fronts.

At noon on the fifth day the assault on the Golan Heights began. No surprise was possible and the Syrian army was fresh, having done no fighting, whereas the Israeli units were tired and worn. The assault forces rushed straight up the steep slopes with heavy losses, fighting their way through the massive Syrian fortifications which both the Russians and the Syrians had considered impregnable. In a little over twenty-four hours the Israelis accomplished the impossible and conquered the entire Golan.

And thus on the sixth day the new war came to an end.

THIRTEEN

Assaf's wounds were not as serious as Anna and Tajar had feared. He would have restricted movement of his left shoulder and perhaps a slight limp, but the rest of his body would mend with time, they were told. When Anna was with him in the hospital Assaf kept up a show of courage, but when Tajar was alone by the bedside Assaf let all his bitterness pour out.

It was horrible, he said. Even when we were succeeding it was horrible. Men are ripped apart and blown to pieces and you just keep pushing on trying to kill. It's brutal and ugly and there's no sense to any of it.

There was a family hiding in one of the Arab houses we went through, he said. We had to stay for a while because we were giving covering fire. The family was huddled in a corner watching us, as still as death except for a little girl who couldn't stop crying. It was a small room and they were just a few feet away. We were firing out the windows. While I was reloading I said something to the little girl, trying to comfort her. She wasn't surprised I was speaking to her in Arabic. Then it struck me. She was too young to know enemy soldiers don't usually speak in your tongue because enemy soldiers are always from another country or tribe or another something. Her father was surprised but not the little girl. We were ready to leave and I had a moment before crossing the yard. I knelt beside her, wanting to stop her terrible sobbing. It's going to be all right now, I said. The soldiers are moving up the street and you'll be safe in your house. She didn't stop crying but I knew she heard me. Then she choked out some words between the sobs, pathetic little words that were meant to explain her crying and justify herself in front of her family. I'm so frightened, she said. This is my first war.

Tajar leaned over the bed to hear Assaf, who had closed his eyes. A shudder ran through Assaf under the sheets. He opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling, speaking in an exhausted voice.

Her first war, repeated Assaf. That's what she said in that room where her family was huddled in the corner as silent as death. If this were the last war then maybe I could justify what I saw and did that night. But where is the last war? My mother conceived me in the first war and my father was killed in the second war and I was mangled in the third war and . . . what's the matter with people? What's wrong with their minds and their hearts? This isn't survival or life or anything at all a man can speak about. It's just horror. War.

Tajar sat with his hand resting on Assaf's arm, saying nothing, listening. Some of the exploits from Tajar's early life had become known to the public by then, not his intelligence work in Arab countries but his efforts to smuggle Jews into Palestine when it was still under British rule. Accounts had appeared in books and Assaf made reference now to these histories.

And I'll tell you something else, said Assaf. If I were asked to rescue people, I'd volunteer for every mission as long as I had the strength. Bringing people to safety and freedom? That's easy because there'd never be any doubt in what you were doing and never a fear in yourself. Who doesn't want to help people? It's right and it makes you feel good and that's the way it was when you were my age, Tajar. That's what you faced and you did it, but doing the right thing then was simple. Don't you see it's not that way now? You were lucky. You saved lives. But that's not what I'm called upon to do. I lie awake at night listening to a little girl cry. But when she's older and stronger and harder, when she knows hate better, maybe she'll no longer cry. . . .

Sadly, Tajar listened to Assaf pouring out his feelings. It was all understandable after what he had been through, with his body still in great pain. He was severely troubled and more time would have to pass before they could know how his experiences had changed him.

We can only wait, Tajar told Anna after describing what Assaf had said to him. The psyche adjusts to trauma in so many different ways, we just can't assume anything yet. But the resilience of the human spirit is a wondrous thing, truly limitless. Despair passes and anything can be born from it, anything at all. And Assaf is very young and he's strong inside, so we'll wait and watch and listen, and we'll see what we can do to help him regain his footing.

Tajar was a profound comfort to Anna that summer. She didn't know how she could have got through the first visits to the hospital without him, or the days and weeks that followed. Often in the evening he turned up after work at her house, unannounced, and the two of them would sit on her balcony until a late hour, talking quietly in the shadows beneath the stars, a heady fragrance of jasmine drifting up from the courtyard on the night breezes. Anna was now aware that Tajar had once known her dead brother David, in Cairo during the world war, so their conversations carried even further back into the past, spanning her entire life.

We try so very hard, she said to Tajar one night, but no matter how hard we try we never do very well. And people always seem to struggle for the same causes, wanting life to be a little better for their children than it was for them, but what comes of it?

Are you referring to your own life? Tajar asked after a moment.

Yes of course, she replied. Here I sit twenty-five years after the death of my brother, who was my only living family then, while my only child is lying in a hospital in pain, tormented by his terrible memories of a night in a place where I brought him, in that valley just below us. I thought I was trying when I brought him here. I meant to try and I did try as best I could, but what have I done? What have I done and why? Just look what's come of it.

Tajar knew there were tears in her eyes without being able to see her face. He could hear the tears in her voice and feel them in the darkness. He stirred and a match flared as he lit a cigarette.

What have I done and why? he murmured. It's a question that never gets answered and always has to be asked. And what, I wonder, did you do today, Anna?

I went out, she said simply.

And?

I was painting. I went out and painted.

Where?

On a hillside. Just on a hillside.

Just on a hillside in Jerusalem, you say. And why, Anna?

To forget, she replied. And to remember. And to know a moment of beauty in Jerusalem.

Tajar nodded in the shadows. And just so is life, he said. To forget and remember and know the beauty of one afternoon in Jerusalem. . . . Surely no sage has ever said it better.

FOURTEEN

The extent of Israel's victory in the Six-Day War astonished the world. A tiny new nation had triumphed against overwhelming odds. In America photographs of Israel's dashing, one-eyed military leader, General Moshe Dayan, appeared with the legend: We try harder. And in Israel itself the euphoria was complete.

Everyone saw a new era. Security and prosperity and peace — the good things of life were only a matter of time.

The Mossad had played its part. Dror and Tajar had planned wisely and the Runner operation was a brilliant success. No one had done more for victory than the Runner himself.

Yet Tajar was profoundly disturbed, alone in the gloom he felt. It made him angry to drag around secretly grumbling when everyone else was ecstatic, but no matter how hard he tried he couldn't shake his depression. His gloom was inexplicable to others. He managed to hide it from Anna, or so he thought, but others sensed it readily enough and spoke to him about it. The young men he worked with at the Mossad were particularly incredulous.

What's the matter with celebrating a great victory? they asked him. It wasn't just some gift from heaven, so why plague yourself about whether we deserve it or not? And as a matter of fact, Tajar, we do deserve it. We earned it. Our boys did it, the whole country did it. We all made the sacrifices and made it happen. The Arabs were the ones who wanted war, not us. They pushed and pushed for war and finally it came and we gave it to them, and they've learned their lesson. They're finished and now they'll have to make peace.

Tajar grumbled and shook his head and went shuffling off in his awkward gait. Nobody's just finished, he thought. It doesn't happen like that to a people. Doesn't our own history prove it doesn't? You can't just humiliate a people and expect good to come from it. Anyway, nations don't learn lessons the way a child does, history isn't as simple as that. People learn to hide and survive or hate and survive or dream and survive, but the one thing they do is survive and not with acceptance in their hearts for those who humiliate them. A million more Arabs under Israeli rule? It's impossible. It can't be, it won't work.

Behind his back his younger colleagues found reasons for Tajar's feelings. He's always been very close to the Arabs, they said. Naturally he understands how they feel and now when they've taken such a beating, when they've lost so much territory. . . .

But it wasn't territory Tajar was thinking about. It was people that haunted him. He had profound respect for the despair born of humiliation and what it could lead to. And of course it was also true that he had been intimate his whole life with Arabs and Arab ways, unlike so many of the men he worked with, who were of European descent and oriented toward a European past.

Or maybe it's those other things they say, thought Tajar. Maybe it's just that I'm from another generation, an old Jew, the old Jew. Perhaps I worry and fret when things go well because I'm too used to things not going well. The old Jew? Well I am old. Fifty-one is old when you first risked your life on a mission thirty years ago and have gone through a world war and three other wars since then. But can there really be an old and a new man in that respect? Do the inner ways of a people change so suddenly from one generation to another? Can feelings and perceptions become obsolete in only a decade or two and be discarded, like some weapon from the battlefield that doesn't fire as rapidly as a newer model? Is human nature like that? Are people like that?

Is there something wrong with me because I can't accept our generals as heroes and our little country as invincible?

A mere two decades after the holocaust, thought Tajar, and the nation of two million Jews defeats their enemy nations of eighty million and the whole world applauds as if history had suddenly reversed the evil of the holocaust, easing everyone's conscience a bit, while even we applaud the wonder of our new selves, the new Jew inside us who's proud and young and strong and says never again.

Well it's true I must be from another time and place, thought Tajar, because something deep inside me doesn't like any of it. The Arabs wanted war and we had no choice, but I fear what's happened. We're out of balance, the proportions are wrong. War isn't our strength as a people and generals shouldn't be our heroes.

Those are foreign gods, for others. Nor are the Arabs Nazis, nor is Israel in Europe, nor should anyone pretend we're settling history's scores. Israel is here and we're not of Europe or the West. We're a people of the far more ancient Middle East, one of many, who have wandered and come home, where all our neighbors are Arabs and always will be Arabs. True, they don't have to accept us, but if we're going to live here we have to accept them. And even to begin to imagine we can remake the world here in six days and rest on the seventh? It frightens me. In that presumption lies arrogance, the hubris of the ancient Greeks, the insupportable pride from which all human tragedy flows. . . .

Tajar tried to keep his gloomy fears to himself. In any case there was no one he could really talk to about the feelings that had come over him. The men he knew professionally all had other views, and Anna had Assaf and her own concerns. What she needed from him then was confidence and assurance and strength, the same qualities he had always been known for in the Mossad.

Tajar's house was very near Anna's, just around the corner and up the Street of the Prophets, for it was a part of Jerusalem he dearly loved. When he left her on her balcony in the evening he took a long time going home, hobbling slowly through the shadows and stopping to gaze at the noble old buildings dark against the stars.

Finally he reached his turn off the Street of the Prophets, a collapsed gateway with a giant cactus rearing inside it. The scarred ancient cactus, taller than a man and many yards across, gave an appearance of desolation to the gateway, as if the desert had crept into Jerusalem and taken over an abandoned lot. But in fact the cactus merely guarded the gateway and hid what lay beyond it from the curious eyes of passers-by.

Once around the cactus a large compound opened up, unkempt and seemingly impenetrable, the silver leaves of thick-trunked olive trees shimmering above a solid tangle of flowering rosebushes gone wild with the years. A giant cactus and gnarled olive trees and roses blooming in confusion — for Tajar, it was a Jerusalem kind of splendor.

The compound was enclosed by a high wall. Beyond the cactus a narrow path wound its way into the tangle.

There were glimpses of three or four small stone houses sheltering off to the sides near the wall, but houses and wall alike were mostly obscured by the bushes and trees. Sometimes the houses were occupied and sometimes not. They were tumble-down little places left over from the nineteenth century, as was the compound, and people seemed to move in and out of the houses as it suited them, without any particular notice to anyone, staying for a while and leaving when they found something better.

Tajar had bought his house years ago when he was recuperating from his automobile accident. Here he had learned to read Homer and also to walk again. The path wound through a final maze of rosebushes and all at once there was an open space and his low stone house standing beside it, at the very end of the walled compound.

It was a tight little cottage built close to the ground, no bigger than the others in the compound but in good repair. An English painter of Jerusalem in the nineteenth century, William Holman Hunt, had once lived in the house and Tajar enjoyed the associations of paintings having been created there.

He had a hammock strung between a corner of the cottage and an olive tree. Often in the summer he brought a blanket from inside and lay down out there, unable to tear himself away from the vast beauty of a starry night over Jerusalem. Often, too, he fell asleep in the hammock without even closing his eyes, it seemed, for one moment he was gazing up at the stars in a perfect stillness and the next moment he was stirring stiffly, a faint light of dawn gently nudging him awake.

I sleep in the yard like an old horse, he thought with a smile, gathering up his blanket to go inside for another hour or two of rest before it was time to begin the day. But there was so much to see in a Jerusalem night, how could he possibly close his eyes on such exquisite beauty?

Still, he wished there were someone he could talk to who understood his work, not the everyday details but what it meant to him, the scope and direction of his life and especially the new concerns that troubled him as a result of the June war. And then all at once he thought of just such a man, the man he had sent Yossi to see a few years earlier for that very reason, so Yossi in his isolation in Damascus could have someone to talk to who understood.

Bell. The one-eyed hermit of Jericho whom Tajar had worked for in Cairo during the world war. Just the other day Anna had mentioned Bell, recalling his mysterious connection to her brother David and the way he had helped her in Egypt long ago.

Bell? Naturally Tajar had kept himself current with Bell's situation in Jericho over the years, for professional reasons and also out of curiosity. Jericho was a small place and it was easy enough to come by reliable information, and of course he would never have sent Yossi to see Bell if he hadn't been sure of Bell's circumstances.

And now as chance would have it, Jericho was in Israeli hands and Bell was living only fifteen miles from Jerusalem, in the same place where he had been living for the last twenty years. And what might that mean for me? wondered Tajar.

In a world of secrecy and fury and chaos, it was astonishing how short distances were and how quickly things changed. Indeed, how near an unexpected friend could be.

FIFTEEN

In Jericho on the morning the June war began, Abu Musa and Moses the Ethiopian came drifting over to Bell's front porch and positioned themselves on their benches, there to remain most of the time during the next days, taking comfort in the company of friends and keeping a kind of vigil. As the hours of light passed into darkness and the darkness passed back into light, Abu Musa and Moses brooded over the shesh-besh board on the table between them, playing game after game and saying little. As usual Bell reclined in his tattered chair to the side, sipping arak and saying even less.

At first the Arab bulletins on the radio spoke only of victory. But the noise of heavy fighting came echoing down the hills from Jerusalem, and since the Arabs had begun with positions of strength surrounding the city on three sides, with the Israelis holding only their narrow corridor up to Jerusalem from the coastal plain, it seemed likely to Bell that the fighting was in fact going the other way. Perhaps in the excitement of going to war against the Jews, he thought, the Arabs were once more indulging that profound Levantine trait of preferring the mirage in the distance to the dreary stretch of desert at hand, the rich prospects of fantasy rather than the gritty facts of everyday life.

This seemed even more likely to Bell when the bombardments on the heights of Jerusalem all but ceased at the end of the second day of the war. By then Jordanian troops were moving through Jericho but they were all heading east across the river, away from the fighting. From time to time Abu Musa rose and went inside the bungalow to pick up the latest news on Bell's old radio, which he relayed to his two friends when he returned to the porch.

Total Arab victories everywhere, announced Abu Musa the first day.

Total Arab victories continuing in a glorious manner on all fronts, he announced on the second day. It sounds bad, he added. They must be losing.

Total Arab victories everywhere in the most glorious of manners and the Jews are being thrown into the sea, he announced on the morning of the third day, when the bombardments had stopped in Jerusalem.

You don't sound pleased, said Moses. What does it mean? Can you decode the bulletin for me?

I can, replied Abu Musa. In such a situation, when the mirage recedes in the distance and the desert track is long, our brothers generally mean the opposite of what they say. So the truth is probably that the Arabs are being defeated everywhere in the most ignominious of manners, while the Jews are advancing away from the sea on all fronts. Moreover, the silence we hear with our own ears from Jerusalem is ominous. Perhaps the Jews have already taken east Jerusalem and the Old City and are at this moment on their way down to Jericho? Perhaps we'll see them this very afternoon in Jericho? That's what the bulletin means, decoded.

The two men went back to their shesh-besh game. That afternoon an Israeli mechanized battalion came rolling down from the western hills and sped through Jericho. There were no defensive positions in the town or on the plains of Jericho, so after some sporadic firing around the police station the battalion left a few jeeps and soldiers in the central square and moved on north up the valley. The Jordanian troops had already retreated across the river and all was quiet in Jericho once more.

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.