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 tha
t 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 ho
pe 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.
Jericho Mosaic (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 4) Page 9
