Jericho Mosaic (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 4)

by Edward Whittemore

  It seems so, replied Assaf.

  Why?

  Because I feel I know him much better. Because everything about him is so familiar to me. Am I wrong, though? I was only eight when he died and you were his best friend. Do I see him clearly? Was he as I remember him?

  Oh yes, certainly he was, said Tajar. I only wanted to point out that the apparent mysteries of the past are not always as enlightening as we like to think. My own feeling is that David, now, can’t tell you what you want to know about yourself. Despite Anna’s recollections of him, or my own.

  Assaf laughed.

  You’re contradicting yourself again, he said. If the past is intriguing because it’s important, why shouldn’t I pursue it?

  Tajar also laughed.

  Exactly, he said. But can its mysteries ever compare to what goes on around us today? As for contradicting yourself, welcome it always as putting you closer to the truth. The tapestry shifts from moment to moment, just as the unchanging desert never stops changing.

  SEVEN

  I FIND IT STRANGE all the same, Tajar said to Anna later. Why should a vigorous young man with his whole life ahead of him be more obsessed by the past than a creaky, battered old camel like me? It’s upside down, backwards. I urge Assaf to seize today and he nods sagely and goes on to ponder what was and what might have been. Does that make sense to you?

  Anna smiled. I guess it has to, she said. He doesn’t have a past or much of one, so naturally he peers in that direction to help him find his whereabouts. If you and I don’t look back it’s because we know what we’ll see. And also because we’ve already done that enough.

  Tajar moved his crippled legs with his hands to a more comfortable position. As so often, they were sitting on Anna’s balcony and gazing down on the courtyard crowded with flowers.

  I suppose you’re right, he said. Anyway, I’ve never been cut out to be a mother. I don’t have the patience.

  Anna laughed. I don’t think God or the state ever intended you to be a mother, she said. But you do have patience, much more than most people. To me, the important thing about Assaf is that he’s become so outgoing. He takes far more pleasure in people than he ever did, even before he was wounded. When friends of mine are here he wanders in and laughs and tells stories and is actually charming. People remark upon it. They notice how he has changed. Deep down he’s as serious as ever, but he gets along with people now and that’s just wonderful. It’s because of Yousef, mostly. Knowing Yousef set him to thinking in so many ways. He’s come alive since then.

  Anna paused and looked down at her hands. Her voice was soft, uneasy.

  Our poor Yousef. Has anything? …

  No, sadly, replied Tajar. There’s been no news at all, I’m afraid.

  Yousef’s self-imposed exile was a painful subject for Anna. She became silent and withdrawn when she thought of it, for it was all too easy for her to imagine Assaf having done something like that if the circumstances had been different. All these years later, as Tajar knew, Anna still recalled how her brother had retreated into himself when faced with a world that was too much for him, and the memory hurt her even now. She couldn’t bear to think of her son closing himself off that way, which was exactly what she had feared might happen after Assaf was wounded. His deliverance from that, by way of Yousef, caused her heart to ache all the more for the lost one—Yousef—since it brought a measure of shame to the joy she felt. To Anna, Assaf’s new success with people seemed inextricably linked to the suffering of another, and that she found intolerable.

  Tajar understood this.

  Look, he said, it’s just not so that what Yousef has done is connected to Assaf. Yousef would have done it anyway, whether he’d met Assaf or not. His exile has to do with the Six-Day War and the PLO and Jews and Arabs not living together in Palestine, and the grand city of Jerusalem and its poor neighbor on the other side of the Mount of Olives, his own tattered little village of el Azariya, and with his brother’s senseless death and his need to do something after it that would count with himself. Those are the things, the facts, that influenced Yousef to do what he did. Assaf’s friendship only added to Yousef. It gave to Yousef. It didn’t take anything from him.

  And yet their destinies are linked now, Anna said softly. They have to be … how can it be otherwise? I feel it because I know Assaf feels it, so what do facts matter? Assaf visits Jericho more than ever, and what are those visits but a pilgrimage to his common ground with Yousef? To a place they shared and do share, Assaf now and Yousef in memory, down there near the river on the other side of the Judean desert. Isn’t that what Jericho and the house in the orange grove have become for Assaf … a place of pilgrimage?

  After leaving Anna that evening Tajar shuffled back to his cottage at the end of the wildly overgrown compound and stretched out in his hammock beside the rosebushes. Wrapped in blankets against the summer chill, he gazed up at the starry night over Jerusalem and tried to put his feelings in order. He was thinking mostly of Yousef and Anna and Assaf, but his thoughts kept drifting away to Jericho and the house in the orange grove … Bell’s house.

  Soon after Yousef disappeared, Tajar had put a permanent tracer on him because of his friendship with Assaf. When the Shin Bet or the border police acquired information on Yousef, it was forwarded at once to Tajar. The security services had no idea why someone in the Mossad could be interested in a man as low-level and inconsequential as Yousef, a former village schoolteacher in hiding, a nominal member of the PLO who wouldn’t take up arms. Yousef’s name was buried in a long list of PLO supporters whose routine activities were reported to the Mossad, when there was anything to report. Of course the security services would have been far more interested in Yousef’s quixotic behavior if they had known their information on him was going to someone as important as Tajar. But that was the last thing Tajar wanted. Even the commandos, who logged most of Tajar’s communications within the Mossad, didn’t know about the tracer on Yousef. Those reports, meager as they were, reached Tajar by a different route.

  Subject said to be living in caves east of Hebron.

  Subject said to have friends among the bedouin, or among the village boys, who cache small amounts of food for him when grazing their flocks.

  Subject said to have been living in the southern Judean desert during the middle of the month.

  Always vague and fragmentary accounts. Never an actual sighting or an actual contact, only hearsay and rumors from the villages on the edge of the desert. But for Tajar that in itself was remarkable, for it meant Yousef was adapting quickly to his fugitive life. He was learning to survive in the desert as an unseen presence and Tajar respected that. Inevitably, perhaps, it also reminded Tajar of the special talents of the Runner.

  Tajar understood well enough the attraction of Jericho for Assaf now that Yousef was gone. Indeed, Tajar himself was strongly attracted to the house in the orange grove, although for different reasons. Soon after the Six-Day War Tajar had planned to pay a visit to Bell, hoping to renew their acquaintance, but then Assaf’s friendship with Yousef had intervened and Assaf had met Abu Musa and Bell, which complicated everything. The Runner was now on the other side of the border from Jericho and could no longer go there, but professional judgment told Tajar the only safe course was caution. Reluctantly, he put aside for a time his desire to appear at Bell’s front gate.

  Then came the astonishing revelation that Anna also knew Bell.

  Tajar had never suspected that Anna might connect the one-eyed hermit of Jericho with the former British intelligence officer who had helped her in Cairo after David was killed, who had also provided her with papers to come to Palestine. Bell had gone by a different name in Egypt and had lived in Jerusalem for only a short time after the world war, obscurely and quietly, before moving down to Jericho. For nineteen years Jericho had been part of Jordan and there was no reason why Anna should know who Bell was. Before 1967 the one-eyed hermit’s reputation had existed on the other side of the border, on the ot
her side of no-man’s-land, and it wasn’t something Anna could have heard about in west Jerusalem. Tajar knew about Bell because of intelligence files, because he had always been interested in Bell and had made a point of keeping track of the former head of the notorious Monastery in Egypt. But no ordinary Israeli could know anything about Bell.

  Bell, after all, had buried his past life, his clandestine life in espionage, with great care. Not even Abu Musa knew anything about it.

  The story came out when Anna told Tajar of Assaf’s first visit to the house in the orange grove in Jericho. Anna had paused then to smile at Tajar.

  The hermit Assaf speaks of, she said, is the man who did everything for me in Cairo. But since it’s your business to know things, you’ve probably known that all along. Have you?

  Tajar was astounded. Well … yes, he replied. As a matter of fact, I did know it. But it amazes me that you do, because his past is a very well-kept secret. Once he left Egypt, Bell, as he has called himself since then, went out of his way to put his old life behind him. And I’d say he has had great success in doing just that.

  You knew him in Cairo, didn’t you? asked Anna. Through your work then?

  That’s right.

  And he was important, wasn’t he?

  Oh yes. Very.

  I’ve always thought he must have been, said Anna. And I’ve always imagined you must have known him, even though I’ve never said anything about it. I asked him once, later, why he had done so much for me in Cairo. I knew it was connected to David but not how, exactly. He wouldn’t talk much about it, or he couldn’t, but he said there had been a terrible mistake with David and that was why he did what he did for me. It touched me so deeply, looking back, his caring that way and taking the time to do something about it. Cairo was such absolute chaos then, and for a man as important as he seemed to be to come on his own to find me … well, he could have sent someone but he didn’t. He came himself. He was the first person to come, you know. I was alone in the house with all the doors and shutters locked when he turned up to help me. I was lying in the corridor downstairs near the back door, the door to the courtyard. The floor was stone. It was hard and cold and dark and I was terrified, half out of my mind. There was nothing left, just nothing. Somehow he got into the house and lit a candle and all at once there was his face above me in the darkness … life, and what a face. He brought me back from the dead and I’ve never forgotten any of it…

  Even now, all these years later, Anna shuddered at the memory of that darkness and terror when she had thought she was slipping into madness. Her hands came up in front of her in a pathetic involuntary motion. Protection against the darkness? A plea to the angel of death to be merciful? She gripped her arms and tightened her fists, forcing down the fear and memory from long ago. After a moment the shudder passed. Quietly, she resumed her account.

  So with his help I came to Palestine, she said. Then one winter after the world war ended I was walking down a street in Jerusalem, not far from here. The street was narrow and it was raining hard and blowing and I was struggling along with my head down against the wind, all wrapped up so I couldn’t see much of anything. A car came along and I had to get out of the street because it was so narrow, so I pushed into a doorway and there was a man doing the same thing beside me. He was coming from the other direction and if it hadn’t been for the car right at that moment we wouldn’t have seen each other’s face, just each other’s feet slogging by in the rain. But we both looked up to find a place to push into and there he was. It was him, with most of his face hidden by a scarf and a hat and his coat collar. You can imagine my shock. I hadn’t seen him since Cairo and I had no idea who he really was. I didn’t even know his name and of course I didn’t know what had become of him. We just stood there staring at each other.

  Anna fell silent. Suddenly she smiled.

  That face, she said. How could anyone ever pretend to act in a normal way with a face like that just there all at once in front of you? No one in the world has a face like that.

  Anna went on smiling, a gentle smile.

  It’s like a mask, she said. Some inhuman kind of mask that’s so extreme and unlikely you can’t believe it at first. That great bulging staring single eye, and the bulging black eye patch, and the scars and all the rest of it. It’s a face you have to be warned about, to prepare yourself for, otherwise you just stare and stare because it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen. Now I can smile about it because I came to know what was beneath that mask, but I couldn’t then. His face paralyzed me then. And meeting him like that, both of us drenched with the water streaming off us, huddling in a doorway … it was absurd and ludicrous and wonderful, and fearful and joyous and ridiculously awkward all at the same moment, just everything. I was paralyzed and my heart leapt, both at once. But I’m afraid I’m making no sense at all, trying to describe it all these years later…

  They stood in the doorway until finally one of them suggested they get out of the rain. Bell, for that was his name now, lived nearby and offered coffee and a fire. They went to his small apartment where the rooms were half underground with walls of stone several feet thick, the broad windowsills on a level with the garden outside, a snug and cozy retreat on such a blustery winter afternoon. Bell poured brandy and built a fire in the stove and soon they were warm in front of it.

  The rooms were heaped with books. Bell was studying Arabic, he said. He read and did little else. He had some disability pay from the war and intended to live on it, to begin a new life in some remote corner.

  Anna told him of her own years since Cairo, of her wanderings in Palestine. Bell was reticent, polite, sometimes shy. He wanted to be cordial but it was apparent he hadn’t put his old life behind him and didn’t know how to behave with Anna, who in a way was from that old life. Yet she wasn’t really a part of it and Bell had nothing to fear from her. To reassure him, she promised at once never to say anything about having known him in Cairo.

  But no, then she realized it was his own face that was making him reticent and fearful. He didn’t seem to know how to behave with a young woman. From what he said she gathered he had no friends in Jerusalem and saw almost no one other than the Arab scholar who came to tutor him. In Cairo she had thought he was important, but now she realized he had probably been much more important than she had imagined. Without an official position and the status that went with it, and the automatic relationships that went with it, he didn’t know how to act, especially with a young woman. He was unsure of himself, even lost. Alone now with his face, with his freedom, he hadn’t yet learned how to make his way.

  The rain splashed on the windows and they drank more brandy and became lovers that afternoon. Far more than him, it was Anna’s doing. She had much to thank him for, more than she ever could, but there was also something beyond even that. So seldom could one make a profound difference in the life of another, and Anna sensed she had that gift then, for in his way he was as alone and fearful as she had once been in Cairo. As they lay in front of the little stove and the rain beat down in the half-light turning to darkness, Bell told her as much. Since the shattering of his face, he said, it was the first time he had been with a woman in a regular way, as if he were just a man who could meet someone and…

  They saw each other for several weeks. Anna came to him every afternoon and stayed through the night and it never seemed to stop raining the whole time they were together. Love was the delicious smell of olive wood smoke and rain softly beating down outside on the garden above them, and brandy and an early darkness and a warm cheery stove hidden away from the world for long tender evenings. Then she was busy for a few days, and when she came again Bell said he had decided to move to Jericho. He had found his remote corner of the world, he said. They held each other and Bell smiled. A warm smile. Anna knew his face by then…

  So that’s what he did, she told Tajar. Then not long after that I left Jerusalem too, and found my way down to the Negev. And the British were leaving Palestine and the
Arab countries invaded, and a new life began for me as well. I’ve never told anyone about it, not even Yossi. There seemed no reason to. It was a long time ago, twenty years ago, and it was a few weeks that belonged to two people. Since then I’ve never heard from Bell, or of him, not until Assaf came back from Jericho with his story of the three wise men and the house in the orange grove, with its forty-year shesh-besh game and a one-eyed holy man who oversees it with a glass of arak in his claw.

  I don’t doubt Bell knows Assaf is my son, said Anna. One of them down there must have asked Assaf about his background, or Yousef could have talked about me or whatever, and Bell would have realized who Assaf is, I’m sure. Not that he’d say anything about it. But it’s strange looking back, isn’t it? It seems we all have these rare and beautiful moments hidden away within us, turnings we could have taken in life but somehow … didn’t. Once or twice during those few weeks with Bell, you see, we both considered … well what? A life together? We didn’t come out and say it in so many words, but it was there in front of us, seriously so. And if we had decided to try that, given his nature and mine, it probably would have gone on for a lifetime. As it happened the time wasn’t right then, or so we thought. He needed to be sure of himself and to know he could manage on his own with his face, although I never had any doubts about that. And I thought I still needed to be able to wander, to be free to move around and find myself, although it couldn’t have been so very important to me because soon after that I ended my wandering, with Yossi.

  What’s strange about it to me now, said Anna, is that I know it could have worked with Bell. Oh yes, it could have worked and all the years would have been very different. Not better, but different. And how true it is that the turnings on the path are often so subtle, so unsuspected at the time, that we pass them by with a wave and a smile and a near arrogant ease. Yet when we look back in life the reasons for our choices seem unbearably flimsy and silly, which is confusing and even frightening. A totally different life which could have worked just as well as the one we have? That’s something none of us likes to think about. Instead, we try mightily to forget our other worlds that might have been, and with good reason. But all the same those rare and beautiful moments from the past live on within us, no farther away than the smell of an olive wood fire or the sound of rain beating softly on a garden, time’s unquiet ghosts, haunting our memories with secret whispers of what if? …