Unhappily, it means the Runner is going to have much less to tell us about airplane hijackings and other things, Tajar said to General Ben-Zvi, the director of the Mossad. But I suppose it was inevitable that the Russians should learn their lesson like everyone else. Having the Syrians as allies is one thing, but working out of Damascus is another. As the Egyptians used to say, quoting their brothers the Iraqis, who had it from their brothers the Jordanians, who borrowed the saying from their brothers the Palestinians, who were repeating an old proverb of their brothers the Lebanese: With brothers like the Syrians, who needs? …
Led by Sadat of Egypt, the October war of 1973 was launched against Israel. Syria’s tank brigades fought well on the Golan Heights and briefly it looked as if they might win back the territory taken by Israel in the Six-Day War. But Israeli air power was too sophisticated for the Syrians and their army was beaten with dreadful losses. Once more Ziad came to sit through long evenings with Halim on his friend’s broad empty verandahs, above the overgrown gardens where the villa’s solitary broken statues could be glimpsed among the trees and hanging vines, elegiac guardians of lost memories.
Ziad was especially gloomy. It’s hopeless, he said. I was sure we were at least going to break even this time. But no matter how well we fight, we lose anyway. The Russians give us last year’s weapons in abundance, but the Americans give the Israelis next year’s weapons and there’s no comparison. Courage has nothing to do with it. Technology decides the outcome and we can never fight them as equals. If we did we might win, and who knows, maybe even the Russians don’t want that. What’s the point of it all? We’re simply used as murderous toys…
As after the previous war, the Russians rearmed the Syrians with improved weaponry and the Americans rearmed the Israelis accordingly. In matters of electronic guidance for shells and missiles and bombs, and counterelectronic systems to overrule them, nothing could compare to tests under actual battlefield conditions.
More then ever Beirut flourished as the Middle Eastern entrepôt for pleasure and money and arms and drugs, the convenient meeting place for everyone with something or someone to buy or to rent or to sell. The oil embargoes had arrived with the October war and oil became the great black weapon of the world as the price shot up. The industrial nations of Europe scrambled to strike covert deals with the sheiks of the desert. Enormous sums were to be made by entrepreneurs at every level. Western banks and corporations came to Beirut to help the oil princes dispose of their stupendous new wealth. And everyone in Beirut had to be serviced: the bankers and sheiks and corporations, the myriad business representatives from every country with oil or in need of oil, the arms dealers and smugglers, the drug merchants from Africa and the West, the intelligence agencies from all the countries of the Middle East, the intelligence agencies from the major countries of Eastern and Western Europe, and the biggest players of all with their spy satellites roaming the heavens—the KGB and the CIA.
Plots and schemes and trade. This for that in Beirut, with a cut for the smiling industrious people who provided the sun and the waterskiing, the seaside hotels and the dark back alleys, the appropriate setting for any transaction.
Trade in every guise had been the vocation of the Lebanese coast since the time of the Phoenicians, five thousand years ago. The temples of true believers had always been elsewhere, beside the Nile and the Tigris and the Euphrates and in Jerusalem and Damascus.
It was almost a surprise for Halim to realize how great a distance the Runner had traveled in the last years. A pattern had settled over his business enterprises and he no longer had to concern himself much about them, now that he wasn’t trying to start up in new fields. The same earnest manager still ran his office in the building that had the Hotel Brittany on the top floor. The man had been with him more than a decade and they were old friends. Halim seldom had to interfere with his decisions.
In addition to his export-import business, Halim was generally involved in two or three partnerships which turned some profit. He wasn’t wealthy but he was successful for a Syrian. He gave part of his income to charity as would any worthy Moslem in his position. The Runner’s back-up team was Tajar’s expense, but the Runner himself cost the Mossad nothing. In any case the back-up team was smaller than it had been before the Six-Day War, when the Runner was concentrating on tactical intelligence and moving a great deal of material, quickly. The cupboard-toilet dead drop was almost never used anymore.
Halim still rose early and walked to work for the exercise, taking different routes to vary the scenery. By now he knew hundreds of people along the way, familiar faces from over the years who greeted him and passed along the neighborhood news, sold him his cigarettes and newspaper, inveigled him to pause for a Turkish coffee. When he entered the lobby of his office building, the Tatar horseman on guard there solemnly raised his antique Mauser rifle with the red tassel at its end, in the morning ritual of salute. Halim conferred with his manager and dropped in on his bookkeepers, always a pleasantly nostalgic pastime for the boy hidden away in him who had once done bookkeeping.
At least once a week he rode the creaky cage-lift up to the top floor to have coffee in the hotel lounge and visit with his old friends who still worked there. He went out and walked to appointments in downtown Damascus, then met a business acquaintance for lunch near Martyrs’ Square or by the river. He took a taxi home after lunch and observed the siesta hours, unplugging his phone and resting or reading until late afternoon, when he was known to be at home to visitors. He carried the phone out to the gathering of chairs beneath his fig tree, and there people came and went.
Halim welcomed them all, his Syrian friends, his Palestinian friends. He listened and advised and helped when he could. His friends knew where to find him and came around the house through the garden, after first calling and setting a time. Halim boiled Turkish coffee for every guest and later set up a table with drinks beneath the fig tree. It was a comfortable setting, relaxed and private. Occasionally he went on to dinner with some of his visitors but returned home early to read and listen to music. Several times a week he met one of his women friends for dinner at a restaurant beside the Barada, but even then he was home early the next morning to change clothes and walk to the office. It was a single man’s regular life of work and routine, friends and commonplace pleasures.
Life was also a nexus in the usual Arab fashion. His office manager was a cousin of the machinery company owner who had been his first business partner in Damascus, the man he had met over dinner in the Hotel Brittany. The owner had now retired from his company and been replaced by his son, whom Halim served as a senior business adviser. Halim had been given a place of honor in the son’s wedding and was an unofficial uncle to his firstborn, a boy. Halim had also helped his manager by guaranteeing a loan for a new apartment. Halim’s cleaning woman, who arrived in the morning and worked until he returned home in the early afternoon, was a poor relation of the manager’s wife from a village in the north. And so it went, with obligation and loyalty tightly connected in the usual manner of a traditional society.
The pain Yossi used to feel over Assaf was hardly there anymore. Very slowly the torment had dimmed, the anguish receded. Halim still experienced it sometimes when he was alone in the garden, not in the house. But even then the feeling was remote, a memory rather than a physical sensation that suddenly gripped his chest and threatened to strangle his heart, as it once had done. Only the sadness afterward was the same, the immense longing he was left with when the spasm passed, an emptiness for what was gone.
As if in compensation for his loss, a small compensation but nonetheless real, he had come to love his old house again. Here he had suffered and survived his terrible anguish and now it was truly his home, his place in the world. He loved its crumbling grandeur and tangled gardens, its noble old-fashioned rooms with their great window-doors opening onto the verandahs. He felt safe and comfortable sitting beside the fire on rainy winter nights, listening to music, and never tired of
wandering along the verandahs on warm evenings and gazing up at the stars. Israel seemed very far away to him now and more than ever a dream, an imagined place. It was over there, like Ziad’s dream of Europe and Paris: a distant place and beautiful, a rare and certain treasure to be loved, to be cherished, pure as only an abstraction can be.
But there was never anything abstract about Tajar in his thoughts. Tajar was also far away but Tajar was his dearest friend and more, his father and brother and keeper, the conscience of his finer self. He felt so close to Tajar that he often spoke of him in conversations with friends in Damascus, under the pretext of recalling the widower-cousin in Argentina who had given him his start in life. Naturally, this was most true with Ziad. It was curious but in some ways Ziad was more familiar with Tajar—under a different name, in a different time and place—than he was with almost anyone else in the world, save for Halim himself.
Halim had always hoped Anna would remarry, and his memories of her had an idyllic charm to them. The memories dwelled on the intensity of their lives at the little settlement in the Negev that was soon to fall… Those few huts in the vastness of the desert. The still nights and glorious sunrises. The two of them together at the dawn of the world when hope and love had sparkled in the very grains of sand sifting through their fingers.
The women he knew now were loving in their way, but it could never be the same again because he wasn’t the same. Now, the unfathomable joys and sadness of life were no longer still ahead of him.
Yet he had achieved what he always wanted. He had been determined to create his own life and that was exactly what he had done, with Tajar’s help. Choice after choice, decision after decision, he had pushed on to create Halim, the Runner, himself—a long and arduous journey. And he was here in this house, and the accomplishment was unique. He knew that.
But there were also strange moments of indefinable power when Halim saw something else. On evenings when there was a moon and his overgrown garden came alive with shadows and eerie moonglow, he sometimes found himself gazing down from the verandahs and glimpsing ghosts among the trees. These were the broken, discolored statues he had inherited with his old house. The clearings that had once surrounded the solitary statues, like the paths that led to them, had long since been lost to vines and bushes and hanging branches. He knew they were no more than statues, and yet they would suddenly rise up to haunt him as images of the important people in his life—Anna, Assaf, Tajar, Ziad… Each statue solemnly off by itself. An enduring stately presence in its own secret grove. A mystery standing alone in the moonlight.
There were so few of them, so few people in his life. But were there more in any man’s life?
He wondered about that. He also wondered about the conceits of solitude. Because lately, as if to mock these illusions, another ghost had abruptly begun to appear in his garden at night.
Yes, Bell. That crooked, shattered, fate-blasted face … smiling in broken discolored marble. Of all the ghosts only Bell seemed to smile, and Halim found this oddly appealing. The idea intrigued and amused him at the same time because to his mind, the hermit of Jericho was the ultimate spirit of disguise. Who but God, after all, could ever create a mask as unworldly as Bell’s face?
Ziad continued to make his regular trips to the squalid refugee camps in southern Lebanon. The practical training given him by Halim was to bring him to the notice of his superiors, with unexpected results.
The Runner operation, through no fault of the Runner himself, entered a period of torpor which was vaguely troubling to Tajar. Before the 1973 war the Mossad was almost totally occupied with the international terrorist campaign of the PLO, so effectively financed and directed by the KGB. The director of the Mossad, General Ben-Zvi, spent all his time on it. When the KGB transferred control of the campaign from Damascus to Cyprus, Tajar and the Runner operation slipped in importance for a time. But that was to change.
Looking back later, Halim was able to see it all clearly enough. Wars marked the great changes in the life of the Runner: the Six-Day War in June 1967, the Yom Kippur War in October 1973. Up until the June war he had lived as two people, as Yossi and Halim, with part of himself still in Israel and another part in Syria. From then until the October war he had gone through the painful process of learning to be but one man in Damascus—Halim. And thereafter came the third great shift in his career, which was to involve him so intimately with Lebanon.
Of course both Halim and Tajar had always known this third stage would come. It was only to be expected that sooner or later, one of the important Syrian intelligence agencies would make Halim an offer he couldn’t refuse.
FIVE
HALIM HAD COME TO know Bell at Tajar’s suggestion, in order to add a different dimension of time to the Runner’s life, as Tajar had said then, when Jericho was still part of Jordan. Yet Tajar didn’t renew his own acquaintance with Bell when the opportunity came after the Six-Day War. The reason Tajar gave himself for this was professional. It was a matter of security. Assaf had become closely connected to the house in the orange grove in Jericho, through his friendship with the fugitive Yousef.
The excuse was plausible and even real, but it wasn’t in Tajar’s nature to fool himself, and he also knew how easily the demands of security could be adapted to personal needs. The secrecy of espionage wasn’t always a mask presented to others. It could also be a mask to oneself, a hiding place, and in fact there were deeply personal reasons why Tajar hadn’t gone to see Bell.
The most important was that Bell had once lived Tajar’s kind of life but had gone on to choose a different path. Tajar was a little afraid of that. And then there was the fact that Bell had once been the grand master of espionage and Tajar the novitiate, long ago in the Monastery in Egypt. And finally, there were Anna’s feelings for Bell.
So it was complicated and there were many subtle reasons why Tajar had put off his journey to Jericho. But the passage of the years changed that, especially the profound despair Tajar felt after the Yom Kippur War. Suddenly delay and caution seemed futile. Why go on avoiding Bell? All at once it seemed a cowardly act of omission in facing himself. He decided to make his pilgrimage to Jericho and not surprisingly, the decision brought a kind of relief that lightened his heart.
Everything having to do with Bell tended to be unique in Tajar’s eyes, and he would never forget their first meeting after a lapse of thirty years. Tajar turned up at Bell’s gate early one summer morning when it was likely Bell would be alone on his front porch. The iron gate creaked noisily under his hand. He took a deep breath and called out: Anyone at home among God’s oranges?
The insects buzzed in the orange grove. Tajar imagined his feet being studied beneath the trees, from the porch. No, Bell wouldn’t recognize these old shoes with the aluminum crutches planted beside them. A generous, welcoming voice came back: But for the grace of God we are all strangers at a strange gate.
And so it began. Tajar shuffled forward through the orange grove and there was Bell standing in front of his dilapidated chair, looking exactly as Tajar remembered him. With a face like that, a man didn’t change. Tajar stopped in front of the porch, smiling broadly.
The last time we met was by the Nile, said Tajar. I learned a great deal from you then, but it’s the student who remembers the teacher, isn’t it? I had legs in those days and you took me for a walk in the desert to help me and calm me, because I was frightened. I was leaving on a mission that night which seemed very dangerous, and you said …
Bell was pleased to see Tajar, who was surprised at how well Bell remembered him. When he had served under Bell during the Second World War, Tajar had been no one of any particular importance, merely another of those experts in disguise, the anonymous Monks, who were sent on long-range missions by Bell’s secret organization hidden away in the desert near Cairo. Yet as soon as Bell placed him, which he did very quickly, the recollections came back at once.
Just as surprising, Bell seemed totally unconcerned that Tajar had turned
up on his porch that morning. Without quite putting it in words, Tajar hinted that intelligence had become his career. Yet Bell seemed to accept his unexpected appearance as a commonplace event. For the hermit, apparently, all things were equally routine and fantastic. Bell was as relaxed as Tajar himself would have been at home in his hammock, contemplating his rosebushes.
They talked of many things, going back to the time when they had known each other three decades ago in Egypt.
And so you went on to do important work, said Bell. You must be very proud of that. It’s a splendid way to spend one’s life. If I’d had a cause such as yours ahead of me, the building of a homeland, my life would have been very different. But there was nothing so grand waiting for me at the end of the Second World War, in fact nothing grand at all. Quite the contrary. What lay ahead seemed petty and mean and narrow. The days of the British Empire were over and it was obvious they would be trying to withdraw with a measure of order, which meant fighting ugly little wars of retreat. I wanted no part of it. And because I’d been born in India and had never really lived in England, I suddenly found myself a man without a country. Permanent exile seemed to be all there was, so I ended up here.
Bell smiled in his strange twisted way.
Like all men I was born at the wrong time, he said. A mostly blind Argentine wrote that. It’s miraculous to me what people see despite the darkness and anguish they live in. Mostly we hear the roar of the world but there are real tunes of glory and this land, more than most, has heard them. Perhaps that’s why it has always been fought over…
When he opened Bell’s gate that morning Tajar still hadn’t decided whether to mention Anna, which also meant speaking of Assaf. He had hoped the candor between Bell and himself would go that far, and now after only a few hours it seemed completely natural to speak of them. Bell was excited and pleased and showed it. How fortunate you are to have known her all these years, he said. Bell spoke of his fondness for Assaf, and then of the lost Yousef and the dead Ali. After that, he fell silent.
Jericho Mosaic (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 4) Page 26
