Jericho Mosaic (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 4)

by Edward Whittemore

  Better to say it? asked Tajar at last.

  Oh yes, replied Bell. I was thinking of Anna. Of all my acts of cowardice and stupidity, none compares to that piece of folly. Once in Jerusalem I had the whole world within reach and I let it go, let her go, turned away. It was utterly inexcusable and I’ve never forgiven myself for it. Fools that we are, we learn everything too late. It seems unimaginable to me now. Why did I do it? How? But there are no answers to comfort a human heart, or to justify or explain it, and the tragedy is always the same. Love was there and I lost it, I turned away. Oh yes…

  The time came for Tajar to leave, the long morning of remembrance and renewal at an end. Bell walked with him to the gate.

  My car is just down the way, said Tajar. I’ll come again.

  They embraced and Tajar began hobbling away. Bell leaned on the gate watching him go. The road was deserted in the midday heat and Tajar hadn’t gone very far when a thought came to Bell.

  That evening we walked in the desert, Bell called out. The time when you were leaving that night. Where were you going?

  Tajar stopped and turned his head. To Syria, he called back. I was on my way to Damascus and it seemed very dangerous, but you pulled me through.

  He waved a crutch in salute and hobbled on down the road, raising little puffs of dust with his crutches.

  Tajar drove slowly out of Jericho that day, working the special hand levers in his old car that made it possible for him to drive without legs. He went slowly because he was reluctant to leave the bright colors of the oasis, the splashes of purple bougainvillea and orange-red flamboyants, and to leave Bell and the house in the orange grove. He was thinking how aware Bell was of the advantages of his, Tajar’s, life and what he had done with the years. Of course. Tajar had been busy in the world and his mark was deep on men’s affairs. Yet it was human nature to miss what you lacked and Tajar couldn’t help but think how appealing Bell’s life seemed, with its solitude.

  Tajar laughed at himself, at his own weakness for misgivings. If Bell had been in his place in life, Bell would have done exactly what he had done for the last thirty years. Tajar knew that for a fact. And if he had been Bell, well then naturally…

  All the same, it was fascinating how the dream could change.

  He was thinking of his father and his father’s father, those pious poor rabbis who had endured the squalor and oppression of Jerusalem under the Turks, men of profound longing for whom the Holy City on the mountain had always been an imaginary place, an unrealizable dream, much as it was for Bell, who had lost the great love of his life there. Yet for he who had been born in Jerusalem and lived there and had come to know it as the capital of his country—for Tajar—his imagination was now turning elsewhere, he found. Bell was the one who was in exile, seemingly in exile. He wasn’t. And yet?

  Tajar smiled at his musings that day. He shook his head and laughed as he busily pushed and pulled levers, driving his car without legs up the mountain. The road curved and he caught a last glimpse back at the plains of Jericho and the Dead Sea, and beyond them the hills of Moab where God had shown Moses the promised land which Moses could never enter.

  Of course we learn everything too late, thought Tajar. Life, our Jericho crossing, our Jericho mosaic … there it is forever glimpsed from afar.

  After Tajar left, Bell stood lost in a reverie with the fierce sun beating down on him. What a splendid man he is, Bell kept thinking. What a grand life he has built for himself since we knew each other so long ago.

  Bell, alone in retreat all these years, had only two or three friends for whom he counted, whereas Tajar, this hobbling and smiling cripple from the mountain, had tirelessly pursued his worthy cause and truly become a world to many people. Inevitably, thought Bell, a paucity of giving is the affliction of one who cuts himself off. But why have I done that? Why have I become a recluse?

  He stood in the dense sunlight gazing at his porch, at the tattered chair and the old table with its worn dusty goods. All at once this shabby evidence of his days seemed a profoundly naked display, a pitiful collection of junk to be left behind one day as proof he had lived here. He crossed the porch and wandered through his rooms, aware there was almost nothing in them. They were so bare it was as if no one at all lived here, or at best some transient putting up for a night or two.

  Bell felt exhausted, drained. He went out the back door and fled to his grape arbor to escape the waste of his life. This shabby emptiness … what was the use of it? Tajar had been so pleased to see him, but Tajar remembered another man who had gone by a different name in Egypt, a clever and determined man of great power, the secret leader of the Monastery whom Tajar recalled with respect … looking back.

  But of course Bell wasn’t that man anymore. Tajar was. It was Tajar who helped people to do more and be more, who gave back light from the darkness of the times, who smiled merrily and kicked up little puffs of dust on the difficult road to somewhere, while Bell lapsed ever deeper in his dream of a crumbling nowhere, a recluse in timeless Jericho, absorbed in the rhythms of the sun and the swelling hum and shade of his orange grove.

  This house, this life, thought Bell. This unspeakable shabbiness … it’s appalling.

  In fact it was so appalling it made him smile. For even Bell was sometimes surprised at how far he had gone in creating his own world, where everything was in harmony with his being.

  When Abu Musa arrived late that afternoon for the daily shesh-besh session with Moses the Ethiopian, Bell was still sitting in the grape arbor, his round single eye a full stop in the question of the universe.

  What’s this? thought Abu Musa. Off by himself without even a large empty glass of arak in his twisted claw? Only the memory of a lost love in Jerusalem could keep our resident holy man from a drink at this time of day. Obviously he needs a jolt. Even a holy man can doubt himself.

  Stealthily, Abu Musa went up on tiptoe. Bell was too absorbed to hear anything but he did sense a movement and all at once he saw Abu Musa’s great noble head, dark-skinned and white-maned, gazing solemnly down at him from among the grapes at the end of the arbor. There was no body with the head. The foliage hid that. There was simply Abu Musa’s huge serene face among the sun-streaked grapes, a magnificent vision of mankind adrift amidst nature’s fruits.

  My God, murmured Bell with a start.

  I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, boomed the head. Look not upon me that I am swarthy, that the sun hath tanned me.

  The head wagged roguishly and disappeared. Laughing and sighing and snorting all at once, Abu Musa came waddling into the arbor and settled his bulk on a bench. The quotation was from the Song of Songs, he said, good King Solomon’s discourse on love and lovemaking. Moses had taught it to him and he particularly liked that phrase, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, because it suggested the sensual mysteries and flowering courtyards of a sumptuous harem. Solomon had had innumerable wives and concubines, he added, and surely it was a wise king who replenished his wisdom regularly in the heat of summer afternoons.

  Bell smiled. In his roundabout way Abu Musa was reasserting his belief that nothing revived the spirit so well as love and lovemaking. But given Bell’s status as a hermit and holy man, Abu Musa quickly moved on to his second-best solution for any problem, which was a tale. Abu Musa loved to tell stories and he now launched into a convoluted account of Crusader ruins in desolate places. According to him, the reason the Crusaders had lost out in the Holy Land was because of their underwear. Most of them had come from France and Germany and had insisted on wearing the same heavy sheepskin underwear they had used for the cold damp winters at home.

  In the long summers we have here? asked Abu Musa. Tufts of sheepskin squeezed in under all that tight-fitting armor? Can we even begin to imagine the intolerable itching?

  Abu Musa shuddered at his own description. Quickly he reached down to give his genitals a thoughtful scratch and realignment through the loose folds of his faded blue galabieh. In other words, he conclude
d, it’s futile to bring your prejudices with you when you go in search of the Holy Land. That’s not what the land is about.

  Bell laughed. What is the land about then? he asked.

  Abu Musa looked even more thoughtful. Dust and oranges? he replied. A dream of man’s spirit freed at last from the fervor of fanaticism? Cool water and shade and the talk of friends at the end of the day? For a wise king, hot summer afternoons of love. And for a holy man, smiling on all this because it is right and good.

  And yet nowhere in the world has there been more fervor and fanaticism than here, said Bell. And why is that, when all great men of all religions have always preached otherwise?

  Why? said Abu Musa. Because great men understand dust and oranges far better than the rest of us. Because they know man is dust and oranges. Because they know all the rest of it is simply the clatter and dice of a shesh-besh game, a run of chance and skill which we all play and refer to as life … clatter and dice, dice and clatter. So come now. Moses and the very finest chatter await us on your front porch, and you and I know a man is always in the right place when he’s in Jericho…

  That evening after the shesh-besh players left, Bell recalled the glorious vision of Abu Musa’s smiling face among the sun-streaked grapes. Long ago, after the First World War, his war, Abu Musa had been briefly, joyously married. His happiness, and hers, had known no measure. His young wife had wanted to give him a son and she did, but she had died in childbirth and then a few years later the child had also died, so there was nothing. Over half a century ago. And all that time Abu Musa had honored the love in his heart with his gently lustful daydreaming, an inspiration for poetry and good humor and erotic tales, a memory to be embraced and treasured, the indomitable dream of an epic lover. Could one ever be sure, wondered Bell, who the real king was?

  And again that night as so often, Bell thought of Yousef lost somewhere above Jericho in the vastness of the Judean wilderness. Oddly, it seemed to him, he also found himself thinking of a man he hadn’t seen in some years, the mysterious adventurer from Damascus, Halim.

  Why had Halim come to mind? Bell thought about it and decided it had to do with Tajar’s unexpected visit. The connection seemed simple enough. The last time he had seen Tajar, three decades ago beside the Nile, Tajar had been leaving on a mission to Damascus. And as it happened Bell knew only one man in Damascus, Halim, the Arab patriot Yousef revered and had always wanted so much to meet.

  Bell smiled to himself in the darkness of the grape arbor where he had gone once more to sit. Tajar, Halim, Yousef … why was he suddenly trying to make something of these associations? The connections were only in his own mind. Moreover, it had been years since he had thought this way. It was Monastery thinking, he knew, the mirrors and reflections of the secret world of intelligence which he had left behind long ago in Egypt, only briefly resurrected today because of the appearance of Tajar. For Tajar was still a traveler in that other world of secret knowledge and probably Halim was too, although Halim lived across the river on the other side of the Great Afro-Syrian Rift that ran through Jericho. Halim and Tajar were enemies, of course, in the implacable temporal struggle of Arab against Jew.

  And Yousef? Also a traveler in another world, but one that was even more obscure and inaccessible than espionage—the stark, sun-blasted landscape of lunar chasms called the Judean wilderness, where his human soul could know no bounds or comfort at all. Ineffable was Yousef. A spirit lost to the regular ways of men.

  Tajar, Halim, Yousef …Three totally different reflections of the fabled land where all great men had always preached freedom from fanaticism. It was Monastery thinking, but the more he thought about them the more he connected them in his imagination: a Jewish masterspy in Jerusalem, a Moslem patriot in Damascus, a Christian schoolteacher hiding in the caves of the Judean wilderness. Yet the connection had no reasonable basis. It was bizarre and arbitrary. With their conflicting dreams and journeys, what could three such men possibly share? How could they have anything in common, other than fate perhaps?

  Other than fate. As if that were not enough.

  Abruptly, Bell laughed at himself. Poor Tajar had merely wanted to look up a piece of his past. That was the purpose of his visit to Jericho, and why was Bell now conjuring up mysteries around the poor fellow, imagining connections that didn’t exist? Was it simply because he had failed to mention that he knew Halim, Tajar’s enemy in Damascus?

  I’m being as convoluted as Abu Musa, thought Bell. I’m thinking in some kind of Jericho time.

  Bell stirred in the warm darkness and his gaze drifted up toward the stars. But are we finally all secret worlds? he wondered.

  SIX

  COLONEL JUNDI’S OFFER WAS the most extraordinary among many that Halim had received over the years. Long ago Tajar had told Yossi that a measure of the operation’s success would be the length of time the Runner could function in Damascus without being recruited by Syrian intelligence. That the Runner would eventually have to become a double agent was never in doubt. It was inevitable because the more successful he was as Halim, the more attractive he would be to Syrian intelligence. Their hope was to delay it as long as possible, so that Halim would be recruited by the Syrians at a higher level.

  Tajar’s task was to allow this strategy to continue to exist within the Mossad. Again and again he had to convince successive directors of the Mossad that it was right for the Runner to refuse opportunities which often appeared extremely inviting.

  To do this, Tajar relied on his intimate knowledge of the way the Syrians disorganized intelligence—the perennial nature of their twelve secret services. Since the Syrians didn’t have a paramount intelligence agency that was going to survive as an entity, argued Tajar, it wasn’t worthwhile for the Runner to devote himself to one of them. If the Runner accepted a position with a Syrian agency the Mossad would benefit for a few years, but then the Runner’s reputation would suffer with the next realignment of power in Damascus, where no one was more suspect than the intelligence agents of the last regime. The Runner’s independence, his ability to maneuver and make friends among the new men, whoever they might be, was far more valuable to the Mossad than any short-term gain.

  The argument made sense and Tajar was allowed to have his way. The closest he ever came to losing out was when the KGB established the headquarters for its European terrorist campaign in Damascus. The Mossad’s need for immediate operational information, then, was so urgent that the long-term benefits of the Runner operation might well have been sacrificed to it, if the right offer had been made to the Runner at the time. But as it happened, the KGB found it impossible to run a secure campaign from Damascus and soon moved that headquarters to Cyprus.

  From a personal point of view, Tajar couldn’t help but be relieved. Once more it put off the time when the Runner would have to become a double agent, with all the complications that meant. For Tajar had never envisioned the Runner operation as merely a penetration of an Arab capital. To succeed in Tajar’s terms the Runner had to be pure in his support of the Arab cause. He had to be a genuine idealist—what Tajar himself might have been if the history of the Middle East had taken a different course after the First World War, when Tajar had learned to run through the multiple cultures of Jerusalem as a boy. Of course Tajar never expressed his idea in this way to the directors of the Mossad. With them he used arguments based on the terms of espionage, which were also true. But the Runner himself had always understood it, and it was the special nature of this vision that had inspired Yossi from the very beginning.

  It was never easy for Halim to turn down these offers from the competing secret services in Damascus. Nor was it just the Syrians who approached him. As his reputation grew among the Palestinians, his potential value was recognized by the intelligence agencies of other countries. In Beirut especially, where he went on routine business in connection with his export-import company, he often found himself having chance meetings and chance introductions which weren’t what they appeared
to be. The ruling Baathists of Iraq, ostensibly Syria’s closest friends and in fact its most relentless enemies, were particularly eager to recruit him. The Iraqis were the most persistent but he was also approached by the Egyptian and French services, a Lebanese Christian faction, and the Iranians of the shah. And there was a tentative inquiry that Halim suspected came from the Mossad itself.

  Tajar was greatly amused to hear of this last contact. He looked into it before his next meeting with Yossi near Beirut.

  True enough, Tajar told Yossi. Suspicion confirmed. I ran my own little operation inside headquarters and it turns out this man who had his eye on you was actually on the Runner back-up team in the sixties. He didn’t think there was a chance in the world that Halim would bite, but his boss was so impressed by Halim’s reputation he thought an effort had to be made through that Lebanese who talked to you. A bizarre turnabout, but at least it shows the Runner’s security is everything it should be…

  With his years of experience, the Runner saw these approaches coming long before an offer was made. What he couldn’t always discern was whether the offer would be professional or personal. Syrian intelligence officers often engaged in smuggling and other illegal ways of making money, and Halim as a businessman who traveled was a natural target for their schemes. But Tajar had foreseen this and Halim kept strictly to his reputation as the incorruptible one, an eccentricity in Damascus and one of those odd characteristics that made Halim unusual. To his friends, it was part of the idealism that had brought him back from Argentina in the first place.

  When the approach was professional, however, and a Syrian intelligence officer began by appealing to Halim’s patriotism, his reaction had to be much more intricate and subtle. With great charm Halim set out to project that quality of vision, almost of naïveté, that Ziad had felt so strongly in the early days of their friendship. Halim spoke warmly of all the important causes and his enthusiasm was real, but he also seemed hopelessly impractical when it came to politics, a dreamer who couldn’t grasp the everyday facts of life in the Middle East. Perhaps it was because he had grown up in Argentina and saw Syria differently, not really the way it was. In any case he drifted off into a nonexistent realm of airy concepts and futile abstractions, talking on about Arab unity and the Palestinian cause and the Syrian role in Arab brotherhood. The Syrian officer who had thought of recruiting him would soon be accepting Halim’s unspoken claim that it was only bookkeeping and basic engineering that he understood in a practical way. Certainly Halim was a patriot, but he just wasn’t suited for a clandestine role. He lacked a devious eye. He lacked cunning and the essential traits of espionage. In political matters he had faith instead of understanding, an innocence that was nearly childlike in its simplicity.