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 de
stiny, 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 th
ere 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?
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