Jericho Mosaic jq-4

by Edward Whittemore

  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 hope 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.

  Herod's mother was a noblewoman of Petra. Both accessible and secluded in ancient times, its valley was enclosed by cliffs of red and purple sandstone eroded into fantastic shapes and displaying towering rock-cut temples and tombs with columned façades, so huge they appeared to be deserted palaces fashioned by a forgotten race of giants. It was an eerily romantic place which was lost to history before the Middle Ages and only rediscovered when the Swiss explorer Burckhardt passed that way in the nineteenth century and wrote his famous description of Petra: a rose-red city half as old as time.

  For Assaf as for other young Israelis, the dream of seeing forbidden Petra became one of those symbolic journeys that can haunt the youthful adventurers of a generation, a way of breaking out of history's confines through a near-mystical trial of courage and daring.

  The journey through enemy territory could only be made at night. During the day the intruder had to hide in caves or crevices. Jordanian army patrols roamed near the border, and there were wandering bedouin who would report a hiding place or a footprint. The land was stark and lifeless, deeply cut by the erosions of thousands of years. If there was enough moonlight to illuminate the jagged terrain, then there was also enough light for a lone figure to be visible from a great distance.

  There was no easy way to reach Petra. Even if the route hadn't traversed enemy territory it would have been an arduous desert crossing in darkness. And with Jordanian patrols and hostile bedouin out hunting and waiting in ambush, the dangers of the journey were extreme.

  Nor was any practical purpose served. It was an act of pure bravado to cover that dangerous distance merely to gaze down on the ruins of Petra for a minute or two, from some crag, before turning back. But of course the appeal of the adventure was precisely its purity.

  Some never found the ruins and others never came back, but for those who reached Petra and did return there was a singular sense of triumph. He's been to Petra, people whispered. A young aspirant to the Mossad, those elite of the elite, was sometimes casually asked by an interviewer: Have you been to Petra?

  Before long a popular song about the forbidden journey to Petra was banned by the Israeli government, so seductive was the lure of this lost city to the young.

  Assaf was one of the lucky ones who succeeded. He was only fifteen at the time, younger than most. An Israeli army patrol picked him up when he crossed back over the border just before dawn. Anna was severely shaken by the news and turned to Tajar, who left at once to drive down to the army post in the Negev where Assaf was being held. During the drive Tajar thought of many things he could say to Assaf but rejected them all. In the end, when he arrived at the army post, he led Assaf to the side of a hill and sat with him in silence, looking out over the desert in the direction of Petra.

  At fifteen, Assaf was already as tall as Yossi and as darkly handsome. He had a quiet and thoughtful manner which resembled his father's reticent charm, but he was less spontaneous with his feelings and given to a kind of solemnity unusual in one so young. Tajar saw aspects of Yossi in his son, but the boy's reserved nature also reminded him of Assaf's uncle, David, Anna's dead brother. Assaf's dignity mixed with melancholy, in fact, was exactly what Tajar recalled of David when he had known him in Cairo during the world war.

  Anna also recognized this resemblance and had spoken of it to Tajar, who accepted what she said without mentioning that he readily saw the similarities himself. For Anna was still unaware that Tajar had once known her dead brother. When Tajar met Anna after the world war he didn't say anything about her brother, because he didn't want to cause her pain by reopening the past. Then later there seemed no reason to bring up the matter. Now Tajar was sorry he lacked this additional bond of kinship with Anna and her son. It might be especially helpful to Assaf, he thought, and he decided to speak with Anna about it as soon as he could. But that was for the future, when the shock of the Petra adventure was behind her.

  After sitting with Assaf in silence for a time, Tajar found he didn't want to say anything so much as to listen.

  As for Assaf, he was more frightened in a way of Tajar, the known, than he had been of the unknown during his days and nights on the journey to Petra. Finally, nervously, Assaf spoke up and admitted as much. He also mentioned Anna.

  She's deeply disturbed, said Tajar. Show her as much love as you can when you see her, and remember, she takes no pride in what you've done. She can't. You're her only child and to her the trip was dangerous and pointless and nothing else.

  Assaf gazed down at the sand, sifting it through his fingers.

  And you, Tajar? How do you feel about it? he asked softly in Arabic, a form of intimacy between them since Assaf's earliest childhood.

  I feel it was dangerous and pointless and also that what's done is done, replied Tajar. So what I want now is for you to tell me about the trip. What and where and how, and the ruins, and everything you saw and felt from the moment you crossed the border until the moment you returned. I want to hear it all so I can tell you what you might have done better. The ancient, colossal ruins of Petra glimpsed for a moment beneath the stars? What are they, Assaf, but an exquisite fantasy? An illusion and a dream and a way station of the soul? Of course the journey is always what counts, sweet one, the journey and nothing more. You know that now and it's an impressive piece of wisdom to have learned at your age. So tell me about it, every detail.

  Solemnly Assaf did as he was asked. He had always felt close to Tajar but never closer than that afternoon when they sat together on a hill in the Negev, gazing across the desert, and Ass
af talked of his secret journey into his heart to see the mysterious ruins of Petra by starlight, to behold the ancient wonders of that unforgotten lost city of caravans somewhere to the east — a dream and an illusion which Tajar knew from the very beginning could only be connected in Assaf's mind to the Old City of Jerusalem, always so close to Assaf when he was growing up yet always just over there beyond reach, a dream on the other side of the valley.

  ***

  A few years later Tajar sat with Anna on her balcony one cold winter day in Jerusalem, the two of them bundled up against the weather. The heavy sky was gray and threatening but even when it rained they often sat on the balcony, looking down on the courtyard with its lemon and cypress and fig trees. It was December 1966, the month of Assaf's eighteenth birthday when he would go off to begin his military service. That morning he had told Anna he was volunteering for the paratroop brigade, an elite unit which took the most casualties in time of war.

  Tajar rose when Anna told him the news and hobbled inside and returned to the balcony with a framed photograph, which he placed on the table. It was a photograph of Yossi at the age of twenty-nine, in a paratrooper's uniform somewhere in the desert, taken a month before the 1956 war broke out and Yossi was supposedly killed in the Mitla Pass in the Sinai. A photograph of a handsome and dashing young officer who would never age, who always smiled and was eternally a hero — the image of his father that Assaf had lived with since the age of eight.

  Tajar looked at the photograph and sighed.

  Ah yes, he said. All these years this has been sitting on your desk, Anna, so how could we have expected anything else?

  ELEVEN

  The Runner operation grew significantly in the middle 1960s. More and more information flowed into the Mossad from Damascus. Equally important from Tajar's point of view, there was now a back-up team supporting the Runner from Beirut and even in Damascus itself. The team eased Tajar's tasks and greatly strengthened the security of the operation. Tajar had always hoped to have such a team someday.

  Communicating with a deep-cover agent and receiving his material was by far the greatest danger to any long-term penetration. With a back-up team of professionals handling communications, while the identity of the Runner remained unknown to them, everything was simpler and safer. Of course putting such a team in the field was expensive and difficult in itself, and the operation had to justify the additional support it entailed.

  Tajar had made plans for such a team long ago, but the opportunity for setting it up came sooner than he expected with the downfall of Little Aharon.

  For more than a dozen years the rabbi's son from the Ukraine had run the Mossad as his own private fiefdom.

  Except for the few months right at the beginning when Tajar was in charge, the Mossad had never known another director. Through hard work and an emphasis on personal loyalty, Little Aharon had taken over a small country's intelligence effort and built an international reputation for the Mossad. His successes were legendary. And because the Mossad was small, Little Aharon had always been able to run it as a family.

  There was no real command structure and little in the way of operational procedures. Instead there were Little Aharon and those who worked for him.

  But as admired and powerful as Little Aharon was, and as ruthless, he was unable to survive the political upheavals that came with the decline in fortune of the country's founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, who had often used Little Aharon as a troubleshooter in domestic affairs. Over the years Little Aharon had made many enemies. As Ben-Gurion faltered and finally went off to retirement in the Negev, those opposed to Little Aharon eased him out of the Mossad. For the Mossad without Little Aharon, as for the country without Ben-Gurion, it was the end of an era.

  Military intelligence had always been the junior partner in Israeli intelligence. The director of military intelligence reported to the army chief of staff while the director of the Mossad reported directly to the prime minister. After Little Aharon's downfall, the man picked to replace him at the Mossad was the army officer who ran military intelligence, General Dror, once a flamboyant battlefield commander.

  General Dror had been the army's second-ranking officer during the Sinai war in 1956, and he might have become chief of staff had he not believed so strongly that a general's place was with his men. He took a paratroop refresher course after the 1956 war, and his parachute failed to open all the way on a jump. General Dror survived, barely, and spent eighteen months in a hospital. His days as a field commander were over but eventually he was brought back into the army as chief of military intelligence. Subsequently he became the focal point for those in the government, particularly those in the army, who were opposed to Little Aharon's power and the way he used it.

  As director of the Mossad, Dror began to make changes to tighten it as an organization. Immediately he was faced with a revolt. Many of the Mossad's senior members threatened to resign and others withheld information from him. The father figure had gone and the family was angry. Inevitably, Little Aharon's men saw General Dror's appointment as a takeover by the military.

  To Tajar, the whole affair was deeply ironic. Years ago he himself had lost out as chief of the Mossad because he wasn't considered as capable as Little Aharon of administering a government agency, because he took too personal an interest in his agents, because he ran operations in an old-fashioned way out of his pocket. Now Little Aharon was being accused of these same faults by the more efficient and better organized men Dror had brought with him from the army. A further irony was Dror's near-fatal parachute accident. But for that accident Dror would still be an army field commander, probably chief of staff. And but for his own near-fatal automobile accident years ago, Tajar himself would still be in operations in the field, not overseeing them.

  One of the criticisms of Little Aharon was that he had ignored day-to-day intelligence from the neighboring Arab states, which the army needed, in favor of more glamorous operations in Europe and elsewhere. Dror meant to correct this by reshaping the Mossad and redefining its priorities. As it happened, Tajar was the Mossad's leading expert on penetrating Arab countries. He also ran one of the Mossad's most effective Arab penetrations, and against its most militant neighbor: the Runner operation in Damascus. Lastly, Tajar was an old hand from Little Aharon's generation. His experience went back even farther than Little Aharon's and his expertise was impeccable. No one was more respected among the senior executives of the Mossad.

  For a variety of reasons, then, Tajar was a natural ally for Dror to turn to in his new job. Tajar recognized this and decided to make use of the circumstances that had come his way.

  Suddenly I seem to be back in favor at work, Tajar told Anna. Is it possible that if you survive long enough your ideas come back into fashion, the way old clothes do?

  Anna laughed. She knew Tajar worked for the ministry of defense, perhaps in military planning, but she wasn't aware he was connected specifically with intelligence. Or at least that's what she told herself. Tajar never talked about the nature of his work and she preferred not to speculate on it. Since the death of her brother long ago in Cairo, intelligence had always been a painful subject to her. Tajar knew this and avoided it.

  Well I suppose it's possible, said Anna. It happens in other things, why not in ideas?

  It's an odd one for me all the same, said Tajar. I'm much more used to being considered an old crank who was born before the flood. I'll have to be careful not to let it go to my head. It's almost enough to make me feel young again.

  They were sitting on Anna's balcony watching a fierce spring downpour soak the flowers in the courtyard, the sweep of the rain softened by thousands of tiny fingers on the cypress trees. Tajar hummed his way through an old song and Anna smiled wistfully, her eyes far away. The song had been popular when she first met Yossi on the little settlement in the Negev, during the war for independence.

  Another world, she reminded herself. Another world that's gone and no longer exists except i
n memory.

  ***

  Dror sensed at once that Tajar's support for him within the Mossad hinged on the Runner operation, because it was the only important operation Dror had no trouble getting his hands on. Elsewhere, in other cases, essential details were withheld or buried and Dror had to dig to uncover them. But Tajar was lucid and straightforward when he briefed Dror on the Runner operation. Obviously Tajar wanted the new director to appreciate the value of the operation, to invest in it and make it his own.

  It was also apparent to Dror that Tajar was almost alone among the senior Mossad executives in not feeling threatened by the appointment of an army officer as director. Tajar made this clear by always referring to Dror in an easy manner as the general, to his face, the only senior executive who did so. To others Dror was a general only behind his back. Given the atmosphere of the Mossad after Little Aharon's downfall, this habit of Tajar's never seemed to emphasize Dror's seniority but rather, in some subtle way, had the opposite effect of expressing an equality of feeling between the two men. Dror knew that Tajar had always stood alone, that he was unattached to any particular doctrine and without ambitions for himself. His concerns revolved entirely around the Runner operation.

  In any case, Dror had a high opinion of the Runner operation from the very beginning. It was an extremely clever long-range penetration, meticulously planned at every stage, each aspect of its development exactly fitted to the personality and character of the Runner himself. Dror admired this careful planning and was quick to tell Tajar that he did. It was the kind of planning that won wars, he said.

  In particular, Dror was struck by the Runner's recent involvement in the repair of Syrian armored vehicles. It was nuts-and-bolts work, but to a military man the opportunities inherent in it were intriguing. And at that point in his briefing, curiously enough, Tajar all at once lost his place in his files and began rummaging through papers, giving Dror a chance to let his imagination roam.