Jericho Mosaic jq-4

by Edward Whittemore

  By seven in the morning the assault was over and the paratroopers occupied all the buildings facing the walls of the Old City from the north. The fierce night attack had carried them the length of Arab Jerusalem. There were still Jordanian positions on the ridges east of the city, so another day was to pass before the colonel in command of the paratroopers led his men through Lion's Gate, the same northern approach that had been used by the Babylonians and Romans and Crusaders in taking Jerusalem. The Old City itself passed to the Israelis without any organized resistance within the walls.

  The Old City was taken on the third day of the war. The Jordanians had been beaten back along the central front and were retreating to the east bank of the Jordan River. On the fourth day of the war Israeli armored units reached the Suez Canal, trapping what was left of the Egyptian army in the wastes of the Sinai. The paratroop battalions in Jerusalem were put on buses again and sent north, along with all other available troops from the southern and central fronts.

  At noon on the fifth day the assault on the Golan Heights began. No surprise was possible and the Syrian army was fresh, having done no fighting, whereas the Israeli units were tired and worn. The assault forces rushed straight up the steep slopes with heavy losses, fighting their way through the massive Syrian fortifications which both the Russians and the Syrians had considered impregnable. In a little over twenty-four hours the Israelis accomplished the impossible and conquered the entire Golan.

  And thus on the sixth day the new war came to an end.

  THIRTEEN

  Assaf's wounds were not as serious as Anna and Tajar had feared. He would have restricted movement of his left shoulder and perhaps a slight limp, but the rest of his body would mend with time, they were told. When Anna was with him in the hospital Assaf kept up a show of courage, but when Tajar was alone by the bedside Assaf let all his bitterness pour out.

  It was horrible, he said. Even when we were succeeding it was horrible. Men are ripped apart and blown to pieces and you just keep pushing on trying to kill. It's brutal and ugly and there's no sense to any of it.

  There was a family hiding in one of the Arab houses we went through, he said. We had to stay for a while because we were giving covering fire. The family was huddled in a corner watching us, as still as death except for a little girl who couldn't stop crying. It was a small room and they were just a few feet away. We were firing out the windows. While I was reloading I said something to the little girl, trying to comfort her. She wasn't surprised I was speaking to her in Arabic. Then it struck me. She was too young to know enemy soldiers don't usually speak in your tongue because enemy soldiers are always from another country or tribe or another something. Her father was surprised but not the little girl. We were ready to leave and I had a moment before crossing the yard. I knelt beside her, wanting to stop her terrible sobbing. It's going to be all right now, I said. The soldiers are moving up the street and you'll be safe in your house. She didn't stop crying but I knew she heard me. Then she choked out some words between the sobs, pathetic little words that were meant to explain her crying and justify herself in front of her family. I'm so frightened, she said. This is my first war.

  Tajar leaned over the bed to hear Assaf, who had closed his eyes. A shudder ran through Assaf under the sheets. He opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling, speaking in an exhausted voice.

  Her first war, repeated Assaf. That's what she said in that room where her family was huddled in the corner as silent as death. If this were the last war then maybe I could justify what I saw and did that night. But where is the last war? My mother conceived me in the first war and my father was killed in the second war and I was mangled in the third war and . . . what's the matter with people? What's wrong with their minds and their hearts? This isn't survival or life or anything at all a man can speak about. It's just horror. War.

  Tajar sat with his hand resting on Assaf's arm, saying nothing, listening. Some of the exploits from Tajar's early life had become known to the public by then, not his intelligence work in Arab countries but his efforts to smuggle Jews into Palestine when it was still under British rule. Accounts had appeared in books and Assaf made reference now to these histories.

  And I'll tell you something else, said Assaf. If I were asked to rescue people, I'd volunteer for every mission as long as I had the strength. Bringing people to safety and freedom? That's easy because there'd never be any doubt in what you were doing and never a fear in yourself. Who doesn't want to help people? It's right and it makes you feel good and that's the way it was when you were my age, Tajar. That's what you faced and you did it, but doing the right thing then was simple. Don't you see it's not that way now? You were lucky. You saved lives. But that's not what I'm called upon to do. I lie awake at night listening to a little girl cry. But when she's older and stronger and harder, when she knows hate better, maybe she'll no longer cry. . . .

  Sadly, Tajar listened to Assaf pouring out his feelings. It was all understandable after what he had been through, with his body still in great pain. He was severely troubled and more time would have to pass before they could know how his experiences had changed him.

  We can only wait, Tajar told Anna after describing what Assaf had said to him. The psyche adjusts to trauma in so many different ways, we just can't assume anything yet. But the resilience of the human spirit is a wondrous thing, truly limitless. Despair passes and anything can be born from it, anything at all. And Assaf is very young and he's strong inside, so we'll wait and watch and listen, and we'll see what we can do to help him regain his footing.

  Tajar was a profound comfort to Anna that summer. She didn't know how she could have got through the first visits to the hospital without him, or the days and weeks that followed. Often in the evening he turned up after work at her house, unannounced, and the two of them would sit on her balcony until a late hour, talking quietly in the shadows beneath the stars, a heady fragrance of jasmine drifting up from the courtyard on the night breezes. Anna was now aware that Tajar had once known her dead brother David, in Cairo during the world war, so their conversations carried even further back into the past, spanning her entire life.

  We try so very hard, she said to Tajar one night, but no matter how hard we try we never do very well. And people always seem to struggle for the same causes, wanting life to be a little better for their children than it was for them, but what comes of it?

  Are you referring to your own life? Tajar asked after a moment.

  Yes of course, she replied. Here I sit twenty-five years after the death of my brother, who was my only living family then, while my only child is lying in a hospital in pain, tormented by his terrible memories of a night in a place where I brought him, in that valley just below us. I thought I was trying when I brought him here. I meant to try and I did try as best I could, but what have I done? What have I done and why? Just look what's come of it.

  Tajar knew there were tears in her eyes without being able to see her face. He could hear the tears in her voice and feel them in the darkness. He stirred and a match flared as he lit a cigarette.

  What have I done and why? he murmured. It's a question that never gets answered and always has to be asked. And what, I wonder, did you do today, Anna?

  I went out, she said simply.

  And?

  I was painting. I went out and painted.

  Where?

  On a hillside. Just on a hillside.

  Just on a hillside in Jerusalem, you say. And why, Anna?

  To forget, she replied. And to remember. And to know a moment of beauty in Jerusalem.

  Tajar nodded in the shadows. And just so is life, he said. To forget and remember and know the beauty of one afternoon in Jerusalem. . . . Surely no sage has ever said it better.

  FOURTEEN

  The extent of Israel's victory in the Six-Day War astonished the world. A tiny new nation had triumphed against overwhelming odds. In America photographs of Israel's dashing, one-eyed military leader, General Moshe Da
yan, appeared with the legend: We try harder. And in Israel itself the euphoria was complete.

  Everyone saw a new era. Security and prosperity and peace — the good things of life were only a matter of time.

  The Mossad had played its part. Dror and Tajar had planned wisely and the Runner operation was a brilliant success. No one had done more for victory than the Runner himself.

  Yet Tajar was profoundly disturbed, alone in the gloom he felt. It made him angry to drag around secretly grumbling when everyone else was ecstatic, but no matter how hard he tried he couldn't shake his depression. His gloom was inexplicable to others. He managed to hide it from Anna, or so he thought, but others sensed it readily enough and spoke to him about it. The young men he worked with at the Mossad were particularly incredulous.

  What's the matter with celebrating a great victory? they asked him. It wasn't just some gift from heaven, so why plague yourself about whether we deserve it or not? And as a matter of fact, Tajar, we do deserve it. We earned it. Our boys did it, the whole country did it. We all made the sacrifices and made it happen. The Arabs were the ones who wanted war, not us. They pushed and pushed for war and finally it came and we gave it to them, and they've learned their lesson. They're finished and now they'll have to make peace.

  Tajar grumbled and shook his head and went shuffling off in his awkward gait. Nobody's just finished, he thought. It doesn't happen like that to a people. Doesn't our own history prove it doesn't? You can't just humiliate a people and expect good to come from it. Anyway, nations don't learn lessons the way a child does, history isn't as simple as that. People learn to hide and survive or hate and survive or dream and survive, but the one thing they do is survive and not with acceptance in their hearts for those who humiliate them. A million more Arabs under Israeli rule? It's impossible. It can't be, it won't work.

  Behind his back his younger colleagues found reasons for Tajar's feelings. He's always been very close to the Arabs, they said. Naturally he understands how they feel and now when they've taken such a beating, when they've lost so much territory. . . .

  But it wasn't territory Tajar was thinking about. It was people that haunted him. He had profound respect for the despair born of humiliation and what it could lead to. And of course it was also true that he had been intimate his whole life with Arabs and Arab ways, unlike so many of the men he worked with, who were of European descent and oriented toward a European past.

  Or maybe it's those other things they say, thought Tajar. Maybe it's just that I'm from another generation, an old Jew, the old Jew. Perhaps I worry and fret when things go well because I'm too used to things not going well. The old Jew? Well I am old. Fifty-one is old when you first risked your life on a mission thirty years ago and have gone through a world war and three other wars since then. But can there really be an old and a new man in that respect? Do the inner ways of a people change so suddenly from one generation to another? Can feelings and perceptions become obsolete in only a decade or two and be discarded, like some weapon from the battlefield that doesn't fire as rapidly as a newer model? Is human nature like that? Are people like that?

  Is there something wrong with me because I can't accept our generals as heroes and our little country as invincible?

  A mere two decades after the holocaust, thought Tajar, and the nation of two million Jews defeats their enemy nations of eighty million and the whole world applauds as if history had suddenly reversed the evil of the holocaust, easing everyone's conscience a bit, while even we applaud the wonder of our new selves, the new Jew inside us who's proud and young and strong and says never again.

  Well it's true I must be from another time and place, thought Tajar, because something deep inside me doesn't like any of it. The Arabs wanted war and we had no choice, but I fear what's happened. We're out of balance, the proportions are wrong. War isn't our strength as a people and generals shouldn't be our heroes.

  Those are foreign gods, for others. Nor are the Arabs Nazis, nor is Israel in Europe, nor should anyone pretend we're settling history's scores. Israel is here and we're not of Europe or the West. We're a people of the far more ancient Middle East, one of many, who have wandered and come home, where all our neighbors are Arabs and always will be Arabs. True, they don't have to accept us, but if we're going to live here we have to accept them. And even to begin to imagine we can remake the world here in six days and rest on the seventh? It frightens me. In that presumption lies arrogance, the hubris of the ancient Greeks, the insupportable pride from which all human tragedy flows. . . .

  Tajar tried to keep his gloomy fears to himself. In any case there was no one he could really talk to about the feelings that had come over him. The men he knew professionally all had other views, and Anna had Assaf and her own concerns. What she needed from him then was confidence and assurance and strength, the same qualities he had always been known for in the Mossad.

  Tajar's house was very near Anna's, just around the corner and up the Street of the Prophets, for it was a part of Jerusalem he dearly loved. When he left her on her balcony in the evening he took a long time going home, hobbling slowly through the shadows and stopping to gaze at the noble old buildings dark against the stars.

  Finally he reached his turn off the Street of the Prophets, a collapsed gateway with a giant cactus rearing inside it. The scarred ancient cactus, taller than a man and many yards across, gave an appearance of desolation to the gateway, as if the desert had crept into Jerusalem and taken over an abandoned lot. But in fact the cactus merely guarded the gateway and hid what lay beyond it from the curious eyes of passers-by.

  Once around the cactus a large compound opened up, unkempt and seemingly impenetrable, the silver leaves of thick-trunked olive trees shimmering above a solid tangle of flowering rosebushes gone wild with the years. A giant cactus and gnarled olive trees and roses blooming in confusion — for Tajar, it was a Jerusalem kind of splendor.

  The compound was enclosed by a high wall. Beyond the cactus a narrow path wound its way into the tangle.

  There were glimpses of three or four small stone houses sheltering off to the sides near the wall, but houses and wall alike were mostly obscured by the bushes and trees. Sometimes the houses were occupied and sometimes not. They were tumble-down little places left over from the nineteenth century, as was the compound, and people seemed to move in and out of the houses as it suited them, without any particular notice to anyone, staying for a while and leaving when they found something better.

  Tajar had bought his house years ago when he was recuperating from his automobile accident. Here he had learned to read Homer and also to walk again. The path wound through a final maze of rosebushes and all at once there was an open space and his low stone house standing beside it, at the very end of the walled compound.

  It was a tight little cottage built close to the ground, no bigger than the others in the compound but in good repair. An English painter of Jerusalem in the nineteenth century, William Holman Hunt, had once lived in the house and Tajar enjoyed the associations of paintings having been created there.

  He had a hammock strung between a corner of the cottage and an olive tree. Often in the summer he brought a blanket from inside and lay down out there, unable to tear himself away from the vast beauty of a starry night over Jerusalem. Often, too, he fell asleep in the hammock without even closing his eyes, it seemed, for one moment he was gazing up at the stars in a perfect stillness and the next moment he was stirring stiffly, a faint light of dawn gently nudging him awake.

  I sleep in the yard like an old horse, he thought with a smile, gathering up his blanket to go inside for another hour or two of rest before it was time to begin the day. But there was so much to see in a Jerusalem night, how could he possibly close his eyes on such exquisite beauty?

  Still, he wished there were someone he could talk to who understood his work, not the everyday details but what it meant to him, the scope and direction of his life and especially the new concerns that troubled
him as a result of the June war. And then all at once he thought of just such a man, the man he had sent Yossi to see a few years earlier for that very reason, so Yossi in his isolation in Damascus could have someone to talk to who understood.

  Bell. The one-eyed hermit of Jericho whom Tajar had worked for in Cairo during the world war. Just the other day Anna had mentioned Bell, recalling his mysterious connection to her brother David and the way he had helped her in Egypt long ago.

  Bell? Naturally Tajar had kept himself current with Bell's situation in Jericho over the years, for professional reasons and also out of curiosity. Jericho was a small place and it was easy enough to come by reliable information, and of course he would never have sent Yossi to see Bell if he hadn't been sure of Bell's circumstances.

  And now as chance would have it, Jericho was in Israeli hands and Bell was living only fifteen miles from Jerusalem, in the same place where he had been living for the last twenty years. And what might that mean for me? wondered Tajar.

  In a world of secrecy and fury and chaos, it was astonishing how short distances were and how quickly things changed. Indeed, how near an unexpected friend could be.

  FIFTEEN

  In Jericho on the morning the June war began, Abu Musa and Moses the Ethiopian came drifting over to Bell's front porch and positioned themselves on their benches, there to remain most of the time during the next days, taking comfort in the company of friends and keeping a kind of vigil. As the hours of light passed into darkness and the darkness passed back into light, Abu Musa and Moses brooded over the shesh-besh board on the table between them, playing game after game and saying little. As usual Bell reclined in his tattered chair to the side, sipping arak and saying even less.