Jericho Mosaic jq-4

by Edward Whittemore

What is it? asked Tajar.

  Oh, I was thinking of Argentina, said Yossi. When my Syrian acquaintances there used to speak of life being hard in Syria, because it's a poor country, there was often a hint of something more in their voices. A suggestion meant for me perhaps, an unspoken word, a perception they shared, looking back. Not something they wanted to say out loud because that would have meant demeaning their homeland and their memories. I felt it on this trip, especially when I was with Ziad. Ruthless was that unspoken word. You have to be that way to succeed in such a place, when you're born there and grow up there, and Ziad doesn't have it. He lacks it entirely.

  Oh well, ordinary for his time and place, like most people, said Tajar. Of course I wouldn't imagine he'll go very far. But then most people don't . . . anywhere, do they?

  TWO

  The first years of the Runner operation in Damascus were devoted to Halim establishing his export business.

  With his introductions from Syrian businessmen in Buenos Aires and his Swiss letters of credit, he had no difficulty putting together shipments of leather goods and obtaining export licenses. The shipments went off to Belgium and more orders came in.

  Halim worked alone in his business, using the small hotel where he lived as his office. The hotel occupied the top floor of a large building off Martyrs' Square in the center of downtown Damascus. It was not yet a big city but it was growing rapidly, in confusion, and private flats and commercial and government offices tended to be all crowded together in the same buildings. Construction was haphazard after the Second World War and new Damascus was as much a hodgepodge as the old. Halim's building was typical with shops and coffeehouses on the ground floor, the offices of dentists and lawyers and small businesses and municipal departments on the two floors above that, then three floors of apartments where families lived, with the hotel on the top floor.The same two creaking cage-lifts serviced all the floors, so every manner of person could be found coming in and out of the building. The lifts were at the end of a cavernous entrance hall, poorly lit, and people tended to slink through this near-darkness like fugitives, no matter how confidently they entered from the bright sunlight. Far back in the gloom an elderly guard reigned from his perch on a high stool. The guard wore a vague khaki uniform and was armed with a Mauser, a huge antique rifle from the time of the Ottoman Turks. The rifle was merely ceremonial: a shiny brass plug with a red tassel was fitted into the end of the barrel. But this was the guard's undisputed domain and here he ruled with the ill-humor of a stranded Tatar horseman, gruffly directing a band of ragged urchins who fetched coffee and ran errands for the offices upstairs.

  Only Syrians stayed at the hotel. The bedrooms were comfortable, even spacious, and a few were occupied by old women who lived there permanently and spoke French more often than Arabic. But most of the guests were men from the provinces with business to do in the capital, or people visiting relatives. The polite deskmen were careful with messages, and the younger bartenders were ready to provide discreet information on women and gold and hashish.

  Halim often worked on one of the balconies outside the public rooms of the hotel, where he could do his correspondence and bookkeeping while looking down on courtyards with palm trees and banks of flowers, a low red-tiled roof somewhere among them. The streets near Martyrs' Square were always noisy and crowded but there were also grand old houses with overgrown gardens hidden away between the newer buildings, and the balconies of Halim's hotel offered a glimpse of these graceful memories of an older Damascus.

  Ziad pretended to find Halim's living arrangements insufferably bourgeois. Secretly, though, he liked the peaceful comfort of the hotel, exotically named the Brittany, which was far removed from the hectic coffeehouse scheming he lived in so much of the time. Halim would still be at work when Ziad arrived at the end of the afternoon. Ziad would poke his head through the beaded curtain separating the barroom from the balcony and announce himself, then settle into a leather armchair and order Scotch. Ziad loved Scotch but he could never afford to buy it. Here it went on Halim's bill. The bar was a sedate room with wood paneling and potted plants and a ceiling fan. There were also free bowls of peanuts. Ziad sat in splendor with his French newspaper open on his lap, watching the sinking sun through the windows and feeling himself a man of the world.

  A second bowl of peanuts arrived with Ziad's second Scotch. By then Halim was gathering up his paperwork and soon it was time for them to go out and roam the city, to visit coffeehouses and meet people and take long walks, ending up at some restaurant Ziad knew.

  On other evenings Halim generally ate in the hotel dining room. It was astonishing how many friends he made there in a short time, men of different backgrounds from different parts of Syria. In many ways, Tajar had told Yossi, your first year in Damascus will decide everything. People get an idea of someone and it lasts.

  Halim was aware how Ziad's company enhanced his own position with other people. Ziad's futile self-display in public, so desperate and awkward and shrill, could only emphasize Halim's more thoughtful manner. Ziad had to pretend to understand every subject and would make any claim, while Halim never talked about something he didn't know. So the contrast between the two of them was striking, and Halim seemed all the more inviting and worthy of confidence because of Ziad's boisterous antics.

  In the beginning Yossi deeply felt the dangers of Damascus. Keeping watch and informing on others, after all, was the traditional free entertainment of the city. In a casual or venomous manner, people idly repeated scurrilous news as a way of passing the time while they waited for something more interesting to happen, much as they also split sunflower seeds with their teeth and spit out the shells around them as they walked or tarried . . . By the by, have you heard? . . . did you know? . . . his mother . . . her grandfather . . . that one

  . . . yesterday . . . the last time. . . .

  This commonplace pastime was a way to enact a private revenge on life, to defend against personal inadequacy and unkind fortune, a neverending litany on the weaknesses and misfortunes of others which hovered between simple gossip and outright slander. Imagined petty intrigues were slipped into any conversation, if for no other reason than to show that the speaker was clever and suspicious. Spite and jealousy and politics were pervasive and demanded constant attention. Rumors had to be tested and insinuations passed along, for how else could they be verified? It was part of the social fabric for everyone to inform on everyone else, and beyond these routine habits lurked the professionals, the plainclothes policemen and the innumerable agents who were employed by the various security services.

  Yossi was only fifty miles from Beirut, where he could meet Tajar. He was only a hundred and thirty-five miles from Jerusalem itself. Yet he often felt farther away from Tajar than he had in Argentina. After the vast expanses of South America, he found it strange to readjust to these tiny distances separating people and enemies in the Middle East.

  So Yossi was intensely aware how alone he was, cut off with no one to turn to. Every confidence he made in the hotel dining room or in the offices where he did business, every step he took on the path to becoming Halim, only made his isolation clearer to him. His life was profoundly remote and there was no relief from solitude. At first this aloneness was hard to bear and he often confided in Ziad, revealing his fears and loneliness as a stranger — not as Yossi of course but as Halim, an immigrant from faraway Argentina, absent from Syria since the age of three. As for Ziad, he was more than sympathetic. In fact he loved this intimacy and was eager to understand Halim's feelings, which were exactly what he had always yearned to experience in life and knew he never would, an aspect of his own secret dreams of adventure, of breaking away from the confines he had been born to and going to live in a foreign land.

  A concern, an understanding which was always generous and genuine — this was Ziad's gift to Halim in the beginning, and certainly for Yossi the gift was far from small. Yossi was aware someone else might have done as much for him when he first arr
ived in Damascus, some other friend he might have made during that early, crucial period. But the fact remained it was his little friend Ziad who listened to him and shared his feelings when he was vulnerable, before he began to acquire confidence in his status as Halim.

  ***

  Shesh-besh caused the first great change in Halim's life in Damascus. The game was newly popular in Europe when he began exporting tables, and they became an enormous success. Other companies soon entered the market, but by then Yossi had already made enough money to recompense the Mossad for all the costs of the Runner operation to date.

  Tajar was astounded when he read the Runner's financial reports. He smiled and hummed to himself.

  Intelligence operations never made money. They either spent it or lost it. The Runner was unique in many ways but of course no one would ever know it except Tajar and the director of the Mossad.

  In Damascus, Halim's manufacturers were ecstatic with their share of the profits. The tale of Halim's shesh-besh triumph in Europe crept into the coffeehouses, and Halim's reputation as a shrewd businessman was assured. Halim rented offices on a lower floor of his hotel building and hired a clerk and a bookkeeper.

  He began to look for a permanent place to live. The government fell and the influence of the Baath Party increased, particularly in the army. Through Ziad, Halim became friendly with the arrogant nephew of the new army chief-of-staff.

  They're Druse and therefore the uncle can never be president, confided Ziad. That makes it a safe appointment, unthreatening to the older political parties. But the uncle is known to lean toward the Baath, and this shows how our strength is growing. Another year or two and we'll have it all. . . .

  Ziad's we was the Baath. His interest in the party had suddenly revived now that it was moving closer to power.

  Halim's shesh-besh success gave him a reputation as a marketing genius with the right contacts in Europe.

  Businessmen approached him with proposals and he studied the projects carefully before investing his time and money. He was thorough and hardworking and honest. He favored partnerships and was exactly the kind of man anyone would want for a partner. He liked the idea of developing import schemes to balance his export trade. He also showed a flair for practical engineering projects. Once he had even thought of becoming an engineer, he admitted.

  And then with a shy smile: If we could choose whatever we wanted in the world I suppose I would have been an inventor in the early nineteenth century, in Europe or America, one of those cranks who tinkered around in his workshop and found a practical solution to something real, on his own.

  Halim had this conversation with a businessman he had befriended a few years previously at the hotel. The man owned a well-established machinery company which had begun to slip. Together they worked out an ambitious partnership. Halim would invest capital for new imports and be responsible for marketing and development. His partner would continue to run the firm and be in charge of its service and repair operations.

  Halim redirected the company into air-conditioning, which was soon making money. He also developed a special capability in exhaust systems, first for plants and then for trucks. They repaired army trucks and went on to the more complicated systems of armored personnel carriers. The basic equipment was Russian and not the best, nor had it been designed for Syrian conditions. Sand got into everything.

  With his machinists, Halim worked out modifications for the intake and exhaust systems. The new parts were tooled in the company's shops and worked well when installed. They made still more improvements when army transport officers took Halim and a master machinist into the field to check performance on the spot.

  But that was only one of Halim's many projects during those years. He was always busy and worked long hours. He now had a manager running his central enterprise, his export-import office, and was generally involved in two or three other business ventures as a partner, in addition to the machinery company. His work took him back and forth through Syria, frequently to Beirut and sometimes to Europe. He also went to Jordan to visit the Palestinian refugee camps there, a humanitarian problem that had begun to concern him.

  Still, he was careful to stay out of politics in Damascus, which he could do as a businessman who had come from Argentina and was unencumbered by the usual intricate networks of past favors and loyalties and allegiances. Of course there was no question he was a patriot. He had returned to Syria for that very reason.

  And everyone knew his sympathies were with the progressive policies of the Baath, the party of social reform and nationalism. His friends suspected he might take a more public role when enough time had passed for him to feel firmly established. He might not, but that was the usual way with businessmen who owed their success to hard work and caution.

  Although he had little time to enjoy it, Halim was obviously very fond of the house he had found for himself. It was one of those old Damascus villas he had always admired, with rustling palm trees and an overgrown garden tucked away between newer buildings, a relic from a more leisurely era. The house itself wasn't so large and much of it was given over to wholly useless verandahs with broad stone steps to nowhere, which must have once commanded a view. The villa had been on the outskirts of Damascus when it was built and now it was well within the city, but the grounds and the trees and walls still gave the house a great sense of privacy. Halim could walk to his office and did so every day, strolling briskly along tree-lined streets and greeting dozens of people on the different routes he followed to vary his walks. Because Damascus was growing so rapidly, squalor stood next to luxury and Halim passed through many kinds of neighborhoods.

  Ziad wasn't surprised at the sort of house his friend had chosen. Since their days on the hotel balcony he had expected Halim would eventually live in one of these crumbling old villas, hidden away behind high walls and crowded in among ancient fruit trees. Ziad knew his friend would take no notice of the primitive electrical wiring and water pipes which ran along the walls inside the rooms. Naturally it was the tangled garden that would enchant Halim, with its disused fountains and broken, discolored statues. The statues were half as old as Damascus itself, relics of the Greek and Roman and Byzantine periods, worn both white and black by two millennia of rain and sun. How many gardens have they stood in? mused Halim. How many eras have they calmly watched come and go?

  Of course, tradition, Ziad said, laughing. It takes a man from the wide open spaces of the New World to appreciate such a romantic ruin of a house. What does it matter that it has leaky roofs and bad plumbing and huge drafty rooms which are impossible to heat in the winter? The garden alone justifies all. Here Aristotle can contemplate the bust of Homer and marvel at the poet's blind stone eyes and wonder whither time marches . . . yes?

  There was another government coup. Tanks rumbled through downtown Damascus and this time the Baath seized power outright. The more outrageous land speculators were arrested, allowing this sure means of instant wealth to slip into other hands, perhaps those closer to the new educated classes and the army. The general who had been the Syrian military attaché in Buenos Aires became the new president. Halim sent flowers to his former shesh-besh partner, congratulating him, and became a guest at presidential receptions.

  Ziad was able to find a job for himself in the ministry of information, the most substantial position he had ever held.

  Halim began entertaining in his home and Ziad turned up with his new friends, mostly Baath army officers.

  Ziad also brought along women to these evenings. With the ways of regular journalism now behind him and no longer a source of income, with his success now dependent upon army officers, he had come up with a new service for those in power — pandering. Always pathetically unsuccessful himself with women, he now found he could enjoy their company on the strength of the important men he would introduce them to. Slightly hysterical and already a little drunk, he appeared at Halim's door early in the evening with a woman on each arm, and rushed off to try to gather up a
few more who might or might not be waiting for him. Then he gulped Scotch and spent the rest of the evening flitting around Halim's living room, refilling glasses and telling raucous anecdotes.

  Halim himself acted as a quiet host at these gatherings, in keeping with his more reserved manner. While Ziad chattered noisily from group to group, Halim was apt to be in conversation with someone off to the side.

  Most of the women brought along by Ziad were secretaries from government ministries, but occasionally he captured a more glamorous prize. One evening he turned up with a popular singer, a vivacious and ambitious young woman. Halim introduced her to a colonel and took the two of them for a stroll in his garden, applying all his charm to making the encounter a success. For the colonel, who was the new commander of the paratroop brigade on the Golan Heights, that evening in the shadows of Halim's garden was the beginning of a passionate love affair with the singer, and he always felt warmly toward Halim for bringing her into his life.

  There were also other kinds of friendships for Halim. The austere minister of information, educated in Paris and the leading intellectual of the Baathist regime, was a man of a different sort. Halim met him through Ziad but thereafter they got together without Ziad, the better to discuss Latin American politics and pursue the minister's scheme, first suggested by Halim, of securing financial support for the Baath from the Syrian community in Buenos Aires. Halim wrote letters to Argentina and collected some funds for the minister. But as the minister said, the amount of money wasn't as important as the principle of Syrians overseas taking part in the rejuvenation of their ancient homeland.

  ***

  Halim was busy, always busy. The machinery company in which he was a partner had been given a contract to improve the ventilation systems of bunkers on the Golan Heights, which accommodated armored vehicles as well as artillery and tank crews, a whole complicated series of connecting underground fortresses. Each bunker was different and presented a slightly different set of ventilation problems. Halim worked on the diagrams with his master machinists, making modifications and finding practical solutions.