Jericho Mosaic jq-4

by Edward Whittemore

  For his central office Halim still used the suite of rooms he had acquired originally in the large building off Martyrs' Square, the building with the hotel on the top floor. Now he had to find space in the suite to work on these ventilation schemes. The only free area was the seating arrangement at the end of his own room, where a company director normally sat with his guests over coffee. Halim moved the overstuffed chairs to his manager's office and put in draftsman's tables and lighting fixtures and banks of deep flat cupboards with dozens of drawers to hold the blueprints and diagrams. When his partner came by and found Halim and the master machinists pouring over their papers, he joked that Halim's room looked more like a crowded architect's den than a successful businessman's office.

  It was crowded and there were papers everywhere, but nothing was done by chance in the Runner's life. The entrance to Halim's offices lay at the end of one of the two corridors that ran the length of the building on each floor. The elevators opened between the first and the second corridors. In the second corridor was the room with toilets and sinks for the smaller offices on the floor which were without toilets of their own. The entrance to Halim's offices was in the first corridor, but his rooms extended to the blank wall of the second corridor.

  And the far end of his own room, now crowded with draftsman's cupboards and tables, backed exactly against the wall where the toilet stalls were.

  In redesigning the room the Runner had done some special work of his own. If he set the screws in the back of one of his cupboards in a certain way, a man in the second corridor could enter the toilets and lock himself in the last stall, unfasten a panel in the back wall and another panel in Halim's wall, and reach through into Halim's cupboard — to remove the cardboard cylinder that had been placed there for him. The panel in the toilet stall could conceivably have been opened by chance, but if that happened it would have revealed nothing. The next panel through Halim's wall, giving access to Halim's cupboard, couldn't be discerned. Nor could that second panel be opened accidentally, since only a correct combination of screw turns on Halim's side allowed it to open.

  There was risk involved. No dead drop was ideal when bulk material had to be transferred frequently. Either the Runner repeatedly carried compromising material on his person to some neutral location in Damascus, or the dead drop had to be adjacent to his office. Tajar felt the lesser risk was for the Runner never to have the compromising maps and diagrams on his person. Better for the couriers to bear that danger and make it their main concern. The arrangement also freed the Runner to be only Halim when he moved around Damascus, a subtle and important consideration to Tajar's mind. Thus setting the screws at the back of the office cupboard was Yossi's task. And later when Halim walked out of the office he could simply be himself, a man who carried nothing he need fear. Risk was inherent for the Runner, but Tajar knew the risk was lessened the more Halim could be Halim. In any case, Tajar expected the dead drop to be in use for only a limited period of time. The underground fortresses on the Golan were extensive, but not infinite.

  So there were intricate risks and dangers in the Runner's progress, and precise precautions and continual readjustments. To Ziad as to anyone else who knew him in Damascus, Halim's early steps in the Syrian capital had always seemed to follow naturally and easily one upon the other: where he lived and where he worked, the hotel on the top floor and then the offices on a lower floor of the same building, the villa out of the center of town, the way his life and business came to be what they were. But behind it all were the careful decisions of a master planner.

  ***

  Hectic, busy years for the Runner then, and soon there were to be many changes around him because the Middle East was slipping toward the Six-Day War, that utterly disastrous defeat for the Arabs. God was said to have created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, and certainly the 1967 war completely reworked the destiny of the Middle East in only six days. But it did so with a secret promise of years of brutal struggle instead of a seventh day of peace. Ziad lost his job and added espionage to his list of failures. After the war, the young nephew of the former army chief-of-staff lapsed back into the obscurity of his Druse village.

  The minister of information, more fortunate than many, went into exile as the Syrian ambassador in Paris.

  And the paratroop colonel took part in a failed coup attempt and then escaped to Baghdad, only to reenter Damascus clandestinely with the help of Iraqi agents, disguised as an old peasant woman, to be immediately arrested and tried and shot, all within twenty-four hours.

  Yet for Halim looking back, those times before the Six-Day War were the good years, the years of building and moving forward, before chance and skill changed the maps of fate so drastically. Tajar used to tell Yossi that the identity of Halim would come over him very gradually in Damascus. Before the Six-Day War this seemed to be so to Yossi, and the two aspects of his life never met. Yossi and Halim remained separate people. They had different tasks and different lives, different emotions and different sensibilities, in keeping with the controlled schizophrenia of a deep-cover agent. Halim's life was decided by circumstances outside himself, by the background Tajar had constructed for him, and by the ways business and society worked in Damascus. Halim's life was subtly aggressive. Exploiting opportunity was the purpose of it. And Halim could do this without second thoughts because the justification for it lay elsewhere. The Runner operation justified what Halim did.

  Yossi's life, on the other hand, was minutely prescribed. There were exact instructions for everything Yossi did, particularly after the fortifications on the Golan Heights became the goal of the Runner operation. Tajar's back-up team was responsible for moving the Runner's material, and Yossi didn't know these men for security reasons. Halim crossed paths with hundreds of people each day, all kinds of people in all kinds of places. His life was arranged that way on purpose. The disguised and coded messages between Tajar and the Runner might be embedded between the outer and inner cardboard layers of what looked like a common cigarette box, discarded and crushed and empty, its bottom torn open so that it would be of no use even to a child or a tramp. The crushed cigarette box was put in a certain place, and elsewhere a commonplace mark was made at a certain place on a wall or a tree, by Halim or by a member of the back-up team, explaining exactly what had been done. The cupboard transfer for bulk material remained the same at Halim's office, but coded messages back and forth were always kept separate from that.

  Tajar continually revised these procedures, always striving for naturalness and simplicity. When he met Yossi in Beirut, an important part of their time together was devoted to reviewing Halim's movements and contacts, so Tajar would have the knowledge to work out safe new methods connecting the Runner and his back-up team.

  Thus Yossi's work was rigid and inflexible. It was mechanical, outwardly complex but demanding nothing of his inner self. Yossi was neither aggressive nor opportunistic. He didn't exploit people or situations. That kind of activity belonged to Halim's sphere. Yossi as a person, a former paratrooper who had gone on to more specialized training, had no need to question anything. His objective was clear: the high ground of the Golan.

  The Runner operation as a whole — Halim, Yossi, the communication and transport systems maintained by the back-up team — worked as a machine run by Tajar. In fact Tajar did more than run the machine. In effect, he was the machine.

  All that changed with the Six-Day War. It took some time for Yossi to realize it, but the comfortable schizophrenia of his several lives irrevocably came to an end with that war, which had seemed to be his and Israel's greatest triumph. Thereafter he had no choice but to become Halim, a man who was as much a Syrian in his complex way as Ziad.

  THREE

  Damascus was appalled by the magnitude of the Six Day defeat. Overnight the Runner operation became completely inactive. Halim retreated into the quietest of his business enterprises and saw as few people as possible, like everyone else. The danger grew as shock gave way
to recrimination and bloodletting in the government, in the Baath and the army. Yossi, hidden away inside of Halim, suddenly had a great deal of time to roam through his house and garden. He was joined by Ziad, who was out of work and in need of drink.

  Ziad came to spend long summer evenings alone with him in the old villa. Together they sat for hours in heavy thronelike chairs on Halim's broad empty verandahs, above the wide stone stairs leading down to nowhere, their thoughts drifting in the shadows as they imagined the open fields and caravan processions which were no longer there in the distance.

  Defeat — brutal, overwhelming, ignominious — caused Ziad to look back over his life that summer. He became obsessed with the past and often recalled the stirring visions and noble causes of his student days, all sadly come to nothing.

  Yossi also looked back over his life that summer, though in a much different way. The news of Assaf's wounds from the war troubled him far more than he was able to admit to himself at first. The fact that Assaf had come so close to death destroyed the exhilaration Yossi might have felt over Israel's victory and his own contribution to it. To be suddenly inactive after years of hectic effort might have brought a letdown in any case, but added to this depression was a profound sense of remorse.

  There was nothing he could do for Assaf. There was no way he could ease Assaf's pain or comfort him, no way he could even see him. This caused a terrible sense of inadequacy in Yossi, and the fact that he understood his situation so clearly did nothing to lessen his bleak mood of uselessness. He felt he had betrayed Assaf and the betrayal brought him intense pain. Even the house he was trapped in was all at once painful.

  Yossi's house in Damascus was very much like Anna's house in Jerusalem, at least in its interiors. Tajar had described the Jerusalem house to him and of course the similarity wasn't surprising. The stone houses on Ethiopia Street had been built by the Nashashibi family, one of the important Arab clans of Jerusalem under the Turks and the British. When various branches of the family had gotten together and erected an enclave of connecting homes and courtyards early in the century, they had followed accepted custom and built their houses in the Damascus style: a large central room with high ceilings of painted wood arranged in geometric designs, tall recessed windows and wrought-iron doors opening onto courtyards or balconies, the smaller rooms for sleeping all giving off this central gathering place for the family, with the kitchen and pantries and storerooms tucked away out of sight at the end of a long corridor. As an arrangement of space it was the typical old-fashioned design for a large Arab family of means. The spaciousness of the central room and its painted wooden ceilings, in particular, were what signified the Damascus style during the Ottoman era.

  Thus the apartment where Assaf had grown up in Jerusalem was almost a replica of Yossi's house in Damascus. The grounds were different and Yossi's house was single-storied. But when Yossi wandered through the great central room of his old villa, he sometimes had a haunting premonition that Assaf was there somewhere, lying wounded in a bed behind one of the doors, waiting for Yossi to find him. The sensation came to Yossi without warning, a sharp rush of excitement as fleeting as it was irrational. Restless and pacing, his thoughts on some practical matter, he would chance to glance up at the orderly patterns of the ceiling and all at once feel a presence near him, a special significance to one of the doors. . . . Was Assaf in there?

  The feeling was so strong he might turn toward the door or even take a step in that direction. But then the truth would strike him like a blow and crush his heart in a moment of unspeakable anguish, a pain far worse than any he had ever known. He realized it was his own guilt that was torturing him in this cruel way, but he could do nothing to evade the torment. Yet it was also true that he only had this experience when he was alone and could think of himself as Yossi. It never happened in the company of someone else, not even Ziad.

  Tajar's training of Yossi had been so profound that even these powerful bursts of emotion were overruled by Halim's unshakable discipline.

  So Halim's safety and solitude remained intact, but there was an inevitable price to be paid for it. In a matter of months Yossi's hair turned mostly white. It was also during this period that his face came to have the lean carved look of a permanent desert traveler, and his eyes acquired that startling penetrating quality which Tajar found so mesmerizing when they met again in Beirut after a separation of several years. By then the Runner's transformation was so complete that Halim's radiant smile was the only outward sign to remind Tajar of the eager young man he had sat with on the shores of the Mediterranean near the Negev a decade and a half ago, and there revealed his dream of an extraordinary clandestine operation they would build together, and an adventurous new life for Yossi which would be uniquely devoted to the purest of ideals.

  As for the Runner, he was simply trying to survive in his innermost being, and what surprised him most was how remote his old self now seemed. He found himself recalling Yossi as he might recall a childhood friend.

  He knew every detail about the life of this other person, but it was all a memory from another world. Yossi's hopes, Yossi's fears . . . they were simply no longer his. Halim understood disguises, and the lean new face he saw in the mirror, with its deep-set eyes and white hair, meant little to him. It was the inner changes that astonished him as Yossi slipped away into the past.

  The steps of survival were always so small, it seemed to the Runner. Yet how vast was the sad finality of these changes he was witnessing.

  ***

  Through the long quiet evenings they shared on Halim's dark verandahs that summer, Ziad mistook his friend's distant mood for the gloom of defeat pervading Damascus. Ziad had lost his job at the ministry even before the war broke out, a casual victim of one of those periodic shuffles that accompanied minor weekend intrigues in the army. Some pro-Egyptian officers had been arrested, some people fired. Ziad was caught having coffee on the wrong side of the corridor one morning.

  He was disappointed, but he knew after the war he would have lost his job anyway. Important men were being arrested and jailed, and Ziad wasn't even important. People used him. He ran errands. Now he was doing part-time work for several newspapers. The only real friend he had was Halim, who treated him as an equal.

  With Halim there was never any need for him to hide and to play the buffoon. He could always reveal his fears and be himself, because of the bond between them. He wasn't used to such good fortune in life and never ceased to be amazed by it, and grateful for this place he had in Halim's heart.

  But then Halim wasn't like other people. Halim had grown up in Argentina and chose to live in a crumbling villa from another era. He recalled grand tales of a mythical Damascus and dreamed of being a Syrian and an Arab, which meant he actually believed there were such things. To Ziad these were abstract concepts, unconnected to reality and meaningless in the end. Reality to Ziad was the nexus of family and tribe and chance, and money and skill and religious sect, which determined a man's place in the souk. There were many little souks and the one great souk that included them all — Damascus, which for thousands of years had been the chief place of a satrapy or province or border state often called Syria, sometimes Greek or Roman or Persian or Turkish or Mongolian, sometimes Moslem or Christian or pagan, a meeting place for caravans, a way-station for conquering armies from Europe or Asia or the vast hinterlands of the deserts. This abstraction was what Halim liked to think of as his homeland, Syria. And to Ziad, Arab had even less meaning than that. To him it was a term as vague as Latin American.

  You know it means nothing, he said to Halim. What does an Amazon Indian hunting in the jungle with a blowgun have in common with a stiff Chilean of German descent tending vineyards on the slopes of the Andes? You had no trouble understanding that over there. Why pretend it's any different here?

  Halim only smiled in answer to Ziad's arguments. Of course it was true Halim had visionary aspects to him, undeniable touches of the mystic. Halim even believed in the caus
e of the Palestinians, who were merely a tool to everyone else, a convenient source of manpower to be drawn on for private wars. So astute and practical in business affairs, Halim had this strange other side to him when it came to viewing the politics of men, an ability to disregard the everyday facts of life and find an ultimate faith in human destiny. Ziad couldn't fathom the paradox. He knew the world didn't work the way his friend envisioned it, but he was still fascinated by Halim's faith. Halim was a dreamer and Ziad couldn't help but love him for that.

  But above all, it was Halim's acceptance of him that affected Ziad most deeply. Life for Ziad was a hard, perpetual performance of skill and trickery and dissembling, a desperate and neverending attempt at false bravado. He utterly lacked Halim's charm and easy way with people. It wasn't that he meant to harm himself with his awkward behavior. He wasn't perverse. He simply had a clumsy touch with others and couldn't avoid the feeling that he was sinking in life, without ever having had a chance to rise. He felt out of place in almost any situation. Inevitably his feelings betrayed him and then he was out of place.

  Only with Halim was it different. Halim's presence reassured him. When they were alone together he truly felt calm inside himself, as if blessed, because Halim accepted him as he was. This seemed nothing less than a miracle to Ziad, a gift from heaven.

  In fact he often thought of his friend in exactly those words.

  For me, he said to himself, Halim is a gift from heaven.

  ***

  As the months passed Halim began to devote more of his time and money to helping his Palestinian friends.

  Again the Runner was busy, reporting on Palestinian activities.

  In Damascus it was a time of instability and uncertainty. Halim's former friend, the minister of information, was brought back from Paris and sent to jail for life. A younger cousin of the ex-minister, who had become the head of a Baathist intelligence agency while still in his early thirties, committed suicide by jumping out an office window in the defense ministry, or was murdered. A fierce struggle developed between the civilian and military wings of the Baath, with Iraqi agents and pro-Egyptian elements active against each other. Protection money from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf oil states, beyond the regular subsidies, was available to those who knew how to extort it. In this turmoil Syria practically closed its borders to Westerners. Even influential Syrians rarely traveled beyond Beirut. King Hussein of Jordan, in danger of losing control of his country to the PLO, went to war against the PLO militias and drove them out of Jordan into Lebanon. Syrian tanks invaded Jordan but drew back when Israel warned of war and Saudi Arabia warned of a cut in money.