Jericho Mosaic jq-4

by Edward Whittemore

  The mosaic fascinated Halim, said Bell. We would sit there and look at it and before long his imagination would be roaming in every direction at once, back and forth through history to all those ancient and not so ancient peoples who have unrolled their banners and come marching this way in search of Jericho, our not quite forgotten Garden of Eden, the Egyptians and Assyrians and Babylonians and Persians, the Greeks and Romans and Byzantines and Arabs, the Crusaders and Mamelukes and Turks, the Israelites before and the Jews more recently, and the many other less remembered tribes whose movements remain obscure, whose empires were never born. Yes, the mosaic fascinated Halim and evoked many moods in him, many emotions and memories. I've always found peace when I sit beside it, but not so Halim. To him it was deeply disturbing, finally. Yet he always wanted to return to it and so we did, many times.

  Bell fell silent but Tajar said nothing, waiting. Perhaps there was more?

  I asked him once what troubled him about the mosaic, Bell said at last. He told me but his answer was a little too succinct. Quite possibly he didn't fully understand it himself, then.

  What did he say? asked Tajar.

  He mentioned the lion's gaze. Not the ferocity of it but its fixed quality. That was what seemed to bother him.

  NINE

  With the Syrian army on hand in Beirut to suppress the Palestinian and Moslem militias, the Maronite Christians were free to take on each other and act out a play within the play of self-destruction, a civil war within the civil war. At stake as always was money and power, called territory by the Maronites in gangland style, what Tajar referred to as Lebanon's Mafia imperative.

  The elderly leaders of the Maronite factions were all in their seventies and eighties. For decades these aging clan chieftains had tirelessly plotted against each other as one or another of their number had managed to ease himself into the presidency, by way of unscrupulous deals with his deadly enemies. The play had always gone on because the presidency was good for only six years of plunder. Wisely, the French had made reelection to the presidency unconstitutional, in order that the keys to the treasury might keep moving from gang to gang. The difference in the late 1970s was that the Syrian army had put down the Maronites'

  enemies, and the Maronite factions were very heavily armed. Both the Syrians and the Israelis had been providing them with weapons since the civil war.

  Among the most powerful Maronite chieftains was one who had always been squeezed out of the presidency at the last moment, a stiff and impeccable man known to everyone as Sheik Jean-Claude, very dapper in his dark blue French suits.

  Although the mask of the old man's face was now as dry and set as an Egyptian mummy's, the sheik had begun life as a pharmacist and had been known in the 1930s as Jean-Claude the condom, because his pharmacy in the brothel district was conveniently open at odd hours, the better to do business. That was long ago but a certain raffish aura still clung to the ancient visage of Sheik Jean-Claude, who had seen it all so many times that his expression never changed, and whose hard-earned transformation from a condom to a sheik in the course of a busy half-century was very much in the admired Lebanese manner of achievement.

  Sheik Jean-Claude embodied the Francophil element in Maronite thinking, which liked to believe that Lebanon wasn't really in the Middle East at all, but rather just off the south coast of France, a spicier Riviera. The opposing view was held most strongly by the Maronites of the north, who did think they were situated in the Middle East, in fact right next door to Syria. The northern Maronites were accustomed to getting along with the Syrians and even doing business with them. Thus the former Lebanese president whose son ran the Lebanese side of the Middle Eastern hashish alliance, along with the Syrian dictator's younger brother, was a chieftain of the north.

  Sheik Jean-Claude had never quite managed to maneuver himself into the presidency, but he still had hopes for his sons. The eldest son and heir apparent, Zozo, was killed in a boating accident at the beginning of the civil war. While waterskiing off Beirut, he was swamped and ridden over by an unidentified speedboat. Sheik Jean-Claude's aspirations then passed to his second son, Fuad, and his third son, Nazo, who dropped his childhood nickname and reverted to his real name, Naji, which Sheik Jean-Claude considered more respectable for a possible presidential candidate.

  Both Fuad and Naji had become local leaders during the civil war. Fuad was more interested in political organization, like his father, but Naji loved the casual flair of paramilitary uniforms and devoted his time to Sheik Jean-Claude's militia. Both brothers were also active in various commercial ventures, in order to pay for their political and military enterprises. Fuad dealt in smuggled whiskey and automobiles and ran some profitable joint businesses with the chief of PLO intelligence. He was friendly with many Lebanese Moslems and had close connections with Syrian intelligence, who supplied him with arms. Naji dealt mostly in hashish and smuggled gold. He despised Moslems, got his arms from the Israelis, and had close connections with the Mossad.

  Naji, always smartly dressed in well-tailored camouflage fatigues, became the official commander of his father's militia. He was only twenty-eight at the time and his preferred food was Mars bars. Naturally Fuad still had his own troops which he controlled, separate from Naji's. There were also many other private armies financed by the Arab powers, who all found Lebanon a convenient place to do their killing, without disturbing the precarious political situations they invariably faced at home.

  One June morning Naji launched a fateful attack against the summer palace of the clan chief of the northern Maronites. The ex-president himself was in Beirut and Naji's target was the man's son and heir, the most prominent Lebanese of Naji's generation and Naji's most serious Maronite rival, both in politics and in the hashish trade.

  For Naji, whose experience was mostly in street killings, the attack on the summer palace was a well-planned military assault. His rival, the ex-president's son, went down shooting in the kitchen, killed along with his wife and their three-year-old daughter and the family dog.

  ***

  And so it went as the gangsters in Lebanon shot and bombed their way into the eighties. Halim met with the lieutenants of these clan chieftains, as well as with Palestinians and Lebanese Moslems. He also dealt with many Syrian intelligence officers who ran operations in Lebanon, and with the countless agents they employed — all for Colonel Jundi. He knew Lebanon could have managed a vicious civil war on its own, but how much more vicious it was with the country stuffed with arms and serving as a killing ground for everyone else's causes, with Syria on one side and Israel on the other and the PLO in between them.

  In time Naji became more and more closely aligned with the Israelis. First the Mossad dealt with him, then Israeli generals, then the new Israeli prime minister himself. The Syrians had entered Lebanon on the side of the Christians, but in only a few years the Christians had turned around and were fighting the Syrians, more or less led by Naji.

  It was easy enough for Halim to see what was happening. The Israelis had a grand new scheme which would make Lebanon right for them: the Maronites in control, the PLO crushed and Syria out of the country, a peace treaty, an open border. And Naji was the tool who would bring these wonders to pass, with the help of the Israeli army. To Halim it made no sense at all. It ignored everything he knew about Lebanon.

  It was also obvious to Halim that his reports to the Mossad had become irrelevant. The extraordinary access he had in Lebanon, the information he acquired for Colonel Jundi and passed on to Tajar, had seemed spectacular only a few years ago. But it was entirely meaningless now that the Israeli government had already decided on its course in Lebanon. And not only the Runner but Tajar himself had become irrelevant to the Mossad. Tajar was a man of subtlety in Middle Eastern ways, and to him the grand new scheme for Lebanon was preposterous. As Naji organized new shoot-outs around Lebanon and was praised by those in power in Israel, Tajar more than ever seemed a man of the past. As usual he spoke his mind, and like the messenge
r who brought unwanted news he was ignored and isolated in the Mossad as a result.

  Halim knew all this. They talked about it one night at a meeting in another safehouse on the coast.

  It is what is, said Tajar. I've served a long time and eras change. We used to wonder about it but it does seem, finally, that Israel is to become part of the Middle East after all. People in this part of the world have always had a thin grasp of reality. It's a place of wish and fantasy. You either believe absolutely, which generally means religion, or you make-believe with equal fervor. Either way there's not much room left in the middle for men like me. It's dangerous to always call defeats victories, as we do in this part of the world, but what is it that leads us to embrace these fatal illusions? Is it the desert with its harsh extremes that promotes fanaticism? Everything is so much itself in the desert. Is that why man gets viewed with such disastrous simplicity? In all my life I've never seen anything so horrifying as Lebanon. Even religion is merely a metaphor for what goes on here. The Maronites fear the Moslems, but they're just as quick to kill Maronites from the next village, and the Moslems are the same way. And where are the Palestinians to go? Or are they simply to go, as the Turks said to the Armenians when I was a child. How much easier it is when evil has a name, when there is an enemy. But Lebanon isn't like that, unfortunately for all of us, and worst of all for the people who live here. Being Israeli or Syrian may be difficult, but it's nothing compared to being Lebanese. . .

  .

  Halim was aware that in fact he was now working primarily for Colonel Jundi. His reporting was no longer of any particular use to the Mossad and to Israel, but it was extremely valuable to Colonel Jundi and therefore to Syria. He said as much to Tajar.

  Yes, I suppose that's true, replied Tajar. And it does seem like some kind of unbelievable reversal of cause, of loyalty. But it isn't really, not to my thinking. Look at it another way. I can't use the word succeed in Lebanon, because no matter what anyone does here now it can't be called succeeding. But if Colonel Jundi and the Syrians were somehow able to keep things together in Lebanon, that and only that might keep the Israeli army out, which would be a blessing for us and an enormous triumph for the Runner operation. The Syrians can't win here. No one can. There are no winners in such a place. To come in means to lose. It will be a disaster for the Syrians here, but it will be a far greater disaster for us, to us, to come in. If we do we'll be just another Middle Eastern country playing the Middle Eastern game: illusion, power, suppress where you can, dominate those you can dominate. And coming in on the side of a man like Naji, this heroic defender of his minority faith, is fantasy pushed to madness. So I see your work for Colonel Jundi as immensely important in an unexpected way. Strangely, it's as important as anything the Runner has ever done. You're serving Israel, Yossi. But you're doing it in a murky and difficult world where truth can be its opposite. . . .

  When Halim left Tajar that night he found himself thinking of the persistence of the Arab-Israeli wars, with their steady recurrence every seven to ten years, or about the time it took for a new generation of men to exert their influence on affairs. Yes, but it isn't just that men forget, thought Halim. It isn't as easy as that.

  The tragedy is that our greatest human treasure — memory — so often glitters locked away out of reach, the one gift we can never quite give to another, even to those we love most.

  He was staying that night with a Syrian officer, an acquaintance who had taken over a villa in the mountains above Beirut. He had to go to another meeting in the city before he went up to the house, so it was very late when he got there. He was exhausted, as he always was in Beirut. The watching and the listening, memorizing every nuance of what he saw and heard — there was never any rest when he left his garden in Damascus and took the road of descent down into the hellish chaos of Lebanon.

  It was almost three o'clock and he had to be up again in three hours. Still, he didn't feel like trying to sleep.

  The somber conversation with Tajar had disturbed him in many ways. The house was quiet and he poured himself a brandy to take out to the terrace. Some specific memory was rumbling around in the back of his mind, trying to push itself up into consciousness. He was too tired to think of it but he settled into a chair on the terrace, hoping the memory would surface and release him to go off to bed.

  In the distance below was the harbor, peaceful and beautiful with the lights on the sea. All harbors were beautiful at this silent hour in the darkness. And beyond it the great black expanse of the Mediterranean reached out to an infinity of stars.

  Suddenly he saw it. The image was there in front of him with perfect clarity. It was thirty years ago at the little settlement in the Negev and he and Anna were sitting side by side in the central hut, counting out bullets. It was night and a single kerosene lamp burned overhead. Other men and women were there. They were all there except for those on guard duty, about two dozen of them. Only Yossi and one other Palmach soldier had had any military training. The rest were just men and women, like Anna. The Egyptian army was expected in two or three days and they were all sitting together and counting out the rounds for the few old rifles they had. They were also deciding who would take over each rifle — in the second case, in the third case — if the man or woman assigned to the rifle could no longer fire it. After that Yossi would fill some bottles with the last of their precious petrol, so that he and the other Palmach soldier would at least have something to throw at the armored cars or tanks, if the Egyptians came with them.

  How solemn they were as they went about these tasks to defend the little settlement which they all knew would fall. How pure the dream had seemed to them then, how simple and right and good. And they had succeeded, that was the wonder of it. They had held out and defended their settlement for one whole day, a miracle. And to Halim . . . Yossi, looking back, that single day in the desert seemed the greatest triumph of his life. Never again had he known such exhilaration, such a sense of pure victory as when darkness came to protect them that night.

  Only thirty years ago and now there was this. There was this tormented city at his feet, half-destroyed and torn by war and more war. There were Naji and his gangsters and all the other gangsters. And there was the Runner, as clever an agent as the Mossad ever had, working as hard as he could for Colonel Jundi, the utterly ruthless inspector general of Syrian intelligence.

  He drank off his brandy. He had always believed in himself and his cause, but lately he had begun to wonder how long the Runner could go on running. That only really mattered to him and to Tajar. If it did happen that he saw the end coming, should he speak of it? He was inclined to think not. After all Tajar had done for him, a smile and a wave seemed the better way. The rest, all the rest, Tajar would certainly understand.

  TEN

  Ziad was painfully morose that last winter, the winter of 1982, the fortieth year since Anna had fled from Egypt. He still worked in Syrian intelligence as a courier for his old hashish department, its senior employee both in age and in years of service, a true survivor who had managed to hold on to his battered briefcase with the false bottom as his department had moved from agency to agency and been regularly raided and absorbed and realigned and reintegrated, in keeping with the law of changing fortune for Syrian secret services. Ziad had also served under many different men. His original captain had been purged years ago.

  Other captains had disappeared into prison and a few had been transferred to the Golan Heights. The last captain before the present one had simply not turned up for work one day, the victim of some unrevealed intrigue.

  Ziad's hashish department always served the dictator's younger brother, no matter which intelligence agency it happened to be in at the moment. The turnover in captains was continual because they were at a level where the temptation to do a private deal was great. If they took a chance and succeeded, they made a small fortune overnight. Ziad always referred to the officer he was serving as my captain. They lasted for longer or shorter periods and
were cruel and ambitious men. Colonel Jundi had their secret services penetrated at a higher level and the danger of their work was extreme. But the potential profits were so enormous there were always new men eager to take their places.

  Ziad himself might easily have advanced beyond his lowly status if he had been willing to take chances. But Halim was forever warning him against it, and Ziad was too timid for that in any case. Ziad loathed his trips into the Lebanese mountains. He feared the Maronites he visited and hated the way they treated him. Before he left Damascus he was so depressed he could hardly speak, and by the time he returned he was so hysterical he had to drink himself into a stupor in order to quiet down, as if each trip were an unexpected reprieve from death.

  With Halim that last winter he was morbid and manic at once. His humor knew no bounds. He laughed wildly with tears in his eyes and joked as the tears ran down his face. He grinned and gestured extravagantly, making fun of himself. But still the tears kept coming and eventually, as the night wore on, his pathetic face crumpled into undisguised despair.

  In the afternoon when he and Halim were strolling along the river in Damascus, he would suddenly look over his shoulder to see that no one was near them in the thin winter sunlight. Then he would clutch Halim's arm and lean close and giggle.

  Have you noticed that el presidente has promoted himself? he whispered. He's now having the newspapers compare him to the illustrious Salah al-din, the greatest Moslem warrior who ever lived. And with careful reminders that it was this military genius who defeated the Crusaders and finally threw the foreign devils out of the Middle East. At first I thought: oh dear, is he really going to become as powerful as all that? But then I thought: oh no, there's nothing to worry about, it's just another mild case of terminal megalomania. National leaders in this part of the world always get that. It's when they begin comparing themselves to God that you have to worry. That's when the trouble starts and you get upheaval on a colossal scale. . . .