Nile Shadows (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 3)

by Edward Whittemore

  Years were to pass before she came to know this mysterious one-eyed man who was to be such an important part of her life. At the time she only wanted to escape from the house and from Cairo and the Englishman helped her in many ways, above all by providing her with papers for Palestine. She knew he must be connected to British intelligence and was helping her because of her brother, but she was too overwhelmed by grief and fear to make any sense out of what he was doing. Escape was all that mattered to her.

  Anna was twenty-three when she left Egypt. The tanks of the German Afrika Korps were little more than fifty miles from Alexandria. The British fleet had already sailed for the safety of Haifa and British military and civilian staffs were being evacuated from Cairo. Long columns of trucks wound away into the Sinai, an exodus heading north and east toward Palestine.

  THREE

  PALESTINE WAS A DRASTIC change from Egypt, which made it easier for Anna. She was even grateful it was such a primitive place with nothing to remind her of the sophistication of Cairo, where different cultures had lived together for centuries. In Palestine every group distrusted every other: the Moslem and Christian Arabs, the Oriental and European Jews, the British. Only from the outside when faced by enemies did any one of them appear to be a community. As soon as she got to know them she saw how divisive they were among their own kind, with a hundred conflicting views about who they were and what they should be doing against the others. It was all a bewildering kind of confusion with turmoil everywhere.

  A time of wandering and seeking, it seemed to Anna. Not unlike the way it must have been three thousand years ago, she thought, when Joshua led the twelve tribes out of the wilderness and they first caught sight of the plains of Jericho beyond the Jordan, and every man had his own vision of the promises to be found on the far side of the river.

  She made no effort to find a place for herself during those first years in Palestine. Instead she wandered from the towns to the settlements and back again, a period here and an interval there, always moving even if it was only a few miles away, never staying long enough in one place to become part of a way of life. She had been trained as a teacher in Cairo, and it was easy enough to support herself with substitute and part-time work. In any case people came and went in the chaos of war and her restlessness was unremarkable.

  Nor was it difficult for a young woman to find a room in some new place. There were many men in her life then, and perhaps what she liked most about those brief and intense affairs was lying in bed late at night and listening to her lovers talk about themselves, gaining what seemed to her a vast knowledge of the dreams and fears that haunted men’s lives. To Anna, those intimate encounters so quickly come and gone were a way of avoiding intimacy with herself, a way of feeling close to life without opening herself to its dangers. For she was still fleeing, she knew, still trying to escape the narrow street in Cairo with its crowded memories.

  The Russians advanced on Berlin and the world war drew to an end. More Jewish refugees arrived in Palestine from Europe and elsewhere in the Middle East, many on clandestine routes. After a period in Jerusalem Anna left the strife of the cities and towns, seeking smaller settlements. Her way led south to the desert and it was there in the Negev, not far from the Egyptian border, that she found herself when the fighting broke out between the Arabs and the Jews, even before the British left Palestine.

  It was also there that she met Yossi, one of the handful of Palmach soldiers sent by the central Jewish command to help them defend their isolated settlement. Everyone in the settlement dug trenches and learned to stand guard duty, but the young Palmach commandos were the elite among them because they had received real training in warfare.

  Yossi was a handsome man whose lean dark body glistened in the desert sun. To her he looked more like an Arab than a Jew, and she wasn’t surprised to learn he was from Iraq. When they were alone he spoke Arabic with her. His beautiful smiles burst upon her with a flash of teeth and she laughed at that, recalling the ways of her Arab friends in Cairo.

  The little ones don’t understand, Yossi said to her one day, referring to the settlers who were from Europe. They want to be good Jewish farmers but that won’t help us when the British leave and the Arab armies attack. With only twenty-five defenders, women and men, and the roads controlled by the Arabs, we haven’t a chance out here. We’re too far away.

  What then? she asked. What will become of us?

  Oh we’ll use our few rifles and throw some bottles of petrol and then we’ll try to get out at night. It’s the resistance itself that’s important, you know they think Jews never fight. They’re out for plunder and picking grapes and we’ve got to show them it’s not like that here. The Egyptian soldiers have a mad idea of the good times ahead, so resistance of any kind will frighten them. They’ll take our sandy little hilltop but then they’ll look around at these makeshift desert huts and say, Why in the name of God are the Jews fighting over this? And if they fight like that here, how will it be farther north when they’re defending real land, real houses? Have the Jews all gone crazy?

  And that’s how we’ll win with a few old rifles and some bottles of petrol, said Yossi, confident and strong with his radiant smile.

  Yossi’s knowledge of the Egyptian soldiers was firsthand. One of his duties for the Palmach was intelligence and he often disappeared at night, disguised as an Arab, going off toward Gaza where the main Egyptian forces were quartered on the coast near the border. A few days later he would turn up again at the settlement, exhausted and exhilarated from his secret journeys through the desert, and go to work sending his information north on the settlement radio.

  On the evenings of his return Anna rearranged her guard duty and she and Yossi were alone in one of the huts. He was younger than she was and perhaps it was the remoteness of her life there, or the knowledge that the settlement would soon fall, but it seemed to her she had never known a man quite like Yossi, so sure of himself in his gentle way and so at ease in the wind-driven desert nights that brought fear to everyone else. Then too, there was no need to think of ending anything with Yossi because in a day or two he would be gone again anyway, off on another secret mission across the desert.

  In the morning sun they sometimes had a moment to sit on a rise of sand and enjoy the silence of a new day coming to the magnificent desert landscapes. Yossi would be thoughtful, gazing at the sand sifting through his fingers.

  Just imagine, he said. Some of these glittering particles come all the way from the upper Nile. The river carries the sand three thousand miles to the sea, then the currents bring it to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean and the winds carry it over here. So seldom do we know the worlds we walk. Isn’t it true, Anna?

  That winter and spring they beat off attacks by Arab irregulars. At the end of spring the British withdrew from Palestine and Israel declared itself a nation. The armies of five Arab countries invaded, with the Egyptian army advancing into the Negev and up the coast from Gaza. When the settlement was attacked, Yossi and the others used up all their ammunition in a single day of fighting. After dark they abandoned the settlement, dragging the wounded, and set out north across the Negev with Yossi acting as guide for the little band of survivors. Before dawn he hid them at the foot of a cliff and went off alone disguised as an Arab in the direction of the Egyptian forces in Beersheva. That night Anna and the others traveled again, without Yossi, and reached the safety of a larger settlement in the northern Negev.

  A month later, when there was a lull in the fighting, Yossi was able to find Anna.

  It’s working, he said. The Egyptians have stopped advancing and are digging in. Soon we’ll hit back between their positions and even things up a bit.

  Yossi laughed and rushed back to the front and the war for independence went better, against all odds. When she saw him that summer he was bursting with success and exuberant plans. He wanted to marry her and it was also what she wanted. She was six or seven years older than he was and sometimes she worried abo
ut that, but she loved him and she also knew her old life was behind her now, as much a part of the past as the Palestine of British days. She was used to more sudden changes in life but these feelings had come to her slowly, over time in the isolation of the Negev, beginning even before she met Yossi.

  Nor was it because of their child that she was choosing a life with Yossi. She had already decided to have the child if she could, no matter what happened to Yossi. So when he came to her in the summer and their love was more intense than ever, it all seemed clear to Anna. Still, only after the decisions were made did she tell him she was carrying his child. Yossi listened to her and smiled and smiled, overwhelmed with pride and wonder.

  My mysterious and lovely Anna, he kept whispering late at night. My infinitely mysterious Anna….

  He whispered in Arabic as they often did when making love. In a way it seemed strange and they laughed at it sometimes. But there was also no denying the sounds had an intimacy that was precious to both of them, recalling their first nights together in the desert as well as more distant bonds from both their childhoods.

  Yossi was twenty-two when their son was born toward the end of 1948. After the war they lived on the coast in the south in order to be near the Negev, which they both loved. Yossi took courses at night and tried several different jobs. He was good at mathematics and physics and for a time he thought he might become an engineer, but nothing seemed to work out for him and eventually he went back into the army, training as a paratrooper. He was away for periods of time at one post or another and Anna returned to teaching when the baby was old enough. Yossi seemed unsure of himself, preoccupied and moody. His silences deepened when he was home and a distance grew between them.

  At first Anna told herself it was simply because of his age that he was finding it difficult to adjust to a settled life. But as time passed she had to admit there was more to it than that, for she also knew Yossi was a solitary man who had always lived inside himself.

  Yossi had grown up in a village near Baghdad, the only child to live beyond infancy in a family with little money. Being poor meant assuming responsibilities, and Yossi had cared for the family’s animals while going to school, along with working outside the house from an early age, first in his father’s small shop and later as an apprentice bookkeeper in the nearest town. He was studious and reserved and devout, and for several years he thought he wanted to become a rabbi when he grew up. Since he was always busy going from one responsibility to another, he could only find time for himself by constructing an inner world. His classmates liked him but they also recognized his strangeness, the differences that set him apart. At school he retreated to the edge of the yard between classes and read while the other children played, then worked in his father’s shop in the afternoon with a book propped open on the counter. Even as a young child he never had the luxury of doing only one thing at a time, so he learned early to treasure the secret adventures of imagination.

  When he was older there were the daily cross-country trips to the town where he bent over a ledger for hours in a dusty little office, writing figures in columns and methodically making sense of them. How he loved those long private journeys through the countryside on unmarked paths which he alone understood. No matter how many times he made the trip, he told Anna, it was always a landscape of make-believe and the great joy of his youth. Out there in the deserts and fields, at last, he was free and there was nothing to hold him back. On the way to the town he ran and ran, memorizing a thousand details as the panorama flashed by in the sun, running and running until his chest ached and his heart tore at him, for no other reason than the joy of feeling himself. Then later, going home after the long quiet hours at the ledger, he traveled slowly in the twilight to spy out what he had missed in the land and to see what had changed, a boyish game of learning to sense the world which strengthened his already profound imagination and gathered it around him like a cloak, against the cool darkness of stars and night.

  Yet despite these early experiences of aloneness and duty and secret escape, or perhaps because of them, Yossi was a man of great charm, as no one knew better than Anna. He was often withdrawn and quiet, even shy in manner, but when he spoke it was with the passion of true feelings. And he acted with the dignity of his solitude, and of course he was handsome. So one way or another, everyone took to Yossi. Anna had never known a man or a woman who wasn’t attracted to him. But unhappily she now knew he would have to make many more journeys alone before he found a way to live with himself and others. She wasn’t angry with what had happened, only sad. In the chaos of war, she realized, some things had seemed clearer than they were.

  She was also reluctant to admit that Yossi’s strength and courage at the little desert settlement during the war had probably made her think of her brother, and that in turning to Yossi then she had been seeking a kind of shelter she had known in childhood. This saddened her even more because it meant she hadn’t traveled as far as she thought during those first restless years in Palestine. Even now when she was in her thirties, the shadows from the house on the narrow street in Cairo were still with her.

  Before it ended with Yossi she had long talks with their closest friend—Tajar, who was several years older than Anna and who had helped Yossi get back into the army when his various jobs had come to nothing. Tajar listened to her and shook his head. Once, briefly, he and Anna had been lovers in Jerusalem before she went south to the Negev and met Yossi, but now Tajar’s friendship was equally strong with both of them. To Yossi, in fact, he had become almost an older brother. Tajar was a practical man, blunt and unmarried, dedicated to his work for the government.

  It’s not your fault, Anna, said Tajar. It’s no one’s fault and you shouldn’t take it on yourself. Of course you feel you’ve failed, so does Yossi. But it was an understandable mistake and you’re both still young. You can do other things, start again, make a new life. I love and admire Yossi, you know that, but I also suspect he’s not a man to be a regular husband and father. Not now anyway, and maybe never. We both know there’s a part of him that lives alone and he knows it too. No one’s to blame but that’s the way it is and we have to recognize what is in life. You fell in love with a man who was strong and laughed and ran free in the desert, and that’s still what he is so you weren’t wrong. You weren’t then and you aren’t now and you shouldn’t blame yourself.

  It’s not that easy, said Anna.

  No of course it’s not, replied Tajar. You have a son and everything I’ve said is no more than words. Living life day in and day out is something else.

  Day in, day out, thought Anna. Finally she and Yossi decided on a divorce. He was very tender with her then, with that wistful manner that often came over him.

  I know you’re right, he said. I know it’s no good like this for either of us, or for our child. Maybe I was just too young. We tried but … well, it just hasn’t worked.

  We didn’t try hard enough, said Anna, tears running down her face. No one ever tries hard enough and so many beautiful things are lost. Irreplaceable things … the treasures of our lives.

  All during those years there was enormous turmoil in the Middle East, with huge displacements of population. After the First World War it had been Greeks and Turks who were displaced and now it was the turn of Jews and Arabs. Nearly a million Jews left Moslem countries, about 700,000 of them going to Israel, and 600,000 Arabs left Israel for Moslem countries.

  There were also constant bombings and murders carried out by Arab infiltrators crossing over from the Egyptian positions in the Gaza strip on the coast. In the autumn of 1956, Israeli tanks struck across the border and raced into the desert against the Egyptian army. During the eight days of the Sinai campaign the Israeli armored columns conquered the entire Sinai peninsula, but they soon had to withdraw because of combined American and Russian pressure at the United Nations.

  Anna and Yossi’s son was then almost eight. It was a clear autumn afternoon when Anna took him for a walk along the beac
h to tell him what she had learned from Tajar that morning.

  Yossi was among the fallen. He had been killed while serving with the paratroop battalion in the western Sinai, caught in the crossfire of an Egyptian ambush at the Mitla Pass.

  Yossi had died a hero’s death and Anna took their son to the funeral. Tajar, ever loyal and strong, arranged everything and stood beside the two of them. But a part of Anna could never accept the fact that Yossi was dead. In her dreams she still saw him as he had been when they first met, a handsome young man with a beautiful smile, laughing, disappearing into the desert disguised as an Arab.

  She said nothing about this to anyone, not even Tajar. But it didn’t really surprise her years later when she learned that Yossi hadn’t actually died in the Sinai, that instead he had gone away to pursue a secret and solitary life in the most ancient of all Arab capitals. For by then, through herself as well as her son, Anna knew much more about the strange ways the past can go on living in other lives, reworking destinies through dream and memory with those same soft echoes of time she herself had once heard in the shadows of childhood.

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  About the Author

  Edward Whittemore (1933–1995) graduated from Yale University in 1955 and went on to serve as a Marine officer in Japan and spend ten years as a CIA operative in the Far East, Europe, and the Middle East. In addition to writing fiction, he managed a newspaper in Greece, was employed by a shoe company in Italy, and worked in New York City’s narcotics control office during the administration of Mayor John V. Lindsay. He wrote the Jerusalem Quartet while dividing his time between New York and Jerusalem.