Edward Whittemore - Jericho Mosaic

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 Dayan, 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.