Edward Whittemore - Jericho Mosaic

And because Assaf is a Jew, added Abu Musa. In times like these, that's also something special.

Oh yes, that too, said Bell.

Jesus was a Jew and I'm a Christian, murmured Moses, so naturally I rejoice in brotherly love that's both lasting and profound. But perhaps the two of you already suspected that?

THREE

All the while Yousef was watching life go on around him, waiting to discover what course his own life would take. Assaf's companionship hastened the healing of the wounds in Yousef's heart. And as Yousef grew stronger in spirit, Assaf walked with greater confidence, his limp less pronounced.

Yousef talked with Assaf more than he ever had with his brother, as if to make up for that failure he blamed on himself and its terrible outcome. No feeling was too intimate for Yousef to lay bare to Assaf, who was eager to listen. For Assaf, listening to Yousef and understanding him became a way of escape from the alley of death, a kind of absolution from the horror he had survived when so many others hadn't.

As time went on Assaf felt Yousef's resolution growing. From the way Yousef talked Assaf knew his friend was nearing some decision having to do with himself and his people and the Palestinian cause. Yet Assaf also knew his friend wasn't warlike or fit for conspiracy. Yousef was a scholarly man, a dreamer and a thinker incapable of aggression. Killing was abhorrent to him and he would never hate nor fear enough to set aside his abhorrence. Significantly, when Yousef talked about himself and the Palestinian people, his thoughts always returned to his village, the poor place on the edge of the Judean wilderness where Jesus had chosen to stay with friends.

Assaf also came to realize how important the austere one-eyed man in Jericho had always been to Yousef.

Something in Bell's life, Bell's manner, Bell's ways, had an enormous hold on Yousef.

What is it exactly that appeals to you so much about Bell? Assaf once asked his friend. Yousef gave several answers, then admitted he had never been able to describe it adequately to himself.

It has to do with his calm, I suppose, said Yousef, and how he set about achieving it and did achieve it. To me, that seems a miraculous accomplishment. Of course I don't believe he's really a holy man the way Abu Musa does, but perhaps that's because we don't have that kind of faith today, Abu Musa's kind of faith, or at least I don't. There have been times when I wished I did, though. When I was a boy I used to marvel at the faith of the Greek fathers, and envy them for it, their absolute belief that what they were doing was the right thing to do. Bell has never had faith like that and he's not a religious man in that sense. Then too, there's his drinking and all it implies. Yet somehow despite all that, and despite his face or because of it, there's a grandeur to him. He denies it and always has, but you can't be around him without feeling it. As wise a man as Abu Musa senses it implicitly, and no one's shrewder than Abu Musa when it comes to human beings and what they're up to. Moses recognizes it too, and he's far more knowledgeable about people than you might suspect from being with him just once or twice. No, it's not a light matter, and the very fact that Bell has done what he's done, without a religious kind of faith, is what's so arresting about him. To me it's an astonishing mystery, intriguing and indefinable. Haunting, even. . . .

Assaf listened and nodded and felt he understood most of it. In his own manner Yousef was seeking Bell's way in life, and Yousef's period of doing nothing, as he called it, was the time needed to let that path reveal itself. As for Assaf, he was surprised by his own understanding. His grasp of Yousef's feelings was itself a step toward self-discovery, the sort of knowledge he might have expected to hear from Anna or Tajar in the past.

The winter turned blustery and cold. The sun was lost and the wind howled as thick clouds raced over the hills, bringing rain and more rain and an early darkness to the Mount of Olives. Yousef returned from his evening walks in the wastes laughing and stamping his feet, sweeping into Assaf's little outpost like some phantom from the wild desert night, his bulky shepherd's cloak heavy with rain and a pungent woolly smell of the sheepskins from which it was made. Together they huddled around Assaf's charcoal brazier where water steamed for coffee. Assaf dug chestnuts from the coals and they burned their fingers cracking them, then scooped up handfuls of fresh dates and drank more cups of syrupy sweet coffee, eating to keep warm as the wind blasted the slopes and screamed through the village. The door shook and the shutters rattled. They laughed and joked and told tales over the charcoal, facing each other in hats and scarves and sheepskins pulled tight against the icy drafts gusting through the room, their hands raised in front of them, warming at the fire.

A pair of open hands facing Assaf, facing Yousef. A palmist's indelible map of the lines of the heart, of the lines of the mind and destiny for the soothsayer in each of them to read by the firelight, one day to ponder.

And so without knowing it the two young friends came to memorize each other's fates down through those rainswept nights of midwinter where they escaped the darkness with warm words, sheltering in Assaf's house on the edge of the wilderness.

***

The first hamsin appears in the Eastern Mediterranean in March, a sudden false summer drifting up from the vast African and Asian deserts to the south. Invisible sand weighs the air and a dry heavy heat grips the land.

The sky turns thickly yellow, the sun is obscured, an unworldly glow suffuses the yellow heavens. After several days the hamsin lifts. The temperature tumbles back to March and the sky is cooly blue, only to be followed in a week or less by the unnatural heat, the stillness, the strange yellow glow of another hamsin.

Hamsin means fifty in Arabic, the number of days this season is said to last. Thus does the desert reassert its hold on the land and boldly lay claim to the sensuous habits of spring, vanquishing the stormy ways of a brief and foreign winter.

The Judean wilderness turns softly green in the spring and whole ranges are bright with wildflowers, gifts of the winter rains and a new sun. But the herbs and flowers and grasses have only a few weeks to complete their cycle of life and shed their seeds to another year, for in just such a time the earth is baked rock-hard once more as the sun hammers all growing things to dust.

The end of winter brought the end of the long evenings of communion between the two friends in Assaf's little house on the edge of el Azariya. Assaf now walked without a cane. When Yousef joined him in the evening they sat in front of Assaf's house, looking down on the desert. Yousef was both serene and excited, apparently having reached a decision about his future. But Yousef didn't speak of it and Assaf felt no need to question his friend. They both sensed it was something better left unsaid and instead they talked about Assaf's future. Yousef felt strongly that Assaf should go to university. As a wounded veteran his education would be paid for and Yousef thought it was too good an opportunity to miss.

They made more visits to Anna in the spring and also traveled down to Jericho. Anna didn't know it but Yousef was saying good-bye. Abu Musa sensed a farewell, but because the death of Ali was still too recent a loss to the old patriarch, he and Yousef didn't speak of it openly. With Bell, though, Assaf suspected that Yousef was more direct. When they were in Jericho, Yousef went off with Bell on his walks out of town at twilight while Assaf, using his leg as an excuse, stayed behind on Bell's front porch with the two shesh-besh players. Assaf knew without being told that Yousef was going away. It was just a question of when he was leaving and where he would go.