Edward Whittemore - Jericho Mosaic

To the Eastern churches, Easter is alone in holiness. Christmas, unmentioned in the gospels and falling near the winter solstice, is to them perhaps a memory of some northern, pagan ceremony honoring the rebirth of the sun. But Easter, born of Jesus' trip to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover and forever linked to Passover through lunar calendars, celebrates the central mystery of Christianity, the resurrection to eternal life.

For the Greek fathers who maintain the church of Lazarus on the Mount of Olives, as for their brethren, forty days of fasting and prayer culminate in the midnight mass which welcomes Easter Sunday. Then, as the church bell tolls twelve in the deepness of the night, the bishop turns to face his congregation with a lighted candle and speaks the words Christ is risen. The church is dark. Each celebrant holds an unlit candle. From the one candle, the light and the promise spread.

When the words were spoken at midnight that Easter, Assaf was watching from the back of the Greek church in el Azariya. It was the first time he had attended a service in a church, and he went because Yousef asked him to come and he felt it was important to his friend. As it happened, it was also the last time he saw Yousef.

The chants and incense swirled for hours, then the church was darkened. The bell tolled, the words were said, the light spread until the whole dim church was flickering brightly. But when Assaf looked around for Yousef he could no longer see him. He waited outside while the church emptied but still there was no Yousef.

In that most precious of moments to the Greek fathers who had raised him, Yousef had paid a silent farewell to his village and slipped away in the darkness to pursue his destiny, gone to live in the caves and crevices of the Judean wilderness as other refugees in the Holy Land had done before him.

Yousef wasn't a man to take up arms and he never did. His cause was liberty and equality, rare facts in his part of the world and hardly known from the Eastern Mediterranean to the East China Sea, but no less desired for that. Yousef had become a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization and thereby a fugitive west of the Jordan River. During his early months in the wilderness he did provide tangible assistance to the PLO, acting as a guide to infiltrators and other fugitives. But soon his flight was too elusive even for that and he became simply a symbol of resistance, a solitary wanderer given to self-imposed exile in his own land.

As the months and years went by Yousef became the subject of stories, living alone as he did in the fiery chasms and icy caves of that desolate landscape, surviving in some meager way that only God could comprehend. Of course the wilderness wasn't truly deserted. Bedouin roamed the stark hills with their black tents and goatherd boys from the villages grazed their flocks deep in the wadis in all but the coldest weather.

Tales were brought back by those who sometimes caught sight of Yousef, or thought they did. He was said to move with the speed of the wind, a sharp small figure disappearing on the horizon at twilight, so quickly gone in the fast-falling desert night that the bedouin and goatherd boys couldn't be sure they had seen a man or a phantom, a man or an eerie trick of last light playing a final echo in a corner of the stony wastes. But mostly he wasn't seen and his presence was only sensed, for to the bedouin and goatherd boys Yousef was more a spirit than a man, to be known through a sudden, distant whirl of sand or an abrupt and peculiar whisper of wind.

Among them it became a custom to leave food and water for the invisible wanderer in some protected place, a sharing offered up after the manner of a portion for the prophet Elijah, to remind God of the dream which forever stirs in the barren places of the human soul. By way of these secret friends and their secret wishes, Yousef somehow survived in the wilderness and became a legend to the Arab villagers of Palestine, a fugitive whose silent desert voice spoke clearly to the hearts of many, a witness to the life and death and yearnings of his brother, an exile who went on gathering his spirit around him as a cloak woven from the stuff of myths, unshakable even in the fiercest summers and cruellest winters.

When Assaf told Anna what had become of Yousef, she wept. Such a thoughtful young man, she said, and so dear a friend to you, sweet one. Why does it have to be like this? Why can't he have a better life, our Yousef?

Tajar, on the other hand, was somber. He listened carefully to Assaf and his eyes turned far away, deep in thought. And so now Yousef also runs in the wilderness, he murmured, hiding and watching and guiding himself as best he can.

While in Jericho, Abu Musa let out a great sigh and bowed his head. Farewells and more farewells, he said to Moses the Ethiopian. What's the use of being a patriarch if you outlive your descendants?

When Assaf talked with Bell, he said he had suspected something like this might happen. Bell agreed with him. But perhaps it's just for a time, added Bell. Yousef only has to slip across the river to live a normal life again. His exile may not be forever.

Assaf took heart from the words because he also suspected Yousef was still seeing Bell. One of the familiar routes of Bell's walks near Jericho at twilight was to the ruins of Herod's winter palace, which lay at the foot of the wadi bounding the Mount of Temptation. There the runoff of the winter rains from the heights of Jerusalem had once fed Herod's pools and baths. The deep wadi could provide hiding places for a man coming down from the wilderness. Where the wadi entered the plains there was a banana plantation, and its thick low foliage was also a hiding place, right next to the ruins. On certain moonless nights Bell made a point of visiting the ruins, and sometimes he heard Yousef's voice calling to him from the shadows.

In the beginning Yousef turned up almost every month to see Bell. Later his visits were far less frequent. The shesh-besh players on Bell's front porch knew of the secret meetings and Assaf suspected them, although he never said anything about it. So perhaps it might have gone on like that for years if Yousef hadn't become determined to meet an even more legendary figure, the great friend of the Palestinian cause who was known as the conscience of the Arab revolution — the mysterious Halim from Damascus.

FOUR

The Runner operation entered a period of quiet after the Six-Day War. Before then the Runner had produced an enormous quantity of information on the fortifications of the Golan Heights. Now the Golan was in Israeli hands. The Runner himself was exhausted from the nonstop days and nights of those years. His clandestine back-up team in Syria and Beirut had worked to the limit, moving the Runner's material on secret routes from Damascus to the Mossad.

Tajar congratulated them all and arranged a schedule of lengthy vacations for them, keeping in place a network for minimum communications. The Runner was told to draw back from military affairs and concern himself with his civilian enterprises. In effect, he was to put intelligence aside for a time and act like a legitimate Syrian businessman.

Tajar had no difficulty persuading General Dror, the director of the Mossad, to accept this new tactic. The Runner and the back-up team were obviously in need of rest. Emotionally as well as physically, they were worn out. War hysteria had been rampant in Syria for months before June 1967, and defeat had brought rank instability in many Arab capitals. It was a dangerous moment for a deep-cover penetration. Complete inactivity was the only safe course for the operation, Tajar felt. There's going to be a lot of bloodletting in Damascus, Tajar told Dror, a regular night of the long knives. The army and the security services will be at each other's throats hunting out traitors to take the blame for what they all did wrong. Treachery is how the Arabs explain defeat. They don't really have another way to justify it to themselves. It's part of their method of self-delusion, their weakness for the abstract.