Edward Whittemore - Jericho Mosaic

Dror smiled. Along with everyone else, he respected Tajar as the Mossad's senior expert on Arab countries.

He also admired Tajar's phenomenal success with the Runner operation. But as a pragmatic military man, Dror often found Tajar himself strangely abstract and incomprehensible. No one in his experience had ever devised plots as intricate as Tajar's. The Runner operation was already a dozen years old, a dozen years in the making, and Dror still wasn't sure he really knew where it was heading, even though he was the director of the Mossad and Tajar always seemed to be candid with him. Of course Tajar was quick to tell him what the operation's objectives were at any given moment, and the results invariably came in. But Dror sometimes felt lost all the same, as if he were a young lieutenant out tramping in the desert and Tajar were his bedouin guide signaling from the next rise in the distance. The guide got him where he was supposed to go but the route remained a mystery to him. Moreover, he never drew any nearer to the guide. Like any good bedouin tracker, Tajar was always up ahead signaling back to him, surveying a stretch of desert that Dror, the young lieutenant, hadn't come to yet.

Why do you think the Arabs are so given to abstractions? Dror asked.

Tajar moved his crippled legs with his hands. Ah well, he said, it's a very human characteristic, isn't it?

Something everyone has tucked away somewhere. Who wants to accept what's at hand, after all? The desert's a harsh place. Who wouldn't prefer to think about the oasis in the distance? Even if there isn't one, just more desert? Who knows? It may be that the Arabs originally picked up the habit from us. Mohammed was illiterate well into manhood and it seems to have made a profound impression on him that these odd people called Jews were always reading a book, their book, created for them, and gathering great sustenance from it. Furthermore, when faced with hardship and defeat these odd people called Jews were always saying, Next year in Jerusalem, when anyone could see there wasn't a hope under the sun of them being in Jerusalem next year. When in fact, like most people anytime, the Jews were exactly where they were going to be until they died. Lastly, to an illiterate but thoughtful man, what could be more abstract than this invincible, invisible world hidden in a book? Naturally Mohammed wanted to have his own, so he learned to read and in time God dictated the Koran to him. So that much of the matter may go all the way back to Mohammed. The difference then becomes, I suppose, whom you blame for not being where you'd like to be in life. We tend to blame ourselves when things go wrong, while the Arabs are more apt to blame the fellow who lives next door. Perhaps we do that because we've been aliens who haven't been living in our own country for several thousand years. But now that we're sitting in our own country and it's this year in Jerusalem and we're there, while the Palestinian Arabs are going into a diaspora, it may be that we're going to become more like them and they're going to become more like us. It's curious, isn't it, General, how human beings affect each other, even enemies. Or is it especially enemies?

Dror nodded and turned the conversation back to the Runner operation. Within the Mossad, Tajar was known as a friend of Arab culture who was severely disturbed by the extensive Arab territory that had come under Israeli control as a result of the Six-Day War. There was no arguing with Tajar on this subject and Dror preferred to keep away from it.

Then we agree, said Dror, that the Runner operation should be quiet for a time. What about the Runner himself?

I feel it's important that I sit with him, replied Tajar. I have to talk with him about his son, and then there's the whole question of the future. The last few years have been . . . a severe strain for the Runner.

When do you plan to see him?

Next month in Beirut, said Tajar.

Good. An in-depth assessment is important. I'd like him to go on, of course, but you'll have to be the judge of that.

Yes. We can talk about it when I get back, said Tajar, gathering his crippled legs together.

***

More than two years had passed since Tajar had seen Yossi. With the back-up team handling communications and the fortifications of the Golan Heights as its objective, the Runner operation had been clearly defined. Roles were precise and everyone knew what he had to do. The Runner himself was superbly methodical. His information fitted together and the maps, piece by piece, had grown more complete. Queries had been sent to the Runner, but as often as not he had already anticipated the Mossad's questions.

Most of Tajar's time, in fact, had been spent solving problems having to do with the functioning of the back-up team, whose work had to be continually adjusted in small ways to mesh with circumstances. In the end, due to Tajar's careful planning, the team had performed its tasks without error. The operation was tight and safe, deeply buried. Security was as strict as ever and only Tajar and General Dror knew the real identity of the Runner. To the members of Tajar's operational team the Runner was still a highly placed Arab in Damascus, a non-Syrian diplomat or military attaché whose sensitive role was of inestimable worth to Israel, to be protected at all costs.

As was his custom, Tajar treated the members of the Runner team as family, as his own sons and daughters. It was an old-fashioned way of running an operation, but with Tajar as clan chief it worked. Tajar's commandos, as they were known in the Mossad, were an elite within an elite, a long-range desert patrol operating behind enemy lines. They took orders only from Tajar, who reported directly to the chief of the Mossad.

Competence and loyalty were fierce among the commandos. Even if the Golan Heights hadn't been conquered in the Six-Day War, the commandos would never have doubted Tajar.

Besides security, there was a more subtle reason why Tajar hadn't met with Yossi in the period before the Six-Day War. By then Yossi had been in Damascus for over half a dozen years, or since the end of 1959.

Tajar knew it would be a crucial time in Yossi's life. Yossi would have been living his clandestine role long enough for the novelty of it to have become routine. The initial exhilaration and sense of secret power would falter, lapse, disappear. Yossi's son would come of age and leave home. And Yossi himself would turn forty, and age when a man was suddenly apt to realize he was where he was going in life.

Tajar knew Yossi well and sensed these were things Yossi would want to face in his own way. Long ago Tajar had come to call Yossi the Runner because of Yossi's experiences as a boy in Iraq, running alone across the desert to the town where he had worked as a bookkeeper. General Dror, and Little Aharon before him, had often found it uncanny how Tajar could always predict what the Runner would do in any given situation. How can you know that? Dror had once asked Tajar in disbelief. When we describe something accurately, replied Tajar, aren't we always describing ourselves?

So Tajar knew it would have been a time of profound change for Yossi in any case. And the suddenness of the 1967 war, and Assaf's wounds in the war and the dramatic outcome of the war for Israel and the Arab countries, were all factors in addition to that, making the changes for Yossi more acute, more complex.

Still, Tajar wasn't prepared for the Yossi who walked into the room at the safehouse in Beirut.

Yossi had aged ten years. His hair was almost completely white, making his skin look darker. He stood very erect and seemed taller than before, an illusion caused by his carriage and the sparse bony planes of his face, which was as lean as a bedouin's. His moustache was thick and black, suggesting a younger man who had once lived in this body, and a heavy line cut down each side of his face. But what was most remarkable about him was his eyes. They were deep-set and powerful, the eyes of a visionary. Tajar had never seen eyes that burned so deeply.