Edward Whittemore - Jericho Mosaic

Anna fell silent. Suddenly she smiled.

That face, she said. How could anyone ever pretend to act in a normal way with a face like that just there all at once in front of you? No one in the world has a face like that.

Anna went on smiling, a gentle smile.

It's like a mask, she said. Some inhuman kind of mask that's so extreme and unlikely you can't believe it at first. That great bulging staring single eye, and the bulging black eye patch, and the scars and all the rest of it. It's a face you have to be warned about, to prepare yourself for, otherwise you just stare and stare because it's like nothing you've ever seen. Now I can smile about it because I came to know what was beneath that mask, but I couldn't then. His face paralyzed me then. And meeting him like that, both of us drenched with the water streaming off us, huddling in a doorway . . . it was absurd and ludicrous and wonderful, and fearful and joyous and ridiculously awkward all at the same moment, just everything. I was paralyzed and my heart leapt, both at once. But I'm afraid I'm making no sense at all, trying to describe it all these years later. . . .

They stood in the doorway until finally one of them suggested they get out of the rain. Bell, for that was his name now, lived nearby and offered coffee and a fire. They went to his small apartment where the rooms were half underground with walls of stone several feet thick, the broad windowsills on a level with the garden outside, a snug and cozy retreat on such a blustery winter afternoon. Bell poured brandy and built a fire in the stove and soon they were warm in front of it.

The rooms were heaped with books. Bell was studying Arabic, he said. He read and did little else. He had some disability pay from the war and intended to live on it, to begin a new life in some remote corner.

Anna told him of her own years since Cairo, of her wanderings in Palestine. Bell was reticent, polite, sometimes shy. He wanted to be cordial but it was apparent he hadn't put his old life behind him and didn't know how to behave with Anna, who in a way was from that old life. Yet she wasn't really a part of it and Bell had nothing to fear from her. To reassure him, she promised at once never to say anything about having known him in Cairo.

But no, then she realized it was his own face that was making him reticent and fearful. He didn't seem to know how to behave with a young woman. From what he said she gathered he had no friends in Jerusalem and saw almost no one other than the Arab scholar who came to tutor him. In Cairo she had thought he was important, but now she realized he had probably been much more important than she had imagined. Without an official position and the status that went with it, and the automatic relationships that went with it, he didn't know how to act, especially with a young woman. He was unsure of himself, even lost. Alone now with his face, with his freedom, he hadn't yet learned how to make his way.

The rain splashed on the windows and they drank more brandy and became lovers that afternoon. Far more than him, it was Anna's doing. She had much to thank him for, more than she ever could, but there was also something beyond even that. So seldom could one make a profound difference in the life of another, and Anna sensed she had that gift then, for in his way he was as alone and fearful as she had once been in Cairo. As they lay in front of the little stove and the rain beat down in the half-light turning to darkness, Bell told her as much. Since the shattering of his face, he said, it was the first time he had been with a woman in a regular way, as if he were just a man who could meet someone and. . . .

They saw each other for several weeks. Anna came to him every afternoon and stayed through the night and it never seemed to stop raining the whole time they were together. Love was the delicious smell of olive wood smoke and rain softly beating down outside on the garden above them, and brandy and an early darkness and a warm cheery stove hidden away from the world for long tender evenings. Then she was busy for a few days, and when she came again Bell said he had decided to move to Jericho. He had found his remote corner of the world, he said. They held each other and Bell smiled. A warm smile. Anna knew his face by then. . . .

So that's what he did, she told Tajar. Then not long after that I left Jerusalem too, and found my way down to the Negev. And the British were leaving Palestine and the Arab countries invaded, and a new life began for me as well. I've never told anyone about it, not even Yossi. There seemed no reason to. It was a long time ago, twenty years ago, and it was a few weeks that belonged to two people. Since then I've never heard from Bell, or of him, not until Assaf came back from Jericho with his story of the three wise men and the house in the orange grove, with its forty-year shesh-besh game and a one-eyed holy man who oversees it with a glass of arak in his claw.

I don't doubt Bell knows Assaf is my son, said Anna. One of them down there must have asked Assaf about his background, or Yousef could have talked about me or whatever, and Bell would have realized who Assaf is, I'm sure. Not that he'd say anything about it. But it's strange looking back, isn't it? It seems we all have these rare and beautiful moments hidden away within us, turnings we could have taken in life but somehow . .

. didn't. Once or twice during those few weeks with Bell, you see, we both considered . . . well what? A life together? We didn't come out and say it in so many words, but it was there in front of us, seriously so. And if we had decided to try that, given his nature and mine, it probably would have gone on for a lifetime. As it happened the time wasn't right then, or so we thought. He needed to be sure of himself and to know he could manage on his own with his face, although I never had any doubts about that. And I thought I still needed to be able to wander, to be free to move around and find myself, although it couldn't have been so very important to me because soon after that I ended my wandering, with Yossi.

What's strange about it to me now, said Anna, is that I know it could have worked with Bell. Oh yes, it could have worked and all the years would have been very different. Not better, but different. And how true it is that the turnings on the path are often so subtle, so unsuspected at the time, that we pass them by with a wave and a smile and a near arrogant ease. Yet when we look back in life the reasons for our choices seem unbearably flimsy and silly, which is confusing and even frightening. A totally different life which could have worked just as well as the one we have? That's something none of us likes to think about. Instead, we try mightily to forget our other worlds that might have been, and with good reason. But all the same those rare and beautiful moments from the past live on within us, no farther away than the smell of an olive wood fire or the sound of rain beating softly on a garden, time's unquiet ghosts, haunting our memories with secret whispers of what if? . . .

***

Tajar lay in his hammock that summer night, gazing up at the stars above his cottage. Once long ago Anna had told him there were three men who counted in her life, himself and Yossi and one other. Now he knew who that third man was and it didn't surprise him. Bell's was a powerful life, lived deeply. That Anna had felt it so long ago only showed how deeply her own feelings ran.

Her memories of Bell and the fondness of her recollections set Tajar to thinking in many ways. There was no question he had always loved Anna. He knew that. And everything she now said about Bell also applied to him and was meant for him. He and Anna had shared those rare and beautiful moments of which she spoke.

They both were aware of that, and what if? . . .