Edward Whittemore: Jericho Mosaic

Yossi was a handsome man whose lean dark body glistened in the desert sun. To her he looked more like an Arab than a Jew, and she wasn't surprised to learn he was from Iraq. When they were alone he spoke Arabic with her. His beautiful smiles burst upon her with a flash of teeth and she laughed at that, recalling the ways of her Arab friends in Cairo.

The little ones don't understand, Yossi said to her one day, referring to the settlers who were from Europe.

They want to be good Jewish farmers but that won't help us when the British leave and the Arab armies attack. With only twenty-five defenders, women and men, and the roads controlled by the Arabs, we haven't a chance out here. We're too far away.

What then? she asked. What will become of us?

Oh we'll use our few rifles and throw some bottles of petrol and then we'll try to get out at night. It's the resistance itself that's important, you know they think Jews never fight. They're out for plunder and picking grapes and we've got to show them it's not like that here. The Egyptian soldiers have a mad idea of the good times ahead, so resistance of any kind will frighten them. They'll take our sandy little hilltop but then they'll look around at these makeshift desert huts and say, Why in the name of God are the Jews fighting over this?

And if they fight like that here, how will it be farther north when they're defending real land, real houses? Have the Jews all gone crazy?

And that's how we'll win with a few old rifles and some bottles of petrol, said Yossi, confident and strong with his radiant smile.

Yossi's knowledge of the Egyptian soldiers was firsthand. One of his duties for the Palmach was intelligence and he often disappeared at night, disguised as an Arab, going off toward Gaza where the main Egyptian forces were quartered on the coast near the border. A few days later he would turn up again at the settlement, exhausted and exhilarated from his secret journeys through the desert, and go to work sending his information north on the settlement radio.

On the evenings of his return Anna rearranged her guard duty and she and Yossi were alone in one of the huts. He was younger than she was and perhaps it was the remoteness of her life there, or the knowledge that the settlement would soon fall, but it seemed to her she had never known a man quite like Yossi, so sure of himself in his gentle way and so at ease in the wind-driven desert nights that brought fear to everyone else.

Then too, there was no need to think of ending anything withYossi because in a day or two he would be gone again anyway, off on another secret mission across the desert.

In the morning sun they sometimes had a moment to sit on a rise of sand and enjoy the silence of a new day coming to the magnificent desert landscapes. Yossi would be thoughtful, gazing at the sand sifting through his fingers.

Just imagine, he said. Some of these glittering particles come all the way from the upper Nile. The river carries the sand three thousand miles to the sea, then the currents bring it to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean and the winds carry it over here. So seldom do we know the worlds we walk. Isn't it true, Anna?

That winter and spring they beat off attacks by Arab irregulars. At the end of spring the British withdrew from Palestine and Israel declared itself a nation. The armies of five Arab countries invaded, with the Egyptian army advancing into the Negev and up the coast from Gaza. When the settlement was attacked, Yossi and the others used up all their ammunition in a single day of fighting. After dark they abandoned the settlement, dragging the wounded, and set out north across the Negev with Yossi acting as guide for the little band of survivors. Before dawn he hid them at the foot of a cliff and went off alone disguised as an Arab in the direction of the Egyptian forces in Beersheva. That night Anna and the others traveled again, without Yossi, and reached the safety of a larger settlement in the northern Negev.

A month later, when there was a lull in the fighting, Yossi was able to find Anna.

It's working, he said. The Egyptians have stopped advancing and are digging in. Soon we'll hit back between their positions and even things up a bit.

Yossi laughed and rushed back to the front and the war for independence went better, against all odds. When she saw him that summer he was bursting with success and exuberant plans. He wanted to marry her and it was also what she wanted. She was six or seven years older than he was and sometimes she worried about that, but she loved him and she also knew her old life was behind her now, as much a part of the past as the Palestine of British days. She was used to more sudden changes in life but these feelings had come to her slowly, over time in the isolation of the Negev, beginning even before she met Yossi.

Nor was it because of their child that she was choosing a life with Yossi. She had already decided to have the child if she could, no matter what happened to Yossi. So when he came to her in the summer and their love was more intense than ever, it all seemed clear to Anna. Still, only after the decisions were made did she tell him she was carrying his child. Yossi listened to her and smiled and smiled, overwhelmed with pride and wonder.

My mysterious and lovely Anna, he kept whispering late at night. My infinitely mysterious Anna. . . .

He whispered in Arabic as they often did when making love. In a way it seemed strange and they laughed at it sometimes. But there was also no denying the sounds had an intimacy that was precious to both of them, recalling their first nights together in the desert as well as more distant bonds from both their childhoods.

***

Yossi was twenty-two when their son was born toward the end of 1948. After the war they lived on the coast in the south in order to be near the Negev, which they both loved. Yossi took courses at night and tried several different jobs. He was good at mathematics and physics and for a time he thought he might become an engineer, but nothing seemed to work out for him and eventually he went back into the army, training as a paratrooper. He was away for periods of time at one post or another and Anna returned to teaching when the baby was old enough. Yossi seemed unsure of himself, preoccupied and moody. His silences deepened when he was home and a distance grew between them.

At first Anna told herself it was simply because of his age that he was finding it difficult to adjust to a settled life. But as time passed she had to admit there was more to it than that, for she also knew Yossi was a solitary man who had always lived inside himself.

Yossi had grown up in a village near Baghdad, the only child to live beyond infancy in a family with little money. Being poor meant assuming responsibilities, and Yossi had cared for the family's animals while going to school, along with working outside the house from an early age, first in his father's small shop and later as an apprentice bookkeeper in the nearest town. He was studious and reserved and devout, and for several years he thought he wanted to become a rabbi when he grew up. Since he was always busy going from one responsibility to another, he could only find time for himself by constructing an inner world. His classmates liked him but they also recognized his strangeness, the differences that set him apart. At school he retreated to the edge of the yard between classes and read while the other children played, then worked in his father's shop in the afternoon with a book propped open on the counter. Even as a young child he never had the luxury of doing only one thing at a time, so he learned early to treasure the secret adventures of imagination.

When he was older there were the daily cross-country trips to the town where he bent over a ledger for hours in a dusty little office, writing figures in columns and methodically making sense of them. How he loved those long private journeys through the countryside on unmarked paths which he alone understood. No matter how many times he made the trip, he told Anna, it was always a landscape of make-believe and the great joy of his youth. Out there in the deserts and fields, at last, he was free and there was nothing to hold him back. On the way to the town he ran and ran, memorizing a thousand details as the panorama flashed by in the sun, running and running until his chest ached and his heart tore at him, for no other reason than the joy of feeling himself. Then later, going home after the long quiet hours at the ledger, he traveled slowly in the twilight to spy out what he had missed in the land and to see what had changed, a boyish game of learning to sense the world which strengthened his already profound imagination and gathered it around him like a cloak, against the cool darkness of stars and night.