Edward Whittemore - Jericho Mosaic

Halim still rose early and walked to work for the exercise, taking different routes to vary the scenery. By now he knew hundreds of people along the way, familiar faces from over the years who greeted him and passed along the neighborhood news, sold him his cigarettes and newspaper, inveigled him to pause for a Turkish coffee. When he entered the lobby of his office building, the Tatar horseman on guard there solemnly raised his antique Mauser rifle with the red tassel at its end, in the morning ritual of salute. Halim conferred with his manager and dropped in on his bookkeepers, always a pleasantly nostalgic pastime for the boy hidden away in him who had once done bookkeeping.

At least once a week he rode the creaky cage-lift up to the top floor to have coffee in the hotel lounge and visit with his old friends who still worked there. He went out and walked to appointments in downtown Damascus, then met a business acquaintance for lunch near Martyrs' Square or by the river. He took a taxi home after lunch and observed the siesta hours, unplugging his phone and resting or reading until late afternoon, when he was known to be at home to visitors. He carried the phone out to the gathering of chairs beneath his fig tree, and there people came and went.

Halim welcomed them all, his Syrian friends, his Palestinian friends. He listened and advised and helped when he could. His friends knew where to find him and came around the house through the garden, after first calling and setting a time. Halim boiled Turkish coffee for every guest and later set up a table with drinks beneath the fig tree. It was a comfortable setting, relaxed and private. Occasionally he went on to dinner with some of his visitors but returned home early to read and listen to music. Several times a week he met one of his women friends for dinner at a restaurant beside the Barada, but even then he was home early the next morning to change clothes and walk to the office. It was a single man's regular life of work and routine, friends and commonplace pleasures.

Life was also a nexus in the usual Arab fashion. His office manager was a cousin of the machinery company owner who had been his first business partner in Damascus, the man he had met over dinner in the Hotel Brittany. The owner had now retired from his company and been replaced by his son, whom Halim served as a senior business adviser. Halim had been given a place of honor in the son's wedding and was an unofficial uncle to his firstborn, a boy. Halim had also helped his manager by guaranteeing a loan for a new apartment.

Halim's cleaning woman, who arrived in the morning and worked until he returned home in the early afternoon, was a poor relation of the manager's wife from a village in the north. And so it went, with obligation and loyalty tightly connected in the usual manner of a traditional society.

The pain Yossi used to feel over Assaf was hardly there anymore. Very slowly the torment had dimmed, the anguish receded. Halim still experienced it sometimes when he was alone in the garden, not in the house.

But even then the feeling was remote, a memory rather than a physical sensation that suddenly gripped his chest and threatened to strangle his heart, as it once had done. Only the sadness afterward was the same, the immense longing he was left with when the spasm passed, an emptiness for what was gone.

As if in compensation for his loss, a small compensation but nonetheless real, he had come to love his old house again. Here he had suffered and survived his terrible anguish and now it was truly his home, his place in the world. He loved its crumbling grandeur and tangled gardens, its noble old-fashioned rooms with their great window-doors opening onto the verandahs. He felt safe and comfortable sitting beside the fire on rainy winter nights, listening to music, and never tired of wandering along the verandahs on warm evenings and gazing up at the stars. Israel seemed very far away to him now and more than ever a dream, an imagined place. It was over there, like Ziad's dream of Europe and Paris: a distant place and beautiful, a rare and certain treasure to be loved, to be cherished, pure as only an abstraction can be.

But there was never anything abstract about Tajar in his thoughts. Tajar was also far away but Tajar was his dearest friend and more, his father and brother and keeper, the conscience of his finer self. He felt so close to Tajar that he often spoke of him in conversations with friends in Damascus, under the pretext of recalling the widower-cousin in Argentina who had given him his start in life. Naturally, this was most true with Ziad. It was curious but in some ways Ziad was more familiar with Tajar — under a different name, in a different time and place — than he was with almost anyone else in the world, save for Halim himself.

Halim had always hoped Anna would remarry, and his memories of her had an idyllic charm to them. The memories dwelled on the intensity of their lives at the little settlement in the Negev that was soon to fall. . . .

Those few huts in the vastness of the desert. The still nights and glorious sunrises. The two of them together at the dawn of the world when hope and love had sparkled in the very grains of sand sifting through their fingers.

The women he knew now were loving in their way, but it could never be the same again because he wasn't the same. Now, the unfathomable joys and sadness of life were no longer still ahead of him.

Yet he had achieved what he always wanted. He had been determined to create his own life and that was exactly what he had done, with Tajar's help. Choice after choice, decision after decision, he had pushed on to create Halim, the Runner, himself — a long and arduous journey. And he was here in this house, and the accomplishment was unique. He knew that.

But there were also strange moments of indefinable power when Halim saw something else. On evenings when there was a moon and his overgrown garden came alive with shadows and eerie moonglow, he sometimes found himself gazing down from the verandahs and glimpsing ghosts among the trees. These were the broken, discolored statues he had inherited with his old house. The clearings that had once surrounded the solitary statues, like the paths that led to them, had long since been lost to vines and bushes and hanging branches. He knew they were no more than statues, and yet they would suddenly rise up to haunt him as images of the important people in his life — Anna, Assaf, Tajar, Ziad. . . . Each statue solemnly off by itself. An enduring stately presence in its own secret grove. A mystery standing alone in the moonlight.

There were so few of them, so few people in his life. But were there more in any man's life?

He wondered about that. He also wondered about the conceits of solitude. Because lately, as if to mock these illusions, another ghost had abruptly begun to appear in his garden at night.

Yes, Bell. That crooked, shattered, fate-blasted face . . . smiling in broken discolored marble. Of all the ghosts only Bell seemed to smile, and Halim found this oddly appealing. The idea intrigued and amused him at the same time because to his mind, the hermit of Jericho was the ultimate spirit of disguise. Who but God, after all, could ever create a mask as unworldly as Bell's face?

***

Ziad continued to make his regular trips to the squalid refugee camps in southern Lebanon. The practical training given him by Halim was to bring him to the notice of his superiors, with unexpected results.

The Runner operation, through no fault of the Runner himself, entered a period of torpor which was vaguely troubling to Tajar. Before the 1973 war the Mossad was almost totally occupied with the international terrorist campaign of the PLO, so effectively financed and directed by the KGB. The director of the Mossad, General Ben-Zvi, spent all his time on it. When the KGB transferred control of the campaign from Damascus to Cyprus, Tajar and the Runner operation slipped in importance for a time. But that was to change.