Edward Whittemore - Jericho Mosaic

He waved a crutch in salute and hobbled on down the road, raising little puffs of dust with his crutches.

***

Tajar drove slowly out of Jericho that day, working the special hand levers in his old car that made it possible for him to drive without legs. He went slowly because he was reluctant to leave the bright colors of the oasis, the splashes of purple bougainvillea and orange-red flamboyants, and to leave Bell and the house in the orange grove. He was thinking how aware Bell was of the advantages of his, Tajar's, life and what he had done with the years. Of course. Tajar had been busy in the world and his mark was deep on men's affairs. Yet it was human nature to miss what you lacked and Tajar couldn't help but think how appealing Bell's life seemed, with its solitude.

Tajar laughed at himself, at his own weakness for misgivings. If Bell had been in his place in life, Bell would have done exactly what he had done for the last thirty years. Tajar knew that for a fact. And if he had been Bell, well then naturally. . . .

All the same, it was fascinating how the dream could change.

He was thinking of his father and his father's father, those pious poor rabbis who had endured the squalor and oppression of Jerusalem under the Turks, men of profound longing for whom the Holy City on the mountain had always been an imaginary place, an unrealizable dream, much as it was for Bell, who had lost the great love of his life there. Yet for he who had been born in Jerusalem and lived there and had come to know it as the capital of his country — for Tajar — his imagination was now turning elsewhere, he found. Bell was the one who was in exile, seemingly in exile. He wasn't. And yet?

Tajar smiled at his musings that day. He shook his head and laughed as he busily pushed and pulled levers, driving his car without legs up the mountain. The road curved and he caught a last glimpse back at the plains of Jericho and the Dead Sea, and beyond them the hills of Moab where God had shown Moses the promised land which Moses could never enter.

Of course we learn everything too late, thought Tajar. Life, our Jericho crossing, our Jericho mosaic . . . there it is forever glimpsed from afar.

***

After Tajar left, Bell stood lost in a reverie with the fierce sun beating down on him. What a splendid man he is, Bell kept thinking. What a grand life he has built for himself since we knew each other so long ago.

Bell, alone in retreat all these years, had only two or three friends for whom he counted, whereas Tajar, this hobbling and smiling cripple from the mountain, had tirelessly pursued his worthy cause and truly become a world to many people. Inevitably, thought Bell, a paucity of giving is the affliction of one who cuts himself off.

But why have I done that? Why have I become a recluse?

He stood in the dense sunlight gazing at his porch, at the tattered chair and the old table with its worn dusty goods. All at once this shabby evidence of his days seemed a profoundly naked display, a pitiful collection of junk to be left behind one day as proof he had lived here. He crossed the porch and wandered through his rooms, aware there was almost nothing in them. They were so bare it was as if no one at all lived here, or at best some transient putting up for a night or two.

Bell felt exhausted, drained. He went out the back door and fled to his grape arbor to escape the waste of his life. This shabby emptiness . . . what was the use of it? Tajar had been so pleased to see him, but Tajar remembered another man who had gone by a different name in Egypt, a clever and determined man of great power, the secret leader of the Monastery whom Tajar recalled with respect . . . looking back.

But of course Bell wasn't that man anymore. Tajar was. It was Tajar who helped people to do more and be more, who gave back light from the darkness of the times, who smiled merrily and kicked up little puffs of dust on the difficult road to somewhere, while Bell lapsed ever deeper in his dream of a crumbling nowhere, a recluse in timeless Jericho, absorbed in the rhythms of the sun and the swelling hum and shade of his orange grove.

This house, this life, thought Bell. This unspeakable shabbiness . . . it's appalling.

In fact it was so appalling it made him smile. For even Bell was sometimes surprised at how far he had gone in creating his own world, where everything was in harmony with his being.

***

When Abu Musa arrived late that afternoon for the daily shesh-besh session with Moses the Ethiopian, Bell was still sitting in the grape arbor, his round single eye a full stop in the question of the universe.

What's this? thought Abu Musa. Off by himself without even a large empty glass of arak in his twisted claw?

Only the memory of a lost love in Jerusalem could keep our resident holy man from a drink at this time of day. Obviously he needs a jolt. Even a holy man can doubt himself.

Stealthily, Abu Musa went up on tiptoe. Bell was too absorbed to hear anything but he did sense a movement and all at once he saw Abu Musa's great noble head, dark-skinned and white-maned, gazing solemnly down at him from among the grapes at the end of the arbor. There was no body with the head. The foliage hid that.

There was simply Abu Musa's huge serene face among the sun-streaked grapes, a magnificent vision of mankind adrift amidst nature's fruits.

My God, murmured Bell with a start.

I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, boomed the head. Look not upon me that I am swarthy, that the sun hath tanned me.

The head wagged roguishly and disappeared. Laughing and sighing and snorting all at once, Abu Musa came waddling into the arbor and settled his bulk on a bench. The quotation was from the Song of Songs, he said, good King Solomon's discourse on love and lovemaking. Moses had taught it to him and he particularly liked that phrase, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, because it suggested the sensual mysteries and flowering courtyards of a sumptuous harem. Solomon had had innumerable wives and concubines, he added, and surely it was a wise king who replenished his wisdom regularly in the heat of summer afternoons.

Bell smiled. In his roundabout way Abu Musa was reasserting his belief that nothing revived the spirit so well as love and lovemaking. But given Bell's status as a hermit and holy man, Abu Musa quickly moved on to his second-best solution for any problem, which was a tale. Abu Musa loved to tell stories and he now launched into a convoluted account of Crusader ruins in desolate places. According to him, the reason the Crusaders had lost out in the Holy Land was because of their underwear. Most of them had come from France and Germany and had insisted on wearing the same heavy sheepskin underwear they had used for the cold damp winters at home.

In the long summers we have here? asked Abu Musa. Tufts of sheepskin squeezed in under all that tight-fitting armor? Can we even begin to imagine the intolerable itching?

Abu Musa shuddered at his own description. Quickly he reached down to give his genitals a thoughtful scratch and realignment through the loose folds of his faded blue galabieh. In other words, he concluded, it's futile to bring your prejudices with you when you go in search of the Holy Land. That's not what the land is about.

Bell laughed. What is the land about then? he asked.

Abu Musa looked even more thoughtful. Dust and oranges? he replied. A dream of man's spirit freed at last from the fervor of fanaticism? Cool water and shade and the talk of friends at the end of the day? For a wise king, hot summer afternoons of love. And for a holy man, smiling on all this because it is right and good.