Edward Whittemore - Jericho Mosaic

That's all true, said Tajar, and I think the reason is simply because he wants to spare her the pain of an illusion. Her family all gone long ago in Egypt, having never remarried, Assaf her only child — for Anna, nothing in the world could mean so much now as having a grandchild. And Assaf knows that, so he spares her this lost hope.

Halim nodded. All at once Assaf had become a much more complicated person to him. He realized he couldn't understand what Assaf had done because it wasn't something he would have done.

The affair with the professor's wife was a terrible mistake, he said. Didn't Assaf sense the betrayal in that when it was happening?

I would say he was very confused in his emotions back then and got them wrong, replied Tajar. I would also imagine a psychiatrist could work out a weighty structure of technical terms to explain it, but what of that?

The fact is Assaf was being himself at the time. In the course of it he made a serious mistake, and the outcome was wretched. Certainly Assaf feels wretched about it.

Halim felt chastened. For years he himself had been a secret father, given to guilt and remorse. What was so strange about Assaf, in completely different circumstances, stumbling into the same dark corner?

You forgive the failures of others with such ease, he said.

Tajar seemed surprised by the remark. He thought about it a moment, then smiled sadly.

If that's so, it's only because my own failures have been so catastrophic, he replied. When I was Assaf's age I had to bear the memory of whole groups of people who had been lost because of my blunders. Now that was failure and those mistakes were truly terrible. To my mind, forgiving oneself is the hardest thing any of us has to face, since no life can measure up.

To what? asked Halim.

What we would have it be, replied Tajar. What we promised ourselves, when young, it would be. We all know that promise is genuine and eternal and foolproof, but nonetheless it turns out we are not.

***

At another of their meetings near Beirut, Tajar spoke of his renewed friendship with Bell. In particular he described his first dinner at Bell's house. For Halim this evoked nostalgic memories, since he recalled with great fondness the times he had spent at the house in the orange grove in Jericho, more than a decade ago now.

***

Darkness had already fallen when Tajar turned up in Jericho that summer evening, only his second visit to Bell's cottage. He intended to stop for just a few minutes and perhaps have some coffee. He was on his way down the Jordan Valley from the north, driving back to Jerusalem. But Bell urged him to stay for dinner and, since it would be late by then, to sleep over on a cot in the living room.

I leave the house at first light for my walk, said Bell, my circle tour of the valley out toward the river and back.

So you can be up and on your way early, and in Jerusalem before most people are having breakfast.

It was more convenient for Tajar to drive down to Jericho in the evening and thus that became the pattern of his visits. He left Jerusalem before the sun set and dropped down through the Judean wilderness in the cool of twilight, arriving in Jericho soon after dark. Bell served dinner and afterward they sat out behind the cottage under the grape arbor, talking until a late hour. Bell welcomed the company. And as Assaf and Yousef and Halim before him had fallen under the spell of the hermit's quiet ways, so Tajar came to anticipate the pleasure of these hours spent with Bell in his oasis near the Dead Sea.

Anna wasn't surprised that Tajar had become so friendly with Bell. She only wondered why he hadn't looked up Bell sooner. Were you being shy? she asked him merrily.

Tajar smiled. I'm always shy with holy men, he said. It's just not seemly to go banging into the life of someone who's considered a holy man. Besides, this hermit-in-residence happens to reside in Jericho and Jericho runs on a different time. Jerusalem is old but Jericho is three times older, and who can imagine such a thing? In Jericho you might greet a neighbor in the morning, then a dozen years later you might greet him in the afternoon and ask him how he is that day. Down there time isn't going anywhere, in other words, and neither are you. Bell says Abu Musa thinks he's three hundred years old and maybe he is. The corn gets harvested in May. Bell also says Moses the Ethiopian thinks he's living in the age of King David and maybe that's true too. What makes sense in such a place? Jerusalem is timeless, but what then of a place that's three times older than timeless? Surely it must be another realm altogether. Yes?

Anna laughed. It amused her the way Tajar talked about Jericho and she enjoyed hearing his descriptions of Bell and the house in the orange grove. But no matter how softly Tajar approached the subject she wasn't ready to think of meeting Bell again herself. Perhaps someday, she replied vaguely, reluctant as always to revive the past.

But that first evening at Bell's cottage when he was invited to stay for dinner: Tajar could never have imagined anything like it. After Tajar accepted, Bell wandered off to the tiny room at the back of the bungalow which served as his kitchen. Tajar had seen the emptiness of that room with its two rusty gas rings, and he preferred not to think what might come out of it that evening. Instead he perched himself regally in Bell's tattered chair on the front porch and gazed out at the shadowy orange grove, imagining it to be his portion of paradise in the hereafter, a sleekly dark old god smiling in the night.

From time to time he heard Bell clattering around in the far-off kitchen. What on earth was the hermit conjuring up back there for his unexpected guest? Last month's impregnable bread and the month-before-last's rock-solid goat's cheese? A bowl of last year's hardtack crumbs topped by a moldy dried date with a side dish of ramrod-hot green peppers, the thin slippery kind shaped like a horn of the devil, to obliterate all taste and detonate nature's needs? Perhaps an ancient green onion the hermit had found hiding in a corner of the kitchen and was now busily stripping of its long gray roots? God alone knew but no matter.

Tajar had survived on desert rations before and whatever the hermit put before him, he was sure he could manage it. The first rule in such a situation was to have a mug of scalding tea at hand. Once cleansed and softened, even a fistful of last year's locusts would go down. Alone in the desert, the prophet Elijah was said to have smiled a blissful smile when Providence and crows had provided him with such fare. Smile and swallow: then as now the rule of the desert. Hermits were notoriously austere creatures, known for their single-eyed vision of other worlds.

And in any case dessert would be delicious. God also made mangoes, an undeniable fact. In Jericho, oasis of fruit trees, dessert was a gift from heaven.

The distant banging eased off in the kitchen. Bell drifted out to the porch and apologized for the delay. Would Tajar care to step inside? Tajar nodded resolutely and gathered up his crutches, determined to face hardship with grace.

Candlelight greeted him at the door. He found himself staring at a magnificent spread of curries and steaming rice, fortified here and there by glistening bowls of homemade chutneys, mango for sweetness and three shades of fiery lemon to burn through the jasmine-scented evening. The array of rich dishes covered the unpainted wooden table in the barren living room, which was also the dining room and later to be Tajar's bedroom. Two sun-bleached wooden benches sat facing each other across the candlelit table, the bare floors swept clean by gentle breezes scurrying through the house. Packing crates hung in the corners with stacks of worn books. High up on the walls immobile geckos, friendly little lizards, awaited any stray insect that might wander in through the doors and windows, which were all thrown wide to the restless fragrance of the night.