Edward Whittemore - Jericho Mosaic

After a few weekends she left to fly a different route elsewhere. A slip of paper arrived in an envelope with a drawing of a fig tree and a sun and a moon above it. In the upper corner an airplane sped away, trailing tears.

She hadn't written any words and there was no signature.

As brief as it was, he knew he could have loved this wonderful young woman. A woman who was capable of giving so much, whatever the circumstances, was a rarity to be treasured. If he had met her a year ago or six months ago, who knew what might have come of it? But he had met her exactly when he did. Why? Because she sensed her abandon was safe with him? Without a future to study it, to understand it and reduce it? Was perfection only there when you disregarded it and considered nothing, calculated nothing, weighed nothing?

Clever people and grocers, she had said, weigh everything.

An idyll in the grand manner, then, a perfect sexual encounter. The Italian woman come and gone, and a last banquet of sensuality . . . Ziad's exquisite daydream briefly made real under Halim's fig tree.

What a superb taste of life. He smiled at the splendor of it.

***

Out of habit he continued to rise early, even though he seldom left his house and garden. One morning at first light he wandered out into the garden and found a dead man.

The man was sitting under the fig tree where the garden furniture was. He wore a greasy cloth cap pulled down tight on his head and a ragged winter overcoat buttoned up to his neck. His trousers were rolled up to his knees, leaving his thin legs bare. He wore no socks and his tattered shoes were huge, without laces. The tongues of the shoes curled up and the soles curled down, making the shoes look like a clown's prop from a circus. The man's eyes were closed and his face was frowning as if he were deep in thought, but the unnatural pose of his body left no doubt he was dead. Halim telephoned the police.

The odd thing was he knew the man, or knew him by sight just as thousands of people did. For years he had seen this tall thin derelict haunting the sidewalks of downtown Damascus, often near the central post office.

He was a stooped man with nervous eyes who was always peering intently down the street. He dressed the same in summer and winter and seemed oblivious to anything around him except a smile, which caught his attention at once if he thought it was directed at him. Then he grew agitated and muttered angrily. But when he was ignored he became calm again.

The derelict's heavy overcoat looked grotesque in the stifling heat of summer, the exposed gray flesh of his legs painfully cold in the hard wind and rain of winter. People learned to walk past him without disturbing him.

He hovered close to buildings and gave the impression that he was about to make a decision to break away and head off down the sidewalk. Sometimes he even took a few forceful steps forward, gazing intently into the distance. But ten minutes or two hours later he was still in the same place, doing exactly the same thing.

Like other people Halim assumed someone looked after him because he was more or less clean, except in winter when his bare legs were caked with mud.

The police were apologetic when they arrived to remove the body. They said the derelict normally kept to the busier downtown streets during the day because he liked to be among people who were hurrying in every direction. Then when it grew dark he went straight home to his slum, bothering no one. He was a harmless man who had been deranged for years, cared for by his sister.

Later that morning Halim received a telephone call from the district police superintendent, a friend, who said it was very unusual for the derelict to have strayed into a good residential area. As for him climbing over Halim's wall to sit down and die in the garden, well, there was no explaining that. Some manner of breeze in the mind of God, as the old saying put it. The superintendent also apologized for the awkward incident.

***

Halim often thought of Bell that spring. More and more he had come to admire Bell's achievements as a man, his humility and wisdom and acceptance of himself despite his horrible disfigurement. The fact that Bell hadn't intended to become what he did in no way lessened the accomplishment.

If Halim had been given a choice now to be positioned anywhere he wanted in life, he would have chosen himself as he was, making a new start in Bell's house with the young Italian woman. Yes, why not perfection? Why not everything? He would have feasted on the fruits of life and sat on Bell's front porch, in Bell's orange grove with its dust and sunlight and hum of insects in the morning, with that magnificent woman singing somewhere nearby.

Certainly he would have chosen Jericho, not Jerusalem and not Damascus.

When he was a child growing up in a village near the Euphrates, both Jerusalem and Damascus had been mythical cities to him. Now at the other end of life, knowing one of them was enough. A man heard many myths but lived only one in the end.

Jericho, still and always, was a different sort of place. Jericho had never had great temples or been the throne of empires. Armies ignored it and aspiring tribes passed it by. Conquerors searched elsewhere. Of all the dreams of man it was the oldest. It was the kind of place, valuable for its balsams, that Mark Antony would present as a love-token to Cleopatra, who would then turn around and rent it for a good price to Herod, who enjoyed it for its sun. Herod had wanted to escape the winter rain and cold of Jerusalem. Mark Antony was thinking of empires and Cleopatra of rent and meanwhile Jericho slumbered on, an oasis in the Great Rift of the world's affairs where one millennium was not so very different from another.

After all, a town that was ten thousand years old didn't have to concern itself with passing fancies. Jerusalem and Damascus with their mighty deeds and ruins, their mighty passions and vigorous causes, went back not half so far in time.

***

Thinking of Bell and Jericho also led him to think of Bell's surrogate son, Yousef, the young Arab schoolteacher who had befriended Assaf for one autumn and winter and spring after the Six-Day War. Since then Yousef had been a fugitive hiding in the Judean wilderness, an exile in his own land, an idealist who had sought this wholly personal and futile way to live the cause of his people in freedom. For all that time, nearly fifteen years, Yousef had done nothing but survive in the wilderness, hiding in caves and wadis and never lifting a hand toward anyone, almost never seen. By now he would surely have to be a little mad, touched by the awesome extremes of solitude in those desolate wastes.

In the security reports submitted to Tajar by the Shin Bet, Yousef was referred to as the green man, the code name given him long ago by Tajar. The green man was a traditional Arab name for the prophet Elijah. At the time Tajar assigned the code name it had been a quiet tribute to an unusual friendship, and a suggestion of the spiritual nature of Yousef's gift to Assaf after Assaf suffered his near-fatal wounds of the soul in the Six-Day War. To the Shin Bet the green man was a crazed Palestinian hermit of no operational interest whatsoever, whom they occasionally heard about third- or fourth-hand, via their informers. When they did hear news they passed along the report to the Mossad, as requested, wondering how even a low-level desk man in the Mossad could be concerned with such a totally useless figure. If they had suspected the recipient of their infrequent reports on the green man was a man as important as Tajar, they would have been astounded. But within the Mossad Tajar kept his interest in Yousef hidden, and only Tajar and Yossi had ever been aware of the private significance of the code name.