Jericho Mosaic (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 4)

by Edward Whittemore

  No one in Jericho and few people anywhere knew that Bell had been a man of great power in the Middle East during the Second World War, when he had headed an elite British intelligence unit in Egypt, mysteriously known as the Monastery because its headquarters were hidden away in an ancient abandoned monastery in the desert. Bell’s agents, inevitably referred to as Monks and famous for their elaborate disguises, had operated behind German lines and among German sympathizers in many Arab countries. So effective were the Monks that their anonymous leader had become an awesome legend to intelligence experts in London. Yet Bell himself, who had gone by another name then, had managed to keep his identity secret even within his own organization. Most of the Monks had thought the withdrawn man with the claw and the war-blasted face was no more than a minor aide to the ruthless colonel who apparently ran the Monastery—actually Bell’s second-in-command.

  No sooner had the North African campaign ended than the Monastery was disbanded by order of the highest authority in London, partly out of professional jealousy and competitive maneuverings within the War Office, partly because of an unspoken fear that the Monastery’s uncanny ability to penetrate almost any target was considered too dangerous in all but the most extreme of wartime emergencies. For by then, justifiably or not, the Monks had acquired a reputation for being able to go almost anywhere and do almost anything.

  The brilliant leader of the Monastery was offered an important staff position in London which he firmly refused, arguing that he was emotionally exhausted and not equipped in any case for the usual promotions of government. Instead, he offered to work in a lesser role in Cairo until the end of the war, when he would retire in the Middle East on disability pay. With a tired voice and his customary self-irony, Bell gestured at his bulging black eye patch with his twisted claw.

  Some of us are never meant to be more than field hands, he said. And an empire, no doubt, always has forgotten corners for its honored cripples.

  To his superiors in the War Office, Bell seemed much too young to be ending such a successful career. But the fact that he had been born and brought up in India and had never really lived in England, together with his face, was enough to convince even the most skeptical generals in the War Office that they had to respect his wishes and not bring him back to London. Indeed, Bell’s face had always been indisputable proof of his sincerity. There was simply no arguing with that grotesque misshapen affliction with which he looked upon the world, the most terrible face anyone had ever seen.

  Bell took advantage of his free time in Cairo by studying Arabic. When the war was over in Europe he retired on disability pay and changed his name and moved to Jerusalem, where he continued to improve his Arabic. Of course he knew his former colleagues in British intelligence were keeping an eye on him. That was only to be expected. One of the reasons he had chosen British Palestine was to make it easier for them to watch him. For the same reason he later decided to move to Jordan when the British Mandate in Palestine was coming to an end, since the British had created the country of Jordan out of the larger, eastern part of Palestine and operated quite freely there. Because of his face Bell had always been extremely sensitive to the feelings of others and he felt certain he couldn’t cause anyone trouble in that little bedouin kingdom: a war-torn English expatriate quietly going to seed in some out-of-the-way place on the edge of the desert.

  Bell found his forgotten corner of empire on a journey east one blustery winter day when he set out from the heights of Jerusalem to walk down through the wilderness of the Judean hills, down and down through the dry barren wastes. And then he caught sight of Jericho deep in the Jordan rift. With its flaring tropical flowers overhanging silent dusty lanes, its tall stately date-palms and cascading jasmine and tumbling walls of bougainvillea, its waterways and gurgling springs and fiery flamboyants bursting against a sun-washed sky, the little Arab village seemed no less than a miracle on the lifeless plain north of the Dead Sea. So small and intensely green in the haze, the lush oasis of Jericho struck Bell as the very mirage of his dreams, truly the Prophet’s vision of paradise in a desert of eternal summer. From the lookout claimed by tradition to be the Mount of Temptation on which the devil had spread before Jesus the good things of the earth, Bell feasted his single eye upon Jericho. Later that same week, with an excitement unknown to him since the loss of his face, he moved his few belongings down the cold windy mountain from Jerusalem.

  In Jericho Bell walked and read and kept to himself, sipped arak and learned about orange trees. He also learned more about the town.

  Presented long ago as a love-token to Cleopatra, as a gift from Mark Antony to his Egyptian queen of infinite variety who had then turned around and rented it to Herod for a good price, famous in antiquity for its balsam and henna and myrrh and saffron and balm of Gilead, the town of palms of the ancients was fed by water that went underground on the ridge of Jerusalem and found its way down beneath the desolate sweep of the Judean wilderness to gush forth in springs, miraculously, on the spot where Jericho had existed for ten thousand years, far longer than any other town ever built by man.

  Because of the heat Bell got into the habit of always wearing white in Jericho, white cotton trousers and loose white blouses which he washed out every day and hung beside his grape arbor. As a foreigner he was an object of curiosity, but not overly so. With the Mount of Temptation standing nearby, and also the stretch of the Jordan River where John the Baptist had wandered and listened to God—and taken up the ancient Eastern practice of purifying his friends and others by dunking them in the tepid river water, including his cousin Jesus—there had been Christian monks around Jericho for the last two millennia, desert outcroppings of poor Greeks and Copts and Syrians and Ethiopians tending their holy concerns.

  Bell was different because of his face, and at first the villagers shunned him out of fear of his single eye—the evil eye to them—turning away when he passed and hiding their children and refusing to look at him. But he was used to this and made no effort to impose himself, having long ago acquired a profound inner solitude. In fact he went out of his way to shield the villagers from the ruin of his face and the single eye, always wearing a drooping straw hat when he left his orange grove and keeping his head down when he walked in town, even addressing the floor in shops so that his face would remain covered.

  These were the ways of a humble man, people realized, and in time the villagers came to accept Bell as part of their shade and sunlight and flowers—the foreign hermit with the terrible God-inflicted face, thin and silent and withdrawn, an apparition in white quietly passing the days behind his orange trees.

  Bell had been in Jericho about a dozen years when his dramatic transfiguration took place. Before that time he had gradually become part of the unfathomable landscape of life, but then all at once a startling revelation gripped the villagers: Bell hadn’t aged a day in twelve years. The austere one-eyed hermit looked exactly the same as when he first set foot in Jericho.

  It took some time to grasp the magnitude of this discovery in a place where eternal summer caused all things to age more quickly than elsewhere. The flowers never stopped blooming in Jericho and the fruit trees never stopped bearing, but it was also true that the fierce sun took what it gave and decay was every bit as rampant as growth. In a matter of months a new house or a new dusty lane looked as if it had already been standing in neglect for half a century. And people, burning dark and wrinkled in the desert sun, moved rapidly through the stages of life to become slow-moving ancients at an early age, retiring to sit in the shade of memory while directing their grandchildren to open the water channels and flood the fruit trees, when the time was right and memory spoke.

  But unlike every other thing in Jericho, Bell didn’t age. His erect thin body was still the same and his drooping straw hat was the same and he still went for the same long walks in the desert at dawn and at twilight, a silent white figure off in the distance, alone with his thoughts. Above all, what everyone now talked about was
the unchanging state of Bell’s terrible face.

  Bell’s face couldn’t change because the shattered bone and muscle had long ago been worked into a rigid mask by surgeons. Those were the medical facts of the matter. But the villagers understood growth and decay much better than surgery, and to them Bell’s face never changed because it bore the special mark of God, a sign of that profound inner peace which was the ultimate treasure of every man’s soul.

  Thus subtly, in time, horror was transformed into beauty and Bell’s monstrous affliction became a cause for reverence in Jericho. The idea shaped itself slowly in the shade of the village but eventually everyone sensed the unmistakable truth. The austere foreign hermit was touched by God and immutable, beyond the fingers of decay that turned even the rocks of the desert to dust. The white he wore signified purity of heart and his round single eye, once feared as evil, was now recognized as a sign of the divine presence that penetrated men’s souls, the all-seeing eye of heaven.

  In the minds of the villagers Bell had become a holy man, in other words, and from then on his gaze and his greeting were revered as blessings.

  Beyond Jericho the myth of the one-eyed English hermit continued to acquire ever more fantastic dimensions through the years. No rumor was too extreme to find its way into the fanciful legends that foreign travelers heard repeated with awe in Amman, the desert capital of Jordan.

  Nor was official interest in Bell at an end. Two decades after the world war an officer from the British embassy in Amman still journeyed down to Jericho once a year to spend a day at Bell’s cottage, ostensibly to inquire after his welfare but in fact to write a detailed report on his state of mind and his habits. For it seemed there were still those in London who were curious about the recluse who had once been the brilliant leader of the anonymous Monks in Egypt.

  Bell accepted these official intrusions gracefully, answering questions as best as he could and withholding nothing he felt might be of interest. As the years passed these visits were made by younger men who were unaware of Bell’s role in the world war and knew only the mythical Bell of the stories told in Amman—the eccentric English recluse with the appalling wreckage of a face who lived a life of asceticism and alcohol eight hundred feet below sea level, in a town that was ten thousand years old, reading and drinking and refining his soul in the heavy sun of Jericho. So perhaps it was only to be expected that these young officials occasionally let slip some wild piece of hearsay while eliciting information on Bell’s front porch, blurting out the latest rumor then making the rounds in the capital of Jordan:

  And is it also true, sir, that you’ve existed on nothing but mangoes and arak for the last ten years?

  Bell’s guest would be sitting poised on the bench beside the front door, notebook and pen in hand, hopelessly mesmerized by the inhuman mask of Bell’s face. On the table were Bell’s customary two decanters and the usual piles of fruit and books. Bell listened to the insects humming in the orange trees and a twisted look of conspiracy came over his face, an expression Abu Musa or Moses the Ethiopian would have recognized as a gentle smile.

  No, it’s not true, replied Bell. In fact I’ve revived the ancient Gnostic rite of eating fresh figs on the night of each new moon. Ripe, sticky, juicy fresh figs, a great basket of them for ceremonial reasons. More than enough to keep a man in visions of ecstasy for an entire month.

  SEVEN

  NO ONE IN JERICHO was happier with Bell’s miraculous transfiguration than his great friend and admirer, Abu Musa, a patriarch of the village who had innumerable cousins and nephews and nieces, and great-nephews and great-nieces, scattered around the Middle East. Although a grower of fruit trees in Jericho for many decades, Abu Musa was a man with another past. Early in the century he had ridden with the forces of Lawrence of Arabia, triumphantly blowing up Turkish trains in the deserts between Damascus and Medina, and he had never forgotten his spectacular adventures with that famous Englishman. Through some strange quirk of the years the old Arab still associated the English with romantic destruction, with dynamite exploding in barren places in a noble cause, and thus Bell’s ruined face to him was a guide to heroic memories and the glories of his own extravagant youth.

  Or at least that was the way Abu Musa explained his feelings of friendship for Bell, conjuring up a chaotic imagery which was typical of the old Arab’s abstruse mixtures of time and nostalgia and fact, an airy heartfelt exuberance that was as inaccessible to reason as the shifting patterns of sunlight beneath the orange trees in Bell’s front yard. For the truth was simply that Abu Musa enjoyed Bell’s company. Like Bell, he was a thoughtful man who pondered the world from a distance, and so the two men had much in common.

  Abu Musa had discovered Jericho in much the same way as Bell. After his own world war, the first one, like Bell but journeying in the opposite direction, heading west from the deserts on the other side of the Jordan River, Abu Musa had glimpsed Jericho from the heights of Moab one winter and decided it was the place where he should spend his life. When Bell turned up in the village three decades later, Abu Musa sold him a house and under the pretense of giving advice on orange trees, which required lengthy discussions in the shade, he became a regular visitor to Bell’s north verandah. Their friendship flourished and Abu Musa soon became Bell’s advocate and protector in Jericho.

  It was Abu Musa, not surprisingly, who planted the first suggestions around the village as to the secret meaning of Bell’s face, when he thought it was time for that miracle to be revealed. Abu Musa believed divine revelation sometimes needed a human nudge, perhaps as a railway in the desert sometimes needed dynamite, so he had gone around delicately placing hints in coffeeshops in order to acquire for Bell the status he felt his friend deserved—that of holy man. This he admitted to Bell only after his secret campaign was well under way. As usual the two of them were sitting on Bell’s front porch that day, Bell sipping arak while Abu Musa puffed away on the nargileh he kept there.

  A shameless deception, said Bell, with a sneer of contempt, which was the way his face showed affection.

  Abu Musa nodded happily, his thick white moustache rising and falling as his waterpipe gurgled and bubbled. He was a tall heavy man whose voluminous, light-blue galabieh made him look even larger than he was, as massive as a bank of faded morning glories spread over Bell’s front porch, where he half-reclined on a bench propped against the wall of the house. In answer Abu Musa waved the mouthpiece of his nargileh in the air, composing an indecipherable script from the whiffs of smoke, perhaps a quotation from the Koran or an obscure reference from the Thousand and One Nights. Sometimes the smoke had the smell of tobacco and sometimes of hashish, depending on Abu Musa’s mood.

  No deception on my part, mused Abu Musa. I was just tired of seeing you hide behind that tattered straw hat of yours. At a certain age a man must step out in the open and declare himself, and there was no question in my mind that you’d been hiding long enough. So I asked myself, Who is Bell really? What are we to make of him in Jericho? And the answer I heard in my heart was as clear as the peaks of the Moabite hills at sunrise. Surely he’s a holy man. Doesn’t he have all the attributes? And if that’s the situation, I thought, wouldn’t it be better for people to recognize the truth? So I whispered a suggestion here and there and now people are beginning to grasp the truth, God willing.

  Bell laughed, sensing more devious schemes at work. A holy man who drinks all day? he asked.

  Once more Abu Musa majestically scattered smoke, wafting aloft the mouthpiece of his nargileh as if he were a magician dispensing illusions with a wand.

  My friend, he murmured, we live in the lowest and oldest town on earth, far below sea level where facts and the air lie heavy and have done so for ten millennia, much nearer the core of the world than people elsewhere. Who can be concerned with a little sipping in such an ancient dry hot place? And anyway, no one’s claiming you’re a saint, just holy. Of course while I was thinking my thoughts back then I also asked myself why I spend so much
time on your porch talking and talking and talking, and listening. According to Jericho time I’m nearly three hundred years old, counting four summers and therefore four years for each one on a normal calendar, and it’s inconceivable I should be a fool at such an advanced age. No, impossible, surely I should be wise with so many years behind me, God willing. And so? And so I considered these flowers within my head and decided the reason I like to sit here and talk and talk with you, and listen, is because I’m in the company of a holy man with whom such things are right and good and the one true way of the one true God. Don’t you see? It’s all very clear when you think about it.

  Bell laughed again. Well it was clear enough, he thought, given Jericho time and his friend’s logic. Why shouldn’t a three-hundred-year-old patriarch assign himself grand motives for his everyday habits?

  But Bell also sensed the old Arab was only partly joking and that disturbed him, because Bell knew there was nothing admirable about his retreat from the world, which was caused solely by his unbearable ugliness. He knew he was a drunkard and a coward who was terrified by the horror of his own face, which to him was a brutal cause for shame, a mark of his utter uselessness as a human being. Indeed, Bell sometimes felt he wasn’t even qualified to be called human. Others might think he acted out of humility, but to Bell his ways weren’t those of humility but of abject humiliation. No one could ever know what the horror of his face meant—to him.

  For a time, it was true, he had tried to hide reality from himself in the secret conceits of espionage. But all of that clever subterfuge had ended long ago in the Monastery in Egypt. By becoming a recluse in Jericho he had intended to render his soul naked through a life without visible purpose, and the reverence he now saw in people’s eyes was causing him a new agony of self-doubt, because he felt he was slipping back into deception. Even the respect shown him by Abu Musa was painful in a way it had never been before.