He’s the biggest man I’ve ever seen, whispered Tajar.
Also the most determined, replied Abu Musa. It’s very dangerous to play shesh-besh with him. Eunuchs have extraordinary powers of concentration which become dispersed in the rest of us through sexual innuendo.
I see. And what will become of your shesh-besh games now?
We intend to go on playing, whispered Abu Musa. Moses is adamant about it. Every afternoon we’ll turn up here at the regular time and sit on Bell’s front porch and play. Of course our conversations won’t be the same because Moses always believes anything I tell him and I always believe anything he tells me. It was Bell who asked questions and straightened us out.
Abu Musa wiped his face with his sleeve. The sweat was still pouring off him.
It must be hot work beating a drum in Jericho today, whispered Tajar.
Today or any day, agreed Abu Musa. But when you live in the lowest and oldest village on earth, you have to expect some heat. You don’t look so young yourself. Do you understand dreams?
A bit. What kind are we referring to?
The ones that come during sleep, whispered Abu Musa, bending down more to get his mouth closer to the ear of the little man on crutches. Once more Abu Musa mopped his face.
This heat, whispered Tajar. But dreams, you say?
Yes. You see I had one the day Bell died.
Ah.
During my siesta that afternoon. I was on my way here, hurrying over to tell Bell and Moses about the dream, when I found him. He was sitting right where you now see his hat, sitting and smiling with a glass of arak in his hand and gazing out at the orange grove, at just about the spot where we’re standing now. It was uncanny. He looked exactly the way he always looked.
Ah.
A thin man, Bell, and he always sat very erect. I could never understand why he was so thin when he ate so much. Those immense curry dinners, for example. You know about them. He served them to you, he served them to me and Moses, he served them to Assaf and to others in the past.
Others?
There was his Syrian friend some years back, the man from Damascus. Bell also made curry dinners for him. And after that, almost every week it seemed, there was the Indian trader passing through. Before you turned up in Bell’s life, of course, and took the trader’s place.
He once told me about an Indian trader, whispered Tajar, but I thought the trader was imaginary. I also thought he was speaking about something that might have happened two thousand years ago. Was there really an Indian trader?
Abu Musa nodded thoughtfully and wiped his face with his sleeve, still bending down to keep his head close to Tajar, who craned upward. The buzz of their whispering voices was easily hidden by the incessant beat of the drum and Moses’s powerful chant, by the hum of insects in the orange grove and the gentle snores rising from the spectators asleep under the trees.
Assuredly the Indian trader did exist, whispered Abu Musa. Not for us to see him but in Bell’s mind. Once a week Bell would announce that the Indian trader was due that night and excuse himself early from the social hour, to go into his kitchen to make preparations.
Ah, I see.
Thump-thump boom.
To make curries, in other words, which he would then eat alone, in the company of the Indian trader who existed in his mind. And you know how he ate when one of his curry dinners was in front of him: like a camel that had been lost in the wilderness for forty years. So I always asked myself, why did he remain thin?
And the answer?
A mystery to the end, whispered Abu Musa. One of God’s mysterious gifts to a holy man. And there were other mysteries. My dream the day he died, for example. The very afternoon he died. It might even have been no more than a few moments before he died. There is a rumor that we sometimes have a vision before we die and in this vision our entire life passes before us in an instant, which is perhaps the instant it took us to live it. For one moment, in other words, we are given to see everything, all we are and were and have done and have been. Are you familiar with this rumor?
Yes.
Well that’s what happened to me, whispered Abu Musa. I had that kind of utterly comprehensive dream and hurried over to tell Bell and Moses about it, to enlist their help in explaining it to me—not realizing at the time that it was a dream to sum up a life—and what did I find? I found Bell smiling as if a pleasant thought had just come to him … smiling and dead, so I closed his eye. Only later, after reconsidering it, did I realize the dream was his, not mine. It was his life I had seen in its entirety, not my own, which was why so much of the dream had seemed mysterious to me and slightly askew. So that’s a more important mystery. Death came to him but the dream came to me. Nor is that all. The day after Bell’s death I told Moses about my curious dream, and it turned out that exactly the same thing had happened to him.
Thump-thump boom.
What? You mean Moses also dreamed Bell’s life? whispered Tajar.
Abu Musa smiled and mopped his face. So Moses claims, he whispered, but he might just be following my lead. In spiritual matters our monkish Moses has always been notoriously susceptible to suggestion, including his own. Just look at this service he’s putting on for Bell. Wouldn’t any serious Christian be scandalized by it?
I’m not so sure anyone would find it amiss, whispered Tajar. And in any case I like it. I like the drum and Moses’s chants, and I like the people dozing under the trees. Everyone seems to be enjoying himself and that’s a fine tribute to Bell. In fact, I feel nothing but elation.
Abu Musa’s eyes flashed. An immense warm smile burst over his dripping, sweaty face.
But that’s wonderful, he whispered. I like it too and elation is just the right word. And we feel this way, you and I, because we have both had the vast good fortune to have known this compassionate, genuine, hard-drinking holy man whom we are here to honor. Surely God has never fashioned finer handiwork, don’t you agree? But come now, at once.
Where?
Abu Musa had seized Tajar by the shoulder and was propelling him out of the shade and into the clearing. The dazed youth on the drum had been relieved by another dazed youth who thumped on. Moses also droned on and most of the friends and neighbors in the orange grove were now definitely asleep. Tajar looked over his shoulder and saw Anna sitting with Abigail and Assaf under a tree near the gate, watching him with startled eyes. Abu Musa dragged him right up beside Moses.
Welcome him, he’s one of us, whispered Abu Musa, tugging Moses’s robes.
Moses broke off his chant and turned and smiled. He reached down and put his hands under Tajar’s arms and lifted him up off the ground as if he were a child, raising him up in the air to his own eye level. Tajar’s crutches dangled at the ends of his arms. Moses pulled Tajar in and hugged him and noisily placed a kiss on each side of his face.
Welcome, said Moses, beaming. Then he lowered Tajar down to the ground and turned back to face the porch and the tattered chair and Bell’s old straw hat, resuming his chant. Abu Musa nodded happily and sat down at Moses’s feet, once more taking his place at the drum. Tajar hobbled out of the clearing and through the shade of the orange grove toward Anna and Abigail and Assaf, who were all silently clapping. Anna held his hand when he sat down beside her.
Bravo, she whispered. But what did all that mean? It looked like some special little ceremony. Have you joined something?
Tajar nodded, smiling.
It seems I’ve become the third partner of a shesh-besh game, he said. I watch and they play. I also comment on what they say. Now and then I turn up here and sit on the porch with them.
Is that all?
All? But the game has no end, Anna. Don’t you see? I’ve been invited to become part of Jericho time.
Later Abu Musa came to join them where they sat under the trees near the gate. He was happy they were all there and especially thankful that Anna had come. After chatting for a while he gestured toward the clearing and the front porch.
; Look here, he said, you might as well just drift away whenever the spirit moves you. There’s no logical time to leave a ceremony like this. Tales may have a beginning and a middle and an end but life in Jericho doesn’t, and especially a celebration staged by Moses. When Moses casts a spell over Jericho his chanting has a way of going on and on like his favorite holy river. No doubt there’ll be a subtle transformation from one thing to another at some obscure hour today or tomorrow or the day after that—but who can say when it will come? I’m sure Moses himself doesn’t know. I’ll be sitting at the drum thumping away when I begin to sense that something has changed, that the world is not quite the same as it used to be. And then I’ll notice, say, that the insects seem to be humming more loudly in the orange grove than they were. Has my hearing suddenly improved because I’m young again? Am I less dazed than before? But no. I’ll look up and notice that Moses’s lips are no longer moving, that instead he’s just standing there leaning on his staff, pondering the old straw hat in Bell’s chair. By God, I’ll think, that’s why the humming seems louder, because Moses is no longer chanting. So I’ll know it’s time to give the drum a particularly forceful whack and that will be the end of it, the final end of the whole affair. Like Moses, I’ll be left limp and tired and elated and satisfied, gazing at the old straw hat in Bell’s chair, and so it goes. Life, Bell, a day in Jericho … ah yes, and so it goes. Our great friend will have been given a send-off fit for a holy man, Jericho style, and Moses and I will both feel good about it because we dearly loved him… And our friends and neighbors here? These people who are happily asleep under Bell’s orange trees? Well in due time they’ll rouse themselves as if from a dream, today or tomorrow or the day after that, and stretch their arms and legs and wander home and eat a meal as the sun is setting, and water their fruit trees and stroke the heads of their children or their children’s children and say good night and go to bed, where some of them will conceive new life while others give birth and still others breathe a final sigh, and all the while I’ll be beating the drum and Moses will be chanting in his incomprehensible Ge’ez and everyone in Jericho will be feeling especially good about everything. But fear not. I’m clever and I’ve bribed some of the local youths to stay on and share the vigil on the drum with me, so all’s well. I’ll be able to nap a bit and still do my share of the thumping and our holy man will be properly honored in Jericho…
Abu Musa laughed at the end of his softly spoken speech. But before you leave, he added to Assaf, do take your family for a turn around the village. Surely that’s the right way to remember Bell.
Joyously smiling and waving and scratching himself and wiping his face with his sleeve—all of these things at once—Abu Musa said good-bye to them at the gate. Abigail knew Jericho from her visits with Assaf but it was all new to Anna, who had always avoided it when Bell was alive. So Assaf, who was driving, decided to follow Abu Musa’s advice and take them on a tour. Just up the road from Bell’s house they passed the tel where archeologists had excavated Jericho’s huge round stone watchtower, ten thousand years old and the most impressive ancient structure in the world, standing now in a deep pit far below the earth’s surface, witness to time’s accumulations and the drifting sands of millennia. Across from the tel bubbled Elisha’s spring, the source of Jericho’s water and the cause of its orchards and flowers. On the outskirts of the village they stopped at the famous ruins of the Omayyad winter palace so Anna could see its exquisite mosaic with the pomegranate tree and the three gazelles and the lion, the ferocious and gentle image of life that had always haunted Yossi. Then Assaf drove slowly through the back roads of the village, down dusty lanes beneath thick greenery, between tumble-down houses half-hidden by fruit trees and banks of flowers and crumbling walls and gates. Tajar smiled and smiled, holding Anna’s hand in the back seat.
What a strange and beautiful little place it is, said Anna. So lush and effortless in its splendor but only as far as the water reaches, and then nothing. Nothing but empty desert, a different beauty, stark and pure. You can’t escape the contrasts of life here, not for a moment. Seeing Jericho like this, it’s not difficult to understand how we have arrived at so many of our dreams.
Assaf nodded and Tajar went on smiling, both of them pleased that she was at last sharing Jericho with them. Abigail was also smiling as she gazed out the window, preoccupied by private thoughts.
Once more they lapsed into silence. The mood deepened as they emerged from the dusty green tunnels and Assaf drove slowly west out of the oasis, climbing above Jericho toward the foothills of the Judean wilderness where the sun was sinking, already casting the first shadows of twilight. Assaf’s dirt road gave way to a desert track. He turned off it and they bumped along over hard sand, coming to a stop near the edge of a wadi. The wadi was broad and shallow as it entered the desert plains, but above them it deepened into a steep ravine where it cut upward into the rising wastelands to the west. Jericho lay below them now. Scattered ruins lined the earth near the wadi, the stones worn and bleached white by the sun, what had once been Herod’s winter palace. Here great ornamental pools had shimmered in the sun two thousand years ago, when the palace had straddled the wadi and the runoff of the winter rains from the mountains had fed magnificent fountains.
They were above the plains with a view not only of Jericho but of the whole Jordan Valley. To the south in the distance the Dead Sea glistened blue and empty, and to the east across the valley the long ridge of the hills of Moab reared pink and purple and mysterious in the late afternoon sun. The silence was complete as they got out of the car to enjoy the view. Anna roamed by herself over to the edge of the wadi. Down below was a bedouin tent with its sides opened to the breezes, little children playing and dogs and chickens poking around, the few camels of the family grazing nearby on the parched land. Across the wadi a small mosque stood amidst a cluster of mud-brick houses, its thin brown minaret rising straight and true against the awesome blue sweep of the sky. Banana trees grew along the far side of the wadi. Farther up in the sandy hills a string of tiny black dots stretched over the wastes—the family’s herd of black goats being led down the mountain by one of the older children.
Surely much of this scene hasn’t changed in thousands and thousands of years, thought Anna. It was here long before the palace was built and it’s still here, long after the ruins have returned to the desert.
She walked along the edge of the wadi, entranced by the grandeur of the view and the placid routine of the bedouin family down below. They didn’t have a view down there, but the wadi provided some meager vegetation for the camels. The family was preparing for night and they would all be asleep soon after darkness came, guarded by their watchful dogs. The camels were already seeking out a place to kneel not far from the tent, their spindly front legs collapsing first and then their hind legs as they awkwardly lowered themselves onto their bellies for the night, the young one close to the mother, the male a little to the rear protecting the calf from the other side. They had arranged themselves so that they faced exactly east, awaiting tomorrow’s light. Did they always sleep that way? she wondered. They were unfettered and untied because they wouldn’t wander in the darkness and no man would steal a camel. From high up the mountain the string of tiny black dots wound nearer. Now she could make out the small figure of a child running along with the goats, leaping down the hillside after a long summer day in the wilderness. How welcome the open tent must look from up there. How good to be coming home at last. And dogs and chickens and camels and a whole family moving around near the tent … surely a joyous moment for the child running down the mountain in the shadows.
Anna too felt great joy then. She was happy with her family and happy with all of it, at peace with herself. She hadn’t seen Assaf so lighthearted in years, and Abigail simply glowed in the rich afternoon sun. And Tajar was so proud to be invited to visit the shesh-besh games on Bell’s front porch…Yes, there were wonderful times in life, moments of breathtaking beauty.
A
ssaf was calling to her. She walked back to the blanket where Abigail had laid out their late picnic of olives and tomatoes and cheeses and bread, grapes and peaches and figs. They feasted looking out over the valley, over the intensely green oasis of Jericho and the desolate plains surrounding it, facing east like the camels with the Moabite hills across the way and the Dead Sea off to the south, watching the colors of the world change as the sun sank behind them and offered these final glimpses of a glorious summer twilight over the desert.
As the feast ended Abigail made her announcement. She was going to have Assaf’s child. Anna tried to hold back her tears but the tears came anyway. Certainly it was joy she felt, but there was also sadness in her heart. Assaf put his arm around her to comfort her. Tajar made a gesture and Abigail and Assaf left them for a few minutes to wander over near the wadi. Tajar took Anna’s hand.
I didn’t want to say it in front of them, whispered Anna, but I couldn’t help thinking of all the things this unborn child will have to go through someday. It just seemed to overwhelm me for a moment. The things we come to know in time … the endless farewells of life. You understand, don’t you?
Tajar squeezed her hand. Oh yes, he said. Memory we call it, you and I … and yes, dear Anna, I do understand.
The hills across the valley dimmed with the last of the day’s light. Anna wiped her eyes and looked up. She was smiling now and Tajar smiled with her. He waved for Abigail and Assaf to come back.
And now, dearest Anna, he said, isn’t it time for us to make our way up the mountain to our mythical city … our beautiful and imaginary and oh-so-real Jerusalem?
An Editorial Relationship
MANY YEARS AGO WHEN I was a young assistant editor at a New York publishing house, a stroke of fortune led me into an editorial relationship that was to last a long time, until after the writer’s death. Our entanglement, like many between writers and editors, was muddied by friendship on the one hand and by the desire to publish on the other.
Jericho Mosaic (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 4) Page 37