At first the Arab bulletins on the radio spoke only of victory. But the noise of heavy fighting came echoing down the hills from Jerusalem, and since the Arabs had begun with positions of strength surrounding the city on three sides, with the Israelis holding only their narrow corridor up to Jerusalem from the coastal plain, it seemed likely to Bell that the fighting was in fact going the other way. Perhaps in the excitement of going to war against the Jews, he thought, the Arabs were once more indulging that profound Levantine trait of preferring the mirage in the distance to the dreary stretch of desert at hand, the rich prospects of fantasy rather than the gritty facts of everyday life.
This seemed even more likely to Bell when the bombardments on the heights of Jerusalem all but ceased at the end of the second day of the war. By then Jordanian troops were moving through Jericho but they were all heading east across the river, away from the fighting. From time to time Abu Musa rose and went inside the bungalow to pick up the latest news on Bell's old radio, which he relayed to his two friends when he returned to the porch.
Total Arab victories everywhere, announced Abu Musa the first day.
Total Arab victories continuing in a glorious manner on all fronts, he announced on the second day. It sounds bad, he added. They must be losing.
Total Arab victories everywhere in the most glorious of manners and the Jews are being thrown into the sea, he announced on the morning of the third day, when the bombardments had stopped in Jerusalem.
You don't sound pleased, said Moses. What does it mean? Can you decode the bulletin for me?
I can, replied Abu Musa. In such a situation, when the mirage recedes in the distance and the desert track is long, our brothers generally mean the opposite of what they say. So the truth is probably that the Arabs are being defeated everywhere in the most ignominious of manners, while the Jews are advancing away from the sea on all fronts. Moreover, the silence we hear with our own ears from Jerusalem is ominous. Perhaps the Jews have already taken east Jerusalem and the Old City and are at this moment on their way down to Jericho? Perhaps we'll see them this very afternoon in Jericho? That's what the bulletin means, decoded.
The two men went back to their shesh-besh game. That afternoon an Israeli mechanized battalion came rolling down from the western hills and sped through Jericho. There were no defensive positions in the town or on the plains of Jericho, so after some sporadic firing around the police station the battalion left a few jeeps and soldiers in the central square and moved on north up the valley. The Jordanian troops had already retreated across the river and all was quiet in Jericho once more.
It's a second coming, mused Moses, studying the shesh-besh board. Three millennia ago there was the first coming when Joshua crossed the river from the east and had seven ram's horns sounded seven times while walking around the oasis of Jericho seven times. And so the walls fell, and the conquest of Jericho was Israel's first act in the promised land.
For me it was the Turks first, observed Abu Musa, also studying the shesh-besh board. Then after the Turks came the English and then the Hashemites and now the Israelis. In my three hundred years I have seen several proud conquerors come to Jericho in search of oranges in the lowest and oldest town on earth, but I suppose that's the nature of living in a desirable place. Rulers in Jerusalem and Damascus have traditionally turned their eyes this way, longing to escape those blustery cold winters they have up there. Didn't Herod and the Omayyad caliphs choose Jericho for their winter palaces? Further, Jericho is a crossing of history. To the east one thing, to the west another, to the north or south a third. Ideas and armies and caravans of believers have always passed this way on their relentless journeys to wherever it is they're going. We sit but fifteen miles from Jerusalem and a little more from Amman, and Jerusalem is midway between Amman, the ancient Greek city of Philadelphia, and the sea. Jerusalem is holy and biblical. Rabbat Ammon or Amman is where King David put Uriah the Hittite in the forefront of battle to be killed, so he might enjoy the dead man's wife Bathsheba, who gave the king a son called Solomon. Thus the mountains and the valley, the deserts and the sea, lust and wisdom and murder and empire, these various profane and sacred causes of man all find their crossroads in Jericho, which is why we grow oranges here. To refresh those who are forever passing through.
And yet nothing that happens today changes our yesterdays, mused Moses. The Mount of Temptation still rises above us to the west, the river where John the Baptist renewed souls still flows beside us to the east.
We are as well-situated today as ever for shesh-besh and holy matters. . . .
The dice clattered as the two men bent over the board,making their moves. Bell sipped arak and gazed through the bottom of his glass at his orange grove.
War gets no better with age, said Bell. My own war was fought mostly in the desert, away from towns and villages and innocent people, but that's the only good thing that can be said about it.
Also my war, observed Abu Musa. My part of it, at least, was fought entirely in the desert. We blew up trains amidst the sand dunes, little snorting trains puffing steam at an empty azure sky, quaint little antique trains chugging from nowhere to nowhere across an immensity of desolate wastes. In retrospect that can seem romantic, but in fact there's not a glimmer of romance in blowing things up.
True, said Bell. I have only to look in the mirror to be aware of that.
Now now, said Moses the Ethiopian, it won't do to have you two brooding over your dark pasts on such a warm and sunny June day. All of that was long ago for both of you, as was the stroke of a knife when I was a boy, making me into a eunuch. Once I yearned for a different kind of manhood, the usual kind, but as destiny would have it I've never taken part in war, nor could I. I'm just not warlike. So I ask myself, isn't that a goodness God has given me?
Abu Musa grinned across the board at Moses. Whatever your status as a warrior, he said, you're still an African giant who plays a fiendishly clever game of shesh-besh. And in any case the ceaseless conquest of the soul is a far more demanding campaign than that waged by any general, as we all know. So, O gentle giant, as two seasoned players in God's scheme let us now roll the dice in order that our friend the resident holy man can feel whatever it is he feels, and immortalize us with his thoughts. Bell? Immortalize away.
Moses the Ethiopian and his partner Moses the Arab have returned to their eternal game. . . .
Bell smiled as the dice clattered and his two friends bent over the board. Several times that afternoon Bell saw boots approach his front gate. Then a man would crouch there — a young Israeli soldier — and peer into the yard beneath the branches of the orange trees. As the young man gaped, his expression turned from curiosity to amazed disbelief. The first time it happened Bell quietly cleared his throat so his two friends would notice. They both looked up from the board and, along with Bell, pondered the soldier.
The conqueror looks stunned, observed Abu Musa.
Jericho has always been a strange place, mused Moses.
And less a conqueror than a frightened boy, said Bell. Like all conquerors, he wears the too-old face of a boy who has had to endure the unspeakable.
Bell raised his glass, toasting the startled young soldier, who stared a moment longer in wonder before disappearing. Certainly for the soldier they made a bizarre trio sitting on the dilapidated porch in the orange grove: a lean one-eyed European dressed in white with a glass of what looked like water in the air, while positioned over a shesh-besh board sat a huge elderly Arab in a pale blue galabieh, and an even more enormous chocolate-skinned giant in bright yellow robes.
And all three of these benign apparitions were gazing thoughtfully down at the soldier as if he were a petitioner come to call in heaven on the day of judgment, heaven that fateful day having taken on the appearance of a sweet-smelling stand of fruit trees where God had chosen to take His ease in a tripartite guise of diverse Selves, a threefold manner of presentation, the better to convey His pleasure at the handiwork of differing races H
e had created for His human family . . . light and dark and darker, dressed in white and pale blue and bright yellow to add a measure of gentle variety to His dream of an orange grove.
Ah yes, thought Bell. Races and wars and caravans of believers from the deserts and seas, with their armies of chance and their games of skill . . . all come to meet in an orange grove at the crossroads of Jericho.
The Holy Land, in other words. And also a fair enough assessment of the lowest and oldest town on earth, it seemed to him. Workable and adequate for the time being, at least until God did show His hand.
Part
2
ONE
The Arab village of el Azariya faces the rising sun from the eastern slopes of the Mount of Olives, away from Jerusalem on the Jericho road, clinging to the last patches of green where the Mediterranean finally loses hold of the land and the desert begins its eastern march to the Persian Gulf and the Hindu Kush. The village is small, perched on the very edge of the barren vistas that drop away to the plains of Jericho and the Dead Sea valley.
Two thousand years ago a poor religious teacher from the Galilee, Yeshua, was in the habit of staying with friends in the village when he journeyed south to visit Jerusalem. The friends he stayed with were two sisters and a brother called Mary and Martha and Lazarus. The present name of the village echoes in Arabic the name of this brother, a memory of the evening when Yeshua turned up to stay with his friends and was told by Mary and Martha that their brother had died four days before then, whereupon the visitor raised Lazarus from the dead in a miracle of guesthood.
In the time of Yeshua, or Jesus as he was later called by the Greeks, el Azariya was a Jewish village known as the encampment, Beit Haniya in Hebrew, from which its Western name of Bethany is derived.
Place is the beginning of memory. In both Hebrew and Arabic, Christians are called Nazarenes, people of Nazareth, after the village in the Galilee where Yeshua lived in obscurity until the age of thirty, before he became a wandering teacher during the last three years of his life. Thus near Jerusalem an encampment or outpost, a brother and a guest and a miracle, a mix of Greek and Hebrew and later Arabic . . . and the passage of two thousand years. As so often in the ancient Holy Land, even the name of the village of el Azariya resonates complexly in time, recalling how deep is the well of the past in a land where the voices of history forever call out with different memories for different peoples, memories which have become known as cultures or traditions, and thenceforth enshrined as religions.
With its lack of water el Azariya has always been a poor place, which is perhaps why Jesus preferred to spend his nights there or in the open on the Mount of Olives, rather than within the gates of Herod's grand city on the other side of the hill. The winter rains from the Mediterranean reach as far as Jerusalem but no farther, and to the east beyond el Azariya come the descending rock-hard fissures of crumbling time and relentless sun known as the Judean wilderness, which ends in the multicolored grandeur of the Dead Sea valley.
The Judean wilderness is no more than fifteen miles wide as the hawk flies, but because of its bleak and terrible landscape it has always been a place of refuge for those seeking safety or solitude. A few centuries after Jesus, ascetics living in its caves evolved the beginnings of the Christian monastic movement which was to become so powerful in the West. Before then Jews hid from Roman persecution in its caves while preparing their revolt, and a thousand years earlier King David fled into this same wilderness to escape the murderous designs of his son Absalom. Throughout the millennia, outlaws and prophets and kings and the wretched have all known the fiery chasms of its summers and the icy cold crevices of its winters.
Small though it is, in the midwifery of time the Judean wilderness has been one of the great birthing places of man's spirit. Out of its stark and stony reaches, through the mysteries of creation, vast events have been given to history. And the destiny of this particular desert has always been coupled to the dream of Jerusalem, joined at the Mount of Olives, as if men could not contemplate the idea of a Holy City without also facing a harsh wilderness of the soul hard beside it, the existence of one inexorably a part of the other.
***
Abu Musa had two great-nephews who were born and grew up in el Azariya, sons of a nephew who had been killed fighting the Jews in the 1948 war. At the time of their father's death the older boy was four and the other was still a baby. Their mother, alone, couldn't raise them both, so the older boy was taken in by the Greek monks who ran an orphanage in the village, connected to their monastery which honored the miracle of Lazarus. The older brother, Yousef, thus grew up as a Christian while the younger brother, Ali, remained a Moslem.
The chance separation caused other differences in their upbringing. Yousef became studious under the guidance of the Greek monks and learned Greek and English, eventually training as a schoolteacher. Ali lived the more traditional life of a village youth, working outdoors with his hands and his back, and would probably have ended as a laborer had not Yousef argued with their mother that more could be done. Because of his older brother's insistence, Ali became an electrician's helper for almost no pay. But in a few years, being a clever boy, he too was learning things and their mother was proud that her younger son also had the beginnings of a trade. Yousef, serious in manner, had taught himself early to seek out responsibility.
From the time they were children, Bell knew the boys as well as Abu Musa did, perhaps even better. All during their youths they were brought to Jericho at least once a season to stay with the family patriarch, Abu Musa, in order to listen to his wisdom and hear tales of cousins and uncles and ancestors, to experience the story of history and learn of their own place in it.
Abu Musa's method of passing on knowledge to the boys was in the wandering oral tradition, as befitted a man of the desert turned grower of fruit trees. Like a philosopher-king, Abu Musa ambled through his regular Jericho days with the two little boys at his heels, wide-eyed and silent, the smaller Ali clutching the older Yousef's hand for safety.
First thing every morning they visited Abu Musa's orange groves, where they examined the soil and the fruit and the blossoms while Abu Musa chatted on about the adventures of this or that relative who had lived in some distant era before the boys were born, in far-off Damascus or Beirut or Aqaba. Following Abu Musa's example, they dipped their fingers in the gurgling channels of water and found it sweet. Then it was time for a leisurely stroll around the central square with a stop for syrupy coffee and gossip for Abu Musa and sticky sweets for the boys, sitting at a little table in front of a coffeeshop under a towering sycamore tree, where the owner of the shop circled their table in an ancient ceremony of welcome, sprinkling water with his hand to lay the dust.
Camels and donkeys came by laden with bananas. The important men of the village salaamed up to Abu Musa to ask their questions of the day and receive advice. A baker brought an offering of hot sesame wafers for the boys. After holding court for an hour or more Abu Musa graciously distributed smiles all around and swayed off home to eat. Then he slept and the boys were free to explore his sheds and play in his water channels. When Abu Musa awoke there was more chatting under the trees before it was time to head for Bell's front porch and Abu Musa's afternoon shesh-besh session with the African giant in bright yellow robes, gentle Moses, who slipped the boys chunks of sugar cane when he embraced them. Sometimes the boys listened to the men on the porch and sometimes they wandered around the orange grove with Bell and ended up sitting under the grape arbor in back, where Bell told them tales of Egypt and India.
And at least once a year they were taken on those wondrous journeys down to the river in the magnificent steam coach driven by Moses. The boys stood in the rear compartment where Bell and Abu Musa sat, fearfully high above the ground and breathless with excitement, two sets of small eager hands gripping the polished woodwork and two solemn little faces peering over the side of the coach, dark eyes round and staring, silently watching the desert fly by.
When the boys were older they had more serious talks with Bell under his grape arbor, wide-ranging discussions on many things. Because Bell wasn't kin and also because he was a foreigner, they could be intimate with him in a way that was unthinkable with Abu Musa. Since the boys had no father they felt the need for this kind of friendship and Bell was always ready to give them his ear and his counsel, modestly as was his habit, speaking in a manner they could understand but without any trace of condescension. Abu Musa, for his part, was overjoyed at the boys' great love for his friend and Bell's love for them. When little Ali hugged Bell in some moment of passion, or when the older Yousef gravely made a comment in English and Bell replied in English with equal gravity, the old man's eyes brimmed with tears of pride.
How rich life is, he whispered to Moses across the shesh-besh board, watching the boys wander away with Bell on their roundabout route to the grape arbor.
Truly, murmured Moses. For God is ever-present if we but open our hearts to His grace.
Ali grew into a forceful young man, active and passionate with an ability to do anything with his hands. His dark eyes glittered when a problem was set before him, some object in need of repair. Quietly he studied the task, turning the object over and over in his hands, then flew at it and quickly made everything right, laughing happily as he finished the work with a triumphant flourish. Electricity was his trade, but for him it was just a way of feeling the world with his hands and making himself one with it.
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