It was snowing in Damascus the night Ziad described that scene to Halim. They had gone downtown to a favorite neighborhood restaurant, a small place which was all but deserted because of the weather, and after dinner they walked along the river as they always did when they went there. It was cold and no one was out by the river. The paths were new and white, without a footprint, the city unusually quiet under the snowfall.
Suddenly Ziad turned and clutched Halim's hand.
Don't you see? he said. I know you've worked hard for what you have in life, but you've also succeeded.
People respect you. People admire you. You've built a place for yourself in the world and I don't have that.
Other than you, no one will ever care that I've lived. For years and years it doesn't seem to matter too much.
You just go on and that seems all right. But then later it does matter and you begin to realize how alone you are, how you have almost no one, and it's frightening. Most of us don't want to be just alone in the end. I know you manage that way but you're different. Most of us aren't like you. Solitude terrifies me. So that's why this is a chance for me. What does it matter if it's an illusion? I know what I look like sitting in one of those cafés in Beirut. I look the way I always look anywhere — ridiculous and awkward and out of place. But even an illusion is better than nothing. Anything is better than nothing. . . .
SEVEN
Beirut is the flashy whore of the Middle East, said Tajar, with a hundred major pimps and a thousand major customers. The pimps are armed like Barbary pirates and every one of the customers lusts after a different menu of earthly and spiritual delights. In such a situation you have to expect some kind of trouble. . . . The gangsters and militias of Beirut began their civil war in a desultory way, about three decades after the French put together a famous ancient coastline and a string of mountains and called it the country of Lebanon.
According to the National Covenant, the Lebanese Christians still controlled the government in the middle 1970s, although they were no longer the majority community. Their main partners in power were still the Sunni Moslems, although the poorer Shiites were now the majority Moslem sect. The Druse were in the mountains and the Shiites were in the south, which was controlled by Palestinian militias. Even before the Palestinians arrived there had been eleven major communities. Beyond religion were clan politics and commerce and clan warfare, honor and profit and hatred and fear, and refugees from every lost cause in the Middle East. There were also the agents of dozens of foreign intelligence agencies, all of them spending money and some of them making as much as oil princes.
Beirut was a flashy playground but without much respect beyond the seas. When the Lebanese president came to New York in 1974, to present the Palestinian cause at the United Nations, his luggage was sniffed for hashish at Kennedy Airport. The Lebanese president was outraged, but it was his son back home who maintained the grand hashish alliance with the Syrian dictator's younger brother.
The Lebanese Christian militias had names like the Tigers and the Giants and the Phalange. In those days they bought their arms in the Soviet bloc, from Bulgaria. Their swaggering gunmen wore large wooden crosses around their necks and had decals of the Virgin Mary on their rifle stocks. They were mostly Maronites, an ancient Eastern church that derives its name from a Syrian hermit and holy man of the fifth century. They also bought arms from Palestinians who wanted to make money. The Palestinian militias were receiving their arms from Iraq and Saudi Arabia and Libya and Syria. The Lebanese Christians felt threatened by the Palestinians, who felt threatened by the Christians and aligned themselves with the Lebanese Moslems.
The fighting began in the poorer neighborhoods of Beirut in the spring of 1975. There was looting in the souks, which spilled over into residential areas. The battle of the hotels began that autumn. Each side occupied the upper floors of luxury hotels on the shorefront and fired artillery and rockets cross-town. Streams of brilliant red tracers lit the night sky over the city. During the day the firing stopped and the coastal highways were crowded with cars as people rushed back and forth to do business. There were truces at the end of the month so people could get to banks and cash their paychecks.
Pauses in the fighting were also a useful time for taking hostages. Armed gangs set up makeshift roadblocks and checked identity cards, which listed religion. Hostages were merely a new kind of money in Beirut. They were barter goods like animal skins in a frontier region. If valuable they could be sold outright, if commonplace they could be swapped by lot. Sorting out the money by identity card was easy. Moslem gangs took Christian prisoners, Christian gangs took Moslems.
It was the end of the appearance of central authority and the beginning of rule by militia. Hatred and fear were now as important as money. The Christians tied prisoners to automobiles and dragged them through their mountain villages while children cheered, until the bodies fell apart. In their areas the Palestinians extracted information by cutting up prisoners with blowtorches and welding irons, a part at a time.
Still, there was business to be done in the new disorder and both sides quickly got down to it. The Palestinians went to work robbing the main banks, which were in their sector of Beirut, and the Christians pillaged the port, which was in theirs.
Eleven major banks were emptied. What every gang was after was the vault where the safe-deposit boxes were kept. Palestinian groups controlled by different Syrian secret services fought gun battles with each other in the streets for the right to break into the different banks. At first they tried to dynamite their way into the vaults, but they didn't know enough about it, so underworld professionals were flown in from Europe to do the job. The Christian militias, meanwhile, pillaged the port of its goods, most of which were subsequently shipped off to be sold in Iraq — with more profits for innumerable middlemen.
These stupendous robberies cost very little life. Killing and profit weren't always connected in Beirut. But outside the city it was a time of massacres, of women and children machine-gunned in villages — Christians by Palestinians and Moslems, Palestinians and Moslems by Christians. In Beirut everyone hurried through the streets and alleys carrying cheap cardboard suitcases, trying to escape somewhere with something. In the Levantine manner, both sides claimed every defeat was a victory and every atrocity an act of heroism.
The Syrian dictator was a fierce enemy of the PLO leadership. He had been helping the Christians but still the Christians were losing. Lebanon was disintegrating and no one in the Middle East wanted Palestinians and Moslem leftists to take over the country, at least no one with money or military power that counted, not the Saudis who heavily subsidized the Palestinians, and not the Syrians or the Israelis.
It was time for a peacekeeping force. The Syrian dictator offered his good offices. An arrangement was made through the Arab League and two Syrian army divisions were sent into Lebanon in 1976, to save the Christians and put down the Palestinians.
Halim's respect for the dictator's maneuvering had greatly increased since he had gone to work for Colonel Jundi in Lebanon. As Halim said to Tajar: Only a very clever mongoose actually gets invited into the pit to keep order among the snakes.
***
In fact Halim was horrified by the savagery of Lebanon. He talked about it with Tajar when they met near Beirut. He talked about it far too often with Ziad in Damascus. He even talked about it with Colonel Jundi at their frequent meetings in the little stone farmhouse overlooking the Bekaa valley. Halim had always thought he knew about war and death and brutality. He had learned about killing as a young man, and since then there had been years and more years to live with the reasons offered up to explain it by wise men, by cynical men, by commonplace frightened men.
He knew it was mostly meaningless. Grand causes were generally the cover: patriotism, family and tribe, honor. Or very personal causes: patriotism, family and tribe, honor. But even war at its purest, war in the desert — two groups of men who agreed to be soldiers and went off to hunt each other like animals
through the wastes — even then most men were suddenly dead to no purpose, forever struggling up the wrong hill when the bullet came, or crouching terrified in a hole somewhere and gazing sadly at their left boot, their right boot, lost in a vast unspeakable loneliness at the moment the shell struck.
All that he knew. But the vicious chaos of Lebanon? These cruelties a thousand times a day? This boundless hatred and fear and self-destruction?
***
In Damascus, in the great central room of Halim's crumbling old house, Ziad stood in front of the fire with his hands out, trying to warm himself and quell his shivering. It was another winter, a year after they had taken their long somber walk in the snow beside the river. Gone now were Ziad's illusions of Beirut, the city of soft music and dancing and gentle laughter, of beautiful lights playing in the night on a Mediterranean harbor of sunsets. The heavy armor of Syrian tanks had brought a ceasefire of sorts to the Lebanese civil war, but what was gone was gone and there was no hope of peace.
Only the little area in front of the fire was warm and bright. The heat glowed on their faces but the rest of the room was a dim cavern of cold and darkness. Huge shadows loomed on the distant walls, distortions of the fire and the drafty room and the agitated gestures of Ziad, whose every movement before the fire set off giant configurations in the gloom. Halim was sitting beside the fire watching his friend and watching these unfathomable designs play across the ceiling and leap up the walls. Outside the wind howled through the garden, crackling the stiff fronds of the palm trees. Every so often a crash sounded through the gale as the wind tore away a branch and hurled it at the night. The whole house rattled and creaked, its very stones uneasy. Halim thought of the solitary broken statues in the darkness beyond the verandahs, each one alone in its grove and blind to the wild fury of the storm, solemnly guarding its secret memories of Greece or Rome or Byzantium.
I'm scared, Ziad was saying again. I've never been so scared. I used to think it was bad before but that was nothing compared to now. They kill people for no reason. They do things to them first, over and over and over.
I want to stop going there but I know I can't just say that. My captain wouldn't even laugh at me. He'd just pick up something and hit me over the head, hit me two or three times and stare at me. What do I have to complain about? I have a job, don't I? I get paid, don't I? I'm Syrian and not Lebanese, aren't I? Why am I whining? What do I have to whine about? . . .
As so often, it went on until a late hour in front of Halim's fire. Ziad was deeply disturbed and drinking more heavily. His shoulders twitched and his hands moved in rapid little jerks as he smoked cigarette after cigarette. And then there was the relentless wind, the huge room dark beyond the little circle of light, the blasts of cold night air and the hulking restless shadows which never stopped roaming the walls with their fantastic shapes.
Halim tried to comfort his friend. There wasn't much to say in words but he said what he could, and he knew the act of sharing Ziad's fear was itself important. That alone was a kind of escape from despair for his friend.
Halim understood this well enough, having long had the benefit of this sort of comfort from Tajar.
So in a way these long winter evenings beside Halim's fire could have been part of any friendship. Ziad was terrified by his place in life and Halim as his friend gave him what he could: attention and love, the strength of sharing, the embrace of his heart. In a small fire's glow, he helped keep back the dark immensity of the night.
But beyond that, it surprised Halim how much time he spent worrying about his friend. His own trips to Lebanon were frequent and complicated. His tasks were grave and there was always danger. Colonel Jundi was an extremely competent professional, a man of nuance who placed heavy demands upon him. It was true Halim had always been a solitary person who liked to be alone inside himself, but he still had to work very hard to satisfy Colonel Jundi and also be the Runner. It was never easy and whenever he left his house on another journey, there were always many details to consider each step of the way. To do less, to neglect any of the details, would be fatal.
Yet at home, crossing the great central room or roaming the verandahs, he found himself thinking again and again of Ziad: picturing some everyday event in his life, recalling an expression on his face or a nervous movement of his hands. These images returned obsessively to Halim, as if he were somehow compelled to see his friend's life more clearly than his own. Why was this so, he wondered? Was his friend's life a reflection of his own, or did his mind at least see it that way? Some kind of different and opposite image, as in a mirror? Because it was easier to see things in Ziad, rather than admit to them in himself?
The irony of this to Halim was enormous and unexpected. Knowing himself was the essence of the Runner, his strength and protection, and in appearance the Runner had never been more successful. Through his work for Colonel Jundi, he was providing the Mossad with highly detailed information on Syrian activities in Lebanon. Syria was the occupying force and the Runner knew everything its intelligence agencies did in Lebanon, often before they did it. He kept watch on their manipulations for Colonel Jundi and passed on the information to Tajar. His secret material had never been more valuable to Israel. Surely it was inconceivable for the Runner to succeed so well in Damascus and Beirut, against all the professionals, and yet falter due to his friendship with an insignificant little man like Ziad?
The very idea astonished Halim. And it was profoundly troubling to him that the Runner operation should suddenly seem fragile — not through any objective concerns, but because of the tricks of his own imagination.
He loved Ziad far too much to think of his friend's life as pathetic. But he did find it infinitely sad, and in the end the brutal ways of Lebanon could only lead to disaster for his friend, a terrified messenger scampering back and forth between ruthless warlords, a little man lost among powerful and monstrous forces. With all his heart he wished there were some way he could really help Ziad, some way to lift him out of his life.
But it wasn't that way for either of them. Halim knew that, and he also knew his friend's destiny seemed all too clear. Yet still the deeper doubts haunted the far corners of his mind. Why was he confusing the fate of another with his own?
EIGHT
There were also startling disorientations from over there which served to remind Halim that espionage wasn't the ultimate subterfuge in life, that the deceptions perpetrated by love could be far more devious and profound.
The specific news brought by Tajar was that Yossi was a secret grandfather. Even Anna didn't know of the birth of the child. Assaf hadn't told her and probably never would. The revelation astounded Halim. More than ever he felt remote in his role as the Runner, as if he were off on some interminable desert journey and a messenger from the distant past had suddenly come riding into camp with this improbable announcement from beyond the horizons.
In fact it was a summer evening and he was sitting with Tajar in a shuttered room south of Beirut, less than a hundred and fifty miles from Jerusalem. The squat concrete farm building, near the coast, was serving as a safehouse that night. He and Tajar met more often, but for shorter periods of time, now that Halim was skulking around Beirut for Colonel Jundi. It was hot in the small room and a fan played over them, the noisy hum of the cicadas outside occasionally rising above the steady whir of the fan.
Tajar himself had only recently learned all this from Assaf. Of course he did know Abigail, unlike Halim, who was hearing of her for the first time, so quickly had that come about. And yes, Tajar was also amazed by the intricacy of it.
Tajar's account went back a few years.
Assaf was now a history instructor at the university in Jerusalem. As a graduate student he had become very close to the professor who was his academic adviser, and to the man's wife and two young children. He spent time at their house and became part of the family. He played with the children and helped the wife when his professor was away at conferences. Imperceptibly over time,
the wife and Assaf drew closer in a different way. With the opportunity so often there, they eventually became clandestine lovers.
The husband learned of the affair only after his wife became pregnant. The two of them considered their lives and the lives of their young children, and agreed to hold onto their marriage for the time being. The baby was born, a girl, and there was no question Assaf was the father. In the end the husband and wife decided against divorce. Instead they were reconciled. Only the two of them and Assaf knew the truth about the daughter, and they resolved to keep it secret for the sake of the family. Assaf agreed to have nothing to do with any of them ever again, not with the daughter and not with the family. The secret was to be inviolable and so it was for some years. Unknown to Anna or Tajar, Assaf went on alone carrying his painful burdens of unspoken loyalty and love, his terrible guilt and regret.
Then that summer Assaf had fallen deeply in love with a young American woman, Abigail, who had arrived in Jerusalem as a journalist and immediately come under the spell of the city's light and sun and history. Abigail adored Jerusalem and Assaf was an inseparable part of it for her. The intensity of their feelings was obvious and even Anna was convinced it was the great love of Assaf's life.
He's devoted to her and I can understand why, Tajar said that night near Beirut. She has intelligence and charm and believes in the Tightness of causes. She also has that marvelous American gift for optimism. Of course she's young, and since she grew up in America she's been protected from many things. I'm told this state of grace she's in is known as the sixties generation in America, but you can't fault her beliefs or her courage, or her youth. She'll get where she's going, I have no doubt about that. And even as it is her feelings aren't all that foreign to me. It seems a hundred years ago now, but when I was her age I remember feeling pretty much the way she does. . . .
Assaf's love for Abigail caused a crisis of conscience. He felt he had to tell Abigail of the child who was his and not his, yet to do so seemed an unpardonable betrayal. In despair he sought out Tajar and told Tajar everything.
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