But to Tajar the most gruesome episode of all was the massacre at Lod airport in May of that year, when three young Japanese men flew into Israel on an Air France plane from Rome, opened their suitcases and threw grenades and fired automatic weapons at random around the arrival hall of the airport, killing and wounding over a hundred passengers.
The Japanese belonged to a tiny terrorist group grandly called the Red Army, of no consequence at all in Japan, which had come halfway around the world to carry out a suicide mission for Black September. The majority of those killed at the airport were Puerto Rican pilgrims, Roman Catholics on a visit to the Christian sites in the Holy Land. The one Japanese who survived, in explaining himself, said he had wanted to become a star in the heavens, visible in the night sky throughout eternity.
Japanese idealists massacring Puerto Rican pilgrims in Israel? In the name of revenge by Palestinian Arabs against Jordanian Arabs? In the hope of becoming a star in the heavens?
Another demented, grotesque act using the cause of human dignity as a mask for madness. Even given man's sad weakness for self-delusion and the clever manipulations of the KGB, the evidence of darkness and insanity in human affairs sometimes seemed overpowering to Tajar.
NINE
Bell's morning walks began at first light. He could no longer go all the way down to the river now that it was the border between Jordan and Israel, but he still set out east each morning to cross the parched empty plains of Jericho, the Dead Sea shimmering off to his right and the dark mass of the hills of Moab looming high in front of him on the far side of the valley. Just before the wire fence of the military zone, he turned north on the second leg of his circle and walked up the valley parallel with the river. The first rays of the new sun were breaking over the Moabite hills when he turned again, west this time. The sun bathed his back with a gentle warmth as he made his way home toward Jericho's lush greenery, the jagged heights of the Judean desert softly pink and glowing beyond the oasis. Bell walked at a brisk pace, savoring the ancient beauty and moods of that wild, haunting landscape.
His walks lasted about two hours. When he got home he showered and ate and washed out his laundry from the previous day, then settled into his chair on the front porch with a large glass of Turkish coffee. The orange grove was already buzzing with its characteristic morning hum at that early hour, the insects busily at work before the sun drew high.
Bell always passed one or two Israeli patrols on his morning walks, open command cars with mounted machine guns driving near the border where the soldiers checked the swept sand beside the wire fence, looking for footprints or other signs of a clandestine crossing during the night. The soldiers waved to Bell and he waved back, for they were as familiar with his routine as he was with theirs. Every few weeks a command car veered off its course to approach him and Bell had a short talk with the soldiers. They were reservists, none too young, serving on their yearly call-up. A visit from a command car only meant that a new sergeant had arrived for duty on the sector and was checking things out for himself.
The new soldiers who hadn't seen Bell close-up tended to stare, unable to hide their morbid fascination with his face. Those who had seen him before made a point of studying the surrounding desert. One of the soldiers always spoke Arabic, so that was the language Bell used. But if a sergeant addressed him in English, Bell answered in English. The interviews were brief and polite. Anyone who did duty near Jericho soon came to know Bell and was able to recognize him from a distance.
The border had been dangerous once, but not seriously so since the Jordanian army had fought and expelled the PLO from Jordan in 1970. When there were infiltrators now they were generally men who were trying to avoid the Jordanians as much as the Israelis. The bridges near Jericho carried a great amount of legal traffic back and forth across the river between the east and west banks, all Arab, but there were always men who didn't want to face policemen of any kind, as at most borders.
Most mornings after coffee Bell read straight through to noon, but there were days when some curious memory came to him on his walk and he found the hours slipping away as he sat with an open book in his lap, pondering a distant episode in his life.
It had been like that this morning. He was out in the desert and had just turned north on his circle route when a command car passed to the east, near the border. A wave from a soldier, Bell waved back. The dust in the wake of the command car disappeared over a rise and Bell suddenly thought of Stern, a man who had been dead nearly thirty years. For the rest of the walk Bell had noticed almost nothing of the hills and the valley and the light, so intense were his memories of Stern all at once. He thought about that now as he relaxed on his porch, listening to the hum of his orange grove.
During the Second World War in Egypt when Bell had been in command of the Monastery, Stern had been his most valuable agent. Stern was a gifted man of many disguises, able to go anywhere, and it was because of him that Anna's brother had been killed. Stern had been a friend of their family in Cairo, of David and Anna and more particularly of their father before them. There was never any professional connection between David and Stern, but a mistake had been made in the Monastery and someone had assumed there was a professional connection, so David had been run down by a lorry in Cairo at the time when Stern was also killed.
Bell had greatly respected and admired Stern. He had never met David nor even known who David was until after his death. But because of his feelings for Stern, Bell had gone out of his way to help David's sister after Stern and David were killed. And after the war that had led to his few weeks with Anna in Jerusalem, which in turn had brought him to Jericho.
During his brief time with Anna in Jerusalem, Bell hadn't dared to let himself think there might be something more for the two of them. He was too afraid then of his face and his freedom to imagine her love could be anything but the paying of a debt, a young woman's way of escaping the ugly memories of her past, perhaps by embracing ugliness itself for a moment. Thus Bell, lacking the courage to hope, had turned his back on Anna and left Jerusalem, running away out of fear to seclusion and Jericho and a life of obscurity on the edge of the desert.
Well, it was simple enough, he thought now. Anna was often on his mind these days because of Assaf. And so in the desert that morning his memory had abruptly tumbled back through the years to Stern, all the way back to Egypt and the Monastery where it had actually begun for Anna and him, although neither of them had known then that it was a beginning, so long ago in Cairo.
Stern . . . Anna . . . secret histories.
I suppose we all have them tucked away inside somewhere, thought Bell, these precious and secret events with their secret beginnings. Understanding as little as we do, we always seem to be connected to others in ways we never suspect, in a sweep of time we can't fathom, in moments we're only able to recognize years later. As if for each of us the important things in life become but one single story in the end, one beautiful secret dream we grasp too late.
Bell smiled at his abstractions, at the way he was trying to make sense out of the secret histories he carried within him. Or is it just that I grow old? he wondered. Is it just that all these years later I still can't forgive myself for leaving Anna and Jerusalem?