Regret? thought Bell. The utterly useless pain of recalling lost chance and lost opportunity? Surely I should know better than that by now.
And yet the folly of losing Anna and going off to live alone sometimes seemed so incalculable to Bell, such a monstrous insult to life, that the sacrilege of it overwhelmed him and drove him to a bleak despair which no amount of atonement could lessen. For years he had lived as a recluse and yet his turning away from the woman he loved had been entirely his own doing, and the humiliation it had caused him ever since then had come only from his own self-loathing.
Yes, and what was the use in the end of blaming it on his face? On fate? On the chance catastrophe of a spyglass once held to his eye and struck by a bullet, shattering his face and his faith in life, in himself? What excuse was that for turning away from love?
It was infinitely sad to Bell, for sometimes it did seem to him that all the moments in life were one and that a man had but one chance to make the world within himself as he wanted it to be, as it should be, as it was right for it to be. And in that, he knew, he had failed completely.
Anna, he thought. If only I'd had the courage years ago. . . .
***
Assaf took a degree in history at Hebrew University and went on to graduate studies. He still visited Jericho once or twice a month and spent even more time there in the winter, when the seductive ways of the sunny oasis were especially appealing. He had his own room now at Abu Musa's where he kept books and clothes, coming and going as he pleased, reading and walking down Jericho's dusty lanes and working in Abu Musa's orange groves, where he repaired the waterways of sun-baked mud.
Abu Musa was overjoyed with the arrangement. He was careful not to interfere with Assaf's freedom, but there was always time in the course of the day for the two of them to be together. In the late afternoon Assaf accompanied the old Arab to the daily shesh-besh sessions on Bell's front porch, where Assaf sat and talked with Bell or listened with Bell to the rambling monologues carried on by the two players. Ever serious and now scholarly as well, Assaf took great pleasure in the far-ranging subjects conjured up with such ease by his three friends.
But it was Abu Musa, in particular, who devoted himself to Assaf. All the knowledge of his long life now seemed dedicated to Assaf, who filled the need in Abu Musa's affections for the innumerable young people of his family from whom he had been separated over the years.
The boy is a blessing in my old age, Abu Musa confided to Bell. Not until Ali was killed and Yousef went away did I realize how seldom we speak in life and how little we say. Why, my friend? Why is age so reticent? When I was young I yearned to hear and know of life and yet so little was said to me, I realized later. My wife's father was a great friend and we were close and he told me many things, but how much more he could have told me. He was a man who had done everything a man can do, yet he never really let flow the depths of his being to me. And why? Because he felt it would have been unseemly? Because of his position and mine? Because he was a great desert chieftain and had to take care that I could always respect him? No sign of weakness, therefore? No hint that he was anything less than wise and strong? A terrible mistake, I tell you, the same mistake I made with Ali and Yousef and won't make again with Assaf. I ask you, what do I have to hide? The fact that I'm not half the man I wanted to be? The fact that these little pieces of wisdom I string together add up to not much at all? The fact that the respected village patriarch solemnly pondering his coffee in the marketplace can't help but recognize an unmistakable kinship with every passing fool of his era?
They've endured. That's what the fool and the patriarch have in common and that's what they represent, and all else is incidental.
Abu Musa's great body shook with laughter.
And so I've put an end to mystery and silent cunning in my old age, he said to Bell. Every pathetic feeling of mine I will lay bare to the young traveler Assaf and he can make of them what he will, knowing that at least one desert wayfarer has told him all there is to tell about one oasis.
***
Of Yousef, however, Bell said little. Abu Musa knew Yousef wanted it that way so his life as a fugitive would cause no harm and as little suffering as possible to others. And to Assaf, Bell said nothing at all about Yousef. In their own ways they all understood the burden of knowledge Bell carried because Bell had always been special in Yousef's life, and because Bell was a foreigner, neither an Arab nor a Jew, and also simply because Bell was Bell.
On moonless nights Yousef still came to the ruins of Herod's winter palace on the outskirts of Jericho, sneaking down the wadi to the banana plantation and crossing into the ruins to see Bell, although he came less frequently as the years went by. Yousef's appearance had changed so much the others probably wouldn't have recognized him. Now he was very thin and worn, as slight a figure as Ali had been in his youth.
He moved lightly, like a desert animal, and every sound in the darkness had a meaning to him. A stirring as soft as a breeze in the night and suddenly a presence would be crouching behind a rock near the spot where Bell sat looking out over the plains from a corner of the ruins. The presence waited for whole minutes and drifted closer, still invisible in the darkness to anyone but Bell. When finally the desert creature spoke his voice was so quiet Bell had to strain to hear him.
So it went season after season and year after year. Yousef liked to hear of the doings of his friends, what Abu Musa and Moses the Ethiopian were discussing during their shesh-besh games and what Assaf was studying and what Bell was reading on his front porch in the mornings. Yousef spoke readily enough of himself when Bell asked him questions, but it was Bell who did most of the talking because Yousef was unused to it. His life in the desert had accustomed him to listening, as Bell understood.
Bell often thought what a strange life it must be. The region where Yousef spent much of the year was in the vicinity of the Wadi Kidron, one of the deepest of the ravines that wound down through the Judean wilderness to the Dead Sea. The wadi began as the Kidron Valley just below the eastern walls of Jerusalem, the valley that separated the Old City from the Mount of Olives. From there it curved south and east, cutting ever more sharply down through the hills and the desert, a ravine of high precipices and many inaccessible caves, so fiercely hot in the summer months it was known to the bedouin as the Wadi el Nar, the wadi of fire. Centuries ago it had served as a route for travelers journeying up to Jerusalem from the Jordan Valley: an east-west traverse between the Way of the Kings up the valley floor and the Way of the Patriarchs stretching up the central ridge of the land from Hebron through Jerusalem to Samaria. The crumbling remnants of ruined monasteries overlooked its deep barren gorges and the hovels of forgotten anchorites were hidden away in its ancient cliffs.
Living in such a place, it was no wonder Yousef seldom talked when he met Bell. With that vastness of solitude around him day after day and night after night, with the intense cold of the desert winters and the awesome heat of the summers and the spirits of other eras as his only companions in the wadi of fire, it was no wonder that Yousef had grown accustomed to listening.
How many interminable hours of sunlight are there in such a place? wondered Bell. How much darkness in even one night? It must be a kind of eternity he lives in, a realm of dreams and visions that the rest of us sense for only the briefest of moments in the course of our weeks and months. Wholly another world and existence, conceived in a multitude of time as infinite as the stars.