Do you see an end to your life in the wilderness? Bell once asked him, in the spring of 1973 after Yousef had been living as a fugitive for a full five years.
Yousef was silent for a time. I don't really know about that, he finally replied. But I have decided there's a man I'd like to meet to talk about it. He has a great reputation among some of our people and I believe you used to know him. A Syrian. Halim is his name. He lives in Damascus.
Yes, I did know him, said Bell. Not well, but what I saw of him was impressive. Does that mean, then, you'll be leaving the desert and crossing the river?
Not right away, replied Yousef. I don't even know yet whether he'll agree to meet me. But if he would, then we'll see. There's no hurry about it, there's no hurry about anything I do. But you'll know first if I decide to cross the border.
It would be a great relief to Abu Musa, said Bell.
I know, whispered Yousef, and went on to ask about Assaf and the shesh-besh games and the books Bell had been reading since their last meeting in the ruins of Herod's winter palace.
***
Bell was excited that Yousef was at least considering an end to his exile in the desert, the first sign in five years that he was having a change of heart. Bell realized the news was meager and tentative and perhaps more of a hope on his part than anything else, but he still wanted to share it with Abu Musa and Moses. This he did the next afternoon when the three of them were alone on his front porch.
Moses looked up at once from the shesh-besh board and smiled and nodded in encouragement at Bell. Abu Musa, however, turned away from the board and busied himself for a time with his waterpipe, which had gone out. A somber mood seemed to have come over him, which surprised Bell.
Of course it's still too soon to know what will come of it, ventured Bell.
Abu Musa fumbled a while longer with his waterpipe and finally gave it up. He sighed and gripped his hands together in his lap.
It may be too soon to know, said Abu Musa, or it may be that the affair has gone on too long already. You don't hear as many tales from the local coffeeshops as I do, my friend. Do you know what the villagers in the hills are saying of our Yousef? They call him a man who casts a long shadow in the moonlight. You see Yousef on nights when there is no moon, on nights when it's dark, or so I imagine. And if you do you miss that aspect of him. You don't see his shadow in the moonlight.
Bell wasn't sure what Abu Musa meant by his allusion to Yousef's shadow in the moonlight, which of course he never did see. As well as he knew Abu Musa, the old Arab's elliptical desert imagery could still elude him sometimes. He said as much now.
Abu Musa sighed again and gripped his hands more tightly together. Oh well, he said, it's just that for most of us life is such an ordinary matter. Day in and day out that's what we know, a persistent ordinariness which is sometimes tedious but which is also reassuring in the end. For some, though, it's not that way and so it may be with our Yousef. I would rather that he still be flesh and blood and not a shadowy promise of redemption that lives in the moonlight of people's dreams. Oh yes, I would dearly prefer it but I am but one man with my own hopes, and you are, and Yousef I fear has gone beyond all this and become something else to many people. Become what? A myth in the hills? A myth of the desert up there? Perhaps, and perhaps even a holy man of sorts. . . . To my mind a holy man who drinks is fine. The drinking merely means he is still a man while pursuing his holiness, a sensible approach to an admirable vocation. And I don't mean to say Yousef sought what he has become. He was always a modest and well-balanced young man and I don't believe for a moment he had this in mind when he went into the desert. But this is five years later, and don't you realize what it has cost him to live alone up there in eternity?
Abu Musa sadly shook his head.
Everything, he said. Quite simply it has cost him his whole life. And I don't mean he has gone mad, although it must be like that in a way, existing as he does in another time and dimension, on a different planet circling a different sun, lost somewhere in the stars. . . .
Abruptly Abu Musa reached out and clutched Bell's good hand in both of his own. He held on tightly, tears in his eyes.
Don't wish too hard for what cannot be, he said. It's good and right for a holy man to believe more than the rest of us, that's what makes him what he is. And you believe in Yousef because you love him and have always loved him, ever since he was a child wrapping his arms around your knees to hold himself up. But you must accept the fact that Yousef is gone and will never come back. Never. He couldn't even if he wanted to.
He's elsewhere now and the villagers in the hills have their beautiful dream of him, a dream of hope and freedom and redemption. Their Yousef now. Not ours. . . .
Abu Musa still gripped Bell's hand, overcome with sadness. In the silence that followed, Moses the Ethiopian slowly lumbered to his feet and rearranged his bright yellow robes with great ceremony. Just as slowly he seated himself again on his bench and fell to studying the shesh-besh board.
A dream such as that, he murmured to himself, must also have been known in those villages two thousand years ago, when Jesus stood on the Mount of Temptation and turned his back on Jericho. But perhaps that's always so in a place as ancient as this, where memories and oranges ripen inseparably in the sun.
TEN
Nineteen seventy-three was a disastrous year for the Israelis. With a fearful sense of inevitability, Tajar watched fortune scatter the seasons with an abandon that allowed nothing to go right. To him it was as if some elemental force in the cause of nations had shifted momentum and was driving silent winds across the land, reworking fate and creating new designs for the secret structures of time. After all the years of struggle he sometimes thought he could sense invisible danger as an animal does, and now his very fingers seemed to feel it whispering to him in the glancing touch of a doorknob, in the heavy grip of his crutches, in the worn smooth stones of Jerusalem when he stopped and rested his fingertips on an ancient wall and closed his eyes and listened.
Tajar had a curious experience that spring.
One still Sabbath morning he was lying in his hammock in the clearing beside his low stone house, far back in the overgrown compound where he lived hidden from the world behind a tangle of wild rosebushes and the giant cactus which reared across the entrance of his tumble-down gate. He had a book in his hand but he wasn't reading. He was gazing up at the fresh spring sunshine spilling through the cypress and olive trees, feeling strangely distant from even the slumbering quiet of Jerusalem, when all at once his eye caught the movement of a butterfly shooting past overhead. Another butterfly fluttered quickly by and another, both identical to the first. They were neither large nor small and of commonplace coloring, orange or yellow with black markings.
Again a single butterfly shot past, again followed by a cluster of three or four. He looked more closely and decided the color was definitely orange. Idly he watched the procession of butterflies repeat itself, then suddenly realized it was a procession and wasn't ending.
He sat up in the hammock and stared. Still the butterflies kept coming, dozens of them jerkily fluttering past him on the same course, seemingly caught in a narrow stream of swift-flowing wind. But there was no wind.
The air was utterly still. And the butterflies all came in a line from the same direction, from the far end of the compound where the gate was, skimming along above the rosebushes and shooting over his hammock and flittering away out of sight beyond his house, a steady flow of them on and on, now one or two and now a cluster, not a single butterfly deviating from the mysterious tunnel devised for them through the sunshine.