Tajar was astonished. He had never seen anything like it. For whole minutes the butterflies went shooting by like a flock of migrating birds, hundreds of them bending their erratic flight to a course, then the stunningly beautiful procession ended as abruptly as it had begun. The stream of butterflies vanished and there was not even one stray orange fantasy in the air overhead, fluttering with black markings across the clearing above his hammock, inscrutably pursuing the route from south to north up the length of his compound.
Tajar found it disturbing, unfathomable. Butterflies were notorious for directionless, patternless flight. Where had they come from and why? Where were they going?
The butterflies made Tajar uneasy that spring day. Later he told Anna about it and she too was astonished, though less mystified than he was. To her it seemed only a wondrous and beautiful event, inexplicable certainly, remarkable because it was so far from the ordinary.
But for Tajar this chance glimpse at the incomprehensible counterorder of the universe was truly startling, far more so than any random clash of chaos could have been behind the tangle of wild rosebushes in his walled compound, where a huge ancient cactus guarded the gate with a thousand sharp swords.
***
The major ambition of the Egyptian leader Sadat, as he always said, was to make up for the humiliation suffered by Egypt and the Arabs in the Six-Day War. The war fought in October 1973 did that.
It wasn't a military victory for the Egyptians and the Syrians. After some initial advances on the battlefield the two Arab armies lost. Egypt conquered six miles of desert along part of the Suez Canal and Syria gave ground. Success swung away from the Arabs long before the end of the fighting, when Israeli tanks were twenty-five miles from Damascus and forty-five miles from Cairo. But wars are measured in more than ground, and the Arabs felt triumphant because they proved they could fight. In Israel, there was a brutal end to the euphoria that had followed the Six Days of victory and creation the last time around.
The new war began on the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the Jewish year. By tradition Yom Kippur marks the day when the ancient Israelites received the second Tablets of the Law and thereby knew they were forgiven for the sin of worshiping the golden calf. It is a day of repentance, of fasting and prayer and meditation, with the intent of receiving the forgiveness of one's fellow man, which in turn will allow the forgiveness of God. It addresses man's weakness and ability to envision the ideal, and celebrates God's help to the penitent.
Israel has a small standing army and can only fight a war after calling up its reserves, in which all men serve until the age of fifty. In such a small country mobilization is enormously disruptive. In May 1973, after the Israeli commando raid on the PLO in Beirut, the PLO attacked the Lebanese army and for a time it looked as if the Syrians might invade Lebanon to assist the PLO. Military intelligence in Israel was against mobilization but the army issued a call-up, which turned out to be unnecessary.
In July 1973 the Mossad was overtaken by a terrible blunder. A Mossad team, on the trail of the PLO terrorist responsible for the Olympic massacre in Munich, was led to the small Norwegian town of Lillehammer where it killed a Moroccan waiter, the wrong man. Norwegian police arrested those involved, the first incontrovertible evidence that Israeli assassination teams were operating against terrorist leaders of the PLO. The affair was given publicity and the Mossad was in trouble at home.
In September 1973 a train carrying Russian Jews emigrating to Israel was hijacked by PLO terrorists in Czechoslovakia, creating great turmoil in Israel. The PLO unit was one of those run by Syrian intelligence.
The Egyptian army always held its annual training maneuvers in the autumn. In September the Egyptian army was on the move beyond the Suez Canal, which had been the border with Israel since the Six-Day War. In the north on the Syrian front there was also activity, but Israeli military intelligence did not foresee war. In its opinion the Egyptians were on their annual autumn maneuvers and the Syrians were engaged in defensive arrangements.
In October 1973 the Egyptians and Syrians had surprise on their side for the first time. Their lines of supply were short, both along the canal and on the Golan Heights. They had the initiative and their motivation was to recapture their own territory lost in 1967. This time Israeli forces had to cross the Sinai to reach the southern front, but Israel's military leaders were contemptuous of the Arabs' ability to wage war. Israeli military intelligence was convinced the Arabs wouldn't go to war unless they were first able to strike at Israel's airfields, as the Israelis had done against Egyptian airfields in 1967, since tank warfare in open country depends on control of the air. Israeli intelligence was aware the Russians had supplied the Egyptians and Syrians with new kinds of antiaircraft missiles, but they didn't rate these weapons very highly.
All together, it was a massive failure of Israeli military intelligence, combined with overconfidence on one side and clever planning on the other. Despite the many signs of war, Israel didn't call up its reserves in October as it had in May.
War began on the afternoon of the Day of Atonement, October 6 that year, when there was complete quiet in Israel. A thousand Egyptian artillery pieces opened up a bombardment along the Suez Canal and 8,000
Egyptian infantrymen crossed the canal in rubber dinghies. Opposing them in the fortifications of the Bar-Lev line were 600 reservists of the Jerusalem Brigade, who were not even on alert. The Egyptians overran the line and that night moved five divisions of troops and 500 tanks and a forward missile defense system over to the east bank of the canal. That same afternoon in the north, on the narrow front of the Golan Heights, the Syrians attacked with more tanks than the Germans had used in Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of Russia in 1941.
Tajar always felt useless when war came. He could find ways to keep busy by helping others at the Mossad, but his own work was entirely in preparation for war, and when war broke out he could only sit and be anxious and wait for rumors and messages from the battlefields like everyone else.
The news that October was horrible. The Sinai provided protection in the south, at least to those who weren't near the canal, but the Israelis couldn't afford to give up land in the north or the Syrians would be in Israel itself, the plains of Galilee open to them. So the Israelis stood their ground on the Golan and whole units disappeared in the first hours of battle, swallowed up by the massive assault of Syrian tanks.
For Tajar, war was also the time when he recalled his earliest years growing up in Jerusalem with his brothers and sisters. He thought of them at other times but never in the same obsessive, intense way. Again and again whole incidents would suddenly flash before his eyes with startling clarity. Why did those images recur at these moments? What trick of the brain abruptly resurrected such long forgotten sensations? The process obeyed some primitive surge from deep in his being. He tried to concentrate on the work at hand but the recesses of memory compulsively thrust him back in time, as if to remind him how vast was the sweep of life and to reaffirm it, instantly and forever, in the hours of death.
They had been a large family, six children in all, Tajar the youngest. Perhaps there had sometimes been strife and acrimony but he didn't remember that, or at least it wasn't the sense of his memories. What he recalled was warmth and well-being and the protection of his brothers and sisters, who would never let any harm come to him. He was small in these scenes, only four or five. His brothers and sisters seemed twice as tall as he was and were therefore powerful guardians against the dangers of the world. Sometimes the whole family was on a picnic outside the walls of the Old City, sitting together in the evening on the slope of a hill, escaping the summer heat of the narrow alleys of Jerusalem. There were always ruins for him and his brothers to play in and perhaps some British officers might come prancing by on their horses, saluting the boys. Or it was winter and everyone was sitting around in the kitchen and the living room, reading and doing lessons, the only sounds the shuffle of pages and the rhythmic click of his mother's knitting needles.