Darkness came early in the winter and everyone read, warmed by the tea his sisters made, all of them bending over their books and dreaming of the Holy City, of the land of Israel and Jerusalem and someday.
There had been little money but he had never gone to bed hungry. Their house was small, with one room for the boys to sleep in and one for the girls. Later a tiny storeroom was turned into a private room for his eldest brother, a great event the children all took pride in because it showed how much there was to look forward to when you grew up.
All of this had been a few years after the First World War when Tajar was four or five, when Turkish rule had just ended in Palestine and a new era of progress and hope had begun with the British. Now Israel was fighting its fourth war and Tajar's mother and father and all his brothers and sisters were long since dead.
When you grew up the youngest in a family, it was strange to find yourself always the oldest person in the room, as Tajar did at the Mossad. Like warfare, espionage was for young men. It consumed your ideals and burned you out. But for an automobile accident that had made him a cripple, Tajar would have been burned out by now. As it was he sat uselessly at his desk and felt sick at heart as the young men of his country hurried off to the fronts in the north and the south.
Hurrying. . . to what?
At night in Jerusalem, driving through deserted streets a few hours before dawn, Tajar had seen a young soldier hurrying along in the darkness. He was a reservist in uniform with his rifle and dufflebag slung over his shoulders, one hand gripping each strap as he rushed along with his head down, on his way to meet some bus or car that would take him to his unit at the front. Was the boy old enough to have fought as well in the last war, Assaf's war? Chance ruled the world. If the boy was twenty-four he had fought in the last war. If he was twenty-three, this was his first war. In any case he was young and intent, hurrying. Tears rose in Tajar's throat and he found himself choking at the sight of the boy hurrying alone in the darkness and silence of the deserted streets . . . O God have mercy, to what?
On the first afternoon of the war the Israelis lost forty planes to the new Russian missiles, mostly over the Golan Heights. Overall the odds on the ground, initially, were ten or twelve to one in favor of the Syrians, far more in the case of the Egyptians. The Syrians reached their maximum penetration in less than forty-eight hours and after that were driven back. But the situation on the Golan was so desperate in the beginning that Israeli tanks were sent up singly to fight on the plateau, without forming units, as soon as crews of reservists arrived to man them. Two Iraqi armored divisions and a Jordanian armored brigade joined the Syrians, but on the fourth day of the war the Syrians had been driven out of the Golan. On the sixth day Israeli counterattacks were launched into Syria itself.
The Israeli counteroffensive against the Egyptians took longer because of the intervening mass of the Sinai.
On the ninth day of the war more tanks were engaged along the Suez Canal than the 1,600 British and German and Italian tanks that had fought at El Alamein, two hundred miles to the west during that same month in 1942. On the eleventh day of the war the first Israeli paratroopers crossed the canal into Egypt. By then the Egyptian Third Army was cut off and trapped in the Sinai.
***
As was customary, the United States and the Soviet Union eventually brought an end to the war.
In terms of land, given the inferiority of Egyptian and Syrian air power and their reliance on defensive antiaircraft missiles, it was unlikely the Arabs ever thought they would carry the war into Israel. At most they could have hoped to recapture some of the territory they lost in 1967, on the Golan Heights and in the Sinai.
In this the Syrians failed completely. The Egyptians managed to hold two shallow bridgeheads east of the canal, while losing a pocket west of the canal.
But in other ways the Arabs knew success. They fought hard and inflicted heavy casualties, proving to themselves that Israel on the battlefield was not the invincible force it had appeared to be in 1967. In Egypt the war was celebrated as a great victory.
The destruction on the battlefield in less than three weeks was immense. The dead were over seven times greater on the Arab side, but for Israel with its small population the cost was enormous. In eighteen days of fighting the Israeli dead, relative to population, were nearly half of what the United States suffered in all of the Second World War.
And for the United States and the Soviet Union, thought Tajar, it was also an opportunity to test their new weapons on the battlefield. To see how well their new weapons killed, much as outside powers had done during the Spanish civil war. For the big and the powerful, it was always easy enough to find new killing grounds where others would do the dying for them.
And so another war, thought Tajar. Disaster for Israel, new pride for the Arabs, a chance for the superpowers to play with destruction — and an intolerable slaughter for everyone, an appalling squandering of ingenuity and promise for all mankind.
Where is the last war? Assaf had once asked when he lay ripped and mangled in a hospital, recalling the terrified words of a little girl who had huddled in a corner beside her family as the shells shrieked overhead: I'm so frightened. This is my first war.
What's the matter with people? Assaf had asked. What's wrong with their hearts and their minds? This isn't survival or life or anything at all a man can speak about. It's just horror. War. . . .
Alone in Jerusalem, alone at the back of the compound of wild rosebushes guarded by a giant ancient cactus, Tajar sat in his small stone house, his spirit crushed. When the new war finally ended he had come back here and hidden himself away so no one would witness his despair and his longing, his indescribable agony. But now, alone at last after the shattering days of horror and waiting and hoping, of praying for his brothers and sons and nephews, he let his heart go and wept for all his friends through the years who were no more, for all the brave young men who had gone to war after war decade after decade, who had gone and gone and gone and would never come back.
Inconsolable, alone, Tajar wept and wept, hidden away by himself because it was strength people needed from him, now and always. The strength of belief and courage and hope, the strength to dream of what could be.
Oh yes, the dream.
Because people counted on Tajar and he knew that. The living counted on him, but no more so than the fallen. After all, if the survivors didn't believe, who was there? What was there? And what then would become of the dream?
Part
3
ONE
For many years until he was brutally killed in the sordid tribal warfare of Lebanon, the little journalist Ziad was Halim's closest friend in Damascus. A Syrian by profession as much as by act of God, as he was fond of joking in the coffeehouses, nervous and smiling and ever brash as he sank more deeply into failure, Ziad was never able to achieve his lifelong dream of escaping his homeland. The great capitals of Europe were always his secret goal, above all the glittering wonders of Paris. But circumstances trapped him early in life and chance receded, and like any man with too weak a grip on hope he sank back into what he already knew and made a routine of it.