Naji, always smartly dressed in well-tailored camouflage fatigues, became the official commander of his father's militia. He was only twenty-eight at the time and his preferred food was Mars bars. Naturally Fuad still had his own troops which he controlled, separate from Naji's. There were also many other private armies financed by the Arab powers, who all found Lebanon a convenient place to do their killing, without disturbing the precarious political situations they invariably faced at home.
One June morning Naji launched a fateful attack against the summer palace of the clan chief of the northern Maronites. The ex-president himself was in Beirut and Naji's target was the man's son and heir, the most prominent Lebanese of Naji's generation and Naji's most serious Maronite rival, both in politics and in the hashish trade.
For Naji, whose experience was mostly in street killings, the attack on the summer palace was a well-planned military assault. His rival, the ex-president's son, went down shooting in the kitchen, killed along with his wife and their three-year-old daughter and the family dog.
***
And so it went as the gangsters in Lebanon shot and bombed their way into the eighties. Halim met with the lieutenants of these clan chieftains, as well as with Palestinians and Lebanese Moslems. He also dealt with many Syrian intelligence officers who ran operations in Lebanon, and with the countless agents they employed — all for Colonel Jundi. He knew Lebanon could have managed a vicious civil war on its own, but how much more vicious it was with the country stuffed with arms and serving as a killing ground for everyone else's causes, with Syria on one side and Israel on the other and the PLO in between them.
In time Naji became more and more closely aligned with the Israelis. First the Mossad dealt with him, then Israeli generals, then the new Israeli prime minister himself. The Syrians had entered Lebanon on the side of the Christians, but in only a few years the Christians had turned around and were fighting the Syrians, more or less led by Naji.
It was easy enough for Halim to see what was happening. The Israelis had a grand new scheme which would make Lebanon right for them: the Maronites in control, the PLO crushed and Syria out of the country, a peace treaty, an open border. And Naji was the tool who would bring these wonders to pass, with the help of the Israeli army. To Halim it made no sense at all. It ignored everything he knew about Lebanon.
It was also obvious to Halim that his reports to the Mossad had become irrelevant. The extraordinary access he had in Lebanon, the information he acquired for Colonel Jundi and passed on to Tajar, had seemed spectacular only a few years ago. But it was entirely meaningless now that the Israeli government had already decided on its course in Lebanon. And not only the Runner but Tajar himself had become irrelevant to the Mossad. Tajar was a man of subtlety in Middle Eastern ways, and to him the grand new scheme for Lebanon was preposterous. As Naji organized new shoot-outs around Lebanon and was praised by those in power in Israel, Tajar more than ever seemed a man of the past. As usual he spoke his mind, and like the messenger who brought unwanted news he was ignored and isolated in the Mossad as a result.
Halim knew all this. They talked about it one night at a meeting in another safehouse on the coast.
It is what is, said Tajar. I've served a long time and eras change. We used to wonder about it but it does seem, finally, that Israel is to become part of the Middle East after all. People in this part of the world have always had a thin grasp of reality. It's a place of wish and fantasy. You either believe absolutely, which generally means religion, or you make-believe with equal fervor. Either way there's not much room left in the middle for men like me. It's dangerous to always call defeats victories, as we do in this part of the world, but what is it that leads us to embrace these fatal illusions? Is it the desert with its harsh extremes that promotes fanaticism? Everything is so much itself in the desert. Is that why man gets viewed with such disastrous simplicity? In all my life I've never seen anything so horrifying as Lebanon. Even religion is merely a metaphor for what goes on here. The Maronites fear the Moslems, but they're just as quick to kill Maronites from the next village, and the Moslems are the same way. And where are the Palestinians to go? Or are they simply to go, as the Turks said to the Armenians when I was a child. How much easier it is when evil has a name, when there is an enemy. But Lebanon isn't like that, unfortunately for all of us, and worst of all for the people who live here. Being Israeli or Syrian may be difficult, but it's nothing compared to being Lebanese. . .
.
Halim was aware that in fact he was now working primarily for Colonel Jundi. His reporting was no longer of any particular use to the Mossad and to Israel, but it was extremely valuable to Colonel Jundi and therefore to Syria. He said as much to Tajar.
Yes, I suppose that's true, replied Tajar. And it does seem like some kind of unbelievable reversal of cause, of loyalty. But it isn't really, not to my thinking. Look at it another way. I can't use the word succeed in Lebanon, because no matter what anyone does here now it can't be called succeeding. But if Colonel Jundi and the Syrians were somehow able to keep things together in Lebanon, that and only that might keep the Israeli army out, which would be a blessing for us and an enormous triumph for the Runner operation. The Syrians can't win here. No one can. There are no winners in such a place. To come in means to lose. It will be a disaster for the Syrians here, but it will be a far greater disaster for us, to us, to come in. If we do we'll be just another Middle Eastern country playing the Middle Eastern game: illusion, power, suppress where you can, dominate those you can dominate. And coming in on the side of a man like Naji, this heroic defender of his minority faith, is fantasy pushed to madness. So I see your work for Colonel Jundi as immensely important in an unexpected way. Strangely, it's as important as anything the Runner has ever done. You're serving Israel, Yossi. But you're doing it in a murky and difficult world where truth can be its opposite. . . .
When Halim left Tajar that night he found himself thinking of the persistence of the Arab-Israeli wars, with their steady recurrence every seven to ten years, or about the time it took for a new generation of men to exert their influence on affairs. Yes, but it isn't just that men forget, thought Halim. It isn't as easy as that.
The tragedy is that our greatest human treasure — memory — so often glitters locked away out of reach, the one gift we can never quite give to another, even to those we love most.
He was staying that night with a Syrian officer, an acquaintance who had taken over a villa in the mountains above Beirut. He had to go to another meeting in the city before he went up to the house, so it was very late when he got there. He was exhausted, as he always was in Beirut. The watching and the listening, memorizing every nuance of what he saw and heard — there was never any rest when he left his garden in Damascus and took the road of descent down into the hellish chaos of Lebanon.
It was almost three o'clock and he had to be up again in three hours. Still, he didn't feel like trying to sleep.