Anna laughed and mentioned the usual things.
No no no, replied Tajar. Forgive me, but even though everything you say is true and real, what does it matter?
Yossi always hoped you would remarry someday, he told both of us that long ago. And Assaf, like any boy, would be better off with a father, even a makeshift step-father. And you would be helping society enormously by not causing these terrible disruptions every time we walk into a café. People look at me with loathing and disgust, don't you see it? How can it be, they ask themselves, that this crippled old pervert has such a handsome young woman in his grasp? Is nothing as it should be in the world? That's what they think as they seethe with secret discontent, and why, Anna? Because you haven't met the right man yet? No, I don't believe it. You have to risk life and take the chance and seize it, as frightening and disappointing as it is. It's foolish to let the years go by like a dream, always living in the shadows and echoes of things. Life is disappointment and only dreams are not, but it's the very tension in that, in those failed longings of ours, that becomes the music of the human soul. What use can there be in denying time's counterpoint? . . .
So Tajar went on in jest and eloquence over the years. He was always a wise and loyal friend to Anna, forever helping her in countless ways. He even became a kind of uncle to Assaf. Yet somehow Anna's moments of reflections slipped by and she didn't remarry. Instead time slipped away and she turned forty.
***
One important thing she did do during those years was move to Jerusalem soon after Yossi's death. Thus Assaf grew up in a city divided between its Arab and Jewish neighbors, between its old and new parts, and that was to have far-reaching effects on his life.
Even as a girl in Egypt, Anna had dreamed of living in Jerusalem. Her brother had always talked of going there someday and her father, after all, had been killed in the campaign to take the city, fighting with the British forces against the Turks in the First World War.
Anna first saw Jerusalem when she was moving restlessly from place to place in Palestine during the Second World War, when the city was undivided and its various quarters were open to every wanderer. From the very first moment she was captivated by the ancient walled city with its sense of mystical hope and its haunting beauty: the clarity of the light on its domes and minarets, the subtle colors of its living stone, the mysteries of a glorious past which could never be obscured by the ruins of time. To her it was a vibrant silent dream of a city, its narrow alleys a maze of man's strivings through the ages where even the smallest corner guarded a hoard of secret history, a treasure of secret tales only fitfully at rest in the dust of millennia. For Anna it was a city like no other, and she resolved when first she saw it to live there someday.
Not the sad end of her marriage but Yossi's death in the Sinai was what decided Anna that someday had come. When she told Tajar of her decision to move to Jerusalem he was naturally enthusiastic, since he had grown up there and loved the city more than any place on earth.
At last, said Tajar happily. Of course, my dear Anna, what could be better? It's as if you've been circling Jerusalem all these years the way a bird in the desert circles an oasis before swooping down to the life-giving water. A city of sunlit stones, Anna, and there are faces in the stones of Jerusalem which you will learn to see as you walk its worn gentle hills. The faces of many races and believers, make no mistake, but especially of our people who went up there so long ago to seek what has no end. And there our prophets looked into their hearts to glimpse the unseeable, diviners for the entire race of man and seers of all time on those ancient slopes. Oh yes, Anna, there are faces in the stones of Jerusalem and Assaf will grow up carrying them in his heart. A wise decision. It's so right, so very good. . . .
Tajar helped her find a place to live on a short narrow road called Ethiopia Street, a twisting secluded lane which he claimed was the most beautiful street in Jerusalem. The solid old stone houses with their red-tiled roofs, built by wealthy Arab effendis in the nineteenth century, were set at odd angles in courtyards amidst cypress and fruit trees, behind high stone walls running the length of Ethiopia Street. Flowers and arches cascaded everywhere. Anna had the second floor of a large stone house, reached through an echoing stone corridor that led in from the street to an outside stone stairway which then climbed and turned in the sunlight through banks of bougainvillea, a light and airy place of tall windows and window-doors opening onto wrought-iron balconies, overlooking her courtyard. It was an enchanting house to Anna. Every turn and window proffered an unexpected view, never failing to surprise her with its beauty, with great gusts of warm sunlight swirling through the rooms and deep corners of cool shade.
The winding little street was not far from a slope that led down to the barren, blasted strip of no-man's-land which had divided the city into east and west since 1948, separating Arab and Jewish Jerusalem. She could see the Old City to the east from her house, but not the valley where no-man's-land ran. Yet in fact the border was so near there were bullet marks in the dome of the Ethiopian Church across the street from her house, left over from the 1948 war.
All the better that it's so close to the border, Tajar had said when first he took her to see the house. The call of the muezzin from Damascus Gate in the Old City will float up to you on still afternoons, the bells of the Holy Sepulchre will sound in the darkness, and little Assaf will hear all the wondrous sounds of our Holy City, even in his sleep. . . .
Anna loved her old stone house with its courtyard and flowers and fruit trees and balconies, hidden away behind high stone walls. She loved it so much she wanted to express the beauty she felt, and it was there, on those balconies, that she first began to paint the scenes of Jerusalem which would one day make her famous.
Assaf, too, felt the beauty of Ethiopia Street. But it was its closeness to the mystery of the Old City, as Tajar had foreseen, that was to be particularly important in his young life.
TEN
For Assaf, the image he held of his father never flared or dimmed with the seasons of a boy's growth, never tumbled through the reflections cast by life's day-to-day mirrors, never blurred in the bewildering confusions of childhood. Instead, unshadowed by age and untouched by a human voice or hand, the vision shined pure and immutable, a presence forever shaping his life in unseen ways.
In the visible world of Ethiopia Street and the new world for him of Jerusalem, Assaf clung close to Anna at first. He missed Yossi's warmth and love and the wound never quite healed despite the passage of time.
Inevitably, life seemed incomplete to him and he was always looking for something he couldn't find in the airy rooms of the old stone house, or off on a balcony where the boughs of the cypress trees sighed, or deep in a corner of the courtyard amidst the vines and bright flowers.
His father's death as a hero in battle marked Assaf as special among his classmates at school, as it did for their parents and also for the neighbors on Ethiopia Street. In games and on school outings and in the homes of others, Assaf was always given a central role and an added measure of sympathy, out of honor to his father's place among the fallen. Aware of this special concern for her son, Anna reacted by sometimes being too strict with him. She wanted to provide the discipline he needed but then, feeling remorse, she would relent and let him have his way. In retrospect, she thought herself too strict on unimportant things and too lenient in bigger matters. Somehow it seemed impossible to achieve a sensible balance that would work for both her and Assaf.