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.
The somber conversation with Tajar had disturbed him in many ways. The house was quiet and he poured himself a brandy to take out to the terrace. Some specific memory was rumbling around in the back of his mind, trying to push itself up into consciousness. He was too tired to think of it but he settled into a chair on the terrace, hoping the memory would surface and release him to go off to bed.
In the distance below was the harbor, peaceful and beautiful with the lights on the sea. All harbors were beautiful at this silent hour in the darkness. And beyond it the great black expanse of the Mediterranean reached out to an infinity of stars.
Suddenly he saw it. The image was there in front of him with perfect clarity. It was thirty years ago at the little settlement in the Negev and he and Anna were sitting side by side in the central hut, counting out bullets. It was night and a single kerosene lamp burned overhead. Other men and women were there. They were all there except for those on guard duty, about two dozen of them. Only Yossi and one other Palmach soldier had had any military training. The rest were just men and women, like Anna. The Egyptian army was expected in two or three days and they were all sitting together and counting out the rounds for the few old rifles they had. They were also deciding who would take over each rifle — in the second case, in the third case — if the man or woman assigned to the rifle could no longer fire it. After that Yossi would fill some bottles with the last of their precious petrol, so that he and the other Palmach soldier would at least have something to throw at the armored cars or tanks, if the Egyptians came with them.
How solemn they were as they went about these tasks to defend the little settlement which they all knew would fall. How pure the dream had seemed to them then, how simple and right and good. And they had succeeded, that was the wonder of it. They had held out and defended their settlement for one whole day, a miracle. And to Halim . . . Yossi, looking back, that single day in the desert seemed the greatest triumph of his life. Never again had he known such exhilaration, such a sense of pure victory as when darkness came to protect them that night.
Only thirty years ago and now there was this. There was this tormented city at his feet, half-destroyed and torn by war and more war. There were Naji and his gangsters and all the other gangsters. And there was the Runner, as clever an agent as the Mossad ever had, working as hard as he could for Colonel Jundi, the utterly ruthless inspector general of Syrian intelligence.
He drank off his brandy. He had always believed in himself and his cause, but lately he had begun to wonder how long the Runner could go on running. That only really mattered to him and to Tajar. If it did happen that he saw the end coming, should he speak of it? He was inclined to think not. After all Tajar had done for him, a smile and a wave seemed the better way. The rest, all the rest, Tajar would certainly understand.
TEN
Ziad was painfully morose that last winter, the winter of 1982, the fortieth year since Anna had fled from Egypt. He still worked in Syrian intelligence as a courier for his old hashish department, its senior employee both in age and in years of service, a true survivor who had managed to hold on to his battered briefcase with the false bottom as his department had moved from agency to agency and been regularly raided and absorbed and realigned and reintegrated, in keeping with the law of changing fortune for Syrian secret services. Ziad had also served under many different men. His original captain had been purged years ago.
Other captains had disappeared into prison and a few had been transferred to the Golan Heights. The last captain before the present one had simply not turned up for work one day, the victim of some unrevealed intrigue.
Ziad's hashish department always served the dictator's younger brother, no matter which intelligence agency it happened to be in at the moment. The turnover in captains was continual because they were at a level where the temptation to do a private deal was great. If they took a chance and succeeded, they made a small fortune overnight. Ziad always referred to the officer he was serving as my captain. They lasted for longer or shorter periods and were cruel and ambitious men. Colonel Jundi had their secret services penetrated at a higher level and the danger of their work was extreme. But the potential profits were so enormous there were always new men eager to take their places.
Ziad himself might easily have advanced beyond his lowly status if he had been willing to take chances. But Halim was forever warning him against it, and Ziad was too timid for that in any case. Ziad loathed his trips into the Lebanese mountains. He feared the Maronites he visited and hated the way they treated him. Before he left Damascus he was so depressed he could hardly speak, and by the time he returned he was so hysterical he had to drink himself into a stupor in order to quiet down, as if each trip were an unexpected reprieve from death.
With Halim that last winter he was morbid and manic at once. His humor knew no bounds. He laughed wildly with tears in his eyes and joked as the tears ran down his face. He grinned and gestured extravagantly, making fun of himself. But still the tears kept coming and eventually, as the night wore on, his pathetic face crumpled into undisguised despair.
In the afternoon when he and Halim were strolling along the river in Damascus, he would suddenly look over his shoulder to see that no one was near them in the thin winter sunlight. Then he would clutch Halim's arm and lean close and giggle.
Have you noticed that el presidente has promoted himself? he whispered. He's now having the newspapers compare him to the illustrious Salah al-din, the greatest Moslem warrior who ever lived. And with careful reminders that it was this military genius who defeated the Crusaders and finally threw the foreign devils out of the Middle East. At first I thought: oh dear, is he really going to become as powerful as all that? But then I thought: oh no, there's nothing to worry about, it's just another mild case of terminal megalomania. National leaders in this part of the world always get that. It's when they begin comparing themselves to God that you have to worry. That's when the trouble starts and you get upheaval on a colossal scale. . . .
Or on a sunny winter weekend as the two of them sat side by side in overcoats on Halim's verandah, a bottle of brandy between their thronelike chairs, Ziad would suddenly interrupt their silent drinking with another terrified giggle.
In Lebanon they say that Syrian torture is considered the cruellest in the Middle East, he whispered. But how do people arrive at such conclusions? Is there a way to measure these things? What of our brothers the Iraqis who also have a progressive Baath party in power? Their president is known as the butcher of Baghdad, and doesn't that mean progress is everywhere? . . . Why do I fear Naji and the Maronites so much? Are they worse than anyone else? It's irrational, I know, but fear's like that. It starts with something specific and becomes general, which is called anxiety. Which is my state of mind, precisely. When are the Israelis going to come in and take Lebanon off our hands? Isn't it time for the Americans to fly by and bomb it into the Stone Age? Aren't the Russians even a little interested? Could the French be talked into taking it back?