activity belonged to Halim's sphere. Yossi as a person, a former paratrooper who had gone on to more specialized training, had no need to question anything. His objective was clear: the high ground of the Golan.
The Runner operation as a whole — Halim, Yossi, the communication and transport systems maintained by the back-up team — worked as a machine run by Tajar. In fact Tajar did more than run the machine. In effect, he was the machine.
All that changed with the Six-Day War. It took some time for Yossi to realize it, but the comfortable schizophrenia of his several lives irrevocably came to an end with that war, which had seemed to be his and Israel's greatest triumph. Thereafter he had no choice but to become Halim, a man who was as much a Syrian in his complex way as Ziad.
THREE
Damascus was appalled by the magnitude of the Six Day defeat. Overnight the Runner operation became completely inactive. Halim retreated into the quietest of his business enterprises and saw as few people as possible, like everyone else. The danger grew as shock gave way to recrimination and bloodletting in the government, in the Baath and the army. Yossi, hidden away inside of Halim, suddenly had a great deal of time to roam through his house and garden. He was joined by Ziad, who was out of work and in need of drink.
Ziad came to spend long summer evenings alone with him in the old villa. Together they sat for hours in heavy thronelike chairs on Halim's broad empty verandahs, above the wide stone stairs leading down to nowhere, their thoughts drifting in the shadows as they imagined the open fields and caravan processions which were no longer there in the distance.
Defeat — brutal, overwhelming, ignominious — caused Ziad to look back over his life that summer. He became obsessed with the past and often recalled the stirring visions and noble causes of his student days, all sadly come to nothing.
Yossi also looked back over his life that summer, though in a much different way. The news of Assaf's wounds from the war troubled him far more than he was able to admit to himself at first. The fact that Assaf had come so close to death destroyed the exhilaration Yossi might have felt over Israel's victory and his own contribution to it. To be suddenly inactive after years of hectic effort might have brought a letdown in any case, but added to this depression was a profound sense of remorse.
There was nothing he could do for Assaf. There was no way he could ease Assaf's pain or comfort him, no way he could even see him. This caused a terrible sense of inadequacy in Yossi, and the fact that he understood his situation so clearly did nothing to lessen his bleak mood of uselessness. He felt he had betrayed Assaf and the betrayal brought him intense pain. Even the house he was trapped in was all at once painful.
Yossi's house in Damascus was very much like Anna's house in Jerusalem, at least in its interiors. Tajar had described the Jerusalem house to him and of course the similarity wasn't surprising. The stone houses on Ethiopia Street had been built by the Nashashibi family, one of the important Arab clans of Jerusalem under the Turks and the British. When various branches of the family had gotten together and erected an enclave of connecting homes and courtyards early in the century, they had followed accepted custom and built their houses in the Damascus style: a large central room with high ceilings of painted wood arranged in geometric designs, tall recessed windows and wrought-iron doors opening onto courtyards or balconies, the smaller rooms for sleeping all giving off this central gathering place for the family, with the kitchen and pantries and storerooms tucked away out of sight at the end of a long corridor. As an arrangement of space it was the typical old-fashioned design for a large Arab family of means. The spaciousness of the central room and its painted wooden ceilings, in particular, were what signified the Damascus style during the Ottoman era.
Thus the apartment where Assaf had grown up in Jerusalem was almost a replica of Yossi's house in Damascus. The grounds were different and Yossi's house was single-storied. But when Yossi wandered through the great central room of his old villa, he sometimes had a haunting premonition that Assaf was there somewhere, lying wounded in a bed behind one of the doors, waiting for Yossi to find him. The sensation came to Yossi without warning, a sharp rush of excitement as fleeting as it was irrational. Restless and pacing, his thoughts on some practical matter, he would chance to glance up at the orderly patterns of the ceiling and all at once feel a presence near him, a special significance to one of the doors. . . . Was Assaf in there?
The feeling was so strong he might turn toward the door or even take a step in that direction. But then the truth would strike him like a blow and crush his heart in a moment of unspeakable anguish, a pain far worse than any he had ever known. He realized it was his own guilt that was torturing him in this cruel way, but he could do nothing to evade the torment. Yet it was also true that he only had this experience when he was alone and could think of himself as Yossi. It never happened in the company of someone else, not even Ziad.
Tajar's training of Yossi had been so profound that even these powerful bursts of emotion were overruled by Halim's unshakable discipline.
So Halim's safety and solitude remained intact, but there was an inevitable price to be paid for it. In a matter of months Yossi's hair turned mostly white. It was also during this period that his face came to have the lean carved look of a permanent desert traveler, and his eyes acquired that startling penetrating quality which Tajar found so mesmerizing when they met again in Beirut after a separation of several years. By then the Runner's transformation was so complete that Halim's radiant smile was the only outward sign to remind Tajar of the eager young man he had sat with on the shores of the Mediterranean near the Negev a decade and a half ago, and there revealed his dream of an extraordinary clandestine operation they would build together, and an adventurous new life for Yossi which would be uniquely devoted to the purest of ideals.
As for the Runner, he was simply trying to survive in his innermost being, and what surprised him most was how remote his old self now seemed. He found himself recalling Yossi as he might recall a childhood friend.
He knew every detail about the life of this other person, but it was all a memory from another world. Yossi's hopes, Yossi's fears . . . they were simply no longer his. Halim understood disguises, and the lean new face he saw in the mirror, with its deep-set eyes and white hair, meant little to him. It was the inner changes that astonished him as Yossi slipped away into the past.
The steps of survival were always so small, it seemed to the Runner. Yet how vast was the sad finality of these changes he was witnessing.
***
Through the long quiet evenings they shared on Halim's dark verandahs that summer, Ziad mistook his friend's distant mood for the gloom of defeat pervading Damascus. Ziad had lost his job at the ministry even before the war broke out, a casual victim of one of those periodic shuffles that accompanied minor weekend intrigues in the army. Some pro-Egyptian officers had been arrested, some people fired. Ziad was caught having coffee on the wrong side of the corridor one morning.
He was disappointed, but he knew after the war he would have lost his job anyway. Important men were being arrested and jailed, and Ziad wasn't even important. People used him. He ran errands. Now he was doing part-time work for several newspapers. The only real friend he had was Halim, who treated him as an equal.
With Halim there was never any need for him to hide and to play the buffoon. He could always reveal his fears and be himself, because of the bond between them. He wasn't used to such good fortune in life and never ceased to be amazed by it, and grateful for this place he had in Halim's heart.
But then Halim wasn't like other people. Halim had grown up in Argentina and chose to live in a crumbling villa from another era. He recalled grand tales of a mythical Damascus and dreamed of being a Syrian and an Arab, which meant he actually believed there were such things. To Ziad these were abstract concepts, unconnected to reality and meaningless in the end. Reality to Ziad was the nexus of family and tribe and chance, and money and skill and religious sect, which determined a man's place in the souk. There were many little souks and the one great souk that included them all — Damascus, which for thousands of years had been the chief place of a satrapy or province or border state often called Syria, sometimes Greek or Roman or Persian or Turkish or Mongolian, sometimes Moslem or Christian or pagan, a meeting place for caravans, a way-station for conquering armies from Europe or Asia or the vast hinterlands of the deserts. This abstraction was what Halim liked to think of as his homeland, Syria. And to Ziad,
You know it means nothing, he said to Halim. What does an Amazon Indian hunting in the jungle with a blowgun have in common with a stiff Chilean of German descent tending vineyards on the slopes of the Andes? You had no trouble understanding that over there. Why pretend it's any different here?
Halim only smiled in answer to Ziad's arguments. Of course it was true Halim had visionary aspects to him,
