In fact it was a summer evening and he was sitting with Tajar in a shuttered room south of Beirut, less than a hundred and fifty miles from Jerusalem. The squat concrete farm building, near the coast, was serving as a safehouse that night. He and Tajar met more often, but for shorter periods of time, now that Halim was skulking around Beirut for Colonel Jundi. It was hot in the small room and a fan played over them, the noisy hum of the cicadas outside occasionally rising above the steady whir of the fan.
Tajar himself had only recently learned all this from Assaf. Of course he did know Abigail, unlike Halim, who was hearing of her for the first time, so quickly had that come about. And yes, Tajar was also amazed by the intricacy of it.
Tajar's account went back a few years.
Assaf was now a history instructor at the university in Jerusalem. As a graduate student he had become very close to the professor who was his academic adviser, and to the man's wife and two young children. He spent time at their house and became part of the family. He played with the children and helped the wife when his professor was away at conferences. Imperceptibly over time, the wife and Assaf drew closer in a different way. With the opportunity so often there, they eventually became clandestine lovers.
The husband learned of the affair only after his wife became pregnant. The two of them considered their lives and the lives of their young children, and agreed to hold onto their marriage for the time being. The baby was born, a girl, and there was no question Assaf was the father. In the end the husband and wife decided against divorce. Instead they were reconciled. Only the two of them and Assaf knew the truth about the daughter, and they resolved to keep it secret for the sake of the family. Assaf agreed to have nothing to do with any of them ever again, not with the daughter and not with the family. The secret was to be inviolable and so it was for some years. Unknown to Anna or Tajar, Assaf went on alone carrying his painful burdens of unspoken loyalty and love, his terrible guilt and regret.
Then that summer Assaf had fallen deeply in love with a young American woman, Abigail, who had arrived in Jerusalem as a journalist and immediately come under the spell of the city's light and sun and history. Abigail adored Jerusalem and Assaf was an inseparable part of it for her. The intensity of their feelings was obvious and even Anna was convinced it was the great love of Assaf's life.
He's devoted to her and I can understand why, Tajar said that night near Beirut. She has intelligence and charm and believes in the Tightness of causes. She also has that marvelous American gift for optimism. Of course she's young, and since she grew up in America she's been protected from many things. I'm told this state of grace she's in is known as the sixties generation in America, but you can't fault her beliefs or her courage, or her youth. She'll get where she's going, I have no doubt about that. And even as it is her feelings aren't all that foreign to me. It seems a hundred years ago now, but when I was her age I remember feeling pretty much the way she does. . . .
Assaf's love for Abigail caused a crisis of conscience. He felt he had to tell Abigail of the child who was his and not his, yet to do so seemed an unpardonable betrayal. In despair he sought out Tajar and told Tajar everything.
He wanted absolution, said Tajar. After all he's still young himself, older than Abigail and a strong boy, but young. Children and a family of his own have come to mean a great deal to him. It's what got him into trouble and I suppose it's easy enough to understand. So this matter of the daughter who's his and not his was assuming enormous proportions to him. To someone else it might not have seemed so grave, but it did to him because of the way he is and because of Abigail. Well naturally I told him to tell Abigail the whole story, which was an immense relief to him. The two of them are good for each other and they're getting on wonderfully. The problem now is that Abigail has some notion she never wants to get married, even though she loves him. She'll live with him but she doesn't want to be married. It has nothing to do with Assaf's past, but with her own. Some set of ideas she has, something to do with her own upbringing. Alas, we all have our own ghosts to exorcise. But they're young and with time, who can say. In any case, that's how I learned of all this. . . .
Tajar paused in the shuttered concrete room and looked down at his hands, grown hard and broad from pushing his crutches all these years. The fan turned slowly. Halim was also gazing at those hands and he realized Tajar must know exactly what he was thinking. Tajar always knew. He never hid his feelings from Tajar. They had talked about Beirut and he had spoken of Ziad, as he always did, and now in turn he had heard about Assaf.
Tajar sighed. He looked up, a questioning expression.
Yes, said Halim, our decisions from long ago do live on in the lives of others, don't they? And they assume directions we could never have foreseen or imagined, a will of their own. Assaf and his secret child? Assaf and the family he wanted so much to be part of and became part of in a wholly impossible way? This confusion of the heart and these dreadful complications between him and his Abigail now that he has found the woman he loves, who loves him? When we're young we ask ourselves where it will end, but of course it never does. It has no end. Deep in the past and lost in the future, it just goes on and on . . . this forever mysterious espionage of the human heart. But why do you feel he'll never tell Anna? They've always been so close, sharing everything. And they're so much alike.
That's all true, said Tajar, and I think the reason is simply because he wants to spare her the pain of an illusion. Her family all gone long ago in Egypt, having never remarried, Assaf her only child — for Anna, nothing in the world could mean so much now as having a grandchild. And Assaf knows that, so he spares her this lost hope.
Halim nodded. All at once Assaf had become a much more complicated person to him. He realized he couldn't understand what Assaf had done because it wasn't something he would have done.
The affair with the professor's wife was a terrible mistake, he said. Didn't Assaf sense the betrayal in that when it was happening?
I would say he was very confused in his emotions back then and got them wrong, replied Tajar. I would also imagine a psychiatrist could work out a weighty structure of technical terms to explain it, but what of that?
The fact is Assaf was being himself at the time. In the course of it he made a serious mistake, and the outcome was wretched. Certainly Assaf feels wretched about it.
Halim felt chastened. For years he himself had been a secret father, given to guilt and remorse. What was so strange about Assaf, in completely different circumstances, stumbling into the same dark corner?
You forgive the failures of others with such ease, he said.
Tajar seemed surprised by the remark. He thought about it a moment, then smiled sadly.
If that's so, it's only because my own failures have been so catastrophic, he replied. When I was Assaf's age I had to bear the memory of whole groups of people who had been lost because of my blunders. Now
To what? asked Halim.
What we would have it be, replied Tajar. What we promised ourselves, when young, it would be. We all know that promise is genuine and eternal and foolproof, but nonetheless it turns out we are not.
***
At another of their meetings near Beirut, Tajar spoke of his renewed friendship with Bell. In particular he described his first dinner at Bell's house. For Halim this evoked nostalgic memories, since he recalled with great fondness the times he had spent at the house in the orange grove in Jericho, more than a decade ago now.
***
Darkness had already fallen when Tajar turned up in Jericho that summer evening, only his second visit to Bell's cottage. He intended to stop for just a few minutes and perhaps have some coffee. He was on his way down the Jordan Valley from the north, driving back to Jerusalem. But Bell urged him to stay for dinner and, since it would be late by then, to sleep over on a cot in the living room.
I leave the house at first light for my walk, said Bell, my circle tour of the valley out toward the river and back.
So you can be up and on your way early, and in Jerusalem before most people are having breakfast.
It was more convenient for Tajar to drive down to Jericho in the evening and thus that became the pattern of his visits. He left Jerusalem before the sun set and dropped down through the Judean wilderness in the cool of twilight, arriving in Jericho soon after dark. Bell served dinner and afterward they sat out behind the cottage under the grape arbor, talking until a late hour. Bell welcomed the company. And as Assaf and Yousef and Halim before him had fallen under the spell of the hermit's quiet ways, so Tajar came to anticipate the pleasure of these hours
