The Damascus Cover Page 4

  He stood there for a moment. The last months had been unbearably lonely…

  “Wait a second,” he said, catching up with her. “I was just going to have an early dinner in the Old City. Would you like to join me?”

  She hesitated.

  “I know a great place, the Golden Arabesque Restaurant. It’s got everything: ceiling-to-ceiling Oriental rugs, arched wooden porticoes, hanging beads, camel saddles for seats.”

  “Does it have food too?”

  “Of course. They serve the most exquisite Middle Eastern cuisine south of Beirut—tender mansaf, savory kebab, succulent chicken. So, are you coming?”

  A smile etched her lips. “Sure, why not?”

  As they walked toward the Old City Ari thought about how alone he was—then pushed the realization out of his mind.

  Yafo Road, its shops shuttered, its sidewalks deserted, testified to Jerusalem’s rigorous observance of the day of rest, differing from sections of the city, like heretical Haifa, where buses and some businesses operated seven days a week. Reaching the end of Yafo Road, they gazed upon the walls of the Old City, proud barriers imprisoning Old Jerusalem in a massive belt of stone. Hidden inside a maze of vaulted alleyways and dark passages were sixty thousand people: Jews, Muslims, Christians, and Armenians—each sealed by race and rite into separate quarters. Ari bypassed Yafo Gate, certain to be crowded with tourists and nonreligious Israelis, and they entered the Old City via Damascus Gate, across from the East Jerusalem bus station and the spires of St. Stephen’s Church. Passing through the walls, they mounted a ceramic-tile staircase leading to the Golden Arabesque Restaurant.

  Inside, rows of hanging beads divided the dimly lit dining room into semi-private cubicles. Bowing in welcome, the maître d’ guided them to a low carved-legged table, surrounded by red pillows, and bearing a round brass tray for a top. An Oriental rug blanketed the floor. Lanterns hung from the ceiling. Wailing music, turned low, played in the background.

  “What about the camel saddle seats?” Kim asked as they settled onto the soft cushions.

  “If you would like one,” the maître d’ said. “At another of our tables…”

  “No, that is quite all right.” After the maître d’ handed them menus and left, she turned to Ari. “You weren’t kidding about the saddles, were you?”

  “No.” He glanced at the menu, then closed it. “Do you like lamb?”

  She nodded, knocking the brass table with her knee as she shifted position.

  “Good. It’s the only thing to order in an Arab restaurant. Most of the beef in the Middle East comes from Argentina. It loses something during the voyage.”

  He motioned to the waiter, who approached immediately. “We’ll have mezza and kebab for two,” he said. “And bring a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon select, 1969 if you have it.”

  The waiter nodded and moved to the beads.

  “They have French wine here,” Kim said in surprise.

  “Not exactly. The wine served in the old city is Carmel, grown in Rishon le Zion. But the Cabernet Sauvignon select has an unusually delicate bouquet; it’s as good as anything Barton and Guestier or Bouchard bottles.”

  “You seem very familiar with the country. I take it you live in Israel?”

  “I do for varied periods of time,” he explained. “I’m in the import-export business. I purchase merchandise in the Middle East and South America and sell it in Europe.” He slipped back into his alter ego effortlessly; in many ways he was as much Hans Hoffman as he was Ari Ben-Sion.

  Just then the waiter arrived carrying a round copper tray bearing the Cabernet Sauvignon and tiny dishes comprising the mezza. As he poured the wine and spread the small portions of dips, salads, meats, sauces, and vegetables on the table before them Kim looked at Ari in amazement.

  “This is incredible. You’ll have to tell me what all these things are.”

  He took a piece of flat pita bread and dabbed it into one of the dips. “I’ll start you with tehina, but after that you experiment on your own.” He brought the piece of bread to her mouth and she took a bite, then savored the taste for a moment.

  “What is it?”

  “Ground sesame seeds.”

  “I like it.”

  As she reached for the shakshouka, highly spiced vegetables sautéed in oil, Ari took a sip of the cool wine and looked up at her. “Are you here as a tourist?” he asked, wondering about her last name, which obviously wasn’t Jewish.

  She shook her head. “No, I’m in the Middle East for a combination of professional and personal reasons. I’ve been commissioned by People magazine to do a photographic essay on women whose husbands were killed in the 1973 War. The assignment will take me to Cairo when I finish in Jerusalem.” She tore off a piece of the pita bread. “As for the personal reason—I’m running away from a bad marriage.”

  Ari nodded sympathetically. He liked her candor; it was refreshing.

  “Something you prefer not to talk about?”

  “Not really,” she said. “I find the more open I am about my past the more readily people I’m with will share the details of theirs.” She scooped a tiny mound of hummus onto the pita and chewed it thoughtfully. “Ted and I met in college and thought we were perfect for each other. You know, same age, same background, same upper-middle-class upbringing, et cetera. He became an architect and I went into freelance photography. Soon after the wedding I started selling my pictures but due to the recession in the United States none of the construction firms were hiring. I had to support both of us. He grew irritable and increasingly hostile every time I made a sale. Finally he took a job in a bookstore. Then came drugs. For four years I tried to make the marriage work, but I couldn’t. In the end I walked out.” She drained her glass. “It hurt, particularly the fear that my success had contributed to his suffering.”

  “I understand the feeling,” he said softly.

  Soon the kebab, chunks of grilled lamb marinated in finely cut onions, spices, and marjoram arranged on hot metal plates was set before them.

  “You must travel a lot in your business,” Kim said, spearing a piece of lamb with her fork.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Traveling can become terribly lonely. I mean living out of suitcases and hotels all the time, making friends, then having to leave. Do you enjoy it?”

  His mouth momentarily full, he nodded. “If you make close friends they’ll always be there regardless of how much time elapses between visits; and if the relationships are not the same when you return that means they weren’t good friends in the first place, so you’ve lost nothing.” His words left him uneasy; they were too logical, too sterile. He wondered if his recent malaise wasn’t the result of more than being chained to a desk, if even reassignment to the field wouldn’t leave him empty, alone.

  “That’s fine when you meet people who live in places you return to,” she said, refilling her glass. “But what happens when you become close to someone there’s little likelihood you’ll see again once you move on?”

  He pushed the rice pilaf around his plate. He had no answer that.

  After dinner they walked to the Christian quarter toward the New Gate, one of the seven portals allowing access to the Old City. The night was cool and comfortable. Sharp stars winked in the sky. As they neared the gate he took her hand and they mounted a narrow stone stairway alongside the wall. The ramparts, replete with crenellations and towers, continuously knocked down and reconstructed over the centuries, were most recently erected by Suleiman the Magnificent during the Ottoman period.

  They walked side-by-side on the parapet until they reached a ledge projecting out of the stone. Sitting down, they gazed over the city in silence. The houses flowed into each other with almost no space between them. Their white stone roofs, domed so that the pressure from the winter snow would not collapse them, shimmered in the luminous night.

  In the foreground the twin cupolas and the Romanesque belfry crowning the dark, incense-filled caverns of the Church of
the Holy Sepulchre protruded from the hill at Golgotha, where it’s presumed Jesus Christ was crucified. Farther away, rising from the plaza where the Temple of Solomon had stood, the golden-domed Mosque of Omar sat serenely at the center of its spacious esplanade, the smaller, silver-domed al-Aksa Mosque stationed off to the side. Looking beyond the Old City wall, past the Biblical Valley of Jehoshaphat, Ari followed the terraced graveyard covering the Mount of Olives to the wooded groves of Gethsemane. From there his eyes shot upward to Mount Scopus and the buildings of the university, pale fingerlike structures silhouetted against the black sky.

  “You know, it’s funny,” Kim said, parting the silence. “But I’m as mixed up religiously as this city is.”

  Ari waited for her to explain.

  “My father was Protestant and my mother Jewish, so they compromised and brought me up nothing.”

  “Maybe you’re better off,” he said, pleased that she was legally Jewish and surprised that he cared.

  “I don’t think so. I would rather have been given one faith or the other. It’s important to believe in something, particularly for children.”

  “Do you have any preference between the two?”

  “Not really. But I guess I know more about Christianity than I do about Judaism. My parents are dead, but when I was young, even though they agreed to ban religion from the house, sometimes my father would tell me stories about Jesus. I still remember them pretty well.” She leaned back against his shoulder. “I think one of the reasons I took this assignment was because I hoped to learn more about Judaism while I was in Israel.”

  “There’s no better place to do that than Jerusalem,” he said, gazing out at the brightly floodlighted spot, below the Mosque of Omar, that marked the site of the Wailing Wall. There, even now, a handful of black-coated Jews, bobbing back and forth to the rhythmic chants of their ancient prayers, watched over the thousands of petitions to God, written on scraps of paper, and wedged into the cracks and crevices of the great stone blocks of the Wall.

  Surrounded by the sounds of night they talked for a long time—rushing into an evening the type of unburdening that usually takes weeks. Strangers adrift, they tried to compress time, to cover their backgrounds in a burst. She shared at length the story of the souring of her marriage and he spoke about a wife who’d disintegrated into an alcoholic. She confessed to tremendous feelings of guilt and he admitted that he bore a similar burden. She talked about the important part a career plays in forming a person’s self-image and he readily agreed. Finally it grew cold and they abandoned the walls and took a taxi to the New City.

  After sundown Jewish Jerusalem burst back to life. Lights popped on, movie marquees lit up, restaurants and bars opened their doors, and by the hundreds the city’s inhabitants swarmed into the downtown triangle formed by the intersection of King George, Ben Yehuda, and Yafo streets. The rich aroma of roasting coffee floated over the crowd as Jerusalemites wandered up and down Ben Yehuda drifting from café to café, invariably bumping into friends they greeted with noisy shouts of recognition.

  Kim and Ari waded through a throng of people and ducked into the stark and brilliantly lit Café Atara, where luckily they found an empty table on the second floor. Ordering espresso and pastry, they ate in silence, content to people-watch. Afterward he walked her to the Eden Hotel on Hillel Street. Retrieving her key from the desk clerk, they stepped into the elevator, both wondering what the other was thinking. Once inside her room she moved toward a cassette player on the dresser and snapped in a tape. The Nordic tones of Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite floated through the air.

  “I had a lovely evening,” she said, turning to face him.

  He crossed the room, sensing the softness of the body outlined under her cotton blouse. Placing one hand on her waist, he brought their mouths together. Her lips, warm and pliant, roamed over his. Her finger circled the small of his back. He breathed in the musky fragrance of her perfume. As the Morning Movement ended they moved onto the bed.

  5.

  AUGUST

  Ari sat on the stone platform of the outdoor amphitheater atop Mount Scopus separating the segments of a Jaffa orange. A few feet away Kim, the ends of the scarf tied around her neck flapping in the breeze, stood at the edge of the rear balustrade, peering out over the gorge at the Wilderness of Judah. The barren hills, broken by deep ravines winding down through the rocky slopes to the Dead Sea, were a blazing brown. The sea itself shone as the sun touched its water.

  “Do you want some?” Ari asked, removing the white pith from the orange.

  She shook her head no.

  He checked his watch, which read three-thirty. During the summer, in order to eat their major meal of the day and hide from the heat, most Jerusalemites went home between one and four, then returned to their jobs and worked until seven. Ari would have to leave soon if he wanted to be back at the Ministry in half an hour. But he was in no hurry to do so. He’d been with Kim for close to three weeks; he knew when something was on her mind, and he knew she’d tell him when she was ready. He would wait.

  A few minutes later she sat down, took a segment of orange off the brown bag in front of him, and tossed it in her hand.

  “I have to be going soon.”

  “You taking more pictures this afternoon?”

  “No, I’m finished with that.” She looked at the cliffs rising on the Jordanian side of the Dead Sea. “You don’t understand. I meant leaving Israel.”

  He peered past her toward the Arava, where the Hills of Judea broke off and the desert began. “I can’t very well photograph Egyptian war widows from here,” she explained. “Originally I wanted to be in Cairo more than a week ago.”

  A sadness started to press down on him but he said nothing. She leaned over and kissed his cheek.

  “When?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I want to stretch it out as long as possible. Maybe another 10 days.” She tossed the piece of orange back on the bag, brought her hands to his shoulders and kneaded his flesh. “Let’s not discuss it now. I had a long morning in Jericho; I’m too tired to talk. Besides, you said you had a meeting at the Trade Ministry at four— you don’t want to be late.”

  He nodded and began picking up the scraps remaining from their lunch.

  “Can we have dinner?” she asked.

  For the first time since she started speaking he smiled. “Of course, I’ll meet you at the hotel at seven-thirty.” He rose, took her hand, and helped her up.

  They walked back through the rows of vacant seats in silence.

  Ari sat at his desk not even pretending to work; the depression he fought consciously now, deepening. A side of him long dead had burst alive in the past three weeks. He could not, would not, let her go. Though he knew quite well that a relationship with a woman was not enough to sustain him, he’d realized recently that its absence was part of what was wrong with his life. Somehow he’d figure out a way to stay with her. It had to be possible. But an entire afternoon’s agitated thought brought no solution to this dilemma.

  A little before seven Ari, staring blankly into the corridor, heard the sounds of approaching footsteps. As the Colonel hurried by he looked in and for a long second their eyes met. The Colonel’s forward momentum carried him past the door but he turned back and entered the cubicle where Ari worked.

  The bare-walled, windowless office contained a Formica desk and a gray steel filing cabinet. There was no room for an additional chair, but at least Ari had the privacy he’d requested.

  “How are you doing?” The Colonel asked.

  “I hate what I’m doing,” Ari said, taking a paperclip off his desk and reshaping the wire into a line. “I’m bored, restless, and anxious to get out of here.”

  The Colonel nodded. “I understand, but do be patient. We’ll have something for you eventually.” He took a Dunhill Montecruz from his inside coat pocket and screwed the cap off the aluminum tube. “Actually I’ve got something now, but I don’t think it’s quite your type of as
signment.”

  “What is it?”

  The Colonel lit a cigar and waved the match out in the air. “Several days ago I received a message from the Chief Rabbi and the headmaster of the Alliance Israelite Universelle school in Damascus. They’re worried about the safety of their families. An American news program called ‘60 Minutes’ recently broadcast a second report showing that Jews in Syria are not suffering under the Baath regime. As a result the Syrian government, feeling free now to do what it wants, has begun cracking down on the leaders of the Jewish community, blaming them for the initial bad publicity. The Chief Rabbi and the Headmaster of the Alliance school have asked us to take their children out of the ghetto so they can’t be used against them.” The Colonel chewed on the end of his cigar, drawing the hot smoke into his mouth. “But an assignment to cope with the repercussions of an American television program isn’t important enough for you. I’m going to send Shaul Barkai and another junior officer.” He glanced at his watch and yawned. “You must excuse me, it’s nearly seven and I still have a pile of paperwork to wade through before I can get out of here.” He moved toward the door, then turned back. “Don’t be too concerned, Ari—eventually something appropriate for you will come up. It’s just a matter of time.”

  As he left Ari began doodling on the corner of the classified report. While the Colonel was talking it had struck him that he could volunteer for the mission. But this assignment wasn’t at all what he was accustomed to—this Operation Breastfeed, this Operation Nursemaid. His field was military intelligence. He’d spent his life concerned with matters critical to the survival of Israel. How could he volunteer for…

  He lit a cigarette and thought about Cyprus. He shouldn’t have been away from his receiver. The Colonel had been angry. Maybe…by going to Syria, by saving the lives of a handful of children he could atone for his carelessness. More than even the score.