The Syrian Sunset, page 8
“Wonderful, self-conscious, even more scientific than we’d planned. It’s a mask sometimes when he’s unsure of himself.” Fuad rose and joined Shai, his firm footsteps echoing in this cavern. “I love him more than I imagined possible.”
“In certain areas you lack sufficient imagination.”
Fuad laughed. “You’re not surprised.”
“Takes someone who knows how to love the whole way, to do what you are with me. How’s Margaret?”
He remembered somehow having a similar discussion once with her at Baalbek. “She’s not answered my last two notes," he said calmly, though sadness at the likelihood he would never again see either of these two people, so long in his life, moved through him like a tornado. He changed the subject. “As a boy Kassem frightened easily. It’s not all gone. But he’s worked his way out of a lot of it.”
“All one can ask for. Especially given how he started out in life. How’s his attachment to you?”
“Deep.”
“Do you play in your mind what will happen when you reveal his history? Angry, enraged at you for the lie?”
“Lies. I think about it all more, of late. Maybe rage would be better. Get it out. A chance to eventually send it into the winds. Silent and festering might cause us problems later on with what we’re attempting. Resentment, rebellion. Follow his own path.”
“The closer you are, the more he will feel. You kept the secret his entire life. He will not immediately care about why.”
“He’s patient. Deep thinker. Studies problems carefully before he jumps at them. I think it will be like that. I hope. Remember that first chemistry set?”
“I worried that you were pushing it on him too soon, at seven,” Shai said. “Unlike your boy, I struggle with patience.”
The memories of Kassem’s childhood filled him with joy. He’d truly enjoyed those science experiments together. “I had the instructions translated and Kassem sat alone with them for two days. Wouldn’t let me in his room. He figured out how to float bubbles on carbon dioxide gas. It was the happiest I’d seen him in years.”
“You won’t lose him, Yussuf. Maybe for a minute but not longer.”
“Chances are a good deal longer.”
“I was speaking in tectonic minutes.”
Fuad chuckled. “What you’re trying here is...unlikely.”
“Yes, exactly. Agree wholeheartedly. Why it might work. I have another old friend, oligarch in Moscow. He might rally to our flag. He’s drawn to the absurd—big fan of American movies.”
Everything felt like painful loss to Fuad now, Shai the latest apparition from the edges of his life disappearing. He was unaccustomed to these swirling emotions and didn’t care for them. Fuad was more afraid of Kassem charging away from him, than he dared speak.
Fuad removed the small box he had unearthed at the Talisman Hotel. Shai launched a large paw and the box disappeared in his pocket.
“Not sure of the impact it will have,” Shai said. “But I’m ever hopeful.”
“It will matter. We’re all sentimental. I’m finding, even me.”
Shai approached and pulled Fuad to him in a bear hug, kissed him on both cheeks in the Arab way. “Don’t want my friend outside missing me too much,” Shai said, a bit angry at himself that he didn’t want to show his tears.
“Bisalama,” Fuad said, himself near tears, in the simplest of Arabic departures, Goodbye. “Though God’s a jokster,” he found himself adding. “He may want us together, so we have to do this all over again.”
Shai laughed unexpectedly joyful, started to leave and then turned.
“If it all blows up, want us to take Fatima out with you? Kassem if he’s in danger?”
“Fatima, yes. Kassem only if he’s near the noose.”
Shai nodded and hurried out, thought it better not to highlight that’s where they were placing his son.
CHAPTER 5
AFRA
THE GOLAN HEIGHTS
Shai woke panting and grasping for breath. An hour ago in the dark, Tami had bolted up at his stirring. Since then, eyes open, she watched and worried. The first stretch of dawn, yellow and pink over the Jerusalem mountains, peeked through the curtainless window. Tami always needed to see the sky.
“Two breaths through your nose, then four slowly out through your mouth,” she said, her voice steady in a crisis. She panicked privately.
A child of two Holocaust survivors, an accidental birth late after they inability to conceive, Tami’s vigilance was born of a mother who feared the loss of every shekel, criticized with near every utterance, and envied everyone who had more, which was a small population. At sixteen in May 1944, her mother had stood against the Beregszasz Ghetto wall in Czechoslovakia, a former immense brick factory, as a Nazi placed a bayonet to her mother’s throat. Her wedding band clanked into a bucket. As they stepped from the transport into Auschwitz, those reconfiguring Europe in their own limited image, ordered three girls to one side and Tami’s grandmother to the other. Tami’s mother said to her youngest sister, thirteen then, “Go stand with mother so she won’t be alone.” Those two disappeared into another type of brick building, the only exit from the chimney. Tami’s father, a wealthy builder, dynamic in the streets, joking with everyone, darkened as he crossed their threshold; he was frustrated and not quietly about his wife’s fears.
When out that door young on her own, Tami drifted through hippie-ish, hashish and years with various men without her clothes. The revisionist history in America about the 60s being vacuous years puzzled her. She still had wonderful girlfriends from that time, suspended in a chrysalis, from which she emerged reborn and flew free. After the second man sobbed that he could not live without her, though unimpressed by his ardor, as she’d been an indifferent partner out of bed, she decided to turn to a new chapter. She changed residences and charged into a life of service unadorned with possessions. Twenty-two years his junior, she met Shai when hired as his boss’s girl Friday. As she sat beside him in bed, she was dismayed that as she grew older, the well-being she’d massed in her rebellious years had weakened into worry, not like her mother’s, but more than she cared for.
“Should I bother and suggest a quick vacation? Dead Sea? One place you won’t sink.”
Shai patted his large belly and swung his feet off the bed. “Sure, let’s go, now.”
“You’re joking, right?”
“I could use it,” he said, as often with Tami he lifted the veil on truth he left down elsewhere.
“What? Now I am worried. You’re going to take the day off?”
He headed towards the bathroom afraid she might read the exhaustion in his face. “Only the morning. You’ll need to drive back. You’ll have to endure a helicopter landing if I steal the time.”
“I wouldn’t care if a tank battalion rolled in.” Tami hurried out of bed, wary. “I’m packing some things before the phone rings. I’ll tell Asher to go to a friend’s after school. I might take my time, since you won’t be rushing me to get back.” She had vacation time amassed, as he usually said he was away too much as it was.
“I’ll tell him.”
Shai padded into his son’s room, had shed weight ten years ago at his birth to attempt longevity for the boy, but then succumbed to the comfort of old habits. In bed, Asher had two copies of The Golden Compass open, one in Hebrew the other in English. He was reading them simultaneously.
“You practicing your English reading?”
“What for? I read fine. I’m checking where the Hebrew translator made mistakes.”
“How’s he doing so far?”
“Not so bad that I have to write him.”
“Mom and I are going to Ein Gedi.”
“Can I come?”
“You have school.”
He kicked from under the blanket and both books tumbled to the floor. “That’s what I thought.”
“Can you go to Dror’s or somebody after school? Mom can call his parents.”
“Dad, don’t be stupid. Nobody needs permission to have a friend over. I don’t know where I want to go yet. I’m not even up.”
“Tell Mom, before you go to the bus.”
Asher climbed out of bed and yawned exaggeratedly. “Maybe.”
Back in the bedroom, Tami had her long dark hair in a ponytail and was already packed. She favored short colorful dresses that revealed her exercised legs. Everywhere she wore her brown ankle-high Blundstone boots not for the smart looking leather but for the pull tab loops front and rear, and the ribbed soles grip on hills and sleek streets particularly in the occasional snow that paralyzed Jerusalem. Shai somehow knew that the low boots had been devised for versatility in the Tasmanian outback. Tami loved his random knowledge. She felt safe that his crowded mind would always have a pathway out, if needed.
As he dressed hurriedly, Shai’s thoughts were already on his afternoon flight to the army base on the Golan Heights. He had planned to drive but he could use the leisurely morning.
He said, “For sure, he’s your kid.”
Tami didn’t want to waste any time asking what Asher had said and glared impatiently at her husband for being ridiculous. Instead, she threw a pillow at him. “You’re the one who taught him to say what was on his mind.”
“It seemed a better idea when he was younger.”
“You like it even more now.”
He smiled in capitulation. “Shall I make breakfast?” Shai said, noticing his speech was steady and he wasn’t slowly forming the words so they would emerge without notice.
“No. Stuff some cheese in pita for Asher and let’s go before your phone screams. Consider it dieting.”
At the freshwater nature reserve of Ein Gedi, just inland from the Dead Sea shore, Shai and Tami sat on a boulder downstream from the waterfall that filled a pool where people played noisily. Tall reeds with purple plumes reached into a cloudless sky, date palms behind them. King David had galloped here from King Saul and scampered by foot up the mountains accessible only to goats. Shai loved the Bible though his relationship with God was on less solid ground, which he solved by not walking there. Ein Gedi meant ‘spring of the goats.’ Curve-horned ibex clamored higher in these hills and on occasion could be seen drinking in the stream after the bathers had gone.
Shai splashed with his legs, as Tami sat still beside him.
“How’s your head?” she asked, trying with some success to hide the terror from her voice.
“The stubbornness or the headaches?”
“The stubbornness is not news. Let’s do some breathing exercises.”
He turned to her and grinned. “How about we consider my actually being here enough for now.” He lifted the water soothingly cold with one foot. “I’m better.”
Tami wondered beyond his health what was worrying him. She felt it like a pebble in her boot that she couldn’t dislodge. He wasn’t telling her something, not the operational details which he never divulged, but something squeezing his heart.
Shai watched two goats with straight horns scamper over rocks high above them. Small stones skidded down, some splashing into the stream. Above the goats, a helicopter abruptly rose from behind the mountain and hovered noisily. Shai thought about how only hummingbirds could fly in place. Like a hummingbird, the chopper abruptly veered towards flat sand beside the thick salt crystals massed at the Dead Sea shore.
The disappointment already formed on Tami’s lips but she caught herself and instead said something she felt deeper, “Thanks for the morning.”
“We’ll have a guest for dinner, just the three of us. See if Asher can sleep out. Make a reservation for eight p.m. Maybe Sushi Rehavia. Let’s walk. I’m considering doing something about my weight.”
“Sure,” she said. “Just when you have so little else to do.”
“I get more done everywhere when I’m busy.”
She felt him hug her close but not tight the way he did before he disappeared abroad. Silent, Tami bent to her carryall and tossed his heavy jacket to him.
Snatching it, Shai walked quickly to where the small Hughes light utility helicopter waited. The rotors beat the air louder as he approached, and the transparent door popped open. He hoisted himself in, excited to meet this young woman he had to win over. Last night he had reread both her military record and the more comprehensive file he’d commissioned. As expected, Shai learned nothing new, had remembered it all.
✽✽✽
Less than an hour later, Shai sat on the boulder strewn plateau of the Golan Heights looking at the Syrian valley below. Shai wore his heavy jacket in the cold and smiled that, as usual, Tami had been correct. Near him small patches of snow speckled the landscape. Peaceful green fields spread completely across the near valley below. Just beyond, low stone Syrian villages blended into the semi-arid steppe where trees rose only along rivers. In the unblemished distance sixty kilometers away, Damascus sat between high brown mountains like a bright diamond.
A jeep sped at unsafe velocity towards him on the dirt road, the engine the only sound anywhere. Shai took in the listening post it had departed. A single space-like antenna reached towards the stars. Below it on iron legs crouched five domes with forward antennae like beetles. He wasn’t sure how far they could hear but Tehran wasn’t a stretch. On the rim of the front line, these listeners huddled in reinforced bunkers deep below ground. Not any place he’d want to spend more than afternoon tea, Shai thought, and added to himself that hopefully he wasn’t alone in that view.
The vehicle approached, empty save for the young woman behind the wheel. Shai didn’t show his smile, liked that she had declined to be driven by subordinates. The jeep slammed to a halt near him with a squeal of worn brake pads against metal rotors; he didn’t flinch.
Early thirties, jet black hair in a ponytail, pulled back severely revealing a naturally beautiful face unfamiliar with makeup Shai knew, and a perfectly shaped nose as if it had been sculpted but had not. He took in the three silver leaves on a blue background, seren, the Air Force captain’s insignia. She trotted towards him, ponytail swinging. He rose like an eagle taking flight, fully in his element.
“Afra,” she said, without reaching out her hand. An Arabic name, sister to the Hebrew afar, the color of earth.
“You didn’t change it to Afar?”
“Obviously. Shai your real name?”
“I have others but yes.”
“I was ordered not to ask questions.”
In a glance he took her look in without inappropriate lingering. She was small everywhere and perfectly proportioned. He said, “That didn’t last long.”
Her lips parted in a small smile, then it retreated. “Hasn’t ever. So far.”
He took a step towards the edge, gazed down. Syrian armor was absent. “The tanks seem to have found greener pastures.”
“They know we won’t attack. Down there, that is. They’ve left to blow up neighborhoods in Homs and Aleppo.”
Shai nodded wearily. Israeli fighter jets controlled the Syrian skies when inclined and not merely to starve Hezbollah’s hunger for more missiles. They recently turned an anti-aircraft missile battery that ISIS had carted away from internecine Jihadi shelling in al-Shajara into scrap metal. Israel made it known they would visit their displeasure on anyone on any side who encroached upon the Druze villages of Hader and Arneh on the Syrian descent of Mount Hermon. The Arabic speaking adherents of the seven prophets, Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, and Muhammad ad-Darazi, the Druse were a million strong in the Levant. Some Israeli Druze fought ferociously with the IDF. Shai felt neither pride nor joy at the bellicosity; it was simple a necessity here, like getting dressed.
Shai said, “I gather the regime’s fallen on its face along the Jordanian border between here and Jabal al-Druze.”
“That was not a question. Why don’t you head toward what you don’t know?”
“Al-Nusra,” he asked thinking she was perfect, headstrong, and quick on her feet while stationary. “From your close view.”
“The regime’s left only one contingent to control Daraa and the road to Damascus. They’re stretched thin. Bashar’s nowhere near invincible. With help the SLA can take them. The jihadis come together, regroup, and split apart. Different aims other than hating us and Bashar with undifferentiated fervor. The flavor of the month is LSY, Liwa Shuhada Yarmouk. They control what’s left of Quneitra City on the Syrian side of the Golan.”
The Martyrs of Yarmouk named for the Yarmouk River, the mightiest tributary of the Jordan River that irrigated the nearly fertile valley by overflowing its banks. “Mostly without ideology,” Shai breathed, sometimes a bit overwhelmed by the variations. “Local and extended family ties.”
“They kidnapped seven UNDOC soldiers from the demilitarized zone.” She nodded towards no man’s land and her hair bounced. “United Nations Disengagement Observer Force, a thousand or so mostly Filipinos. Poor guys just trying to help. LSY believes the UN is silent about the regime’s crimes against the Syrian people.”
“They have more than a point. Aren’t we all?”
She looked at him, figuring he must be security of some cut, internal or globetrotting. “Some world when we agree on anything with them. Somebody in the Gulf paid the ransom.”
“Qatar,” Shai clarified. “I don’t sleep well, so I read.”
She laughed. “At least you sleep. Al-Nusra’s active nearby. Swarming and promising on the lives of their mothers to liberate the Golan as soon as Bashar is buried.” The best trained and fastest on their feet of the howling pack, Al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda gang in Syria, deeply worried Shai.
