Leon Uris (25 page)

They gathered about his table to exchange gossip and views. It was perfectly clear that the Syrians would come down from the Golan Heights and seize the lake, then drive across the Galilee and capture Haifa, with its large mixed population, helping pin down the Jews in advance of their army. From here it was so easy to envision.

Another sleepless night plagued Ibrahim. From a small stone balcony of his hotel room he stared at the lake as the moon danced its way to oblivion and the hills of Syria disappeared from sight.

Gideon Asch had come from a town near the northern end of the lake. It was on Ibrahim’s mind. They would be passing close to it tomorrow. Oh how he missed Gideon. Gideon always knew what was taking place behind the scenes. He wanted to see Rosh Pinna and he wanted to see the house in which Gideon had been born and raised. What would Gideon tell him now about Arab maneuvering?

Certain things were becoming quite clear. A week earlier he had visited the Wahhabi tribe for a wedding. The Wahhabis roamed the northern Sinai and little escaped their eyes and ears. His uncle, the great Sheik Walid Azziz, had told him that Egypt was starting a military buildup in the Sinai. It was scarcely a secret that Egypt would attack Palestine from the south.

Because he knew the Arab mentality, Ibrahim was distressed. No Arab nation would go to war for fellow Arabs without a reward.

Syria, over the lake, had always kept up a vague claim to all of Palestine on the grounds that Damascus had been the political and administrative center for both countries and for Lebanon as well. Syria would certainly grab the Galilee and Haifa for itself. In that manner it would have Lebanon surrounded on three sides, with the Mediterranean on the fourth.

Egypt? It would claim the Negev Desert, the Gaza Strip, and Beersheba at the head of the desert as well as Tel Aviv and Jaffa.

Abdullah would not be able to resist the temptation of ruling over Jerusalem and the west bank of the river.

Palestine would be cut up among them. And what of Iraq and the Saudis and those states that did not border Palestine? They would be in it to restore Arab manhood and for the looting and destruction of the Jews.

Would these nations, each with their own interests in a piece of Palestine, allow the Palestinian people to form a nation? There would be little left for the Palestinians when it was done, and whatever autonomy Haj Ibrahim’s people got depended upon whom they cooperated with. The warlords of Cairo, Damascus, and Amman were not even considering the Palestinian Arabs.

Was his mind wavering? Revelations came easily on the Sea of Galilee. It seemed so utterly plain to him. It was what Gideon would have told him. He would have argued with Gideon. It was difficult to talk himself out of what he had discovered.

How then did the Effendi Kabir plan to play it? What did he have in mind?

M
ORNING FOUND THEM SPEEDING
north along a shoreline of immense historical and religious dimensions. Beyond the place where Jesus walked on the water, a long sloping hill drifted back from the lake. Beatitudes! The Sermon on the Mount. The meek shall inherit the earth. Past the ruins of the ancient synagogue at Capernaum where Jesus preached as a rabbi, the Sea of Galilee abruptly ended.

‘I should like to see Rosh Pinna,’ Ibrahim said.

Dandash looked at his watch, shrugged, and instructed the chauffeur to take the short detour. The village of Gideon Asch’s birthplace on the lower slopes of Mount Canaan had not changed much since it had been founded. It was sleepy but tidy. The people here farmed their own land and homes, in contrast to the communal aspects of the kibbutz.

These continuous thoughts of his former friend puzzled him. Why do I think so much of Gideon these days? Because I need him, I suppose. Haj Ibrahim could visualize Gideon as a lad lazing in the shade of the giant tree with a book in his lap ... or mounting his stallion in defiance and reaching out beyond this lovely place to join the surging new order of things.

‘Can I help you?’ a Jewish farmer asked.

Ibrahim was about to ask to see the home of Gideon. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it is just so very pleasant here.’

On social occasions Jews and Arabs were extremely hospitable to one another hereabouts. ‘You will stay for lunch?’

‘It is not possible,’ Dandash interrupted, ‘we must be in Damascus today.’

They entered the car and closed the doors, ‘Shalom,’ the farmer said.

‘Shalom,’ Haj Ibrahim answered.

Again on the main highway, they turned east and climbed toward the Syrian border. From the bottom of the earth they ascended some three thousand feet onto the plateau of the Golan Heights. At the British side of the border they left the car for a stretch and a meal from the picnic basket that had been prepared at Dandash’s hotel.

Haj Ibrahim stared down at the lake, which appeared to be little more than a large pond from this height. He could see halfway across the entire Galilee to the hills of Nazareth and south for many miles down the Great Rift Valley where the river fell from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea. The strings of Jewish settlements along the lake appeared so tiny and helpless from here. Syrian artillery could sit on this mountain and simply rain down their fire. The Jews had no guns that could reach this far. Certainly the Jews would never be able to scale the clifflike sheerness and capture the place. Even his fellahin in Tabah could hold such high ground against a brigade of the elite Palmach. It took no Saladin to figure out that the Jews would be driven underground by the barrage, after which Syrian tanks and infantry would merely have to sweep down and eradicate them. Of all the military positions in Palestine, Haj Ibrahim could not envision one that gave the Arabs a greater advantage.

The Syrian officer at the border town of Quinetra groveled before the imposing automobile and, after a brief word with Dandash, snapped off a smart salute, shouted a command to open the gate, and watched the car as it bolted into the town.

Quinetra had been built up as a military staging town because of its impeccable strategic credentials and because it straddled an oil pipeline that originated in the Persian Gulf almost a thousand miles away. The flurry of military vehicles, a field of neatly parked tanks and mobile artillery pieces, and hundreds of Syrian soldiers on the street all bespoke coming war.

Once through the town they skirted the bottom of a snowcapped Mount Hermon, a great lonely peak whose broad base touched down into Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon. The mountain’s lower slopes held a collection of villages of the mystical quasi-Islamic Druze sect, impoverished Shi’ite Moslems, and a smattering of Christian Arabs.

Now out on a flat ugly gray volcanic desert plain of the Golan, they linked up to the Amman highway, and before Haj Ibrahim could prepare for it, there suddenly rose before him the spires of the glorious Umayyad Mosque of Damascus, next in sacred rank to the Dome of the Rock. Damascus, the city of Abel and Cain and the Apostle Paul and the birth of Christianity, was claimed as the oldest on earth. It rose from the surrounding desolation as a gigantic oasis. Damascus, which had once ruled an empire larger than Rome’s, continued to live on glory a thousand years departed.

Haj Ibrahim’s calm fled him; his prayer beads were fingered at a feverish pace as they reached the outskirts of the city. Next to his arrival in Mecca, he had never experienced anything like this. His awe was counterpointed by Dandash’s sullenness and the chauffeur’s bullying his way by horn. An Arabic hodgepodge of minarets and domes, of the old walled town with its crumbling casbah packed with humanity, was breached by modern glass skyscrapers and wide boulevards telling of recent French influence. Everything was hazed by an eternal pall of ash and sand that constantly blew in from the desert.

Damascus was made possible by the River Barada, which gushed down from the mountains of Lebanon, then broke into hundreds of streamlets that had been converted into a patchwork of canals. The waters had enriched a greenbelt called El Ghouta. This district had been likened in Arabian fantasy to the Garden of Eden. El Ghouta held an unlikely mixture of gardens and grand villas, of casinos and farms and orchards that fed the city, of parks and recreation areas.

It was in El Ghouta that the Effendi Kabir dwelled in a square villa of demicastle proportions. A quarter of a mile down the gated and guarded entrance they drove through a small blizzard of fruit orchards and into a garden of thousands of Damascus rose bushes, then burst on the villa with its facade of orange-peach colored Algerian marble framed in Persian tiles.

Haj Ibrahim’s head became light and fuzzy as Fawzi Kabir greeted him with no less exuberance than if he had been welcoming a Saudi prince. The enormity of the welcome snapped Ibrahim into alertness and made him doubly suspicious. He knew full well that he had been summoned for something of great importance.

His awe of every new aspect of this fairyland was now tempered by continuous voices of caution. It was dream stuff, his preview of paradise, but he realized Kabir’s hospitality would have a steep price.

Dinner found them in a room straight out of
Arabian Nights
, designed for partying. Large embroidered cloths formed a tent on the walls and ceiling, interspersed with mirrors. The floor was covered, not with thin oriental rugs, but deep plush Western carpeting. Pillows and low tables added a sense of Roman debauchery. The two men ate alone, save a quartet of handsomely muscled young servants and a pair of guards uniformed like old Turkish Janissaries with bloomered pantaloons to the ankles, wide red sashes about the waist, and fez head coverings. At the meal’s end two servants carried in a six-foot silver platter of fruits, nuts, cheeses, and European chocolates, pastries and candies that seemed half as high as Mount Arafat. Kabir clapped his hands, delivered an order, then dug into the great mound of afterdinner delights.

Lo and behold, a quintet of musicians appeared, and as they whined out a repetitious melody a belly dancer slithered in from nowhere and began to gyrate before them.

In Allah’s name! What does this man want of me! I must be alert beyond alert! This could all be a softening-up process to lull me off my guard and then assassinate me. Why does he want to kill me? Oh yes, I made him travel to Tabah once. Although that was a quarter of a century ago a man like Kabir would never forget such an insult! Nonsense! He is only trying to be a good host ... on the other hand ...

The Muktar of Tabah gaped as the woman wiggled her torso toward them, then danced directly above where he was reclining. She was not an Arab, for her skin was a Western white and her hair was gold and her eyes, blue. Kabir leaned over, propped on an elbow, and put his lips close to Ibrahim’s ear.

‘Her name is Ursula. She is German and extremely clever, very talented. She is one of my favorites. Can you believe she learned to dance like that in less than a year? She will visit your room tonight. Keep her as long as you wish.’ Kabir paused slightly to crack a walnut and his eyes roved to the male servants standing at attention. He nodded toward a young man of startling, sensual feline beauty. ‘Or take them both.’

Ursula pumped a beautifully curved, firm, delicious hip an inch from Ibrahim’s nose and met the warm, uneven breath huffing out of him. She turned ever so slowly so that her sacred part was all but in his face.

‘Why was I brought here?’ erupted from Ibrahim.

‘Time enough for business tomorrow,’ Kabir answered. ‘It has been a long day for you. I hope the night is equally long.’

The music abruptly halted, as oriental music often does.

This cannot be true, Ibrahim thought as he lay back on a satined bed in a room fit for Mohammed himself. It was dimly lit and floating little lines of incense twirled to the ceiling.

I know! She is the one assigned to kill me. I must be extremely careful.

His heart thumped audibly and tried to leap through his throat as he sensed movement behind a latticework that divided the room. He could barely see through it but could make out the girl on the other side. She feather-stepped her way into the room, gowned in filmy transparent chiffon, and came to a halt at the foot of the bed and unabashedly revealed herself, stitch by stitch, with agonizing deliberateness.

When her gown dropped to her feet, she came over the bed toward him on all fours. Haj Ibrahim seized her, threw her on her back, and his thrusts were rapid, powerful, and inflamed. In a moment he dropped back, gasping and perspiring. He had never touched flesh like hers. It was madness.

Ursula survived his first assault graciously. The next time he took longer and was not as rough. He collapsed for a second time, finished for the night. The girl lay tightly beside him and her fingers wove elfin circles about his skin.

‘You are so gentle,’ he said at last. ‘You hate me. I made love all wrong.’ He was surprised by his compulsive burst of guilt.

‘You must learn to allow yourself to be touched,’ she said.

‘I did it wrong.’

‘Stop that. Learn to be touched. Learn to enjoy your own stillness.’

Haj Ibrahim gasped several times. Everything was running together: the long drive from Tabah, the spellbinding arrival in Damascus, this night of paradise, Gideon’s home, the moon rising over the Golan Heights, tanks, cannons, Tabah ... Tabah ... Tabah ... the road to Jerusalem.

‘I must confess that for the first time in my entire life, I am somewhat tired,’ he said.

‘Not to be so certain,’ she answered.

Ursula sat up, opened a bedside table drawer and withdrew a little jeweled box, opened it and took out a stick of hashish and crumpled some in a pipe.

Aha! Now that I am weak she will give me hashish dipped in poison.

Before anxiety overtook him he saw her light the pipe and draw a deep, hungry puff, then offer it to him. He smiled, almost aloud, at his own foolishness. As he relit the pipe for a second draw, her hand brought his down.

‘It is very strong,’ she warned.

‘Yes,’ he said in delight, ‘yes.’ The room swirled and the aroma of frankincense glazed his mind. Everything about him was satin. Ursula’s touch had now become incredible. He never realized such finesse existed. She licked him entirely, endlessly. What he thought was dead between his legs began to come alive again.