"Edward Whittemore - The Jerusalem Quartet 04 - Jericho Mosaic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Whittemore Edward)

sleep of centuries.
For Tajar as a boy it was a time to run through alleys and over rooftops, to hide in corners and listen to old
men recall distant memories and young men dream of new dawns of glory. In the early mornings he wandered
down the narrow street called el Wad near the Temple Mount, once a Jebusite donkey path and the oldest
road in the Old City. And in the cool of the evenings he tarried beside the Gihon spring, beyond the walls of
the city since King David's time but the original source of Jerusalem whose perennial waters first caused a
town to take root on the spot, the area around the spring later to become renowned as King Solomon's rose
gardens, the sacred place where perfume and incense plants were grown for the king's grand new Temple on
the hill above, from seeds first brought to the king and the land by the dusky Queen of Sheba.
And so Tajar wandered back and forth through history. Being holy, Jerusalem was an endless source of
myth. There were legends of intriguing mystery, such as the tale that described the original Bible having been
miraculously discovered in the nineteenth century buried in a monastery deep in the Sinai, only to be secretly
reburied later in Jerusalem out of fear and piety in the cause of faith, because this original Bible had turned
out to be a stunningly dangerous document which denied every religious truth ever held by anyone.
And there were stories of fabulous adventure, such as the shadowy accounts of a long-term poker game
which had begun in Jerusalem after the First World War and was still in progress in the back room of an
antiquities dealer's shop somewhere in the Old City, a game destined to run a dozen years, it was said, its
three permanent members a Moslem and a Christian and a Jew, the secret stakes of the game nothing less
than control of Jerusalem itself.
Arabs and Jews and Greeks and Armenians and Europeans тАФ Tajar learned all their languages and glimpsed
all their visions of the Holy City where the patriarch-shepherd Abraham had come four millennia ago to seek
the blessing of Melchizedek, mythical priest-king of the ancient Jebusite city of Jerusalem.
Tajar spied out the hidden byways of the bazaars and the dazzling silences of the great sun-washed
courtyards with their towers and domes and minarets, endlessly exploring the multitude of worlds around
every corner and the multiplicity of ways and tongues and costumes which were the very heart of his ancient
walled city. Above all he loved being different people at different moments, imagining secret lives for himself,
imagining himself to be all the men whose paths he crossed.
He had a game which he called listening to the stones of Jerusalem. He would stop somewhere and turn his
back on the crowds and close his eyes and rest his hands on a weathered stone, a wall or an abutment or
arch, and soon he would find himself slipping back in time to some distant era, feeling its life surge around
him and hearing its sounds and tasting its smells, so clearly the stones seemed to be whispering to him
through his fingertips.
Anna smiled when he described that childhood game to her years later. She smiled and nodded in
recognition at those sensations of his from long ago.
So that's where your sensualism began, she said to him, laughing. And it was true that Tajar always took
enormous pleasure in textures and tastes and colors. He loved to touch things with his hands, to feel them
with his fingers.
Once when he went to make coffee in Anna's house and she waited and waited and too much time had
passed, she found him in the kitchen dreamily dipping his hand in and out of the jar of coffee beans, stroking
the beans and letting them run through his fingers, oblivious to where he was and what he was supposed to
be doing. So perhaps it was as Anna suspected, and his mystical love as a boy for the stones of Jerusalem
gave him a vision that guided his entire life.
In any case, Tajar's sensual pleasure in textures and colors and his love of ideas, his delight in multiple ways
and languages and especially his boyhood games of pretending, all were to provide him with a very special
role in the building of his homeland. The grand rabbi of espionage, Yossi would one day call him, at a meeting
of theirs in Geneva. And although Yossi laughed when he made the remark, it was no less true.
Tajar was the first director of the Mossad, its founder, and in fact his exceptional talent for secret worlds was
wholly natural to him, a result of having grown up in Jerusalem at a time when all its races and tongues
mingled freely, before the strife of later years caused the various communities to withdraw and isolate
themselves one from the other.