Second sight, p.40
Second Sight, page 40
“Poison gas?”
“He even specified the kind he wanted. I don’t remember the name, but it produces vomiting, shitting, burning of the eyes, boils on every inch of skin, maximum agony. If he was a chemist, as you say, that explains how he knew what to ask for. Butterfly says he told him he had more important things to do with his time.”
“You let it go at that?”
“No,” Yeho said. “But it wasn’t easy to follow up. Nobody in Israel had ever heard of these people. Finally we found a scrap of information in an old file. In the eyes of the rabbis they weren’t even Jews. The Ja’wabi believe they’re the descendants of Joab, the commander of King David’s army, and that they left Judah in the first year that Solomon was king—that’s 965 B. C., approximately. They’re educated people in most ways, but they’re very primitive Jews, right out of the Torah. They don’t even have the Torah; to them the first five books of the Old Testament are family stories; their ancestors were there when everything happened. They know nothing of synagogues or rabbis or Talmudic law. They live in the mountains because when the Ja’wabi got there three thousand years ago they thought they had found the highest place in the world. In the time of David we talked to God and burned sacrifices to him from the hilltops, which the Torah calls ‘high places’; temples came later, with Solomon. The Ja’wabi still do it the old way, but secretly. To the outside world they pretend to be Moslems, calling the faithful to prayers five times a day, going to the mosque, performing ablutions, making the haj to Mecca, the whole business. Living their cover. And they’ve gotten away with it right under the noses of their Moslem neighbors for ten centuries. No wonder this Hassan Abdallah wanted to gas them. The experts said forget these people, they’re not Jews anymore; after all this time pretending to be Moslems they are Moslems.”
“Did you agree?”
“No. Who listens to experts? I sent a couple of agents, a man and wife, very good people, anthropologists, to visit the Ja’wabi. We offered to transport them to Israel. They said no thank you; it sounded to them like Solomon had ruined the country with temples and idols just as Joab said he would. So we explained the danger from the Eye of Gaza, gave them some weapons and equipment, and helped them train a defense force. They already had one, called the Ibal Iden, made up of teen-age boys. To them it was a strike force; they had no tradition of passive defense. Ever since the time of Joab, if they had an enemy, they sent the Ibal Iden to wipe them out.”
“I see,” the O. G. said. “Most enlightening.”
Sebastian gazed at an invisible object in the middle distance. Yeho looked from one old man’s face to the other. Finally he asked the question. “I’m under the impression,” he said, “that all this about the Ja’wabi means something to you. Am I wrong?”
“No, you’re not wrong,” the O. G. replied. “Paul Christopher and his daughter are with the Ja’wabi at this very moment. And thereby hangs a tale. With Sebastian’s permission, I’ll fill you in. Is it all right, Sebastian?”
“Go ahead.”
In a few sentences, he told Yeho the stories of Sebastian and Meryem, of Cathy and Lla Kahina, of Christopher and Zarah.
“You’re telling me that Sebastian has a wife, and that she’s a Ja’wabi, and that she knew Heydrich?”
“Yes. So did Hubbard Christopher and his wife. You knew Hubbard, of course.”
“And owe him, as you know,” Yeho said. “But Christophers again.” He clutched his head. “Trouble, trouble.”
The O. G. smiled sympathetically. “Three generations of them this time. Plus the Ja’wabi. Which brings us to the point.”
“That makes me glad,” Yeho said. “But also a little nervous.”
“The point is not Christopher or the Ja’wabi. It’s David and the Outfit. He has a situation on his hands that can’t be handled by conventional assets. But Old Boys might be able to do it. Of course nobody in the government except David could be told. It might embarrass them.”
“Old Boys? What Old Boys?”
“Us’ns,” the O. G. said.
Yeho thought for a long moment. “What’s the objective?”
“Flush out this Hassan Abdallah and his wretched crowd. Clean ’em up once and for all. Save the Ja’wabi.”
“Save the Outfit, you mean.”
The O. G. nodded sagely. “That too,” he said. “As a beneficial side-effect. Will you join the club?”
“What you’re talking about would be expensive,” Yeho said. “Where is the money coming from?”
The O. G. gave Yeho Stern one of his merry schoolboy smiles transported across a lifetime from the sunny playing fields of the Old Hundred. “That was why Sebastian asked you to come over. David has sold one of his paintings, got a big price for it from a private buyer. He’s always wanted to invest in the tangerine business.”
“Then he should have his head examined,” Yeho said. “But who am I to say no?”
5
THE HIGHWAY THROUGH THE MOUNTAINS HAD BEEN IMPROVED SINCE Cathy’s day, and it was possible now to go all the way to Tifawt by car, but Zarah wanted Christopher to see the same sights her pregnant mother had seen when she ran away from him a quarter of a century before, and she had arranged for them to cross the Idáren Dráren on horseback. They were met at the airport by a young female dressed in the hooded, all-enveloping chador of a fundamentalist Moslem woman. She and Zarah embraced, then spoke to each other in rapid Berber.
“This is Kbira,” said Zarah to Christopher in English. “She’s going with us over the mountains.”
Kbira peered at Christopher with animated brown eyes through a slit in the headpiece of her costume, but said nothing. She led them outside to a Peugeot, and despite the chador, took the wheel. As they left the airport she pointed at a range of snow-capped russet mountains beyond the pink city.
“The Idáren Dráren.”
Then, resuming her silence, she weaved adroitly through chaotic traffic in which cars, trucks, horse-drawn wagons, camels, and donkeys all moved at their respective maximum speeds. They had arrived at midday, and even at this altitude it was very hot. Everything—vehicles, houses, trees, animals, people in their flowing Islamic robes—was powdered with red dust; a man beating a camel by the side of the road raised little clouds of it every time he struck the animal with his whip. The temperature became noticeably cooler as the car moved higher into the hills, tires shrieking on the switchbacks as Kbira worked the clutch and changed gears, knees pumping inside the chador. Finally she turned into an un-paved road that climbed for several miles through a forest of stunted pines and oaks. At the end of this track, Kbira stopped the car, leaped out, and stripped off her chador. Beneath it she wore faded jeans, scuffed Reebok running shoes, and a burgundy T-shirt that read, in a lighter shade of red, “I .” She peeled the sweat-soaked fabric away from her breasts and stomach, then plunged her hands into a mop of curly dark hair that had been crushed flat by the chador, and shook it loose. Unveiled, she was a merry, sweet-faced girl, somewhat younger than Zarah. She grinned at Christopher and shook his hand with a firm grip.
“I’m glad to meet you at last,” she said in English. “You do look a lot like Zarah.”
She folded the chador and threw it into the trunk of the car, then picked up a hand-held radio and spoke into it in Berber. It crackled in reply. “They’ll be right down,” she said. “Want a Coke?” She opened a cooler and extracted three bottles of soda. Inside the cooler, sealed in transparent plastic bags, Christopher saw an Uzi submachine gun and two heavy semi-automatic pistols. Kbira, without a trace of self-consciousness, removed the bags from the ice and, while continuing to drink her bottle of pop with one hand, wiped them dry on the folds of her discarded chador. She kept the Uzi for herself and handed the pistols to Zarah and Christopher, with two extra clips of ammunition.
“You know how to use this?” she asked.
“Yes,” Christopher said. “But I’d rather not have it.”
Kbira smiled again and closed her fingers over the butt. “Better keep it.”
The radio crackled again. A couple of minutes later four very young men wearing khaki shorts and maroon T-shirts like Kbira’s came into sight on the steep trail above them. They, too, were armed with diminutive Uzi machine pistols slung under their right armpits. One after the other they embraced Zarah, kissing her on both cheeks and gazing into her eyes. Two of them were nearly as fair as Zarah. One of the darker ones had Meryem’s intense green eyes, and these were even more startling in a young face than in an older one. This youth and Kbira were kissing each other fondly and murmuring in dialect. They were about the same size, just over five feet tall, but muscular and quick in their movements. Zarah, a woman of ordinary size for an American, towered above them. She answered the question in Christopher’s mind.
“They’re all quite small,” she said. “No one except Lla Kahina has married outside the tribe for a long time. Maybe it was Sebastian’s size that appealed to her.”
“Is that fellow related to her?” Christopher asked.
“Yes, but I don’t know exactly how. They’re all cousins. Why?”
“He has her eyes.”
“You’re right. So do a lot of the other Ja’wabi.”
She beckoned the green-eyed man closer and introduced him.
“This is Ja’wab, the leader of the Ibal Iden,” Zarah said; Christopher already knew who and what the Ibal Iden were.
Ja’wab shook hands with Christopher. When he spoke, in English, he did so in Zarah’s faint Kentucky accent mingled with echoes of Semitic triple consonants. “Welcome to the Idáren Dráren,” he said.
Without another word, he picked up Christopher’s bag, balanced it on his shoulder, and led the way up the mountain.
“Your friends are well-armed,” Christopher said.
“Yes,” Zarah said. “Ever since the ostrich hunt. I should have warned you.”
“How does it happen that they all speak English with a Bluegrass accent?”
“Mother taught them, so they could understand the tutors.”
“They studied with the tutors, too?”
“We all went to school together and studied the same things.”
“Your mother paid for all that?”
“Ostensibly.”
“Ostensibly?”
“I think the Ja’wabi may have slipped the tutors something extra. She loved to do things for them, but they don’t like charity.”
On the trail above them, Kbira and Ja’wab turned around and watched them. Kbira now carried two Uzis slung around her neck— her own and Ja’wab’s. Christopher said, “Your friend is called Ja’wab, as in Ja’wabi?”
“That’s right,” Zarah said.
“Is that a common name among the Ja’wabi?”
“No. There’s only one man by that name in every generation. He’s the seventy-sixth Ja’wab.”
“Like the Dalai Lama?”
She laughed. “Ja’wab would like that idea. No. It’s just a name that’s handed down. Like Kahina, for females. You aren’t born with the name; it’s given to you if you have some special quality.”
“Like what?”
“In Ja’wab’s case, bravery.”
“In what context?”
“In the context of finding and killing the people who killed our people,” Zarah said. “All of them.”
She broke into a trot, leaving Christopher behind. They had almost reached the top. Christopher smelled smoke and the aroma of roasting meat. Around the next bend in the trail the camp came into view, half a dozen khaki tents pitched in a meadow near a waterfall. The cascade, flowing over henna sandstone, was a shade of red, like nearly everything else in this landscape. Across the rusty brook a dozen horses, neatly made Barbs with large liquid eyes, grazed among sheep and donkeys.
Zarah awaited him. “Our transportation and food,” she said. “Five days on the trail, five sheep. I hope you like roast mutton.”
There were two other women in the party, one middle-aged and the other still a girl, introduced by Zarah as Aziza and her daughter Dimya. They gave the newcomers glasses of sweet mint tea, then went back to tend the cooking fire. The young men, except for Ja’wab, went into separate tents. A silence settled over the camp.
“I’m going to change clothes and help Aziza with the food,” Zarah said. “Do you want a nap? That’s what the others are doing. Ja’wab is on sentry duty.”
“No thanks,” Christopher said. “I think I’ll hang out with the Dalai Lama.”
By now it was late afternoon. A chilly shadow crept across the meadow. Ja’wab had been searching the surrounding heights with binoculars. Now he crossed the brook with a running jump and inspected the horses’ hobbles. Christopher followed him, stepping from stone to stone across the rushing water, and waited quietly for him to finish what he was doing.
Ja’wab approached him. He had exchanged his Uzi for an American M-16 rifle. “Do you like horses?”
“These are very good-looking.”
“The best. Your late wife bred them. If she saw a beautiful horse, no matter where it was or what it cost, she bought it and brought it back to Tifawt.”
Christopher said, “You knew Zarah’s mother well?”
“Nobody knew her well. She never learned to speak Ja’wabi. Only a few words, nearly all nouns.”
“That’s funny, because you all seem to speak English with her accent.”
“She was the one who taught us. We played in English two days a week; Zarah insisted on it, so we’d all speak English when we grew up. Your daughter is a very systematic person.”
“You know her well.”
“Oh, yes. As well as myself.”
“I should thank you for avenging her mother’s death.”
“Is that what Zarah told you?”
“She said you killed the people responsible.”
“Single-handed?”
“I got that impression?”
Ja’wab grinned. “Zarah,” he said. “Look, I’m going to climb up the mountain a little way, where I can see the camp better. Would you like to come with me?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll get another rifle for you.”
They took up a position on a hilltop that commanded a view of the camp and its perimeter. Ja’wab was well equipped; in addition to his American automatic rifle and his Japanese binoculars he carried a hand-held radio. Only a few miles below them in the valley, crops and orchards grew in orderly patterns and sunlight flashed on windshields.
“Is it really so dangerous, this close to civilization?” Christopher asked.
“Civilization has always been the main problem for the Ja’wabi,” Ja’wab replied. He stood up and began pointing out landmarks. Nearly all had to do with the death of Ja’wabi: by this misshapen rock, in the time of the Romans, two of them had killed seventeen legionaries before dying themselves; in that defile, in the time of Oqba ben Nafi, who conquered the Maghrib for Islam, fifty Ja’wabi had fought to the death rather than accept conversion; in the rubble of yonder brick fort a Ja’wabi force had died to the last man against a French detachment equipped with mountain howitzers and Gatling guns.
The Ja’wabi have always been here,” Ja’wab said, “and the others had no right to be. But they kept coming anyway. So it’s best to watch. Think of Zarah’s mother.”
When they returned to the camp, after being relieved just before twilight, they found the women working by the cook fire, all four of them dressed in bright Ja’wabi clothes, purple tassels swinging from the hems. With her bright hair covered by a scarf and a gold piece resting on her forehead, Zarah was all but indistinguishable from the others. Her skin, like Christopher’s, contained a good deal of yellow pigment and she was deeply tanned, but it was not her complexion that created the resemblance; it was the way she moved and spoke. Yet she was a different creature here. Her voice was deeper and somehow more womanly when she spoke the Ja’wabi dialect. The young men had changed into Ja’wabi costumes also; it was clear that there was going to be a feast.
The women placed a platter on which the whole roast mutton was displayed on the ground. The whole party sat down together in a circle on a carpet, men on one side of the platter, women on the other, eating with their fingers. After the mutton came chicken cooked with dates and figs, then a stew with more lamb and hard-boiled duck’s eggs, then a couscous with carrots, turnips, and other root vegetables.
They ate by the light of the full moon. The meal lasted a long time. Around midnight two or three of the young men got out musical instruments—a drum, a flute, and a stringed instrument Christopher did not recognize—and began to play. After a few moments Kbira and Dimya, carrying tambourines, came out of a tent into the moonlight and danced, clapping their hands and singing in a high treble falsetto, one voice singing a long phrase and the other replying, then the two of them singing a refrain in unison. There was no harmony, just the chanted minor-key melody and the counterpoint of clapping hands.
The young men laughed at the songs and looked at Zarah out of the corners of their eyes. She covered her smile with the end of a scarf. Christopher, who had never before observed her in the company of males her own age, broke the silence with a question.
“What are they saying?” he asked.
“They’re singing a song about negotiating a marriage contract,” Zarah said. “They make up the words as they go along, but it’s an old joke about Ja’wab and me. Kbira just sang, ‘She is worth a hundred black she-camels and one bay faâl because of her beautiful silver eyes,’ and Dimya sang back, ‘By the time I dye two hundred camels black I won’t love her anymore and the faâl won’t love the she-camels.’ “
“What’s a faâl?”
“A stud camel, very valuable, very disagreeable.”
“Who are you supposed to be marrying? Ja’wab?”
“That’s the whole point of the song,” Zarah replied. “Our marriage has been prophesied, but they don’t think he needs a new wife.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’re both married to him already.”
