Legends

By midnight the cold gusts that swept down from the Golan Heights most nights of the year had picked up, drowning out the sound of the helicopters coming in high and fast and plummeting toward the ground like shot birds to land at strategic points around the Hezbollah camp. The roadblock at the spot where the Beirut highway curved up hill to the village and the camp was overrun without a shot being fired. The fedayeen noticed that the men coming toward them were wearing kafiyyahs and made the fatal mistake of taking them for Arabs. “Assalamu aleikum,” one of the men in kafiyyahs called out; a sentry at the roadblock called back, “Wa aleikum salam.” It was the last word he uttered. In the bunker on top of the hill above the quarry, the fedayeen started firing their heavy machine gun into the darkness when they caught sight of figures sprinting up the slope; the attackers, equipped with night vision goggles, didn’t return fire until they were close enough to lob stun grenades over the bunker’s sandbags. Other teams from the helicopters, their faces blackened with charcoal, raced through the village to attack the two low buildings that served as the camp’s dormitory. Most of the apprentice bombers, as well as the staffers and the visiting fedayeen, were gunned down as they tried to flee through the doors and the windows. Explosive charges planted against the small brick building blew away the Hezbollah flag on the roof and set off a string of smaller explosions as the wooden boxes filled with ammunition caught fire.

Dante, crouching inside the door of his room, heard the two guards outside hollering into a walkie-talkie for instructions. When there was no response they both raced off in the direction of the imam’s house behind the mosque, only to be killed by one of the Israeli teams blocking the narrow streets. The first casualties for the raiders came when several of them burst through the back door into Dr. al-Karim’s office: One of the imam’s personal guards walked toward them with his hands raised over his head and then blew himself up, killing two of the attackers and wounding two more. The other raiders, streaming through doors and windows, stormed through the house, killing the bodyguards and servants and one of the imam’s wives and two of his teenage sons as they dashed from room to room. They found Dr. al-Karim hiding in an armoir on the top floor as his second wife and two other children cowered in a nearby bathroom fitted with gold-plated faucets on the sink and the bathtub. The imam was handcuffed and blindfolded and hauled through the streets toward one of the waiting helicopters.

When the sound of gunfire subsided, Dante knotted Djamillah’s white silk bandanna around his neck and darted from the house in the direction of the water well between the village and the Hezbollah camp. Turning the corner of a narrow street, he was suddenly caught in a cross fire between some fedayeen who had taken cover on the ground floor of the school and the attackers crouching behind a low wall across the street. Dante dove behind a pickup truck as the fedayeen started firing rifle grenades. One of them exploded next to the pickup and Dante felt the tingling prick of hot shrapnel in his lower back. The sound of gunfire seemed to grow more distant as he lay on the road, staring up at the dull white stain stretching across the night sky while he waited for the pain that always trailed after the tearing of skin. Slightly delirious, he was trying to focus on the Milky Way in order to identify the star that represented the deified soul of the Alawite prostitute, Djamillah, when it finally arrived: a searing stitch of pain shot up his spinal column and he blacked out.

Dante woke to the blinding whiteness of a hospital room. Sunlight streamed through two windows and he felt its warmth on his shoulders above the bandages. He turned his head away from the sunlight and discovered Crystal Quest sitting on the next bed, munching crushed ice as she worked on a crossword puzzle. Benny Sapir, the Mossad spymaster who had briefed him in Washington, watched from the foot of the bed.

“Where the hell am I, Fred?” Dante asked weakly.

“He’s come back to life,” Benny observed.

“About time,” Quest growled; she didn’t want Dante to take her presence there as a manifestation of softness. “I have other things to do in life besides holding his hand. Hey, Dante, being Irish, you ought to know this one: Joyce’s ‘Silence, exile, and …’ Seven letters, starts with a ‘c.’”

“Cunning. That was Stephen Dedalus’s strategy for survival in Portrait of an Artist.”