Sometimes, the most poetic people can come in the most surprising packages.
If you would have asked me what Abir would end up doing with his life, I would have imagined him as a bouncer, or perhaps a taxi driver in New York.
Abir, an ex-paratrooper, is one of the unsung heroes of the battle of the Chinese chicken farm, when a battalion of paratroopers in the Yom Kippur war had to take a crucial Egyptian position by running 300 yards of open kill-ground; most of the battalion never made it out of there. I could easily have imagined him grabbing one of the first planes out after the war, maybe to New York or Los Angeles.
But you can still find Abir tucked away in the art gallery he owns called the Olive Tree in the Old City of Jerusalem opposite the Cardo. He is one of those personalities described in books as