“If they speak Arabic I can handle them,” Tabari assured the leaders, and two nights later the team went to greet the large ship that plied monotonously back and forth across the Mediterranean hauling Jewish immigrants to Israel.
“Before we go aboard,” Eliav summarized, “I’ve got to warn you again that these aren’t the handsome young immigrants that you accept in America, Cullinane. These are the dregs of the world, but in two years we’ll make first-class citizens of them.” Cullinane said he knew, but if he had realized how intellectually unprepared he was for the cargo of this ship, he would have stayed at the tell and allowed Tabari to choose the new hands.
For the ship that came to Israel that night brought with it not the kind of people that a nation would consciously select, not the clean nor the healthy nor the educated. From Tunisia came a pitiful family of four, stricken with glaucoma and the effects of malnutrition. From Bulgaria came three old women so broken they were no longer of use to anyone; the communists had allowed them to escape, for they had no money to buy bread nor skills to earn it nor teeth to eat it with. From France came not high school graduates with productive years ahead of them, but two tragic couples, old and abandoned by their children, with only the empty days to look forward to, not hope. And from the shores of Morocco, outcast by towns in which they had lived for countless generations, came frightened, dirty, pathetic Jews, illiterate, often crippled with disease and vacant-eyed.
“Jesus Christ!” Cullinane whispered. “Are these the newcomers?” He was decent enough not to worry about himself first—although he was appalled at the prospect of trying to dig with such assistance—but he did worry about Israel. How can a nation build itself strong with such material? he asked himself. It was a shocking experience, one that cut to the heart of his sensibilities: My great-grandfather must have looked like this when he came half-starved from Ireland. He thought of the scrawny Italians that had come to New York and the Chinese to San Francisco, and he began to develop that sense of companionship with Israel that comes very slowly to a Gentile: it was building itself of the same human material that America was developed upon; and suddenly he felt a little weak. Why were these people seeking a new home coming to Israel and not to America? Where had the American dream faltered? And he saw that Israel was right; it was taking people—any people—as America had once done; so that in fifty years the bright new ideas of the world would come probably from Israel and no longer from a tired America.
Nevertheless, he was startled to find that exactly half the twenty-four people promised him were comprised of Yusuf Ohana and his family from Morocco. Yusuf looked to be seventy, but he had three wives, one apparently his age, one forty and one twenty. The latter was pregnant, and the others had eight children between them. When Yusuf moved—a tall, thin man in dirty robes and turban—it was as if a perpetual dust storm moved with him, for he was obeyed. A Jew who came from a small town near the Atlas Mountains, he had lived as if he were still in Old Testament times, and his word was patriarchal law. Tabari greeted him in a mixture of French and Arabic, explaining that he and his family would be working for Dr. Cullinane until the kibbutz found permanent homes and work for them. Yusuf nodded, and with a grand gesture of his hands over the members of his brood, said that he would see that they worked well, but Cullinane noticed that he and his first wife were nearly blind. What can they do? he thought.
The other twelve newcomers were from various nations, and when they were all in the special bus that would carry them to Makor, the man from the Jewish Agency passed among them, handing them parcels of food, Israeli citizenship papers, unemployment insurance for a year, rent money, health insurance, and cellophane bags of candy for the children. In Arabic he shouted, “You are now citizens of Israel, and you are free to vote and criticize the government.” At the door he bowed and left.
Cullinane sat up late that night. Eliav said, “We’ll accept any Jew from any part of the world in whatever condition he finds himself.”
“We did it,” Cullinane said, “and we built a great nation.”
“Critics complain that the old people, like Yusuf and his first wife, or the three Bulgarian women … They say they’ll never be productive. But I’ve always maintained …”
“Eliav was instrumental in helping form the policy,” Vered explained proudly.
“I look at productivity from an entirely different point of view,” Eliav said slowly, polishing his pipe with his palms. “I say that it takes four thousand people to make a town. You’ve got to have four thousand human beings to fill the places, as it were. They don’t all have to be in their middle working years. It’s easy to see that some have to be children to keep the town going in the future. But some should also be old people to fill the places where wisdom is needed, or to act as baby-sitters, or just to sit around as human beings.” He looked intently at Cullinane and said, “How much better the world would be tonight if that boat had been landing at New York. Symphonies and cathedrals are not built by the children of upper-middle-class families. They’re built by the units we saw tonight. You need these people very much, Cullinane, but we can’t spare them and you’re too frightened to take them.”
The next few days at the dig were historic, in a horrible sort of way. Yusuf and his family of twelve were not only illiterate; they were also il-sociate—if there were such a word: they knew nothing of organized life. They had never seen a privy or a public shower or an organized dining hall, or an archaeologist’s pick or a hoe, and life would have degenerated both at the kibbutz and at the dig had not Jemail Tabari stepped forth as the sponsor of the newcomers. He planted six pieces of pottery in the dust and showed Yusuf how they were to be dug out; but this was an error, because Yusuf himself intended doing no work. He showed his three wives how to do the digging and then yelled at his eight children. Patiently Tabari explained that unless Yusuf dug and dug right, he would damned well not eat, and the old patriarch went to work. By luck, it was he who dug out from Trench A the first substantial find, a laughing, lovely little clay goddess, a divinity sacred to pregnant women and farmers who brooded about fertility. It was Astarte, the Canaanite goddess, and she reminded Cullinane of a little statue of Vered Bar-El.
“Congratulations!” He called to Yusuf in Arabic, and on the spot he authorized Tabari to pay the old man a bonus; and that night Yusuf was allowed to carry the goddess to the kibbutz dining hall, where he showed it proudly to the young people who had been working on the tell, and one of the boys shouted, “It looks like Dr. Bar-El!” The naked little goddess with circular breasts was brought to Vered’s table, and she said quietly, “I’m sure I don’t know how he could tell!” So the boy tore his handkerchief and made an improvised bikini and halter for the clay goddess, and the antique little girl did look amazingly like the archaeologist, and probably for the same reason: that each represented the ultimate female quality, the sexual desire, the urge toward creation that can sometimes become so tangible in a bikini or in the work of a long-forgotten artist in clay. Then came the cable from Stockholm:
CULLINANE STOP YOUR LEVEL III STOP 1380 B.C.E. PLUS-OR-MINUS 105 ROYAL INSTITUT
Within a few days the laboratory in Chicago reported “1420 B.C.E. plus-or-minus no,” and Cullinane felt that if that was the date for the two clay pots, he probably ought to date his Astarte at about 2200 B.C.E.
He permitted the make-believe bikini to remain on the little goddess, and each day as he looked at her, standing impudently on his desk, urging him to fertilize his land and have children, he thought more hungrily of Vered Bar-El. It was a serious mistake that she was making, not marrying him, for it was becoming quite clear that she ought not to marry Dr. Eliav. Between those two there was a lack of passion, an obvious lack of commitment, and he felt a desire to restate his proposal. He was stopped from doing so by a cable from Zodman in Chicago asking him to fly immediately to that city, bringing with him if humanly possible the Candlestick of Death. A meeting of the sponsors of the Biblical Museum was be
ing held, etc., etc.
“I’m damned if I’ll go,” he growled, and he summoned a staff meeting to support him.
“As a matter of fact,” Eliav said, “I don’t think you should. Zodman’s just looking for some cheap publicity.”
“I’ll cable that I can’t do it,” the Irishman snapped.
“Wait a minute!” Tabari interrupted. “Remember Uncle Mahmoud’s first rule: ‘The man that pays the bills, keep him happy.’ ”
“If it were anything but that damned candlestick. No!”
“John,” the Arab repeated persuasively, “you certainly shouldn’t prostitute yourself. But I’ve never seen Chicago. I could take that menorah and in my sheikh’s costume I could give such a lecture …”
Vered began to laugh at the prospect of Jamail Tabari’s knocking the women of Chicago dead.
“I can’t spare you either,” Cullinane said. “Next year, all right, because you might do something for Chicago. But with these Moroccans …”
“You haven’t heard my other suggestion,” Jemail volunteered. “Send Vered.”
“Would you go?” Cullinane asked.
“I’d like to see what America’s like,” she said.
“She wouldn’t have the same effect that I’d have,” Tabari said. “A Jew never does, compared to an Arab. But she is …” He blew at the bikini on the little clay goddess.
“We’re just getting into the pottery phase …” Cullinane objected.
“Keep Paul Zodman happy,” Tabari warned, and he drafted a cable which said that in Cullinane’s absence in Jerusalem he was making bold to point out that the director could not possibly leave, but that if all expenses were paid, Dr. Vered Bar-El and the Candlestick of Death …
The next morning one of Yusuf’s wives found in Trench B two small stones; she took them to Dr. Eliav, suggesting that they might be of interest, and they were of such construction that the tall archaeologist halted all work and got the professionals down into the trench. The two stones were flints, not more than an inch long and sharpened to a glistening sheen on one serrated edge. The opposite edge was quite thick, so that the flint could not have been used either as a spearhead or as a hand knife; yet the two unimpressive flints caused as much excitement as anything so far found on the tell, and the team dug through the dust for some minutes before Vered cried, “I’ve another! It matches!” And when placed beside the first two, it did. The hunt was intensified, but an hour passed before Yusuf himself turned up a fourth flint, after which no more were found.
The archaeologists placed the flints in approximately the positions in which they had fallen, and the records were made. They were then hurried to the washing room, where Vered herself polished them and laid them out on Dr. Cullinane’s desk, where he sketched them.
They had once formed the cutting edge of a sickle, these four bits of flint, and they went back in history to the first mornings when men and women, like the young Jews of Kibbutz Makor, started forth to harvest their grain. This instrument, saved from the dust, had been one of the earliest agricultural devices ever used by man; it was older than bronze, much older than iron; it came before the creatures of the farmyard or the taming of the camel. It was so old, so incredibly old, an invention of such wonder—much greater than a Frigidaire or an Opel automobile—and its flanks were so polished and luminous from the stalks of grain that had passed over it, that it had been cherished as one of the differences between the man who owned it and the animals he hunted. For the man who had made this instrument, this marvelous, soaring invention, was no longer required to move from place to place in search of food. In some mysterious way he had made grain grow where he wanted it, and with this sickle to aid him, had been able to settle down and start a village that had become in time the site of a Roman city, of a fine Byzantine church and a towering Crusader’s castle. With reverence the archaeologists looked at the four matching stones, and three mornings later, at both Trench A and Trench B, the Moroccans came down to the bedrock of the tell. Beneath it there was nothing; the long dig ended.
That night Vered Bar-El packed her grips for Chicago, but when she had done so she was inspired to go onto the tell for a last sight of the mound and the living rock which the picks and hoes had uncovered. She was scraping the latter with the heel of her shoe when she became aware that someone had followed her from the main building, and she called, “Eliav?” but it was Cullinane, and with what could only be called a sense of relief she said, “Oh, it’s you, John.” As he walked down the trench she added, “It’s a little disappointing … coming to the bedrock.”
“In a way,” he agreed. “I’d sort of hoped it would go on down … maybe to caves like the Carmel. A hundred thousand years or something like that.”
“What we have is perfect … in its way,” she said in a consoling voice.
“We can make it so,” he said. “In the next nine years we’ll convert this tell into a little jewel. We’ll excavate the three walls, all around. Leave them standing and go for the best that’s inside.” He stopped. “Will you and Eliav be with me for those nine years?”
“Of course.”
“I’ve had a premonition recently that you might not be.”
“How silly,” she said in Hebrew. The unexpected shift of language caught Cullinane off guard, as if she had winked at him or blown a kiss.
“Because if you weren’t to be here …” he began.
To her own surprise she reached up and put her small hands about his face. “John,” she whispered, “you’ve become very dear to me.” She spoke in English, then raised her face until it was close to his. “Very dear,” she said in Hebrew.
He kissed her passionately, as if he knew that this was the last time he would ever stand with her in the Galilean night, and for one brief moment she did not resist but remained close to him, like a little Astarte whose responsibility it was to remind men of love. Then, as if she were pushing away a part of her life which had become too precious to be carried carelessly, she forced her hands against his chest and slowly the Catholic and the Jew parted, like comets which had been drawn to each other momentarily but which now must seek their separate orbits.
“I told you the truth when I said I could never marry you.”
“But every day I watch you, I’m more convinced that you’ll never marry Eliav.” He paused, then asked, “What’s wrong between you.”
“We’re caught in forces …”
“Has it something to do with Teddy Reich?”
She gasped, then asked, “Why do you ask that?”
“Because that night when Reich talked with Eliav … you watched them as if you were a jealous schoolgirl.”
She started to speak, stopped, then said in Hebrew, “Don’t worry about me, John. I need to visit America … for time … to think things out.”
“While you’re in Chicago you will think of what it would be like … living with me there?”
She was tempted to kiss him then, to throw her life completely into his, for she had come to know him as a sensitive man, honest in everything and capable of deep affection; but she would allow herself no gesture of submission. Slowly she turned away from him and left the bedrock of Israel to pack the gold menorah for the flight to America.
LEVEL
XV
The Bee Eater
Four from a set of five sharpened flints intended for fitting into a bone handle to form a sickle for reaping grain. The fifth flint was pointed on the end for use in the first position in the sickle. Original flint cores were found in limestone deposits at seaside cliffs in 9831 B.C.E. Shaped in that year and deposited at Makor during the summer of 9811 B.C.E.
There was a well and there was a rock. At the well men had been drinking sweet water since that first remote day, about a million years ago, when an apelike man had wandered up from Africa. The watering place had always been known in memory if not in speech as Makor, the source.
The rock was a huge, flat expanse of granite with a high place in t
he middle from which gentle slopes fell away on all sides. The rock was barren; it contained absolutely nothing, not even a carving or a pile of stones to mark some deity, for in those infinitely distant ages gods had not yet been called forth by the hunger of men. It was simply a rock, large enough to form in the future the foundation of a Canaanite town or the footing for a Crusaders’ fort.
The rock stood higher than the well, but halfway down the slope that separated it from the well appeared the entrance to a deep and commodious cave and one spring morning nearly twelve thousand years ago a husky, bandy-legged old man in a straggly beard and bearskin stood at the entrance to this cave in the twilight of his life and laughed with gaiety as children ran at him with roly-poly legs, leaping into his arms and squealing with animal joy. The old man embraced the children, even though they were not his own, and roughed them about when they tugged at his beard.
“Honey, honey!” they teased.
“You run away when bees fly past,” he chided, but when they repeated their pleadings he promised, “If I can find where the bees hide it I’ll bring you some.”
He left the cave and walked down to the well, an old man at ease with the forces that ruled his world. With his uncanny sense of land he knew the paths through the forest and the choice spots where fawn deer came to graze. His mind was still active and he could track the wild boar. He was as happy as a man could be, more productive than most in his generation, a hunter who loved animals and who consciously endeavored to bring pleasure to men. Anyone looking at his witty eyes and bandy legs experienced a sense of merriment.