Джеймс Миченер - The Source

THINGS HAPPENING VERY FAST STOP BETTER COME ON OVER

The relationship between the two trenches was now reversed, as often occurred at a dig. Trench B wallowed about in the foundations of the Crusader fort, whose walls cut deep through many levels of occupation, obliterating them all and rendering them largely useless for contemporary study; the diggers in this trench now seemed mainly occupied with shifting heavy stones. But in Trench A, which transected the multiple religious structures, intellectual and archaeological activity was keen, and the reason for bringing along an architect from the University of Pennsylvania became clear. At the top the trench was only thirty feet wide and it had sloping sides, so the amount of wall exposed was never great, but by pecking away at the earth and guessing at what had stood on what, the architect could sometimes come up with clever deductions as to how the various jigsaw pieces had fitted together. He was a patient man who allowed the sweating kibbutzniks to stalk past him as if he did not count, but when they were through lifting and tugging he was there, on his knees, often with a whisk broom, trying to catch signs of how the stones had been dressed and whether they bore fragments of earlier cement, indicating a prior use in some other wall. The quality of this man’s imagination would determine what course the excavations would follow in future years, and the amount of information he could deduce from what to another man would be merely one line of rocks crossing another line, was surprising. Not one of the four top archaeologists at Makor could approach his proficiency in this specialized field.

Only one thing interfered with his work, and he complained about this to Cullinane: “Really, John, you’ve got to tell those girls to wear more clothes. I find them a very disturbing element.”

“I’ve wondered about this myself,” Cullinane said. The dig at Makor was witnessing a phenomenon of the age, common to all countries: for protection from the near-tropic sun young men wore hats, long-sleeved shirts, shoes and socks to protect their ankles, while girls got along with little: sleeveless blouses, shorts, no stockings and tennis shoes. After a few days of sunburn the kibbutz girls became bronzed goddesses, rounded and beautiful. They were modest and well behaved, but they were also alluring, and there could have been few men working at the dig who were not at one time or another tempted to reach out and pinch these lovely Jewish maidens. Of course, such temptation was one of the unexpected pleasures of archaeology in Israel, but Cullinane agreed with his architect: “It was a lot easier digging in Egypt. There the women had to wear clothes!”

But when the architect protested a second time—“John, I was truly worried. If she had lifted that rock she’d have popped out all over”—he decided that something must be done. He therefore summoned Dr. Bar-El and said, in his best administrative manner, “Mrs. Bar-El, I think you’d better speak to the girls. They really must wear more clothes.”

“What do you mean?” she asked innocently.

“The men … they’ve begun to complain.”

“You mean the shorts?” She began to laugh at his embarrassment. “Really, John, no sensible man’s complaining about shorts, I hope.”

“Not exactly,” he stammered.

“Aren’t the girls doing a good job?” she asked defensively.

“Yes! Yes! In fact they’re superior to any others I’ve worked with. But won’t you please speak to them…”

“I wonder if I’m the proper one to do it,” she said shyly.

“Well, you’re a woman.”

“But you haven’t seen the shorts I propose to wear,” she said quietly, and he was left alone, fumbling with a pencil.

That afternoon she wore them, and although her outfit was not immodest it was tantalizingly arranged, and when Cullinane first saw her heading for Trench A he stopped what he was doing to watch. Then he smiled as he saw the architect follow her approvingly down the trench, and he made no further effort to discipline the kibbutz girls. They were, as he had told Dr. Bar-El, the most energetic and intelligent workers he had ever employed, and if they wished to provide a daily beauty parade, that would have to be one of the extra features at Makor; but when Vered Bar-El went past, holding a piece of broken pottery, he asked himself: What would Macalister and Albright think if they could see a dig like this?

She was a delightful person, Vered Bar-El, thirty-three years old, a widow from the War of Independence and a fine scholar who had been offered university posts in several countries. That she had not remarried since 1956, when her young husband was killed during the Sinai Campaign, surprised Dr. Cullinane. He asked her about it once as they were going across the tell, and she had said frankly, “I have been married to Israel, and one of these days I must get a divorce.” He had asked her what she meant by the first part of this sentence, and she explained, “An outsider cannot imagine how hard we fought to gain a state here. It absorbed all our energies. At Zefat, for example …”

“The town in the hills?”

She stopped, and it was obvious that she felt herself assailed by memories too difficult to discuss. “You ask Eliav some day,” she said, and she had run down off the tell.

As for the second part of her sentence, Cullinane understood this only too well. As the son of an impoverished Irish day laborer on the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad, he had devoted himself so single-mindedly to an education, acquiring a polished accent and a Ph.D. at the same time, that he had not married, and his devout mother had fairly well given up parading before him the daughters of her Irish friends. Yet he knew that for a man to be forty without a wife was patently absurd—and open to suspicion as well—and since the fortunate offer by Paul Zodman to finance the Makor dig had settled his economic and professional problems for the next decade, there was no reasonable excuse for delaying marriage any longer; but like the meticulous man he was, the man who signed each card so precisely J.C., he was studying the problem with scientific detachment. He had, one might say, excavated his way through Levels I to XIII of Chicago’s Irish society, and he had come upon some interesting pieces, but he had so far found nothing in the human field to compare with the Christian-Jewish cornerstone that he had found at Makor’s Level VII

Then there was Mrs. Bar-El, working beside him each day, wearing her shorts and smiling at him with her flashing eyes and white teeth. She was an easy girl to remember when one was at the other side of the tell, or sleeping in the next tent. He responded to her in two interesting ways which had little to do with her personality: when considering marriage he remembered how men his age often made asses of themselves, and he had sworn never to become involved with any girl more than twelve years his junior—Vered was only seven years younger; also, he had an affinity for girls who were shorter than he was, and Vered was positively petite. That she was also an archaeologist neither added to nor detracted from her general appeal, and as for the fact that she was Jewish and he Catholic, he dismissed this as a problem of little consequence. In fact, he chuckled as he recalled the joke that had been popular during his navy service in the Korean war: “Soldier calls his Irish mother in Boston and says, ‘Mom! This Xavier in Korea. Just wanted to warn you that I’ve married a Korean girl.’ To his surprise his mother makes no objection. In fact she seems pleased. ‘Bring the girl home, Xave. You can stay with us.’ ‘But where can we stay in your house, Mom, it’s so small?’ ‘You can use my room, Xave, because the minute that Korean bitch puts her foot through the door I’m gonna cut my throat.’” It seemed to John Cullinane that more than half his friends were married to what their parents thought were the wrong mates—Catholics with Baptists, Jews with Armenians, and Xavier with his Korean wife—and he gave the problem no more thought.