Джеймс Миченер - The Source

“She live here in the kibbutz?”

“Where else?” Reich led the way to a series of dormitory buildings, where he knocked on one of the doors, waiting for a girl’s voice that advised him in Hebrew to come on in. When the door was pushed open Cullinane saw a beautiful young girl of seventeen or eighteen, and like a schoolboy he pointed at her: “You won the Bible Quiz!”

“Yes.” She nodded gracefully and indicated four iron beds where they could sit.

Cullinane sat on one and told Reich, “You don’t need to worry about her getting into the university. In Bible she knows more than the professors.”

“But does she know enough English?”

Cullinane began speaking with the charming young woman, and after several exchanges, said, “Heavy accent, but she certainly knows enough to get by.”

“I hope so,” Reich said. “I could have sent her to the Reali in Haifa. They offered a scholarship, but I thought it more important for her to know kibbutz life. Even if the school here isn’t first-class.”

“It’s an excellent school,” the girl protested.

“In academic subjects it’s rotten,” Reich said, and before his daughter could object he held up his right hand. “Rotten, but she’s found herself a good education, nevertheless.”

He was about to discuss entrance requirements when the door burst open, admitting a rugged young fellow of about eighteen dressed only in shorts and with a face full of shaving lather. He seemed to belong in the room, for after apologizing to General Reich and nodding brusquely to Cullinane, he went to the bed next to the girl’s and fumbled about in a locker, looking for his razor. When he finally found it he handled it gravely, like a young man who has not yet shaved regularly, and after further apologies, backed out.

“Your son?” Cullinane asked.

“No,” Reich said.

Cullinane was left hanging. Obviously the young man lived in this room. Obviously Reich’s daughter lived in it, too. He looked at her fingers, finding no wedding ring, and he must have blushed, for suddenly Reich burst into laughter. “Oh, the young man!” His daughter laughed, too, and Cullinane felt embarrassed at a joke which he failed to understand.

“Here at Kibbutz Makor,” Reich explained, “we decided from the first that our children would be brought up outside the home. So while they’re still babies we take two boys from two different families and two girls from two other families and we put them together in one room. And they stay together till they’re eighteen.”

“You mean …”

“Yes,” the general said. “In this bed my daughter. In that one the young man you just saw. Where you’re sitting another girl. And over there another boy.”

Cullinane gulped. “Till eighteen?”

“That’s a natural stopping age,” Reich said. “At eighteen everyone goes off to the army. There the boys and girls meet other people their own age and they get married quite normally.”

“They don’t …” Cullinane could scarcely frame his questions.

“What you mean,” the girl said easily, “is that we almost never marry boys from our own kibbutz. We know them far too well.”

Cullinane looked at the proximity of the beds and said, “I suppose so.”

“As for the other problem that worries you,” the lovely girl went on, “I’ve lived here at Makor for eighteen years and in that time we’ve had only two pregnancies and one abortion. In our grammar school when I was in Washington we had ten times that many in one year. And the girls there were only fourteen.”

Suddenly, in the small room, Cullinane could see his sister in suburban Chicago. The silly woman had three daughters and at thirteen each had become, under her tutelage, a premature Cleopatra, with lipstick, permanent and some pimply-faced teen-age boy as her steady date. The youth of his nieces had been a fleeting thing, and at sixteen each had begun carrying in her purse a flat tin box of contraceptives, in case her escort had forgotten. It was difficult for him to comprehend what Teddy Reich and his daughter were saying—that there was a different way of rearing children, one that worked at least as well as the preposterous system now being followed in America. His reflections were halted when the young man returned to his room, clean-shaven but still in his shorts. With some awkwardness he dressed and ran off to a meeting being held in the schoolhouse.

“Tell them I’ll be along in a minute,” Reich’s daughter cried. Then she turned to Cullinane and asked, “Do you think I’m ready for Chicago?”

“More than ready,” he assured her.

“And you’ll help with my application?”

“I’d be proud to sponsor you.”

The girl left and the two men sat alone in the room. “Do you find it so incredible?” Reich asked. Not waiting for an answer from the stunned archaeologist, he said, “The results of our system are striking. No juvenile delinquency. None. A minimum of sexual aberration. Of course we have our share of adultery and backbiting, but our success in marriage? Far above normal. And when they become adults they have the sturdy drive we need in Israel.”

“But living together … till eighteen?”

Reich laughed and said, “I knew a lot of psychotics in America who’d have been much better off if they’d lived that way in their youth. Saved them from a hell of a lot of mental disturbances.” Cullinane wondered if Reich was alluding to him, a man in his forties and not yet married; perhaps things would have worked out differently if he had shared a room with girls in this normal way until he was eighteen. But these speculations were ended when Reich said, “We kibbutzniks represent only about four per cent of the total population of Israel. But we have supplied about fifty per cent of the national leadership. In all fields. Because we grew up with honest ideals. Solid underpinning.” He rattled off the names of Israel’s notable leaders, and all were old kibbutzniks.

“And none of those men own anything?” Cullinane asked.

“What do you own? Really?” Reich countered. “Your education. Your force of character. Your family. Do you really own the other things? Or do they own you?” But as they walked back to the archaeological headquarters Reich confessed, “Each year the kibbutz percentage of the total population diminishes. Today people are no longer interested in our ideals. Only in making a fast buck.” He shook his head sadly. “So much the worse for Israel.” And in a gloomy frame of mind he walked back through the buildings he had created with one arm.

September came and the dig settled down to the great, serious work before it. The distractions of the Crusader castle were past; the wars between religions were silenced; Romans and Greeks had known their day in the dust; the Jews had built their horned altars; and now the archaeologists had come to those shadowy, those fruitful centuries when remembered history was only just beginning. At last the two trenches operated at the same level, substantiating each other and turning up fragments of clay vessels broken by women not yet accustomed to kitchen utensils, while beds of flint called across the centuries their messages of men who knew no iron for hunting, but only the sharpened edges of stones and lengths of wood in which to fasten them.

Now Vered Bar-El became the most important member of the team, for she alone could look at pottery and assure the men that they had dug through one civilization and were entering another; it was uncanny how she could identify the pieces, some no larger than a shilling, by their glaze, their decoration, the manner in which they were baked, their constituent clays, or whether they had been smoothed down by hand, a wad of grass or a comb. Her pert little figure, clad in a playsuit, could be seen darting into the trench each morning and huddled over her workbenches the rest of the day. Tabari and Cullinane ratified Vered’s findings by inspecting the thin layers of rubble in which the sherds were found; the tell contained seventy-one feet of accumulation laid down during eleven thousand years, and that meant less than eight inches added per century. But recent levels like the Crusader castle had accounted for much of the deposit, so that in the pre-Christian periods whole groups of centuries might be represented by only two inches of silt, but these two inches could contain records as easy to read as if they had been reported in the morning newspaper. It was hard to believe, unless one saw a thin band of soot extending uniformly from Trench A across to B, how the burning of the town—either by enemies or accident—could have left a record that was unmistakable; and when good samples of soot were found, say, a charred deer’s horn or a seashell brought to Makor by some ancient trader from Akko, they could be airmailed to Chicago or Stockholm, where scientists could analyze the carbon of the charring and wire back the date when the fire had taken place.