Джеймс Миченер - The Source

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 being 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.