Джеймс Миченер - The Source

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 the 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.

Three years later, when all that he had attempted had prospered, when his old wife had found strange peace and understanding, when his son was well begun in life and his daughter happily pregnant, he would stand alone in a thicket of thorn and pistachio, trembling with a mighty terror that he could not even describe. It is with this man’s experiences in these three culminating years that the remembered history of Makor begins.

When he reached the well Ur bent down and splashed cool water onto his face. Taking a wooden cup which had been laboriously carved by flints, he drank the water and was about to put the cup aside when he saw his face looming up from the well. It was hairy, surrounded by a circle formed of hunched shoulders, small tight ears and drooping brow, but it was marked by two blue eyes that shone like little stars.

The light reflecting from his eyes fascinated Ur and he began to laugh, but as he did so a tiny pebble, scarce bigger than a bee’s wing, tumbled into the well and set up ripples which distorted the image of his face, and something in the way the water moved, taking his eyes and ears and mouth with it, frightened Ur and he drew back. But as quickly as the ripples had passed, the water restored his features to their proper place and he was once more Ur. He shivered to think that some unknown power could alter the essential he and smear it into a distorted form. Then he smiled at himself but he was not so free and happy as before.

Above his head he heard a soft whisper. It was surely a bee, and he dropped the wooden cup, staring here and there at the sky, and like the hunter he was he spotted the insect and saw its direction down the wadi in which, when rains accumulated, a muddy river roared briefly on its way to the sea. There were dead trees in the wadi where bees kept their homes, and Ur sprang to his feet, chasing after the insect, for if he could keep pace with it he might find his next cache of honey. With long-practiced eyes he followed the elusive bee until he was certain he had spotted the hidden tree. Motionless he sat on the ground, and after a while he saw where bees were flying in and out with whatever it was they stole from flowers to make their honey.