Джеймс Миченер - The Source

When the archaeologists reached the dig the mood was autumnal: only Yusuf and his family of twelve worked at the job of closing down the installations and it was obvious that the old man was beginning to find himself isolated in Israel. Already his children were learning Hebrew and adopting kibbutz ways. His three wives were accommodating themselves to Israel, and the pregnant one was even going by herself to the Kupat Holim doctor to discover how to have a baby in a modern way. From their children the mothers were learning Hebrew, and the old patriarch was left alone, a man out of place in a world that he would never catch up with. His eleven underlings, once so subservient in Morocco, now assumed easy control of the family; no longer was he a man of authority, and as the years passed, the half-blind old man would grow in bitterness, while his new land stole from him his dignity, his language and his comprehension. On Tuesday the Air France plane took off for Cyprus and Morocco.

Ilan Eliav did not laugh at old Yusuf in his deepening solitude, for he felt himself to be in a comparable prison. Vered was proving unpredictably difficult; she still insisted upon an immediate answer. “The last plane leaves on Friday,” she warned. Wednesday came and Thursday, and B.E.A. made its flight. On Friday morning Cullinane, watching two people whom he cherished caught in such a vise, intruded against his own best interests; waiting till he found them together in the ceramics room, he joined them casually and said, “I’m not using a phrase when I say that what you two are doing to yourselves is breaking my heart. Eliav, if you decide to chuck the cabinet business, if you do fly to Cyprus, I will personally guarantee you work for ten years here at Makor and a teaching position in the Chicago area for the rest of your life. And I’m certain we can find Vered a job teaching archaeological ceramics. I make this offer because I don’t want you to reach decisions due to economic pressure.”

“I’ve been asked to teach at Oxford,” Eliav said dryly. “Knowing my background you must appreciate how enticing that would be.”

“I spoke only as a gesture of honor. I don’t want to marry Vered because you couldn’t…”

At this moment Vered was consulting her watch, and she seemed to be marking off the minutes one by one, until finally she rose and said quietly, “The last plane has gone.” Looking at Eliav she placed her hands in his and stood tiptoe to kiss him. “I wanted you so much,” she said haltingly.

She broke down and Eliav was unable to console her, so Cullinane, moving quietly, placed his arm about her shoulder and drew her away. “We’ll come back to Makor in the summers,” he said. “When he can, Eliav will leave Jerusalem and work with us.”

She pushed him away and looked at him as if he were a stranger. “What are you saying, John? I warned you I’d marry only a Jew.” Then, seeing the shock on his face, she muttered, “Damn, damn,” and ran from the room.

The meaning of her behavior did not become clear until three o’clock that afternoon when Paul J. Zodman arrived unannounced in Israel, jumped into a car supplied by the U.J.A. and roared up to Makor. Bursting into an end-of-week staff meeting he said crisply, “I stayed out of this for a week. To give Dr. Eliav the time he needed to make up his mind. He hasn’t married Vered. Neither has Cullinane. So I’m going to. Sunday morning.”

It was Cullinane who said the asinine thing. He stared at Vered, who had regained her composure and was again a little Astarte, her eyes modestly downcast, and then he looked at Zodman, expensively dressed in blue sharkskin, freshly shaved, committed and eager. “But you already have a wife!”

“Had,” Zodman corrected.

“Oh, my God!” Cullinane cried. “Is that why you sent me the cable ‘Come to Chicago’? You knew I couldn’t leave and you gambled that Vered could…”He saw Zodman and Vered smile, and to his surprise he cried, “Zodman, you’re a plain son of a bitch!”

The merchant brushed this aside and said congenially, “Look, John! I came here two months ago an unmarried man. I saw two other unmarried men, you and Eliav, allowing an adorable widow … So I brought her to Chicago to see if she’d marry me.” There was silence, after which Zodman said quietly, “She said ‘No.’ Wouldn’t even let me romance her. Said she was engaged to Eliav, and that if he wouldn’t marry her because of the Cohen business, she might marry you, John, and to hell with being a Jew.”

The group gasped, even Vered. She looked appealingly at Zodman and reminded him, “You were not to speak of that.”

But Zodman continued, “Somewhere along the line all of you have loused things up, so on Sunday, Vered and I are getting married and flying back to Chicago.”

Cullinane looked at the various people and said plaintively, “This dig is going to end just like Macalister at Gezer. My executive goes into the government. My pottery expert flies to Chicago. Tabari, you and I are going to dig this tell all by ourselves.”

“We’ll find you somebody,” Zodman joked; but as Eliav had pointed out, it was never easy to be a Jew, and the Chicago millionaire was about to discover this in a most painful way. He proposed to drive Vered that night to Jerusalem to get a permit for their marriage, but Eliav reminded him that he couldn’t drive because it was Shabbat. “Who gives a damn about Shabbat?” Zodman snapped, and he roared his borrowed car southward across the Galilee.

In Jerusalem no one would speak to him on Shabbat and on Sunday he was advised by the rabbinical board, “Sorry, Mr. Zodman, but you can’t get married in Israel.”

Without raising his voice he asked, “And why not?”

“Because we have decided that no divorce granted by an ordinary American rabbi can be trusted.”

“Rabbi Hirsch Bromberg is scarcely average.” Zodman had been on the committee that selected Bromberg.

“He’s not on the approved list,” a secretary reported.

Still keeping his voice low Zodman said, “I also have a perfectly good civil divorce from the state of Illinois.”

“Israel recognizes no civil divorce,” the rabbis replied.

“You mean to say that from this little room you’re going to judge all the Jews of the world?”

“In Israel it is our responsibility to say who can get married and who cannot,” the rabbis insisted.

In a very low voice Zodman asked, “And I can’t?”

“No.”

“I’m a large contributor to the Republican party,” Zodman said ominously. “I know Senator Dirksen and Paul Douglas.” His voice rose to a roar. “And I will not accept this insult.”

He stormed down to Tel Aviv to see the American ambassador—the state of Israel claimed Jerusalem as its capital and governed the country from there, but foreign powers, still holding that under the United Nations agreement all of Jerusalem was internationalized, insisted upon keeping their embassies in Tel Aviv and recognizing only it as the capital—but the legal aide to the ambassador assured him that the situation in Israel was precisely as the rabbis had explained it: there was no civil marriage; the local rabbis refused to recognize divorces issued by most American rabbis; and there was no conceivable way by which Zodman could marry Vered Bar-El. “Of course,” the young man suggested, “what many do is to fly to Cyprus. Such a wedding does leave the status of the children to be born of the marriage uncertain, insofar as Israel is concerned, but if you don’t plan to live in Israel…”

“Me? Live in Israel? Are you kidding?” And Zodman drove Vered back to Makor, cursing most of the way.

There it was agreed that Zodman and Vered must fly to Cyprus, as so many other Jewish couples were doing, and in the days required for Vered to clean up her work on the first year’s dig, the five leaders of the expedition had repeated opportunities for extended cross-questioning, during which Vered made her position clear: she was leaving Israel not because she liked large cars and air-conditioning, which her friends would charge, saying that she had sold out to the fleshpots of Egypt; not because she was afraid of the future, for she had given ample proof of her courage; not because her allegiance to a Jewish state had flagged, for she knew Israel to be the only tenable solution in a world where other sovereign states had been unable to protect the Jew or give him any honorable alternative to a homeland of his own; but rather because she felt that as a human being aged thirty-three she could no longer bear the burdens of a religion in the throes of becoming a state, with its military problems, social problems, economic problems and especially its complex religious problems. “I’ve done my part for Judaism,” she said without bravado. “I risked my life in more than a dozen battles, lost my husband, lost most of my friends, and I really do believe that I’m entitled to say, ‘Rachel, from now on you be the Jewess. Little Vered is just too damned tired.’”