P. Deutermann - The Last Man

Go find a window in the battlements and jump out is more like it, she thought. She turned back around. “Why is it necessary for anyone to go with him? If he’s so innocuous, that is.”

Ellerstein sat back in his chair. “Well. It is Metsadá, after all. If he was one of those treasure hunters, started digging or something, it would be a major insult to one of our most important shrines.”

“Digging, at Metsadá? I’ve tried that, Yossi. You break your intellectual teeth and your shovel. Yigael Yadin went to bedrock at every important feature at the site. Now there’s nothing but rocks and scorpions. Digging is the least of your worries.”

“You know what I mean. Me, I’m just a glorified number cruncher, but you are an archaeologist. You know what can happen when amateurs interfere with a site. Plus, Metsadá is not the safest site in Israel: You can fall four hundred meters from three sides of that fortress if you misstep.”

“That prospect is not all that unappealing sometimes,” she muttered. “Perhaps I should do this thing.”

“Yehudit, Yehudit, don’t talk like that. Three and a half days. Time to reflect. Then you’ll come back here, prepared to talk about it.”

“ Talk about it? Talk about what, my summer camp at Metsadá, or my future here at the university?”

“The latter, of course.” Ellerstein got up, giving her a moment to absorb what he had just said. His voice became formal again. “Because the chairman has told me he wants to conduct a board of academic review, Yehudit. If you will not seek professional counseling, if you will not open up to the people who want to bring you back into the human fold, they will probably terminate you here.”

She just stared at him. “My God, what have I ever done to that man? And why did he send you to tell me this instead of coming himself?”

“Come on, Yehudit, that’s a silly question. He knows we go back, you and me. Officially, he sent me because I am emeritus here in another department, and thus not directly involved, and I’m on the advisory board of the IAA.” He fixed her with that intense stare. “It’s what you are doing to yourself, Yehudit, that is the issue. So stop your complaining. Accompany the idiot American, as you call him. Then come back next Monday prepared to deal with this matter, because the time has come.”

Only when Ellerstein closed the door behind her did she let the tears come. In her mind she stepped aside as two parts of her personality argued: He’s right, all this blackness and wailing is just self-pity. Dancing with the demons, as Dov would have called it. And what, do you think you’re the only widow in Israel? You don’t read the papers every day? You’re just afraid to face life again. The bastards never would tell me what happened. He just disappeared. I said Kaddish over a letter on the kitchen table, for God’s sake. They said it was a radiation accident, but how do I know? No one knows what goes on in that awful place, Dimona: atomic bombs and possibly worse things. Israel’s world-famous, worst-kept secret.

Dov would not have been a part of the bomb making: He had signed on to work only on the peaceful nuclear engineering projects. Power stations. Radiation against cancers. Safer X-rays. Someday, the ultimate dream: nuclear fusion for electrical power. He had made that clear to the whole damn government when he took part in the LaBaG protest that year. The headlines had been sensational: Government physicist joins anti-nuclear-weapons protest.

She took a deep breath as she remembered those tense weeks. For a while they both thought he might lose his security clearance, and thus his job, but slowly it blew over. Dov had kept his contacts with LaBaG but stopped throwing it in his bosses’ faces. Yosef Ellerstein, whom he had met in the secret meetings of LaBaG, had counseled him to lie low, to subdue his activist profile. He was of more value to them inside the gates than outside in the protest marches. A year later Dov was dead. Snuffed out by a sudden pulse of energy that man had no business fooling with. She had never said it out loud but had always wondered if there had been a connection.

She stared into the olive trees, their foliage blurring now into a green mist, wishing not for the first time that she could just float out through the windows and merge with all that ancient greenness. Supposedly the trees were incredibly old, so old that the builders had carefully planned around the grove when they laid out the new university buildings on Mount Scopus. The olives were one of the spiritual hallmarks of this tortured land. Olives and blood. Everything, the stones, the trees, the warring religions, was incredibly old and drenched in the blood of forty centuries, if not more.

Masada was no exception, of course. Built as a palatial retreat by Herod the Great on the remains of a Maccabean fort, Masada had been both a desert villa and a place of refuge stocked with water, grain, and oil enough for years if the need ever arose. Herod, an Idumean appointed by Rome to rule the ungovernable Jews, had lived in dangerous times. Cleopatra VII of Egypt watched with acquisitive eyes from the Nile, and Rome, whose military power had spread over the known world, was engrossed with the transition from republic to imperium. Many of Herod’s own subjects hated him with a passion he returned whenever the occasion permitted. Technically Rome’s vassal in Judaea and a politician with no illusions, he built fortresses at strategic points all over ancient Judaea for both defense and personal refuge. All of the silly theories this American might conjure up would never disguise the fact that Masada was ultimately just like the rest of Israel — one more ancient killing ground.

She sighed, wiped her eyes, and gathered some papers into a dilapidated briefcase. She decided to go home early. After all, she had to pack for her great expedition. As for the meeting next Monday? That was serious — of this there was no doubt, not with Yosef Ellerstein being the messenger, which was a message in itself. So: for Monday? She sighed again. She would deal with Monday on Monday.

David dozed during the ride back down to Tel Aviv. Professor Ellerstein was beyond dozing: He was sound asleep and snoring forcefully. It had been an interesting afternoon, especially when David had had a better look at his minder. Tallish, maybe five eight in her stocking feet, athletically slim, and dark: black hair; pronounced, arching eyebrows; dark brown, almond-shaped eyes. He thought her forbears must have been Sephardic Jews, for she bore their ancestral features: elongated oval face, high cheekbones, dusky olive complexion, and full lips. All of it under a rigid control, emphasized by her stern demeanor and signs of a quick if impatient intelligence. Properly decorated, she would have been strikingly beautiful, but she appeared to have eschewed makeup of any kind. There had been a brittle edge to her that fairly shouted: This is a man-free zone; back off.

She had not attended the afternoon discussions conducted by Professor Strauss’s two assistants but did appear briefly toward the end of the session to set up their rendezvous for the following morning. He had made a casual comment to the two assistants about her, and they both rolled their eyes. Very beautiful, yes, but a walled city, Mr. Hall. Which had not dissuaded a few of their more adventurous academic colleagues from making a run on The Ressner, as she was known in certain male circles. There was now an informal club of eligible males who called themselves the Shot-downs, after having made a pass with a singular lack of success. Okay, so she’s exotic, if not exactly Miss Personality. A widow of five years, they said. Something going on there, but the two young assistants declined to elaborate.