P. Deutermann - The Last Man

“Yes, I do. Why the stick?”

She gave him the first inkling of a smile he had seen on her face. “For the serpents, of course. Possibly to lean on occasionally. Should your legs become tired, that is.” Her eyes were laughing at him, almost daring him to make the climb. “I will wait for you by the eastern casemate gate.”

He realized then that she would be able to take the cable car and get there ahead of him, even if he left immediately. So much for ditching the minder.

“You won’t come along, then?” he asked innocently.

“I wouldn’t dream of trying that climb, Mr. Hall. I am definitely not in shape for that slope.”

He considered making a gallant reply to that comment but decided against it.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll go get my stuff. See you up there in an hour or so.”

An hour? In your dreams, Mr. Hall, she thought, as she watched him set out across the parking lots for the base of the mountain. The soldiers made some funny comments as they watched him go. What a silly, silly man, she mused. Well, maybe not silly, but certainly impulsive. It must be an American trait. She had caught his surprise when she told him that it was a forty-degree slope, so he must know enough about mountaineering to appreciate the challenge, and yet, almost like a teenaged boy showing off, he had plunged ahead. But showing off for whom, Yehudit? Certainly not you. You’ve been about as cold a fish as could come out of the sea. Nothing new there. Since Dov had died, she had gone cold inside and out.

She thought back to her childhood days in an Ahuza neighborhood on Mount Carmel above Haifa as an only child. Her father’s parents, both wealthy medical doctors, had made aliyah from Europe before World War II, and her father taught European history at the exclusive Reali School. Judith had grown up as something of a solitary person, shy in adolescence from being too tall, eternally awkward, nearsighted, and uncommonly bright in school, characteristics that guaranteed a certain degree of ostracism by her more boisterous classmates.

Her mother had died of breast cancer when Judith was twelve, devastating both Judith and her father, who proceeded to cocoon himself from human relationships until he died seven years later. Judith had later realized that her father had been simply marking time for those seven years until he could join his wife, but at the time, his self-imposed isolation left her alone at a terribly vulnerable phase of her life.

With both parents effectively gone, she had thrown herself into academic achievement, excelling in high school and scoring a thirty-four out of thirty-five on the matriculation exams. Upon completion of her army service, she had gone first to Hebrew University, and then to Cambridge University in England to study with a Scrolls scholar. Like many Israelis, she had met her future husband, Dov Ressner, in the army. It turned out that Dov was something of a clone to Judith in terms of personality. He was a physics and mathematics major, extremely shy, nearsighted as she was, devoted to his academic career, and entirely inexperienced in the field of human relations, especially if they involved young ladies. It had taken a while, first because Judith had money and Dov did not, which caused a certain amount of awkwardness while she figured out how to get around his stubborn pride. Dov had lost his mother and father in an automobile accident, and the growing recognition that he and Judith had shared similar childhood experiences, combined with their mutual passion for academic achievement, blossomed into a marvelous year of catching up across the full spectrum of postponed adolescent love.

Sitting now in the dusty restaurant of the Masada tourist center, her eyes open but unseeing behind her glasses, she could still conjure up the images of the first awkward, tentative, and ultimately wonderful time they had made love, in the back of his cousin’s ancient Volkswagen van just like a couple of American hippies. That they were going to be married was almost a given, with the only obstacle being the requirement for him to study abroad in France for two years. Upon return from Europe, he completed his graduate studies at the Weizmann Institute and later took a job at the government research facilities down at Dimona. They got married as soon as she finished her own graduate degree in ancient languages.

Their time together, even once married, had been all too short. Because his work involved shift hours that often went through the night, he lived in a bunkroom at the site during the week. She had plunged directly back into graduate work, aiming now at a full Ph.D. in archaeology. Deferring as ever to the singular goals of academic achievement, they had put off having children until she completed her Ph.D., which ended up taking four years because of all the summer site work. Their marriage worked, although she had begun to appreciate, toward the end of her graduate program, that the enforced separation might have been shielding both of them from some of the more normal stresses and strains of marriage. Then Dov had begun to change, not so much in his personality but in his attitude about the work at Dimona. It was no secret between most of the married couples connected with Dimona what the site was really all about, although Dov never once told her anything that could be considered a violation of security. He became increasingly frustrated the year before he died, and Judith sensed that he was having trouble sustaining his passion for the pure science in the face of the product it was serving. It was a topic he avoided, however, and because it caused him to be more rather than less affectionate in his love for her, she had decided not to rock that particular boat, even after he became secretly, and then not so secretly, involved with the LaBaG faction.

Then the terrible night five years ago, when his laboratory supervisor, gray-faced and tongue-tied, along with the cadaverous Colonel Skuratov, had appeared at the apartment, hats in hand, a military driver standing nervously down in the lobby, to announce that Dov Ressner was dead. A sudden catastrophe at Dimona, mumbled words about an accident, a matter of urgent security according to Skuratov, and, worst of all, the news that he had been already interred. Judith had been raised in a mildly religious family, casual in the sense that they respected the tenets of the Jewish faith but were not overly zealous in observing every aspect of it. Besides, quick burials were a fact of life in the Middle East. Still, it had accentuated her sense of loss and grief never to see him again, even in death, or to be able to go to the place where he was buried. The scientist had told her as gently as he could that in all probability no humans could ever go near that place. Just like the stone-cold empty place in her heart, which no man would ever get near again.

“I say, miss, are you quite all right?” Judith looked up, her eyes blinking as she came back to the tourist center. The tourists had begun to arrive, and an elderly British gentleman was standing next to her table, looking at her with concern. Without knowing it, she had removed her glasses, and there were tears in her eyes.

“Yes, thank you,” she said hastily, blinking her eyes rapidly. “I was — I was far away, that’s all. Yes, I’m quite all right.”

He nodded, apologized for intruding, and sat back down at his table. She wiped her eyes, put the glasses back on, and scanned the sunlit side of the mountain, finally spotting the dogged American chugging his way up the Serpent Path, something that even dear Dov, outdoors enthusiast that he was, would probably never have tried. She stood up, shook the sorrowful cobwebs out of her mind, and decided to be nice to the dummy on the hill. He was harmless.