P. Deutermann - The Last Man

He stood up, wobbling a little with the effort of balancing the backpack, and continued up the slope to the western gate.

Judith jerked up in the bed with a muffled shout, her eyes wide open but momentarily unseeing. The nightmare had been terrifyingly vivid, ending with the sight of Dov, his back to her, slowly opening a large steel door, heedless to her shouts of warning as he was exposed to a green cauldron of radiation boiling over in a flare of unearthly light that first put him in silhouette and then showed him as a skeleton, transfixed in the doorway, and then as nothing more than a humanoid wraith, leaving her shouting his name over and over but unable to move or make him hear.

She gulped several breaths of air and then subsided back onto her pillow. The glowing door had been replaced by the blank wall of her room. Never before had she experienced a dream like that. Her chest was trembling, and her T-shirt was damp with perspiration. What on earth had brought that on? She thought back to her talk with the American. Maybe talking about Dov had evoked some long-hidden subconscious pain. She wanted to switch on a bedside lamp, but the austere hostel rooms had only the one overhead light. She rolled over and looked out the window, but there was only the shadow of the sand hill behind the building. A breath of cooler air came through the partially opened window. She decided she needed some fresh air.

She got up and slipped on her jeans and sandals, considered and discarded the idea of a jacket, and went out into the corridor. She went downstairs and headed for the side door, not willing to take a chance on encountering some night owl from the hostel staff in just her damp T-shirt.

The side door was a fire door, with a steel bar across the middle, and she looked for signs of an alarm system, but there were none. She opened the door into the cool night air and felt instantly relieved. Not wanting to be locked out, she fished in her jeans for something to stuff into the bolt receptacle, only to notice that there was already a piece of paper wadded in there. Frowning, she stepped back into the hallway and let the door close, then pushed gently on the door itself. It opened. Damned careless, this, she thought. She would have to speak to someone at the desk in the morning. For now, she took advantage, and went outside to get some fresh air and clear away the lingering images of her frightening dream.

The night was dark, but there was good starlight, enough to see the ground. She walked out behind the building, glancing casually back at the hostel to see if there were any lights on, but the place was fully dark. The darkened mass of the fortress mountain loomed before her. The cable-car wire actually glinted in the starlight. A gentle breeze blew in from the western desert, pleasantly obliterating the sulfurous fumes of the Dead Sea.

She sighed as she walked slowly over to the sand bluffs overlooking the parking lots. This was, what, Wednesday night. One more full day here on this ridiculous assignment, babysitter to David Hall, American philosopher, and then back to Jerusalem on Friday. In time for another glorious Sabbath, alone in her apartment. Alone in her life. As she stood on the sand, she pondered her unusual openness with this man. She had talked to him about Dov and the emptiness of her life as she had talked to no man, to no one, actually, in the five years of living alone. Why was that, she wondered. Because he was a foreigner and was soon, as he had pointed out, going to leave, to go back to that strange planet called America? Or because he seemed to be a sympathetic as well as an attractive man?

She shivered in the darkness as she looked up again at the fortress. It had been different when she had been down here on digs. The hostel had not existed. There had been little more than a guard shack, with no cable car or even parking lots for tour buses. They had camped in semipermanent tents up on the western plateau next to the main Roman camp, courtesy of the army engineers. Their water had come through an oil company’s makeshift pipeline, and the weather had been atrocious, but there had been good times, too: nights around the fire like in the kibbutzim. Stories, academic gossip, deep intellectual arguments. The comradeship of the profession.

The symbolism of the expedition had been hard to avoid. Even Yadin had commented on it in the reports from his earlier excavations. With their camp cheek by jowl with that of the Roman army, and the IDF’s temporary cable lift for tools and machinery mounted on the siege ramp itself, the parallels were hard to miss: They were the new besiegers, digging in the dust of the centuries to find — what? Proof of Josephus’s tale? Artifacts? Treasure? Some indication of how those miserable men, as Josephus called them, could have steeled themselves to do what they had done rather than surrender. Was this what the American had come to find out, too? The whole grim story had remained lodged in myth until the Yadin expedition had found what looked very much like the ten lots described in the story of the Last Man, told in meticulous, bloody detail by Josephus, the turncoat. The Last Man, who would go among the dead and dying, to “extend the privilege” to anyone who might require it, before then thrusting his sword through himself with all his strength.

She shook her head, as if in defiance of all the brooding sadness up there. Israel: Your history is written in blood like no other nation’s, and from the beginning of time, too. She had begun to wonder lately if she should get out of the archaeology business altogether, go find a job as a secretary or librarian, something that would lift her nose and her spirits out of the sanguinary past and into contemporary life before she became a complete ghost. Hall had said it, as only an American would be brash enough to say it: You are wasting your life, Judith; you’re compost in a hole. Not even Dov would want you to exist like this.

Her breasts were cold with just the undershirt. She decided to go back in. Try again for sleep, and pray that the terrifying dream did not come back. That was part of her problem, she knew: not knowing what had really happened to Dov. And what had that security man with the skull-like face said? That she would never know. As she went through the door, she reached down for the piece of paper jammed in the lock but then thought better of it. She would leave it there, rub the manager’s fat face in it in the morning. What kind of security was this, anyway?

At one fifteen David stood just outside the ruined walls of the western palace, the backpack at his feet. He studied the gradual slope of rock that seemed to converge, like a very shallow amphitheater, on the small cluster of stub walls and rubble down by the eastern gate. From this elevation, he could see over the eastern casemate walls, across the glittering Dead Sea, and into the lumpy, dark foothills of Jordan on the other side.

The question was this: If it rained up here, where would the runoff go? The top of the mountain was not flat. The major portion of the area between the southern fortifications and the entrance to the northern palace-villa, nearly five acres by David’s estimate, consisted of a shallow, bowl-like — no, he thought, more like a shallow, tilted dish. He bent down to the backpack, and extracted a tennis ball. From his crouching position, he launched it gently down the slope and watched to see where it would go. The white ball, barely visible in the starlight, bumped across the rough surface, hitting some small stones but rolling in almost a straight line directly to the mound of rubble surrounding what looked like a shallow pool about fifty feet back from the entrance to the eastern gate. He went down there, retrieved the ball, and repeated the exercise three more times from different positions at the top of the slope. Each time, the ball ended up near or in the same mound of rubble.