Martin Fieber - He Who Returned

He was alone. His mouth dust dry. The only thing about him that still functioned was the carousel of thoughts which he for some time had not been able to stop. Like wild monkeys the countless thoughts sped about his confused mind. What in the world had driven him to travel to the West Bank at this time of year, to... yes, he truly had not been able to tell anyone this .. to look for records from one no less than Jesus himself? If only he had not had that strange dream a few months ago, then he would not be sweating like a dog in this desolate place now. No dream he had ever had before had remained as vivid in his memory. This sequence of images had a digital quality and each pixel shone in a color, the likes of which he had never seen. It was a color dream. Usually, if anything at all, he saw strange and nonsensical sequences in black and white. But this dream was beautiful. This dream illuminated...

Nonsense. He cursed this dream, for it had knocked over the thought construct which he had hitherto made about life. Even in his thoughts it was still embarrassing for him to think about this dream, for a figure had appeared to him that called itself Jesus. This figure had given him numbers and requested that he seek for personal writings of him.

The storm became even stronger, as if the spirits of the wind were mocking him. In the first weeks following that ominous night he still thought the dream was so ridiculous, that he did not even attempt to check the numbers, which turned out to be coordinates. But the figures stuck like chewing gum in side his head. The more he wanted to forget them, the more they stuck to his mind. The harder he tried to forget Jesus, the more the blue eyes of this dream apparition burned themselves into his memory.

He never wanted to care about such nonsense. Especially, since this nonsense had reached him in form of a dream. Already his father had told him ‘dreams are ten a penny.’ And besides ­– shouldn’t the dream figure have known that he, Michael, had very little interest in God or his son. This was even an understatement. Michael believed neither in God nor in Jesus Christ. Also not in the church nor, as had become fashionable recently, in the fat-bellied Buddha, who was appearing in more and more gardens in his neighborhood. He neither believed in eternal torments of hell nor in singing angels, nor in the possibility of reincarnation on earth, although it was not more logical to him, to only be born once rather than several times. He also simply had spent far too little time considering faith. He neither believed in a universal creative conscience, nor in a bearded father in heaven. And he did not believe in Jesus Christ. Not even now, even if his nose had just caught a salty whiff of the nearby Dead Sea.

But just this in the end convinced Michael, that he should look into that dream and those numbers a little more intensively. If a James Bond had appeared in his dream, passing along coordinates as he sat next to a blonde co-pilot in some futuristic vehicle, than he would have forgotten the dream quickly. But it had not been James Bond, but rather a Messiah.

And yes, after endless hours of critical inner dialogue with himself, he finally had figured out that those numbers were not dates, but rather coordinates. These numbers were supposed to communicate a specific place to him. And this place was somewhere in the West Bank, north of the modern day excavation site Khirbet and Qumran. How was he, a happily engaged twenty-eight year old industrial clerk, who had no clue about archaeology, supposed to search for hidden scrolls in the desert? Did this Jesus really think that he, Michael Jansen from Germany, could find anything that legions of archaeologists had missed?

It should only be a few more metres before he would have reached his goal. One more quick glance at the GPS, and he was there. The satellite supported navigation system showed him that he had arrived. Michael stopped and looked around. Nothing except red brown cliffs and boulders was to be seen. Behind him the hill chain of the Judaic hill country rose up and diagonally in front of him he had a view of the Dead Sea, the lowest point of surface in the world. A truly inhospitable place in his eyes. He did not like deserts, he did not like scraggy country. And he did not like storms that constantly blew sand into his eyes.

Not a soul far and wide. No prominence in a radius of fifty meters. Just a large rock directly in front of him. And on first glance the rock did not look like it could hide a secret. But the data on the GPS left no room for doubt. This rock was the place that he had sought. Michael carefully walked around it, but it did not seem suitable, too normal to serve as hiding place of possibly important writings. A lot of debris lay all about it, and there was no clearly visible indication of an entrance.

Suddenly, as if an old memory had seized him, he began, with hands accustomed more to a computer keyboard, to remove first smaller, then larger pieces of rock. And lo and behold, he discovered a texture in the rock which encouraged him to continue removing rubble.

At first gingerly, then faster and faster. Patience was truly not his forte. However eventually the certainty dawned in him that he would find something. A narrow horizontal cleft emerged above the ground, into which he could barely squeeze himself. Now he even had to work hard in this heat. The thought of that alone was enough to cause his forehead to break into a sweat.

He looked at the rock again thoroughly. Directly above the possible entrance many holes were visible, which birds perhaps had left there over a long period of time. There was still a lot of rubble lying about, and one could make out, that the crevice under the rock must have once been much smaller. No grown up person could have crawled in here.

Michael hesitated. Should he really continue looking? How should this Jesus ever have come this way? So far away from any road?

“You and I, we are here now”, Michael admonished the lazy bum in himself. “You would prefer to just have your peace now, and I would prefer to be sitting in an ice-cafe enjoying spaghetti-ice-cream with Susanne. However, unfortunately you do not have your peace and quiet and I am not sitting next to my girl. So pull yourself together. We are here and I am going to continue digging.” He shook his head once he had noticed that he was already beginning to talk to himself. No surprise, considering the heat.

Michael unpacked his shovel, strapped his little headlamp on and began to enlarge the entrance. Then he knocked against the ceiling of the rock. Tack, tack, tack. Nothing unusual. Further right. Tack, tack , tack. Also nothing. Further back. Tack, tack, tack. Maybe he needed to check the floor. It took a while, until he had turned around in the narrow crevice. Tock, tock, tock. Nothing. Tock, tock, tock. Also nothing. Maybe further back. Tock, tock, tong. What was that? Had it really just sounded like there was a cave beneath him? It sounded hollow and somehow wooden. Was this cave only covered up by boards? He dug about in the floor with his shovel and was just trying to support himself when the floor gave way. He almost would have fallen into a little cave that now appeared underneath him. Stones rolled into the depths. Klong, klong, klong, pling. Now what was that? Something in roughly one metre depth sounded different than the rock. It sounded, he could not believe it, somehow... metallic.

Now a sense of adventure overcame him. Michael let himself down into the little cave and first shovelled rubble to one side, until he actually did spy metal underneath the sand. A kind of aluminum suitcase lay there, which however was larger than the hole through which he had entered the cave. A despairing grunt escaped his lips.

There was nothing left for him to do than to increase the size of the entrance. That might take time. Fortunately t was a little cooler underneath the large rock. After about an hour of hard work he had brought the suitcase into the light of day. It was locked and also did not show any way of being opened, but he wanted to look into that later. “First, to get away from here” he said to himself. “At last you have found it again” he heard a voice coming from somewhere.