The Body

by Richard Ben Sapir

  “A man isn’t a penis, Sharon.”

  “He is not not a penis, either,” she said.

  “But I had put that part away. I had rigorously kept my vows. I had taken that energy and given it to God. Do you understand?”

  Sharon nodded. She moved her body into Jim’s and he folded his arms around her.

  “What are we going to do?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “We’ve got to stop this,” he said. “That’s what we’re going to have to do. We’re going to have to stop it, and you’re going to have to help me … I said you’re going to have to help me.”

  “Jim,” said Sharon, rolling over to get cigarettes nearby on a night table, “I said I understood. I didn’t say I approve. I understand why your Aztecs cut out the hearts of sacrificial victims, also.”

  “So, you are not going to help?” said Jim.

  Sharon took a long inhale on her cigarette and went to the table for Jim’s brandy. Without clothes her backside was even more lovely, two perfectly rounded pillows, moving with barefoot grace.

  She brought him his brandy glass, and as she bent down Jim’s hand rose to feel her right breast. He just wanted to do it so much. She kissed him.

  “Shit,” said Jim. “You know I should leave! I should get up and leave.”

  “Where are you going to put the disk? We’re closer here to Hebrew University.”

  “Right. I’ll put it there tomorrow. I hope you can see now the results of an occasion of sin.”

  “I do,” said Sharon. “I think I wanted you since the first moment at the airport.”

  “Same here,” said Jim. “I think it was the same here. But it has to stop. If you care for me, you’ll help.”

  “Uh huh,” said Sharon, sitting down on the bed next to him, stroking the hairs of his stomach.

  “Going to stop it. Tomorrow. We’ll figure out what we will do and then, dammit, we’ll do it. That’s it. Over,” said Jim. “Do you know you have a magnificent body.”

  “Only when it’s used, Jim.”

  “I never used to think lust would be my weakness. I was so sure that wasn’t going to be one of my problems,” said Jim, and he told her how he used to have a problem with premature ejaculation before he entered the priesthood, how he used to wonder sometimes whether that wasn’t one of the strong motives for his becoming a priest.

  He talked of the priesthood, and of New England, and how there would usually be snow by now in South Portland, Maine, where he had been a little boy. It was so natural and so good to talk like this with someone whom he was close to in mind as well as body. He was thirty-five years old and this was the first time he had ever enjoyed the comfort of falling asleep with someone in his arms.

  In the morning, even as his eyes opened, he said, “No.” Sharon was sleeping next to him, and he realized fully he had been lying to himself. He dressed even as he luxuriated in the smell of her, the joy of her apartment. He was supposed to be sorry for what he did. But he couldn’t feel it. He regretted the sin of it, but not the act itself.

  Actually, as he thought about it, he regretted that the act was a sin. He was even tinkering with thoughts of changing the Church law instead of himself. He was shocked to find that his great ability to lie to himself, the reasoning process that was to lead him to God, had been marshaled as his felicitous guide to the bowels of hell.

  He had even told himself that since he had been exposed to Sharon in service to the Church, vital service, it became less of a sin. He even had himself believing for a while that if he continued an affair with Sharon, and that it helped the Church, what he did was not a grievous breach of contract with God but actually a service to Him.

  Even on the mildest inquiry, this one did not hold. But there was his mind working against himself, lying to him, because his whole body wanted to stay in bed with Sharon that morning.

  He went up to the university, and entered the lab and locked the door, and opened the safe, and opened the case, and examined the disk, which was perfectly safe, and put the disk in the safe, and locked the safe.

  So much for all he could do without Sharon. He phoned her from the lab.

  “Where the hell are you? Don’t ever leave me like that, Jim. How could you do that?”

  “I had to put the disk away.”

  “Dubi left me like that. Don’t ever leave me like that.”

  “Your husband?”

  “Yes.”

  Adultery, Jim reminded himself. He had commited adultery. Not just fornication, but taken another man’s wife.

  “Sharon, we’ve got to stop this.”

  “Don’t say it over a phone, dammit. Say it to me.”

  “I won’t go to your apartment. It is an occasion of sin. I’d be lying to myself if I thought I could go there safely.”

  “You’re at the lab?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “All right. But never again in your apartment,” said Jim. And he was firm on that.

  They made love on a lab table when she got there. And he didn’t even know how it got started. She had walked in, he had started to explain exactly how they might work together without tempting each other, and her clothes were coming off. They were coming off in his hands, and his in hers.

  And they were making love again. And this time he vowed that when he ejaculated prematurely he would pull out and leave it an unpleasant sexual experience for Sharon, and, quite naturally, his problem, that last physical defense for his spiritual disaster, failed to function as expected. Sharon orgasmed twice before Jim did, and then hurriedly told him to dress.

  “Hurry, hurry,” she said. “Do you know where we are? I could lose my job. It would be a disgrace.”

  “Sharon,” said Jim, putting his shirt on inside out, “if we continue like this, every place is an occasion of sin. Our meeting is an occasion of sin. We can’t be together.”

  “So that means another archaeologist to replace me.”

  “That would be a risk for the Church, wouldn’t it?” said Jim.

  “Oh, yes. Yes,” said Sharon.

  “I couldn’t do that to the Church,” said Jim.

  “No,” Sharon agreed.

  “Too much of a risk,” said Jim.

  “Too much,” said Sharon.

  “I will not do that to the Church,” said Jim, with the gravity of a papal decree.

  By the weekend he was living at her apartment, and Father James Folan, S.J., celebrated Christmas in Jerusalem with a last Mass for the brothers at Isaiah House, and a bottle of Carmel wine for his girl friend.

  Father Walter Winstead got a Christmas gift in January. It was not the Church’s Christmas, but the Armenian Christmas, and it came from a Mossad representative who suggested that he stop referring to Haneviim Street in his misleading messages left for the Arab gardener.

  “You mean they are really picking up on them?” asked Father Winstead. He didn’t even bother to disguise the joy in his voice.

  “I am just suggesting that you stop. For many people’s benefits.”

  “Is there something going on on Haneviim Street?” asked Father Winstead.

  “If I knew, would I tell you?” said the man.

  “No. But do you know?”

  “If I knew, I wouldn’t be delivering messages in this weather to you.”

  “And what would happen if I continued to use Haneviim Street in the messages from the garbage?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It may be that this whole thing somehow doesn’t even have anything to do with us, but rather with you.”

  “Could be.”

  “It could be that the mention of Haneviim Street fits in with something I am not even aware of, and will never be aware of.”

  “Could be,” said the man from the Mossad, who wore a little fur hat and a jacket trimmed with fur that was wet now from the January rains.

  “Exciting, isn’t it?” said Father Winstead.

&n
bsp; “No,” said the man from the Mossad, who had to go out in the rain again.

  On the Orthodox Christmas, January 7, the one celebrated in Moscow, Warris Abouf mutilated himself. He did it with a hammer, and he did it to a toe.

  He did it after several attempts. He did it after a long wait looking at the toe, and looking at the hammer, and realizing he could not keep increasing the power of the blow because the last blow already hurt too much, and the toe wasn’t even swollen, let alone broken.

  As he waited he reminded himself why he was doing this. He told himself that he was doing it for his life, for his self-respect, to at least take the chance of getting back to where he felt he belonged.

  All the pressures were working properly on Vakunin. Unfortunately, the major had found a way out. There was still an increasingly urgent need to find an Arab-fluent Hebrew with knowledge of the Vatican. The major had confided that even a Russian had already been lost on that project. This must have been a promotion for the captured agent because there had been some sort of hint before that he was a Jew.

  And Warris knew through Tomarah’s actions there was another man on her mind. Whether she and the major had already tasted each other, he didn’t know. But she walked around the house with little unshared pleasantries inside her, and Warris assumed that she and the major had at least made contact. What Warris had not counted on was Major Vakunin’s solution.

  Why not, said the major, make another broad sweep of installations, even to the training camps producing the chaff? Who knows what hidden intelligence one might find under the cultural exterior.

  And to make sure what he was hearing, Warris this time said:

  “Major, I might have made a miscalculation on one of the students at Patrice Lumumba. I should work harder on him. I will stay here diligently.”

  “No. They’re no good,” said the major. “You’ve tried them before. I’ve accepted that. That’s accepted already. So they are out. You must leave Moscow.”

  “I think we just might be successful this time.”

  “No,” said Vakunin.

  From this, Warris knew Vakunin was now willing to risk a possible chance at success. And it could be only because he wanted something even more. He wanted Tomarah. The passion was working.

  But if Warris left Moscow, the major would get Tomarah, and that pressure on the major to get Warris out of the country might be lost. Indeed, given a good chance to get to know Tomarah, the major might want Warris close to her permanently.

  Warris had to keep things difficult for them to get together, and to do that he had to stay in Moscow, and to do that he needed an excuse, and a perfect excuse was a broken toe.

  It would be a break that would ease in pain enough to move on only when Vakunin’s plight got so bad that he had to send Warris to that assignment inside Israel.

  So, on Christmas Day, while Tomarah and Arkady were out, Warris took the hammer into the bathroom, shut the door, and hit his toe gently to get range with the hammer, and then brought it down harder. But as he brought it down, he decelerated, because he didn’t want to hurt himself. It ended up hurting.

  So he hit harder and it hurt more. And he hit harder a bit, just a bit, and it hurt more, a lot. What he needed was one single hard dramatic stroke.

  And that was the one thing he couldn’t get himself to do to that poor toe. And so he thought about what had brought him here, and how logical the solution was. A broken toe would keep Warris in Moscow closer to Tomarah. Warris could not, he would say, approach a fellow Arab if he were wounded, because, he would say, Arabs did not trust wounded people. It was the sort of thing Vakunin would believe of Arabs.

  Then, Warris would allow as how the toe might be healing, healing enough for a trip to a sunny climate where he knew it would heal. He knew Vakunin would break. He knew the man.

  Perfect plan, perfect part of the body, and all it needed was one decisive hammer stroke.

  Warris put down the hammer and went to the parlor, poured himself one big drink of vodka, swallowed it in a single burning gulp, returned to the bathroom, shut the door, picked up the hammer again, and thought about his toe.

  It must have been a half hour before he heard the door open, and in that time he had been addressing that rotten toe as the one thing that stood between him and home. He was building up a hate for the toe, but never quite so sufficient that it would quiet the toe’s contention that whatever Warris did to that toe, Warris was doing to himself.

  “Hurt me, and I’ll hurt you,” said the toe in Warris’ thoughts. That confident little arrogant toe. That traitorous toe.

  If an eye offends thee, Warris told himself, pluck it out. But that was Biblical, and he wasn’t going to pluck out an eye, either.

  There was nothing an eye could do to him that would make him do that. Warris was a prisoner in his body.

  And then he heard real voices. His son, Arkady, was talking to his mother, Tomarah. And Arkady, the Arkady Warris had kissed on the belly and made gurgle as a baby, that Arkady said to his mother:

  “Is the zhid home?”

  The toe went with one stroke. It was easy. When Warris left the bathroom limping, there were tears in his eyes. And it was not because of the toe, which he informed Tomarah and Arkady he had just broken. Arkady laughed.

  And Warris wept.

  In the third floor of the Vatican, His Holiness was hearing from his Secretary of State how the high number of Slavic priests in attendance at Christmas service might have given an inaccurate picture of the truly Catholic nature of the Church.

  Not that His Eminence Almeto Cardinal Pesci was one who thought Catholic meant Italian. But it was true that Italians tended to blend into the scenery, so to speak, and were accepted as administrators of the Church, almost like the weather. Italians, unlike Slavs, just did not stand out. It was a fact of the Church. Had been for centuries, probably almost since the Church came to Rome with Peter.

  His Holiness wanted to know about the American priest. And when he said it like that, there was only one priest he could mean when speaking to the Secretary of State.

  “He is progressing, Your Holiness.”

  “Is he close to his findings?”

  “I don’t know. As you remember, he did make some calculations concerning the Shroud of Turin.”

  “And what did you think?”

  “I didn’t give it all that much thought, Your Holiness. We are so busy now with the number of Slavic priests, just from an international standpoint …”

  “Did you think he made a good case?”

  “I didn’t give it that much thought, Your Holiness.”

  “Even if it were proved true, the shroud would be just a relic, a lost, precious relic, but a relic. Did you read the Gospels in the light of his report on the height of Jesus, and the height of people at that time?”

  “Read the Gospels again? I don’t have time, Your Holiness.”

  “I reread them. They are truly water to a thirsty spirit. I find nourishment and rest every time I return to them.”

  “If you find them relaxing, then, certainly, Your Holiness. I have always felt that the Pope himself is the one to get the least rest. Pius XII liked walks, they said.”

  “The priest had clung to the shroud to disprove the find, and then the shroud itself was torn away from him,” said the Pope. He felt sadness for the American priest. He had prayed for him several times.

  “I am sure the Jesuit will work it out, Your Holiness,” said His Eminence Almeto Cardinal Pesci, moving on to important matters of state, and then ending the morning session repeating what he had heard from a French cardinal about the lack of French clerics in the Vatican hierarchy, and how the Church was opening itself up to just those sorts of comments from everywhere as long as it kept replacing Italians with any other nationality. And he assured His Holiness he was not singling out Slavs. It was just that they were noticed.

  Mendel Hirsch had to report to superiors, not for them to hear how well Christmas went, but on
what was happening on Haneviim Street.

  “Do they know yet?” he was asked.

  “Not that I know of. I’ve just installed wiring down to the dig, heating, and a humidity control and lights. There will be a long stay. We had the trouble with that Reb Nechtal sect.”

  “The Jesuit, it is being said, had an impressive knowledge of the Talmud. The Jesuits are something, eh? The Reb Nechtal group will now trust only him, and not you, Mendel,” said the superior.

  “Well, you know, when they are not speaking Yiddish they speak Russian,” said Mendel Hirsch, carefully reminding his superior that there was a feeling among many Polish and Lithuanian and Galician Jews that Russian Jews were a bit insensitive to other people’s feelings, a sort of lack of Yiddishkeit, which translated into “nice Jewishness.” The essence of the statement was that the Reb Nechtal had chosen the Gentile over Mendel because of a Russian sort of harshness. That Mendel’s superior had a Russian background was not what Mendel, of course, was meaning. But it might explain why Mendel was not chosen to be the trustee of the agreement between the Reb Nechtal’s group and those who ran the dig.

  “It also might be, dear Mendel, that you used to eat ham sandwiches in front of the Wailing Wall.”

  “That was in a time when we felt we had to get the religious element out of Zionism. It was a statement that we were a political movement, you see. Not bound by ancient laws.”

  “Well, some people remember, Mendel. Maybe the Reb Nechtal remembered.”

  “And maybe somebody reminded him.”

  “Do you think we want Pesci’s man in there, instead of our man? Be reasonable.”

  “You know, it was at a time when we thought that if we could get the religious aspect out of the thing we might face less anti-Semitism.”

  “That was 1939,” said the superior, showing how wrong the strategy had been, because that was the year Hitler began his war and the destruction of Jews. And with that statement, they got back down to business, with nothing else having to be said. It was all unobstructed work thereafter.

  The department head of archaeology at Hebrew University dreaded the moment he faced. With Dr. Sharon Golban, he always had perfect proof that his department did not discriminate against either Sephardi or women.