The Body

by Richard Ben Sapir

  “They could have picked it up,” said Sharon. “There is nothing like a bad habit for sure-fire imitation.”

  Dr. Sproul laughed. He didn’t want to go to his hotel room. He wanted to see the body right away.

  “Had some trouble with the Hasidim, you say?”

  “They’re not Hasidim. Hasidim is just one group among the ultra-Orthodox,” said Jim.

  “But you made a deal with them on the body. Couldn’t remove it, you say?”

  “Right,” said Jim.

  “You see, I don’t think they believe in real Judaism. Those clothes aren’t from the Bible or the Talmud. They’re from eighteenth-century eastern Europe,” said Dr. Sproul.

  Sharon laughed agreement and parked the car.

  “The clothes are only a device to let women know the men should not be accosted for lewd things because they are holy men. Like a priest’s collar,” said Jim.

  “And what about their long sideburns, peot, Dr. Folan? You know, the Bible doesn’t say which locks should not be cut. Could be the forelock. They just chose the sideburns to let grow.”

  “Right. Like the Western Church chose December the twenty-fifth. The important thing is that they’re doing the work of the Lord, right?” said Jim.

  “I can’t see doing it that way,” said Dr. Sproul.

  “That’s why you are a Methodist,” said Jim, nodding to the Orthodox guard who was stationed at the dig. “And that’s why he is Orthodox.”

  Dr. Sproul laughed.

  “The problem is not that he believes in his laws,” said Sharon, “but that he is making us live by them.”

  “Good point,” said Dr. Sproul. “I would prefer using a laboratory to examine the body. Laboratory light should be the best of sunlight. Darkness breeds imagination, superstition.”

  He peered over the edge of the dig.

  “Twenty-five hundred years is a long time down, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Yeah,” said Jim.

  Dr. Sproul had bought the date and story, so far.

  When the metal door was open and Dr. Sproul followed Sharon into the tomb, Jim crossed himself quickly and said a little prayer.

  “This is a tomb?” said Dr. Sproul, looking around when the lights were on. “A good-sized tomb. Man was crucified, you say?”

  “Yes,” said Sharon.

  “How do you know?”

  “Orange line on his tibia. That’s oxidized iron.”

  “Correct,” said Dr. Sproul. “But you found some dating evidence for the First Temple period, 500 B.C.?”

  “Right,” said Sharon.

  “For the Second Temple period, I would say oxidized iron is a right assumption for crucifixion. But frankly, Sharon, I don’t know if your find really is crucifixion for 500 B.C. What do you think, Dr. Folan?”

  “Me?” said Jim.

  “Yes,” said Dr. Sproul.

  Sharon looked at Dr. Sproul, worried. She had said she would bail Jim out if he got in over his head. Obviously she felt he could answer it.

  “I think any oxidized iron line means a spike. And on the tibia, what else is it, except some gigantic accident? Would they nail a dead body anywhere? I doubt it. Only crucified bodies have it, in my experience.”

  Dr. Sproul nodded. He filled the bowl of a pipe. Sharon put a hand on his arm. No smoking.

  “He was found there?” asked Dr. Sproul, nodding to the niche.

  “Yes,” said Jim.

  “No other bodies?”

  “No.”

  “It’s an awful lot of tomb for one man, especially a crucified one. Of course, we don’t know how disgraceful crucifixion was to the Babylonian. They could have done it to the wealthy and powerful, too. After all, they did take the Jews into captivity.”

  “My family,” said Sharon, “were rescued by Cyrus the Great.”

  “The first Diaspora,” said Dr. Sproul. “I always liked that passage about the writing on the wall. That’s where it comes from, you know. When the writing hand told the Babylonian king his kingdom had been judged and his days were numbered.”

  Dr. Sproul thought about that, and smiled. “Just sort of setting where everyone was coming from, which you archaeologists do when you study a dig. You know who is where for what purpose, so you don’t go putting your own values on things.”

  Jim nodded. He remembered how well Sharon had set the scene that Jesus had walked into, His very admission of the truth being a death sentence to that life that threatened the stability of the northern route to the empire’s grain basket. In the end, they did not kill Him for who He was, but for who they were. Jim had to remember Dr. Sproul was setting his scene for approximately 500 B.C. This was the Babylonians, not the Romans. He could not make any reference to Roman rule, or the Sadducees, descendants of the Maccabees who revolted against Alexander’s generals.

  Alexander had yet to conquer the Persians, who had yet to conquer the Babylonians. Rome was a little city on a river. The Persian empire was about to be great. And the Jews were going into exile for the first time. As the prophets had foretold.

  Jim went to one side of the opaque cover, Sharon to the other. They lifted it off, and carried it to the base of the tomb steps.

  The bones were exposed again. Only the portion where the jaw had been cracked off was the original brown. The rest had the whitish cast of the polyvinyl.

  “Sort of big, wasn’t he?”

  “Beg your pardon?” said Jim.

  “Big. How tall is he?”

  “Five-five,” said Jim.

  “That’s tall for the First Temple period.”

  “Very big?” asked Jim.

  “No. It’s just that at that time the Roman roads weren’t in, and one thing you need for nutrition is roads. A good road network is the first requirement of good agriculture because it encourages farmers to grow food for profit, you see? And, to boot, Romans put up aqueducts up and down this area. So people were generally smaller than before the Romans came.”

  “How much smaller?”

  “Two or three inches. You see, this fellow would be the normal size for the Second Temple period. He’d also be tall if he were found in a suit of knight’s armor in Europe. Had a lot of five-footers in medieval Europe, what with the Ice Age and all.”

  “Uh huh,” said Jim.

  Dr. Sproul put the unlit pipe in his mouth and hummed to himself. Jim swallowed. The cave smelled somehow musty again, like before the dehumidifier went into action. Jim reminded himself to breathe.

  Behind Dr. Sproul’s back, Sharon nodded encouragement, and mouthed words that she loved Jim.

  Maybe, thought Jim, God had sent her to him as a comfort in God’s mission.

  And maybe that was another self-deception. He could have relied on Jesus. The Mass and communion were not unknown for comfort. Neither was confession, which he hadn’t been to since before Christmas. Adultery, Father Folan reminded himself, was not a spiritual support from God.

  “Well, I don’t think he was a field slave. Look here at the legs.”

  Jim got behind Sproul.

  “You see, there is no buildup of bone that a field slave or a soldier would have. Marching, or anything like that,” said Sproul.

  “Perhaps royalty?” said Sharon.

  “No, no. Look at the arms. This man worked with his arms, but not his legs. He was a potter. A carpenter, stonemason, some kind of craftsman who required arm strength.”

  “Uh huh,” Jim managed to say.

  “Doesn’t mean he wasn’t a holy man. You see, Jewish holy men at that period all had occupations, too. They did not have that intense ritual priesthood, such as later.”

  “You’re talking about the Sadducees,” said Sharon. “Not the Pharisees.”

  Dammit, thought Jim. Why does she have to bring it back to the beginnings of Christianity?

  “Right, St. Paul. St. Paul was a Pharisee who was told to stop persecuting the new Jewish sect that followed Christ as the Messiah. And Christ himself was a carpenter,” said Dr. Sp
roul.

  “Oh,” said Jim.

  “You didn’t know that, Dr. Folan?”

  “He knew that,” said Sharon. “Of course he knew that.”

  The next day Dr. Sproul was back with his equipment. Jim did not go down to the cave with him. He spent the day in the church at the Garden of Gethsemane, run by the Franciscans. A pilgrim group came in, and Jim heard the Latin Mass said again, reminding him of his childhood as he had grown up with his friend Baby Jesus.

  The Latin was supposed to be only the form not the Mass itself. The words were the vehicle. That was what he had been told, and did tell himself when people complained about the Latin Mass being replaced by English.

  “It only sounds more holy,” he would say tolerantly.

  But in his sin, and desperation, the Latin Mass by this pilgrim group, allowed to be said in the old universal language of the Church because this was an international city for the Church, this Mass was water for his blistered spirit.

  “Et cum spiritu tuo,” Jim answered the priest. And he left church somewhat comforted. Dr. Sproul, according to Sharon, had found a blade mark in the ribs, and established it was going upward into the heart, and also that the edge of the spear was round and not bladed like most other spears.

  Sharon had to lie about that, saying the pointed, nonblade spear was common to Babylonians.

  “But he was guessing Romans,” she said.

  “How much was he guessing Romans?” said Jim.

  “Not with vigor,” said Sharon.

  “Hold me,” said Jim, and they embraced, and he let his head fall to her shoulder. “Tighter,” he said, and then he felt himself wanting her, and this night he knew the love was her gift.

  “You didn’t enjoy it,” he said.

  “Yes, I did,” she answered. “I enjoyed giving to you.”

  And as they lay together in the darkness, she told him how much of a woman he made her feel.

  “I feel good about that, Sharon. Partly.”

  “I know,” said Sharon.

  “I love you.”

  “I know,” said Sharon.

  The next day Dr. Sproul, the world-famous pathologist known as the “bone man,” was leaving. He did not want to stay for Lent in the Holy Land. He wanted to go home. He had found where the spikes had rubbed between the ulna and radius in the arms, so the arms were not tied, but impaled just beneath the wrists.

  Under intense examination of the skull, he had found where the skull had suffered four minor indentations extending from the coronal structure along the frontal, about three inches above the supraorbital notch. Apparently, the skin had been pierced right to the skull with pointed objects, which were not strong enough to dig in deep. Not metallic.

  “Thorns,” said Jim, reading the report in Sharon’s apartment. “A crown of thorns.”

  The report concluded that the body was that of a thirty- to thirty-five-year-old Mediterranean male.

  “What did he say about the carbon dating of the bones? Did he examine the phony report you made up last night?”

  “No,” said Sharon. “He just kept repeating that I wouldn’t lie to him and he had to accept that date.” Sharon paused.

  Jim lowered the report.

  “He asked me who was in charge of this. I told him you,” said Sharon.

  “Yes?”

  “He wished you luck and he said prayers, his deepest prayers, were with you.”

  “I don’t see where he mentions no bones were broken. That’s the first thing he should have noticed, you know. That’s the normal way to end a crucifixion. It’s what made Christ’s crucifixion fulfill the Hebrew prophecy that no bone of the Messiah would ever be broken. He missed that,” said Jim. “That’s strange. That’s the strangest part of all.”

  He looked out the window. He felt numb. He gazed at the white top of the Jewish Dome of the Book, which housed the Qumran scrolls, those scrolls which he had been told in his studies helped establish that the Gospels were accurate in their depiction of what society would be like in the Second Temple period.

  He felt Sharon’s arm around him. “He didn’t want to notice the bones weren’t broken. He clung to the dating.”

  “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what I can do,” said Jim.

  “There is no choice about the matching piece for the disk now.”

  “You mean we have got to have a date outside 30 to 40 C.E.?”

  “In the light of everything, especially Dr. Sproul’s report, about a carpenter in his mid-thirties … and everything else, you have nothing else.”

  “You said, at the beginning, that there was always a way to disprove something, always an area for doubt.”

  “Because usually we get a rock and a shard and a coin. I didn’t know Dr. Sproul would be that corroborative.”

  “And what if the disk, within that fantastically sharp ten-year swing of plus or minus, gives us 30 to 40 C.E.? We would have nothing left then.”

  “I would say, right now, there isn’t an archaeologist in the world who would not testify to the awesome probability that the bones are Him.”

  “I thought so. All right. The disk.”

  “Let me get that dirt off your forehead,” said Sharon, licking a finger to wipe away a smudge right in the middle of Jim’s head. But he stopped her hand.

  “It’s not dirt,” said Jim. “It’s ash. It’s Ash Wednesday.”

  Warris Abouf landed in Beirut on a Syrian plane with a Syrian passport during a lull in the shelling. Debarkation had to be quick because no one could guarantee the shelling wouldn’t resume again.

  “Who is shelling whom? Which faction?” asked Warris in Arabic.

  “Does it matter?” answered another passenger, taking up his bags for the rush to the terminal and the sandbags.

  “Not to me.” Warris smiled. He was home. If he were dead on the tarmac, he was still home. There had been courtesy on the aircraft. There had been respect on the aircraft. Russians in the group were no longer the masters. They were just tourists.

  Even his toe did not hurt him that much anymore.

  It was less than a single day before that he had been called to 2 Dzerszhinsky Square. And when he was not taken directly to Major Vakunin’s office, he thought perhaps he was headed toward Lubyanka Prison, which was right behind. At that time he thought perhaps he had miscalculated: perhaps Major Vakunin would send him to jail instead of home, to get at Tomarah, undisturbed by a nearby husband.

  But Major Vakunin himself sat in a subordinate seat in a large office. Warris addressed himself instinctively to one man sitting on the side, whom he felt was in charge. It was a mistake. The major told him loudly what a fool he was, and that the man behind the desk was running things, not the fellow on the side.

  Now the fellow sitting on the side had thick eyeglasses, and an ill-fitting Russian suit. He did not look impressive, and he was so old one would think he was retired. But Warris knew by the way everyone else stood that he was the power in the room.

  “Quiet,” said the man to Vakunin. “He is smart. He knows. Look, Abouf, we are in a bind, and we need you. You are a smart fellow, and we appreciate your care in your work. But we have to have someone who can be trusted and we have to have him now.”

  “Who, sir?” said Warris.

  “You’re playing a game. I am too old for games, and I am too old for lies.”

  “The Palestinian, fluent Hebrew, knowledge of the Vatican,” said Warris.

  “Yes. We need you. It’s you. That may be bad news for you, it may be good. Will you go for us?”

  “Do I have a choice?” said Warris.

  “Everyone always has a choice. It is just not a palatable one,” said the old man with the power.

  “I am willing to go. I was willing to go before.”

  “We didn’t know that,” said the man, and Warris could feel the anguish radiate from Major Vakunin behind him.

  “In Jerusalem,” said the man, “there is something going on in Haneviim Street. I
t has some Vatican reference but we do not know what it is. All right, we have lost two agents already, and a third has found nothing. We want to know what is so special that it would involve the Vatican Secretary of State and the Israeli government? What?”

  “What are we looking for?” said Warris.

  “That is it, we do not know. But it must be important because the Mossad has put a shield around it.”

  “What if I am caught by that shield?”

  “If you are caught and you talk, we will kill you.”

  “But what if they torture me?”

  “What torture? They’ll put you in a room and talk to you a lot. If you break, we will kill you. They will not. Remember that.”

  “But everyone knows they have torture in their prisons. I read it in Pravda.”

  “Warris, I would expect that sort of a statement from Vakunin. Not from a fellow like Warris Abouf, who has survived by his own worth all his life and not by whom he married, and whom he doesn’t offend. Vakunin and these others will take care of the details. Good luck, Warris. It always hurts to lose a good man.”

  “Thank you, comrade, sir,” said Warris, struck by the fact that the first time he ever got real respect was on his leaving.

  The details were that he would meet men in the Beirut airport who would take him to Abu Silwan, his contact who would get him into Israel. He was given a Syrian passport, and clothes with Beirut labels, and American dollars. He was not even allowed to keep the picture of his son, Arkady.

  And thus ended ten years in a foreign land where he was not wanted, except to be used.

  At the Beirut airport he did not have to find his contacts, they found him. They were two young lads with machine guns, army fatigues, British cigarettes, and a new Mercedes that made Warris’ old Volga look like a sick cart. In fact, this car was so luxurious it had cigarette lighters in it.

  The home of Abu Silwan was outside Beirut, in what the young men called “a safe area.” He loved their voices. He loved their hands moving as they talked, and their eyes, which spoke also.

  The house they took him to was glorious, with glass all over and deep carpets on the floor, and color television sets all over, and whiskey in crystal glasses, and faucets of gold with sinks of marble.