The Body

by Richard Ben Sapir

  And realizing what he had wished, he told his God he was sorry.

  But he did not feel forgiven, least of all by himself.

  The saw cut the hard kiln-baked sheen on the shard, rock-hard with time and fire, making reddish dust on the paper beneath the vise.

  It seemed he would never cut through the shard, but he would just stay forever, moving the saw back and forth, and he also thought if he were to stay over this shard sawing forever, then forever the word would be silenced that He had not risen.

  And then, almost as a surprise, the saw was through the shard, and that thumbnail-sized piece was on the paper beneath the shard.

  He picked up the camera and stand with which he had photographed the shard before sawing, and placed the stand legs on the marks where they had stood before, so there would be a picture of the shard at the same angle after it was cut, with the thumbnail-sized piece beneath it.

  He made a note of the number of the second picture on a bound pad, and then picked up the piece and put it back where it had been on the shard, and made another photograph. He then wrapped the piece and put that in a plastic box labeled B. He wrapped up the shard, and put it in the safe, taking out the disk that had been found on the skeleton, back at the cave.

  And he did the same thing for the disk, and it reinforced his despair that the disk felt exactly as hard as the shard. Time and fire.

  “We can bring it up to Rehovot tomorrow,” said Sharon.

  “No. Today. Today. Yes, today. Today.”

  “I love you,” she said, but the words came from a distant place, a place of the world that was not time and fire and the great yes or no of existence. It came from a woman who loved him, whom he had let love him, whom he had encouraged to love him. Whom he, dammit, wanted to love him.

  “Thank you,” he answered, because he knew she wanted to comfort him. At least he didn’t have to hurt her.

  But at the Weizmann Institute, he would not let her come with him to the lab.

  “This is mine, Sharon. It is all mine. And I am heartily sorry I burdened you with it.”

  He saw her think how to answer. She was not letting him out of the car. She held his arms in her hands.

  For a long while she did not speak.

  “I love you, Jim,” she said finally. And then she turned away, letting go of him. She was crying.

  Jim went to the lab Sharon had described. A young man was waiting for him, all excited about the matching piece.

  “It’s the matching piece that makes this dating precise, otherwise you just verify the range little better than a carbon date,” said the young man.

  “Uh huh,” said Jim. He knew they measured the glow emitted by crystalline material above the normal incandescence when the clay was heated to five hundred degrees centigrade. He also did not need explained to him that they did not need a multitude of average firings when they had two pieces, because they could just match up the glow curves to see if the pottery was fired during the same period.

  Thermoluminescent dating worked, because when a piece of clay was kiln-fired at seven hundred to eleven hundred degrees, the natural thermoluminescent energy was driven out. That was time zero, whereupon it started regaining energy. And TL dating simply measured how much of that energy it had regained, just the opposite of the carbon dating, which measured how much of carbon 14 a substance had lost.

  “Okay, what is your dig?” said the young man.

  “Call it the Golban dig.”

  “She’s already got two in here that are on file. Her first was Golban.”

  Jim thought of his own name for a moment, but he didn’t want that. He hadn’t wanted that for so long and so desperately. He was not going to take this thing to himself in its last breath when he didn’t want it on its first.

  He thought of Haneviim Street, but he had promised secrecy and that just might compromise it. It had become second nature to him to take precautions of secrecy, so Haneviim Street was out.

  And he thought of Messiah or the Hebrew word Meshiah, which would of course be the most appropriate, and, at the same time, the worst possible name for anyone who did not want the world to know what he was about.

  “Masada,” said Jim finally. It was the place of a last stand of Jewish zealots who chose death rather than Roman slavery. A very last stand. Did they, like the Reb Nechtal’s group, believe in the resurrection of all men for judgment? Or did they believe that death was the end of man, that it was all over?

  Could he ever think of death as the end of everything? And wondering that, Jim in one moment sensed how barren life would be.

  “Jesus,” he sobbed on the steps going down from the lab, “how am I going to live without you?”

  Four days later, with Sharon sharing his pain, and every once-comforting prayer now thrown back in his face by reality, Jim got the call from the Weizmann Institute at Rehovot.

  Sharon had the phone and offered it to Jim, and he saw she did not want to bear the final news.

  And he didn’t want to hear it either. The technician asked through the phone held at arm’s length from Sharon, speaking to the room:

  “Is anyone there? Anyone there?”

  “Some people pray like that,” said Jim, rising to the phone, and taking it. “Yes,” he said.

  He heard the details, and then he thought perhaps he was lying to himself with his ears. The man wasn’t making sense.

  “Wait. Would you repeat what you said? It’s very important,” said Jim.

  “Seventy C.E.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve got an absolute maximum leeway, at most twenty years in either direction, and a safe ten. I would put your matching piece right on the button. Seventy A.D.”

  “What’s the earliest it could be?”

  “Stretching everything, it could not have been fired before 50 C.E. You should have seen the glow. It was perfect.”

  “Could you be wrong?”

  “There is no way it could be 40 C.E. or 33 C.E.?”

  “Only with a miracle. If you know how to rearrange glow, then you can do it.”

  “God bless you. God bless you. God bless,” yelled Jim. And, hanging up the phone, he screamed out to Sharon:

  “Hallelujah. He’s risen.”

  Sharon was laughing and crying for Jim. Jim laughed. Jim cried. Sharon jumped. Jim jumped. They tried to hug each other, but they were jumping too much. Finally, Jim grabbed Sharon and squeezed her.

  “You’re back,” said Sharon. “Thank God you’re back.”

  Suddenly the release from the burden came upon him, and he couldn’t stop crying. Even in his tears of happiness, he told Sharon he was not the sort of person who cried, and she agreed with him. Although both of them had cried a lot since he came here.

  And then there were real tears, when all the held-back sadness came out full, and all he could say was, “Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus.”

  It was decided that this time he would not rush into his report back to the Vatican but get the full written report from Weizmann Institute, combine it with everything else, and then return to Rome.

  Sharon thought this was wise, and since he was also a human being, they should take at least one weekend together before he returned to Rome. Who knew how long he would be there? And they had not slept together well since Dr. Sproul had done such a stunning analysis on the bones.

  “You must see Galilee in the spring.”

  “I had hoped to do it, but not quite like this,” said Jim. “Shacking up with a girl friend before I went to the Pope.”

  “You did your job, Jim. You did that for your Church.”

  “I want to marry you, Sharon. I want to get a dispensation from my vows and marry. I don’t want to live without you.”

  “I can’t get a dispensation. I can only get a divorce if I can get to Dubi again. We’re not as reasonable as the Vatican. We’ve had a few more years of entrenched nonthinking.”

  “You’re feeling better too.” Jim laughed. She grabbe
d his ears and kissed his lips sharply, a reminder that he was hers.

  They made reservations at a kibbutz on the Galilee, and took the north/south road that had been so crucial throughout history. It extended clear from Damascus to Cairo.

  On this road, too, you could see one of the problems of the Middle East. From heights, the coastal plain and population centers of Israel were within gunsight. And Arabs were living there. It was the West Bank, their homes were there.

  “I don’t think there is a physical peace here,” said Jim. “I think it’s in the mind.”

  “That’s not all that comforting.”

  “Worse hatreds have been solved.”

  “Sure,” said Sharon. “When better ones take their place.”

  By car, it was less than a half day to the Galilee, a trip that might have taken Jesus a few days. But it was this road that he took.

  The hills were alive with spring flowers, and he could smell the turned earth through the open windows of Sharon’s coughing yellow car. Before they reached the kibbutz hotel, Kfar Gzion, Sharon proudly pointed to stacked black stones on the side of the road.

  “Migdal,” she said. “That means tower.”

  “Mary Magdalene,” said Jim. “Mary from the town of the tower.”

  “Yes,” said Sharon. “We are in the Galilee.”

  And Jim crossed himself.

  “What did you do that for?”

  “I just felt like it. I just got chills. Good chills.”

  “Save them for tonight,” said Sharon. “You’re so funny.”

  It was a fine room in the kibbutz hotel, and they couldn’t wait to get the door closed and the curtains down. They left a trail of their clothes on the floor to the bed and finally had each other, full with joy and passion and lust.

  When they were done, they clothed themselves enough for modesty and pulled open the blinds to look across the dark blue of the Sea of Galilee and the brown mountains of Moab and the Golan Heights, very clear this day. Beyond that was Syria. The road they had taken continued to Syria, but no one, of course, could take it in either direction until there was peace.

  “I wonder if people there are as happy as I am now with you. But I don’t think so,” said Jim. “Nobody is happier than me.”

  “I am,” said Sharon.

  “No, you’re not,” said Jim.

  “I’m not sinning,” said Sharon.

  “Do you want us not to have sex until we’re married?” said Jim.

  “No,” said Sharon, exaggerating the horror.

  “Then shut up,” said Jim. But his voice was light.

  They had dinner late, when it was dark across the Galilee, and lights twinkled sparsely like distant heavens on the mountains of Moab, named for people who were no more.

  The main course was St. Peter’s fish, and Jim wondered out loud if Simon the fisherman ever thought as a young man that all the fish in this lake he worked would one day be named after him.

  “He certainly wouldn’t expect to be a Jesuit,” said Sharon. She was smiling her trap smile. Jim recognized an attack on religion was coming. Sharon had put that away during Jim’s depression during the bulk of Lent. But now she was back with a vested interest in illuminating all the contradictions of the Roman Catholic Church because he was a priest.

  “He wouldn’t be a Jesuit because we weren’t formed for over another millennia?”

  Sharon grinned broadly. “He wouldn’t be a Jesuit because he was totally tainted on his mother’s and legal father’s side.”

  “Oh, that,” said Jim. “How long have you known about that?”

  “About a month, but you were so sad, I didn’t bring it up.”

  “Let me explain.”

  “Jim, don’t explain. I love it. I love it. It’s beautiful. The Society of Jesus wouldn’t let in Jesus. Oh, Jim, that is beautiful.”

  “Sharon, stop laughing. It was a silly thing.”

  “I love it. Mary is out. So are the apostles. Pilate is in. Peter is out. You would keep out Judas, and that’s okay. But Joseph is out. Not him. Adolf Hitler, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, and the Marquis de Sade, yes.”

  Jim caught her laughter, and was laughing with her even as he tried to explain.

  “What happened was, originally the order had many converted Jews, and during a time of great tension, during a time when many Jews converted to save their lives …”

  “Oh, the dirty Jews.” Sharon laughed. “If saving your life isn’t anti-Christian.”

  “Will you stop? It was a silly law which in practice is not done today.”

  “Did you ever worry that your son might not be able to be a Jesuit?”

  “Not when I took my vows, no,” said Jim.

  “You’re mad,” said Sharon.

  “You’re not going to listen.”

  “I’m not going to believe in what you’re mad about.”

  “Do you want to hear my argument, my thought-out invincible Jesuit argument to which you cannot rationally respond?” asked Jim.

  “Yes,” said Sharon, enjoying the combat.

  Jim stuck out his tongue and made a Bronx cheer in her face. A table of women in black with white bands around their bonnets looked over, shocked. They were nuns.

  Jim wanted to crawl under the table. Sharon couldn’t stop laughing.

  When dinner was done, Sharon was still laughing and they returned to the room reeling and hugging, very much in love at this beautiful time.

  That night they agreed to stretch out this time as much as possible by leaving before dawn on the day after Shabbat, and picking up the report on the disk from the Weizmann Institute that morning. It was no more than a two-and-a-half-hour drive if they pressed it. And in that way they would have one more evening in this blessedly beautiful place, where they were beautiful, and, Jim felt, also blessed.

  It was two days they had. They swam in the cool Galilee, and sailed on kibbutz boats, and waved to fishermen and water skiers, and even to the mountains of Moab, which was the land of Jordan now.

  They laughed a lot. Sometimes they were just quiet together, feeling each other’s being. They shared every thought. From toothbrushes to the lily they found growing wild and white, they said how they felt. And more often than not, each one knew.

  By the time they got their jug of coffee in the hotel kitchen for their drive to Rehovot, they knew they had shared a special time.

  And Sharon thought, If I have nothing else in my life, this has been more than I ever expected. Thank you, God.

  “I just thanked God for our time,” said Jim.

  “Did you?” said Sharon, and held back that he said what she had thought, because then she would have to explain, too, that in thanking God she also sensed this might be more joy than a person was allowed.

  It was not logical, but she knew that whatever they had they would never have again. Something as precious as life was going to be over.

  It was 9 A.M., and the sun was up over the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot when Sharon parked the bug and accompanied Jim to the lab. She wanted to talk to the technician about the new advances in thermoluminescent dating.

  “I always suspected that someday they would go beyond just matching, and be actually able to date, like a chart on the glow curve. I mean, not plus or minus eighty, like carbon dating, but quite precise stuff. Plus or minus ten. And, obviously, they have already done it with your piece.”

  “That’s how they got the 70 C.E.,” said Jim.

  “Exactly,” said Sharon. “And I want to know how they are doing it. I have a reputation for being an authority on technological dating.”

  “I have time, take all the time you need,” said Jim.

  But when they met the technician at the lab, he seemed puzzled. He gave them the report on the matching pieces, which was two typewritten pages, accompanied by thick computer printouts. He also gave them a bill. He kept nodding as Sharon talked about the new dating method, that they might even be able to discard the need for a matching piece if
they could date by precisely charting the emissions alone.

  “We can’t do that yet,” said the technician.

  “Well, then, how did you get 70 C.E. from a matching piece that was 32 C.E.?” said Sharon.

  “He didn’t say 32 C.E.,” said the technician. “I didn’t say anything. I didn’t give you a date. I wanted a yes or a no,” said Jim. “That was all I expected. You gave me more.”

  “You said Masada. Masada fell in 70 C.E.,” said the technician, taking back the report, and checking his writing again. “You said you got the piece from Masada, right?”

  “No. I only said Masada. I didn’t give you the date.”

  “Was the date of the matching piece 32 C.E.?”

  “Yes,” said Jim.

  “Then your date is a perfect 32 C.E. We got a perfect glow match.”

  Sharon drove slowly to Jerusalem with Jim sitting numb beside her, the report on his lap. He was going back to Rome and he had to let them know that.

  But the little car could not get up to the apostolic delegate’s that morning of the first day of the work week. Israeli soldiers stopped all traffic. A procession was coming down the Mount of Olives, with people singing and carrying palm fronds. It stretched clear up over the hill.

  It was Palm Sunday.

  20

  Ecce Homo

  Warris Abouf awoke to the call of the muezzin that prayer was better than sleep. It was not his faith, but it was his language.

  He rolled up the mattresslike bed on which he slept and put it in the closet, so the room could be used for other purposes than the mere eight hours in which he slept.

  He washed and put on the Western suit so prized in the business world, and then went out for morning coffee and fruit and sweet rolls with his cousins.

  It was the day after Palm Sunday, and the beginning of his work week. He was an assistant to his cousin as an accountant, but he was sure he would make a good salesman because, as he said, he knew people better than he knew numbers.

  And he knew he was home. There was talk of a good marriage for him, with all his cousins agreeing that even though the Russian marriage did not count at all, only a fool would mention it to the family of the prospective bride.