The Body

by Richard Ben Sapir

  “You don’t know that,” said Jim.

  “For both our sakes, please think about that,” said Warris Abouf, who knew he had just successfully passed his most dangerous moment, knew it in the man’s eyes.

  “Jim, what’s wrong?” said Sharon, getting into bed with him, leaving her clothes on the chair nearby, trying to snuggle up to him for warmth.

  “Nothing. Nothing is wrong. I just wanted to know how limitless our expenses are from the Israeli government. You seemed to have done rather well not teaching this year is all I am saying.”

  “Jim, please don’t do this to me. What’s wrong?”

  “The whole world is wrong.”

  “I feel we’re becoming wrong, Jim. I can’t take that now. Not now.”

  “All right, then let’s not talk.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Do you really think I am a better lover than Dubi, or was that just something you said?”

  “Why now?”

  “Do you think I believed that?”

  “I never said you performed better than Dubi. I said it was better with you. And it is. Because I love you. You feed the whole woman, Jim. Dubi fed this,” she said, and she gave a sharp motion of her right hand between her legs.

  “Ah … ahhh … shit,” said Jim, in English, finally.

  “What?”

  “I know you love me.”

  “Of course, I love you. What’s the matter with you, you stupid, crazy lunatic?” yelled Sharon, furious to the point of tears. “You. What’s the matter with you? You hurt me.”

  “I love you.”

  “Thank you for nothing. I don’t need this now. Not now,” said Sharon, and she asked him angrily if he wanted some orange juice, and he said he did, and he suggested that maybe they needed a trip back to the Kibbutz Kfar Gzion on the Sea of Galilee.

  “We’ll never have that time again, Jim,” she said, bringing him the orange juice and filling it with some brandy because he liked it that way.

  “We’ll have another time.”

  “You never do,” she said.

  And Jim knew she would go with him.

  The key was to move everything at the last minute, and put it in the tiny bug without Sharon knowing it. That, Jim assumed, would be the easy part. The hard part would come later, he thought.

  “Oh no, the money man,” groaned Father Winstead, running from one phone to another. “Could you come back tomorrow? We are inundated. Some Communist radio has been broadcasting to the Middle East that we’re going to recognize Israel and the phones have not stopped.”

  “And what do you tell people?” asked Jim.

  “I tell them that we have yet to receive word of any such occurrence. Which is ‘Hell no’ in diplomatic language.”

  “I have to have the money. At least five hundred dollars more. But this money I am going to repay.”

  “On your vow of poverty?”

  “I’ll be more poor,” said Jim.

  “Sounds like less pregnant, Father Folan,” said Father Winstead.

  The money came just as quickly as before, but this time Jim thanked Father Winstead.

  “Pray for me, will you?”

  “And you for me, Father,” said Father Winstead.

  With the five hundred dollars he bought opal earrings to match the necklace Sharon loved so much, the one the Arab owner of the lot had given her. He put a note in it, and then let the jeweler wrap it. He was sure he was being taken, although he tried to bargain. The note said, “Sharon, I will love you forever, Jim.” It was in English, because that was his language.

  The next morning Jim asked Sharon if he might borrow the car because he had a surprise for her he had to pick up.

  “It’s big?” she said.

  “Not bigger than a Volkswagen trunk,” said Jim.

  Sharon held her hands roughly four feet apart in width. “Well, it must be an American mink coat for a million dollars.”

  “You will get your gift at the Sea of Galilee.”

  “Sounds Biblical,” said Sharon.

  She smiled, and in that smile Jim could see a little island of joy in her grief. That was how life handled grief, bits of joy and living coming up in brief spaces and getting larger and more common until the grief itself was an island and a memory.

  But for Jim, only his expressions changed. What was there in pain was still there, like a sharp rock only occasionally covered by a rise in water, but always there, unmoving, planted.

  He drove up to Hebrew University and parked outside. There had been several Palestinian bomb attempts at the university and cars had not been allowed in since because they might be packed with explosives that could cause major damage. The university had learned to live with bombs, and Sharon was learning to live with Paula’s and Mari’s deaths, so why should Jim’s loss be irredeemable?

  Was it because the Redeemer was lost?

  It seemed like forever now since he had said a Hail Mary. Would he get used to that?

  As he entered the lab and opened the safe for the disk, he forced a Hail Mary, and it felt blessedly good.

  The case that had brought the disk from the cave was lying under it, but he didn’t want to use that one, in case Sharon might accidentally stumble on it. So he got a plastic shopping bag, and stuffed it with papers, and then put in both sides of the disk.

  If Tabinian had been representing the Vatican instead of someone as important as the Vatican Secretary of State, Jim suspected that the Church might have gotten the body at what he was sure was the original price, just taking it off the Israelis’ hands.

  But that was at the beginning, when things were simple, and he was sure now, just as he was that first day meeting Hirsch, that the Israelis would not dare claim the Vatican had stolen the body. Because that would bring them just what they wanted to avoid in the first place.

  Maybe the Vatican would recognize Israel, anyhow. He had always thought it should. But it would be done free of using Him as barter.

  Outside the university he put the bag in the trunk. There really wasn’t much room left, two and a half feet at most.

  But he had planned on that. Two and a half feet was the limit of the size of the bag the ultra-Orthodox were letting through. Anything larger might be a skeleton.

  Jim drove the yellow bug to a baggage shop, and, with the trunk open, bought an overnight bag to fit.

  At the dig the guardian of the body nodded to Jim, his black hat moving precisely as always. Jim nodded back.

  It was the first good, warm, warm day of spring, almost summer, and somehow the man wore the same black clothes he seemed to wear in winter. If both of them could speak the same language, he might find out why, someday.

  This climb down would be the last time. Already, the weather was claiming this incision into history as its own, with the shades of earth and debris all coming to the same patina.

  Inside, the cave was dry and hot, with the dehumidifier still working. Jim removed the tarpaulin, and then the opaque plastic cover. Carefully, he rolled a light layer of cotton onto the bottom of the small bag, and then slid a card under the bones of the body’s right hand without the cartilage and ligaments of life, and without the bond of polyvinyl keeping it stuck to the palette, the hand became a light palmful of carpal, metacarpal, and phalanx bones, which felt like so many very light beads. He was faster with the left hand. He laid the arms and legs adjacent on the next layer of cotton, and then the pelvis, which he had to take out again to get it to push up into the rib cage. And finally the head, the skull, and that small orange fragment that had pinned his legs so long ago.

  And the zipper would not close on the bag, so he took out all the pieces of what was once a man, and he tried again, starting with the rib cage and skull, and then laying in the hands and feet around it, and again it would not fit. Four ways it would not fit, and where the polyvinyl had not covered, the brown bone was beginning to break off in his hand.

  They are just bones, Jim told himself. No matter who it
was, they were just bones. The bones were what was left of the man, not the man. And who, after all, had said let the dead bury the dead, if not Him? He would be the most understanding. He would be the most forgiving. Didn’t Jim know that?

  Jim took one very deep breath and then with both hands pressed down on the bones. They cracked easily, like breadsticks. He groaned. He pressed again and cried out as though someone were breaking his bones, and then it was done. The blue bag would zipper.

  He left the cave for good.

  The Reb Nechtal’s man only smiled when he saw the same small bag that went in. A body was so amazingly small when it was just the bones, like a couple of basketballs. Jim put the bag in the trunk, and it fit. Now it fit nicely. It all fit.

  When Jim was a little boy, he had wondered why everybody didn’t fit nicely into his place in the world, and now he understood how the thing was done to make everyone fit. You broke people. Because everyone had to fit. When he picked up Sharon he told her about people fitting, even as he told her her gift was in the trunk and their overnight things should go in the back seat.

  “Why are you so upset about people fitting into the world, dammit?” said Sharon. “You’re a Jesuit. You’re supposed to fit.”

  “I’m a human being.”

  “Welcome to the rest of us. You don’t have to yell at me.”

  “Why are you yelling at me?” said Jim.

  “Well, why are you yelling at me?” asked Sharon.

  “I’m sorry,” yelled Jim.

  “All right,” said Sharon.

  “Aren’t you sorry?” said Jim.

  “All right,” said Sharon. “Who drives?”

  “Go ahead,” said Jim.

  “You don’t like my driving,” said Sharon.

  “Wherefore is now different from any other day?” said Jim.

  “I’ll drive,” said Sharon.

  And they left Jerusalem and drove north up to Galilee, through land that had once been swamp and which was considered worthless because of the diseases swamps breed, now drained and tilled and loved back to usefulness. Through the beautiful spring-kissed land of Abraham and Isaac they drove, in dull, sullen silence.

  They registered at Kfar Gzion, and then, alone in the room, realized how hard being angry was. And also how very silly it was.

  “I’ll like you if you bought me an expensive gift,” said Sharon, and then they both laughed and touched each other. But this time when Jim wanted the love to be so good, good for Sharon, it seemed as though she were doing the same thing. And it was not as good as always, it did not satiate certain longings which he could not define. He felt somehow incomplete.

  “I will give you your gift tomorrow morning.”

  “Why tomorrow morning?” asked Sharon.

  “It’s a morning gift. You don’t give a morning gift at night.”

  “No,” said Sharon. “You never do.”

  It took Sharon a long time that night to fall asleep, because she was talking about herself, about how she had first come to Israel and vowed to be a better student than the Ashkenazi, how she had not really loved Persia like her older brother had, and then another aspect of why he left.

  “I think he just felt it was time to go. You know, two thousand five hundred years, and it is time to go. We were there before Islam, and in the time of Christ we came to Jerusalem with our coins of graven Persian kings, and when Alexander conquered Darius we mourned for our fallen king. I guess there is a time to go. It does not mean that it is a pleasant time to go, or an easy time to go, but like death, it is time to go because it is time to go.”

  She said, as she settled into the calm that preceded sleep, “Sometimes I wonder why we Jews don’t feel that way, you know. Good-bye, world. But then if we were not Jews, what would we be? You have to be something, yes?”

  “I love you,” said Jim. “I will love you forever.”

  And there was contentment in that beautiful dark face as she closed her eyes and went to sleep. Jim stayed with her awhile, and then he put the opal earrings on the night table, and, daring not even to kiss her lest he wake her, went out to the car and waited in the spring night. It was dark. The clouds shared the night with the moon.

  “Are you there?” came the voice in that struggle with Hebrew. It was the Arab, Warris.

  “I am here.”

  “Good,” said Warris.

  Jim had trouble with the bug’s engine, and when it finally got going, he saw a figure in a man’s shirt running toward the car from the cabins. It was Sharon in his shirt in the night.

  “Jim. Jim. Where are you going?”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  “You’re leaving.”

  “No.”

  “What’s this?” She pushed the note from the earrings into the car. She noticed Warris. “Who is he?”

  “Someone I met, Sharon. I’ll be back.”

  “You’re leaving me. Don’t, Jim. Jim don’t leave me,” cried Sharon.

  Suddenly the Arab, Warris, was slipping a gun out of his pocket. Jim got out of the car, making sure the Arab was behind him.

  “Sharon. I love you. I am coming back.”

  “What is this?” She held up the note that came with the earrings.

  “That’s part of the morning gift.”

  “What’s the other part?”

  “I am going to get it.”

  “I don’t believe you, Jim.” She was crying, and he held her, and kissed her, and when he couldn’t let go, even though he knew he had to let go, he asked for help. It seemed as though there were no end to things he felt he couldn’t do that he had to do.

  But he did it. He just did it. That was the way things were done. The way to do it was to do it.

  He drove out of the parking lot, seeing Sharon start to run after him, and then stop, apparently giving up.

  “Will she report us?” asked the Arab, Warris.

  “We’ll find out, won’t we?” said Jim.

  “We will never make it,” said Warris.

  They drove to Ras Pinhas, beyond Capernaum, and then west to the Golan Heights with the car coughing to desperation from the climb.

  What surprised Jim was how broad the Golan was. He had thought it was a strip atop a cliff, but it was more like a plain atop a cliff. Suddenly they were stopped by soldiers who warned them to turn back, or they would be driving into Syria. “Thank you,” said Jim.

  They turned around, and drove a half mile down the road, and then parked the car. Jim opened the trunk and took the bag with the bones, and gave the other with the disk to Warris.

  They left the road, trudging across the moist clumps of turned earth for at least a quarter of a mile. Then Jim turned them back toward the Syrian border.

  They almost stumbled upon one military post and had to circle it. But what they circled into was some barbed wire. They had no wire cutters, so they had to try to help each other ease through, tearing their clothes and skin.

  Then there was nothing for about four hundred yards, and someone called out in Hebrew and they knew they were still on the Israeli side. They stood still for a long while, then continued. What puzzled Jim was why there were no obstacles on this slope, and then he realized he had walked through a minefield. Warris was panting heavily, taking his breath in groans.

  In the distance there was a mellow glow. That had to be Damascus. They rested, until Warris was ready to go on. Perhaps Marine training never left, because Jim realized his advantage. He knew this was what traveling at night was, a hope that you got where you were going, and lots of effort for little distance.

  Walking became easier as they moved on untilled land, until there was another barbed-wire fence, and a searchlight fixed them, helpless in the dark Golan night.

  But the yelling was Arabic. Warris dropped his package and put up his hands. Jim could raise his hands with the light bag of bones.

  “They’re telling you to drop it.”

  “I won’t drop it. I’ll put it down.”

&n
bsp; “Drop it.”

  Jim lowered the bag, and a shot went blowing air by his ear.

  Jim dropped to the ground with the bag, and another shot was fired and there was more yelling. He could smell the earth.

  “Get up. Get up. Get up. They’ll kill us if you don’t. We made it. We’re in Syria.”

  Warris was yelling something Jim didn’t understand. He picked up the name of someone, Abu Silwan, only because Warris was repeating it many times and desperately.

  The bags were taken. Jim protested. They belonged to the Catholic Church.

  Warris and Jim were taken to an empty farmhouse.

  The floor was packed earth and the walls were stone. There had been a fire in the middle of the floor and it smelled of charcoal.

  The bags were brought back in by two soldiers, and an officer questioned them, especially about the bones of a person. They were strange bones. Was this a relative? Who was this person who was so valuable that his bones had had to be rescued for reburial? He did not ask about the disk.

  “Tell him I represent the Catholic Church. The bones belong to the Church,” said Jim.

  “No. I will tell him we wait for Abu Silwan himself. Until then, no mystery is resolved.”

  Warris straightened his back and answered the Syrian officer. The officers left with the bags and they were alone for a day. No one brought them food or water, even though Warris complained that they thirsted.

  “Wait, when Abu Silwan comes, we will have water, we will have food.”

  Toward the next night, they heard the purring engines of several fine cars. They were pulling up near the farmhouse. Doors opened and closed with that muffled sound of fine tooling.

  There were conversations outside, low, like plotters in some alley but without the desperation.

  “That is Abu Silwan,” said Warris. “I told you. He is a friend of mine. He is a good friend of mine. You’ll see, priest, everything will be good. You’ll see.”

  The officer was the first one back into the farmhouse. Warris stood up and ran to the man behind him. The man had a little cat’s smile, and acknowledged Warris’ effusive greeting and hugging with a little smile.

  Warris was a stream of explanations, his hands went up and down, he smiled looking for a response on the face of Abu Silwan, but Abu Silwan looked only at Jim.