The Source: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  Finally Eliav said, “It’s a great day for the Jews,” for this was a folklore representation of the flat wagon bearing the wooden Ark of the Covenant in which the tablets of the Ten Commandments were supposed to have been carried from Mount Sinai to the Promised Land. Originally this stone must have enjoyed a place of honor in the synagogue of Makor, but when that structure was torn down by the victorious Christians, some workman had carved his three crosses on a different face, while the vanquished Jewish side was cemented into the darkness of the basilica. To have the Jewish symbols exposed now, before Jews who had returned from exile to build their kibbutz near the ancient site, constituted a luminous moment; and Dr. Cullinane, happening to look up from the trench, saw that some of the older kibbutzniks had tears in their eyes. With deep pleasure he modified his earlier drawing and filed it.

  Almost before he was finished, a workman found a coin that completed the violent sequence of that period: Roman temple, synagogue, basilica, mosque, church … all equally collapsed into a shared destruction.

  Cullinane allowed the stone and the coin to be exhibited at the kibbutz for some days, and grave-faced Jews stood before them looking first at their long-buried ark but staring mostly at the hard face of Vespasian, whose armies had destroyed their temple, and at the figure of Judaea Capta as she mourned in humiliation under the palm tree. It was one of the most beautiful coins ever issued, this flawless union of imperial force and tribute sorrow, and it fascinated the modern Jews whose history it summarized. Cullinane, himself deeply affected by the three emotionally related finds, cabled Paul Zodman:

  THINGS HAPPENING VERY FAST STOP BETTER COME ON OVER

  The relationship between the two trenches was now reversed, as often occurred at a dig. Trench B wallowed about in the foundations of the Crusader fort, whose walls cut deep through many levels of occupation, obliterating them all and rendering them largely useless for contemporary study; the diggers in this trench now seemed mainly occupied with shifting heavy stones. But in Trench A, which transected the multiple religious structures, intellectual and archaeological activity was keen, and the reason for bringing along an architect from the University of Pennsylvania became clear. At the top the trench was only thirty feet wide and it had sloping sides, so the amount of wall exposed was never great, but by pecking away at the earth and guessing at what had stood on what, the architect could sometimes come up with clever deductions as to how the various jigsaw pieces had fitted together. He was a patient man who allowed the sweating kibbutzniks to stalk past him as if he did not count, but when they were through lifting and tugging he was there, on his knees, often with a whisk broom, trying to catch signs of how the stones had been dressed and whether they bore fragments of earlier cement, indicating a prior use in some other wall. The quality of this man’s imagination would determine what course the excavations would follow in future years, and the amount of information he could deduce from what to another man would be merely one line of rocks crossing another line, was surprising. Not one of the four top archaeologists at Makor could approach his proficiency in this specialized field.

  Only one thing interfered with his work, and he complained about this to Cullinane: “Really, John, you’ve got to tell those girls to wear more clothes. I find them a very disturbing element.”

  “I’ve wondered about this myself,” Cullinane said. The dig at Makor was witnessing a phenomenon of the age, common to all countries: for protection from the near-tropic sun young men wore hats, long-sleeved shirts, shoes and socks to protect their ankles, while girls got along with little: sleeveless blouses, shorts, no stockings and tennis shoes. After a few days of sunburn the kibbutz girls became bronzed goddesses, rounded and beautiful. They were modest and well behaved, but they were also alluring, and there could have been few men working at the dig who were not at one time or another tempted to reach out and pinch these lovely Jewish maidens. Of course, such temptation was one of the unexpected pleasures of archaeology in Israel, but Cullinane agreed with his architect: “It was a lot easier digging in Egypt. There the women had to wear clothes!”

  But when the architect protested a second time—“John, I was truly worried. If she had lifted that rock she’d have popped out all over”—he decided that something must be done. He therefore summoned Dr. Bar-El and said, in his best administrative manner, “Mrs. Bar-El, I think you’d better speak to the girls. They really must wear more clothes.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked innocently.

  “The men … they’ve begun to complain.”

  “You mean the shorts?” She began to laugh at his embarrassment. “Really, John, no sensible man’s complaining about shorts, I hope.”

  “Not exactly,” he stammered.

  “Aren’t the girls doing a good job?” she asked defensively.

  “Yes! Yes! In fact they’re superior to any others I’ve worked with. But won’t you please speak to them …”

  “I wonder if I’m the proper one to do it,” she said shyly.

  “Well, you’re a woman.”

  “But you haven’t seen the shorts I propose to wear,” she said quietly, and he was left alone, fumbling with a pencil.

  That afternoon she wore them, and although her outfit was not immodest it was tantalizingly arranged, and when Cullinane first saw her heading for Trench A he stopped what he was doing to watch. Then he smiled as he saw the architect follow her approvingly down the trench, and he made no further effort to discipline the kibbutz girls. They were, as he had told Dr. Bar-El, the most energetic and intelligent workers he had ever employed, and if they wished to provide a daily beauty parade, that would have to be one of the extra features at Makor; but when Vered Bar-El went past, holding a piece of broken pottery, he asked himself: What would Macalister and Albright think if they could see a dig like this?

  She was a delightful person, Vered Bar-El, thirty-three years old, a widow from the War of Independence and a fine scholar who had been offered university posts in several countries. That she had not remarried since 1956, when her young husband was killed during the Sinai Campaign, surprised Dr. Cullinane. He asked her about it once as they were going across the tell, and she had said frankly, “I have been married to Israel, and one of these days I must get a divorce.” He had asked her what she meant by the first part of this sentence, and she explained, “An outsider cannot imagine how hard we fought to gain a state here. It absorbed all our energies. At Zefat, for example …”

  “The town in the hills?”

  She stopped, and it was obvious that she felt herself assailed by memories too difficult to discuss. “You ask Eliav some day,” she said, and she had run down off the tell.

  As for the second part of her sentence, Cullinane understood this only too well. As the son of an impoverished Irish day laborer on the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad, he had devoted himself so single-mindedly to an education, acquiring a polished accent and a Ph.D. at the same time, that he had not married, and his devout mother had fairly well given up parading before him the daughters of her Irish friends. Yet he knew that for a man to be forty without a wife was patently absurd—and open to suspicion as well—and since the fortunate offer by Paul Zodman to finance the Makor dig had settled his economic and professional problems for the next decade, there was no reasonable excuse for delaying marriage any longer; but like the meticulous man he was, the man who signed each card so precisely J.C., he was studying the problem with scientific detachment. He had, one might say, excavated his way through Levels I to XIII of Chicago’s Irish society, and he had come upon some interesting pieces, but he had so far found nothing in the human field to compare with the Christian-Jewish cornerstone that he had found at Makor’s Level VII.

  Then there was Mrs. Bar-El, working beside him each day, wearing her shorts and smiling at him with her flashing eyes and white teeth. She was an easy girl to remember when one was at the other side of the tell, or sleeping in the next tent. He responded to her in two interesting ways whi
ch had little to do with her personality: when considering marriage he remembered how men his age often made asses of themselves, and he had sworn never to become involved with any girl more than twelve years his junior—Vered was only seven years younger; also, he had an affinity for girls who were shorter than he was, and Vered was positively petite. That she was also an archaeologist neither added to nor detracted from her general appeal, and as for the fact that she was Jewish and he Catholic, he dismissed this as a problem of little consequence. In fact, he chuckled as he recalled the joke that had been popular during his navy service in the Korean war: “Soldier calls his Irish mother in Boston and says, ‘Mom! This Xavier in Korea. Just wanted to warn you that I’ve married a Korean girl.’ To his surprise his mother makes no objection. In fact she seems pleased. ‘Bring the girl home, Xave. You can stay with us.’ ‘But where can we stay in your house, Mom, it’s so small?’ ‘You can use my room, Xave, because the minute that Korean bitch puts her foot through the door I’m gonna cut my throat.’ ” It seemed to John Cullinane that more than half his friends were married to what their parents thought were the wrong mates—Catholics with Baptists, Jews with Armenians, and Xavier with his Korean wife—and he gave the problem no more thought.

  His present liberal views in these matters marked a sharp change from his youth in Gary, Indiana, where he had grown up in a Catholic neighborhood whose popular sport had been the seeking out of Jewish schoolchildren during the tedious afternoons. He and his friends would lurk behind fences, rock in fist, waiting for the occasional Jew in the district to come furtively home. With yells they would spring upon him, pummeling him harshly and shouting:

  “Jew boy! Jew boy!

  Gonna crucify a goy.”

  Once the truant officer had come to the Cullinane home with a warning: “Mike, your boy has got to quit picking on the Ginsberg kids.”

  “A fine thing,” his father had stormed. “An officer of the law wastin’ his time over such a matter.”

  “Mike, it’s gotta stop. The Jews is makin’ protests to the mayor.”

  “Over what? They crucified Jesus, di’n they?”

  Why did we do it? Cullinane sometimes asked himself in later years, and he found no difficulty in determining the answer. As each Easter season approached, the priest in his parish launched a series of sermons recounting the crucifixion of our Saviour, and his Irish brogue would hang almost longingly upon the terrible mystery of our Lord’s passion. Young Cullinane and his friends would listen in growing anger as they heard of the manner in which the Jews betrayed Jesus, forced a crown of thorns upon His brow, nailed Him to the cross, pierced His side, mocked Him in His agony and even bargained in selling His clothes. It was almost more than the boys could bear, and it infuriated them to think that descendants of those same Jews were roaming the streets of Gary that day.

  It was not till Cullinane reached college that he discovered that it had not been the Jews who had done these things to Jesus; it had been Roman soldiers. He also discovered that no Catholic dignitary who had advanced beyond the stage of parish priest any longer proclaimed such views, but by then it did not matter. On his own recognizance he had discovered that an instinctive hatred of the Jew made no sense, and that a rational dislike could be supported by no evidence whatever. And he had changed so completely that now he could even contemplate marrying a Jew.

  He found himself thinking about Vered a good deal, and one of the thoughts that recurred most often was a warning delivered years earlier by a French archaeologist in Egypt: “Many digs in the Near East have come to grief because God made little-girl archaeologists and little-boy archaeologists, and when you put them together in tents at the edge of a desert … the strangest things can happen. Now this is particularly true of digs organized by Englishmen, because somehow the Englishwoman, so proper at home, seems to go to pieces as soon as she sees a pickaxe plopped in the earth … in a nice way, that is.” In furtherance of this theory the English photographer was romancing with the kibbutz girls, and Cullinane didn’t blame him a bit.

  In spite of the strenuous schedule laid out by Eliav, there was a good deal of social life at the kibbutz, and in the long summer evenings the group used to gather for folk dancing. Word had gone out that Big Boss was a bachelor, and some very pretty girls hauled him onto the floor while the accordion beat out folk music and partners swept through beautiful old dances, some from Russia, others from the steep hills of Yemen. Cullinane found the kibbutz girls too young for serious attention, but he did confess to one change of opinion, which he shared with Tabari: “In America I always thought that folk dancing was for girls too ugly and too fat for modern dancing. I stand corrected.”

  In July he became uncomfortably aware of the fact that at the kibbutz dances Vered Bar-El usually preferred to dance with Dr. Eliav, and they made an attractive pair. His lank frame moved with masculine charm through the peasant steps, while her petite body had a lively grace, especially in those dances where girls were required to pirouette, their petticoats flying out parallel to the floor. Tabari also arranged evening excursions to historic sites like Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee or the poetic ruins of Caesarea, King Herod’s ancient capital, where Cullinane saw Vered standing in the moonlight beside a marble column that had once graced the king’s gardens, and she seemed to be the spirit of Israel, a dark-haired, lovely Jewess from Bible times, and he had wanted to run to her and tell her so, but before he did, Dr. Eliav moved beside her; he had been standing behind the pillar, holding her hand, and Cullinane felt like an ass.

  And then one night in mid-July as he inspected the dig in moonlight he was alerted by someone moving along the northern edge of the plateau, and he suspected it might be a worker out to steal a Crusader relic; but it was Vered Bar-El, and he ran to her with a kind of release and caught her in his arms, kissing her with a vigor that astonished both of them. Slowly she pushed him away, holding on to the lapels of his field jacket and looking up at him with her dark, saucy eyes.

  “John,” she laughed warmly, “don’t you know I’m engaged to Dr. Eliav?”

  “You are?” He brushed her hands away as if he were afraid of them.

  “Of course. That’s why I came on this dig … rather than Massada.”

  He’d wondered about that in Chicago: Why would Bar-El pass up a sure thing like Massada to work with me? He became angry. “Damn it all, Vered. If he’s engaged to you, why doesn’t he do something about it?”

  For just a moment she looked as if she had been asking herself the same question, but quickly recovered and said lightly, “Sometimes these things …”

  He kissed her again and said most seriously, “Vered, if he’s held back this long, why not marry a man who means business?”

  She hesitated, as if inviting him to kiss her again, then pushed him away. “You mean too much business,” she said softly.

  “How long have you been engaged?”

  Standing apart from him, she said, “We were in the war together. I roomed with his wife before she was killed. He fought beside my husband. These are things that bind people …”

  “You make it sound like patriotic incest.”

  She slapped his face, with all her force and all her anger. “These are serious matters. Never, never …” Then she threw herself into his arms and sobbed. After a while she whispered, “You’re a man I could love, John. But I fought desperately for this Jewish land and I’d never marry anyone but a Jew.”

  He dropped his arms. Her statement was archaic and somehow offensive. It was inappropriate for this moment when two people were groping for love. If the Jews of Europe had gone through what they did in order to build a state in which an attractive widow of thirty-three could talk like that … “You’re no farther along than the Irish Catholics I used to know in Gary, Indiana. ‘You bring a Polack husband into this house and I’ll horsewhip the both of you.’ That was my father speaking to my sister.”

  “I didn’t ask you to kiss me,” Vered pointed out.

>   “I’m sorry I did,” Cullinane snapped.

  She took his angry hands and held them to her cheeks. “That’s an unworthy remark and you know it. I’ve watched you working in the trenches, John. You want to know every fact there is and no prejudice diverts you. All right, you’ve been digging in this trench and you’ve uncovered something you don’t like … a Jewish girl who has seen so much terror that there’s only one thing in the world she wants to be. A Jewish girl.”

  The force of her words made Cullinane respect what she said, but he could not rationally accept it: if he understood anything about human relations, he knew that Vered Bar-El was not going to marry Dr. Eliav. She gave no impression of being in love with him and he no sense of being hungry for her. Like the Israel of which she was a part she was caught in historical cross-currents, rather than in the emotion of love, and she betrayed her awareness of this unsatisfactory situation. With compassion Cullinane observed her uncertainty, then said, “Vered, I’ve spent the last twenty years looking for a wife. I wanted someone who was intelligent, not afraid of big ideas, and … well, feminine. Such girls aren’t easy to find, and I won’t let you go. You’ll never marry Eliav. Of that I’m convinced. But you will marry me.”

  “Let’s go back,” she said, and when they entered the main room of the Arab house the others began to giggle, and Cullinane gained reassurance for his theory when Dr. Eliav said lightly, not as an outraged lover but as a boy in college might have spoken to his roommate, “Looks to me, Cullinane, as if you’ve been kissing my fiancée.”

  The Irishman wiped his lips, looked at his fingertips and said, “I thought Israeli girls had forsworn salonim and lipstick.”

  “They sometimes do,” Eliav said, “but later they reconsider.”