The Source: A Novel

by James A. Michener

Cullinane decided to play along with the make-believe and extended his hand. “In later years, Eliav, your wife can truthfully taunt you: ‘If I hadn’t married you I could have gone to Chicago with a real man!’ ”

  “I’m sure I’ll hear about it,” the tall Jew said, and the two archaeologists shook hands.

  “If it’s a formal engagement,” the English photographer cried, “we’ll celebrate all night,” and somebody jumped into a jeep to dash into Akko for some bottles of arrack; but for John Cullinane the songs and dances were tedious, for watching Vered and her man he knew that this was a spurious engagement party. More important, he had admitted to her and to himself how much he needed her and he wondered what their relationship could be during the remainder of the dig.

  Next morning, as Cullinane was sketching the first object so far uncovered which might date from before the Christian Era, Dr. Eliav received a phone call from the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem advising him that Paul J. Zodman, of Chicago, was arriving at the airport that afternoon and was to be extended every courtesy becoming a man who had contributed generously to the establishment of Israel. A few minutes later a cablegram reached Cullinane advising him of Zodman’s arrival, and a few minutes after that the Tel Aviv agent of the United Jewish Appeal called to say, “Is this the Zodman dig? I want the director. Zodman’s arriving this afternoon, and for God’s sake keep him happy.” Cullinane finished his sketch and called in to the other room, “Now we can all begin to sweat.”

  Two cars drove down from Makor, Tabari and Eliav in one, Mrs. Bar-El and Cullinane in the other. It was Eliav who had insisted upon this arrangement, sensing that the potential unpleasantness of the night before must be thoroughly dispersed if the dig was to function properly. “Furthermore,” he added, “I’ve found that it never hurts when you’re meeting a millionaire to have a good-looking girl around. Makes him feel the operation is first-class.”

  “This girl’s not good-looking,” Cullinane said. “She’s beautiful.” Vered kissed him lightly before the others, and any tension that might have persisted was relaxed.

  On the long trip to the airport Vered said, “We’ve heard a lot about Paul Zodman. What kind of man is he?”

  Cullinane reflected. “He’s three times more intelligent than you’re going to think. And three times more stupid.”

  “Has he ever been to Israel?”

  “No.”

  “I’ve read about his gifts. Fifty thousand for planting trees. Half a million for the school of business administration. How much for the dig? Third of a million?”

  “He’s not altogether ungenerous, as the British might say.”

  “Why has he done it? If he’s never been here?”

  “He’s typical of many American Jews. One day he said, ‘In Germany I’d be dead. In America I own seven stores. If I didn’t give to Israel I’d be a jerk.’ ”

  “Strictly charity?” Vered asked. “He has no particular sense of partnership with us?”

  Cullinane laughed. “When he sees how successful this country is … roads, hospitals … he’s going to feel let down. He thinks he’s been feeding outcasts in a ghetto.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “What do you think?”

  “How old is he?”

  “That I’ll tell you. He’s forty-four.”

  “Married?”

  “Yes.”

  “He get his money from his father?”

  “Four of his stores he inherited. The rest he’s done himself.”

  “I see him as a big man,” Vered said, “aggressive, never read a book but respects college professors like you. He must be liberal or he wouldn’t have hired a Catholic for your job.”

  “Did you mean it when you said you’d never marry a non-Jew?” Cullinane asked abruptly.

  “I certainly did. Our family has a story which sums it all up. When we moved from Russia to Germany my aunt wanted to marry an Aryan.”

  “Whatever that means.”

  “In her case it meant a blond-haired, blue-eyed Prussian with a good university education. Our family raised hell, but it was Grandmother who delivered the telling blow. She said, ‘For any man being married is difficult, and no man should be tempted later in life to get rid of his wife merely because she’s a Jewess. He’ll have enough other reasons.’ My father said that everyone laughed at the old woman’s reasoning, and my aunt wept, ‘Why would Otto be tempted to get rid of me because I’m a Jewess?’ and the old woman explained, ‘The day may come when Germany will make its men give up their Jewish wives,’ and my aunt cried a good deal, but she didn’t marry Otto. He married another Jewish girl, and in 1938 he was forced to get rid of her, and the poor girl was sent to an extermination camp. Of course, my aunt went to the same camp, but she went with her husband.”

  “You think the time could come in America when I would be commanded to get rid of you because you are Jewish?”

  “I don’t bother about specific cases,” Vered replied. “I only know that the wise old grandmothers were right.”

  When the jet landed, there could be no mistake as to who Paul Zodman was. The first passengers to alight were ordinary French and American businessmen, bearing no marks of distinction. The next were some elderly men weighed down with cameras, and one could not think of Zodman as bothering to collect visual records of where he had been, for he was mostly concerned with where he would go next. Two powerfully built men descended, but they lacked any intellectual quality, and they were followed by three or four who might have been Zodman except that they were sloppily dressed and careless in manner. Then came a man about five-feet-eight, underweight, dressed in a dark blue English suit conservatively tailored, sunburned not from the sun but from a barber’s quartz lamp, eager, bouncy, liking all that he saw and running down the stairs to greet Cullinane.

  “John! You didn’t need to drive all the way down to meet me”—but God help John if as an employee he hadn’t been there!

  “This is Dr. Bar-El, our pottery expert,” Cullinane said. He knew how impressed businessmen were with the title “doctor”; they cursed professors but they wanted their help to have doctorates. “This is Dr. Ilan Eliav. And this is the top expert of them all, Jemail Tabari, Oxford University.” Businessmen felt the same way about Oxford.

  Paul Zodman stepped back, surveyed his team—three good-looking sunburned men and a beautiful woman—and said, “You’ve got yourself a fine-looking group. I hope they know something.”

  “You cross-question them while I get your bags.”

  “One bag,” Zodman explained, throwing Cullinane the ticket. “A small overnighter.” That also proved that he was Paul Zodman; he had learned that most travelers load themselves with preposterous amounts of luggage. When Cullinane got to the bag he found it to be one of those super-expensive fiberglas-and-magnesium jobs that weighed practically nothing. As a matter of interest he asked the El-Al man to put it on the scales, and fully loaded it hit just under nineteen pounds. Two Jews from New York struggled by with seven bags weighing nearly two hundred pounds.

  On the trip back to the dig Zodman suggested that he ride with Tabari and Eliav for the first half and that he then change to Cullinane and Bar-El, and as the cars left the airport Cullinane asked Vered, “Well?”

  “I’m impressed. He’s younger and smarter than I thought.”

  “Wait till you see how smart he is,” Cullinane replied.

  They were permitted to do so at the halfway mark, when Zodman jumped out of Eliav’s car and came to Cullinane’s. “Two excellent men,” he said as he climbed in. “I’d hire either of them for my stores right now. That Tabari’s a shameless charmer. Tried to snow me with flattery. Eliav’s the powerhouse. You paying them decent wages, John?”

  “Starvation,” Vered replied.

  “Well, if they’re as good as they look, after six or seven years raise them five dollars. That goes for you too, Miss Bar-El.”

  “Mrs. Bar-El.”

  “This matter of
wages on an archaeological dig is most perplexing,” Zodman said. “Since you’ve gone, John, I’ve had Miss Kramer get me the reports of all the important digs in this area—Macalister, Kenyon, Yadin, Albright …” He rattled off some dozen names.

  “You’ve read those reports?” Vered asked. “The big folio volumes?”

  “The big expensive volumes. I’ve spent almost as much on the books as I have on you, and, John …” He stopped, and there began that series of events which was to prove how stupid he could be. “Do you suppose I could see the trees?”

  “What trees?” Cullinane asked.

  “I gave eighty-one thousand dollars to plant trees in this country.”

  “Well …” Cullinane mumbled.

  Vered rescued him. “The forests are over there,” she said, waving generally toward the right, and to distract Zodman she began asking specific questions about the archaeological reports, discovering that he had not skimmed the books but was well versed in details.

  “They never tell you what the expeditions cost,” he complained. “Correction—Macalister did say that to continue at Gezer would take about …” He took out his wallet and with no fumbling produced a slip of paper from which he read: “ ‘… at least £350 per mensem would be requisite; and this does not allow any margin for extra expenses.’ That was in 1909. And what was the pound worth in 1909? About five dollars? That’s $1,750 a month … eleven thousand dollars for a season. Now Makor’s a lot smaller than Gezer was, yet you’re charging me about fifty thousand dollars a season. How come?”

  “Macalister had only himself and Tabari’s uncle and they hired their diggers for twenty-one cents a day. On our payroll …”

  The car had turned in the direction that Vered had indicated, and Zodman asked, “Is this where the trees are?”

  “Down that way,” Vered replied, seeking to sidetrack him, but soon the road turned “that way” and Zodman asked, “Now do I see the trees?” Vered assured them that they were somewhere ahead, and in this way they reached the tell, but when Cullinane started to describe the Crusader castle, Zodman said quietly, “You’re going to think it silly of me, but I’d like to see my trees. That castle died a thousand years ago. The trees are living.”

  Tabari took Eliav aside and warned him, “Here we go again. You produce some trees, or we’re in trouble.”

  Temporary relief was provided when Cullinane brought forth the gold menorah. “This is your Candlestick of Death,” he said, and for some minutes Zodman was lost in contemplation of that fateful object. “Which was the candle where they cut off the king’s head?” he asked.

  “The middle one,” Tabari assured him.

  Eliav did not smile, for he was in trouble. Often before he had encountered this problem of the trees, for skilled Israeli collectors, crisscrossing America for the Jewish Agency, cajoled many wealthy American Jews into contributing dollars for reforesting the Holy Land. “Imagine!” the collectors wheedled. “Your trees. Growing on land where King David lived.” So when these donors reached Israel, the first thing they wanted to see was their trees. Paul Zodman had given half a million dollars for buildings, but he had no desire to see them, for he knew that plaster and stone look pretty much the same around the world, but a living tree growing from the soil of Israel was something which commanded his imagination.

  Unfortunately, Eliav had found, a newly planted tree looked exactly like what it was: a wisp of potential growth with less than a fifty per cent chance of living, and amicable relations between the new state of Israel and her Jewish friends in America had been damaged by this inability to show men like Zodman where their contributions had gone. Eliav had several times tried taking such donors to mountainsides where millions of fingerlings had been planted, but from a distance of even twenty feet no living tree was visible. Some visitors never recovered from the shock.

  “What we need is a ready-built forest,” he whispered to Tabari, whereupon the Arab snapped his fingers.

  “We’ve got one! Relax. Our problem is solved.”

  “What are you going to do?” Eliav whispered.

  “Mr. Zodman,” Tabari announced expansively, “tomorrow morning you are going to see one of the finest forests …”

  “You’re to call me Paul. You too, Mrs. Bar-El.”

  “Tomorrow morning, Paul, I’m driving you to see your trees.”

  “Could we possibly go now?”

  “No,” Tabari said with firmness, and he was surprised at how easily Zodman accepted decisiveness. The Arab then took Cullinane aside and asked, “You got any quick-dry paint?”

  “A little … that cost a good deal.”

  “It could never be used for a finer purpose.”

  “What purpose?” Eliav asked.

  “I am going to convert, here and now, the Orde Wingate Forest …”

  “Wait a minute! Those big trees?”

  “Paul Zodman will never know the difference,” Tabari said, and that evening he painted an impressive sign:

  After the paint had dried, the sign looked rather garish, so Tabari took it out to the tell and scuffed it about in the dig, after which he disappeared for the rest of that day.

  That evening, through a chain of misunderstandings, the Makor dig almost collapsed. Trouble started when Paul Zodman, strolling away from headquarters at sunset, asked a kibbutznik, “Where’s the synagogue, young man?”

  “Are you kidding?” the farmer laughed as he went off to milk his cows.

  Zodman returned to the office and complained to Eliav, “I arranged my flight so I would arrive in Israel on Friday. To attend prayers my first night. Now they tell me the kibbutz doesn’t have a synagogue.”

  “This kibbutz, no. But others do,” Eliav temporized.

  Vered asked, “Do you attend synagogue at home?”

  “No, but Jews who support Israel … well, we sort of expect …”

  Vered was contemptuous of this reasoning and met it head-on. “You expect us Israeli Jews to be more religious than you American Jews?”

  “Frankly, yes. You live in Israel. You have certain obligations. I live in America. I have other obligations.”

  “Like making money?” Vered asked.

  Zodman realized that he was being foolish and lowered his voice. “I’m sorry if I raised embarrassing questions. But, Mrs. Bar-El, your people do come pestering me every year for funds … to keep Israel a Jewish state.”

  “And each year you send us a few dollars so that we can be holy on your behalf?”

  Zodman refused to lose his temper. “I’m afraid you’ve put it rather bluntly, but isn’t that what we Jews have been doing for centuries? When my ancestors lived in Germany, men from the Holy Land came round each winter begging funds which would support religious Jews living in Tiberias and Zefat …”

  “Days of charity are over,” Vered snapped. “A new kind of Jew lives in Israel.”

  And Paul Zodman was about to meet one of them. As he sat down to dinner he saw before him a tureen of soup, some chunky meat, some butter … He looked aghast at the combination of meat and butter and called for a waiter. He happened to get Schwartz, the kibbutz secretary.

  “Is this butter?” Zodman asked.

  With a bold forefinger Schwartz took a dab of the butter, tasted it, wiped his finger on his T-shirt, and asked, “What else?”

  “Isn’t this kibbutz kosher?”

  Schwartz looked at Zodman, then at Cullinane. In an American accent he asked, “He some kind of a nut or something?” He stopped a waiter and took from him a pitcher of cream. “Cream for your coffee,” he said contemptuously.

  Zodman ignored the gesture, but when Schwartz had moved along to another table he said quietly, “Don’t you find it extraordinary that this place is not kosher?”

  “Are you kosher at home?” Vered asked unsympathetically.

  “No, but I …”

  “Expect Israel to be,” she finished sardonically.

  Still Zodman refused to grow angry. “I should thin
k that a kibbutz, where young people are growing up …” He shrugged his shoulders.

  Eliav offered concessions. “Our ships, airplanes, hotels … they’re all kosher. Doesn’t that reassure you?”

  Zodman did not reply, for he was truly disturbed by his discovery of a kibbutz that had no synagogue and a mess hall that was not kosher; it was Tabari, an Arab Muslim, who brought him consolation.

  “Paul, when you see your forest tomorrow!”

  “His what?” Vered asked.

  “His forest. I checked it this afternoon and it looks fine. After we see it, why don’t we go on to Zefat? It’ll be Shabbat and we can attend the Vodzher Rebbe’s synagogue.”

  “Good idea,” Eliav agreed. “Mr. Zodman, there you’ll see the Israel you’re searching for.”

  But Zodman did not respond to the offer and that night the group went to bed irritated and apprehensive. Zodman felt that he was wasting his money on a Jewish state that ignored synagogues and ritual; Cullinane suspected that he might have lost his chief financial supporter; Eliav felt that as an agent of the Israeli government he should have been able to keep Zodman happy; and Vered remembered the American as an irritating fool, condescending in his attitude toward her country. She wished that he would leave so that the experts could get back to their jobs. Only Tabari was satisfied with that first day and at midnight he came to Cullinane’s tent, wakened the American and Eliav, and offered them bottles of cold beer.

  “We’re in real trouble,” he said blithely. “But there’s a way out. My Uncle Mahmoud knew more about digs than any man in Palestine, and he had one basic rule. The man who is putting up the money has got to be kept happy. Mahmoud always kept one major find buried under sand so that when a visitor of importance arrived …” He leaned back, “By tomorrow night we are going to have in Paul J. Zodman one of the world’s happiest millionaires, because you should see what my boys dug up this morning! It’s hiding out there now, with two guards watching it. Lie down! Lie down!” He rose and barred the exit. “Tomorrow morning, just as we drive off to the forest, Raanan from Budapest is going to come running up to my car, shouting, ‘Effendi! Effendi!’ ”