A Long Way to Shiloh

by Lionel Davidson

  I thought, when rage allowed, that he’d better be.

  ‘Caspar,’ he said after a moment.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Caspar. To coin a phrase, this thing is bigger than both of us. You’ll see.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I’ll make it up to you. You’ll tell me what I can do.’

  ‘I can tell you now. You can get stuffed.’

  ‘Yes, love. Stay where you are. Till four o’clock.’

  2 Subtility to the Simple

  To the young man knowledge and discretion. [Proverbs 1.4]

  1

  The Israeli Embassy is in Palace Green, at one end of Kensington Palace Gardens, that private and brooding avenue, almost entirely extra-territorial, which lies between Kensington and Bayswater. It was after six and dark when we got there, which didn’t seem to be unplanned, and we bowled into it from the Kensington end, similarly not by chance.

  ‘The neighbours farther along are nosy,’ Uri said, turning into the drive.

  The neighbours farther along were the embassies of Jordan, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia; no soul from any of them, however, stirring now. Nothing whatever seemed to be stirring in the street. Uri’s whimsy-shrouded secrecy, strenuously maintained throughout the journey, had already brought on a severe attack of the habdabs, in no way lessened now by the masterful way with which he opened the embassy door and whipped me inside.

  The Israeli Embassy is a nice embassy, very snug. There is a democratic air about the place, of rolled sleeves and glasses of tea. A girl was crossing the hall with a glass of tea as we went in, and Uri exchanged shouted Shaloms and bevakashars with her as we mounted the staircase. We went through a large room into a smaller one. Four or five men were sitting about in it, talking; one of them, I saw, Agrot. I’d never actually met him, but his face was familiar enough from book jackets and papers. He was spooning yoghurt from a bottle, and he rose with it still in his hand, a big chap, moustached, nose a bit out of true, not unlike Hunt the logistician of Everest.

  He said, ‘Shalom,’ smiling, grip very hefty.

  ‘Shalom.’

  ‘I wanted to meet you a long time.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were here.’

  ‘I just arrived. Excuse this,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t eat on the plane. I liked your Eteo-Cretan work.’

  ‘I liked your Bar-Kochbah.’

  ‘Compliments!’

  We sat down and swapped a few more. He continued spooning his yoghurt. Some time during the course of it someone got me a drink. I began to feel that vague uneasiness that comes with hearing a newly-arrived foreigner speak your language as well as his own and exhibiting in it a lively awareness of a range of affairs you’d supposed to be purely local. The rest of the characters drifted off after a bit, leaving just Agrot, Uri and myself. It seemed to be time for business.

  I said conversationally, ‘And what brings you here just at the moment, Professor Agrot?’

  He said, ‘Yes,’ and licked a spot of yoghurt off his thumb and reached into his breast pocket and drew something out.

  It was a little print, about five by three, evidently of a text fragment, square Hebrew letter, very badly done.

  ‘What do you make of this?’ he said.

  Apart from the fact that some of the words were suspiciously long, as if the writer had forgotten to leave spaces in between, I didn’t make anything of it. Certain Hebrew letters, M and T, for instance, are not dissimilar – about as similar, say, as O and D in our own letter. Just as the English word ODD, badly written, could come out as DDD, OOO, DOO, ODO, so a word in scroll Hebrew using M and T could produce its own stock of permutations. In addition, scroll Hebrew uses no vowels. A group of three letters, say MTR, could therefore be read as MATTER, MOTOR, TUMOUR, TOTTER or possibly some proper name, or just as possibly some word common enough a couple of thousand years ago and not encountered since.

  Most often, because of the root structure of the Semitic languages, you can have a general stab at the thought implied in the word; and if there are enough of them place it reasonably in context. There weren’t enough of them here, and I couldn’t pick out any recognizable root.

  I said, ‘The scribe seems to have had his wrong boots on that day.’

  ‘He was rather ill at the time.’

  ‘It’s not Hebrew or Aramaic, anyway.’

  ‘How’s your Greek?’

  I studied it again.

  ‘Better than his. It’s not Greek.’

  ‘Try it backwards.’

  I tried it backwards. The consonantal clusters began to assume vaguely familiar associations.

  ‘Here,’ Agrot said. ‘A rough reading in English of the portion you have.’

  The rough reading went: Here of the place [in the area] by the hand of the lowest and he who testifies alone [the private soldiers and myself only] so that they should not have it in their mouths [without witnesses] the OEED in darkness [is buried].

  ‘Interesting?’ Agrot said.

  ‘Very.’

  ‘What strikes you particularly?’

  ‘About this invalid who thought backwards in Greek?’

  ‘He didn’t think that way naturally. He was making a pre-arranged report to an authority who would understand.’

  ‘I see.’ From his confident assertion he obviously had a great deal more of the stuff.

  ‘Anything else?’ he said.

  ‘This OEED, you mean.’

  ‘What do you think it means?’

  I looked at it again. Anything with a code-name usually telegraphed some piece of priestly property. From the juxtaposition with ‘darkness’ it could indicate ‘light’.

  ‘Light?’ I said.

  ‘We’re thinking alike.’

  ‘In that case,’ I said, ‘you’d expect a sacred article, a Book of the Law or the Prophets – anything with light-shedding properties in a religious context.’

  ‘This one needed four men to carry it.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Together with its auxiliary equipment.’

  ‘H’m.’

  ‘Any further ideas?’

  ‘Not on one drink. You don’t get performance and economy.’

  Uri got up and poured me another.

  ‘Why has the light got to be metaphorical?’ Agrot said.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘What sheds light physically?’

  ‘A lamp?’

  ‘Bravo.’

  I looked at him. ‘You’re not supposing, I hope,’ I said slowly, ‘the lamp?’

  ‘Well. It would be quite a turn, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Quite a turn.’ He seemed perfectly serious about it. I said, ‘Have you got a date for this?’

  ‘A very accurate one. March of 67.’

  ‘Then the lamp couldn’t have remained in darkness very long, could it?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Agrot said. ‘Tell me why.’

  He was leaning back, nose a little to the east, smiling gently.

  He didn’t need me to tell him why. He would know why, rather better than I. The lamp, the great seven-branched lamp, the Menorah, has been the symbol of Judaism for some thousands of years; of his own State, Israel, for the past fifteen or so. The Roman conqueror Titus took the lamp when he destroyed the Temple in August of 70. A representation of it is still to be seen on his Triumphal Arch in Rome; a group of Romans carry the massive gold object through the Roman streets in the triumphal procession. The procession was witnessed by the historian Flavius Josephus who recorded it in the finest detail. If Agrot had a date of 67 for the lamp, and Titus took it in 70, then it couldn’t, as I said, have remained in darkness very long.

  ‘Because Titus took it,’ I said.

  ‘We wonder if he did.’

  ‘He took the lamp.’

  ‘He certainly took a lamp,’ Agrot said.

  I said, ‘Ah, h’m,’ and lit a cigarette.

  Apart possibly from the True Cross and the True Shroud, the True Menorah h
as attracted a larger corpus of fairy tale and legend than any other artifact in history. Its design and dimensions were of course as specified by God to Moses – in history’s earliest As-Told-To, the Pentateuch – and as subsequently installed in the Temple by Solomon. With such sponsors, the devout have always accorded it magical properties, including inviolability. I’d never heard that Agrot was particularly devout and he didn’t strike me as much of a one for fairy tales. I looked at him through the cigarette smoke. He was still smiling gently.

  ‘What’s bothering you?’ he said.

  ‘What you’d expect to be bothering me.’

  ‘All right, look at it this way. Given the idea that a copy might have been made at some time – and after all, it’s a very old idea, much older than Titus – you’d expect somebody to have had a try at making one then. The times were very dangerous.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And therefore for someone to bury the original.’

  ‘And therefore for someone else to whip it as soon as they found where it was.’

  ‘Ah,’ Agrot said. ‘I see what’s bothering you. Quite so. The point here is that we don’t think anybody ever did find where it was. We think there is a good possibility it is still where it was put.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well. There are reasons,’ Agrot said. ‘But to find out, you’ll have to come to Israel.’

  It suddenly occurred to me that if I hadn’t been brought here to listen to this load of fable-type cock I might by now be in bed with Lady Longlegs. Would the chance ever recur?

  ‘You look worried,’ Agrot said.

  ‘He has a number of problems,’ Uri said.

  I said, ‘Yes. You see, Professor Agrot, although of course I’d like to –’

  ‘I hear that you are now a professor yourself.’

  ‘Quite. And I have to get this department going. It’s a new university and I have to get –’

  ‘Dr Silberstein will get the books,’ Uri said.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Dr Silberstein. The doyen of all book-getters. Dr Silberstein will get the books.’ He said it very confidently.

  I drew in a lungful of smoke and looked at him. Dr Silberstein was indeed the doyen of all book-getters. If there was a book to be got, Dr Silberstein could get it. I’d used him before. I’d have used him this time, except that a Silberstein book came out a bit pricey. It wouldn’t, however, have page 64 missing, and it would have all relevant errata slips gummed in, even if Dr Silberstein had to lay hands on six separate copies distributed over six separate countries to ensure it.

  I said, ‘How will Dr Silberstein get the books?’

  ‘How will Dr Silberstein get books?’ Uri said, opening his eyes very wide.

  ‘How will he get my books? How does he come to be in the act at all?’

  ‘I have brought him in the act,’ Uri said. ‘I have told him everything you told me. With regard to books, you have nothing further to worry about.’

  It occurred to me that this bastard was being not only unusually knowing and unusually persistent but also unusually intrusive.

  ‘Who asked you to?’ I said.

  Uri respectfully inclined his head.

  ‘I did,’ Agrot said. ‘Of course with the approval of the Department of Antiquities of the Ministry of Education and Culture.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘No, love. You don’t,’ Uri said. ‘I’m afraid it all had to happen in a hurry. But everything was strangely – the religious might even say divinely – propitious. The suggestion is that while Dr Silberstein does a job for you, you do this job for us, we paying both fees. You’re needed, you see.’

  ‘Urgently,’ Agrot said.

  It took a moment for this to settle.

  I said, ‘What’s up with your own semiticists?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Agrot said. ‘Only I’ve been re-reading your work at Jericho and Megiddo. It shows unusual qualities of flair. You have good hunches. They work. We need them.’

  ‘How do you know they’ll work now?’

  ‘I don’t,’ Agrot said. ‘Do you?’

  He was still smiling his gentle smile; a student of human nature.

  I said, ‘What’s the urgency?’

  ‘Our copy, unfortunately, isn’t the only one. And it’s certainly not the best one. The readings are, so to say, obscure. We have good reason to believe our neighbours have a better copy. You haven’t been approached by them, I suppose?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No. I don’t know if you saw this.’ He’d taken a booklet out of his pocket. ‘I’ve marked the page.’

  It was the Revue de Qumran, Editions Letousey et Ane, Paris, by way of being one of our trade papers. The marked page was a correspondence page. A letter signed Khalil Sidqui from Amman, Jordan, had been ringed. I began to read it, with a vague recollection of having read it before. Apropos some doings at Qumran, Sidqui had reason to believe documents had been found elsewhere that cast light on first-century place names in Northern Palestine. Scholars had a duty to publish such valuable material. It was unscholarly to allow politics….

  The usual kind of sniping carried out by both sides to see if the other has turned up something new.

  I said, ‘Yes, I read it.’

  ‘Do you know Sidqui?’

  ‘Yes.’ I’d met him in Jordan, a little elderly worrier; not very top class.

  ‘There’s no question it’s our thing he’s talking about. We have other evidence. Someone put Sidqui up to this.’

  ‘A funny choice. Does he bother you?’

  ‘Not Sidqui qua Sidqui,’ Agrot said. ‘Just the implications. They must have had their copy some time.’

  ‘When did he write this?’

  ‘Before last December, anyway. He died then.’

  ‘Did he? I didn’t hear about it.’

  ‘No. Nor did I till last week.’

  ‘What was up with him?’

  ‘He was a sick man. Bilharzia. Some other things. However,’ Agrot said briskly, ‘the point is we know they have it, and that they are being very busy with it. I understand you leave your present post next week. If Silberstein takes on this thing for you, I’d be glad if you could come out then.’

  Would you? Everything moving a bit too fast here. Too many wheels turning too audibly.

  I said, ‘Well, I’d have to have a word with my principal, of course–’

  ‘No,’ Agrot said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘No.’

  A certain silence fell on the room.

  I said, ‘How do you mean?’

  Agrot looked at Uri. Uri said, somewhat wheedlingly, ‘Because there’s no need. I mentioned everything was working out very propitiously. And so it is. Next week you leave on your library travels. So Dr Silberstein or one of his assistants will do it for you. Any place they happen to go, you happen to be somewhere else. Who needs to know where?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t they know?’ I said.

  ‘Because,’ Agrot said, somewhat reluctantly, ‘we don’t want it to get back to our neighbours that you are involved. It could very easily. It’s better they don’t know – and of course I rely on you not to mention any of this. The fact is, some of the background to this business is Classified. Don’t ask me why now. I’ll tell you in Israel, together with a lot of other interesting things. But don’t expect me to go on my knees. If you want to come, come. If not, we’ll have to manage without. It’s been known before.’

  He said it very soberly, very reasonably, with a built-in annoyance factor peculiarly Israeli.

  I said, ‘Let me think about it.’

  ‘Who has to let you?’

  ‘When do you go back?’

  ‘In the morning. I came only to see you.’

  ‘Well. I’ll have to let you know, then.’

  ‘Good. Shalom.’

  ‘Shalom.’

  ‘Just a minute,’ Uri said, somewhat bewildered at the rapid turn of events. I was a bit bewildered myself. ‘I have Dr
Silberstein below. Don’t you want to see him?’

  ‘Not now.’

  ‘But he came specially. He’s waiting to see you. He’s sitting with a glass of tea.’

  ‘Then we hope he enjoys it,’ Agrot said calmly, still pumping my hand. ‘On Israeli territory nobody forces anybody. Shalom. Shalom.’

  He shook Uri’s hand, too. I thought he had a quiet word with him as I went to the door.

  Just a few minutes later we were on the road again.

  On the North Circular, these fantasies reverting to proportion, more prosaic matters came to mind. I said, ‘How did you come to get her number?’

  ‘Lady Lulu? From Birkett. I rang and asked him.’

  Of course.

  ‘Was she really going out?’

  ‘I don’t know. I told her I wanted to see you at four.’

  ‘Was she surprised at your calling her?’

  ‘Yes. Startled,’ Uri said.

  Better. A clearer picture emerged. All was not lost.

  I said more cheerfully, ‘So what’s your trouble, buggar-lugs? You’re morose.’

  ‘Just thoughtful.’

  ‘Are you disappointed in me?’

  ‘I can’t tell you what assignments to accept.’

  ‘It’s fantasy, Uri. The thing can’t exist.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Besides, I’m in the knowledge business, love – a very international business. We’re supposed to publish things, not hide them.’

  ‘Do me a favour,’ Uri said, ‘and keep that crap for your students. I don’t see the Arabs hurrying to publish.’

  ‘Maybe that’s why they got stuck with Sidqui.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Silence. A long silence.

  I said, ‘Also, it’s a serious step taking on a thing like this without telling the principal.’

  ‘Don’t take serious steps.’

  ‘It’s not a thing I could decide on the spur of the moment. I don’t even know if I’m capable of it now.’

  ‘Am I arguing?’ Uri said. ‘The decision is yours. Who wants challenges? You’ve earned yourself reputation and position. Nobody says you have to keep testing yourself.’

  Agrot had certainly had a word with him; some other, subtler kind of hustle going on here. They’re kind, the Israelis, and hard-working, and accommodating, and conscientious; all these things. Also frigging bright.