The Last Man

by P. T. Deutermann

  “The well water tastes like the Dead Sea smells,” he announced. “You must, of course, pay for your drinking water.”

  He gave them room keys. They unloaded the car and took their bags across the visitors center lobby, through a connecting passageway to the hostel. David’s room was all the way at the end of the first-floor hall, right next to a set of fire doors. Judith disappeared upstairs, carrying her portable computer along with her bag. Good, maybe she would want to stay in and do her homework. David’s room was small, no more than ten feet square, with a single screened window giving an expansive view of the familiar sand, rocks, and scorpions. There was a single metal bed that looked suspiciously like an army hospital bed, a single chair, and a small wardrobe. He had passed the communal bathroom and showers halfway down the hall in the middle of the hallway. He opened the wardrobe and found a shelf with a single extra blanket and four wire coat hangers. He dumped his gear bags on the bed and went down the hall to wash up. When he returned, he took out his notebook and camera, changed from sneakers to his trail boots, slipped a tube of sunscreen into his pocket, and went out, locking the door behind him. He headed for the restaurant.

  He was finishing his second cup of coffee and a breakfast roll when Judith showed up. She was still wearing the same outfit but had taken off the mirrored sunglasses, which she now had hanging from a button on her left shirt pocket. The soldiers gave her a frank group appraisal as she came into the room but politely lost interest when she bought a cup of tea and a sweet roll from the counter and joined David. In addition to the roll, David had breakfasted on some small squares of what tasted like cream cheese, and two hard-boiled eggs.

  He gave her a curt nod when she sat down and then resumed his inspection of the mountain. The cable-car wires originating from somewhere above the restaurant dipped lazily across the parking lots before rising in a sweeping arc to the plateau on top of the mountain. David could make out the ruined battlements and casemate walls along the southeastern rim, and what looked like the vague outline of a switchback path leading up from the ravines below the parking lots to the casemates on the east side of the fortress. He was pretty sure that was the so-called Serpent Path.

  “Is it necessary that we wait for the cable car?” he asked.

  “Are you really fit, Mr. Hall?” she countered. “Do you perhaps ski?”

  “Actually, yes to both. I work out on a home exercise machine daily and spend about a third of the year hiking and climbing.”

  “I ask because the army patrol gets annoyed when they must rescue tourists whose legs have turned to jelly halfway up the Serpent Path. That is a forty-degree slope.”

  “I see,” David said, swallowing. Wow, he thought. Being a skier, he knew full well how steep that was. Forty degrees. It didn’t look it.

  “The switchbacks are deceiving,” she observed, as if reading his thoughts, “but it is a very interesting climb, and there is history to the Serpent Path, of course. During the siege, the Romans apparently left it deliberately unguarded, although not unwatched. They wanted to keep it open as an avenue for defections, as a way of diminishing the garrison. They only closed it when they realized that Jews were not deserting but coming in from what was left of the country to join the garrison. The climb will take you an hour or so if you keep moving. You will need to rent a stick and take some water. You have a rucksack, I believe?”

  “Yes, I do. Why the stick?”

  She gave him the first inkling of a smile he had seen on her face. “For the serpents, of course. Possibly to lean on occasionally. Should your legs become tired, that is.” Her eyes were laughing at him, almost daring him to make the climb. “I will wait for you by the eastern casemate gate.”

  He realized then that she would be able to take the cable car and get there ahead of him, even if he left immediately. So much for ditching the minder.

  “You won’t come along, then?” he asked innocently.

  “I wouldn’t dream of trying that climb, Mr. Hall. I am definitely not in shape for that slope.”

  He considered making a gallant reply to that comment but decided against it.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll go get my stuff. See you up there in an hour or so.”

  8

  An hour? In your dreams, Mr. Hall, she thought, as she watched him set out across the parking lots for the base of the mountain. The soldiers made some funny comments as they watched him go. What a silly, silly man, she mused. Well, maybe not silly, but certainly impulsive. It must be an American trait. She had caught his surprise when she told him that it was a forty-degree slope, so he must know enough about mountaineering to appreciate the challenge, and yet, almost like a teenaged boy showing off, he had plunged ahead. But showing off for whom, Yehudit? Certainly not you. You’ve been about as cold a fish as could come out of the sea. Nothing new there. Since Dov had died, she had gone cold inside and out.

  She thought back to her childhood days in an Ahuza neighborhood on Mount Carmel above Haifa as an only child. Her father’s parents, both wealthy medical doctors, had made aliyah from Europe before World War II, and her father taught European history at the exclusive Reali School. Judith had grown up as something of a solitary person, shy in adolescence from being too tall, eternally awkward, nearsighted, and uncommonly bright in school, characteristics that guaranteed a certain degree of ostracism by her more boisterous classmates.

  Her mother had died of breast cancer when Judith was twelve, devastating both Judith and her father, who proceeded to cocoon himself from human relationships until he died seven years later. Judith had later realized that her father had been simply marking time for those seven years until he could join his wife, but at the time, his self-imposed isolation left her alone at a terribly vulnerable phase of her life.

  With both parents effectively gone, she had thrown herself into academic achievement, excelling in high school and scoring a thirty-four out of thirty-five on the matriculation exams. Upon completion of her army service, she had gone first to Hebrew University, and then to Cambridge University in England to study with a Scrolls scholar. Like many Israelis, she had met her future husband, Dov Ressner, in the army. It turned out that Dov was something of a clone to Judith in terms of personality. He was a physics and mathematics major, extremely shy, nearsighted as she was, devoted to his academic career, and entirely inexperienced in the field of human relations, especially if they involved young ladies. It had taken a while, first because Judith had money and Dov did not, which caused a certain amount of awkwardness while she figured out how to get around his stubborn pride. Dov had lost his mother and father in an automobile accident, and the growing recognition that he and Judith had shared similar childhood experiences, combined with their mutual passion for academic achievement, blossomed into a marvelous year of catching up across the full spectrum of postponed adolescent love.

  Sitting now in the dusty restaurant of the Masada tourist center, her eyes open but unseeing behind her glasses, she could still conjure up the images of the first awkward, tentative, and ultimately wonderful time they had made love, in the back of his cousin’s ancient Volkswagen van just like a couple of American hippies. That they were going to be married was almost a given, with the only obstacle being the requirement for him to study abroad in France for two years. Upon return from Europe, he completed his graduate studies at the Weizmann Institute and later took a job at the government research facilities down at Dimona. They got married as soon as she finished her own graduate degree in ancient languages.

  Their time together, even once married, had been all too short. Because his work involved shift hours that often went through the night, he lived in a bunkroom at the site during the week. She had plunged directly back into graduate work, aiming now at a full Ph.D. in archaeology. Deferring as ever to the singular goals of academic achievement, they had put off having children until she completed her Ph.D., which ended up taking four years because of all the summer site work. Their marriage worked, although she
had begun to appreciate, toward the end of her graduate program, that the enforced separation might have been shielding both of them from some of the more normal stresses and strains of marriage. Then Dov had begun to change, not so much in his personality but in his attitude about the work at Dimona. It was no secret between most of the married couples connected with Dimona what the site was really all about, although Dov never once told her anything that could be considered a violation of security. He became increasingly frustrated the year before he died, and Judith sensed that he was having trouble sustaining his passion for the pure science in the face of the product it was serving. It was a topic he avoided, however, and because it caused him to be more rather than less affectionate in his love for her, she had decided not to rock that particular boat, even after he became secretly, and then not so secretly, involved with the LaBaG faction.

  Then the terrible night five years ago, when his laboratory supervisor, gray-faced and tongue-tied, along with the cadaverous Colonel Skuratov, had appeared at the apartment, hats in hand, a military driver standing nervously down in the lobby, to announce that Dov Ressner was dead. A sudden catastrophe at Dimona, mumbled words about an accident, a matter of urgent security according to Skuratov, and, worst of all, the news that he had been already interred. Judith had been raised in a mildly religious family, casual in the sense that they respected the tenets of the Jewish faith but were not overly zealous in observing every aspect of it. Besides, quick burials were a fact of life in the Middle East. Still, it had accentuated her sense of loss and grief never to see him again, even in death, or to be able to go to the place where he was buried. The scientist had told her as gently as he could that in all probability no humans could ever go near that place. Just like the stone-cold empty place in her heart, which no man would ever get near again.

  “I say, miss, are you quite all right?” Judith looked up, her eyes blinking as she came back to the tourist center. The tourists had begun to arrive, and an elderly British gentleman was standing next to her table, looking at her with concern. Without knowing it, she had removed her glasses, and there were tears in her eyes.

  “Yes, thank you,” she said hastily, blinking her eyes rapidly. “I was—I was far away, that’s all. Yes, I’m quite all right.”

  He nodded, apologized for intruding, and sat back down at his table. She wiped her eyes, put the glasses back on, and scanned the sunlit side of the mountain, finally spotting the dogged American chugging his way up the Serpent Path, something that even dear Dov, outdoors enthusiast that he was, would probably never have tried. She stood up, shook the sorrowful cobwebs out of her mind, and decided to be nice to the dummy on the hill. He was harmless.

  * * *

  The climb took closer to two hours than one. It had been technically simple but extremely demanding because of the punishing heat and the nature of the trail itself. David had seen no serpents, remembering halfway up that the Serpent Path was called that because of the way it snaked back and forth across the face of the ancient scree. The trail itself was no more than a footpath, all loose dirt, shale, stone rubble, and sand. It was not so much treacherous as fatiguing, since every step demanded he first find a secure foothold before the other foot could be planted. The view out across the Dead Sea and into distant Jordan was stupendous the higher up he went, and his appreciation for the fortress’s natural defenses improved as he climbed closer to the casemate walls guarding the rim. He could not imagine anyone trying to come up this slope in the face of archers, or even a crowd of women with a good supply of big rocks. Every time he looked up at the walls above he had to plant the stick behind him to overcome the sensation that he would topple over backward and go tumbling down the slope in a cloud of sand and dust, pursued no doubt by a sand-slide of scorpions.

  He had not bothered with the rucksack, choosing to stick the plastic bottle of water in a pocket. After twenty minutes on the slope, he had shucked his shirt, tying it around his waist, and built up a pretty good sweat by the time the cable car rumbled overhead with its first load of tourists. He had heard and then watched the initial squadron of tour buses come down the coast road from the cities. He wondered if Judith would take the first run up the mountain or watch from her vantage point in the air-conditioned restaurant until she saw him getting close to the top. He was breathing strenuously because of the heat but felt fine otherwise except for a stinging in his calf muscles.

  Judith Ressner, he thought. A strange woman. His first impression of her remained intact: physically very attractive, with that exotic sabra face and those mile-long legs. Smart, but distant. No, more like preoccupied. Or maybe just plain sad. Ellerstein had said that she had not recovered from the loss of her husband, the physicist. As a “nuke” himself, he wondered briefly if her husband had worked directly in the not so secret Israeli nuclear weapons program. Right now, though, he needed to focus on the mission here, and not get involved with The Ressner. She was actually doing him a favor, because he needed that distance. He especially did not need to aggravate the woman. So keep your trap shut, he reminded himself. Maybe she’ll stay down at the tourist center.

  As it turned out, however, she was waiting for him as he climbed wearily through the stone gates at the top of the Serpent Path. He was pretty well soaked with sweat and puffing when he climbed up the last one hundred feet, which were much steeper than the rest of the path due to the erosion over twenty centuries. He walked unsteadily up the rounded stone steps that led inside the casemate walls, stopped briefly in the cool shadows of the guards’ chamber to regain his wind, and then emerged into the bright sunlight of the fortress enclosure. Judith was sitting on a low stone wall, facing the guards’ chamber and reading a book. She had her mirrored sunglasses on again but now had changed from jeans to abbreviated khaki shorts, and David took a moment to admire the scenery. She looked up at last.

  “Welcome to Metsadá, Mr. Hall. Did you enjoy your climb?”

  “I don’t know if I’d say I enjoyed it, but I certainly have a better appreciation of the defensive strength of this place.”

  “Well, that’s why it wasn’t the side the Romans attacked, of course. I brought you some water in case you might have run out.”

  David’s single bottle of water had run out a third of the way up the mountain, and he reached for the cool plastic bottle gratefully. Their fingertips touched for an instant.

  “Thank you very much,” he said, drinking half the bottle in one gulp. “The climb would be a whole lot easier without that sun.”

  “The Bedouin call it the Hammer of Allah; now you know why. During the siege, all of the traffic up and down that path was at night.”

  A trio of very blond and pretty girls came by, one of them giving his sweaty torso a frankly sexual appraisal. He decided to put his shirt back on. Judith turned and shot them a pointed look, and they strolled away, giggling in what sounded like a Scandinavian language. He sat down a few feet away from her in deference to his aromatic condition and looked around. The top of the mountain looked to be about three football fields long and about one and a half wide, in the rough shape of a large, broad spear point, just as all the books described. The sharp end of the spear pointed north, up the Dead Sea, and, like a spear point, the offset spine of the mountaintop was ridged slightly higher than the surrounding edges. Sitting near the eastern gate, he looked up a gently rising stone slope to a collection of ruined buildings that appeared to be about eighty yards away near the western rim. To his right, the ground also sloped upward toward a much larger collection of ruins situated behind the remains of a smooth fifteen-foot wall.

  All around the rim were the remains of casemate walls, which consisted of two parallel fortification walls spaced about eight feet apart and which originally had been covered by a ceiling to allow defenders to get anywhere around the rim without being exposed to enemy fire. The walls were much reduced now, and the ceilings were, for the most part, long gone. The open ground space between the ruined clusters of masonry was hard-p
acked sandy dirt or bare stone, reminding him of the flinty surface of the Acropolis in Athens. The rubble of buildings and fortifications gleamed bone white in the glare of the late morning sun. The eastern gate he had come through was just north of the middle of the plateau, and the cable-car landing platform was close by. Small knots of tourists were scattered here and there across the plateau. One group had a guide who was giving his tour in French. His voice carried crisply across the stones.

  “The main palace-villa complex is on the north end,” Judith said. “I assume you know something about the layout, and that there are several periods of history represented by the various buildings.”

  “Yes, I’ve studied it a bit. As I understand it, the mountain was probably first fortified during the Hasmonean period, say 167 to about 37 B.C. Then came the Herodian period, from 37 to 4 B.C., which is when the bulk of all this was built up as a summer palace and potential refuge for the king. Then Judaea became a Roman province, and there was a Roman garrison up here until a band of Zealots took the place away from them around the beginning of the Jewish revolt, in either A.D. 66 or 67. The Romans took it back in 73 or 74, left a garrison here for about fifty years after that, and then later there was a Byzantine monastery up here until the late 400s or so, after which it fell into complete ruin. In brief.”

  “In brief, that’s pretty good,” she said. She seemed somewhat friendlier since he had made his climb up the Serpent Path. Perhaps her earlier frostiness was some kind of initiation. Be careful, he told himself—don’t show off. She’ll become suspicious if you can name every building up here, which he could.