The Last Man

by P. T. Deutermann

  “The steps leading back up to the top palaces are called the water steps. Slaves would have to come down here continuously to collect water in jars and then carry them back up to the main level, where they would fill smaller cisterns, which in turn piped water throughout the palace for the baths, hypocausts, and fountains. There are other cisterns farther back along the channel.”

  He looked beyond the entrance and saw the second hole, smaller than this one. “Same thing—dry hole?”

  “Yes. Once the Romans breached the dam and raised the ramp, no more water ever came into these cisterns.”

  “Yet, if they were full when the siege began, and these things are, say, sixty feet to eighty in diameter, then each one would have held nearly three-quarters of a million gallons of water.”

  She looked at him. “Did you just compute that?”

  He smiled, trying to cover his sudden error. “I’m an engineer, remember?” he asked. “Volume of a sphere; pretty simple calculation.” Pay attention, dammit, he thought. She doesn’t need to discover she’s telling you things you already know. Especially about the cisterns.

  He looked over the edge of the water channel again. Some birds sailed through the wadi a few hundred vertiginous feet below them. He gave a small shudder. Judith turned to walk back to the relative safety of the water-slave steps. They went up and then turned left and down the terrace steps to the lowest level, where she showed him some of the remaining fresco fragments and speculated about what the buildings looked like. He remembered the drawings in the Yadin reports and said so.

  “Very speculative, but at this distance in time, as good as any,” she replied. “Truly, there is much we do not know.”

  A warm breeze swept across the ruined terrace, bearing just a sulfurous hint of the Dead Sea far below them. They stood and looked out over the panoramic view, which from this elevation covered nearly thirty miles in every direction except due west, where the Judaean hills blocked out the metallic sky. Those hills looked to be about as dead as the sea over which they kept silent watch. From the lowest terrace, the main Roman camp, approximately a quarter mile distant, was at about eye level.

  “Do you suppose the Zealots came down here?”

  “They did for water, depending upon how much remained in the rim cisterns. We think they took some of the stone works from down here to reinforce the outer casemate walls once the Romans began the siege ramp. As you can see, the foundations are all here, but there is a lot of material missing—and, of course, no wood fragments.”

  “Right. The wood went into the walls at the end of the siege. This was a tough fight.”

  “Yes, with very high stakes. If you have studied Roman military history, you know that once the Romans sank their teeth in, there was usually only one outcome.”

  He gazed out over the western hills, shimmering in the early afternoon heat, and tried to imagine what it had been like up here for the Zealots. They would have watched with growing desperation as the inexorable Romans built first a wall around the entire mountain, the circumvallation, and then the ominous ramp, and finally the siege tower. The fighters among them must have known as they hunkered down on this impregnable rock, day after day, month after month, how it would have to end: an entire Roman legion fastened onto the flanks of the last Jewish stronghold, inching ever forward and upward. She seemed to sense his thoughts.

  “When you actually stand here,” she said in a soft voice, “it is perhaps easier to appreciate why they did what they did. Two years and more, day after day, fighting off the daily probes, all the while watching the ramp grow. How many times must some of them have come down here to the lower palaces to look out at the Roman camp, watching and wondering: when? What they finally did may have come as a release of sorts.”

  “Yes. Now you can understand why I wanted to come here. The books don’t convey that feeling. Adrian had been here, and she was fascinated with the place.”

  “I forget. Was she a writer?”

  “More of a dreamer, I think. Why?”

  She smiled at him, a full smile this time. It illuminated her face. “Writers must above all have feelings,” she said. “For the atmosphere of places, for people’s emotions, a sense of tragedy if that’s appropriate. I am an antiquities historian more than anything else. We have feelings, too, but our passion is for cold facts and the truth more than for the people who made the history.” She paused for a moment. “This terrible place tends to confuse archaeologists, because the feelings intrude so forcefully.”

  At that instant he was seized with the urge to tell her why he was really here. The intensity of this impulse surprised him, this sudden need to share with her, with someone, the enormous concept that had brought him here, but he knew he dared not do that. He would have only one chance, and that was probably going to be tonight or tomorrow night. One shot, yes or no, Adrian had been right or utterly wrong. He needed to keep his minder here well out of that picture until he knew. He looked at his watch. Almost three o’clock.

  “Yes,” she said, looking at hers. “We must get back to the base. Do you want to walk back the way we came, or shall we take the cable car?”

  “That’s a no-brainer,” he said.

  She smiled again. “No-brainer? I haven’t heard that expression before, but I presume it means we ride, yes?”

  * * *

  After their meal together in the restaurant, they again bought some fruit, bread, and bottled water for later that evening. On the way into the hostel to stash their supplies, David suggested they take a walk down to the beaches of the Dead Sea. At first she seemed reluctant, but then agreed, and they met fifteen minutes later out in the parking lot. The sun was well down in the western sky, and the day’s heat had begun to break, the ovenlike air giving way to the first hint of an evening breeze. The east side of the mountain and the southern ravine were in deep shadow, with only the rim of the fortress reflecting a golden light off the ruined casemate walls. There were still some tourists up there, but for an instant David imagined he was seeing the long-lost defenders.

  They threaded their way through the parking lot where half a dozen tour buses were loading up a gaggle of Japanese tourists, each of whom appeared to be carrying his body weight in camera gear. The bus engines were running at high idle to maintain air-conditioning inside, and the billowing exhaust gave the two of them an incentive to break into a light jog out of the parking lot, down the access road, across the coast road, and into the crystalline dunes.

  David admired the determined way she walked along the hard-packed sand. He found himself walking slightly behind her, conscious of the poise and strength of her stride across the difficult ground, and the way those long legs moved. She had the body of an athlete, which made him curious: She didn’t seem to be the type who worked out, and yet she had managed the climb up the southern ravine at a pace almost equal to his, and he had been training for this trip for nearly a year. His thoughts were interrupted when she looked back over her shoulder and caught him looking.

  “Tired already, Mr. Hall?” she asked with a teasing smile.

  “I was just enjoying the view,” he replied, without thinking, and then colored. “I mean—”

  “Yes, the light is interesting at this time of day, isn’t it?” She turned back around and kept walking.

  He caught up with her, trying to cover his embarrassment, but she simply looked away across the water, as if suddenly fascinated by some distant object on the Jordanian shore. He kicked at a lump of solidified phosphate.

  “This isn’t like any beach I’ve ever seen,” he said. “Certainly not like our ocean beaches.”

  “You were one of those ‘surfer dudes’?” she asked.

  He laughed. “No, not at all. I grew up in Washington, D.C. My father was a scientist at the National Bureau of Standards. We kept a summerhouse on the Delaware beaches. I was something of a natural water baby. My father was not thrilled.”

  “He expected you to be a scientist as well?”

>   “Well, he didn’t expect me to grow my hair long and spend every waking hour down on the beaches with a bunch of surfer dudes, as you put it. I discovered scuba and girls when I was fourteen, and that didn’t help.”

  “Scuba is an expensive sport for a fourteen-year-old, I should think,” she observed.

  “So were girls,” he said. They had to walk carefully now, picking their way through a scrub of cactus and razor-sharp crystal stalagmites. “My Uncle Jack lives for outdoor sporting activities. He’s the one who actually taught me scuba. Do you dive?”

  “My husband was the fanatic with the scuba,” she said. “At first I did the diving just to be with him. Then I became an enthusiast. It is popular here in Israel.”

  “Yeah, well, in the summers I went to work in a dive shop to pay for all the pricey toys. I love to dive; I’m going to do Caesarea Maritima when I’m through here.”

  “I would think a parent would be afraid, a fourteen-year-old doing scuba.”

  “Part of a general pattern, I’m afraid. Teenaged boys in America often do precisely what most disturbs their fathers. I had a much better relationship with my uncle than with my father. Fortunately, I had a younger brother who was everything Dad wanted. Outstanding student. Career oriented from the age of about eight months. I think Dad kind of kissed me off once he figured out that Larry, that’s my younger brother, was going to turn out closer to the mold.”

  “Yet still you became a nuclear engineer?”

  “That was the funny part. My mother realized before I did that I had more brains than I was letting on, especially in math and science. She steered me into the right courses, the ones I could do in my sleep—math and science. That left me more time for other interests.”

  “Your uncle sounds interesting,” she said, stopping to dump small stones out of her shoes.

  “He is. He works at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Washington. He always told me to go to work for the government.”

  “For the security?”

  “Not quite. He used to say he worked in order to play. You know, the fat man who lives to eat versus the thin man who eats to live? He once told me that he worked for the government because, if you wanted it that way, it was just a job, not really a career. Do your job, eight to four thirty, and then resume your real life. Careerists bring it home with them.”

  “And university?”

  “Went to my local state university in Maryland. Took a degree in chemical engineering, minor in physics. Uncle Jack got me a starter job at the NRC. Damn! This place stinks.”

  “Yes, it gets stronger in the late afternoon. There is geothermal activity along here. Cooks the chemicals. There are big salt mines farther south. Did you have to do national service?”

  “No. It’s not like here, where everyone must serve. I thought about it, but they told me I’d have to serve in nuclear submarines, and I didn’t want that.”

  They entered a clearing where suddenly the stink of chemical salts went away, and they stopped to breathe clear air. He looked back at the looming mountain fortress, which was subsiding into even deeper shadow as the sun went down.

  He kicked a rock down onto the beach, where the sand was so hard it skittered all the way to the water. She had certainly warmed up this afternoon, but he wanted to stop talking about himself.

  “You called yourself Mrs. Ressner,” he said. “What does your husband do?” Having spoken to Ellerstein, he already knew the answer, but pretended not to.

  She looked away. “I am a widow, Mr. Hall. My husband died five years ago. I have never remarried.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said automatically, feeling like a heel.

  “For what? You haven’t done anything. Or do you mean you feel sorry for me?”

  Oh, hell, he thought, here we go. Miss Attitude is back. “It’s just an American expression. Of sympathy. Someone loses his or her spouse, we presume they’re sorry, too. How long ago did you say?”

  She took a minute to reply and turned around to start walking back toward the hostel. “Almost five years. And, yes, I am sorry. Perhaps too much so. My life has not been very good since then, and that has created some problems.” She told him about the chairman’s ultimatum and the reasons behind it. David frowned. Ellerstein hadn’t mentioned any ultimatum.

  “Wow,” he said. “Decision time. All this because you elected to withdraw from social life for a while? To live alone? I should think that was your option.”

  “Thank you, yes, so did I. Apparently I’ve overdone it. I’ve kept myself immersed in my work, which is easy enough to do. Historical linguistics is an introspective business, but I think I have given cultural offense to the collegial community.”

  “What about the rest of your life?” he asked. “Do you get out at all, or are you just holed up in an apartment somewhere and calling it life?”

  She gave him a curious look, her head tilting to one side. “Who have you been talking to, Mr. Hall?”

  “Nobody, Mrs. Ressner,” he said. “I’ve met people in your situation before, although I must admit they were all men. What happened to your husband, if I may ask?”

  She sighed. “He died in an accident of some kind at the place where he worked. He was a scientist.”

  David took a gamble. “An accident of ‘some kind’? That sounds as if you don’t know exactly what happened.”

  She turned to face him. “He worked at Dimona. You’re a nuclear engineer from Washington: You know what Dimona is, don’t you? Israel’s so-called atomic power research center?”

  He smiled at her. “So-called, indeed. Yes, I know what Dimona is. By reputation, anyway.”

  She nodded. “The implication was that it was a radiation accident,” she said. “I—I never saw him again. He is buried out there at the site, along with some radioactive waste, no doubt. Okay? Don’t ask me anything more about it, because I don’t know anything more about it. One morning he left for the site and I was a wife. By that night I was told that I would never see him again, and, oh, by the way, now you are a widow. We have lots of those in Israel.”

  She turned and walked away, her face and posture suddenly stiff. Startled by her bitter outburst, he hurried to catch up with her. He remembered Ellerstein’s equally vague description: some kind of an accident. Something bad enough that the body had not been returned to the widow. He conjured up the image of a lead-lined body bag at the bottom of a green-glowing moonpool somewhere. He understood her anger a little better.

  He closed the gap and then walked by her side as they picked their way through curious crystalline formations that stood along the shore like stumps from some petrified chemical forest.

  “Five years,” he said, after a few minutes. “That’s a long time to grieve. Or is that customary for the Jewish culture?”

  She looked sideways at him again, as if to see if he was being sarcastic. David shook his head. “I meant that question sincerely. I’ve heard that there are some Middle Eastern cultures that do not permit a widow to remarry. I guess I’m trying to figure out why someone as attractive as you are hasn’t rejoined the world by now.”

  “I forget how direct you Americans are,” she said, with a hint of exasperation in her voice. “Really, Mr. Hall. This is hardly any of your concern. Whether or not I am an attractive woman, if I choose not to rejoin the world, as you put it, that’s my business, is it not? You would not say that to a man, would you?”

  “Touché,” he said. “I would not. Although I would probably still ask the underlying question. It’s always interesting to know why people do what they do. Besides, sometimes it helps to talk about it.”

  “I don’t feel any particular need to talk about it, Mr. Hall. Especially with a stranger.”

  “Well, forgive me, but I sense that you do. Need to talk about it, that is. If nothing else, what you’re facing on Monday morning compels you to at least think about it, and it’s safer to discuss such things with a stranger, especially one who will be gone in two weeks. As opposed to a c
olleague, for instance, who might have a stake in the outcome? I don’t know. If you just crawl into a hole and pull it in over you, you become compost, you know?”

  She kept walking, not answering him, her head down now, concentrating on picking her way through the scraggly underbrush in the fading light. Finally she stopped.

  “What of you, Mr. Hall? You were in love, yes, with this Adrian? Then she disappears. Are you ‘back in the world’?”

  “Well, I’m here,” he said. Once again he suddenly wanted to tell her the real reason he was here.

  “So you are,” she said.

  He pressed on. “And, yes, we’re having this conversation because I’m interested in you. You’re a beautiful woman, still young, and smart enough to hold a Ph.D. from a prestigious university.”

  More silence. Then, finally, softly, “So—what about Adrian? She is, what, forgotten now?”

  He swore, loud enough to startle her. “We’re in the same boat, Mrs. Ressner. You don’t know what happened to your husband. You do know that he is—gone. I don’t know what happened to Adrian, but the probability is that she decided our relationship was over and just—left.”

  “So now, what? I am potentially her replacement?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” he exclaimed. This was getting too hard. A voice in his head was warning him to shut up, go back to the hostel, and leave this poor woman to her own devices, but he couldn’t help himself. “What I’m saying is, why not get on with your life? There must be a hundred guys right there at the university who would jump at the chance. Why waste your life?”

  “In your humble American opinion.”

  He laughed. “Yes, in my humble American opinion.”

  “A waste.”

  “Yeah, a waste.” He tripped over a rock trying to keep up with her and nearly went sprawling. She turned to face him.

  “Is that what you did, Mr. Hall? When your Adrian did her disappearing act? Did you jump right back into life? Did you go find another woman? To avoid the waste?”