Читать книгу Thicker Than Mud - Jason Z. Morris - Страница 7

The dun-colored sediment of Tel Arad was so dry it was almost powder, and even though Adam dug with slow precision, he was covered in dust. It clung to his work boots and his legs. It coated the roof of his mouth.

The heat pressed on him from below as well as above: as the sun’s rays poured down through the cloudless sky, those that missed Adam’s back caught his face and neck after reflecting off the clay. Adam put down his spade and pulled three water bottles out of his pack. His student Maggie was digging on her knees, her back toward him, so that he could see the map of the Belmont College campus under the Jesuit coat of arms on the back of her t-shirt. Adam had seen the shirt many times over the summer, but he still smiled at the caption: “Because God so loved the Bronx…”

He called out to her, “Maggie, it’s a furnace out here. Take a water break!” He tossed her one of the bottles when she turned to face him. “You should go back to the tent,” he said. “You still have time to grab some lunch and get to the afternoon lecture.”

Maggie glanced at Adam over the wire frame of her sunglasses with a look of perfect resolve. “I’m not afraid of the heat, Professor Drascher,” she said. “We have heat in Puerto Plata, too. And my skin won’t burn. Not as easily as some.” All summer, she had been mocking his twice-a-day slathering on of suntan lotion. “Besides,” she said, “I just know the second I leave, you and Dr. Renaud are going to find something and then I’ll be kicking myself.”

Claudia Renaud sat cross-legged, her notebook and pen on her lap, as she pulled the loose strands of her sun-bleached hair off her tan, graceful neck and back into a ponytail. She looked up at the mention of her name and she caught Adam’s gaze. Her eyes were a brilliant, piercing blue. “You were the same way on your first dig, Adam,” she said. “You still are. Evidently, we all are.” She wiped at her forehead with her red plaid neckerchief. “Toss me one of those bottles and let her work.”

Adam walked over and handed Claudia a bottle. He had known her for over a decade, ever since he was one of her star-struck students back in the first year of his Ph.D. in archaeology at Fletcher University. Claudia had been fairly new then, but she already outshone everyone else in a department full of luminaries. Adam had been spellbound, he remembered, as she told her class about the lost world she was bringing to light in the Judean desert.

There were still moments like this one—too many, Adam chided himself—when he would catch himself seeing Claudia as he had seen her that first day. He turned away and drained his bottle. “All right, Maggie,” he said. “You can stay through the lecture if you can listen while you work. Dr. Renaud and I can probably teach you something while we all roast.”

“Maybe we should start with a quiz,” Claudia said. “I’d like to see how well Dr. Drascher has taught you.”

Adam smiled at the mischief in her tone, but he wasn’t sure if Maggie could hear it. Claudia had always had a gift for provocation and for courting controversy, which went a long way toward explaining how she had become an academic celebrity. The high-end journalists knew Claudia was always good for a quote, and the few people Claudia failed to charm, she could incite.

Adam gave Maggie an encouraging nod. Maggie was the best student Adam had taught at Belmont. She would be applying to graduate school in the fall and Claudia’s letter could get Maggie in anywhere if Maggie impressed her enough.

Maggie finished her water and picked up her spade. “Ask away,” she said. “I’m not scared.”

“That’s a good beginning, then,” Claudia said. “We’ll start with an easy one. What do you expect to find here? Coins with Alexander’s face on them? A Roman dagger?”

Maggie raised an eyebrow as she dug. She shook her head and brushed her straight, black hair out of her eyes. “Much too recent,” she said. “Alexander died in what? Three hundred BC? Three-fifty? The Romans were long after that. The upper layers of dirt must have been carted away before we got here, right?” She waited for Adam to nod confirmation before she said, “You and Dr. Drascher focus on the monarchy, between about 1000 and 600 BC. We’re digging down around… was it seven-fifty, Professor?”

Claudia gave her an approving glance. Adam smiled his encouragement.

Maggie scratched lightly at the dirt as she framed her answer. “Amos was prophesying then,” she said. “We were reading about it just before the midterm. Assyria would crush the Northern Kingdom before too long, but here in Judah things were okay, right?”

“Good!” Adam said.

“All right,” Claudia said. “You have the context. Go on. Say you got really lucky. What might you expect to find here?”

Maggie looked up at her. “A cup? A piece of jewelry?” She caught Adam’s eye and she laughed. “Those are pretty safe answers, aren’t they? I wouldn’t even give myself credit for that.”

Claudia looked at her intently. “What if you found an Egyptian scarab? Or Greek pottery?”

“I wouldn’t be shocked,” Maggie said. “Egypt is close by and it had been interacting with Judah for a long time, since the beginning. A Greek artifact, though . . . I wouldn’t assume that came directly from trade with the Greeks. It probably would have come from Phoenician traders, maybe from Tyre.”

Claudia looked pleased. Adam wanted to roll his eyes. It was typical of Claudia to be impressed by an answer based so closely on her own lecture, he thought. She had spoken about cultural exchanges in the ancient Middle East the first week they were at the site, and Maggie had listened, enraptured. If Maggie won Claudia over by parroting Claudia’s ideas, then that was all right with him, but he knew Maggie was capable of much more.

“What about you, Dr. Drascher?” Maggie asked. “If you could find anything here, what would it be?”

Adam wasn’t sure what to answer, but Claudia interrupted. “Something religious, no doubt, right Adam?” She said. “A Baal statue, or some hymn dedicated to Asherah?” Adam thought he could detect a suppressed smirk, and it set him on edge.

“Most people in Judah probably prayed to the Canaanite gods,” he said, “even if they worshipped the God of the Bible. Just finding a statue wouldn’t really teach us anything new, but it might get us on television, right Claudia?” He paused for a reaction, but if she noticed his jab, it didn’t register on her face. He turned toward Maggie. “But if we found something more revealing, something that gave us an insight into Canaanite religion, that would be something, wouldn’t it? When a Canaanite prayed to his god, what did he feel? The prophets were constantly hectoring the people to leave off their worship of other gods, but we have nothing in the words of the people who worshipped them. What was it that drew them? What was so attractive? Was it beauty? A sense of security? Of comfort? Of belonging?”

“This is an old disagreement Dr. Drascher is drawing you into, Maggie,” Claudia said. “He thinks he can get into the minds of these people. He thinks if he’s clever enough, he can interpret fragments of inscriptions or snippets of poetry and think like a Canaanite, or like someone from Judah.” She fixed Adam with her gaze. “It can’t be done. We have artifacts. We can get their age and where and how they were made. We can discuss the political or economic structure of a settlement. We can talk about what they ate and how large their families were and what kind of house they lived in. But that’s all. It should be enough.”

Adam didn’t offer any response. He just wiped the sweat off his forehead with his callused hand. He didn’t want to discourage Maggie, but more and more, this spadework that he had once loved so much felt futile. There’s only so much time a grown man can play in the dirt, he thought, looking for buried treasure and coming up with nothing. And here he was out in the August heat; another summer had almost gone. His tenure deadline was coming closer and closer and he had little to show for all his work.

They dug in silence for almost half an hour. Claudia looked like she might have something, but she kept her head down and Adam didn’t ask. He turned to see how Maggie was faring and he saw her take up her brush to clear away a bit of loose dirt without risking damage to whatever lay underneath. He heard her mutter, “¡Ay, Dios mio!” and then she looked up and called to him, “Professor! Would you take a look at this?”

Adam nodded and moved alongside her to see what she was pointing at. He didn’t get his hopes up. A couple of times before on the dig, Maggie had found blank, uninformative pieces of pottery. Once, she had uncovered a piece of a very plain knife. Claudia had kept copious records on them, but even she hadn’t been very excited. Now Claudia wasn’t even looking up from her work.

“What have you got?” Adam asked. Maggie showed him the squared-off corner of red clay pottery that she had exposed. It lay nearly horizontal in its bed of dirt. “Good eyes.” Adam told her. “Be delicate with that, now. Take your time with it.”

“Do you want to take over?” She asked. “If I ruin this, I don’t think my stipend would cover it.”

Adam shook his head. “If it turns out to be something your stipend wouldn’t cover, neither would my salary. Shift over. I’ll get the finer tools and we can both work on it.”

“What have you found?” Claudia asked.

“No way to know yet,” Adam said. “There’s a fragment of something buried here, maybe an ostracon. It’ll be a while before we’ve got it out.” Adam photographed the piece where it lay, and then he and Maggie worked together with brushes and picks of varying caliber. She spoke to him in whispers as if she were afraid her voice would disturb the ceramic. The labor was slow and painstaking, but Adam felt himself caught up in Maggie’s enthusiasm and the time passed quickly.

They finally unearthed a flat piece of ceramic, straight and approximately ten inches long, almost undamaged. Adam and Maggie noted the precise placement of the tablet: its location and depth, the angle at which it had lain in the ground, and the features of the dirt surrounding it. Adam then took the artifact in his hands and examined it. The tablet was covered in writing in the ancient Hebrew script that was in common use before the Babylonian Exile. The writing would have been done while the clay was still damp. Adam could almost picture the thin stylus held in the hand of a professional scribe or a priest, its tip cutting each line of the deeply engraved letters. The tablet could only have been preserved if it had been baked, and the color suggested it wasn’t made in Tel Arad. The clay was too dark. That suggested the tablet was fired in a kiln and then brought here.

Adam scanned the text. Most of the inscription was still clear. He felt his grip tighten involuntarily when his eyes struck on a cluster of letters about a third of the way down the tablet that spelled “Refaim.” Healers! His heart began pounding so hard that Adam thought the others might be able to hear it, too.

Adam looked over at Claudia, but she hadn’t looked up from her spadework. Adam had been fascinated by the Healers since he first encountered them in grad school. They were figures of the Canaanite underworld, but they also appeared in several places in the Bible. For a short while, Adam had considered writing his thesis on them, but he had realized even without Claudia’s admonitions that the topic was a career killer. It was clear that there would never be enough evidence to draw solid conclusions from just the few texts that have survived on the Refaim. Still, for someone like Adam, the call to understand how the Canaanites saw the afterlife was strong. He looked at the tablet again. “Qirvu elai Refaim,” it said. “Come to me, Healers.” If only it were that simple—as if you could just ask for the dead to appear and you would feel their presence and know that you remained connected to them. Even as a child, Adam had lost belief in anything that could make loss less permanent.

“Professor?” Maggie was pulling on Adam’s sleeve. She must have been trying to get his attention for a while. Adam hadn’t heard her say anything. He wondered how long he had been lost in his thoughts.

Adam didn’t want to tell Maggie what he had seen just yet. It would take too long to explain, and he didn’t want her to get too excited until he could confirm what the rest of the text said. Besides, he admitted to himself, he had caught a glimpse of something that had been buried for thousands of years and he wasn’t quite ready to share it. Adam took a deep breath. “The writing looks very old,” he said. “It’s consistent with our time period. Nice find! Do you know the old alphabet?” He was pretty sure she wouldn’t. They teach only the modern, Aramaic style of writing in Hebrew classes. “Well, you’ll want to learn it. I’ll show you when we’re back in New York.”

Claudia looked over. “There’s writing? Can you make out what it says?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Adam said. “Probably just a snippet of religious poetry. I doubt you’d be interested.”

Claudia scurried over to look, ignoring his sarcasm. She gave Maggie a high five. “Let’s see how you recorded the find.” She nodded approvingly as Maggie displayed her documentation of the tablet. “We’ll have to celebrate!” she said. “The legal drinking age in Israel is eighteen, isn’t it?”

Maggie smiled broadly. “It is.”

“I have a bottle of champagne back at the hotel,” Claudia said. “Let’s work until dinner and then we’ll have a toast.”

Adam took out his phone; Claudia stepped beside Maggie and put her arm around her shoulder to pose for a picture. The three of them were still grinning when Adam’s phone rang. He jumped at the sound. The phone was only for emergencies; everyone he knew in Israel was at the dig. Adam’s first thought was that it could be his grandfather, but he almost always waited for Adam to call, especially when Adam was away. With a stab of guilt, Adam realized he had let almost two weeks pass since they last spoke.

Adam shielded the screen from the sun’s glare as best he could with his hand. The call was from Danny. Adam had a bad feeling. Almost two decades before, for reasons that had always escaped Adam, Danny had ceased to be just a kid from the neighborhood in his grandfather’s eyes. Adam had never been consulted, but somehow Danny became virtually a part of their household, loud, needy, and omnipresent. “Maybe he just wants something,” Adam thought. But he knew Danny’s call would mean trouble.

“Excuse me,” Adam said to Claudia and Maggie as he tapped the screen, “I should take this.” He spoke into the phone as he climbed out of the trench where they had been working. “Hi Danny,” he said. “What’s going on?” Despite the poor connection, Adam could hear the strain in Danny’s voice. “Hold on a minute, Danny, I’m in a dead zone. I’m going to try for a better spot.”

He walked toward the tent. It was probably the best he could do out here.

“It’s Hank, Adam,” Danny said. “There was a slight pause. “I think you should come home.”

Adam felt the muscles in his neck and shoulders stiffen. He had been holding his breath, he realized, and he let it out. “What happened? Can you put him on?” His grandfather had seemed fine when they last spoke. He hadn’t complained about anything on the phone. Of course, he wouldn’t have, Adam thought.

“No, Adam; he’s in the hospital. He’s not awake. They said to call you. Can you come?”

He had planned on flying back two days later. “Yeah. Yes. Of course I can come. I’ll find a flight and I’ll call you back.” Everything around Adam seemed to be moving in slow motion. At his feet, a tiny beetle was scurrying into a hole, underground, home. Back in the trench, Maggie and Claudia were kneeling beside each other, their heads close together. Inside the tent, Adam could see the afternoon lecturer, gesturing at his presentation screen.

Adam checked the time. It was almost two-thirty. He called El Al to see if he could fly out that evening. It was a Friday night and he wasn’t sure what running up against the Sabbath would do to the schedule of flights out of Israel. He was on hold for a while before he got to an operator, but when he explained his situation, the woman on the line was sympathetic. She put Adam on hold again while she checked the flights.

Adam looked back at the dig site from where he stood, and he remembered standing there a few summers before, watching Claudia’s husband Theodore. That was less than a year before he died. Theodore had been painting a gorgeous landscape of the ancient city of Tel Arad, restored, fully alive, superimposed over the modern, unimpressive skyline of the neighboring Israeli town. Adam had understood without being told that the sky in the painting, a luminous blue, was the exact shade of Claudia’s eyes. Theodore had loved Claudia with a passion and single-mindedness that she reserved for herself, Adam knew. Adam understood that, too

The woman came back on the line. There was nothing leaving that night, she told him. El Al’s flights the next day were booked as well. She said it was possible he might find a flight tonight if he went standby, perhaps on another airline. But the best he could do would be to get to the airport and figure things out from there. Adam walked back to the dig. Maggie and Claudia looked up from the tablet when he approached.

“Sorry I had to take that,” Adam said. “That was . . .” was there even a word for what Danny was? He wondered if there was any language that had a word for someone you grew up with and could never shake loose?

Maggie sounded concerned. “Are you okay, Professor?”

“Just a family thing,” Adam said with a curt wave. He didn’t want to explain. They didn’t need to know. “I have to fly back tonight. I should probably pack up my stuff now; there’s a bus to Tel Aviv at four.” He glanced over at Claudia. “I’m sorry I can’t stick around, but you and Maggie can celebrate without me.” Claudia acknowledged his comment with a nod, but she was still lost in the tablet. Adam wondered what part of it had captured her attention, but there was no time to ask. It would have to wait until they were all back in New York.

Adam retrieved his daypack and handed Maggie the remaining water bottles he had brought. “I’ll see you both in a few days.” He looked over at the tablet. “Send me your pictures when you get a chance, okay, Claudia? Please say goodbye to the others for me.”

Adam rode his rented bike the six miles back to his room in Arad. It would take him only a few minutes to pack; he had been living out of his suitcase since June. He took a quick shower, changed into the only clean clothes he had left, and arrived at the bus stop with a few minutes to spare after checking out of the hotel and returning his bike.

Arad was near the beginning of the line, so the bus was nearly empty when Adam boarded, but the ride would last almost two hours as the bus traveled its route, first due west, then almost due north. It would pick up passengers all along the route: black-hatted haredim rushing to be home before the Sabbath, soldiers on leave, grandmothers.

The more Adam thought about Danny’s phone call the more concerned he felt. The bus seemed so slow that it was all Adam could do not to get out and push. He was in no mood to speak to strangers trying to be sociable or looking to practice their English. He set the music on his phone to shuffle and he stared blindly out the window as he slipped the headphones into his ears.

Adam skipped over several songs that didn’t suit him, until he came to “Meditations for Moses.” It was Charles Mingus solo at the piano, and Adam felt each jab of Mingus’s fingers on the keys as if he had been struck. The next song was Bill Evans’s mournful, disquieting “My Man’s Gone Now,” and it sucked Adam in whole. For the rest of the trip, Adam’s consciousness drifted unfocused and disconnected. He had only the faintest awareness of the bustle all around him as people boarded at each stop.

Adam’s mind drifted back over his last few conversations with his grandfather. There wasn’t much to them, Adam thought. His grandfather was usually reticent on the phone, especially on international calls. Adam wondered if his grandfather knew he was sick. He was in his eighties, but he never talked about his health. “It is what it is,” he would say. “Tell me how you’re doing.”

The final stop was in Tel Aviv. It was only about an hour until sunset, but Adam managed to catch a cab to the airport. By a quarter to seven, he was speaking to a ticket agent, but as he had feared, there were no seats available that night with any airline. It took him until nine to straighten out his itinerary. The best he could get was an outrageously expensive seat to New York via Kiev, leaving at eight-fifteen the next morning. He resolved to hunker down in the airport instead of finding a hotel room.

Adam tried to call Danny several times during the evening to let him know when to expect him, but without success. He tried his grandfather, praying he would be at home, the crisis over, but he only got the machine: “We can’t pick up the phone right now. Please leave a message after the beep.” “We,” Adam thought. His grandfather had lived alone since Adam had moved out many years before, but he had never changed the message.

“Hi, it’s me,” Adam said. “I hope you get this in the next few hours. Danny said you weren’t feeling well, but I’m on my way home. I’ll see you soon.” Adam bought a sandwich in the food court and then slumped into a chair for the night, his legs resting on his suitcase and his daypack on his lap, a prop for his elbow so he could rest his head on one of his hands. He dozed fitfully, starting at every sound out of fear that he would sleep through his departure time. He needn’t have worried. He was fully awake by five the next morning, and when the gate opened, Adam was first in line to check in.

When he landed in Kiev, Adam had to wait nearly two hours for his connecting flight to JFK. It was four-thirty a.m. in New York. Adam checked his messages. Nothing. After an internal struggle, he decided couldn’t call for at least another hour and a half. The wait was excruciating. He drank a decaf coffee as slowly as he could and then decided to try killing time in a bookstore. Most of the titles on the shelves were written in Cyrillic and were useless even as a distraction, but he did see a guidebook written in English. As far as Adam could make out from the maps he found in the book, the places his family had lived for centuries—almost all within a hundred miles of Kiev—didn’t even exist anymore. Whole villages had succumbed to butchery, had been erased.

He paced as he watched planes take off, feeling more and more on edge. “There was no way that coffee was decaf,” he thought. The frequent announcements in Ukrainian or Russian, he wasn’t sure which, weren’t helping his nerves, either. The music of the language was close enough to Yiddish to call out for his attention, but the words meant nothing he could understand. He tried to read his biography of Duke Ellington, but he couldn’t focus. He wondered if the Ukrainians around him would recognize the Hebrew lettering on the bookmark he had picked up at his hotel; he put the book back in his bag. He checked his watch and decided it was late enough to call Danny, at least. If his grandfather had gotten home from the hospital already, Adam didn’t want to wake him this early.

The phone rang only twice before Danny picked up. “Adam, where are you?”

“I’m in Kiev. I’ll be boarding for New York in a few minutes. How is he?”

Danny didn’t answer.

“He’s steeling himself,” Adam thought. But he still couldn’t bring himself to articulate what that meant.

“He’s gone, Adam.” Danny said then. “Hank died last night. I’m sorry. I tried calling but you must have been out of range or in the air. I didn’t want to leave a message.”

“He died?” It didn’t feel possible.

“It was peaceful.” For a second, Adam thought Danny might sob, but he pulled himself together. “He was peaceful at the end. The room was all full of lights and beeping machines. That was horrible. I was with him, though.” Now Adam did hear a sob. “I was with him until the very end. It was a heart attack. They couldn’t get him stable.” Danny paused. “I’m so sorry, Adam. I can’t believe Hank’s gone.”

Dead. Gone. Adam couldn’t even process what that meant. His grandfather had been his one enduring constant. Everything else could collapse; everything else did collapse, but not him. He was like the Western Wall. “I should have been there,” he said.

There was a long pause before Danny answered. “What do you want to do about the funeral, Adam? I could start calling people. We could do it on Monday. I’ll handle everything.”

“No. No. Don’t call anyone.” Adam was surprised by the vehemence of his tone, and he lowered his voice. “We should do it ourselves, okay, Danny? He wasn’t close to anyone else the way he was with us. We don’t need to get other people involved. It will be more meaningful this way.”

“What?” For a second, Adam thought he had lost the connection, but finally, Danny said, “Look, we’re both in shock. We can talk after you land. Just call me from New York and we can work out all the details then, okay?”

“OK.” Adam said. “They’ve already started boarding my flight. I’ll call you from my apartment.” He hung up the phone, felt in his pocket for his boarding pass, and walked over to the gate.