by Jeff Spence
The Silver Scroll
Jeff Spence
Copyright © 2018,
Jeff Spence and Silver Sabre Publishing.
All rights reserved.
The Dead Sea Region
ONE
Marina jumped to the side of her bed, almost to her feet. A startled look around and she let out the first of several deep breaths and settled back onto the mattress. She swore — or half-prayed — and wiped the sweat from her head. That broke almost a solid week of uninhibited sleep. She wondered how long it would go this time. She rose from her bed and went straight to the iPhone on her dresser. Music, that's what she needed, lots of it... and loud.
From there she spent a good twenty minutes in the shower, washing away the cobwebs of sleep and the sweat of her nightmares. The cobwebs would wash away clean, she knew, but the dreams and memories would still be there, just below the surface. Just below the purposeful noise of a busy life.
As she dried off and scrutinised her steam-framed face in the bathroom mirror, the phone rang, cutting in on the club music with a favourite moment of Nina Simone.
She tapped screen. "Hello?"
"Hi."
It was Barry. His tone flat, focused in on himself.
"Hi Barry. How are you?"
"You know how I am."
"I do?"
"You should."
She rolled her eyes. "You're mad about last night?"
"You said you'd be there."
"No, I didn't. I said I'd try to be there."
"Did you though? Did you try?"
She sighed. It was like dating herself ten years ago. "Look, I worked late, then just felt too burnt out to sit at a basketball game. I needed sleep, that's all."
"So you went home?"
"Yes."
"Really."
"Christ, Barry, what is it?"
"I called, Marina, and you didn't pick up.
What were you doing?"
"I wasn't doing anything. I was sleeping."
"Alone?"
"Excuse me?"
"Sorry, sorry… I didn't mean that. But you were supposed to be with me, then you said you were at home. What am I supposed to think?"
"Think whatever you like, but I don't have any reason to lie to you — if I want someone else, I'll tell you."
"And do you?"
"Barry…"
"Well do you?"
"No… I've not been with anyone else."
"And you don't want to be either?"
It was getting harder to feel like it. "No, I don't."
A long silence from Barry.
"Is that it?"
"What do you mean?" His voice pained, like he had been ambushed. "We're just talking. Can’t we just talk?"
"Sure, but I just got out of the shower… I have a few errands to run, then I'll probably drop by school."
"Can I see you tonight?"
She closed her eyes. "Yeah, sure. Grab a drink at the Far Side?"
"Yeah. What time will you be there?"
"I don't know… seven maybe. Eight."
"Can I know a little closer? Like, seven-thirty?"
"If you want."
"So you'll be there at seven-thirty."
It wasn't a question, so she didn't bother correcting him.
"Bye Barry."
"See you later. I love you."
She hung up the phone. Not enough patience in the world for her to deal with an "I love you" just then. Maybe she hadn't heard him; she still had plausible deniability for that. She dropped the phone on the counter and stared at herself in the mirror. A little older. Visible around the eyes. The eyes themselves though; there was something still there. A damage in the depths of whatever it is she could see, restless below the glistening surface.
She had been in the States for nineteen years, since the day after her fourteenth birthday. The years before that were a hostile country in the world of her memory. She visited too often in her dreams and, if she wasn't careful, in any of the quiet moments of her day. It was difficult to stifle the images, to keep them tied down in the shadows. And so the music. The television. The dancing at clubs. Climbing rocks. Skydiving. Soccer.
Still, at times the memories were difficult to keep at bay. They pressed in like home invaders. Seeped into place in her day like any other moment might. The line between the present and the past was never sharp for her. It blurred. Wavered. Superimposed visions of the past onto what seemed like memories of the present.
She looked into the mirror of her room, but instead of her own face staring back at her, she saw the eyes of the other children as the war arrived in her little town of Trebxinje, some twenty miles north of Dubrovnik. The faces of friends turned to scowls, in religious and ethnic hatred toward other friends… or in simple fear of being lumped in with the losing tribe. Serbs against her own people, the Bosnians. Lovers sending lovers to the rape camps, the detention centres set up in the soccer stadiums where the detainees grew and harvested potatoes by hand, scraping in the dirt like pigs after truffles. Truffles they would never eat — unless they stole a raw and dirt-caked bite here and there… which they all did when they could.
She watched the strong young men of her town flee, or wither into hollow phantoms, lanky skeletons with pools of despair or hatred where their eyes once were. Sarajevo had become everything she imagined hell must be.
So she hid.
When the firefights started, and then stopped, she watched her unarmed parents gunned down by her high school principal and the man who fixed their unreliable little car. She crawled under the edge of a wood pile and stifled her terrified sobs in the dirt and bark fragments. When night fell she slid out from her refuge and sought a friendly face.
That night she found none. Nor the next.
Nor the next.
On the third day she stole apples from a basket beside an old man's home and turned to flee, only to feel a grip and a pull on her arm that nearly tore her shoulder from the socket. She was tumbled down on the floor of an old, leaning shed and feared for a moment that the man was going to do to her what she had seen so many men do to women in the streets and alleys of her town those first few days.
But he hadn't.
She looked up to see his finger across his lips below wide eyes. When he saw her compliance he turned then to a crack in the wall of the shed and watched for some time. Then she saw the tension leave his body, as if draining from his shoulders to the ground.
"How old are you?" He asked.
"Eight," she said aloud to the mirror, surprised at how distant her adult voice seemed to her own ears.
The man was named Bratislav Knežević, a Serb, too old to serve as a soldier anymore, and left on his own, to die or survive as his abilities allowed.
He survived.
He had been a boy when the Second World War hit. His father a worker on the hydroelectric projects in the mountains. When the Ustaše forces began their campaign to wipe out the Serbs, Bratislav's father had taken refuge in the mountains, with his young son.
He taught Bratislav to hunt in silence, to hide — to kill a man if need be. Bratislav learned well. He and his father spent the better part of four years like that, moving like wolves through the underbrush and ravines. When one day Bratislav heard shouting outside of their little cave, he crept to the entrance to see what was happening. He saw his father, a rabbit on a string slung over his shoulder, and a young soldier in the distance, shouting for him to stop. To raise his hands.
Bratislav met his father's eyes for a moment, and then his father ran. A shot echoed among the rock faces around them, but did not strike flesh. The boy watched as his father leapt off through the bush, head low, soldier in pursuit. Several shots were fired after that, in the distance, and th
en nothing more. Wait as the boy would, his father would not return.
Now he saw another child, not so unlike he had been so many years before. So thin. When the movement outside moved away, and he looked at her there, the little wisp of a girl, she had begun to cry. He grasped her by the shoulders and gave her a gentle shake.
"These things you see," he whispered, "you bury them. Bury them deep. Take them out only when you must, or when all of this is a distant shadow of thought. For now," he said, echoing what his father had told him so many years before, "you must become more than this terrible thing, or it will consume you, and leave you for the carrion and worms! Where it is strong, you be stronger. Where it is forceful, crush it." He balled up his fists and made a terrible grimace.
She stayed with him then, in his little house, beside the teetering shed. There was no conversation about it, no invitation, no request. She bathed in a tin tub of cold water, scrubbed the tears and filth from her body, and steeled her thoughts against everything that raged inside her. She would be more than this thing. She would be strong. She would be a rock upon which those evil men broke and bled like lambs in an avalanche.
She remembered her young face as she had stood, stared in the warped mirror at her thin, naked body, and at her eyes. Sharp points of light. Hatred. Fear. She stared at them longer, ignoring the chill that had begun to send shivers over her small frame. She willed a change. Stability. Determination. Control. She gripped all of those things that she feared most deeply, and broke them upon the sharp edge of her will. Her sight dimmed. Her body trembled, ignored by the solitary girl inside of it.
Sometime during those long moments, Bratislav had entered the room, wrapped a thin blanket around the girl with the staring eyes, and carried her to the attic stairs, to the small nest of towels and rags he had made for her. To keep her warm. Hidden. Safe.
Grown-up Marina shook her head and splashed water on her face. That was enough of that. No need to walk farther down that road this morning, if she could help it. She had things to do and they wouldn't get done on their own. She turned the music up, clapped her hand against her thigh, chained to the rhythm, and sought after the perfect thing to wear for a sunny day in Indiana.
TWO
Marina passed by the main doors of the amphitheater, catching a few words of the current lecture series, and considered stopping to catch the rest of it.
Something about the Dead Sea Scrolls.
She had a vague idea of them, a certain interest even, but Barry was waiting and the last thing she wanted was more drama with him at the opening to an evening of blowing off steam on the dance floor, accompanied by a few drinks to lubricate a good time. That combination could go wrong in a hurry if he picked a fight with her. She didn’t have the energy to spare.
She watched as members of the audience threw their comments up to the podium.
"Finders, keepers, I say… possession is nine- tenths of the law!"
"It's 'nine points of the law', actually, but that doesn't even apply here — the Bedouin sold them, fair and square."
"Nothing fair about it! What did they get, twenty-eight bucks for the first ones?"
"That was a lot more in the forties than it is now, but even if they did get ripped off, it's not like they wouldn't have done the same thing if they had known how much they were worth and they had the upper hand."
"Even Kando didn't know. What he got for the scrolls was far less than they were worth — even back then they were worth millions…"
"But they didn't know that!"
"And that's just business, after all: buyer beware, seller beware…"
"You're all missing the point, they are Jewish documents, they should all go to the Jewish people."
"But when they were found, that territory was part of Jordan! Possession is nine... whatevers of the law, right? It's just the same with artefacts found in the States or in England: the state owns them."
"Was Israel even a state then? Not for the early finds… Maybe the British should own them."
"Like they own half of the artefacts from all over their empire? I don't think so!"
"Don't forget that Christianity was a Jewish sect at first, right, so it's just as much a Christian thing as a Jewish thing!"
"It's not Christian at all, they split away!"
"But they were one group when the scrolls were buried!"
"Hardly! There weren't even Christians back then. It wasn’t a separate thing!"
Ben Gela cleared his throat and drew his audience's attention back up to the front of the room. He smiled. Though this was supposed to be a prepared paper delivered to the public, almost half of the allotted time had been taken up by eager people asking questions about the scrolls: what was in them, who wrote them, and to whom they rightfully belonged.
The first of the three questions he could answer: they were writings, more than a third of them copies of what would later become biblical books, almost a third of them were religious stories from the time period, but that didn't make it into the canon of the bible — and the rest were writings specific to the sect at Qumran.
For the second question — who wrote them — he could offer educated conjecture and scholarly consensus — nothing more. They were mostly found in the area of the ruins of Qumran. The site and the ruins roughly fit with descriptions in the writings of Pliny, and Flavius Josephus. The people who wrote some of them, and collected the others, were members of a Jewish sect that called themselves the Yahad, the Holy Ones. Archaeology seemed to support that this group lived at the Qumran site for a substantial period of time, around the right years to be the writers in question. So far, anyway, these guys were the best guess.
For the third, he had bounced the question back out into the audience, fresh from a few words on the subject and banking on the various degrees of background knowledge and personal biases his audience had prior to the seminar. A few of them were fairly well informed. When tempers got hot though, and they always did, he had rein them in and put out a few soothing words as he wrapped it up. Those arguments always degraded, if left unchecked, into racial slur and accusations of Naziism and comparisons to Hitler. Only once had he miscalculated and let things get that far; he wasn’t about to repeat that mistake.
"It is a difficult issue. The Scrolls have changed hands through war, theft, government confiscation and, most often, simple sale and purchase. I say simple, but as you know, the cloak-and-dagger stories of how various parties got their hands on the scrolls in the midst of military and political partition, the gain and loss of territory, and all of this on the backdrop of a regional unrest already centuries old by the nineteen forties and fifties — well, there is nothing 'simple' about it anymore. It would make for a good movie."
Chuckles from the audience. He continued. "The bare fact is that the artefacts have come to be in the hands of various interested parties that we consider valid, for the most part, and some twenty known items are available on the black market, if one has the cash to pry them from the hands of their keepers. Even then, these are tiny fragments, nothing earth-shattering there as far as we know. Regardless of our opinions on the right to ownership, they are where they are, and they are owned by whom they are owned — anything else is, at this point, academic."
A hand raised in the fourth row, a middle aged woman with dark hair. She didn't wait to be called upon. "You still haven't given us your opinion, Professor Gela. As a Jew, and an expert, what do you think?"
Ben smiled. He had hoped to end the lecture there, but they weren't going to let him go so easily.
"Yes, that." He paused a moment. "My Judaism is a bit complicated, so I’ll leave that one untouched, but as a scholar… I suppose I could withhold my opinion on academic grounds, or even on practical grounds — one doesn't want to alienate one side or the other when one might sometime need access to study what they hold — but the truth is neither of these. The truth is that the whole situation is so tangled up that I feel grossly inadequate to sort it out. I really
don't know. I have a Jewish background, yes, but I don't see it as black and white as many other Jews do. It is terribly complex, and I tend toward thinking that a solution is not at hand — one doesn't exist at this point. Maybe one never will. Those who are in a position to decide have a rough road ahead of them, and there is no way that even the majority is going to be happy in the end. Thankfully, such a decision is not — and will never be — up to me." He held a hand up to stop the sudden surge of new questions, and used the mic to speak over the noise, "Thank you for coming everyone, my email address is available on the university website, and there are some books at the side table if you wish to purchase one — I'm happy to sign them if you wish. I’ll be there at the back for a bit, then in the bar afterwards."
The audience applauded and Ben stepped down from the stage, immediately surrounded by people wishing to shake his hand and ask him questions they were too shy to ask before, or didn't get a chance to put forward in the allotted time. He was pleasant with all of them, but kept moving toward the back of the room. He had spend twenty minutes there, signing books and avoiding those who would simply try to impress him — unsuccessfully — with their knowledge of the scrolls. Ah well, it was human nature; he had tried to do the same thing with his auto mechanic. He was probably just as unsuccessful.
The night had gone well — it didn't always — and he felt confident that he had sell a few books on top of his speaking fee. That was good, he needed the money. He hadn't skimped on his education, attending the best institutions and taking every opportunity to present at conferences and conventions, to research in situ in Jerusalem, Paris, Montreal and Dallas, topping it off with four years in Oxford, with Millar, Vermes and Goodman. Then he had met Donna, fell in love, splurged on the wedding of her dreams. He had given her everything he could afford, and even a little more, before… before he had lost her. Not that she had asked him for those things. She hadn’t been demanding that way. It was him. He had always been a romantic in his soul, and with that came the grand gestures, the passionate sacrifice.