The Source

by James A. Michener

  “Preposterous!” Cullinane said.

  “As a Catholic you know it’s preposterous,” Tabari laughed, “and as a Muslim so do I. But the Jews don’t, and even Cabinet Minister Eliav isn’t quite sure. Because pretty soon he’s going to have to face up to that problem.”

  “While I was in the hospital,” Cullinane said, “I had the gloomy feeling that one of these days all of us were going to have to face up to certain moral problems. And we just don’t seem to be willing. I had a long talk with an official of the Italian government. Up to arrange with the Jordanians for the entry of Catholic pilgrims into Bethlehem. He told me how close the Italian voters had come to electing a Communist government. Explained how a small swing of the total votes would have done it. He asked, ‘Supposing this happens? What does the world then do with the Vatican? Does it go to Russia? Or to the United States? Or does it stay locked up within the walls, impotent, in Italy?’ The day could come when we’d have to face that problem.”

  “Religions are always in trouble,” Tabari said. “In adversity they grow honest. It’s good for them.”

  “And I also had the feeling,” Cullinane added, “that perhaps at the same time the world might have to face up to the problem of Judaism. ‘To what extent are we prepared to protect Judaism as our parent religion?’ ”

  Eliav caught the significance of this question, but Tabari did not. The Arab spoke first: “The other day I joked about putting the world’s Jews into orbit, but seriously, I suppose the day is past when you can exterminate six million Jews.”

  But Eliav said, “You’re equating Israel with Judaism and you wonder what the world will do if the Arabs try to eliminate Israel altogether?”

  “Yes,” Cullinane said. “For the first time since I’ve been in Israel … lying there in the hospital with the crazy cut across my face, thinking of the distorted ideas behind the religious hoodlums who threw the rocks … What I’m trying to say is that if such zealots represent the new Israel, you can’t expect people like me to come to your aid if the Arabs attack. And the death of Israel would raise the moral problem I spoke of.”

  “You’re wrong and you’re right,” Eliav said. “You’re wrong in equating the state of Israel and the Jewish religion. No matter what might happen to Israel, Judaism would continue. Just as Catholicism always continued when the territory of the Vatican was held by others. But you’re right that all of us, Catholics, Arabs, Jews, have got to work out some sensible pattern of life for the world, or new alignments will occur so radical that no one here can visualize them.”

  “One afternoon,” Cullinane said, “the doctors gave me a shot of something and I had one of those visions … of a Jerusalem that had been agreed upon by all the world as an isolated zone of ghosts in which the Pope had his little Vatican because he was no longer welcome in Italy, and the chief rabbi had the area around the Wailing Wall, because he was no longer acceptable in Israel, and the new prophet of Islam had his territory, because no one in the Muslim countries wanted him, and the Protestants and Hindus and Buddhists each had their corner, because nobody wanted them either, and all the rest of the working world was, as you say, realigned into radical new patterns. And over each gateway to Jerusalem stood an arch with a bold sign which read in sixteen languages: MUSEUM.”

  “It was no vision,” Eliav said, “and it’s our job to see that it doesn’t become fact.”

  On Friday the cable from Stockholm arrived, and three excited archaeologists gathered in the arcaded building to read the news which would determine whether the human bones imbedded at Level XIX were of crucial importance or not. The Swedish scientists reported:

  YOUR SAMPLE NINETEEN STOP REPEATED TESTS YIELD SIXTY-EIGHT THOUSAND B.C.E. PLUS-MINUS THREE THOUSAND STOP SOUNDS EXCITING

  Tabari cheered. “I’ve got a job here for the next fifteen years, plus-minus five.”

  “Were we lucky!” Cullinane said. “Of all the available tells we picked the good one.”

  Eliav, always practical, reminded the men, “But to dig out that solid breccia will cost money.” The planners looked up from the cable, and Eliav made it clear that the Israeli government could not advance the funds, exciting though the find promised to be. After the men had explored various alternative avenues Tabari said glumly, “Well, let’s say the ugly word.”

  “Zodman?”

  “Correct.”

  “After the way I gave him hell?” Eliav asked.

  “I’d never ask Zodman and Vered for the dough,” Cullinane protested.

  “My Uncle Mahmoud,” Tabari said slowly, “once wangled money for the same dig from the chief rabbi in Jerusalem, the Catholic bishop in Damascus, the Muslim imam in Cairo, and the Baptist president of Robert College in Istanbul. His rule was, ‘If you need money, shame has not yet been invented.’ I’ll send Zodman a cable that will break his heart.” He began to play an imaginary violin.

  Cullinane advised, “Let’s wait till we get confirmation from Chicago on the carbon dating,” and the three leaders spurred the workmen to close down the dig, but each day one or the other crawled down the tunnel to sit beside the well of Makor where living creatures had crouched two hundred thousand years before. For each of the archaeologists it was a mystic rite, huddling there in the cavern: to Tabari it was a return to the ancient sources of his people; to Eliav it was the spot where man had begun his long wrestling match with the concept of God; to Cullinane it was the beginning of those philosophical analyses with which he would be engaged for the balance of his life; but to all it was the source, the primeval spot where the growth of civilizations had begun. At the end of the week Chicago reported:

  YOUR LEVEL NINETEEN STOP WE GET A FIRM SIXTY-FIVE THOUSAND PLUS-MINUS FOUR STOP CONGRATULATIONS

  As soon as he read the confirming report Tabari drafted a hearts-and-flowers cable to Paul Zodman, begging him for money. When Cullinane read it he growled, “It’s repulsive. I forbid you to send it.”

  So Tabari prepared an alternative which said that since Cullinane and Eliav were absent in Jerusalem he was forwarding the laboratory reports, and he trusted that a man as generous and as far-seeing as Paul Zodman … “It’s still repulsive,” Eliav grimaced.

  “It’s how we handled the British,” Tabari joked.

  “You really have no shame, do you?” Cullinane asked with admiration.

  “You ever hear about my father, Sir Tewfik, when he was judge at Akko? One night he slipped in to see the litigant in a crucial case and said, ‘Fazl, I know I shouldn’t be here, but I just want to point out that you have three lawyers to choose from: an Arab, a Greek and an Englishman. Be sure you choose right.’ Fazl replied, ‘Ya-effendi, I was going to use the Englishman, but if you say so, I’ll switch to the Arab.’ My father said, ‘You misunderstand. Be sure to use the Englishman, because when he bribes me it’s in pounds sterling.’ I’ll bet my cable gets us another half-million dollars.” Two days later they had their answer:

  I SEE THAT CULLINANE AND ELIAV DIDN’T HAVE THE GUTS TO CABLE AND AFTER THEIR INSULTING BEHAVIOR NO WONDER STOP BUT YOU HAVE THE GALL TO ASK FOR AN ADDITIONAL HALF MILLION DOLLARS TO COMPLETE EXCAVATION DOWN TO LEVEL TWENTY-FIVE STOP YES STOP YOU HAVE GIVEN VERED AND ME A TREMENDOUS WEDDING PRESENT STOP MILLION THANKS

  “A man like that, it’s easy to hate,” Tabari laughed. “I should have asked for a million.”

  “He has style,” Eliav granted. “Wedding present!”

  Cullinane broke out some champagne and announced, “I’m going to crawl down there and give those old bastards at the well one of the best parties they ever had.” He lugged the bottle down the tunnel shaft and splashed the liquid against the bones protruding from the breccia of Level XIX. “My God, we’re glad to find you,” he whispered. Then he proceeded to the well, where he sprinkled the champagne as if he were a priest. “To all of you. We’ll be back.” And as he made this flippant remark the echo of his voice came back to strike him, and he fell heavily on one of the marble benches set there by Timon Myrmex i
n the time of Herod. He put the bottle aside and covered his face with his hands. “Vered!” he whispered, and where no one could see him except the ghosts he admitted how forlorn he was, how deep had been his need to marry the little Jewish scholar. He had the vague feeling, at that lonely moment, that he was not going to find a Catholic wife in Chicago, nor would Ilan Eliav find a Jewish bride in Jerusalem; like huge Father Vilspronck they would move about the Holy Land for some years, respected and even loved, but men apart—a Dutchman married to a church, a German Jew married to a state, and an Irishman obsessed by the philosophical analysis of history. “Vered! Vered!” he muttered. “You could have saved me.”

  At the surface he reported lightly, “The old reprobates lapped it up. They said that if civilization could produce something as good as champagne they were going to have children like mad so as to speed up the process.”

  “How did they communicate those sensible ideas,” Tabari asked, “seeing that when they lived speech hadn’t been invented?”

  “To the silent ones,” Cullinane proposed, “deep in the earth.” And that afternoon he took a plane for Chicago.

  The last man to go down the tunnel before things were locked up for the year was Ilan Eliav, who felt regret at leaving the dig just as the exciting years were beginning. Descending to the well he sat in the gloom beside the cool water that had brought life to so many. It surely didn’t start a mere two hundred thousand years ago, he reasoned. Below this must lie the plain where animals had always come to drink, and over there, hiding behind a tree, waited some creature who had wandered up from Africa a million years ago, holding in his hand the first rock of Israel that had ever been formed into a weapon. That had been the beginning, that ancient first, and it would never be known, that hairy hand waiting in the reeds as the animals came to drink; nevertheless, Eliav felt communion with that hunter. At Zefat we Jews held the rock in our hand and damned little else. At Akko and Jerusalem, too. He patted the cool wet earth. And now we’re climbing our way once more. And he started the long crawl back to where Tabari waited.

  As soon as he saw the Arab he said what was on his mind: “Get your records in shape, Jemail, because Cullinane’s got to finish this dig by himself.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m taking the cabinet job. The prime minister announces it tomorrow. And my first appointment will be you. Director-general.” He extended his hand to the Arab.

  Tabari drew back. “You know what you’re doing?” he asked suspiciously.

  “I sure do,” Eliav said. He threw his arm about Tabari’s shoulder and led him to the edge of the dig, where they sat on stones that had once served as part of a synagogue-basilica-mosque-church, and there the Jew and the descendant of Ur fought it out, as their ancestors had done ages ago. They were two handsome men in the strong middle years of their lives: the ascetic Jew, tall and serious, with hollow cheeks and cautious manner; the man of Ur, with his five children, heavier, browner, with a quicker wit and a more congenial smile. At the dig they had formed a constructive team, assuming responsibility for decisions and sustaining the creative mood on the tell. Now they were about to grope for a reincarnation of that fruitful if tempestuous partnership which Hebrew and Canaanite had shared four thousand years ago and which Jew and Arab had known for thirteen hundred years following the arrival of Islam.

  “It’s about time we Jews and Arabs made some real gestures of conciliation,” Eliav began. “Looks like we’re going to share this part of the world for quite a long time.”

  “I have no wish to serve as an experiment.”

  “And since in the matters I’ll be handling, you’re the best-informed man I know …”

  “If you appoint me there could be all sorts of hell.”

  “There will be. But we’ve got to encourage the day when Nasser will appoint a Jew to some job of similar importance. And he will.”

  “I don’t want to see you get in trouble, Ilan.”

  “Trouble I can take. If they fire me I’ll come back here and live off Paul Zodman.”

  “But you’ll be up to your neck in Arab-Jewish relations, and I could hurt you.”

  “No. You’ll help. To prove that even in these difficult areas Jews and Arabs can work in harmony.”

  “There aren’t six people in Israel prepared to believe that.”

  “You’re one of the six, and our job is to increase the number.”

  “I was always much impressed,” Tabari said, “when your Jewish God halted human sacrifice. Here you are, restoring it.”

  “I’m trying to restore something much older. The brotherhood that used to exist on this land. Want to help?”

  Tabari studied the invitation for some moments, then said, “No. I’m an Arab, and the fact that I stayed behind to help rebuild this country doesn’t make me any less an Arab. I’ll become your assistant, Eliav, on the day your government gives one sign that it understands Arabs, wants them to stay here, and is willing to accept them as full partners …”

  “Haven’t I proved that this summer? Haven’t you and I been full, respectable partners?”

  “You and I? Yes. Your government and we Arabs? No.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Take out your pencil. We want better schools, hospitals, roads to our villages, nurses, a place in the university for our best young men, a partnership in which our talents are respected. We want you to see that on this land there can be a fruitful association of equals. Your intellectuals have got to stop patronizing us as if we were idiot children. Your businessmen have got to accept us as men who can count and who are as honest as they are. Eliav, we want to feel that as Arabs we have a home in your society.”

  “Haven’t I conveyed that promise in everything I’ve done this summer?”

  “And there’s one other reason why I can’t accept.”

  “Do I know what it is?” Eliav asked.

  “I think you can guess. In those long discussions we had with Cullinane on the nature of the moral state, I noticed that there was one topic which he often led up to but always shied away from. Americans are taught to be so sensitive about other people’s feelings. Yet this is the problem which really tests the moral foundations of Judaism.”

  “You mean the Arab refugees?”

  “I do. Those refugees on the other side of the border were in Cullinane’s mind every time he fell silent in our discussions. They’re in mine, too.”

  “What would you have us do?” Eliav asked in frank perplexity. “In 1948, against every plea of the Jews, some six hundred thousand Arabs evacuated this country. They did so at the urging of their political leaders. On the promise that within two weeks they would come back as victors, take over all Jewish property and do what they liked with Jewish women. Now it’s sixteen years later. They tell us the number of refugees has multiplied to a million. Arab governments have not allowed them to find new homes in Arab countries and the time has passed when they can recover their old homes here. What do you want us to do?”

  “I’ll join you, Eliav, on the day Israel makes proper restitution for …”

  “We’ve agreed to do that! In my first speech I’m to announce that Israel, before the bar of humanity and world opinion, is willing to discuss compensation for every refugee who can prove he left old Palestine, if such a settlement becomes part of a total peace treaty. I’ll go through the world begging Jews in every land to help us pay off that self-imposed obligation. I’ll propose taxes here at home higher than we’ve ever had before. Tabari! Work with me to reach this honorable solution.”

  “And what about repatriation?”

  Eliav fell silent. Uneasily he moved about the tell and from some distance said, “After we took Zefat I personally went out … in a captured English Land Rover … begging the fleeing Arab refugees to come back to their homes in Zefat. Twice I was shot at, but I kept on, because I knew then that we needed those Arabs and they needed us. But they wouldn’t listen. ‘We’ll come back with an army,’ they boasted.
‘We’ll take everything. Our homes. Your homes. And all the land.’ And they walked over the hills to Syria. A couple of nights later, right where I’m standing, other Arabs killed my wife, yet the next morning, after we had the big fight in Akko … where I met you for the first time …” He looked across the tell at Tabari and asked in a low voice, “What did I do that morning, Jemail?”

  The Arab remained silent, and with a sudden leap Eliav was upon him, grabbing his shoulders and shaking them. “What did I do?” he shouted. “Tell me … now!”

  In a soft voice, barely audible above the November breeze that was coming down the wadi with the first hints of winter, Tabari said, “You went to the beach, where the boats were filling up with Arab refugees, and you pleaded with every man you could reach: ‘Don’t run away. Stay here and help us build this country.’ ”

  “And did any stay?”

  “I did.”

  Eliav looked at his friend with the kind of quiet passion that history instills in men of perception. He sat down, burdened by the impossible complexity of the refugee problem, and recalled those fateful days when the Arabs had fled the country. “More than twenty thousand left Akko that day,” he said, “and I went from man to man, but of them all I was able to persuade only you.” He bowed to Tabari, then said with increasing bitterness, “And now they want to come back. When the land is fertile and the shops are filled, when the schools are productive and the mosques are open, they want to come back. It may be too late. In Cyprus we’re seeing what happens when you try to force two different peoples to live together in a majority-minority status. Would you have us create a second Cyprus here?”

  “I want a state which preaches morality to practice it,” Tabari said. “Bring back at least a token of these refugees to prove …”

  “We will!” Eliav cried. “In my speech I’m also to make that offer again. More than a mere token we will bring back. And we’ll absorb them in full brotherhood. But a million? Dedicated to destroy us? When only six hundred thousand left? No, dear friend, you cannot demand that we commit suicide.”