by Michael Oren
I cringed at my own clumsiness. “Tomorrow afternoon,” I answered. “Quarter after twelve, on the dot.”
“On the dot. Yes. And where?”
I produced a slip of paper which he snatched from my grip and held up to the flickering light. Green and purple played on his wrist.
“Easy location,” I offered. “A few blocks’ walk from here.”
“Thank you. I’ll drive.”
I continued, “On the street corner there’s this round antique clock. You know, the kind that they used to put up outside of pharmacies and such. Still keeps time, still rings a bell exactly on the hour—you can hear it all over town. And fifteen minutes after that clock strikes twelve, that man will be standing in front of it.”
“You sound very sure.”
“Oh, I’m sure alright. You see, it wasn’t enough to wreck me financially and poison my name, now he’s extorting me.” Elbows on the table, I leaned forward and rasped. “We set up a meeting for that time, right in front of the clock. He thinks he’s getting paid.”
“And I’ll know him how?”
“Easy. The bastard’s a dandy. Always wears a deerstalker hat, even in winter.” I allowed myself a laugh. “You can’t miss him.”
“No,” he responded. “I won’t.”
From somewhere in the gloom, a nod. I felt he was starting to rise and almost reached out to stop him.
“I had no choice, you understand. There’s only so much humiliation that one man can bear, so much hate.” I heard my voice growing louder, paused, and suppressed it back to a whisper. “We’re not talking vengeance anymore. It’s justice.”
He moved, then, shifting from one end of the bench to the other and yet managing to dodge the ricochets of light. All I saw was the sleeve of a military-style jacket and a curl of boyish blonde hair.
“I’m sorry,” I blurted out. “I know I must sound like an idiot. You probably don’t hear this stuff.”
The man chortled, “You’d be surprised.”
He had one leg out of the booth. If the pinball machine illuminated his face, I could not see it. Only the turned-up collar of his army parka and a few more whorls of hair. “One other thing…”
I thought he would simply ignore me or even drop the envelope back on the table. In his business, question-asking customers were a liability. But, no, he hesitated and, without turning, spoke. “He won’t feel any pain, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
“I wouldn’t mind it if he did.”
With that, the man named Ray drifted out of the pinball light and disappeared into the murk of the bar. But I remained seated for hours. No matter, the bar never closed and its tender—if there was one—never noticed. A pitcher of beer would have been cherished, and a succession of tequila shots, but the last of my cash had gone into that envelope. There was nothing to do but wait out the night and the morning.
During that time, I thought again about the devastation my enemy had caused me. The bankruptcy, the wife who left because of it, the kids I no longer see. The death of my reputation in a town too small to disappear in. I can’t even walk down the street without wanting to hide my face.
* * * * *
If the sun rose outside the bar, if people went to work, took their coffee breaks, I could not tell. Still lurking in the last of the booths, steeped in stench and the pinball’s strobe, I sat and counted the bells. Ten, eleven, the corner clock struck. And then, finally, noon.
Only then do I pick myself up from the bench. More numb than nervous now. I feel ready, I feel relieved. Justice and revenge are near.
No need to rush, I tell myself. In fifteen minutes, I can easily walk those few blocks. Exiting the bar, squinting into the midday glare, I say out loud, “Just look innocent,” and flip on my deerstalker hat.
The Secret of 16/B
Varda wiped her forehead with the back of a wrist and reached for the Number 6 scraper. Even under the black, non-reflecting net, the newly risen sun spiked the temperature to unbearable. Especially in section 16/B, located at the epicenter of the site, far from the sparse eucalyptus trees that shaded its perimeters. Heat was an inescapable discomfort of her profession, along with back and shoulder pains, chaffed knees, dust-inhalation, and snakes. Only here, at Azaria, lurked entirely unusual hazards. Curses, imprecations, and the occasional stone tossed high over the “Danger: Excavation” signs to penetrate the net and smack some defenseless archaeologist.
Bertolt, her colleague from Freiberg, had already been rushed to Hadassah Hospital with an oozing head wound and a possible concussion. Later, there had been talk of postponing the entire expedition. The government reportedly met in an emergency session to discuss the crisis, and the Foreign Ministry set up a special task force to deal with its diplomatic fallout. Only the press rejoiced in the controversy inflamed by those probing the earth for remnants of villagers who lived two thousand years ago, while their descendants shouted maledictions and punched the air with their fists. The Ultra-Orthodox Jews protested the desecration of their ancestors’ bones and Palestinian Arabs demonstrated against an attempt—so they saw it—to stake an Israeli claim to their land.
Varda, never a political person, an atheist, understood little of it. She felt nothing, not even fear. Only the slight gratification of seeing two peoples so opposed at present united in protecting the past.
The police assured the team that they would not let the rabble get within rock-chucking distance of their work, and for the past two days, at least, the worst that had happened to Varda was a bee sting. She’d even stopped hearing the Arabic and Yiddish swears, and again focused on the gentle rasp of her scraper.
This was her favorite tool, reserved for the lowermost layers. Meters beneath the topsoil with its detritus of plastic bags and soda cans. Under the strata of machine gun bullets and musket balls, the Turkish pipes and Mamluk pottery. Down, down, to the bedrock of what the aerial photos had indicated was buried beneath these flinty Judean Hills. A mid-sized farming community, complete with modest dwellings and workshops, and ritual baths—the tell-tale sign of an ancient Jewish community destroyed, most likely, by the Romans.
And sure enough, here, at maximum depth, she found the crust of that trauma. Ash and bitumen, a jigsaw of shards scattered as if by sword-tip. That is where she began, around the shattered amphorae, scraping. Number 6, reminiscent of a dentist’s implement with its textured grip and its hooked, stainless steel tip sharp enough to cut human skin, could shift bits of soot aside without disturbing what lay underneath.
That, Varda knew, could be anything. Coins in near-mint condition, utensils, perhaps even parchments—anything that a simple man might hide at the last moment before fleeing. Anything a believing man—and these Jews believed—could retrieve once the Roman millstone had smashed over them.
So she scraped, much as she had for the past three decades of her career, burrowing particle by particle, through centuries, seasons, and days. Wearing a pair of old gardening gloves, with army-issue knee pads and her head concealed in a floppy kayaking hat, she bent over a square slightly larger than her face, pausing only to exchange the scraper for a makeup brush that whisked aside the loosened filaments. Methodically, she worked, diligently and patiently, aware that the slightest mis-movement could ruin a discovery.
She scraped and brushed and wondered for a moment what anybody might find, two thousand years from now, excavating her life.
Not much. An ambitious student with limited time for social matters, much less a family. Nothing resulted from a short marriage in her twenties—another archaeology student, a sweet boy but unserious, today a businessman with a wife and three kids. There was, in fact, a child, or rather the beginnings of one, but the timing, just before her thesis presentation, was all wrong. Nothing unearthable remained.
She brushed and noticed the emergence of a rectangular shape. A small table, maybe, or kneading board. Not wooden or stone but baked clay—an oven? She scraped again, resisting the urge to gouge quicker. She stro
ve to focus but found herself, once again, boring back to more recent years. That time when, in a fit she barely understood at the time and now could only recall incredulously, she attempted single motherhood. But that, too, failed—some vague ovarian deficiency—and she returned to work, telling herself that it was all for the better. Otherwise, she might not have been here, at the Azaria site, slowly revealing this relic.
An oven, indeed. Here were the fired tiles that intensified the heat. Here was the lid for inserting the dough, the eyehole for watching it rise. Protocol called for informing the head of the international team, a distinguished professor from Chicago, and documenting the find. Photographs would be taken, measurements made. But for once, Varda hesitated.
Her wrist again trolled her forehead. A fly made her upper lip twitch. From nearby sections came the rasp of other tools and, more distantly, the shouts. Without thinking, she put aside the Number 6 scraper and bit the fingers of one glove.
The hand that emerged was the hand of a much older woman—leathern, nails clipped and unpolished. This, too, was a tool. She inserted in into the oven’s opening and flexed her fingers inside. They touched something. Hard yet not heavy and with a human form she could already feel through her calluses. Pinching delicately, she extracted it.
She blew on its surface—how unprofessional!—and shook off the dust. A statuette. Though smaller than her palm, Varda instantly made out its abnormally enlarged breasts and hips, its sex intimated with a V. A fertility goddess, Bona Dea, probably, or Aphrodite. Crudely crafted, as one might expect in the provinces, but nevertheless irrefutably pagan. Outrageously pagan here, in a village of believers in the one God with no face who prohibited the slightest human likeness. Hidden in an oven so that not only the Romans would not find it, but neither would her own people.
Her. Why did she assume the owner was a woman? Because, she reasoned, who else would conceal this most invidious of sins in an oven? Where else might a man’s hand never wander? And the figurine—rustic, pathetic, a testament to the despair of one whose prayers remained unanswered. So despairing, Varda surmised, that she was unable to smash the idol even as the enemy approached.
Varda glanced over her shoulders at her teammates, each confined to a section, bent and scraping. She glanced up at the plastic net that diced the sun into razor-edged spangles. Then, with a licked finger, she wet the statue’s face.
From under the dust, peeking through millennia, a smile emerged. Half-impish, half-empathetic. A god on my side, Varda thought. The deity dedicated to voluptuous youth and fertility, that nevertheless shared her regret. That grinned at the middle-aged woman with arthritic knees and rounded shoulders and the hands of a day laborer who, despite her sacrifices, would never head her own dig.
All that could change now. Easily, sprinkling dirt around the antiquity and returning it to the oven, she could summon the Chicago professor and indicate she may have found something. The others would gather, hunching around her section as the photographer pushed through. The oven would be revealed and then, with the leader’s permission, she might be able to reach inside and remove its contents. Cheers would ring out from the international team and the press would headline, “First Century Jews Worshiped Sex Goddess!” The protesters, Ultra-Orthodox and Arab, would lay down their stones and vanish. Nobody fights over pagans.
But she would remain with her find. She could almost imagine the controversies it would stir, the academic articles devoted to it, and ultimately the special exhibit in which, glass-encased and coned in dramatic lighting, tourists would line up to view. Who knew, during the next excavating season, she might even be granted a dig.
Or not. Protocol called for the team leader to get all the credit. Varda might merit a footnote, at best, if he were generous. She pondered this as a commotion arose on the northernmost flank of the site. No doubt some volunteer chancing on a coin or another of her colleagues struck on the head. More shouts, interspersed with police whistles. She pulled the glove back over her hand, tugged it down with her teeth, and laid the statue on her palm.
It smiled at her as it once smiled at another woman who, childless and aging, appealed to other powers. A woman who, with the crunch of hobnailed soles approaching, concealed her secret in the one place neither her husband nor her neighbors would ever look, where even the war-fires could not singe it. She sealed the lid and—so Varda imagined—covered the oven with dirt. Only then did she join the others in escaping the village, over the scraggly hills into exile.
Varda retrieved the Number 6. Held firmly, at precisely the angle she was taught, it could mend as well as scrape. It could restore the embers to their traumatic state, inter the lid and seal the eyehole, leaving barely a fold. With a hand as expert as it appeared ungainly, she blanketed the oven with ash. Then, rising, slapping her knees, she marked the section with a flag. This meant that 16/B was thoroughly cleared and that—according to Azaria’s protocol—need never be excavated again.
Beautiful Bivouac
On a distant ridge, an artillery shell exploded in a plume of phosphorous.
“Beautiful,” one of the soldiers—Marciano, he thought—remarked.
Arkus snarled, “No, it isn’t. It’s disgusting.” His judgment was clearly political rather than aesthetic and touched off a round of drowsy observations that for a moment divided the unit into those for and against the war—or all wars in general.
Better to talk about that than Miller’s death that morning. His half-head angled toward the sky, his thoughts, dreams, memories piled pink in the dirt. Better than to try to recall Bardugo the day before. And so, beauty.
He came down on the beautiful side, at least with shellfire. The twirling and sometimes entwining blossoms reminded him of bougainvillea or a bouquet of Queen Anne’s lace. But he said nothing. Indeed, on all the issues already raised around the bivouac—the weather, the lack of fresh socks, speculations about when they’d move out and to where—he remained silent. Instead he stood there, just outside the huddled circle, awkwardly cradling his gun.
Awkward was the operative word for him and not only because of his inability to become one, as his officers urged, with his weapon. Even before the army, he never fit in. The kid who kept to himself in the classroom and who hid most evenings in his room.
Perhaps the army would change all that, he once told himself. What with so much marching rather than socializing, discipline instead of charm. But the military only accentuated his otherness. Not one of the boys, he was now not among the men who sat and chatted so effortlessly, their rifles laid crosswise across their laps.
The impromptu campfire they’d lit from empty ammo crates cast molten light on the soldiers’ faces, filling their creases with gold. These faces, too, seemed beautiful to him—manly and saintly and strangely immortal. But that, too, set him apart. His own face was a frightened child’s.
He’d seen it earlier that day during the fighting. Briefly, in a shard of window that somehow survived the blasts, he’d met his own reflection. There, sweating beneath an oversized helmet, was the most terrified expression he’d ever seen. He felt sorry for its owner. But then Sergeant Ramon ordered him to move his ass, and he moved, mindless with fear.
An animal fear, the fear of an insect scurrying from a boot. This, alone, redeemed battle. For those endless minutes under fire, no other thoughts existed. No stink of shit and cordite coiling from his uniform, no body parts littering the street. Crouching for cover, he forgot the women beyond his equal, the father he could never please. His lack of professional success, his loneliness—what, with people he’d never met trying to kill him, could be less pressing?
But all of his inadequacies returned to beset him the moment his unit regrouped. In the night, hanging back from the others, he was once again the outcast, the one who, despite his uniform and standard armaments, remained different.
Another shell erupted in the distance, just as the report of the first one thumped past them. The sound always reminded him of oil drums
barreling down stairs. A fighter jet lacerated the horizon. Bullets traced ellipses in the dark.
Marciano said, “It’s art, I tell you,” and Arkus spit, “Art, my ass. It’s garbage.”
And still he thought, “Beautiful,” without saying the word. “All of it. All of you. Beautiful.”
Cigarettes were passed around and a can of something which once was turkey. They ate and they puffed, their eyes like illuminated craters. No one bothered to sleep. Dawn would break soon anyway. Another day which for some of them might be the last.
He stepped further back as the men rose to their feet, shouldered their guns, and palmed their helmets. Over the ridge, the sun appeared, a fresh wound. Armored engines grumbled and roared. Soon they’ll be shooting at me, he thought with a sense of both dread and relief. Time to cower again, in the comforting solitude of fear.
An Agent of
Unit Forty
Ignoring the “Please spare the grass” sign, the students crossed the quad. They huddled and jostled, laughing some of them. All hung back from their professor.
“What are you afraid of?” one of them chided another, an athletic blonde, who insisted they keep distant. “He’s going to call you counterfactual?”
“He needs his space,” the sophomore explained and held out her arms so that none of her classmates could pass. “Besides…”
A snicker from the rear of the pack. “Besides, what, he won’t stare at your boobs?”
“Besides,” she huffs, “he could slit your throat. You know what he did before this.”
By “this” she meant the selective college and its faux-gothic buildings, the gardens, the quads’ awakening green. “This” included the professor’s reputation as the world’s foremost expert on World War I, his Pulitzer and Bancroft, his lecture halls invariably packed. The suits precision-made in Paris, the shoes hand-tooled. All that and emerald eyes, swells of salt-and-pepper hair, and a gymnast’s physique preserved well into middle age—a handsomeness bordering on beauty.