The Body

by Richard Ben Sapir

  “Of course not.”

  “Doesn’t sound English?” said Sharon. “Jeremiah Murphy O’Connor, Winston Randolph Churchill.”

  “Not in the least.”

  “Maybe they sound alike because Ireland and England are so close?” said Sharon.

  “They don’t sound remotely alike.”

  “I guess you can tell the difference,” said Sharon.

  Driving to Weizmann Institute to pick up the report, Jim asked what would they do if they found the carbon dating gave them more than an eighty-year difference from the crucifixion, 30 to 40 C.E.

  “Your dating of the disk becomes less crucial then, and, of course, you would get the greatest gift of your life.”

  “Do you think that will happen?” said Jim.

  “No,” said Sharon.

  “I don’t either,” said Jim. “That Pilatus coin is good circumstantial dating.”

  “Yes, but don’t forget those coins were still in use during the reign of Governor Glaucus.”

  “Which means?”

  “Which means that the date of the find could be twenty years after our known limits of the crucifixion, and both the coin and the carbon dating couldn’t tell it.”

  “But the kiln-fired disk dating could, right?” said Jim.

  “Only if we use the matching method. If we measure just the thermoluminescent glow of the disk, we get no better range than the carbon 14 dating, seventy or eighty years either way. But if we can get a kiln-fired piece that we know the absolute date of, we can match the glow curves and the two pieces and get within ten years, plus or minus.”

  “Then, I would say we would have to get a piece we knew for sure was fired between 30 and 40 C.E. But how do we do it?”

  “You find a piece with writing on it that says, ‘Dear Pontius, here are some more oils for washing, because I hear you are washing your hands a lot lately.’”

  “Is that hard?”

  “Not easy. But if you have the time and the money and the influence, it is something I would like us to do.”

  “I would like not to have to,” said Jim.

  Sharon went into the building where the carbon 14 dating was being done while Jim waited in the car. She came back, with a sigh.

  “We have to. It came in at 50 C.E. It’s within the range of the crucifixion, easily.”

  That night, Jim did not want to be left alone. He wanted Sharon to be with him.

  “It’s Friday night. I’ve got to go to Paula’s. I do it every Friday night.”

  “Don’t leave me alone,” said Jim.

  “But I’ve got to go. It’s my family.”

  “Take me,” said Jim.

  “Someone I’m living with, to Shabbat Eve?” she said, horrified.

  “Well, you know, it’s not exactly not a sin for me either,” said Jim.

  “But Shabbat Eve?”

  “Yes. Your sister-in-law doesn’t have to know we’re sleeping together.”

  “Paula will know. She’ll know.”

  “Sharon, you are an archaeologist, a senior lecturer at Hebrew University, and I am a Jesuit. I think we can possibly fool someone who to your own admission had only one year of college and then dropped out to marry your brother Avrahim. All right?”

  “You do make sense,” said Sharon.

  So that evening Sharon put on her very modest Shabbat Eve dress, and Jim put on his cleanest chinos and newest shirt, and the two colleagues who only worked together went to Paula’s house to share a harmless Shabbat Eve dinner.

  Paula answered the door in a print dress over her ample frame. She carried a wooden spoon, still dripping.

  “Hi, I’m Jim Folan. I’m working with Sharon. I’m glad to meet you, Mrs. Golban. Sharon has told me so much about you,” said Jim, in his smoothest voice of honest authority.

  “She’s a married woman,” said Paula, pointing the wooden spoon at Jim’s eyes.

  “He knows that, Paula. Please.”

  “He should remember it.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Sharon.

  “Yes, you do,” said Paula. “But it’s Shabbat Eve, so come on in.”

  Dr. Avrahim Golban welcomed Jim profusely. He had Sharon’s dark features and regal bearing. The son, Rani, was courteous. He wore a kepah on his head but the father did not. Mari ran to Sharon, and hugged her and kissed her. She was a pretty little girl, with very blue eyes in her Persian face.

  She announced to the family that Jim was beautiful, and that if Sharon didn’t want him, she did. She thought that was funny. So did the father. Paula said the dinner was ready.

  Dr. Golban said Shabbos prayers, as Paula seemed to monitor every word he said, that it be correct. Then she served dinner.

  Dr. Golban wanted to know what kind of food Jim thought he was eating.

  “I would assume kosher. I can’t imagine Mrs. Golban serving anything that was not strictly kosher,” said Jim. He smiled broadly at Paula. Paula served him vegetables.

  “But what group would you say the food comes from? Kurdish? German? What?”

  “Well, considering it’s stuffed cabbage and potato pancakes, it seems typically Jewish to me.”

  “Jewish, it is plastic. Plastic,” said Dr. Golban, and then he went on at length to describe food that he liked. The children thought that was funny.

  Dr. Golban described Persian cooking, with its subtle use of lemon flavoring, how the meat would be chopped into inch-square cubes, and how the sauce and the rice and the meat would all blend into a unity.

  He talked of Arab cooking, which, while not the food he grew up with, still had taste.

  “I have a friend who, when I go into his house, I sit down and they bring before me many dishes. And a big plate of rice with almonds and raisins, and I dig my hands in like this,” said Dr. Golban, with grinning gusto, and he thrust his hands forward into an imaginary pile of rice with almonds and raisins and sauce.

  He clenched his fist. “The rice sticks into a ball. And you eat that.”

  The Arab was his friend whose wife was once a patient. Arabs would bring the whole family to the hospital. Dr. Golban had cured the man’s wife and had forgotten about it, until he had a stone porch built and the builder wouldn’t charge him. It was, of course, the same man, Haj Suleiman Labib, who would not charge. Dr. Golban had been to his house as a guest, and he had had Haj Suleiman Labib here as a guest.

  “And he liked the food,” said Paula.

  “He was a guest, he had to,” said Dr. Golban.

  “The food is plastic,” said Mari.

  “You, eat,” said Paula. “And if you don’t, if you don’t have a good Shabbat, you know what?”

  “Daddy said it.”

  “You don’t say it.”

  There was another threat for violation of Jewish law that night, this time to Rani, who had been lackadaisical all week in the ritual cleansing of his hands on rising, and if Paula saw that, who knew what God was seeing? Again the awesome punishment of “You know what.”

  The ritual cleansing on waking reminded Jim how Jews thought sleep was a ritual impurity, and for the most astounding reason. During sleep, man lacked free will. The idea of free will placed humans in the cosmos in a way so different from many other religions and philosophies.

  One could look at both Judaism and Christianity and say, here, here is the common root. For what that said—which was so incredibly different from all that went before and so much that came after—was that man was not an animal, a piece of machinery, part of a state, a cog in a historical process. Free will meant he could choose to love God or not. It said to Jim, every time he confronted it in its different forms, that man is not here for a season, but for eternity.

  Jim looked over to Sharon and saw Paula watching. He wanted to be on Sharon’s side of the table, touching her, being close to her. Did he have a choice here? Where was his free will?

  He had one. He was just too weak. He could leave Sharon, which would have been like tearing o
ut his belly with a hot iron. No. He could do that easier because once your belly was out, you couldn’t put it back in. At this point he could not leave her and stay away. He could not. So where was his free will?

  “Do you think Sharon is beautiful?” said Mari to Jim.

  Paula, the director of proper feelings at the table, something even God never claimed, answered Mari for Jim:

  “He feels Sharon is married. He feels that if Sharon wants to get a divorce, she should find her husband. And he respects her because she is not some kind of loose woman who worries about the size of her anatomy. No woman who ever worried about sizes ever got a good husband. That’s how you get bad husbands.”

  “Is that how you feel?” asked Mari, holding her fork over her plate. She was so adorable, trusting that her question would be answered honestly. Her eyes were so blue and her dark skin so smooth with innocence. Jim did not really know what to answer. He didn’t want to lie. He also did not wish to face Paula’s wrath.

  “Your mother has made very good points about living. I certainly would say they are good points,” said Jim.

  “But how do you feel? Do you feel the way she says you feel?”

  “Well, your mother is talking about incontrovertible law.”

  “Do you think Sharon is beautiful?”

  “Define beauty,” said Jim.

  “Something that is pleasing to you,” said Mari, dangerously cutting off Jim’s retreat. That was not what he wanted her to say, because he had intended to get into a discussion of what beauty was, and the little innocent girl just about ended it.

  “Then, an apple becomes beautiful,” said Jim.

  “Yes. Is she beautiful?”

  “Your aunt is certainly prettier than an apple, Mari,” said the Jesuit.

  “Real beauty is inside,” said Paula. “Beauty is not apples. You eat apples,” said Paula, as though the term was impossible with human relationships, and in her mind, thought Jim, probably was.

  “Is she beautiful inside?”

  “I think that is your aunt’s great beauty,” said Jim. “She is a fine, decent, moral woman.”

  “I think so too,” said Mari.

  Sharon hugged her and kissed her cheeks. “I love you,” she said to Mari, and then also kissed Rani, who winced.

  “I’m sorry, you have a bruise on your cheek.”

  “Where?” said Paula.

  “It’s nothing,” said Rani. “Nobody ever saw it.”

  “How did you get it?”

  “I was hit,” admitted Rani.

  “And were you hitting too?”

  Rani lowered his eyes.

  And thus on Shabbat Eve, in the city of Jerusalem, did Paula pronounce the punishment for disobeying a parent, which was a violation of Jewish law, as ancient as the First Temple stones.

  And this was the punishment she had been threatening all evening:

  “No ‘Little House on the Prairie.’”

  Later, when the children were asleep, Paula said she disliked taking that American television show away from them, because it always had a morality so difficult to find these days.

  Jim said nothing, but smiled in weak agreement.

  Outside, as they walked to their car, coming close only when they were out of sight of Paula, Sharon said:

  “She liked you.”

  “That’s liking?”

  “She doesn’t like the idea of any romance between us.”

  “I’m glad she didn’t ask if I were married.”

  “She will,” said Sharon.

  Saturday was spent in bed, talking about themselves, and on Sunday they went for long walks around the city, because the sun had come out briefly.

  Jim confided that he had had fears about becoming a priest, that he couldn’t make it.

  “But you did change your mind?” said Sharon.

  “Yes. I did, because the Jesuit I was talking to at the time said I wasn’t expected to make it alone.”

  “You mean, the help of God?”

  He said he couldn’t make it through a day himself as priest without Jesus. And so I said, ‘Okay, Jesus. It’s your problem, not mine. I’m counting on you for help.’”

  “Ah,” said Sharon. “God as a friend.”

  Jim felt her squeeze his arm, and they walked quietly through the hills of Jerusalem.

  Monday began the search for the matching kiln-fired piece of pottery. Throughout the week reports kept coming back from Sharon’s colleagues that there was no kiln-fired pottery in any museum with writing referring to Pontius Pilatus.

  “Do you want to go the illegal trade?” said Sharon.

  “Not yet,” said Jim. “If we have to, we have to. What are our chances, even if we go illegal?”

  “I don’t know,” said Sharon. “I’m not that familiar with the illegal market.”

  “Well, then, that will be a last resort,” said Jim.

  “Good. I’m glad,” said Sharon.

  Shabbat came around again, and again they went to Sharon’s brother’s house, but Jim went early to play Frisbee with Rani and Mari in a nearby park. He was showing off his ground skimmer when he saw a park sign.

  He was playing Frisbee in the Valley of the Cross, the place from which tradition said the wood for the cross had been taken. Part of it was now a Boy Scout park.

  On Shabbat Eve, he heard Dr. Golban describe the beauties and glories of Persia.

  “May I ask why you are here, then?”

  “Because I am a Jew,” said Dr. Golban.

  “But you sound so Persian.”

  “We were there for twenty-five hundred years,” said Dr. Golban, and he talked more about Persia and said that, to his surprise, he was using classical Greek remedies that he thought were Persian.

  “How did classical Greek medicine get to Persia?” asked Jim.

  “You’ve never heard of Alexander the Great?” said Sharon.

  “He married a Persian princess,” said Mari.

  “He was a great general,” said Rani. “But he overextended himself, though.”

  “I found out they were Greek remedies only when I came here. It was hard, you know, because they did not accept my Persian medical education. For good reason, too.”

  “There was a choice,” said Sharon, “of staying in Persia, Iran, with respect for his medical skills, or coming here with his little sister and learning again. I was brought here at twelve.”

  “Let me ask again, even though you have answered. Why did you come?”

  And Dr. Avrahim Golban rose from the Shabbat table and kissed the forehead of Rani and then Mari.

  “When I was a boy, my big fear was that my father would not be able to defend me. My children in Israel do not have that fear,” said Dr. Golban. “You have heard many things about Islam. The Muslim neighbors in our village were the most beautiful people in the world. I can cry for missing them now. But I tell you, Mr. Folan, it was as recently as twenty-five years ago that it was not more of a crime than a twenty-gold-piece fine in that Islamic land to kill a Jew. In our village, our Muslim neighbors would defend us.”

  “We were lucky, because our village was good to all minorities,” said Sharon, “Zoroastrians, Christians, Bahai.”

  “Here, we defend ourselves,” said Rani, and he put a hand on Mari’s shoulder, next to his father’s hand.

  “You see,” said Avrahim, his voice trembling, “my children will not miss Persia, and that beautiful land and our beautiful neighbors.”

  Outside, going home, Sharon explained to Jim that in her brother’s house there was a conflict within Judaism.

  “He’s Persian. They have adopted some of the Muslim customs. Paula, of course, is Ashkenazi to a T, to a T.”

  “So what do they do?”

  “They do it the woman’s way and the man complains. The candles and types of Friday night prayers over the chaleh, bread that is Ashkenazi. As a matter of fact, about a hundred and twenty different kinds of Judaism showed up in the great return, with only a single c
ommon belief they all shared.”

  “What was that?” said Jim.

  “That the other one hundred and nineteen were doing it wrong.”

  By the next Friday night, Jim was calling Dr. Golban by his first name, and Mari absolutely loved Jim and was going to marry him, and Sharon couldn’t because she was a married woman. Paula thought Jim was too thin and not eating enough, and Rani wanted to know what Jim did for a living.

  “I teach at Boston College in Boston,” said Jim.

  “They have a good nursing school,” said Paula.

  “They have many good departments.”

  “I’ve heard that the only good one is nursing.”

  “Well, that’s a misconception,” said Jim, who did not need to go to the homeland of Christ to hear that Boston College had only one good department, and one that he had nothing to do with, to boot.

  The national holiday of Tubashvat was close, and Jim offered to plant a tree in their backyard, which they accepted. This was an important thing with Israelis. But when he returned to Sharon’s apartment with the apricot tree he had bought, to show her what they would take to her family, he found someone blocking his way.

  A younger man with dark curls and much jewelry tinkling on his exposed, hairy chest waited at the doorway to Sharon’s apartment.

  Jim excused himself, and opened the door with the key.

  “Who are you?” said the younger man in Hebrew.

  “I live here,” answered Jim in Hebrew. “Who are you?”

  “I am the rightful husband of the woman you are living with.”

  “Oh,” said Jim.

  “Oh,” repeated the younger man with indignation.

  “You must be Dubi Halafi.”

  “I am.”

  “Well, Sharon will be home later, why don’t you come back then?”

  “I am here now. I am her husband. I belong here. By law.” He made a grand gesture with his fingers, his voice resonating on the word “law,” as though it was just something he had discovered.

  “Come back later, please,” said Jim. It was not begging. He was firm.

  Suddenly, an ugly knife was at his throat.

  “No Israeli court would convict a husband trying to get into his own home. Heh?”

  Jim did not move. He did not want to give in to the man, and he was so angry he almost didn’t care what happened. He thought of bashing the tree into Dubi Halafi, maybe even killing him in the fight. After all, the man did draw a knife, and Sharon said he had a minor criminal record, a thing she found out only after they were married.