De Lussac insisted on commencing with a visit to the Royal Palace museum, it was just a short walk across the impeccable maintained grass gardens from the Bougainvillea Hotel, which overlooked the Mekong. At the entrance to the museum Laura donned a long sarong to cover her legs and a tee shirt to cover her shoulders before entering the grounds as they wanted to visit the temple An hour later, after admiring the magnificent statues of the Khmer Empire, they paused for a moment on a veranda facing the courtyard gardens seated in the wicker armchairs and shaded from the sun by the broad roof. The temperature was perfect; a slight breeze moved the bright green palm fronds and the silence was broken only by the sound of birds chirping in the background.
They had slept well, but waking up had been an effort, the flight to Phnom Penh from Amman with the changes in Bahrain and Bangkok had been long. They immediately discovered the Cambodian capital was much noisier and considerably warmer than Israel. A sharp spell of cold weather had hit Israel in the few days prior to their departure when the temperature had fallen to zero in Jerusalem.
Laura had progressed with the translation work whilst O’Connelly cogitated over the exchanges they had had with de Lussac, who seemed unstable and difficult to reassure even though progress had been made. He hoped that the firm assurance he had from Alfred Mann as to the publication of de Lussac’s work, once the translation had been completed, would satisfy him.
De Lussac had picked them up from the airport the previous evening and dropped them off at their hotel, where pleading fatigue they had called it a day. That morning he had been charming, providing them with a guided tour of Phnom Penh and running commentary on the history of Khmer Empire and South East Asia in general. O’Connelly was struck by similarity of the monumental works and the rise and fall of empires, so familiar, not only in the Orient, but in other regions of the world so far apart in distance and in time.
The Khmers rivals were the Burmese and Thais to the West, the Vietnamese to the East and the vast empire of China to the north. South East Asia with its natural barriers composed of mountainous jungles and vast rivers had throughout history been a brake on the movement of armies, unlike the more open arid regions of the Middle East, but the jungles had not prevented the religions of northern India from penetrating and dominating East Asia thought and the destiny of its peoples.
De Lussac was not engaged in research at the well known sites of the ancient Khmer capital of Angkor, but in the exploration of lesser know sites and vestiges of the country’s past civilisations and answers to the multiple questions linked to the sudden the collapse of the a vast and powerful empire that had prospered over hundreds of years.
That afternoon as O’Connelly braced himself for more probing questions as to the real or imaginary problems that troubled de Lussac, but another subject was to trouble him. But the first visit on their agenda was to the Genocide Museum. O’Connelly had seen other forms of hell where man had inflicted torture and death on his fellow men, the first he remembered had been Auschwitz-Birkenau, then there were the prisoner of war camps in Vietnam, Mandela’s prison in South Africa, not forgetting Alcatraz, a different kind of hell, which he could contemplate every morning from his apartment when in San Francisco.
The strange banality of the museum left O’Connelly plunged into his own thoughts and as he walked past the boutique towards the exit he was surprised not to see souvenir skulls for sale. Later he learnt that rocket launchers covered be fired for two hundred dollars a shot at the Killing Fields outside of the city or machine guns fired for a dollar a round.
Genocide was as old as man, as the history he was discovering of the Middle East, even the Bible preached the virtues of wiping out the Canaanites to deliver the Promised Land to the followers of Joshua. What was it in man’s soul that drove him to wantonly kill his fellow men and what stopped his victims from resisting such slaughter, walking like sheep to the sacrifice, and what stopped observers from intervening.
He recalled how as a reported during the war in Yugoslavia he had watched the events take place Srebrenica, in living colour on his hotel room TV in Belgrade, Serbs separating men from women and children under the eyes of a Dutch contingent of the UN. He remembered how so painfully obvious what their fate was to be, yet not one nation, not one single nation, had made the slightest effort to intervene. A short gun battle would have surely passed the message, but seven thousand innocent Muslim men were led to the slaughter, without a single finger being lifted, under the eyes of blond, muscular, macho, European troops, in their impeccably clean, freshly pressed, uniforms, clear eyed and well fed, frozen into inaction by their hierarchy and inability of the European governments to act.
The Genocide Museum was a necessary, but sinister tourist attraction, as was Auschwitz or the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, though it was impossible for ordinary, free, men and women visitors to relate to the terrifying reality of the past, when men and women sent other men and women to their atrocious deaths.
They had lunched in a small restaurant a few steps across the road from the gate of the museum. De Lussac spoke of his irritation with Mann as O’Connelly tried to smooth his ruffled feathers, carefully studying the man who obviously suffered some kind of paranoia. He had spent ten years of his life studying the history of Jerusalem and believed his work would lead to a peaceful solution between the Jews and Muslims in their dispute over the site of their respective holy places.
In spite of that his writings barely concealed his contempt of the Muslims, more precisely the Palestinians, who were the historical co-owners of Canaan ever since the dawn of historical times before the legendary arrival of Moses. The Jews had been overwhelmed by the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Persians, the Romans, until the Holy Land was conquered by the Arabs, Crusaders, Ottomans and finally the British.
Seen far from Israel, O’Connelly saw that the Jews historical claim could only be considered tenuous. The return of the Jews to Israel was a consequence of centuries of persecution in Europe. Their resettlement in the Holy Land had commenced in 1881 when they had been given permission to do so by the Ottoman government at a time when the population of Jews in Palestinian was no more than a few thousand, an insignificant number compared to the Palestinian Arab population who had lived in the land for at least two millennia.
De Lussac spoke little of his work in Cambodia, his attention was focused on the publication of his work he now called La source du Temple, the word source meaning both spring and origin in French. He complained he had received little feed back concerning Mann as to the publication of the work and the translation.
‘We have several tasks ahead of us Isaac, one the work has to condensed, two it has to be translated into English and three it has to be published and four we have to find a distributor.’
‘I’m not sure about Mann,’ de Lussac replied.
‘Well we’ve signed an agreement with him.’
‘I don’t think he is capable of publishing my work.’
‘The agreement doesn’t necessarily mean that his trust publishes it, though they have published a good number of books related to religion. Mann has excellent connections in the Jewish world and that’s where the principal market is, especially in the USA.’
De Lussac did not seem convinced he appeared to be extremely nervous if not agitated.
‘I have received nothing concerning the abridgement of the work.’
‘We are working on it, Laura has several people working on it.’
‘Specialists?’
‘No, I don’t think we need specialists Isaac, you’re the specialist, our people are working on the literary content, the subject is not being touched.’
‘I have to see the drafts.’
‘Of course.’
‘When?’
‘We have a draft of the first three chapters with us, Laura will go over it with you.’
That seemed to calm him down and O’Connelly was relieved to be able to return to their planned visit to Angkor, the capital
of the ancient Khmer civilization at Siem Reap the next day, two hundred kilometres to the north. De Lussac had made the travel arrangements, there were three possibilities he explained, by plane, boat or by road. He had opted for the latter, like that they would see the Cambodian country side, the boat was crowded and uncomfortable and he had assumed they had seen enough of airports after the journey from Tel-Aviv.
The Mekong Express, a first class bus service, left Phnom Penh at seven the next morning from the operator’s office, a short taxi ride from the Bougainvillea Hotel. The journey would take about five hours explained the charming hostess who seemed not more the sixteen years old and dressed in a traditional style wild silk uniform with an orchid in her hair. They settled in and once they were under way O’Connelly saw de Lussac one row ahead of them and to the left sifting through the draft that Laura had given him the previous evening.
Both O’Connelly and Laura had now spent a month of intensive work reviewing the history of the Holy Land and the Jews, sifting through archaeological reports and visiting sites, as well as speaking to numerous experts in Israel, England, Egypt and Syria. Their preliminary conclusion was that de Lussac’s work was based on research in ancient texts that made reference to disputable direct or indirect eyewitness accounts as the site of the Temple linked to the different levels of the cisterns measured by the Palestinian Survey Fund one hundred years previously, references to springs and aqueducts, and lengthy descriptions of the purification rites for the Temple’s priests, as well as long references to the history of the Holy Land since the time of Christ.
However, his theory relied entirely on the fact that the cisterns were positioned in cascade, which was logical since water according to the laws of gravity flows downhill, and the aqueduct, which supplied the cisterns with water from Solomon’s Pool situated at an altitude of about that of Jerusalem in the hills to the south of Bethlehem, entered the Esplanade near its surface. However, there was in fact no original discovery, no new archaeological evidence, no new texts, no new scientific evidence, no new survey, simply the work of the British army engineers carried out by candlelight in the tunnels of beneath the Haram, more than one hundred years before using the rudimentary measuring techniques of those times .
Was his theory justified, it was impossible to say, there was a certain logic to his theory, but it would be clearly impossible to investigate the underground hydraulic system for years, decades or maybe centuries to come. His theory therefore remained conjecture, a sop to the imagination of certain extremist Orthodox Jews. It would certainly do no harm to publish it, if it was not taken up as a political tool to justify certain extremist actions.
The most important question for O’Connelly was whether he could build his novel around the story of the Temple, he had already accumulated a substantial quantity of notes and documents. Little by little his story was taking form, the subject was rich in history, Israel was filled with contradictions and protagonists, de Lussac had all the makings of a central character. He now realised he had little need for de Lussac, his novel would be built around the story of the Temple, but where it would lead was still unclear.
During the two scheduled stops, they got down to stretch their legs and O’Connelly observed de Lussac becoming more and more introspective, his face a closed mask.
At the Siem Reap bus station they were met by Jean-Louis Claudel, a French archaeologist working with the French team on a restoration programme. Claudel announced they would be staying at his guest house a couple of kilometres from the centre of the city.
The house was off the main road that linked the city centre to the airport in a district where instant wealth was visible in the form of luxury ten or twenty room architect designed villas bordered surrounded by unmade roads, on the corner of each road were smoking piles of garbage; the refuse disposal system had not caught up with the creation of private wealth.
The guest house was a large modern villa of two levels with, as far as O’Connelly could make out, eight to ten guest rooms. Claudel, his family and their staff lived in the rear part of the house. As an archaeologist his salary was modest, but the income from the guest house enabled him to live comfortably, most of his guests being French tourists travelling individually, the staff, chamber maids and cleaners, lived in and certainly not paid more than a few dollars a week plus food and board. O’Connelly later discovered another form of clientele when an expensive SUV arrived with a Cambodian, probably a businessman or official, and his girl friend, renting a vacant room for an hour or so.
De Lussac took his leave, he rented a house on the other side of the Siem Reap River in a residential district near to the down town area, he barely said goodbye and seemed to have almost totally clammed up. They spent the evening with Claudel and his Thai wife, he was amusing and talkative, a fluent Khmer speaker who was well informed on local politics and gossip. He recounted how speculative investors had built an over supply of up market hotels in and around Siem Reap, many of which were half empty. O’Connelly prompted him to talk of de Lussac, it was not difficult and Claudel told him how he lived frugally with his handicapped sister in a modest house, he had few friends and his only interest was his work for an American society whose interests seemed more related to religion than archaeology.
The next day they took breakfast with de Lussac at the guest house, he was not very talkative and announced he would be busy but would spend the morning looking through the drafts. The couple set out for Angkor Wat in a tuk-tuk, a three wheeled motorised rickshaw. Claudel assured them the driver knew the site well, he was reliable and spoke good English, but O’Connelly soon discovered that the driver’s conversation was limited to about a dozen words, however, he was friendly and willing, he could read the map and his sign language were efficient.
The wonders of Angkor were a pole of attraction for tourists from all over the world and O’Connelly was a little disappointed to discover that they were amongst the two or three thousand daily visitors to the site. He was consoled however, by the dimension of the site was, so vast that they were alone in most of the huge outlying temples, the majority of tourists being on short trips visiting Angkor Wat and its surrounding temples. He was one hundred and fifty years too late, after all it was impossible to complain about tourists in Jerusalem or at the Pyramids for that matter. O’Connelly needed little confirmation to realise that it was impossible to be alone in the world at the beginning of the 21st century.
That evening with no news from de Lussac and they decided to eat in the down town area. Laura’s guidebook recommended the Khmer Kitchen, which owed its fame to the reported visit of a certain Mick Jagger, as for the food it was less sensational than the rock star.
Siem Reap was rebuilding its sewage system; it was the dry season and the quantity of dust raised by the motodops and tuk-tuks was choking. The city centre was not unlike any fashionable tourist site, where a wildly free market economy prevailed, restaurants of every kind, beggars, thieves, armless and legless musicians and souvenir shops, it could have been Key West. There were expatriates, adventurers and itinerants, all trying to make their fortunes, in every kind of enterprise from French restaurants to guest houses, from banana leaf paper to elephant shit paper and every tourist service imaginable.
In despair they stopped at a traveller’s bookshop, rather a more Cambodian run down version of Shakespeare’s bookshop. In it O’Connelly found a copy of George Orwell’s ‘Burma Days’ written in 1927 when he had served in the Imperial Police, he hoped it would give him an insight to the pre-Boeing age. They returned to the guest house a little bewildered and disappointed by their first impressions of Siem Reap compared to the splendours of Angkor’s past they had witnessed in its ruined temples.
O’Connelly switched on the TV and watched CNN news; the headlines reported the Hamas take over of Gaza, threatening to turn Palestine into another war zone. O’Connelly could not help thinking that Alfred Mann had chosen a good cause for his trust, it would assure people s
uch as him of work for many generations to come.
The Hamas landslide victory in the elections eighteen months earlier had resulted in shooting in the streets and now a schism in Palestinian politics. Alfred Mann’s vision of peace, de Lussac’s Temple theory seemed more far fetched that ever. Politicians come and go and Israel will inevitably be…what? Destroyed! Thrown out! Defeated! So many tragic possibilities, in a scenario that was changing at a startling speed.
The next day they set out again, seeking a lesser known part of the huge site. An article in the local English language press had announced satellite images from NASA’s telescopes showed that Angkor had been larger than modern day Los Angeles. Whilst Laura scrambled amongst the fallen lintels of an isolated and unnamed temple, O’Connelly sat alone in the stifling heat high up on its steep flank, he looked out at the dense green forest below and asked himself, as had so many others before him, what had caused the rise of civilisation, the availability of resources and the desire to become rich and powerful? And their fall? The loss of resources? The number of Asian tourists he had seen swarming over Angkor Wat was perhaps the evidence of the rise of their civilisation and the decline of Europe’s.
It was two days since they had had no news from de Lussac. Was he sulking? When they returned to the guest house Claudel informed them that de Lussac had left for his site somewhere in the jungle to the west of the country in the hills nearby Battambang. He had left O’Connelly a note that he could join them at an address in Thailand in Koh Chang.
‘What do you make of this?’ he asked Claudel.
‘Don’t ask me, he’s a very strange bird.’
‘What’s this address in Thailand?’
‘It’s not that far from here, he’s got friends there, Israeli’s.’
‘Israeli’s?’
‘Yes, some guy who’s made a lot of money.’
‘How do you get there?’
‘Depends, but you can take a boat to Battambang, then you go to the border where you can pick up a bus.’
‘How long does it take?’
‘If you leave tomorrow morning you’ll be there in the afternoon. I’ll get the boat tickets if you like.’
De Lussac was gone, they had seen enough of the extraordinary temples and Siem Reap held no more charm. O’Connelly looked at Laura who nodded yes.
The boat was not what they had expected. The tuk-tuk dropped them off at a filthy quay in a third world slum village on the banks of Lake Tonle Sap, the boat was not much better. O’Connelly cursed as the boat filled with back-packers and other lost travellers. Claudel had no doubt made a substantial profit on the tickets knowing he would never see them again. The lake crossing was pleasant enough, though they were cramped for leg room. The river to Battambang was another story, the water was low and the boat piloted by two Cambodians who looked more like Dayak pirates had the greatest difficulty in navigating the stream. It was late in the afternoon when the finally arrived in Battambang where they decided to stay the night.
There was nothing to see in the city after the wonders of Angkor and they took a meal at a restaurant nearby the hotel then after some inquiries booked a taxi to take them to the Thai-Cambodian border forty kilometres away.
They settled down in the room watching BBC news that reported the indignation of Muslims in the Middle East over a perceived insult to Mohammed in a recent Swedish film, riots had broke out in Pakistan, Indonesia Iraq and Gaza in protestation. The Hamas threatened Swedes in Palestine and when a preview of the film was show on French TV France was in turn threatened. Islam was in its virulent phase with frequent bouts of fever when ever it perceived real or imaginary threats. No other world religion at the beginning of the 21st century was in such a state of ebullition. The State of Israel was vociferous, but not as a result of its religious convictions but out of concern for its survival.
The next morning the left for Thailand early, the taxi was air-conditioned and comfortable, but the road was unsurfaced and with the dry weather and the other vehicles they crossed or overtook raised huge clouds of ochre dust. In a village the driver stopped and took on an unforeseen passenger, an ex-Khmer Rouge leader still wearing the Pol Pot style uniform, a hard faced silent man. He dropped him in the last town before the border and told them how the Khmer Rouge leader’s first marriage had been extremely turbulent, his wife spending the family income playing cards, finally the Khmer Rouge leader divorced her and married again, his second wife was not better than the first, resulting in daily domestic fights to the amusement of his neighbours, she too spent his money on playing cards all night.
They crossed the border without incident and found themselves in Thailand, the bus station they had been promised was non-existent, an open truck with bench seats took them to the next major town eighty kilometres away where they caught a regular bus line to Trat, a town facing the island of Koh Chang. A fast boat took them across the straits to the island where O’Connelly showed the address to one of the local taxi drivers. It was not exactly a taxi, but a small open pickup truck also with a long bench seat to either side; they picked up and dropped off anyone who hailed them without any regular stops. The driver not speaking a word of English made a sign they climb in and set off, twenty minutes later he stuck his head out and pointed to a small road on the coast side.
Rolando Winkler had arrived in Thailand five years previously with what he called a small capital that he had wisely put to one side for a rainy day, the equivalent to half a million Euro, he had lost his shirt in the dotcom crash and done an overnighter to escape angry bankers and investors with all that remained in the company safe. Koh Chang had proved to be a good spot then, little known and about to take off as a new tourist destination in Thailand. He invested in a piece of real estate and built the first phase of his future resort. Winkler, an Argentinean Jew, held at least three passports, he had met Claudel on an exploratory trip to Angkor and had invited him to Koh Chang.
Claudel had told them that de Lussac visited the island from time to time, it was better than Sianoukville with its polluted waters and other dangers, however de Lussac’s reason for visiting Thailand was not tourism, but the need to renew his two monthly visa and that of his sister. The problem was he could not subject his sister to such an arduous journey, however Winkler’s connections with the local police overcame that difficulty.
Winkler told O’Connelly that de Lussac held an Israeli passport, which he used alternatively with his French passport for his Cambodian residence visa, thus saving the time it required for the paperwork at the Cambodian embassy in Bangkok. Each time he arrived in Koh Chang he simply handed in the passport with the expired visa and collected the other with a new visa, just needing to stay overnight.
Winkler ran he ran a small exclusive resort for wealthy scuba diving enthusiasts. He told O’Connelly his story over drinks that evening, ‘I looked around and bought this piece of hillside land for a song. Nobody was interested then as there was no direct access to the main White Sands Beach, only the small cove, where the jetty is now. My clients are up market diving enthusiasts, they can spend a night on one of the small islands I now own where I’ve built a few bungalows, they can relax in a real natural paradise. Some of the guys like to go down to the public beach for a change, there’s a lot of Swedish girls down there…alone.’
The resort stood on a densely forested hillside between White Sands and Klong Prao. The guests arrived directly from Trat by speedboat from the ferry terminal a short ride from the airport. Winkler had got himself a good lawyer from the start, an American educated Thai who paid off all the local politicos.
‘Who are those guys fishing down there on the jetty?’
‘They’re a couple of guards, Israelis, they keep an eye on things, you never know.’
Winkler’s story was long; he had a studied business and finance at the University of Haifa, before his first attempt at business in Israel after the Camp David agreement when he hoped for a boom in business with the Palestinians. He
was out of luck, too optimistic, not sufficiently oriental in his ways, and after a series of difficulties he gave up and returned to Argentina, where he invested in the import of computer equipment. His business prospered, but anticipating one of Argentina’s periodic economic crises he left for Miami where he became involved in telecoms. Three years later with the new technology boom he returned to Argentina setting up an Internet services company, but when the dotcom crash he was forced to make a hurried exit for Tel-Aviv, where an Israeli passport gave him protection from the various creditors who pursued him accusing him of fraud. Thailand seemed a good refuge, one of the countries in South East Asia where Israeli nationals were accepted, and he took of once again awaiting for the storm to pass.
‘We only take direct bookings mostly word of mouth and a couple of specialised agencies, no local tourists. You have seen the only road we have is the service road with security guards at our discreet entrance off the island road. No advertising. No local girlfriends, he said laughing, this is a serious establishment.’
‘I would have thought there were few security problems in Thailand.’
‘Not now, you’re forgetting the Muslim south, only yesterday three people were killed there and with the cartoon story tensions are running high. We’ve quit a few guests from Israel.’
The next morning they decided to explore a little taking a taxi to Lonely Beach, the name had a nice sound to it. The beach was small, in the middle was a relatively upmarket hotel where travellers could be lonely in comfort, further along the beach were a few forlorn huts for back packers. In all it was about five hundred meters long with effectively few people. The White Sands beach seemed more attractive with the long clean beach they had seen from Winkler’s resort, it was lined with small cafés bars and hotels. Behind the islands beaches was a backdrop of jungle covered hills, the coast road was separated by a broad fringe of palm and leafy mangrove trees from the beach area.
They selected a spot and settled down to enjoy the scenery and clam after the previous day’s hectic journey. Laura stretch out on the white sand to improve her tan and O’Connelly decided to stretch his legs with a walk along the seashore. He reached a rocky promontory near the south end of the beach by the worn wooden huts, described by a sign as bungalows and the young Scandinavians taking a break from their endless cold and dark northern climate, where a swarthy foreigner looked at O’Connelly and scowled, surprising him by waving his arm in sharp movements. Almost too late O’Connelly saw a fishing line.
‘Sorry.’
The swarthy man pulled in his line without the least sign or gesture in his direction. O’Connelly deciding to be friendly, he smiled and nodded. There were two men, one about fiftyish and the other in his thirties, they looked like Middle Easterners or perhaps light skinned Indians though they were very thick set. The older of the two looked at him, his face seemed hard and unfriendly, his eyes were surprisingly light coloured in contrast to his swarthy bearded complexion.
‘Caught anything?’ asked O’Connelly.
The man nodded to a plastic bucket. O’Connelly looked in there was a stone the size of a fist.
‘I can’t see anything.’
The man thrust his hand into the bucket and pulled out dark ugly looking fish.
‘Are you staying at Lonely Beach?’
‘Yes.’
‘On holiday?’
‘Yes.’
His guttural accent seemed familiar, Arab perhaps.
‘Where are you from?’
‘Israel.’
‘Ah, Tel-Aviv?’
‘No, Haifa.’
The man relaxed a little and they exchanged a few casual words as tourists do.
‘So good luck with your fishing, shalom.’
‘Shalom,’ the man smiled thinly.
O’Connelly returned to Laura and told her of his encounter.
‘Funny meeting a couple of Israeli’s here.’
‘Yeah, funny,’ he replied pensively. Israelis were cautious about where they travelled avoiding Muslim countries. Thailand seemed a good destination non-Muslim, thought O’Connelly, wondering about the route they took, they themselves had flown from Amman; Winkler would no doubt provide him with the answer.
Back at the hotel when he the men he had seen on the beach Winkler laughed. He told O’Connelly they were from his security staff, it was their day off and as usual they had gone fishing. Later that evening the two security men turned up with two of the ugliest girls he had ever seen, they had picked them up in a massage parlour. Winkler laughed remarking that their feet were especially designed for working in the rice paddies and when he was accused of being contemptuous he replied the truth could not be contemptuous.
That day O’Connelly has seen how certain locals lived and only thirty metres from the coast road, the only road on the island, the same distance from the beach, in miserable huts surround by the plastic refuse, the rejects of civilisation, hidden from the environmentally conscious Scandinavian and Germans tourists, enjoying hedonistic massages and manicures under the leafy palms fronds from the wives of the disinherited, or strolling hand in hand with their daughters before the girls became worn and ugly. The luckier daughters would win a lottery ticket to Düsseldorf or Essen, returning as queen bees to be massaged and fawned over by their unfortunate sisters.
They decided to eat out and took a taxi to the Taj Palace. O’Connelly ordered a chicken Vindaloo, it was hot, powerful and required a good quantity of cold beer to wash it down. The waiter, a Nepalese, told them the restaurant was owned by a Thai born Sikh, he himself had briefly escaped the political throes in Kathmandu, where the oppressive king fought an even more vicious Maoist movement. The young man’s ambition was Europe.
Outside of Winkler’s resort they had the greatest difficulty in getting themselves understood, he told them that the island was more than ten years behind Koh Samui and twenty behind Phukit, and so much the better thought O’Connelly.
The next day they left for a small island that was to all intents and purposes Winkler's own private island where they were to some diving. They were joined in the boat by Ofir, an Israeli of about twenty five. That evening they spoke of Israel and the conversation drifted to France and Israel.
‘They’re Jews!’ retorted Ofir when O’Connelly spoke of the Jews in France.
‘Jews?’
‘They’re not Israeli’s, not the same thing, a completely different mentality, soft, coddled by Europe. We’re Orientals,’ he said laughing. ‘In any case the Jews in France are Sephardic,’ he added with a hint of disdain.
‘Not all.’
‘Most.’
‘I spent my three years military service in a front line special combat unit.’
‘Front line?’
‘Yes fighting in the Lebanon. Fourteen of my friends died. I saw a lot of dead bodies and blood whilst other guys of my age were enjoying themselves in soft army jobs, you know computers and programming, surrounded by girls, when they left they were snapped up by civilian IT firms.’
‘And you?’
‘I had learnt how to kill, not much use in civilian life, so I went back to university, languages, my Arabic was not bad, same with my English, I also did history, to try to understand more about Israel I suppose. Interesting but not much money in it.’
‘So what will you do now?’
‘As you see I’m passing the time in archaeology, what I really want to do is go to Australia, Israel has changed.’
‘Changed?’
‘More corrupt. The people have changed only money counts. There’s one million Russians.’
‘Jews?’
‘Not all of them, they’re clever. It’s funny before they came the churches were empty, now they’re full.’
‘There’s a lot of Arabs too.’
‘One million.’
‘Do Israeli Arabs do military service?’
‘The Bedouins like the Druze can do military service if the want to, it’s not compulsory for them
, but Palestinians are excluded from military service.’
‘What do you mean Bedouins?’
‘Those who still led nomadic lives, herders.’
‘Ah, I see those you can see camping in the Negev.’
‘That’s it.’
‘And your family came from where?’
‘A Ukrainian grandfather and an Iranian grandmother on one side, and a Czech grandfather and German grandmother on the other.’
‘Quite a mix.’
‘We’re like that in Israel.’
‘So going back to archaeology, what’s your position?’
‘I suppose you mean am I a Bible archaeologist or a real archaeologist,’ he said laughing. ‘For me the answer lies somewhere in the middle of the road, I don’t try to demolish the Bible like Finkelstein.’
‘I don’t think he does that.’
‘Well you know what I mean. Personally I don’t believe in God. God would not have made the Holocaust; if he did then he didn’t care much about us. My grandfather’s family was deported in early 1944 to Auschwitz. Where was God during the Holocaust? How could we have merited such a punishment?’
O’Connelly shrugged there was little he could say.
‘If you are asking me whether I am a religious person the answer is no. If you are asking am I a Jew the answer is yes. I respect tradition, that includes the synagogue, but I do not pray. The prayers of my grandfather and his family went unanswered in Auschwitz. God does not exist.’
‘How do you feel about the Arabs?’
‘At university I made a good friend, a Druze, he doesn’t like being called an Arab, he feels Israeli, speaks fluent Hebrew, and wants to be recognised as an Arab speaking Muslim Israeli and nothing less. When we went to the army we ended up in the same unit together. Somebody called him a Bedouin and got a bloody nose for it. He’s studied Aramaic and Assyrian. If ever he prays, it’s for peace, so that he can enjoy life, he’s like me, not too sure about what happens after.’
Ofir was well built, five-eleven, his English was good though with an Israeli accent. He told O’Connelly his family was closer to being poor than anything else and that he had been brought up in a kibbutz, which had failed with the kibbutz system in general. His parents could not pay for an education in the USA like the privileged young Israeli’s who spoke with good American accents. He was a determined man with ideals and it was clear he was made of a much stronger fibre than any European.
‘I want to catch up on the time lost in the army, enjoy myself with the girls.’
‘Maybe in one hundred years we can live in peace…maybe we’ll not be here.’
‘It doesn’t look good.’
‘Do you know that some people are already building bunkers in their homes against a nuclear attack?’
‘Are they?’
‘Yes, they’re spending tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars to build them!’
‘People are afraid of Iran?’
‘Of course, you know some Israelis argue that the time for diplomacy is over, they believe Iran could have the bomb very soon, four or five years, even less. The fear of a nuclear attack has almost become an obsession, two thirds of Israelis believe that if Iran has an atomic bomb, it would use it to destroy Israel.’
‘And the Palestinians?’
‘It’s not ordinary people, it’s their leaders, the Hamas and Hezbollah, they’re well organised with political, military and social structures. They get money from Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia. The poor Palestinians have large families and are given help in exchange for a son who will become a militant, trained to fight and perhaps end up in an Israeli prison, like the 11,000 Palestinians behind bars today, if he is not killed. They give money to the Bedouins to, so that they support the Palestinians rather than becoming Israelis. For my self I keep away from politics, politicians are all corrupt, not only the Arabs, but also our leaders.’
Ofir was not against de Lussac’s water theory, but he did not concur with his positioning of the Temple site. He believed things were complex and spoke of the water wheels in Syria that could have raised water to the surface of the Esplanade. O’Connelly wondered if it was just to be different. Ofir explained that the original cisterns were natural faults and fissures in the bedrock that had been progressively opened by man as Jerusalem grew.
‘Interesting, but why so big and so many cisterns,’ asked O’Connelly. Then as the thought passed his mind he asked: ‘I wonder if it’s possible to visit the cisterns?’
‘It’s very difficult unless you are a Muslim, and then you would have to get permission from the Waqf.’
‘It’s a great pity; it would be really useful for giving a convincing description to get a first hand look.’
Ofir shrugged.
‘What about the stables?’
‘Same thing, it’s been transformed into a mosque today.
‘There’s no secret tunnel?’ he asked only half jokingly.
‘There is a tunnel, nothing mysterious or secret, but it’s under lock and key. A few years back it caused an outbreak of riots when the Arabs heard noises made by our archaeologist and said we were desecrating the Haram by secret excavations.’
There was a long pause as O’Connelly digested his disappointment.
‘Maybe there is a way…,’ Ofir finally said. ‘You remember I talked about an Israeli Arab friend, perhaps he could help us. He’s a Druze but like me very sceptical about religion. We studied history together. He thinks like me. I’ll speak to him.’
55
Philistine and Babylonian Gods
The Legacy of Solomon Page 55