The Pale of Settlement (15 page)

The university was quiet, the students mostly gone for the semester break. Avraham crossed the empty plaza to the institute, stopping by the faculty boxes to pick up his thin stack of mail. He waved to the department secretary, who fortunately was busy chatting on the phone. This would be the first summer in over forty years that he wouldn't be in the field. He was out to pasture instead.

In the office that had once been Avraham's, Udi's light was on, his door open halfway. Avraham poked his head around the door-frame.

Avraham! Udi said, waving him in with a pudgy hand. Sit down, sit down!

Avraham lowered himself onto a chair facing Udi. The desk was piled with stacks of site plans, grant applications, books and journals, excavation reports. Udi's hair had receded even further, if such a thing were possible, in just the few weeks since Avraham had seen him last. Even the young men were ancient here. The place was a goddamned morgue.

Nu! Udi said. How's the life of leisure treating you? He laced his fingers together, pushing them outward with a crack.

Avraham shrugged. He noticed that Udi still bit his nails down to the quick.

So, Udi said, did you catch our good friend Feigelman on television the other night? Son of a bitch never misses an opportunity to create a stir.

What's so bad about a stir? Avraham said. Udi was jealous, that
much was clear. Feigelman is smart, he said, rubbing it in. Who's the one with the villa in Herzliya, you or him?

The man just likes to piss on all our founding myths, Udi said, bringing his fist down on the desk and sending a small avalanche of paper cascading to the floor. It's his wife's money, anyway, he added.

I told you he's smart, Avraham said. But he was in no mood to defend Feigelman. The fellow might be smart, but he had his Iron Age chronology dead wrong. Avraham stretched out his legs. So, he said, are you ready for the dig?

Udi ran his hands back over his scalp, adjusted his
kippa
, and leaned back in his chair. It's a disaster, he said. One bus blows up and all the Americans and Europeans hide beneath their beds. We're going in with twenty volunteers instead of a hundred and twenty. Apparently Feigelman's canceling his 2001 expedition altogether! But, as you know, we don't have a choice. The conservation work can't wait.

Avraham shook his head. It wasn't his problem anymore. He would go to Be'er Sheva and visit his grandchildren instead.

Avraham shut the blinds against the light and lay down on top of the sheets, propping a pillow behind his head. From the open windows came the sounds of honking horns, the hiss of a braking bus, the hollow pock of a tennis ball hitting concrete. No one took a siesta anymore, these days. Avraham pushed his newspaper aside, picked up Leah's diary instead. When did it begin? He counted back—she would have been seventeen in 1956—his first season at Hazor. He was just a student volunteer back then, working under Trude in the Canaanite temple and potter's storeroom in Area C. In the expedition photograph taken at the end of that season, Yadin sat in the
center of the front row—his legs apart, hands resting on his knees, like the statue of the Canaanite king they'd found among the stelae. Avraham was standing at the back, his shirtsleeves rolled up over his biceps, grinning from ear to ear. Nothing he'd ever done, before or since, came close to the excitement of those times.

Leah would have been at home with Abba then. He pictured her sitting at the kitchen table in the fading evening light, her hair falling forward to screen her face, closed around herself like fruit around a stone. Sounds waft in—the cadence of a Yiddish argument, the crickets' chirping drone, a dog's yowl.
Everyone wants too much from me, but at the same time there is not a single person who really cares
. Why
did I let D. kiss me after the cinema on Saturday night? A huge mistake! Now he keeps sending me such desperate notes—“What about us? Do you ever want to see me again?” I'm sick of these boys. I'm sick of the girls, too, twittering like stupid birds. I'm sick of
being
a girl, of all the male attention and demands, of having to be nice
. But
nice
is what she is, of course, a dutiful daughter, desperate to please. It is Abba who always wants too much from her, who shouts at her to lose weight, pull back her hair, put on a dress. He has not managed well without a wife. He is an angry patriarch right out of the Bible, punishing and remote.
Who will ever want to marry a lazy girl like you?
As if she should stay home and take care of him instead.

Leah shakes her hair back, stares into space. She is thinking of the way D. held her against the cinema's wall, his tongue flicking against hers, his knee against her groin. His metallic taste, his smell. The way he made her grow so wet. She lives, motherless, in a world of men—father, brothers, teachers, boys from school. Men hold her back, yet without a man, she cannot imagine her escape.
He will be tall, dark, slim, with a strong chin, straight nose, etc.—impossible, clearly
. He could be anyone at all. He does not exist.
I'm sick
of
being
a girl
. She'd like to be the one to sail off beyond the Green Line, to Europe or the States, although she doesn't know it yet. She doesn't know that within six years she'll be married in New York, that her father will be dead. She doesn't know how quickly the borders of a life can change.

Cuneiform Tablet ~
The tablet lay on the rubble dump, sunlight shadowing the wedge-shaped marks embedded in the clay. Triangular impressions like headless torsos; horizontal lines like flags stretched out in a stiff wind. One shape like a trident, another like a star. Marks made with a stylus made from a reed cut on a slant. Scratched sideways, from left to right.

They unearthed half a dozen tablets, over the years, though not the royal archive they believed, or hoped, was buried there. They found a record of a fourteenth-century
BCE
real estate case; a fragment of an Akkadian-Sumerian dictionary; an inventory of goods (textiles, copper, silver, gold) to be sent to Mari, north of Babylon. A list of names and payments: a third of a shekel, or a half. Multiplication tables. A letter delineating a legal dispute.

To Ibni
, this tablet began. Was this the ancient king Ibni-Addu mentioned in the Mari archive? Or could it be Jabin, the Canaanite ruler famously overthrown by Joshua? Or an even later king, possessing the same name?

Everything depended on a few lines etched in red-brown clay.

A scratch made by a human hand.

The impression of a wedge.

Avraham skimmed on, noting how the loopy characters of his sister's handwriting became smaller and more regular as time progressed. Was this the way personality consolidated, over time—growing
tighter, more self-contained? He lost track of the chronology, turned back again.
I don't know what to write—there are so many things floating around within me, sticking together in a burning clump, tipping the balance of my moods. I don't know who I am or who I want to be
. She could barely hold herself together, at seventeen.
I feel caught in the middle of everything, neither here nor there
. On the cusp of living, stuck in time.

And what about him? He could not find a single mention of his own name. Yet of course he'd been there all along, there in the Sanhedria flat with her and Abba, except for summers on the dig and those times when he got called to the reserves. But his memory was as unrevealing as the pages of the little book. He must have sat across from her at the dinner table on Shabbat, waited in the hallway for her to finish in the bathroom, rapping at the door. But the only moment he remembered now was one captured in a photograph—not a true memory at all. In the picture, they are standing in front of Abba's brand new car, a Morris imported from England at considerable expense. His arm is loose around her waist. He's looking straight into the camera, his forehead pressed into a frown.
Hurry up
. Leah is wearing denim shorts and sandals; her legs are brown and strong. She is looking off to the side, beyond the range of the lens. They are touching, but not quite.

Somewhere along the way, her handwriting began to change. Somewhere came a marked shift in tone. He leafed back through the pages, checking dates. May. August. May again. When?

She has finished the
bagrut
; she is in the army now, a desk job on the base—that much is clear. She is still living at home, but she's almost out from under: real life has drawn her in.
Well, it has begun! So many new and interesting things are happening, I can hardly write it all down
. She is typing up reports, shuffling paper at a metal desk,
answering the phone. She wears a pert beret, a khaki skirt, and a blouse. She twists her hair back into a knot.
It
does
seem strange that I've only been here such a short while! We are all strangers, from such different backgrounds, and yet held by such a strong, common bond
. Her unit is a mix of the children of old-time socialists, Holocaust survivors, and refugees from Yemen, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, all building the new nation, the fledgling Jewish state.
This “experience” really is important, if only in terms of forcing me to get to know and re-evaluate myself
. But what a provisional thing “experience” is, set inside quotation marks like that. “Experience” is what will happen to her, not something she will do herself. In the end, “experience” can only mean one thing.

And here it is, just a few pages on:
Noticed Y. again this morning, getting on the bus. He is really nice-looking, I think! Dark curly hair, wide dark eyes, straight nose, broad face, long fingers, gorgeous smile. I like him—though I'd better not let anyone find out
. Who is he, this “Y”—a Yochanan or Ya'acov, Yaron or Yonatan? A fellow soldier? An officer, perhaps?
The other day, I thought he had on a wedding ring... but today it wasn't there. What kind of situation is that, I wonder?
What kind, indeed. The attentions of an older, married man would be just ambiguous enough to be exciting, illicit but not impossible—such things happened all the time. No one called it harassment, back then.

He could just see Leah in her cap and skirt, sitting at her Underwood, playing with a loose strand of hair. Stepping up to board the bus, hiking her skirt above her knees as she mounts the stairs.
Then he got on too and sat in front, but after a bit he got up and moved back to where I was!
This is what “experience” was meant to be! She feels her gut contract, the blood rush to her cheeks.
He stayed there next to me the whole ride home! Well, actually, he sat across the aisle, but he
was still next to me, except for the open space. I swear he looked right at me a couple of times, and smiled, too. I couldn't speak a word. The whole ride was just one long expanse of time
. This is nothing like the way it was with those high school boys. She is aware that these are the symptoms of a girlish crush, but she wants it to be more.
I think that I'm in love with him! Of all people. Shit
. Her heart beats fast and high inside her throat. His heart is beating, too, right there across the aisle. If a boundary exists between them, it is invisible as air.

The article was not coming along well. Avraham leaned forward, scrolled down to what he'd written the day before. Skipping over the Iron Age chronology, he turned to the question of the Late Bronze Age destruction of Hazor instead. It was written in the Book of Joshua that the Israelites set fire to Hazor in the last stage of their conquest of Canaan. Inscriptions on the Merneptah Stele in Cairo marked the first mention of the name “Israel” in describing the Egyptian victories over Ashkelon and Gezer in 1207
BCE
:
Israel is laid waste, his seed is not
—so one could suppose that the Israelites had conquered Canaan sometime in the thirteenth century
BCE
. But the archeological record was ambiguous at best. While the ceramic evidence dated the destruction broadly to the fourteenth or thirteenth century
BCE
, it said nothing about
who
set fire to Hazor. The cursor blinked mockingly. He was no Bible scholar or theologian. He'd trusted science, persistence, analytic rigor, methodology. Yet now, after all these years of hard work, he could not confirm a thing.

Avraham knew what the revisionists were arguing. That the destruction of the nearby Canaanite cities of Aphek, Lachish, and Megiddo took place not all at once but over the course of a century or more. That the hill survey evidence convincingly showed that
the Israelites were no well-organized tribe, coming out of Egypt to launch a sudden conquest of the land, but a disparate group of nomad-farmers whose identity developed only slowly, over generations, in the highlands of the Galilee.

It made perfect sense. It made no sense at all. If the Israelites didn't destroy Hazor, who did?

The Palestinians were already making political hay out of the controversy, claiming that they, as direct descendants of the Canaanites, trumped the Jews with the more authentic claim to the ancient land.

It was no consolation that nothing could be proved.

Myths created a reality of their own.

Mask ~
He crouched inside a court defined by four low stone walls, part of a Canaanite temple from the Late Bronze Age, just below the ramparts of the tell. He brushed away the reddish dirt, lifted aside a stone. Two hollow eyes. A nose.

He called to Trude—Quickly! Over here! Together they reached down and brushed the rest of the dirt away, touching the long brows and parted lips, the beardless cheeks and chin. The holes for tying string in the center of the forehead, and above and below each ear. From the field telephone, they called Yadin. Come quickly! Come and see!

The face stared up at them like a child at the seashore, buried to the neck in sand. Was it the death mask of a Canaanite child? Or an object associated with a cult? Long after Canaanite times, the Phoenicians depicted the moon god Ba'al Hammon and his consort, a powerful goddess called Tanit. Clay masks found at Carthage—with broad, smooth cheeks and protruding ears, almost identical to this—represented Tanit's face. Was this too a mask of
Tanit? The Deuteronomist called for the destruction of the pagan gods. Did Joshua's men decapitate the statue of Ba'al that this mask would have adorned, set the universe ablaze?