Wings of Refuge (27 page)

Moshe paused, and his gaze traveled briefly to each of his three children. Abby saw his love for them in its softness. Then a fierce flame kindled briefly in his eyes, a fire that told her he would do everything in his power to protect them.

“My father was born in Israel,” he continued, “the same year that our nation was born. I was born here, on the Golan Heights, after Israel won all this land where we are sitting in the Six-Day War. Israel is built upon the blood and the ashes of our ancestors. That is why we must never sacrifice one inch of territory that others have bled and died to win.”

“Not even for the sake of peace?” Hannah asked.

“There can be no peace until Israel fulfills her destiny to possess all of the territory that once belonged to King David and Solomon—from the Nile to the Euphrates.”

Hannah broke her roll in half and began spreading it with margarine. “But what about all the Palestinians and Jordanians and Syrians who live in that territory?” she asked.

“Israeli rule will improve their standard of living,” Moshe said, gesturing to the bountiful table spread before them.

“At what price?” Hannah asked softly. “Surely you must realize that such a conquest would cause insurmountable problems. We can’t keep an entire population captive and expect them to be happy about it, no matter how many good things we provide for them. The Palestinians on the West Bank have taught us that lesson.”

“If they don’t like it, they can move elsewhere. Let their brethren in Iraq or Saudi Arabia take them, as we have absorbed our own Jewish people from all over the world. This land is
ours
, and we will own
all
of it one day.”

Abby glimpsed the passion of Moshe’s convictions in his reddening face, his tightly clenched hands.

The table fell silent for a moment, then Moshe turned to Ari, who sat between Hannah and Abby. “I know what Hannah believes, but what about you, Ari? You must have fought in the last war . . . are you willing to trade our hard-won land for peace?”

Ari stared at his empty plate for a moment, as if reluctant to speak his thoughts. He pushed it away from him before speaking. “Like you, I was also born in Israel—only I’m a third-generation Israeli. My ancestors were early Zionists who came here from Russia at the turn of the century. I have never known holocausts or pogroms. I have also never known peace. I grew up with the constant threat of Syrian shelling from the Golan Heights, and I slept in an underground bunker every night until I was twelve. When Israel won possession of the Heights, my village could sleep in safety for the first time. We must never give the Golan back, even for the sake of peace!”

His words had become more and more passionate, and he paused for a moment to glance at Hannah, as if afraid he had offended her. Then he continued. “In 1973, three months after I graduated and began my military service, Israel was attacked again. It didn’t matter that I was a new recruit; every man was needed to fight, so I fought. After that it was the war in Lebanon, then the Intifada, then the Gulf War—and all that time the terrorism against our people has never stopped. I am tired of fighting. It is tragic that every Jewish child in Israel must learn to use a gun; horrifying that every child must live with the constant threat of terror—”

He stopped abruptly. He had been looking at Ivana as he spoke the last sentence, but now he gazed down at his plate again, biting his bottom lip. When he finally looked up, his eyes met Moshe’s. “I don’t agree with you that we should go to war to win more land. I only want to live on the land my ancestors cleared and fought for and are buried on. It is the Palestinians who don’t want peace, the enemies all around us who want to possess what we’ve worked so hard to build. All the years I was growing up, they wanted to push every last Jew into the sea, wipe out the nation of Israel. They rejected partition, refused to recognize our existence, attacked us all over the world—even at peaceful events like the Olympics. And now they say
peace
. The world can hardly blame us for being suspicious. I will never believe that our enemies want peace.”

He folded his arms across his chest, and for the remainder of the meal, Ari was silent and withdrawn. The gradual thawing of his emotions that had begun after Dr. Voss’s departure seemed to abruptly shift into reverse until Ari was frozen inside himself once again. Abby could understand his anger and bitterness—they were so much like her own. But what she couldn’t understand as she walked home that night with him and Hannah was why Ari’s heart had been hardened by his enemies, while Hannah’s remained untouched by hatred.

TEL DEGANIA EXCAVATION—1999

A
bby knelt in the dirt, carefully shoveling one tirea full of it at a time into plastic buckets for Marwan to haul away. The Palestinian worker stood above her on the top of the balk, wiping the sweat from his dark face with his T-shirt.

“You’re too efficient for me, Marwan,” Abby said, smiling up at him. “You’re hauling it faster than I can dig it.”

“Perhaps that is because I am being paid and you are not,” he said with a grin.

“Yes, or perhaps it’s because you’re ten years younger and in ten times better shape than I am!” she laughed. Abby had developed a warm friendship with Marwan Ashrawi as they had worked together for the past week, especially after discovering that he was also a high school teacher during the winter months. The stories he told about his students sounded remarkably similar to her own, regardless of the cultural differences. Marwan taught physical education, which explained his trim body and muscular build—not to mention his tireless endurance. His deep-set black eyes and thick black brows conveyed a wide range of expressions, from impish laughter as he joked with Abby about his students, to sullen withdrawal whenever Ari appeared.

“Pah! You American women worry too much about getting fat,” Marwan said. “Palestinian men like their women to have a bit of meat on their bones.”

“Yeah? Well, American men certainly don’t.” She couldn’t help thinking of Lindsey Cook, a slender blonde. Mark’s rejection had hurt Abby the most, as if he thought of her as a used car, easily traded in on a newer model. Abby hoped she had kept the bitterness out of her voice. “Hey, you can climb down here and help me dig, Marwan, if you’re tired of waiting,” she joked.

The smile instantly disappeared from Marwan’s face. “Dr. Bazak would not like that. He would not trust me to do it correctly.”

Abby wondered if the animosity between Ari and Marwan was personal or racial, but she was afraid to ask. She stood and passed the bucketful of dirt up to him, then watched him amble away with another wheelbarrow load. Abby was growing weary of dirt. She had it in every wrinkle and pore of her skin, in her hair, her eyes, her ears, and her throat. It mixed with her sweat and ran in muddy rivulets down her face as she labored without shade under the blazing Israeli sun. Hannah was right—archaeology certainly wasn’t as glamorous as Hollywood portrayed it.

“Take a break, everyone,” Ari suddenly called. “Dr. Rahov wants to show you what we found over here.”

Abby took a long drink of tepid water from her canteen before joining Hannah and her co-workers in another part of the rambling villa. As soon as Abby saw the small outer chamber, the short set of stairs leading down to a deep plastered hole, she recognized the now familiar shape.
“Another
mikveh?” she said aloud. “Is this the culture that coined the phrase, ‘Cleanliness is next to godliness’?”

Hannah laughed. “We’ve seen our share of ritual baths, it’s true—but I’ll bet you’ve never seen this before! I know I haven’t!” She had somehow climbed all the way down into the chamber where people once immersed themselves. Now she stepped to one side, gesturing to a pile of rusty triangular-shaped metal wedges, about two or three inches long.

“Those look like arrowheads,” one of the students said.

“Good guess. That’s exactly what they are. Quite an arsenal of them, too, I would say. And do you see how there are several different sizes and shapes mixed together? That’s because the Romans used troops from all over their empire as archers.”

“Why would the Romans hide arrows in the bathtub?” another student asked. Hannah gestured to Ari, allowing him to explain.

“The Romans wouldn’t,” he said. “These weapons were probably stolen from the Romans and hidden here by Zealots.”

“Were they like Palestinian terrorists, Dr. Bazak?” one of the students asked.

Ari seemed thrown off balance by the question. When he didn’t reply, Hannah quickly said, “No, the Zealots were first-century Jews, freedom fighters who felt that only God should rule over the Jewish nation. Their ‘zeal’ was for the Lord. In fighting to overthrow the Romans, they saw their political resistance as a religious war, and they expected the promised Messiah to be a political leader. The movement started after the first Roman procurator in
A.D
. 6 held a census for taxation, inciting a rebellion. One of Jesus’ disciples was a Zealot, but Jesus wasn’t. He told Pilate, ‘My kingdom is not of this world,’ and He urged His followers to love their enemies.”

At the breakfast break, Abby sought out Hannah and sat down beside her in the shade of the canvas canopy. She was surrounded by college students as usual, patiently answering their questions and listening as they told her about themselves. It was clear how very much Hannah enjoyed being with young people, and when Ari joined them, Abby recalled Hannah saying that he had been one of her first students.

“Seriously, Dr. Rahov, what is with all these baths we keep finding?” one of the girls asked.

Hannah smiled and set her paper plate on her lap. She always needed her hands free in order to talk. “According to the Law of Moses, ritual cleansing was necessary whenever something caused a person to become ‘unclean’—contact with a dead body, certain illnesses, and so forth. Religious Jews today still have ritual baths. And bathing is also necessary before worship. Remember the baths we saw below the Temple Mount?”

Abby swallowed a bite of tomato and joined the discussion. “You know, there is an old custom in America of taking a Saturday night bath before Sunday morning church. I wonder if the mikveh is the origin of it?”

“Maybe so,” Hannah laughed. She picked up her yogurt container and ate a couple of spoonfuls before saying, “Another law requires every woman to take a ritual bath a week after her monthly period ends. That’s what Bathsheba was doing. Remember how some of the neighborhoods we saw in Jerusalem had houses that were built on the hillsides, looking down on top of each other? Evidently Bathsheba’s mikveh was visible from King David’s rooftop. Look up that Scripture passage sometime. It says that she had just purified herself from her uncleanness. In other words, the author wanted us to know that Bathsheba’s monthly period was over, her husband was away at war, and so the baby had to be David’s.”

Abby was still thinking about King David’s adultery when it was time to return to work. Against her will, she was also thinking about Mark. When she saw how all the young college girls flocked around Ari at the site every day, supposedly asking questions about archaeology, it made her furious. Ari was friendly but not flirtatious, and it angered her that the girls would flirt so shamelessly with a married man. He didn’t wear a wedding ring, but then neither did Marwan or the hotel manager, Moshe Richman. Maybe wedding rings weren’t customary for men in Israel. But Abby’s husband, Mark, had always worn one, and it hadn’t stopped Lindsey Cook from her pursuit.

Abby was chipping at the hard-packed dirt, trying to work out her anger, when Ari climbed down into the pit beside her. “You are within centimeters of first-century floor level,” he said. “You must please dig very carefully.”

“Do you think there might be a mosaic floor under all this dirt?”

Ari couldn’t disguise his boyish excitement. “I am hoping there is. I will come back and join you myself as soon as I finish documenting the weapons we found in the mikveh.”

A few minutes later, Abby’s petesh struck something hard. She laid it aside and began carefully sweeping the dirt away with a small whisk broom. Her heart beat like a trotting horse. Even under a two-thousand-year-old layer of dust, the brilliance of the tiny colored stones shone through. She swept faster, quickly uncovering a foot-long section of border, fashioned like rolling ocean waves in shades of green and blue and white.

“Look at that!” Marwan said as he returned with his wheelbarrow. He jumped down into the pit to help her, carefully scooping the dirt she was loosening into the bucket with his hands.

When Abby saw that the border continued along the edge of the wall, she changed direction, sweeping toward the middle of the room. After cleaning another small section, she found herself staring at a fish—a cleverly fashioned gold and gray and green fish, with fins so graceful it seemed to swim. But it was what she found above the fish that took Abby’s breath away—five Greek letters. She had seen them before, along with a fish, on the bumper sticker her daughter had pasted onto her car. They were Christian symbols.

“I think we’d better send for Hannah,” she told Marwan. She was breathless, afraid to take her eyes off her discovery, afraid it would disappear if she did.

Ari and Hannah arrived at the same time. They looked down at the mosaic, then at each other, and something as powerful as a bolt of lightning seemed to pass between them. Abby didn’t see who moved first—they might have moved simultaneously—but suddenly Ari and Hannah were in each other’s arms. She couldn’t see Hannah’s face, but Ari’s eyes were closed as he battled his emotions.

“You have to be the one to publish this, Ari!” Hannah said. “You have to be!” Then they parted, the moment passed, and Hannah celebrated by climbing down to hug Abby and Marwan and everyone else in sight, while Ari began snapping dozens of photos of the mosaic.

“This Greek word,
ichthys
, means fish,” Hannah explained to the gathering students. Her voice was thick with emotion. “It was one of the symbols used by the early Christian church. It’s an acronym for ‘Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.’ Do you have any idea what that means? We know Degania was a Jewish village. Yet some of the people who lived here were among the earliest Christians!”