A Skeleton in God's Closet Read online

  “Common mistake. Not to worry.”

  “I’ll learn in time, Shannon. But aren’t you supposed to be minding the books?”

  “I also mind the new help,” she replied with a chuckle, as she scampered off to supervise the Arab work detail. Shannon seemed to know all the workers by name, and each smiled as she chatted with them. Jon liked the sparkle in her uninhibited style. To hear her spouting good Arabic was impressive enough, but to see that the linguist was an extremely winsome lass in white shorts . . .

  A hand touched his shoulder, and a voice said, “Don’t even think about that one!”

  “Oh, it’s you, Dick,” said Jon. “Yes, I know all about the Israel Antiquities Authority!” He hoped Cromwell wouldn’t notice the flush in his cheeks. “I was just . . . intrigued by that cavern in the escarpment over there.” Fortunately, it was in the same direction.

  Rather than ponder the ethics of half-truths, Jon quickly hauled the spoil buckets over to a screen and sifted for any tiny item, such as a bead or scarab, that would otherwise have been lost. Only what fell through the sieve went to the dump pile. Anything fashioned by humankind he dusted off with a brush and put into plastic sacks, along with a card indicating sector and stratum. The sacks then went to the flotation tank crew, who hovered over an oblong, water-filled trough, where the botanist was both cleaning the artifacts and also “floating” the soil clinging to them, separating out the seeds and fruit-pits that would open the menu on ancient diets.

  All the while, the orange hat of Austin Balfour Jennings could be seen moving from one sector to the next, as he issued directives, answered questions, offered advice. Though the director did little physical work, his tongue was in constant motion:

  “No, no, no! That’s only a lump of soil. Throw it away!”

  “Yes, yes, yes! Save that! It’s not trash, it’s a potsherd!”

  “A little more aggressive with that trowel, Natalie! You’re just picking away at dirt. You’ll know when you come to something important. Dig in! There’s a good girl!”

  “You were going to throw that away? Look at it again. It’s a faience bead. Now check carefully. There may well be others there. . . .”

  Late the next morning, Jennings looked over Jon’s shoulder to check his progress. Jon, of course, had hoped to make a brilliant discovery within hours of taking trowel in hand, but his efforts had only laid bare the small bath others had discovered.

  “Well, lad, you do acceptable work,” Jennings commented. “There may be some hope for you in this field. But really, now, wouldn’t you rather help me supervise?”

  “I’ll earn my way, Austin.”

  “Spoken like a worthy chap!”

  Just then, a cavalcade of cars rolled to a stop below the dig. All doors seemed to open simultaneously, and a procession of bearded, black-hatted figures moved solemnly toward the excavations. Filing onto the upper perimeter, they pointed to the escarpment and chanted in a ghastly unison: “ASSUR! ASSUR! LA’A-SOT ET ZEH! ASSUR! ASSUR! ”

  “It’s the bloody, blinking Hasidim,” Jennings snarled, “the superorthodox fanatics!”

  “Weird sight!” exclaimed Jon. It was indeed. With temperatures above ninety degrees, these guardians of orthodoxy had sallied forth in furlined, broad-brimmed hats and long-coated suits in solid black—atavistic throwbacks to their ancestors’ days in the cold ghettos of northern Europe. Their faces were fringed with lengthy beards, while their hair dangled in carefully curled forelocks down each side. Now they were shaking their fists at the excavators, screaming again, “ASSUR! ASSUR! LA’ASOT ET ZEH! ASSUR! ASSUR! ”

  Then their spokesman, a pale, scholarly sort who seemed to know that an Englishman was in charge of the dig, lifted a piping voice in translation: “Forbidden! Forbidden! It is forbidden to do this!” Again he pointed, with the others, to the escarpment tomb.

  “The idiots think we’ve discovered bodies!” Jennings hissed. “They don’t want the dead disturbed in any way. . . . LO!” he cried in Hebrew. “REIK!” (“No! It’s empty!”)

  To no avail. The chanting continued. Jennings summoned Naomi Sharon and said, “Go over and explain to them that we’ve not found any bodies there, that the cavern’s been empty for centuries . . . grave robbers, et cetera!”

  Naomi scampered across the dig and climbed up to the spokesman, who averted his eyes from her shorts and shapely bare legs. Five minutes of animated Hebrew dialogue failed to convince him, for Naomi returned and said, “They don’t believe you. They think you’re hiding the bodies.”

  The Hasidim now stooped down to pick up stones and hurl them at the excavators. But they were out of range, except for Dick Cromwell, who caught a rock squarely on his shin. It drew blood. In a rage, he picked it up, threw it back at them, and yelled, “I’ll show you dorks the art of stoning!”

  The rock sent a fur cap twirling off the head of one of the leaders. A low, ugly howl growled up from the group. Jon looked apprehensively at Jennings and commented, “Might we say, ‘the situation is deteriorating’?”

  “It certainly is,” said Shannon. “Got any ideas, Jon? These yukshis could close down our dig!”

  Jon walked up to an ancient rabbi who seemed to be one of the leaders of the demonstration. Nodding in courtesy, he said, “Shalom aleichem. Bo itti, bevakashah, ten li leharot lecha et hakevarim.” Then, in case his biblical Hebrew proved inadequate, he turned to the Hasidic scholar who had spoken English and said, slowly, “Peace be with you. Come with me, please, and let me show you the tombs.”

  The aged rabbi studied Jon suspiciously for several moments. Then he turned to his followers with some instructions, nodded to the other Hasid, and they both followed Jon to the escarpment as the rest looked on in stunned silence. Jon crawled inside the cavern, helping them do likewise. Then he scraped his finger along the floor of each loculus, showing the dust of time clinging to his finger. “Reik! Ein anashim metim kan!” he said, with emphatic sincerity, then reiterated in English, “Empty! There are no dead people here.”

  Returning outside, the two Hasidim seemed satisfied. “Ken,” the rabbis said, nodding. “Reik. ”

  “Yes,” the other Hasid agreed. “Empty.”

  Within minutes, the demonstration evaporated.

  FIVE

  It was while taking the Hasidim through the cavern that Jon first noticed it. Spring rains had eroded a small gully next to the escarpment at the rim of the dig site, washing away some of the soil along its base. A flat, gray-white stone was now partially exposed, which Jon would not have noticed were it not for the top of a neighboring stone of the same shape and color butted against it in the same plane. Somehow, the fit seemed a shade too perfect for nature.

  Jon forgot all about the stones until the mid-morning break the next day. While sipping a cup of Turkish coffee, he chanced to look across to the escarpment and then recalled the anomaly he thought he saw. Draining the cup, he walked over to the slope and began troweling into the cliffside next to the gray-white stones. There was nothing of interest to their right, but after some troweling on the left-hand side, another flat stone started coming to light in the same plane, again tightly abutting its neighbor. And the surface of this one showed pick marks. It had been hewn! Jon stood up, cupping chin in hand. “Mother Nature had very little to do with this,” he muttered.

  Grabbing a hand pick from the toolshed, he returned to the cliff and started removing the dirt 55 more efficiently. Burrowing deeper, he noticed that the stones were partially joined to each other with some sort of mortar. Now he swung the pick like some crazed zealot, relishing, at last, the thrill of archaeology—liberating something unanticipated and unknown from the shroud of earth and letting it take on new life.

  Darn! Jon suddenly thought. I forgot to ask Jennings for permission! Hurrying over to the director, he admitted rather sheepishly that he had sinned. “Mea maxima culpa,” he confessed. “First, I abandoned my post here. Second, I opened up a new sector without your approval. Come and see.”
r />   “Those are mortal sins, Jonathan, not venial,” Jennings replied, with a smirk. “But before we ex-communicate you, let’s see what you have.”

  Jon led him over to the site. Jennings knelt down and ran his hand along the exposed stonework. Then he stood up and surveyed the whole face of the escarpment, waving off flies with his hat. Now he crouched down again and studied the hewn stone very carefully. Finally he said, “Oh, oh, oh, laddie! You have brought something to light here, haven’t you?”

  “But what could it be? Looks like a retaining wall . . . maybe to brace up the cliff? That is mortar of some sort, isn’t it?” He pointed to one of the joints.

  “Clay mortar,” Jennings nodded. “We’ve found it all over the dig. Now, what I want you to do is this: keep removing the overburden to the left here—switch to a brush when you get close to the facing— and keep at it until the structure stops. Then call me, all right?”

  “Fine.”

  But Jon called him back sooner than expected, because the hewn rock, once fully exposed, proved to be the end of the stonework. Jon was crestfallen: a structure three stones wide was nothing to write home about.

  “Not to worry,” Jennings advised. “Now you must dig down—carefully, of course—and see if there’s any more stone.”

  “Then I’m forgiven, good master, for my transgressions?”

  “Possibly.” Jennings chuckled. “But go and sin no more!”

  At the end of the day’s digging, Jon had, to his surprise, uncovered two more courses of stone beneath the original series. The row just below it was four stones long, the one beneath it five, and all rocks were a similar gray-white limestone. When Jennings stopped by again, his face was cut by a vast grin.

  “If this progression continues,” said Jon, “the wall should eventually reach the Mediterranean!”

  “I doubt it’ll get much wider.”

  “Aha! You know what this is, then?”

  “Well . . . no.”

  “You think you may know what it is?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “What is it?”

  “And spoil your fun? Never! Discover for your-self, dear fellow!”

  Weekday evenings of the campaign were devoted to reviewing the day’s finds in a secluded conference room at the hotel in Ramallah. For the benefit of the students, Jennings or Brampton would also give illustrated slide lectures on “The Archaeology of Palestine,” as Jennings preferred to call it, from his pre-Israeli years of working the dust of the “Holy Land.”

  “Why can’t he say, ‘The Archaeology of Israel’? ” Jon overheard Gideon Ben-Yaakov ask Shannon Jennings in the darkened room, as her father held forth with slides from a previous dig.

  “Don’t get paranoid, Gideon,” she replied, in more than a whisper. “And don’t give me any Jewish rot on that score! Dad’s been politically neutral ever since 1948. He likes Israelis, but he bloody well likes Arabs too!”

  “Fine, fine!” he replied, holding up his hands.

  Here and on other occasions Jon found Shannon nothing if not candid—a Gaelic firebrand who seemed to have arrived via virgin-birth from her sainted Irish mother, Jennings having played the Joseph-like role of mere foster father in an updated parallel to the Nativity. Shannon spoke her mind on any occasion in less-than-Oxonian accents and prided herself on her ability to tell a man off in five languages.

  Ben-Yaakov, clearly, tolerated her tongue because he adored the rest of her. He showed up at Rama much more frequently than at the twelve other digs taking place that summer in Israel, for reasons that were at least transparent. Jon assumed it was only a matter of time before they announced their engagement.

  When day’s work was done and the lecture sessions over, there seemed to be some pairing off also among the students and younger staff. Clive Brampton appeared to spend more than a professional amount of time with Naomi Sharon, and their conversations likely went beyond ceramic chronology, Jon assumed. Photographer Dick Cromwell had a favorite assistant, Natalie Pomeroy, a striking blonde from Oregon, and she often had a curious flush to her cheeks when they emerged from the darkroom after developing the day’s photographs. Anthropologist Noel Nottingham, who was newly divorced from his wife in Cambridge (England), was doubtless delighted to explain comparative anatomy to the well-endowed Regina Bandicoot from the outback of Australia. Just possibly there was more demonstration than explanation in those sessions, according to dig gossip.

  In bed that night, Jon smiled at his own poignant memories of the volatility possible when past mixes with present, and the romance of archaeology takes on dimensions of another sort. For years, though, he had wondered if romance would ever put in an appearance in his own life. It had taken him such an age to “discover” women, he reflected, thanks to his growing up in the Hannibal parsonage. It had meant a happy youth, to be sure, but one well-fenced-off from any temptations of the flesh. Only rarely had he gone to high-school dances, not because his parents had anything against dancing, but there was a conservative faction in the church they did not wish to offend. PKs—pastors’ kids—were supposed to serve as “examples to the youth,” his mother insisted. This left Jon two choices—go along with the scheme, or rebel. He had gone along, perhaps because he was an only child and struggled to live up to his parents’ expectations. They had wanted more children, but none ever came.

  While at Harvard, he had dated girls from Radcliffe and nearly fell in love with a Cliffie from the Long Island Hamptons. Jon turned in bed with an embarrassed grin as he thought of Pamela. On one of their dates at Crane’s Beach near Ipswich, as they huddled together on a blanket behind a secluded sand dune, she tried to make it easy for Jon by assuring him that she had brought along a condom in case he had forgotten. In one instant, his whole universe shattered. He had been so sure that the lovely Pamela, fresh as the first flower of spring, had fallen for him and him alone. He tried to recover, but his clumsy efforts to probe her past helped not at all. She found his preference for virginity in a woman “old hat,” “medievalist,” and altogether unrealistic. He finally asked about the number of lovers she had had and was promptly told to go straight to the destination he had been warned against ever since Sunday school. They never dated again.

  Later, when his roommates pumped the information out of him, their comments were quite the same as Pamela’s: he was a Neanderthal who had missed out on the sexual revolution. Was he some kind of social misfit? he wondered at the time. A freak? A Puritan pietist? One who let his faith become a joy-killer?

  Plunging into his studies at Harvard and then Johns Hopkins, Jon had given women a wide berth for a time. Books became his first and only love, an all-encompassing intellectual mistress that demanded all of his time.

  Until Andrea stepped so surprisingly into his life at Heidelberg, and he learned for the first time about the principal entrée in life’s feast: love. The appetizers had been saucy and piquant, promising much, but Andrea had shown him the main course. They had spent their honeymoon summer digging together in Israel at Caesarea-on-the-Sea. Their hot, sweaty efforts each day were rewarded by swims in the Mediterranean at sundown or hikes up to Mount Carmel. Those were the magnificent, the carefree, the salad days, Jon reflected in reverie, and what happened on the night of July 14 that summer he would remember beyond memory itself.

  French students in the dig were celebrating Bastille Day, and they broke out several cases of wine for the others partying with them in a late-night soiree on the Mediterranean beach. Near midnight, one of them yelled, “Allons nager!” and a chorus of “D’accord! . . . Oui! . . . Bonne idée!” responded. “Let’s go sweeming,” a French girl explained to Jon and Andrea, who hardly needed the translation. In a trice, the young people had shed their shirts and jeans and had dived into the Mediterranean au naturel.

  “Oh, oh,” Andrea had worried. “This doesn’t look good, Jon.”

  “You figure a beach bacchanal’s in the making?”

  “Could be. Let’s go.”

 
That was typical of Andrea and her stringently conservative Southern upbringing, Jon recalled. Few would have guessed she was still a virgin at marriage, but she was. To be sure, she had previously permitted Jon some exquisite intimacies, but never ultimacies.

  Now, however, their honeymoon gloriously vanquished most restraints. They left the beach party and walked northward along the shore toward the ancient Roman aqueduct, rejoicing in the grandeur of a star-saturated canopy of sky over their heads, a warm wind from Cyprus caressing them, and the Mediterranean swarming with millions of tiny luminous particles of some kind. Jon stooped down to feel the wash of a wave at his feet.

  “Water’s deliciously warm, Andrea. Let’s do go for a swim.”

  “I don’t have my swimsuit.”

  “Neither do I. But so what? Nobody’s around.”

  “No. We shouldn’t.”

  “Yes. We should.”

  She stooped down to feel the final ebb of a spent wave. “It is warm . . .”

  “It’s magnificent! ”

  “Promise not to look until I’m submerged?”

  “We’re married, Andrea!”

  “I know. Still . . . promise?”

  “Okay,” he said, smiling at her shyness.

  “Breaking promises is dangerous in the Holy Land!” she laughed, as she peeled off her clothes and hurried into the water.

  The swim was merely exhilarating, but it became glorious when they brushed against each other in the water—innocently at first, but then with gathering intention. The Mediterranean served as a cloak of modesty, shielding and yet fostering their intimacy. Slowly, he put his arms around her, and they trembled at the tactile shock of joy as she touched his chest, while their lips and mouths found the seawater a piquant garnish for the rich taste of one another.

  Hurrying onto the beach, they clasped each other in exuberance, tumbling down onto the sand in a manic quest for oneness. The rising thrill . . . the love that was building to its ultimate expression . . . the gentle caresses . . . the sands and waves celebrating with them . . . the tender nuzzling of one another . . . the incredible crescendo to the rarest of raptures . . . the serenity of the denouement . . . the oneness they pledged for eternity . . .