The Jerusalem Diamond (20 page)

“Don't.”

Their mouths were frantic. He touched her until her knees bent, then he lifted them until they nudged his shoulders. He eased through, bucked, found a rhythm like the heartbeat of a giant. Then faster, a little sucking sound each time. Arms captured his head. The sensitive mouth was on his neck, her teeth scraped. She kept pace. Too skilled, he thought faintly.

“Yes please,” she said.

He wanted to make this a voluptuous career. He tried to think of other things. Tax rates, a diamond for the actor. The Romans waiting below. He couldn't breathe as, oh lord too soon, she groaned and he fell off the mountain.

They lay and panted, pulling each other's mouths with their lips until he realized his weight was on her. Her hand came up and the tip of a finger traced his eyelids, his nose, his nostrils, the insides of his lips. Slid over his tongue.

“Bishop Pike,” she said.

When he awoke again his watch said four-forty. He was alone. Outside it was oppressively hot but the air was clear, the
sharav
had gone. Over the desert plain below, dust blew like mist.

He took a long sponge bath in the lav, which helped. Coming back, he looked over the wall near the Roman Ramp and saw her outside the
cabin. The pale light was cruel to her thighs, heavy even for such long legs. She was bent over a pan set on a rock, washing her hair. It had been too dark. Next time he wanted to watch her mouth, the bony curve of her nose, the way sometimes her eyes laughed and sometimes they didn't.

Masada's air currents were strange; he heard the splash as she emptied the pan of water and then the ringing sound when she struck the pan on the rock.

The sun was beginning to show.

At the Zealot's hut he took the red stone from his bag and held it to his eye, focussing through the garnet's worn window on the light. It gleamed like … what?

The warm eye of a beneficent God.

Tyger, tyger burning bright, he thought. It was as close as he could bring himself to reciting a blessing, but it was strangely comforting as he went back to sleep.

13

EIN GEDI

When he lugged his things down the sunbaked Roman Ramp, she and the car were gone but there was a note on the unlocked door of the cabin:
Back soon. Juice in icebox. T
.

The refrigerator was perhaps the oldest he had seen, an Amkor, Israel's answer to General Electric. He poured himself a glass of orange juice and drank it while he studied her things. A clean bra lay on her knapsack; the rest of her dried washing was folded and stacked on the window sill, topped by balled white socks and folded cotton panties. A worn book, printed in Arabic, had been dropped on the floor near the bed. She rolled her toothpaste tube.

He was peeping at her again.

For lack of anything better to do, he took the Copper Scroll photostats from his bag. Lying on the bed, he began to study them. But he had been over them again and again; what they said was unintelligible to him.

He was glad when he heard the car. She came in looking hot but cheerful, her hair braided in a tight bun, as it had been the first time he had seen her. He liked it that way. She wore shorts and an old army
shirt, the knotted tails like a clenched fist beneath her breasts.

“
Erev tov
. You are a sleepyhead.”

“
Shalom
. Where have you been?”

“To Arad. To use the telephone. Your friend the monsignor has had better luck than we.”

“Oh?” He sat up.

“Yes, he met with someone last night in Bethlehem.”

“Mehdi?”

She shrugged. “A middle-aged, overweight man. They met outside the Church of the Nativity at eight forty-five
P.M.
and they stood and talked for perhaps half an hour. Then the monsignor went into the church. He lit three candles and prayed for about an hour. A few minutes later, he took a
sheroot
back to Jerusalem.”

“And Mehdi?”

“He was driven from Bethlehem in a blue Mercedes registered to an importing company in Gaza, almost certainly a false registration. The car went south. They kept track of him for several hundred kilometers. Almost to Eilat, where he crossed the border into Jordan.”

They agreed that if and when Mehdi came looking for him it would be on Masada and not in a little cabin near the base. After a breakfast of cheese and pita and coffee so strong he could scarcely drink it, he climbed back up the Roman Ramp. Despite the heat, there were tourists on the plateau. The cable car was running from the eastern base, where two tour buses were pulled off the road. He joined a group of perspiring Jews from Chicago, sitting in the shade of an ancient storehouse while their rabbi told them the story of the Zealots. The rabbi got several important facts mixed up, but apparently only Harry noticed. Eventually the narrative was over and the people from Illinois lined up at the cable car landing and floated out of his life. On the car's return trip they were replaced by a group from Reading, Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania rabbi was young and better prepared than his colleague from Chicago, but he had a stern, pedantic style that made Harry want to go to the men's room until the sermon was over. There was no sign of Yosef Mehdi.

It was a very long afternoon.

When he made his way down to the cabin, Tamar had prepared
dinner, salad and
felafel
so spicy that he ate as little as he could without offending her, finishing the last of the bananas to satisfy his hunger. She made a face when he put canned milk in his coffee.

It was oppressive in the cabin. At dusk they took a blanket outside and she got her guitar and began to sing in Arabic. Her voice wasn't up to her playing but it had a quality that reached him. He lay near her and had heartburn while it grew dark.

“What was it about?” he asked when she finished the song.

“A young girl is to be married. On the night before, she worries about the man. Is he old? Is he young? Does he drink? Will he beat her?”

When he smiled she shook her head. “You can't understand,” she said.

“What's to understand?”

“The culture. Girls bartered off into marriage when they are too young. Having children before their bodies are ready. Old women by the time they are my age.”

He saw she was very serious. “How did you escape that?”

“Barely. A teacher convinced my father I should go to a secondary school. He gave in, he thought I could then get a job as a clerk in a store. But he became distraught when I took the university examination. He said no man would marry a woman with too much learning.”

He reached up and touched her face.

“I was estranged from my father for three years. It caused us great pain.”

Poor Tamar. “Fathers,” he said, thinking with discomfort of Jeff. “When I was a boy my father sent me to summer camp each year, as I have sent my own son.” She didn't know about summer camp; he had to explain. “My father wanted me to improve my language skills, so I had to write a letter to him every day in Hebrew. He never sent me a letter but every day I would get back one of the letters I had sent to him. It would be corrected for grammar and spelling.”

“Poor Harry.”

He took the guitar. He could play only a few banjo chords. He did a 1920's version of “I Found a Million-Dollar Baby in a Five-and-Ten-Cent Store” and she clapped her hands. He had to explain million-dollar
baby and then he had to explain five-and-ten-cent store. He asked her to teach him the Arabic song.

“Later.” She took the guitar from him and set it carefully out of the way.

“Sweet Harry,” she said in a little while.

She loosened her hair. It tickled him as she knelt over him. She gave him lots of swift, moist kisses. “Just enjoy,” she said. “Don't worry about grammar and spelling. It doesn't have to be perfect.” So of course it was.

Next morning the air was feverish. He was alarmed, thinking the
sharav
was returning, but Tamar shook her head.

“It is just a hot day.”

“Mehdi won't come here in this heat.”

“It may be exactly when he would choose to come,” she said thoughtfully.

“To hell with him.” He was feeling a little giddy. He went outside and sat in the car and ran the air conditioner. When he left the car it was even worse. He went into the cabin and told her he was going to cool off in the Dead Sea.

She made a face. “You wouldn't like it. Salt gets into all your openings. Any little cut burns.” She smiled at his dismay. “All right. I'll take you to a better place, Harry.”

She drove him north only ten miles, to a pocket of green at Ein Gedi.

When they got out of the car under tall palm trees, the air was cooler. She led him up a path to where a waterfall glittered as it dropped into a shaded pool.

“The rainy part of the country drains here underground. In the winter, the waterfall thunders. Now it is small.”

He needed no apologies for the place. He was out of his clothes in moments and into the pool, which proved to be warm, a shock.

She laughed. “Hot springs.” She folded her clothing neatly on the bottom bank. Tiny fishes flashed between their legs. He lay on the sandy bottom and let the water pat at his face. She had brought soap and was washing her hair under the falls. She shampooed his hair, too. It was a beautiful place for making love, but she moved her head away when he tried to kiss her.

“There is a kibbutz close by. And a field school for the Society for the Preservation of Nature. People can come at any time.”

“You are too practical,” he said, smiling at her.

The air dried their bodies quickly. As they dressed, he felt better.

“You are not a practical man?”

She turned to face him while she buttoned her shirt. “Harry, you won't spoil it? By being impractical? By becoming serious?”

It took him by surprise. The last thing he had in his mind was to become serious about her.

“I don't want to feel that way about anyone,” she said. “Not ever again.”

“We'll be friends. Who enjoy using one another,” he said. “Is that a practical description?”

She smiled at him. “Very practical.”

“So don't worry about responsibilities.”

“No spelling or grammar,” she said. She moved to him and kissed him lightly just as three men carrying spades came into view, followed by a fourth man pushing a barrow filled with banana seedlings. They all exchanged friendly
shaloms
. Tamar smiled at him innocently.

He admired the beautiful date trees as they walked to the car. “That's what your name means.”

“Yes,
tamar
, the palm. Long ago this place was called Hazazon-Tamar, meaning where they prune the palm. I never had trouble remembering it when we studied geography. I used to think of it as where I got my hair cut.”

He hated to leave the oasis. He drove back to Masada slowly through heat-shimmer. He hoped Mehdi had not come while they were gone. Then he didn't really care. The man was fast becoming an abstraction; he was no longer certain Yosef Mehdi existed.

They took fruit and pita and a jug of lemonade and went back up to the plateau. Tamar busied herself writing a museum report in the cool of Herod's terrace. Feeling he had to be more visible, Harry found a shaded spot near the tramway landing. He began to go over the photostats of the Copper Scroll yet another time.

About halfway through, he came to a passage that made him stop short. He read it again and again.

He hurried to Herod's terrace.

“Can you translate this phrase, please?”

Tamar examined it. “It seems to be
haya karut
”

“Not
haya koret
?”

“It could be
haya koret
. Since there are no written vowels, you make your own choices.”

“Exactly.” He forgot all about the heat. “Now. I've been seeing this as
haya koret
, the active form of the verb.” He showed her his notes. “This is the way I've been translating this passage.”

At the place where the trees cut back near the wine press at the bottom of the lesser of the two hills on the east, a guardian of gold, buried in clay at twenty-three cubits
.

“If we assume that it is
haya karut
instead of
haya koret
—the passive form of the verb instead of the active—and if we add a comma, this is what we have.”

At the place where the trees
are
cut back, near the wine press at the bottom of the lesser of the two hills on the east, a guardian of gold, buried in clay at twenty-three cubits
.

Tamar looked at him. “This place where the trees are cut back?”

He nodded, deliberately calm. “Hazazon-Tamar. Where the palm is pruned,” he said.

When their first excitement died down, they quarreled. He wanted to return to Jerusalem immediately in order to tell David Leslau he had discovered the whereabouts of a
genizah
.