“My being locked up here in the Golan Heights does solve their problem, Judith. Ellerstein may be more concerned about what you might say one day, not me. All I can say these days is amen.”
The monk reappeared at the garden gate and beckoned Judith.
“I must go, David. Here: I have a package for you. This might well be your way out.”
“What is it?” he asked. He heard the helicopter’s engines starting down below the walls.
“Something very special, David. Get the monks to put it in a closed room, and then you’ll understand.” She leaned over and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. Then she was gone.
As the helicopter lifted off into the darkening sky he opened the tote bag. Inside was a cardboard box, tied up with common white twine. Inside he found a green felt cloth. The cloth contained the wine bowl from the cavern.
David felt a chill go up his back. He reached in to extract the bowl but then paused. The writing on the wall had alluded to a connection between Judah’s tragic brother and this wine bowl. They had both jumped to the same conclusion, but of course there was not one shred of proof. Still, he found himself very reluctant to touch it. He rewrapped the bowl in the felt cloth. Then he remembered her suggestion: Put it in a dark room. Like the chapel, perhaps?
“So, how did it go?” Ellerstein asked Judith. “Did he look healthy?”
“A little gaunt,” she said, shifting her phone to the other hand so she could mute the television. “I think he’s used to more food than they are giving him in that place.”
“All Americans are used to more food,” Ellerstein said. “What about his state of mind?”
“He wants out, of course. He knows why he’s being held there, but wonders why they won’t trust him to keep his mouth shut. As he says, there is no benefit to him for revealing what happened.”
“Americans are funny about things like that,” he said. “He gets out, goes home to the States, then thinks about his fifteen minutes of fame and maybe wants to try that again. Americans seem obsessed with fame.”
Remembering what David had said, she asked him if he was worried about what she might say one day. Ellerstein stared at her for a moment. “Oh, my,” he said. He began to fiddle with his pipe.
“What, oh, my?”
“He saw right through it, didn’t he? Your coming to him, promising him a chance at release. He knows.”
“Knows what, Yossi?”
“He knows he’s never coming out of there, that is what.”
Judith surprised him. “I don’t believe that, Yossi,” she said. “Governments come and go. The past becomes the past, nobody cares. Paperwork gets lost, stories become diluted. Once all that happens, then there will be no point to keeping him.”
“Well,” he said, “I hope you’re right. It does seem unfair, especially after he led you to such prominence. You are right about governments coming and going, especially with these uprisings in the Arab world.”
“Intifada, yet again?”
“No. These Arab uprisings are generational, Yehudit. The young men throwing over the old men. The problem is that nothing in their lives will change except that there will be no wise old hands to restrain them.”
“I’m glad I did what I did, then,” she said. “Up there on the mountain.”
“What was that, Yehudit?”
“If I am right, you will soon see.”
He chuckled. “Stay in touch, Yehudit. I will do the same.”
She switched off the phone and put it down on her dining room table.
Stay in touch, she thought. Just you wait, Yossi.
Late that night one of the monks knocked on David’s door. He had no idea of what time it was, having taken off his watch weeks ago. He kept monastery hours, for the most part, going to bed when they did and getting up for the early morning services in the chapel.
“What is it?” he asked.
The door opened, and one of the younger monks, who spoke no English, motioned for him to get up and come with him. He held the candlestick high so David could put on his robe and sandals. Then they went to the chapel, where it looked like all the monks were gathered by the front door, including Father Kamil. The doors to the chapel were partially open, and the monks were murmuring to each other excitedly. Father Kamil gestured for David to join him on the top step.
“Look inside, Mr. Hall,” the abbot said, ushering David to the doorway. “Tell me, what is that thing on the altar?”
David looked inside the chapel at the wine bowl, which he had put on a back corner of the altar after the last service of the evening. The chapel was suffused with a warm glow, but the wine bowl looked just the same, plainer than even the candleholders and the simple Orthodox cross on the altar.
“A first-century wine bowl,” David told him. “From the great discoveries at Metsadá.”
“How did this thing get here, Mr. Hall?”
“Dr. Ressner brought it to me. The authorities weren’t interested in it. Why is everyone so excited?”
“Look again, Mr. Hall. At the chapel, not the bowl.”
“Okay, I’m looking. I don’t see any changes.” White stone floor and walls, with no ornamentation to speak of. The Stations of the Cross represented by simple wooden crucifixes. No windows. A white stone altar with simple vestments. Two large brass candlesticks on the altar.
With no candles.
“Where is the light coming from, Mr. Hall?” the abbot whispered. “Can you tell us that, please?”
Feeling the hair rise on the back of his neck, David looked again. No candles. There was no electricity in the tiny monastery. No batteries that he knew of. If they needed light at night, they’d get a candle. Yet there was no mistaking it: There definitely was a faint, almost golden glow to the chapel’s interior.
He looked again at the bowl, but it was not glowing. It was just a plain bronze bowl, not quite perfectly symmetrical, looking a little wobbly around the rim. Dull, plain metal. It looked no different than the moment at which he’d first seen it.
“Father Kamil,” he said finally, “we need to talk privately.”
The abbot closed the chapel doors and instructed the monks not to go in there until he returned. Then he took David across the courtyard to his cell, which was no different from the one David occupied except for a desk and a second chair at one end. He pulled up the chair and indicated for David to take the other one.
“Proceed,” he said.
For the first time, David told him the whole story of how he had come to Israel, what he’d discovered, and how he had entangled Judith Ressner into his deceptions and ultimate success. He then described the words on the wall that Judith had translated, which were probably now gone, regarding the bowl and the writer of the words.
The abbot sat there the entire time, fixing his eyes on David’s face with the intensity of an eagle about to launch. When David had finished, he sighed.
“God give me strength,” he said quietly.
“We were both making rather large assumptions, Father Kamil,” David said. “She was translating from Aramaic, and even she said there were always many different interpretations for any word in Aramaic, especially of that age.”
“Yet there is light in the chapel. Like no light I have ever seen.”
David had no answer for that, but he was suddenly, perhaps irrationally, glad he had not touched that bowl.
“What will you do now?” he asked the abbot.
“We shall pray,” the abbot replied promptly.
“In the chapel?”
“Oh, no,” the abbot said. “At the door. Until we understand the light. So: This is why you are confined here? The government knows about that bowl?”