10

The following morning dawned bright and sunny, with a slight dust haze in the air carried in by a brisk breeze from the northwest across the tops of the Judaean hills. David met Judith in the restaurant as planned for coffee, where she surprised him with the suggestion that they walk up the southern ravine to the Roman siege ramp. “The cable car won’t start up for another two hours; we might as well see some things in that time,” she said.

This was the reverse of David’s plan, but it served his purposes even better, allowing him to gauge the time required to go up Wadi Masada. They set out twenty minutes later, passing the ridgeline where David had kept vigil the night before. The sheer walls of the mountain rose about six hundred feet on the right, or north, side of the ravine, which was about a hundred yards wide at its mouth. As they climbed, the ravine narrowed down to about thirty yards in width. On their left rose the sheer rock walls of the southern plateau, which was actually higher than the rock of Masada. The wind kicked up dust devils along the ravine floor, and the going was much more difficult than David had anticipated due to the soft sand, hundreds of small rocks, and leg-deep fissures carved in the old stone by centuries of flash floods. The occasional scream of a hawk punctuated his grunts and quiet curses as he forced his way up the gradually more demanding slope. He was very grateful she had reminded him to bring his stick. She led the way, dressed in jeans, army boots, and a sleeveless sweatshirt. She wore a floppy sun hat and her mirrored glasses and had a plastic water bottle sticking out of her fanny pack that bobbed incongruously as she climbed ahead. He realized that she was puffing a little more than he was, but she put her head down and pressed on, and so did he. After forty-five minutes of climbing in the wadi along the southern edge of the Masada escarpment, they reached a ridge from which the ground fell away in a steep hillside into a second ravine, this one pointing north along the western edge of the mountain until it ran smack into the right side of the Roman siege ramp about a quarter mile away. Judith paused to take a water break and to point out some of the engineering features of the fortress.

“This is the western branch of Wadi Metsadá, the ravine used to fill Herod’s cisterns. You can see that it runs down from the hills on our left and along the western wall of the fortress.”

“Yeah, but the cisterns are on the north face.”

“Northwest, actually. Before the Romans built the ramp this wadi ran all the way along the west side of the mountain and down to the Dead Sea around the northern tip. Herod’s engineers dammed it up just beyond where the Romans eventually put the ramp. They then dug channels into the stone palisade that forms Metsadá’s west face. In the winter, storms occasionally sweep in off the Mediterranean and turn this wadi into a torrent. You may have seen the pictures in Yadin’s report. The water would back up at the dam and overflow sideways into the channels, run down along the channels, around the corner, and into the cisterns on the north face.”

“Ingenious—but of course the Romans destroyed the impoundments.”

“The very first thing they did. In a desert siege, of course, water is the key, but the fortress had been collecting water for decades. Even after it fell, people lived up there on what remained in those cisterns for nearly fifty years. There were other cisterns, too, of course, up along the rim, but they were small compared to the palace cisterns.”

“How did they get the water up to the top from the palace cisterns?”

“I will show you, but basically, water slaves carried it up in buckets. Shall we go?”

They started down the side of the Wadi Masada, slip-sliding in the loose sand and dirt until they reached the bottom, and then traversed the ravine from side to side as they made their way north down the slope to the base of the Roman siege ramp. Although they were in the shadow of the mountain, it was getting hotter by the minute, and it seemed to David that the dry desert wind was sucking the moisture right out of him. The ramp, a huge pile of sand, dirt, and stones, rose four hundred feet from the bottom of the gorge, bridging the wadi between the western plateau on the left and the western rim of the fortress. Having been built across the ravine, it made its own dam, and there were signs of some violent erosion over the centuries.

David knew that the main Roman camp was up on that plateau above them to the left, and Judith indicated that they would first have to climb up the left side of the ravine to get to the beginning of the ramp. David could see that the sides of the ramp itself were much too steep to climb without axes. The ravine at that point was about two hundred feet deep, so it took them another thirty minutes to get up to the base of the ramp. David was winded when they climbed over the top and stood at the base of the siege ramp itself. Judith was red-faced and completely out of breath. He realized they had been slowing down for the last thirty minutes. It was the heat, he told himself. At night he should be able to do better than this.

“For someone not in shape, you’re doing all right,” he said.

She could only nod and smile weakly and mop her forehead with a handkerchief. He looked at his watch. To the base of the ramp had taken an hour and a half, including the rest stop at the top of the cross ravine. He would have to allow two hours in the dark. The going would be slower, but he should be able to make better time without her. He looked up to the fortress walls, hundreds of feet above them, and then at the ramp.

“How in the hell did they build this thing? The defenders could hit anyone exposing themselves out here just by throwing rocks.”

“We have no firsthand facts,” she replied, between inhalations. “Historians surmise that initially they took some casualties. Then they probably went back to the remains of Jerusalem and gathered up a few thousand women, since all the men had been killed. The Jews on the mountain probably could not bring themselves to kill Jewish women who were being used as slaves. They built it by carrying baskets of earth and sand and throwing them into the wadi. Eventually they filled it in and then piled more on until the ramp reached the summit and the engineers could bring up the siege tower.”

“Good Lord.”

“Yes, even then it was a very bad thing to lose a war. Beyond the hard labor, since there was no water here, each woman was forced to carry an amphora-sized jar of drinking water from Jerusalem to the Roman camp. By night they would have been used by the legion. You can begin to understand how the defenders might choose death over what they saw befalling their countrywomen. The Roman camp is over there. Do you wish to see the ruins?”

“No, I think not. I saw the outlines yesterday from up there, and it looks like only wall foundations. My focus is on what’s up there. Besides, I’m just dying to climb some more.”

She gave him a look that said she was just plain dying, but then hefted her stick, and they set out up the ramp. Damn, he thought, maybe she’s human. He stumbled in the loose sand. This is inhuman, he thought then. Just hard slogging, up another forty-degree slope of hard-packed sand and rocks. They paused halfway up to catch their breath, and David wondered aloud about the siege tower.

“On this slope, how could they pull something like that up close enough to the walls? Those towers were fifty, sixty feet high.”

“The slope was probably not this steep; there is evidence that the ramp started closer to the Roman camp than the edge of the wadi. They would have taken the siege tower up the ramp in pieces: the base on wheels, the tower sections one at a time. The soldiers would have pulled it up the ramp using ropes. They would have used a testudo to protect the soldiers—do you know what that is?”

“Yes,” David nodded. “The tortoise back: Several dozen soldiers put their shields over their heads and advance in close formation. From above they present an impermeable shield wall. Still…”

“Yes. Those men? Now they were in shape, and implacable.”

David nodded soberly. Implacable indeed. He could only imagine the growing despair on the mountain as that siege ramp took shape and then the antlike columns of soldiers began pulling a siege tower into position to begin the bombardment that would batter down the casemate walls.

By silent agreement they set out again to walk up the final few hundred feet to the top of the ramp, where they encountered a steel and concrete stairway that took them up to the western gate. David looked around for indications that the gate was locked at night but did not see any signs of chains or other securing devices as they went through the gate, climbed the casemate ramp, and encountered the first group of tourists.

They spent the rest of the morning walking through the casemate wall that surrounded the entire rim of the fortress, where she pointed out the locus of individual archaeological finds including some coin hoards, weapons, the skeleton of a man apocryphally believed to have been Eleazar ben Jair himself, and a small stash of scroll fragments similar physically to those found in the caves of Qumran, the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls.

“Were any of them legible?” he asked.

“One they were able to recognize right away, because the text was visible on the outside of the scroll. It was the Vision of the Dry Bones, from Ezekiel.”

“Now there’s a lovely metaphor, especially here.”

“Indeed.”

In the early afternoon they met with a security guard who admitted them to the narrow stone stairway leading down to the terrace palace ruins. Two terrace palaces had been built below the northern prow of the mountain, descending two hundred feet down from the main plateau in two stepped levels. The view out over the Dead Sea was breathtaking as they maneuvered carefully down the worn and very steep steps. Judith explained that the first terrace, confusingly called the middle terrace, had had a circular pavilion surrounded by a colonnade, and the lower terrace a rectangular, nearly square hall called a triclinium in the center surrounded by porticoes on all sides and a bathing area. Sheer stone and mortared brick walls dropped away from the marble balustrades on either side.

Down below the left, or western, side of the middle terrace Judith showed him the water channel that had once routed storm water from the wadi to the very large cisterns cut into the northwest face. The channel was about three feet wide and two feet deep, cut along the face of the cliff, aiming back along the western palisade to a point now buried by the Roman siege ramp. Fifty feet back along the channel was a large, irregularly shaped hole in the cliff, with several smaller holes behind that one, all in a line across the cliff face.

“May I?” he asked, pointing to the hole.

“With great care, please,” she answered, reminding him that there was no railing on the outside edge of the water channel. It looked to be about four hundred feet straight down from the channel to the bottom of the gorge. He stepped off the stone stairway and walked back along the water channel, whose bottom was polished smooth. He tried not to look over the side. A sudden updraft tugged at his shirt. He did not have a big problem with heights, per se, but this was pretty exposed.

He reached the first hole, knelt down, and peered into it. He was at the top of an enormous spherical cavern, perhaps eighty to one hundred feet across and the same dimension in depth. Beams of sunlight coming through the hole projected his silhouette on the smooth lower walls. Descending from the hole was a set of steps that had been cut out of the rock, spiraling down the side to the very bottom of the cistern. There was no railing there, either. The walls of the cistern were water polished, and there were two large pillars of rock that had been left in the center to support the ceiling. He wanted to walk down those steps, but it was pretty clear that the cistern was completely empty. It was just a big dry hole in the rock. As worn as the steps were, it would have been very easy to fall to the bottom of the huge stone cavity. Judith came up behind him to join him at the entrance.

“The steps leading back up to the top palaces are called the water steps. Slaves would have to come down here continuously to collect water in jars and then carry them back up to the main level, where they would fill smaller cisterns, which in turn piped water throughout the palace for the baths, hypocausts, and fountains. There are other cisterns farther back along the channel.”

He looked beyond the entrance and saw the second hole, smaller than this one. “Same thing—dry hole?”

“Yes. Once the Romans breached the dam and raised the ramp, no more water ever came into these cisterns.”

“Yet, if they were full when the siege began, and these things are, say, sixty feet to eighty in diameter, then each one would have held nearly three-quarters of a million gallons of water.”

She looked at him. “Did you just compute that?”

He smiled, trying to cover his sudden error. “I’m an engineer, remember?” he asked. “Volume of a sphere; pretty simple calculation.” Pay attention, dammit, he thought. She doesn’t need to discover she’s telling you things you already know. Especially about the cisterns.

He looked over the edge of the water channel again. Some birds sailed through the wadi a few hundred vertiginous feet below them. He gave a small shudder. Judith turned to walk back to the relative safety of the water-slave steps. They went up and then turned left and down the terrace steps to the lowest level, where she showed him some of the remaining fresco fragments and speculated about what the buildings looked like. He remembered the drawings in the Yadin reports and said so.

“Very speculative, but at this distance in time, as good as any,” she replied. “Truly, there is much we do not know.”

A warm breeze swept across the ruined terrace, bearing just a sulfurous hint of the Dead Sea far below them. They stood and looked out over the panoramic view, which from this elevation covered nearly thirty miles in every direction except due west, where the Judaean hills blocked out the metallic sky. Those hills looked to be about as dead as the sea over which they kept silent watch. From the lowest terrace, the main Roman camp, approximately a quarter mile distant, was at about eye level.

“Do you suppose the Zealots came down here?”

“They did for water, depending upon how much remained in the rim cisterns. We think they took some of the stone works from down here to reinforce the outer casemate walls once the Romans began the siege ramp. As you can see, the foundations are all here, but there is a lot of material missing—and, of course, no wood fragments.”

“Right. The wood went into the walls at the end of the siege. This was a tough fight.”

“Yes, with very high stakes. If you have studied Roman military history, you know that once the Romans sank their teeth in, there was usually only one outcome.”

He gazed out over the western hills, shimmering in the early afternoon heat, and tried to imagine what it had been like up here for the Zealots. They would have watched with growing desperation as the inexorable Romans built first a wall around the entire mountain, the circumvallation, and then the ominous ramp, and finally the siege tower. The fighters among them must have known as they hunkered down on this impregnable rock, day after day, month after month, how it would have to end: an entire Roman legion fastened onto the flanks of the last Jewish stronghold, inching ever forward and upward. She seemed to sense his thoughts.

“When you actually stand here,” she said in a soft voice, “it is perhaps easier to appreciate why they did what they did. Two years and more, day after day, fighting off the daily probes, all the while watching the ramp grow. How many times must some of them have come down here to the lower palaces to look out at the Roman camp, watching and wondering: when? What they finally did may have come as a release of sorts.”

“Yes. Now you can understand why I wanted to come here. The books don’t convey that feeling. Adrian had been here, and she was fascinated with the place.”

“I forget. Was she a writer?”

“More of a dreamer, I think. Why?”

She smiled at him, a full smile this time. It illuminated her face. “Writers must above all have feelings,” she said. “For the atmosphere of places, for people’s emotions, a sense of tragedy if that’s appropriate. I am an antiquities historian more than anything else. We have feelings, too, but our passion is for cold facts and the truth more than for the people who made the history.” She paused for a moment. “This terrible place tends to confuse archaeologists, because the feelings intrude so forcefully.”

At that instant he was seized with the urge to tell her why he was really here. The intensity of this impulse surprised him, this sudden need to share with her, with someone, the enormous concept that had brought him here, but he knew he dared not do that. He would have only one chance, and that was probably going to be tonight or tomorrow night. One shot, yes or no, Adrian had been right or utterly wrong. He needed to keep his minder here well out of that picture until he knew. He looked at his watch. Almost three o’clock.

“Yes,” she said, looking at hers. “We must get back to the base. Do you want to walk back the way we came, or shall we take the cable car?”

“That’s a no-brainer,” he said.

She smiled again. “No-brainer? I haven’t heard that expression before, but I presume it means we ride, yes?”

*   *   *

After their meal together in the restaurant, they again bought some fruit, bread, and bottled water for later that evening. On the way into the hostel to stash their supplies, David suggested they take a walk down to the beaches of the Dead Sea. At first she seemed reluctant, but then agreed, and they met fifteen minutes later out in the parking lot. The sun was well down in the western sky, and the day’s heat had begun to break, the ovenlike air giving way to the first hint of an evening breeze. The east side of the mountain and the southern ravine were in deep shadow, with only the rim of the fortress reflecting a golden light off the ruined casemate walls. There were still some tourists up there, but for an instant David imagined he was seeing the long-lost defenders.

They threaded their way through the parking lot where half a dozen tour buses were loading up a gaggle of Japanese tourists, each of whom appeared to be carrying his body weight in camera gear. The bus engines were running at high idle to maintain air-conditioning inside, and the billowing exhaust gave the two of them an incentive to break into a light jog out of the parking lot, down the access road, across the coast road, and into the crystalline dunes.

David admired the determined way she walked along the hard-packed sand. He found himself walking slightly behind her, conscious of the poise and strength of her stride across the difficult ground, and the way those long legs moved. She had the body of an athlete, which made him curious: She didn’t seem to be the type who worked out, and yet she had managed the climb up the southern ravine at a pace almost equal to his, and he had been training for this trip for nearly a year. His thoughts were interrupted when she looked back over her shoulder and caught him looking.

“Tired already, Mr. Hall?” she asked with a teasing smile.

“I was just enjoying the view,” he replied, without thinking, and then colored. “I mean—”

“Yes, the light is interesting at this time of day, isn’t it?” She turned back around and kept walking.

He caught up with her, trying to cover his embarrassment, but she simply looked away across the water, as if suddenly fascinated by some distant object on the Jordanian shore. He kicked at a lump of solidified phosphate.

“This isn’t like any beach I’ve ever seen,” he said. “Certainly not like our ocean beaches.”

“You were one of those ‘surfer dudes’?” she asked.

He laughed. “No, not at all. I grew up in Washington, D.C. My father was a scientist at the National Bureau of Standards. We kept a summerhouse on the Delaware beaches. I was something of a natural water baby. My father was not thrilled.”

“He expected you to be a scientist as well?”

“Well, he didn’t expect me to grow my hair long and spend every waking hour down on the beaches with a bunch of surfer dudes, as you put it. I discovered scuba and girls when I was fourteen, and that didn’t help.”

“Scuba is an expensive sport for a fourteen-year-old, I should think,” she observed.

“So were girls,” he said. They had to walk carefully now, picking their way through a scrub of cactus and razor-sharp crystal stalagmites. “My Uncle Jack lives for outdoor sporting activities. He’s the one who actually taught me scuba. Do you dive?”

“My husband was the fanatic with the scuba,” she said. “At first I did the diving just to be with him. Then I became an enthusiast. It is popular here in Israel.”

“Yeah, well, in the summers I went to work in a dive shop to pay for all the pricey toys. I love to dive; I’m going to do Caesarea Maritima when I’m through here.”

“I would think a parent would be afraid, a fourteen-year-old doing scuba.”

“Part of a general pattern, I’m afraid. Teenaged boys in America often do precisely what most disturbs their fathers. I had a much better relationship with my uncle than with my father. Fortunately, I had a younger brother who was everything Dad wanted. Outstanding student. Career oriented from the age of about eight months. I think Dad kind of kissed me off once he figured out that Larry, that’s my younger brother, was going to turn out closer to the mold.”

“Yet still you became a nuclear engineer?”

“That was the funny part. My mother realized before I did that I had more brains than I was letting on, especially in math and science. She steered me into the right courses, the ones I could do in my sleep—math and science. That left me more time for other interests.”

“Your uncle sounds interesting,” she said, stopping to dump small stones out of her shoes.

“He is. He works at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Washington. He always told me to go to work for the government.”

“For the security?”

“Not quite. He used to say he worked in order to play. You know, the fat man who lives to eat versus the thin man who eats to live? He once told me that he worked for the government because, if you wanted it that way, it was just a job, not really a career. Do your job, eight to four thirty, and then resume your real life. Careerists bring it home with them.”

“And university?”

“Went to my local state university in Maryland. Took a degree in chemical engineering, minor in physics. Uncle Jack got me a starter job at the NRC. Damn! This place stinks.”

“Yes, it gets stronger in the late afternoon. There is geothermal activity along here. Cooks the chemicals. There are big salt mines farther south. Did you have to do national service?”

“No. It’s not like here, where everyone must serve. I thought about it, but they told me I’d have to serve in nuclear submarines, and I didn’t want that.”

They entered a clearing where suddenly the stink of chemical salts went away, and they stopped to breathe clear air. He looked back at the looming mountain fortress, which was subsiding into even deeper shadow as the sun went down.

He kicked a rock down onto the beach, where the sand was so hard it skittered all the way to the water. She had certainly warmed up this afternoon, but he wanted to stop talking about himself.

“You called yourself Mrs. Ressner,” he said. “What does your husband do?” Having spoken to Ellerstein, he already knew the answer, but pretended not to.

She looked away. “I am a widow, Mr. Hall. My husband died five years ago. I have never remarried.”

“I’m sorry,” he said automatically, feeling like a heel.

“For what? You haven’t done anything. Or do you mean you feel sorry for me?”

Oh, hell, he thought, here we go. Miss Attitude is back. “It’s just an American expression. Of sympathy. Someone loses his or her spouse, we presume they’re sorry, too. How long ago did you say?”

She took a minute to reply and turned around to start walking back toward the hostel. “Almost five years. And, yes, I am sorry. Perhaps too much so. My life has not been very good since then, and that has created some problems.” She told him about the chairman’s ultimatum and the reasons behind it. David frowned. Ellerstein hadn’t mentioned any ultimatum.

“Wow,” he said. “Decision time. All this because you elected to withdraw from social life for a while? To live alone? I should think that was your option.”

“Thank you, yes, so did I. Apparently I’ve overdone it. I’ve kept myself immersed in my work, which is easy enough to do. Historical linguistics is an introspective business, but I think I have given cultural offense to the collegial community.”

“What about the rest of your life?” he asked. “Do you get out at all, or are you just holed up in an apartment somewhere and calling it life?”

She gave him a curious look, her head tilting to one side. “Who have you been talking to, Mr. Hall?”

“Nobody, Mrs. Ressner,” he said. “I’ve met people in your situation before, although I must admit they were all men. What happened to your husband, if I may ask?”

She sighed. “He died in an accident of some kind at the place where he worked. He was a scientist.”

David took a gamble. “An accident of ‘some kind’? That sounds as if you don’t know exactly what happened.”

She turned to face him. “He worked at Dimona. You’re a nuclear engineer from Washington: You know what Dimona is, don’t you? Israel’s so-called atomic power research center?”

He smiled at her. “So-called, indeed. Yes, I know what Dimona is. By reputation, anyway.”

She nodded. “The implication was that it was a radiation accident,” she said. “I—I never saw him again. He is buried out there at the site, along with some radioactive waste, no doubt. Okay? Don’t ask me anything more about it, because I don’t know anything more about it. One morning he left for the site and I was a wife. By that night I was told that I would never see him again, and, oh, by the way, now you are a widow. We have lots of those in Israel.”

She turned and walked away, her face and posture suddenly stiff. Startled by her bitter outburst, he hurried to catch up with her. He remembered Ellerstein’s equally vague description: some kind of an accident. Something bad enough that the body had not been returned to the widow. He conjured up the image of a lead-lined body bag at the bottom of a green-glowing moonpool somewhere. He understood her anger a little better.

He closed the gap and then walked by her side as they picked their way through curious crystalline formations that stood along the shore like stumps from some petrified chemical forest.

“Five years,” he said, after a few minutes. “That’s a long time to grieve. Or is that customary for the Jewish culture?”

She looked sideways at him again, as if to see if he was being sarcastic. David shook his head. “I meant that question sincerely. I’ve heard that there are some Middle Eastern cultures that do not permit a widow to remarry. I guess I’m trying to figure out why someone as attractive as you are hasn’t rejoined the world by now.”

“I forget how direct you Americans are,” she said, with a hint of exasperation in her voice. “Really, Mr. Hall. This is hardly any of your concern. Whether or not I am an attractive woman, if I choose not to rejoin the world, as you put it, that’s my business, is it not? You would not say that to a man, would you?”

“Touché,” he said. “I would not. Although I would probably still ask the underlying question. It’s always interesting to know why people do what they do. Besides, sometimes it helps to talk about it.”

“I don’t feel any particular need to talk about it, Mr. Hall. Especially with a stranger.”

“Well, forgive me, but I sense that you do. Need to talk about it, that is. If nothing else, what you’re facing on Monday morning compels you to at least think about it, and it’s safer to discuss such things with a stranger, especially one who will be gone in two weeks. As opposed to a colleague, for instance, who might have a stake in the outcome? I don’t know. If you just crawl into a hole and pull it in over you, you become compost, you know?”

She kept walking, not answering him, her head down now, concentrating on picking her way through the scraggly underbrush in the fading light. Finally she stopped.

“What of you, Mr. Hall? You were in love, yes, with this Adrian? Then she disappears. Are you ‘back in the world’?”

“Well, I’m here,” he said. Once again he suddenly wanted to tell her the real reason he was here.

“So you are,” she said.

He pressed on. “And, yes, we’re having this conversation because I’m interested in you. You’re a beautiful woman, still young, and smart enough to hold a Ph.D. from a prestigious university.”

More silence. Then, finally, softly, “So—what about Adrian? She is, what, forgotten now?”

He swore, loud enough to startle her. “We’re in the same boat, Mrs. Ressner. You don’t know what happened to your husband. You do know that he is—gone. I don’t know what happened to Adrian, but the probability is that she decided our relationship was over and just—left.”

“So now, what? I am potentially her replacement?”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” he exclaimed. This was getting too hard. A voice in his head was warning him to shut up, go back to the hostel, and leave this poor woman to her own devices, but he couldn’t help himself. “What I’m saying is, why not get on with your life? There must be a hundred guys right there at the university who would jump at the chance. Why waste your life?”

“In your humble American opinion.”

He laughed. “Yes, in my humble American opinion.”

“A waste.”

“Yeah, a waste.” He tripped over a rock trying to keep up with her and nearly went sprawling. She turned to face him.

“Is that what you did, Mr. Hall? When your Adrian did her disappearing act? Did you jump right back into life? Did you go find another woman? To avoid the waste?”

Again her vehemence startled him. “It’s not quite the same,” he began, somewhat defensively. He couldn’t see her face in the shadow of sunset, but her voice was trembling.

“You said it was. We were in the same boat, you said.”

“Well, I guess we’re not, are we? I kept hoping, believing when no one else did that she was coming back. That she would call. E-mail. Something. When I finally realized she’d dumped me, I finally accepted it.”

“And then?”

“And then, I did nothing, for a while. Then my friends started to invite me to parties or outings where there was always an unattached woman. I went through the motions, but…”

“Me, too,” she said, surprising him. “Same thing. But…”

“Well, it’s not like I haven’t seen other women since then. I just haven’t met the right one to marry, that’s all. At least I’m looking. I finally recognized that you have to do something to make something happen.”

She gave a snort of derision. “That’s what it is about you Americans, I think,” she said. “You think that every situation can be, I don’t know, what’s the English—fixed? Fixed as long as you do something. You people go all over the world fixing things, doing things, whether or not you should, whether or not the people involved even want them fixed. Iraq. Afghanistan. Who’s next, I wonder.”

“Ah,” he said. He turned back toward the hostelry and started walking again, forcing her to catch up with him this time. He had to acknowledge, though: Her life right now might be precisely what she wanted.

“Ah?” she echoed. “What does this mean, this ‘ah’?”

“Never mind, Mrs. Ressner,” he said. “I guess I’m just another ugly American. You were right: I’ve been making assumptions. Please forgive me.”

That silenced her, and she remained silent as they picked their way through the reeking patches of solidified alkaline wastes back toward the road. He got to the road first and waited for her. The tour buses were all gone, and the security floodlights up at the tourist center pointed hot white eyes at them. Her face was a white blur in the darkness along the empty road. He turned to head up toward the hostel.

“Please go on,” she said. “What assumptions?”

“Are you mad at me?”

“Yes!” A moment. “No. Please.”

“It’s the romantic in me, I guess,” he said, trying to keep it light. “I assumed you were looking for love.”

“What do you mean by love, Mr. Hall?”

He smiled in frustration. Damned woman. Now she did want to talk. “Well, the older I get, the more I feel that love is an accommodation more than a pursuit. Two people who meet and like each other. As friends first, and then as lovers in the physical sense. Who grow to care for each other. Who can give each other affection. Who have enough similar interests that they can enjoy doing things together, but don’t get upset over being apart occasionally. Who’ve outgrown all those unreasonable expectations we had when we were starting out. Grown-up love.”

She didn’t reply for a moment. “Yes,” she said finally. “That sounds like love to me. Except perhaps for the being apart bit.”

“Well, if you live entirely alone, dwelling on or in the past, you are by definition being apart.” He paused and then said, “The folks I’ve known who kept themselves apart from life usually ended up on the bottle, or drugs, or in frequent contemplation of a premature exit.”

He heard her sharp intake of breath as she stopped in her tracks and then turned to face outward toward the sea. He mentally kicked himself. He had touched a nerve. He stopped behind her, close enough to reach out and touch her shoulders, but kept his hands to himself. He looked out over the purpling waters. He could just detect the scent of her hair on the evening breeze. What are you doing? a warning voice in his head asked.

“You have to be out there for love to happen, Judith Ressner. Memories are simply not enough to sustain life, not until you get very old.”

She didn’t reply for a minute, and when she did it was in a very soft voice. “They are very good memories.”

“Want to tell the ugly American about them?”

Surprisingly, she did. She sat down on a flat-topped boulder, and he did likewise, startled by the residual warmth in the stone. He noticed that, sitting together, they were the same height.

She told him about her short life with Dov Ressner: the way they were so evenly matched intellectually, he the physicist, she the linguistics historian, not having to protect each other from the sharp edges of their own intelligence; their casual, almost bohemian existence after he finished his schooling and went to work for the government, while she worked to achieve the Ph.D. She described their mutual love of the outdoors and diving, their expeditions to Eilat and Caesarea, and the many recreational dives they shared along the Mediterranean coast of Palestine and in the Red Sea.

Then she talked of how, as time passed, he had become disillusioned about what was really going on at Dimona, struggling to live up to his promises of keeping the government’s secrets but making it clear that he felt he was being used to facilitate something truly awful.

“I probably should not be speaking about that,” she said.

David knew a great deal more about Dimona than he was willing to let on. “Well, you’re right about Dimona,” he said casually. “I mean, that’s hardly a secret anymore. Everyone assumes Israel has a nuclear weapons capability, which is the whole point of the exercise. Nuclear weapons are basically useless except as a deterrent. If people don’t think you have them, then having them is pointless.”

“Yes, but there is a difference between your assuming it and a government scientist coming right out and stating it as a fact.”

“Your husband did that?”

“Not … precisely, but he did take part in an anti-nuclear-weapons demonstration once. That caused a lot of trouble, for both of us. We even argued about it before he did it—and after. The site management took it as a major security breach. We had to spend some time with some very unpleasant officials. I thought we were going to lose everything, and I had not finished my Ph.D. yet. Our income, our apartment, everything depended on his job. Yet…”

“For him, it was a matter of principle?”

“Yes, exactly, and one of the most appealing things about Dov was that he was a principled man.”

“How did you fix it?” he asked.

“Fix it. That word again.”

“I’m sorry, I—”

“No, actually, ‘fix it’ is an Israeli concept, too. Dov had a friend in the LaBaG who became something of a mentor, really.” She looked sideways at him. “Your interlocutor, Professor Ellerstein? He emigrated from America. He is a mathematician. He actually worked at Dimona for a while. He was sympathetic to LaBaG’s cause, but the fact that he was a member of LaBaG was a secret. I think that’s why he left Dimona, finally.”

David’s brain was churning. He knew some of this, courtesy of Ellerstein, but didn’t want her to know that he knew.

“Anyway, he ‘fixed’ it. Dov had to make amends, had to do some publicity work to restore the peaceful image of Dimona. Still, for several months, it remained very difficult for us, both at work and at home. Dov kept telling me that the program out there had gotten out of hand. That they were reaching for something they did not need. In the end, though, they needed him, so they kept him on.”

“Some of the frustration must have come because he realized that someone else’s survival depended on his keeping a paycheck coming. Namely you. That all those lofty principles of his might have to be compromised, because to persist might be putting his wife in danger.”

She turned to look at him. She has truly beautiful eyes, he thought, as she registered pleasant surprise.

“You are perceptive, David Hall,” she said. “Yes, that was exactly correct. He made amends. He did insist that he would only work on peaceful uses for atomic energy: power plants, medical research, things like that. Never weapons. Dov was good at that: taking a position, but then making people come around to his point of view by his obvious sincerity. I think there were other scientists out there who felt the same way, but Dov was the one who did something. Sometimes I think that the work he was required to do might not have been so clear-cut. I always had the sense that he had uncovered something else, that he knew more than he would tell me, but I also knew better than to ask. Our life was happy again, with just this one strange thread woven through it. Then one day”—she stopped and took a deep breath—“he was just … gone.”

David wondered fleetingly if something bad had happened to rebel scientist Dov Ressner. Something bad that had nothing to do with radiation accidents. He could just imagine the kinds of people who might be working security for Israel’s nuclear program. The modern-day descendants of the Masada Zealots? What was their security organization called? Mossad? Bad MFs, from everything he’d read.

“And ever since then, nobody’s quite measured up, has he?” he asked, trying for a safer direction.

“Yes. No. I don’t know, really. That’s always an unfair comparison. We were just extremely well suited, that’s all. In every way. Marriage to Dov was so very easy. The only tension we had between us was physical, and the solution to that was wonderful. That’s what I mean about the memories.”

“I have similar memories. Adrian was … difficult, but resolution was spectacular.”

“Difficult how?”

He let out a long breath. “She was too smart for her own skin. Everything I said was a challenge. For a while, it was interesting, exciting even. Then, truth be told, I got tired of the eternal sparring. I asked her once if she was always ‘on,’ and what it would take to have her turn all this intellectual fencing off.”

Judith smiled. “How did that go over?”

“A week of silence.”

“What then?”

“A week of the best sex of my life.”

She smiled again. The transformation of her face was amazing, but then it faded.

“What?” he asked.

“I could never do that,” she said.

“At some point, you must,” he said. “Even if you find a new guy, you must.”

“A new ‘guy,’ as you put it, would not be interested in my lost husband,” she retorted.

“The right guy would,” he said. “The right guy would have to accept your former marriage as a part of you. If he couldn’t do that, then he wouldn’t be the right guy.”

“Then what would I do, Mr. Hall?”

“Hell, look for another guy.”

She smiled. “How very American. Always a solution: Do something until you get your way.”

He laughed. “Well, yeah, persistence is an American trait, I suppose. That’s what we do. We want something, we go for it. It may take several tries and an expanding tolerance for failure along the way. We call that growing up, but we typically will give it a shot.”

“You Americans are not embarrassed by failure, then?”

“Sure we are. Just look at the state of politics in America right now. But some of us are even more afraid of regrets, as in, the thought of having never tried in the first place.”

“Even if you think that what you are seeking may not ever happen again?”

“Like you’ll never find another man as well suited to your love as the first man was? Well, what if he is out there and you never go looking? Do you really want to go out to the end of your life and then have to regret that you never even looked?”

She stared down at her sandals.

He remained silent, marveling that she had opened up. He was also surprised at himself. He could not figure out if he was attracted to her just because of her looks or because he was responding unconsciously to her need for an emotional bridge of some kind, a need that seemed to be missing absolutely in every female he’d met in Washington over the past few years. Get a grip, he reminded himself. You can’t afford to get involved with this woman. That’s not why you’re here. Focus, dammit.

“It’s getting dark,” he said. “We’d better get back.”

She nodded without replying, her silence implying that she was probably having second thoughts about revealing so much to this foreigner. They retraced their steps to the hostel building without talking. He was conscious that they had stepped beyond some barriers. Jesus, he thought, if she only knew …