Free Saving Grace by Barbara Rogan Page B

adults. Tireless and incapable of boredom, he would haul bucket after bucket of excavated dirt away from the dig, then sit for hours in a patch of shade, patiently sifting for small artifacts. The archaeologists treated him like a mascot, patiently submitting to interminable questioning: what is this and how was it made and who made it and what did they use it for—and always, interestingly: How do you know? The child took nothing on trust, not even Tamar, whose adoption of him had been incremental, a slow annexation of the little orphan boy taken in by the kibbutz. When he was eight, Tamar taught him to map finds on a site grid, and a few years later to excavate and photograph artifacts in situ. Micha had good hands, an eye for the land, and a boundless curiosity that Tamar thought would stand him in good stead as an archaeologist; but Micha chose instead to follow his adoptive father’s footsteps and make the army his career.
    He had done well—his fond mother thought he would have done well in any field—but lately she had sensed his dissatisfaction. The army was not what it had been in her day, when it had faced the massed might of five Arab nations and prevailed, like David over Goliath. Nowadays they were Goliath. Their soldiers fought schoolboys and women in a hopeless struggle; if they won, they lost. But Micha had not yet spoken, and it was not her way to force a confidence.
    “Try now,” Micha said, when they had dug all around the hidden object. Tamar gently wriggled it back and forth, gauging the ease of motion before slowly lifting it out of the hole and laying it on a ground cloth. Despite its encrustation, they could see at once that it was an intact earthen pitcher. While Micha dusted off the superficial dirt with a brush, Tamar used a dental pick to chip sediment from the space between the curved handle and the body of the pitcher. When it was clean they put it back in the hole and Micha photographed it.
    “Assyrian?” he asked when he was done.
    Tamar picked up the pitcher and closed her eyes, sighing a little in perplexity. “It’s at least that old, but it’s not the right shape. Look.” She handed it to him.
    “Maccabean?”  
    “Possibly.” She marked the pitcher’s location on a grid of the test ditch, then numbered and logged the artifact.
    Micha squinted at the sun, though he wore a watch. “Getting close to dinner.”  
    His mother laughed. “Ah, well, I know better than to stand between you and a meal.” She packed the little pitcher carefully in a cloth bag and stowed it in her backpack. They shouldered their equipment and set off on foot.
    They were inside Nachal Arugot, a wadi whose spring-fed waters cut a swath of green bounty from deep within the Judean wilderness downward to the Dead Sea, where it ran parallel to Ein Gedi, the Spring of the Wild Goat: ancient even in biblical times, the oasis in which David hid from the wrath of King Saul.
    Tamar was a surgeon by vocation, an archaeologist by avocation. Convinced that there had been significant early habitation beside the spring’s source, deep in the heart of the Judean desert, she had tried for years to persuade the archaeologists of Ben-Gurion University to mount a serious expedition. Her conviction was based not on hard evidence, for all she had amounted to little more than a few potsherds that might have come from anywhere, but rather on her instinct for the past harbors of desert dwellers.
    Some people reach enlightenment through visions, some through music, some through meditation; but the lowly instruments of Tamar’s enlightenment had always been her feet, which were to her like the deep roots of the acacia that suck the sap of the earth. The stones underfoot were known to Tamar, and the hidden pools, and the generations of ibex that browsed among the prickly acacia trees. Like the worm that burrows into flesh and makes its way to the heart, so did the ancient memories of the earth wend upward to lodge in the