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Show 210 day she said nothing, only smiled. At first I was assigned to work with Chaim, a slender tight-lipped Israeli a little younger than myself, perhaps twenty-five, whose grim face and pious manner never varied. I was put at the bottom of the pit, he at the top, and with little to do between bucketsful of dirt except clean his glasses, his hands otherwise in his pockets, he looked down on me as though the ten or fifteen feet between us had been ordained. When we stopped for coffee that first day, Chaim asked me where I was from. He had heard of Cincinnati. "Why did you come to Israel?" I didn't like the tone of his questions, the arrogance which seemed to fuel them. I told him simply that I had been traveling in Greece and come to Israel when I needed a winter job. "Then you are working here only for the money," he said, his narrow eyes turning on me with clear contempt. There seemed no point in telling him that I too had a personal interest in the Temple and its past. Just as I had in the Parthenon, and in King Minos' Palace of Knossos, and was no doubt as excited as he about what our work might uncover. "I was a paratrooper in the Six Day War," Chaim went on, more to the others standing around than to me. "I fought with my brothers right here in the Old City. When we recovered this ground, I wept." That ended it. Chaim wasn't digging up the Temple, he was restoring it. We returned to work in cold silence, I at the bottom and he at the top; and day by day, as the tear-soaked earth of |
