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Show 217 year I took up various positions outside the frame. I began to wheeze, uncontrollably. I told Talma I had to leave. She walked me to the bus stop. The day Talma Levy fell, Chaim had come back to visit the dig. It was an unusually bright Jerusalem day, the ground soaked and shining from rain the night before, and it was Friday, payday. On Sunday and Monday I had missed work because of my sickness, stayed beneath the blankets and sweated it out; now only a lingering soupiness in my lungs and an occasional cough reminded me of my strange visit to Kiryat Hayovel. I was at the top, adjusting the rope and pulley, when I saw Chaim coming; walking carefully across the raw bulldozed soil, picking his way through rock piles and heaps of scrap iron as though they were the bones of his ancestors. He was wearing a blue flight jacket and sunglasses, and even at a distance I could see that he was inflated with some new self-importance. When he waved it was not at me. I tightened the pulley and double-knotted the rope and threw a few extra sandbags on the base of the frame before I climbed back down into the ground. The pit Talma and I were excavating had become the deepest at the dig, close to twenty feet, and I didn't want anything slipping above me. It had become the richest too, the buckets of mud yielding important new finds each day: corroded Byzantine tools and crusty gold coins and dim etchings on flat rock |