She felt Dror watching her. She met his eyes; his gaze flattened and moved elsewhere.
The mighty Roman army—the guide intoned—which had vanquished all of Jerusalem in a matter of days, staged a siege for more than a year in this searing desert before it succeeded in bringing about the fall of this small community of Jews atop Masada. While the Romans suffered in the heat below, the Jews above drank the plentiful water from the cisterns and lived off food stores laid away by the notoriously paranoid Herod. The Roman camp called for reinforcements, brought in engineers, rationed water—all to defeat the last tiny gathering of Jews still daring to practice their own religion. And when the massive Roman division had at last completed an earthwork to breach the walls, and as the Roman soldiers prepared battering rams and lit fires around the mountaintop, the Jews finally knew their situation was hopeless. Their leader, Eliezer, gathered the men. It was time, Eliezer said, to deny the Romans the chance to murder or enslave them. “Let us at once choose death with honor,” the guide recited, “and do the kindest thing we can for ourselves, our wives, and our children, while it is still possible to show ourselves any kindness.” Each man, Eliezer urged, must kill his family. Then, in an order to be determined by lot, the men would slaughter one another. The final man standing would kill himself—but only after setting fire to the food stores so that the Romans would be denied that prize. Only one food storeroom and water cistern would be left intact, to mock the Romans with its bounty. Let the Romans find the food and the brimming cistern, and the bodies tenderly laid in a row. Let them know that the Jews had chosen death, rather than slavery to the Romans and their gods.
Not long after, when the Romans broke through the walls expecting a pitched battle, they found themselves facing smoke and silence.
The guide pushed himself off the stone wall he’d been leaning against. Today, he told them, Israeli soldiers are sworn in at dawn on this mountaintop to the motto “Masada shall not fall again.”
On all sides, the plains below them wavered in the heat to the far horizon.
“Still,” Avi, the short, stringy American, muttered to two of his fellow volunteers, “how can anyone kill someone they love?”
The guide glanced up sharply.
Avi, reddening—he hadn’t meant to be overheard—nonetheless continued. “I mean—what sort of man can do that?”
Dror let out a small sound. He dropped his cigarette and ground his heel hard into the dirt. Pocketing the butt, he turned away from the American.
That guide said nothing for a moment. Then he spoke in a low, quick voice. “Have you ever had to contemplate letting loved ones die at the hand of someone who hates them?”
The American, silenced, turned to the view.
Checking his watch, the guide motioned with his head toward the Snake Path. The volunteers began the descent without another word. In single file, they picked their way toward the desert floor.
Ahead of Helen, Dror jogged down the twisting footpath. Next in line behind him, she followed heedlessly, matching his punishing pace regardless of the sliding of her feet on the steep pitch, the sun pounding her head. Twice someone called her name from the slow-moving line behind her, but she didn’t turn. With each jarring step she slipped free of the first century and martyrdom, the grisly story sliding off her hot skin as she let gravity carry her down the mountain. Dror met each turn of the path as though he’d been born to this—his birthright to run down a mountain without breaking his neck. She knew she was unsafe at this pace, but she didn’t slow. She didn’t care if she broke a bone. She wanted to break a bone. She wanted to wing down this mountain and stumble through all this stark parched bright impossibly romantic desert air to break herself on those stones. So he’d have to stop at last and speak to her.
The mountain was running out on her, her legs pounding, the flat plain approaching with fearsome speed. She didn’t know what she would do if she caught up to Dror, only that it was urgent that she do so.
He disappeared into the bus.
She stopped in the lot, her breath loud in the silence. Slowly the heat claimed her, as if some essential boundary between her body and the desert had been erased. She stood, heart beating steadily, as the footsteps of the rest of the group became audible on the rocky path.
Halfway to Ein Gedi, she rose from her seat and made her way to the front, where the guide was tracing a route on the map with his nicotine-stained thumbnail and conferring with the driver. When the guide looked up at her, she wasted no time on pleasantries. “If all the Jews died,” she demanded, “how do you know what happened up there?”
The man tapped his worn map and sighed. Atop Masada, he’d been solemn. Now his grave demeanor had spent itself. Brusquely he said, “The historian recorded it. Josephus Flavius. And Josephus knew because two Jewish women, one old and one young, hid in a cave with some children during the killing. In their cowardice they were caught and made slaves by the Romans, and the women told their story to Josephus.” As the bus rounded a shuddering curve the guide squinted at the roadside, drew on his cigarette, and exhaled meditatively past Helen’s face. “They were traitors. But they did at least the good of keeping the story alive.”
Someone in the back of the bus was complaining about a stuck window. Someone else began to sing and was silenced by a volunteer who said she had a headache.
“Why?” Helen said.
“Why what?” The guide, who had turned to speak with the driver, glanced back at Helen.
“Why were those women traitors?”
From the corner of her eye she saw Dror look up sharply from his seat across the way, but she didn’t turn to him. “Why was it cowardly to want to live?” she charged.
The guide gave her a weary look. With a slow shake of his head, he returned to his conversation with the driver.
On the lurching walk back to her seat she passed Dror, who paid her no mind.
That night on the base she felt a wild disappointment. For the first time she considered leaving. The desert that she’d imagined speaking to her in fact spoke a language she didn’t understand at all, a foreign tongue of whispers and implications.
She left her bunk. The night breathed traces of desert plants whose names she’d never know. The single bright bulb outside the dining hall lit the eyes of a jackal on the far side of the fence and she turned from it. The silence of the base had deepened to its midnight pitch. A man appeared from the far side of the dining hall, a uniformed figure. He approached her with a hesitant step, the cast on his arm catching the dim light. An impulse took her—to run from the sight of him.
But she hesitated, and he was in front of her. He stood perfectly motionless, as though to compensate for having fled down a mountain to escape her.
She lifted her chin like a soldier standing at attention—she meant to mock him. The air between them was alive. She could feel him through it.
A question passed over his face. Then he stepped forward and kissed her.
The night sky shone beyond the horizon of his tight, dark curls. Her hand, rising, found only the plaster encasing his arm, cool and smooth as though he were made of stone or weathered bone.
A breeze. A lone cypress bent, occluding the stars.
Then, with a hushing sound, the cypress swept back over the sky’s thick stars and she found the living skin of his inner arm, then his warm body reaching, and something gave way.