THE LECTURER
DECEMBER 1900
Thomas Gardner was an Instructor in Bible at Kenyon College. He wanted someday to be a Professor of Bible at Kenyon College. That was why he was now in the Holy Land.
“We have concerns, Gardner,” President Peirce had told him in August, before the start of the term. “There are no complaints about your teaching, certainly, but it has been two years since your last research was published, and that research has not been well received.”
“Because it was controversial, sir. My precis on the Son of God Scroll…”
“Yes, the one the missionaries are all excited about, though as you’ve argued, maybe they ought not to be. Speaking personally, I think your reading of the scroll is more likely correct than not” – as a deacon of the Episcopal Church, Peirce had put his money where his mouth was on that, recommending against treating the scroll as a prophetic text – “but Dean Everett at Harvard, and just as importantly, Hoffman at GTS say that it isn’t well supported, and they’re right. You’ll have to do more, and better, if you want a professoriate.”
“What would you suggest, sir?” Gardner asked, knowing that Peirce wouldn’t have called him into his office but to make a suggestion, and that a suggestion from Peirce would have the force of an commandment from God.
“A sabbatical, Gardner. We don’t ordinarily allow them to instructors, but you have promise, so I’ve convinced the trustees to make an exception in your case. Go dig through the scrolls yourself, read more of what the Essenes had to say, and come back with a treatise that passes Everett’s muster. Or maybe you’ll find something altogether different.”
“You’re telling me to go to Jericho, sir?”
Peirce had the grace to laugh. “I’m telling you to
return from Jericho. Spend a year and come back to us with the scholarship I know you can produce.”
And that was how, on the thirty-first of August 1900, the bursar had presented Gardner with a check for seven hundred fifty dollars – three-quarters of his annual salary as an instructor – and four train tickets to New York.
None of Gardner’s family were any happier about the trip than he was. His wife Martha, the daughter of a prominent Elyria family, no more looked forward to a year of nomadic life than any other faculty spouse, much less on three-quarters of what was already meager pay. But she, at least, was dutiful, as her strict Congregational parents had raised her to be. James and Sarah, six and four, were too young to be dutiful. James complained constantly of being taken away from his school and his friends; Sarah simply didn’t want to leave home.
Three months in New York hadn’t cured them. Gardner had needed to consult the libraries at Columbia University and the General Theological Seminary for background research; it took time to comb the sources he was looking for, especially when he had to translate them from Aramaic or Greek, and the living standard that three-quarters of an instructor’s salary allowed in New York City was… not high. For Gardner, life in a fifth-floor apartment with a washroom down the hall was a reversion to the way he’d lived as a student at Oberlin; for Martha it was a return to the first year of marriage she’d fondly thought she’d left behind forever; and for the children, it was a poverty far less genteel than that of a instructor’s family in Gambier. Sarah and James were biddable under ordinary circumstances, but this life wasn’t ordinary; they did their chores with reluctance, refused lessons in Hebrew and Arabic, and complained of even small things.
Three weeks aboard ship scarcely helped matters. The Atlantic was cold and stormy, allowing little time for fresh air and exercise; the family spent the first three days in seasickness and misery and the next ten cooped up in their cabin. As an academic man, Gardner was allowed the courtesy of the first-class dining room, a courtesy that mollified Martha once she was able to eat but did little for him. The conversations about travel and luxuries that he couldn’t afford, and the endless debates about whether the twentieth century was soon to begin or already eleven months old (he favored the former), grew tedious quickly, and the first-class passengers’ unconscious snobbery grated. The weather, at least, was better in the Mediterranean, but the other complaints remained.
They landed at Acre on December twentieth and took the train to Safed – or as it was pronounced here, something a little more like “Tzfat” than “Sfat.” There was an archive here containing transcriptions of all the scrolls thus far found, and other libraries to consult, so they would stay a month before traveling on to Jericho. The family could afford better accommodations – the Holy Land was far cheaper than New York City, cheaper even than Gambier – and Gardner hoped that would settle James and Sarah. It did – slightly. But Safed was also where their refusal of language lessons came back to bite; they realized of a sudden that they were in a place where few people spoke English and all the signs were in a language they couldn’t read, and took only a moment longer to realize that for most of this city, Christmas was just another day. They’d always looked forward to Christmas, and Martha’s attempts to soothe them by telling them that this Christmas would be in Jesus’s own country were thin gruel.
And so it was that on Sunday, December twenty-third, Thomas Gardner, B.A., felt very much at the end of his rope. The family had gone to church that morning, but it was a Maronite church – there were Protestant churches in Jerusalem and Nazareth, but not here – and the unfamiliar Sabbath service conducted in Arabic had made the children restless. They’d gone clothes-shopping next – another thing that made James and Sarah restless, even with the sights and smells of the market all around and the ministrations of a tailor who was obviously used to children – and after, they’d made the rounds of the stores to stock up on housewares. A cold snap had come in the day before and there were six inches of snow on the ground, which would have delighted the children in Ohio but only added to the drudgery here.
Dusk was falling, and the house they’d rented was half a mile uphill through winding streets and narrow stairways. Gardner was carrying Sarah – she’d refused to walk any farther – and James kept up a stream of complaints that took in all his grievances from the past four months. Gardner wasn’t much of a drinker – a glass of wine at dinner, maybe two if he had guests. But if he had to listen to one more such complaint before they got home, he was ready to open a bottle.
And Providence was suddenly with him, because the next sound from James was a cry of excitement.
It had been months since Gardner had heard such a cry from either child, so it took him a startled moment to realize what it was. It took him another moment to ask why, and one moment more to follow where James was looking and make the question superfluous.
There was a wooden sign by the door of one of the ancient limestone buildings that fronted a stairway between two alleys. A portrait was painted on it that any Ohioan – any American – would know instantly. And under the portrait was painted, in the Roman alphabet, “General Grant’s American Steak House.”
“Can we go in, Papa?” asked James. “Please?”
“It’ll be expensive,” Gardner began – his sabbatical coffers, already sadly depleted by three months in New York and the price of a second-class ocean voyage, could ill stand the strain. But he saw James’s face, and Sarah’s, and even Martha’s, and cut himself short. “Let’s have supper,” he said.
They entered the dining room to a blast of blessed warmth and the sound of conversation and hissing steam pipes. The walls were full of photographs of President Grant, some of them formal portraits, one of him by a derailed train with troops that were obviously local, one of him congratulating a young one-legged archer who’d won a prize at a competition. It became clear, as Gardner swept his eyes around the room, that the archer was the owner – there were photographs of him at other contests, a medal from the militia service where he’d been wounded, and above the bar, a longbow hanging below a Springfield rifle.
The owner’s son Asher saw them and came quickly, greeting them in accented but competent English – even Gardner felt warmth spread through him at the sound, as if a gift from home – and ushering them to a table near the kitchen. “It will be twenty-four piasters,” he said – “eight for the gentleman and lady, and four for each child.” That translated into dollars as less than a similar meal would have been in New York or even Gambier, but more than their daily food budget here – but maybe, this once, he didn’t have to care.
The steaks, when they came, were rare and grilled to perfection – Asher’s father, Yemeni though he was, could cook a steak as well as any Ohioan. They were accompanied by a pitcher of red Galilee wine, another of the dark beer that they brewed in the Wadi Ara, and a third of orange juice for the children. But the fixings that Asher placed, family style, in the center of the table, were less familiar: Tzfati kugel; zaatar mashed potatoes; pickled onions; artichokes; fattoush; a salad of tomatoes and boiled eggs with an herb dressing; red, green and brown zhug. They were good – zhug worked surprisingly well as a steak sauce, in fact – but evidently the “American” part of the restaurant’s name allowed some artistic license.
The owner took some license with the music too. He’d got a gramophone somewhere and, for a while, the family dined to the accompaniment of scratchy ragtime cylinders; that was certainly American enough. But when a band took over – a band whose members had obviously been to the United States, although they wore Krymchak clothes – the ragtime base was overlaid by something Tatar and the lyrics were in Hebrew.
“We’ve never had a Christmas like this, have we?” Gardner asked the children, and he saw a smile from Sarah, and an answering one from Martha. And when the owner came to greet the American guests, and offered to show James how to shoot a bow, he too was practically beside himself.
“It’s American enough?” murmured Martha.
“It seems to be.”
“There’s something I should tell you then,” she said, and, remembering moments in New York and aboard ship, Gardner realized that there was something she’d been on the edge of saying for weeks but that amid all the tension, the time had never felt right. He wondered what that could be – he and Martha had never kept secrets from each other – and waited anxiously to hear what she would say next.
“Your research will never be good enough for Everett and Hoffman, you know that? They don’t
want to hear that the Son of God in the scroll is a wicked king. They want to lead people to Christ, and for that, they need to hear that the Jews prophesied Jesus a hundred years before he was born.”
Gardner started to form a reply, but he realized suddenly that she was right. All the guff about his conclusions not having enough scholarly support – guff was what it was. It wouldn’t matter if he came back with a voice from Heaven to support his findings; the only way he would gain the accolades to become a professor was if he changed them.
But he would do that only if what he found here, and in Jericho, warranted such a change. “The way to Christ is not through lies,” he said.
“I hoped you would say that,” said Martha. “But you needed to know.”
Whatever he was going to say next was interrupted by Asher returning to the table with another bowl, and Sarah’s joyous carol of “ice cream!” And it was – citron ice cream, in fact, with a plate of jachnun and honey next to it. “From Yemen,” Asher said, “where my father’s family comes from.”
“Where is Yemen?” said James – he sounded genuinely curious.
“A long way from America,” Gardner answered. “When we get home, I’ll show you on a map, and I’ll show you how to read the Arabic for it.”
James nodded. Maybe that was all that Gardner could expect, at least for now; it was more cooperation than he’d had from James for months.
“We make American Christmas dinner,” said Asher – probably with as much license as the steak, and certainly with no ham, but the children’s eyes lit up again, and Gardner decided that the budget could stand one visit more. Who knew what the budget would be next year, after all – in the twentieth century, when he would be teaching in a different place.
