by Tracy Barone
“Finally, we’re back to prostitutes…”
“Riley, since you’re eager—define prostitute. As we know it today.”
“A prostitute has sex for money and it’s illegal, except, I think, in Vegas. Although there are other ways to prostitute yourself, for power or grades, for example.”
“Let’s say, ‘to offer sexual intercourse for money.’ From a Judeo-Christian perspective, the holy woman becomes a prostitute, the powerful woman a slut. When we use the word virtue—the virtue of a woman—it’s immediately linked to virginity. But imposing one concept of virtue on another isn’t what we’re supposed to do in a democratic society—that would be like having a national religion, right? So how we define words is affected by the prevailing point of view.” She calls on a reedy kid who has had his hand up for a while.
“It comes down to what’s moral. That’s not something that shifts based on the times. I’m Catholic and I believe there is something wrong with prostitution. Back then and now.”
“Mesopotamian families didn’t have the structure and assumed relationships of Western society. You need to put your judgments and personal beliefs aside—”
“But it’s not a personal belief—the Old Testament makes it very clear that being a prostitute is forbidden. A prostitute is someone’s daughter. That’s about family structure and values.” Cheri feels increasingly dyspeptic—is it the kid, the lack of antacids, both?
“As I was saying, this class is not about a literal or religious interpretation of the Bible. If you’re interested in that, take a course in the divinity school.” Cheri moves behind her lectern to get the class back on track. “In the Abraham cycle—the original dysfunctional family story—we have polygamy, concubines, surrogacy. All legal in Mesopotamian law. Hagar was like the sacred prostitute, performing a vital function. In a tribal culture it was a numbers game; the more wives and concubines a man had, the more chances for children. The bigger the tribe, the greater chance of survival and nation building. Your next paper will be on Abraham’s sons Isaac and Ishmael. Examine their two paths. Do you stay at home and inherit your father’s kingdom, where his shadow looms long, like Isaac did? Or, like Ishmael, do you heed the call, either by circumstance or by choice, and leave home and become, like your father, a builder of your own nation?”
She can’t make a clean exit. A few students lurk around the lectern after class, trying to get her attention. There’s gifted but unlikable Rachael who wants to talk about Cheri’s book, which linked the advent of writing to the decline of the goddess. The Catholic kid, hugging his backpack like someone who never lends his books, and Riley. “My office hours are posted,” she says, walking past Rachael and the backpack kid, but she can’t shrug off Riley. “I’m serious about applying to the Near Eastern language program for grad school. I was thinking—”
“Based on how you do this semester, I’ll consider writing you a recommendation. Now can I walk in peace?”
“Thanks, but that’s not what I wanted to ask you. I heard you’re going on leave to work with Professor Samuelson on that new Mesopotamian find? I want to apply to be your research assistant.”
Cheri is surprised undergraduates have heard about Samuelson’s project. She certainly hasn’t been able to pin down the details. First, there’s Bush’s “axis of evil” rhetoric and accusations of WMDs, all of which make it impossible for Western archaeologists to collaborate with their counterparts in the museum in Baghdad. But there’s also the black hole of McCall Samuelson himself, Cheri’s department chair and head of the Oriental Institute. Samuelson has yet to specify for Cheri—a mere mortal scholar—any details of her job description and critical path until they are able to get into Iraq. “Not now,” she barks, and heads up the stairs to her office.
“They say it’s a cache of cuneiform tablets, that it could be as important as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Is it true, they could trace back to the Old Testament?” Riley tags after her. “No job would be too small. I’ll be your temple prostitute. Not funny?”
In a few seconds she’s alone at her desk, popping an antacid. Her office is anarchy. Scholarly books commingle with beach reads stacked randomly in teetering towers. There’s a poster for Rock ’n’ Roll High School signed by the Ramones; one shelf is home to the upper portion of a llama’s skull and an aqua hookah worthy of Alice’s caterpillar. Her coat is buzzing. She has several messages, most from Cici. Oh, for the freedom of the cell-free days when everyone wasn’t available 24/7. Ever since Sol died, five years ago, her mother war-dials her if she doesn’t answer right away. Then there’s a message from her editor in New York, chirping, “How’s that next book coming?” Her first book, an extended version of her doctoral dissertation, The Rise and Fall of the Goddess: Dicks, Chicks, and Mythological Cliques, reached what her publisher called the “upper mainstream,” a segment of the population Cheri knew well from Montclair—urbane professionals who thought being open-minded was listening to NPR in their luxury vehicles on their commute to work. How ironic that the people she fled from turned out to be her most receptive audience. In academic circles, her colleagues had denounced it as “populist,” likely because it didn’t have enough obscure, dense footnotes, and resented its success. Cheri sits back in her chair as the last message begins to play. It’s from McCall Samuelson’s secretary, saying he has to cancel the meeting that was scheduled for this afternoon. Again.
It’s gray and dreary outside. Hyde Park looks particularly New England-y today, its brick homes and tree branches dusted with weekend snow. Cheri has just enough time to try to track down Samuelson before heading back to the land where twins are made in petri dishes. At thirty-nine, any time off from fertility treatments counts in dog years. Her life has been co-opted by the microscopic of egg and sperm for so long now that she’s forgotten what it’s like not to think about it. She’s burned out on more than baby birds, and her career has suffered because of it. She needs to get her head back in the game and would love nothing more than to be in the thrall of something bigger. Piecing together the puzzle of humanity’s ancient past is what drew her to Mesopotamian studies in the first place. Teaching was never Cheri’s passion. It was research and translation that thrilled and sustained her. Nothing compared to holding a clay tablet in her hands, knowing she would be the first person to read it in thousands of years. Translating known languages was a cakewalk compared to the linguistic detective work of deciphering cuneiform. She’s always dreamed of being first in on a new discovery, having her translation become the benchmark for every subsequent generation of scholars. Now that she’s part of Samuelson’s team translating tablets rumored to be of biblical importance, this kind of lasting contribution is within her grasp. But first, she has to break out of the fog of infertility and pin down Samuelson about her job description.
Cheri walks past a row of Thai restaurants on Fifty-Fifth Street, heading toward the lake. She’s heard Samuelson has been meeting with someone from the British Museum but she was supposed to be his primary—and only U.S.—cuneiformist. Her husband’s words return to her: “You can’t trust someone with two last names. Pace yourself; if you get caught up in every perceived slight, you’ll run out of energy for the real heartache.”
From their accidental discovery in 1991 by a Sunni villager digging a ditch near the ancient city of Ur, the Tell Muqayyar tablets have been a tangled web of happenstance and politics. The clay tablets—most in fragments—were no sooner found than separated and dispersed on the black market. Over the years, some were confiscated and returned to Iraq’s national museum; others landed in the British Museum. They would have moldered in basements, along with thousands of other undeciphered tablet fragments, were it not for a plot twist. A cuneiform scholar from the British Museum stumbled onto one of the illegal fragments in a London antiquities shop and noted that its seal impression corresponded with a stone cylinder seal on documents he’d recently cataloged. Now it was a tale of two institutes, each with broken pieces of related texts and its own
ideas about how to assemble and translate them. Neither could proceed without the other’s fragments, so a third party was needed to mediate. Last year, when it looked like Iraq was opening back up, McCall Samuelson, as the United States’ most experienced Mesopotamian archaeologist, was tapped to lead an international team of scholars in reconstructing and interpreting the tablets. Rumors swirled that the ancient documents could trace back to Abraham. Proving that the original biblical patriarch was a real historical figure was, indeed, the holy grail of archaeology.
Cuneiform scholarship was a small and rarefied field and one that was not immune to the petty politics and social climbing that was the blood sport of academe. Many of her colleagues were vying for a spot on Samuelson’s team, and while Cheri knew Peter Martins—the scholar who had found the fragment at the London antique shop—and knew he’d put in a good word for her, it was both a relief and a triumph when she was named last month to his team. Involvement in a project of such prestige qualified her for the leave of absence she was desperate to take. It also stopped the clock on her tenure review while pretty much guaranteeing she’d receive it upon her return.
Her ears sting from the lake-locked chill and she needs nicotine. She turns her back to the wind, cups her hand, and lights up. Delicious. She tells herself she’ll quit when she’s pregnant and heads toward a green canvas awning that says The Woodlawn Tap. It’s an old journalist’s hangout, a dump known for its grilled cheese sandwiches and collection of reference books. She steps inside, walks around the horseshoe-shaped room, and spots Samuelson in his usual back booth, reading the Tribune and the Wall Street Journal in tandem. His back stiffens and he pretends not to see her. A man who functions from the neck up, he has the incongruence of the hands and thick frame of a butcher.
“Am I interrupting?” Cheri says.
“Oh, Professor Matzner,” he says, putting down his papers then clasping his sausage-like fingers together.
“I wanted to check in and see how things were progressing. I know Dennis Donohue was in town last week.”
“I’m working with quite a few parties on this, as you know.”
“And is there any news on how we might proceed? Obviously, nobody is getting into Iraq at the moment, given the current politics.”
“Fits and starts, my dear. We’ve dealt with worse blows from UN sanctions in the past. Whatever happens this time, the prudent course is to take the long view. I believe we’ll resolve the situation, just like we did in Nippur.”
“That was before 9/11. Who knows if Tony Blair has any real evidence of weapons of mass destruction, but it’s pretty clear that he and Cheney are building a case for invasion.”
“Governments may enact all sorts of Sturm und Drang, but much can slip twixt the cup and the lip. One thing experience will teach you is—know enough to know when you don’t know. Leave it to those who do.”
A waiter appears, bearing iced tea.
“Sugar, please,” McCall says, “the real stuff.” The waiter looks at Cheri, but before she can order a drink, Samuelson waves him off. “In any event, while nobody wants bloodshed, one could make an argument that a regime change—if it’s done with the framework of an international coalition and blessed by the UN—would be in the best interests of the Iraqi people as well as archaeology.” He sits back and nods, seemingly satisfied at the wisdom he has just bestowed on Cheri.
But, to the evident annoyance of McCall, Cheri charges on. “Politics aside, I’m sure you must be considering how you’d like your team to proceed until we can get access to the tablets in Baghdad.”
“There are many moving parts to consider and, rest assured, we are considering them all.”
“I understand,” she says, trying to sound calm as she clenches her hands under the table. “I’m bringing this up because, as you know, I’ve cleared my teaching schedule in the fall to be fully available to you. My publisher is waiting on my second book and I’m trying to plan my time.”
Just then, a stately man walks up to the table, holding his coat in his hand. “Professor Matzner, Dr. Donohue,” McCall says. “Professor Matzner is a cuneiform scholar and one of our professors. She was just leaving.”
“Nice to meet you,” Cheri says with a too-firm handshake, and with that, she is dismissed.
Cheri presses the gas pedal of her Jeep, listening to the engine cough and then die, cough and then die. Samuelson’s condescension infuriates her. Her hand trembles. It’s a tic, an old hangover from her love affair with amphetamines. When the engine finally catches, she drives west on North Avenue to get to the Kennedy Expressway.
“Men can’t handle women being direct. You have to appeal to his ego,” her oldest friend, Taya, had advised when she’d complained about Samuelson. “Or, better yet, make a donation. He probably chairs some archaeology foundation that needs funding. You may live like you don’t have money but you inherited a boatload from Sol so fucking spend some of it to help yourself for once. Or if all else fails, you could always fuck him.” Unfortunately, Taya’s only knowledge about the pressure points of academe came via an affair she had with a visiting professor from Russia when she and Cheri were undergraduates at NYU.
The direct approach with Samuelson had failed her before. Last March when Saddam Hussein held an international conference in Baghdad and invited leading Western archaeologists to attend, Cheri made it known that, if Samuelson was willing to break the U.S. sanctions, she’d be on board to join his staff. The official purpose of the conference was to mark five millennia since the advent of writing. But the gathering was a flashing yellow light to international scholars saying, Come back in, the water’s fine. American archaeologists knew that if the U.S. didn’t lift its embargo soon, they’d be the last in and lose the best sites. Going to the conference ensured McCall Samuelson and their university a place at the table. When her name didn’t appear on his staff list, she confronted him. “My mistake,” Samuelson said, “I presumed you would understand the politics. The Iraqi government reviews the staff list. Do you think they won’t vet and veto someone with a Jewish last name?” She pointed out that she wasn’t Jewish. Her parents were registered Catholics and she was an agnostic. “If you think that matters to Saddam Hussein and his Baathist cultural committee, you have no business being involved,” he’d answered.
Samuelson was part of the archaeological establishment. He had a long history of good relations with the Iraqi authorities prior to the 1990s sanctions—they protected his sites, gave him logistical support, helped him achieve professional fame. And as repulsive as it was, Cheri had to admit Samuelson was right. They wouldn’t have let her in for an event at Saddam’s invitation. Now, as a scholar on Samuelson’s team and with the British as a key element, it was different. She felt worse than idiotic; she felt naive.
Cheri was no stranger to being mistaken for a Jew. In her prior life as a cop in the NYPD, she’d been subjected to sniggers of “bagel bitch” and worse but refused to use the “I’m not a Jew” defense, since it implied that their anti-Semitism was wrong only because they’d made an incorrect assumption about her. She had no love for the name Matzner or the man it came from, and she had considered changing it when she married Michael. But who wanted to live her life as Cheri Shoub?
Cheri gets on the expressway bound for the suburbs. The irony is that she’d never had an affinity for babies. She didn’t know what to do with small, helpless creatures. As an adopted child, Cheri was intimately aware that some people should never have children and she was afraid she might have inherited the propensity to abandon her young. So it was a shock to her when, as she was heading toward forty, she started thinking, Well, maybe. When maybe turned into yes, she assumed reproduction was an inalienable right—you didn’t need a permit to have a child like you did to have a handgun—and her body would comply.
All roads lead to donor eggs. Cheri knows Dr. Morrison will push this as the only viable option. She’s tried everything else: four failed rounds of inseminations with FSH injection
s and two in vitro fertilizations that didn’t implant. Using eggs from a twenty-something increased her risk of multiples. Giving birth to and caring for a litter? Out of the question. She likes to think she has an open mind, but does she want another woman’s child taking root and growing inside her? What twisted strands of lineage and dysfunction would she nourish and would she be able to love whatever she pushed out of her vagina as much as if it had had her own faulty strands? Then again, she was genetic mystery meat and could have any number of unknown hereditary conditions to pass on to her child.
As she nears the exit for the expensive Fertility Gods, Cheri’s cell phone vibrates. She steadies the wheel with her knee and fishes around in her purse for her phone, almost rear-ending an old Saturn station wagon that suddenly decides to switch lanes. From the insistent buzz, she can tell it’s Cici. She finally retrieves the phone and pulls over.
Cici seems to be midsentence already by the time Cheri answers. “Where have you been, cara? You could be dead on the street, bleeding. I could have been dead and bleeding on the street.”
“Then there would be nothing either of us could do, so what’s your point?”
“What if I need something, what if I need a check, or money?” Cici shouts, just in case there’s a bad connection.
“That’s what banks are for. Or any of your bookkeepers.”
“I do not like speaking to those people, you know this, and the pug, he have diarrhea, on the Persian rug in the hallway. And Gristedes on Park, they no want to deliver, it is impossible, they deliver for fifteen years and now they say no?”
“Mom, what do you want me to do about it from here? Ask Cookie.”
“She is so smart she can change the mind of Gristedes? Why you not pick up the phone when I call? What is wrong? You sound like you are not paying attention.”