‘You are a flatterer of the worst kind, Salim!’ the doctor boomed. ‘And who needs an encyclopaedia these days? But young lady, the washing machine story is absolutely true. Follow, follow, I’ll show you around.’
‘He’s also a great expert on Mosul’s bridges,’ Salim said under his breath once the doctor’s back was turned. ‘I wouldn’t get him talking about them if I were you.’
‘I heard that!’ the doctor shouted back at them. ‘Young woman, the city of Mosul has five of the finest bridges in the whole region. Let me take you out on my boat one day to see them from the river.’
‘I’d like that.’
Salim and the doctor showed Katya around the museum. She felt overwhelmed by it all, an archaeological paradise: the statues of the kings of Hatra, and the Islamic-era ceramics with their intricate flower designs, the cylinder seals used to stamp impressions into clay. All of it secret, wrapped in plastic, revealed only for her. She didn’t stop until she reached the room with the lion hunt carvings.
‘Carved by the Assyrians from slabs of gypsum, six and a half centuries before Christ,’ Dr Malik announced. ‘Right here in Nineveh, when Athens and Rome were just villages.’
Katya followed the scene around the room: the hunting King in his chariot, the commoners gathering to watch on the wooded hill, the soldiers with their spears and dogs, the flying arrows, the lions scattered dead and dying in all directions.
‘This is King Ashurbanipal,’ Katya said, and pointed to the man in the chariot, his braided beard made up of conch-shell whirls, and his peaked crown.
‘That’s right,’ Salim said. ‘The last great king of Assyria. He built the world’s first library, conquered Egypt and Persia. And when he died, that’s when the Assyrian Empire began to collapse.’
‘The plug pulled out of a bath!’ the doctor boomed. ‘These are the greatest achievements of a civilisation, and they were made right before it disappeared for ever.’
‘Like agave plants,’ Katya said.
‘What?’
‘That’s how I’ve always thought of it. They grow for years and burst into flower only once. Right before they die.’
The doctor laughed approvingly. Salim nodded and put his tongue into the side of his cheek.
‘Yes. I like that,’ he said. Then he sagged. ‘Of course, these are just replicas. The original carvings are in London. You must have seen them.’
‘A million times,’ Katya said. ‘When I was a kid, I was obsessed. I made my mum take me every time we went to the city. She told me they came from the same place as my dad.’
That lion again, the same one from the book, leaping up to bite the wheel of the King’s chariot as spears drove into its back. That sorrow: visible in the lion’s eyes, the veins bulging in its legs, the muscular tension.
‘The lions look so real, don’t they?’ she said. ‘So full of pain.’
Salim eyed her.
‘Come on. You’ll have plenty of time to explore. Let’s go see the site.’
Katya spent the drive putting on suncream, and felt nervous the whole way there, though she couldn’t describe why. She kept thinking about the lions, pierced with the King’s arrows. Across the river, a broken scrubland rose from the lines of houses, the jagged lines of walls and towers, crumbling mud brick and stone.
‘There it is,’ Salim said. ‘Welcome to Nineveh.’
They left the car and climbed the earthen bank that was once the ancient city’s ramparts. The sun was only a pale white through the clouds but it could still burn, and Katya felt the grease of suncream on her arms and neck. They climbed up through the scrub of tamarisk, dotted with the delicate purple ziziphora flowers pushing through the rubble. Salim looked strange in this wild place, in his shirt and brogues. He had a way of bounding over the stones as they went, looking like a boy going through rock pools, and the sun gave his hair a golden tint.
‘You can see all twelve kilometres of the city wall from here,’ he said, reverence in his voice. ‘The capital of the world, in its time. That’s the North Palace, up there, and that’s where the ziggurat once stood …’
‘That must be the Shamash Gate then.’ He nodded.
‘That’s right. You should see the lamassu up there. They’re beautiful. That’s where we’ve seen the most looting, so we’ve been concentrating our efforts over there. And there’s the Halzi Gate. When they first excavated, they found dozens of skeletons there, left unburied in the streets. From the day the city was destroyed.’
‘I read about it. Lying in the gatehouse where they fell, with arrowheads still in their ribcages.’
Salim nodded.
‘Look at it: an empire that ruled for a thousand years. And then in a few short years, it was gone.’
‘The end of the world,’ Katya said.
‘And no one at the time knew that it was coming.’
They stood there for a moment and watched the wind blow over the brown land, over the rubbish and tyre tracks, loose limestone and shattered concrete pipes, blue plastic bags. While Salim spoke about the dig project, Katya tried to imagine the city in its former glory, the buildings rising up from the dust, all the people and animals, the temples and markets.
‘This way,’ Salim said with a serious note in his voice. ‘I’ll take you to see your part of the site. It was hit by looters just the other day, so that’s where you’ll start. We’ll secure the site, set up a proper dig and see what we can save.’
Katya’s site was a low mound of bare earth at the corner of two busy modern roads, rising from the middle of a dense residential area and overlooking the river. Parts of the Nineveh ruins had been built over, the new concrete city washing over it like waves over a reef, so that now white rooftops clustered all around, and a water tower loomed overhead. The ground was littered with broken stones, shredded plastic cartons and cigarette packets.
‘That’s the tomb of Jonah,’ Salim said, pointing up to an elegant minaret on a hill. ‘The people here love that mosque, so we’ve never been allowed to dig too near. But since the looters have had a go, we’ve got our opening. It’s hard to know what’s down there, but this whole hill is the collapsed remains of a large building of some kind. Some think it’s another palace, or a barracks or arsenal.’
A gnarled and ancient olive tree pushed through the crumbling wall that edged the slope. The tree’s bulbous centre was dead, with shreds of rusting chain-link fence absorbed into its body and names carved on its bark, but enough life remained for some of the limbs to put out heads of silvery-green leaves.
‘So it’s your choice where to begin,’ Salim said. ‘The looters have dug holes all over this patch. You can start over the other side of the mound, or get started here.’
Katya climbed up and examined the olive tree, its leaves rustling like foil in the breeze.
‘I’ll start here.’
Salim laughed.
‘You can take the archaeobotanist out of the lab …’
He left her soon after, and Katya spent the morning making a basic walking survey of her new site. She mapped the clumsy holes dug by the looters and got to know the bumps and runnels of the wind-blown land. Archaeology moves from the known to the unknown: she paced the site and marked on her map the mounds with the greatest promise, looking for signs of ancient architecture beneath. It was like trying to guess the shape of the sea floor by looking at the waves.
Before lunch, Katya met the rest of the dig team. She was the youngest there by a few years, only twenty-six and with the ink still wet on her PhD. The registrar was an Australian woman called Mia who wore a wide-brimmed hat and drove a rusting white jeep around the various sites, collecting new objects to be catalogued in blue crates. There were two Italian women, Giulia and Martina, and an older Iraqi couple from the south, Raad and Khawla. These two pairs kept to themselves, tending to murmur to each other in their own languages. They all sat at folding tables beneath a canopy with the site map stretched out in front of them, the contours in the land mak
ing it look like a map of the weather.
‘So the situation looks like this,’ Salim said, rolling up the sleeves of his shirt and rubbing his forehead. ‘The looting is getting worse. The gangs are getting bolder and more organised. Some could even have links to groups fighting in Syria, so they’re well-funded, well-equipped and often well-armed. We’ve got to the point where the police are afraid of them, and the army can barely put together a patrol. So our job is getting harder every day. But that also means it’s more crucial than ever. When we see evidence of looting, we secure the site. We set up a proper dig and catalogue the finds before more damage gets done.’
‘Or before we run out of funding,’ said Mia, but no one laughed. Everyone looked tired, windburnt, their faces smooth and pink as if they’d been at sea. After the meeting, they ate a lunch of rice mixed with tinned tomatoes and chickpeas that had arrived in a big stainless-steel pot, brought by a local caterer on the back of a 4x4.
‘So what other food do you get here?’ Katya asked Mia, who just chuckled and shook her head. Salim caught her eye across the table.
‘In a month without wages, don’t count the days,’ he said.
‘What does that mean?’
He broke his poker face for a moment and gave a crooked smile.
‘Just a saying around here.’
It rained at intervals, thundering on the tarpaulin. Rivulets of water poured down between their boots. As they ate, the others asked about Katya’s previous digs. She told them about her PhD in Italy, how she’d dug in ancient latrines looking for pollen particles dispersed by the plant life of the Roman hills: lavenders, basil, capers and bay. Then she told them about the Bronze Age wreck she’d excavated as a Masters student, off the coast of Lebanon: the remains of pistachios, figs and coriander mouldering in the subaqueous bottoms of clay jars, the thorny burnet used as padding for the cargo that traced the ship to its far home port. They asked her questions about palynology, ancient leaf marks and charred grains, DNA analysis and the collection of sediment cores. As she spoke, she noticed Salim listening intently, though he kept his eyes on his bowl the whole time. She savoured the gently impressed expression on his face, and returned to the thought of it many times that afternoon as she walked the site and mapped it inch by meticulous inch.
Katya managed to get online that night, using a pay-as-you-go SIM Salim had given her. She sat in her room and read the news, regretting it immediately. She learned that 300 people had been killed across Iraq that month. Journalists called it ‘a rising tide of bloodshed’, as though bloodshed was something that welled up from the earth and ebbed with the moon. She read about the bombs that ripped through busy markets and mosques, the kidnappings, the names of militias and terrorist groups she couldn’t keep track of, all reported in the same dispassionate way as they had once reported on her dad. The streets outside seemed quiet, though: the rumble of a plane high overhead, a fox or an ailing dog nearby, the soft hooting of horns. She thought longingly about the llama herds she might have seen in the mountains of Peru, and the sound the Aegean makes when it laps a pebbled beach.
Then, on a whim, she googled Salim. There wasn’t much about him online: a University of Mosul profile, and an older one from a university in New Orleans. She read them both. She learned that he was born in Iraq, but studied in the United States, and returned as a translator for the US Army, then as an archaeologist. She bit one of her nails, and then felt a flush of guilt, as though she’d been spying on him. She went into her settings, clicked ‘clear history’ and shut the laptop.
Instead, she sat and read the book Salim had given her, glancing more than once at the lion hunt carving on its front cover. She flicked to a page that had its corner turned.
‘You will never take my wife,’ cried Enkidu the wild man.
And so the King came to meet him in person, and the two prepared to fight. The two of them crashed through the streets like wild bulls. They battled until the city crumbled to broken brick and ash around them.
Finally, the King prevailed. He pinned the wild man to the ground. The men with axes rushed forwards to kill him, but the King only laughed.
‘I’ve waited all my life to meet someone like you,’ he roared. ‘A man who could give me a fair fight. And here you are! A wild man from the forest!’
He got up and offered his hand, and they embraced in the ruins. Later, the people crept from the rubble to rebuild their homes.
It was more or less how she remembered it: austere and distant, its words infused with a strange kind of brass, a cold and alien light falling over it all. Katya lay down on the mattress and listened to the sounds of mosque loudspeakers crackling into song in the city outside. She thought of every room she’d ever lived in – her room at home in Coventry full of old art projects and books on archaeology, collections of pressed flowers and paintbrushes with the bristles stuck together, the photograph of her mum and dad when they were young – her university flat in Sheffield with crumb-covered carpets and piles of clothes, photographs peeling off their Blu-tack on the walls – the room she did most of her PhD in, with the poster of a painting by Hubert Robert and the black mould working its way through the ceiling and all the plants in their pots on every surface: ficuses, bromeliads, succulents, aloes – and the way the street lights at night would shine orange through the condensation on her window. She thought about who might be living in those rooms now, and whether any trace of her was left. Then all the lights went off, making her jump. Another power cut. Salim had given her a torch today. She clicked it on and wandered out into the dim halls in her socks, her beam cutting geometries between the statues in their plastic wrappings. She tried out the echo.
‘Gilgamesh, King in Uruk!’ she shouted.
Uruku-ruku-rukuruk …
Without warning, a sudden terror filled her. She was certain for a moment that all the veiled statues were not statues at all; that the lot of them were alive, breathing, blinking beneath their coverings, completely still. She ran back through the halls, and the whole way she felt something behind her. When she got to her room, she wedged the chair back up against the door, and listened to her breathing rise and fall.
‘You’re an adult,’ she hissed to herself. ‘Get a grip.’
She got into bed and tried to sleep, but that feeling stayed with her. She kept drifting off only to feel the sensation that someone was standing in the room with her, in the shadows of the corner, watching her. She kept opening her eyes to check that no one was there. To calm herself, she did what she always did when she had trouble sleeping: she ran through her reel of memories of her dad, each one worn with use and crackling with absence.
Walking through the forest in green light, with her dad naming the birds he heard, and the leaves of the trees: beech, oak, elder. The poetries of his adopted country.
Visiting the broken shell of Coventry cathedral, a war ruin, like a cobweb of stone broken by sky.
The way he’d said McDonald’s with a G and she made fun of him for it, and then he’d say the longest Arabic word he could think of. ‘When you can pronounce that,’ he’d laugh, ‘then you can make fun of your dad.’
Katya thought of the fantasies she’d entertained when she was a child: that her dad was still alive somewhere, that he’d knocked his head and lost his memory and started living out another life somewhere with another family, that he’d been kidnapped and left on a desert island or on top of an inaccessible mountain, that he’d become a Buddhist monk in Tibet, that he’d simply fallen out of love with her mum and never wanted to return to England. How anything had seemed better than what she was being asked to believe.
After a few more days of surveying, Katya began to excavate her site. It had been a year since her last dig, and this was the first time she’d been the only one in charge. While she conducted her walking survey and met the local workers who manned the shovels and picks, she tried to find that quiet place inside herself, separate from the chaos of the world. With every step around that pat
ch of wind-blown waste, the other Katyas in Greece and Peru faded from her mind. As the days went by, she began to feel at home in her work. She loved the ache in her muscles that set in on the second morning and deepened with each day, the weight of the pick and the shovel in her hands. She was proud of the mud and spots of silt that never washed out from under her nails, and her blisters that hardened into yellow callouses. While they broke the topsoil, her team of local workers helped her and taught her some Arabic words. Mafi mushkila: no problem. Shams: sun. Ghabar: dust. They laughed at her efforts. Once around midday, she looked up from her work to see someone watching her from the shade of a faraway tree jutting out of the reed bank near the river. Katya shielded her eyes and could just make out the shape of a girl, a little iota of colour. When she next looked, the girl was gone.
Over her first week, Katya sunk the first trenches into the earth, pebbled with stones and pottery fragments. Whenever she wrote down notes, she remembered her mum always tutting about her handwriting, ‘It’s just like your dad’s.’ A series of squiggles, indecipherable to others.
As she dug down through the soil’s surface horizons, Katya imagined herself climbing down into the past. Everything was down there, if you knew how to measure it. It took only a centimetre for her dad to drive out of the desert and fly home to her. A few more, and the Internet shrunk and grew silent. Then the aircraft thinned from the skies. Half a metre down, in the lowest topsoil, the mechanised armies of Europe burned their peninsula to the ground once and then twice, nearly drowning in their own blood. A metre down, in the reddish subsoil, the railways disappeared. European armies chugged up rivers in their steamships, then back again by sail, plantations shrinking behind them. People unproved mathematics and forgot the explanations of things, then the constellations of lights that map the night winked out, and the air grew colder and clearer. Silkworms were smuggled back to China in bamboo canes. The buffalo returned in hordes to the plains of America, and its old inhabitants came with them. Another half metre, with the subsoil darkening to chestnut, and the two sides of the world undiscovered each other. Smallpox returned to the old world by ship. Great cities shrunk, and the roads that joined them faded. Forests teemed and spread. Rome burned again and again, growing each time; armies of horsemen riding back into the steppes and returning cities to life in their path. In the clay and loam of the deep subsoil, people began to worship gods who were jealous of one another, who bickered and warred among themselves.
All Our Broken Idols Page 4