All Our Broken Idols

by Paul M. M. Cooper

  As she moved deeper, Katya uncovered steel brooches and shattered pieces of pottery, countless in number and painted in a different style at each layer. She found coins of different eras, corroded blue-green and delicate as dry leaves, weights and bone handles, a stone sickle with a chipped edge, layers of ancient rushes, bricks with inscriptions stamped into them, date stones, olive pips and animal bones. All of them secret, hidden as the inside of an apple. In the evenings, in the gloom of the museum basement storeroom, she took the objects from their crates and cleaned them, sketched them, photographed them.

  Finally, after weeks of digging, she reached it: the roof layer, charred and packed where it had caved in, cluttered with wind-blown sediment: the layer at which, twenty-six centuries before, the city of Nineveh had burned. She straightened and stretched her back, wiping the sweat mixed with suncream from her forehead. A smear of ancient ash came away on her gloves and her face.

  ‘The capital of the world,’ she said aloud, and regretted it immediately when the wind whipped dust into her mouth and she had to spit. She crouched down and brushed away the soot. There was another layer beneath it. It was strange: a soft white dust, fine like icing sugar. She made a note of its depth and consistency, and then moved on. In her lunch break, she sat on the crumbling wall and thought about the gulf of time between then and now: cavernous, large enough to swallow her own life a hundred times over. How long ago that felt, and also not that long at all.

  She stood up and saw the distant shape of that girl again, watching her from the shadow of the tree. She waved to her, and the girl ducked down and out of sight.

  At lunch, eating the same chickpeas and rice every day, Katya got to know the other members of the team. There was Giulia, who had spent ten years in Pompeii, mapping the buried streets and gardens, preserving the red-painted murals in the houses and political slogans still daubed on the walls. Then there was Martina, who had followed the ghost of the Emperor Hadrian around Europe for years before getting bored and switching to King Ashurbanipal (‘I always fall for complicated men,’ she said, shrugging). Raad and Khawla had met at the college of archaeology in Baghdad. Raad had hated Saddam with a fury, but Katya couldn’t help but notice that he admired the man’s fashion: he often wore cowboy hats and sunglasses to his dig. Khawla was fluent in ancient Akkadian and Babylonian, and could read and write in three kinds of cuneiform. She was freckled, fierce and to the point, with a lick of reddish hair poking out from beneath her abaya. Most of all, Katya spoke to Salim. He often seemed distracted, his mind on other things, but he was calm and gentle and made her feel at ease around him. He spoke about broken pieces of pot and brick as though they were intelligent, subtle creatures who understood stratigraphy and carbon dating, who found their way to their particular strata according to their knowledge. Some evenings Katya and Salim went out into the city to get falafel or chicken and rice, peeling strips from the fluffy, crackling flatbreads to eat with smoky baba ganoush.

  ‘This is the only good thing to ever come out of all the years of sanctions,’ Salim said as they sat in his favourite restaurant. He gestured to the clay charcoal ovens in the corner. ‘Iraqis never forgot how to make real bread.’

  Katya realised later that this was one of the first times Salim had ever spoken about the past. It happened more and more as they went out in the evenings and he seemed to relax around her. On another night, he spoke about his childhood, in a suburb of Baghdad, his large family and his time in the United States. She began to look forward to those evenings more than anything else, and would get an excited buzz in her stomach whenever he suggested them.

  After another week of digging, Salim came to inspect Katya’s progress on the site. It was raining heavily and drainage had never been a strength of hers: it required a broad overview of the site when she was strong on the particulars and details. Water cascaded down the hill in runnels, frothing and carrying litter, opalescent with oil. When Salim arrived, he cast a look over the trench, and the water leaking through the white sandbags lining its borders. Katya tried to brush the water from her eyes, but only smeared her cheeks with mud. A puff of steam billowed out from under Salim’s hood.

  ‘Everything okay?’ she said. He shook his head.

  ‘The looters hit the other site last night.’

  ‘Oh. Was it bad?’

  ‘Yeah, they tore up the whole place. It keeps happening, and our resources are so limited. The army’s useless. We used to be able to keep up.’

  ‘Did they get anything?’

  ‘Some writing tablets, we think. They get a lot for those. Collectors overseas give them lists of things to steal, then they go out and dig for them.’

  ‘That’s terrible.’

  ‘Yeah. A lot of poor people here, desperate for money. And criminals too. We have a guard over here at night, but he’s just one man with a mobile phone. And the police often have other priorities. Anyway, if you see any damage just catalogue it, collect what fragments you can and move on.’

  ‘What if there aren’t any fragments?’

  Salim puffed out a long fern of steam but didn’t answer. He looked down at her trench, which was filling with water. He seemed to notice it for the first time.

  ‘That looks bad.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s a long time since I had to do so much drainage.’

  ‘Don’t worry. My speciality. Let me help with that.’

  He jumped down into the trench, and she followed. The mud sucked at their boots, and the rain on their hoods made conversation difficult. Salim had to tap her shoulder to get her attention whenever he needed her to deepen a certain culvert or outlet. As they worked together, she began to feel their personal space overlap, their breaths moving through each other in the cold air. She began reading significance into every movement he made through the trench, each look or touch felt through her raincoat. Later, when they got back to the museum and brushed the mud from their faces, they each laughed at the way the other looked. When Salim said he had to go, Katya felt a faint feeling of loss tug in her chest, and she knew that she was in trouble.

  Aurya

  The day after her fight, and the day after that, Aurya kept away from Sharo. She saw him sitting on the roof sometimes, murmuring to himself – but whether he was telling stories to himself or muttering to his drawings, she couldn’t tell. She returned the matting she’d repaired to the potter’s wife, who gave her some wheat cakes in return and shook her head at Aurya’s poor clothes and thin frame.

  ‘That Tappum,’ she said. ‘Shamash bring him another wife.’

  In the evening, Aurya found Sharo’s sketches in the mud. They were all lions now: running, rearing, jumping. She rubbed them out with her foot so their father wouldn’t see. She didn’t have to worry: as it got colder, fog came in over the hills in the morning, and the rain fell in bursts, gushed in rivers down the paths to the quarry, erasing Sharo’s drawings and washing away the last dying crops in their field. The cut on Aurya’s head scabbed and swelled; she wore a headcloth to hide it.

  On the second morning, Aurya saw Nebo-Pishtim and his friends by the river. She’d gone looking for birds’ eggs and the fish she sometimes managed to trap in crescents of rocks built in the shallows. She could hear the boys sniggering but couldn’t summon the fight to go up to them. Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw something swinging from Nebo-Pishtim’s hand, but she didn’t give him the satisfaction of looking. She just tightened her grip on her fish spear and muttered bitter prayers:

  To the god of lost things

  To the god of mothers

  To the god of lightning

  She watched the boats sailing past with indistinct figures moving about on their decks, cloaks over their heads against the rain, the barges gliding lazily along the towpaths, the ships heading off to better places. She felt like the long-fingered river weeds, rooted in place but always reaching downstream. In one of her fish traps, she found a small green-backed carp flitting from side to side, trapped, thrashi
ng at the rain-mottled water in panic.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she told it. ‘I’m stuck here too.’

  She speared the fish and took it away into the rushes to eat raw, wiping her bloody hands and mouth on the leaves.

  That night Aurya woke up to hear her father screaming. This happened more often in the months when the air cooled. She lay there and listened to him shouting in his sleep about how his friends were dying, how the chariots of the enemy were circling them. She heard him throw himself awake, and then lie sobbing softly in the darkness.

  On the third day after the fight, their father came home with some tough bread, the kind made from unsifted flour. He gave it to Aurya and Sharo with eyes made flinty by shame. They knew what he wanted, and were happy to play along: they sat outside on the flat stone slab behind the house and made believe for a while that he was a good father as fathers went, who protected them and brought them enough food to eat. Somewhere in the distance a reed flute played, and their father told them riddles.

  ‘The tower is high; it is high, but it gives no shade.’

  Aurya crunched a piece of charcoal in her bread and spat it out.

  ‘A sunbeam,’ she said. Her father grunted.

  ‘You’ve heard it before.’

  ‘No, I haven’t. It’s easy. It’s high, but it doesn’t give shade.’

  The rings under his eyes were dark as a bruised reed, and his lips were cracked.

  ‘Too clever for a girl,’ he croaked. ‘Fine, try this one. Like a fish in a fish pond; like troops before the King.’

  Aurya shrugged.

  ‘A broken bow,’ Sharo said.

  ‘The boy’s got it,’ their father grunted, put out by their good guesses.

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ Aurya said.

  ‘Maybe not to you,’ their father said, and laughed. It was an ugly sound, like a plough going through mud, but as they sat there and joked, Aurya felt like they could have been some other family.

  ‘King’s men coming tomorrow,’ their father said, stroking the surface of the stone. ‘The carters from downriver say it’s a whole royal flotilla: soldiers and slaves and all. You know what that means?’ Neither Aurya nor Sharo spoke. ‘It means the King himself could be with them. Imagine that: King Ashurbanipal passing down the river and stopping at our little village. And to buy stone from your father! Make sure you don’t embarrass me, children. You know what I mean: dirty clothes, begging them for food. And fighting.’

  Their father leant over and narrowed his eyes. Aurya realised too late that she’d forgotten her headcloth.

  ‘I’ve noticed the two of you haven’t been talking,’ he said, through a mouthful of bread. ‘Which means you’ve been causing trouble.’

  He took her chin in his dry, hard hand and inspected the wound on her forehead like she was a damaged piece of stone, turning her head one way, then the other. He breathed loudly through his nose and swallowed.

  ‘This isn’t going to help your bride price.’ Aurya shook her head free of his grip and spat another piece of grit from the bread, a stone this time. She recognised the warning signs by now: every time the demon scratched on the inside of his skull, his eyes gave a little flutter. They were doing that now.

  ‘Not going to tell me what you’ve been up to? Well, you know what I say: punish first, find out later.’ He brandished his bread at them both like a judge’s baton. The air felt heavy with anger, the smell of old reed matting and the promise of rain. Then he seemed to remember that he was trying to be kind, and rubbed his forehead with the thick slab of his hand.

  ‘Do you know there’s a lion in the old village well?’ he said after a while. ‘A beast of the high hills. And what do the watchmen do about it? Someone ought to split that monster’s skull.’

  He jabbed out, invisible spear in hand. Sharo give a gasp, and Aurya’s heart sank. Sure enough, their father rounded on him.

  ‘What? Are you frightened of a half-starved lion?’ He laughed, that sound again, like stones falling down the quarry wall. Aurya could hear that demon scratching in the sudden high pitch of his voice, its long nails on the inside of his skull. He jabbed a finger into Sharo’s chest. ‘Look at you, moaning like a dove in its hole, and nearly the size of me. Always drawing your pictures in the mud. Yes, I’ve seen those, though your sister tries to hide them. When the next war comes, the recruiters will have you, be sure of that. They’ll march you out into the desert to fight the scavengers, or up into the hills, to Elam. Then you’ll know fear, boy. The mountain men creeping through your tents at night with knives. I should just throw you down there with the lion and get it over with.’ He turned on Aurya. ‘What about you? Not defending him any more?’

  She took her last mouthful of bread.

  ‘I’m going to the river.’

  ‘With your belly full of my bread!’ Her father made to swipe at her. She jumped out of the way, feeling the whoosh of air from his hand. Aurya ran across the field, where the plant that people called ‘the reed of tears’ had begun to crack through the earth everywhere.

  ‘Scurry all the way to the Bitter River if you want!’ he shouted after her. She gave only one look back at the house, and saw her father already cuffing Sharo around the head.

  ‘Stop blubbering!’ he was shouting. ‘Do you think a soldier cries?’

  Aurya ducked into the thicket and set off to the river. But instead of heading to the bank, something made her veer off in the other direction. She crept towards the old village ruins, past the little reed shrines people hid out there. When she reached the pit, she covered her mouth with her shawl and sat on the edge. The lion at the bottom looked even more starved and wretched than it had before. Its eyes were closed, but mist was still rising from its jaws and curling in the air. The shaggy tufts of its mane caught the gold in the sunlight, and its black beard was matted. Its ribs showed now, its hide scabbed with fly bites and white maggots curling from the wound on its foot. She took in its greyish pelt, the fold of skin hanging down the length of its belly, and wondered: what led it here? Did a larger male chase it from its mother, send it slinking down from the hills? Or had hunters pursued it with dogs and fire until it forgot its way home? Aurya sat on the pit edge and tried to feel triumphant about its suffering. She looked at the lion’s claws, and thought of them tearing at her mother’s clothes, those jaws clenching on her mother’s throat. But somehow the sight just filled her with pity.

  ‘If it wasn’t for your kind, I’d have a mother now,’ she called down to the lion. The animal didn’t move. Aurya picked up a pebble and hefted it in her hand. She threw it and hit the lion between the shoulder blades. She expected the beast to let out a great roar and gnash its teeth, but it just flinched and gave a little whine, its shoulders darting together and then slipping back down. It covered its head with one paw.

  When she got back to the house after sunset, Aurya found that her father wasn’t there, and Sharo was asleep on the sagging roof despite the cold. Her brother always slept turned away from the river and the farmers’ houses running along its other bank: the two of them used to go from house to house on that side, trading gypsum charms for grain, and Sharo could remember in perfect detail the pattern of bricks in each house, the woodgrain on their beams, their interlacing of roofing reeds. When he slept, he always faced the quarry and the hills that he’d never climbed, which sat in his memory as a dark and peaceful land.

  Aurya went up and lay down next to him, and saw fresh bruises on his arms and neck. She watched his sleeping back breathe against the evening stars, each one of which he had given its own name, each one’s position he knew with his eyes closed.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, but she didn’t think he could hear her. After a while, the trembling overcame her, and she crept back downstairs and curled up alone.

  The next thing Aurya remembered was someone gently shaking her awake. She grunted, and pain ran through her forehead like a pounded nail. A dark form loomed over her. She knew by the beer smell that i
t was her father. One of his hands was running a twine of her hair through his fingers.

  ‘You have hair just like your mother,’ he said, and it wasn’t a whisper so much as an intake of breath, as if he’d never noticed before. She tried to move and found the weight of him was pinning her down to her mat.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she breathed. Then his heavy hand swung down and struck her across the face. She cried out. Her vision swam, her ears ringing.

  ‘What happened to the necklace?’ His weight crushed into her painfully.

  ‘I don’t –’

  He hit her again, the other cheek this time, and the taste of an axe head filled her mouth.

  ‘You never let me sell that necklace. Such a cheap thing, and you never let me. It always reminded me, seeing it …’

  Her father’s other hand went to her cheek. It was smooth and dry, like old stone, and she flinched away from it.

  ‘Shh shh shh,’ he said, spraying spittle. ‘Sharo told me what happened. You know he hates it when I hit him. And he can’t lie either. Can’t lie. He told me some boy took it. Or maybe you gave it away. Is that what happened? You gave the necklace to a boy you liked? You’re becoming a woman now …’

  ‘Get off me,’ she said, and heard how tiny her voice was beside his. Barely a breath.

  ‘What’s the matter? You know I’m going to stop drinking, Aurya? Just one last celebration, just one last – and then I’ll stop. Like you’re always telling me. You’ll get a fine price. You’re so like your mother, you know. So good.’