All Our Broken Idols

by Paul M. M. Cooper

  ‘Got something there?’ Salim’s voice called out from a distance. Katya jumped. She heard his footsteps crunching behind her, and his nephew hurrying along behind him.

  ‘Some human remains,’ she murmured, hearing her voice a million miles away. ‘The looters uncovered them. And a week’s worth of headache.’

  Her hands felt buoyant. Not now, she silently begged. She watched helplessly as Salim and Athir came over to where she stood in the hole and looked around the scarred site. Salim kicked a piece of shale so it skimmed across the dust.

  ‘Turns out the guard we had on the site last night wasn’t the usual one. No one can track him down, used a fake name. No surprises there. I’m sorry you have to deal with this.’

  ‘It’s fine. Good material for when I write my tell-all.’

  ‘Just catalogue the damage for now. Piece together the fragments, try and put a story together.’ He turned to Athir. ‘You’ll have to deal with this one day. Get out while you still can.’

  Katya tried to think through the fog descending on her.

  ‘Do you see that white dusty deposit everywhere?’ she said. ‘What is that?’

  ‘Yes, that is strange,’ Salim said, but he didn’t seem to be paying full attention. ‘Take a sample and we’ll get it tested. I’ll get Giulia and Martina over here for the next few days, help you put this mess back together.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Salim peered down into the hole beside her, where the hand still jutted from the wall.

  ‘Oh, look at that. Poor bastard. Looks like he scared the looters off.’

  ‘Yeah. Could be from the day Nineveh burned.’

  Even as she said each word, she felt that she had said them already, that she was repeating all this, just as it had happened before.

  ‘Could be. That’s exciting, though. Let’s get the human remains excavated and back to the museum. We can do tests there, find out more. Hey, are you sure you’re okay?’ Salim said, eyeing her.

  ‘Yeah. Just tired. The stress.’

  ‘Okay. Take care of yourself. This place can take its toll on people.’

  ‘Thanks. I will.’

  ‘And by the way, Dr Malik is threatening to take us out on his boat soon. To see the bridges. It’s best to practise your interested expression now.’

  Katya laughed, and he gave her only the slightest look.

  ‘Come on,’ he said to Athir. ‘Let’s show you what a proper soil profile looks like.’

  The young man nodded at Katya. She noticed that he had the same crinkles to his eyes as Salim when he smiled. She sat slumped against the edge of the hole with the body beside her, and listened with relief to Salim and Athir walking away. The thrum of their engine started up, tyres crunching the grit. She looked down at the leathered fist extruding from the earth. The aura had faded a little, and her head felt clearer. Maybe it was a false alarm after all. Katya crouched down into the hole again and let the white dust filter between her fingers. She took a sample in a plastic tube. Then she reached out and touched a finger of the mummified hand. It was dry as bark.

  The seizure hit without warning. She had only enough time to brace herself against the rough trench wall. Her last thought before the black fell over her was of the hand in the hole, clenched over something she couldn’t see.

  The world came back gradually, like water seeping through karst. Katya found herself shivering cold in the looter’s hole, with a dog nosing down at her from the pit edge. She didn’t know how long she’d been out. It was usually only ten minutes or so, but now the sun was high overhead, pale white through the cloud, and the day’s cold had sunk right through to her bones. She pulled herself out and got on with her work.

  Over the following days, Katya joined up the looters’ holes into an organised trench, and excavated the rest of the body. Around the remains, she used the long brush that let her sweep delicately through the dust, and took photos from all angles. She wasn’t an expert in this kind of analysis, but she thought the body was male. It was huddled in a foetal position, with that one hand reaching out. His teeth were visible in the partially mummified skull, the hair still curling black and lifelike. As she examined the area around the body, Katya found traces of wood and charcoal, rushes and large plant fibres. On the skeleton, she found marks of trauma along the rib bones and a cleave in the skull, along with an iron chip as though from an axe or sword. She stood up and felt the echoes of that day in the air around her: the day Nineveh burned. She could almost smell the smoke, the shouts of men bursting in with weapons. As the day went on, the wind picked up and the body disintegrated. Katya covered her mouth, but at times she found herself swept up in a whirlwind of corpse dust. Pieces of human grit stuck to the sweat on her forehead, got in her teeth. She found this horrible at first, but you can’t find something horrible for ever. She couldn’t shake the feeling of excitement: the magic of finding someone who had been completely lost, the joy of uncovering them, bringing them back into the air.

  As Katya sketched and photographed, she kept coming back to that hand, the one that seemed to be gripping on to something; the way it reached out as though to hand her something. The transportation of the body was painstaking but successful. Back in the museum that evening, her face still greasy with dust and suncream, Katya and Salim laid the human form out on the steel table.

  ‘His teeth show signs of dental microwear,’ she said, pointing with the end of a pen. ‘A carbohydrate-rich diet. Lots of grains most likely, marks from the accidental chewing of stones in food. So probably quite a poor upbringing at least. Some signs of wear around the wrists and elbows, some kind of repetitive strain perhaps. And look: he had curly hair.’

  ‘Like me,’ Salim said, pulling one of his locks. Katya crouched down and pointed to the clenched and blackened hand.

  ‘I’ve written up everything else. Some pollen and phytoliths under the microscope. But … I think there’s something in there. Clenched in his hand.’

  ‘You’ve got it all photographed and recorded?’

  ‘Yes, all done.’

  ‘Let’s try it then. See if we can get that hand open without too much damage.’

  Katya leant in, heart beating. She took some tweezers and tested the give of the knotted fingers, gently teased them apart. She was right: she could just make out a small object clenched inside, caked in black mud. As the fingers pulled apart, the flesh the consistency of chipboard, the object fell out into her palm. It was a cylinder of greenish stone. Katya gave an intake of breath.

  ‘It’s a cylinder seal,’ she said, brushing some of the dried mud from its surface. Salim whistled.

  ‘That’s a nice find.’

  Katya had seen objects like this in museums. They were peculiar to Assyria and Babylon: a roller carved with an image designed to print into a wet piece of clay, used to seal a contract. She let the little weight roll around in her palm, feeling its cool through the latex glove.

  ‘What’s the story behind that? The way he was clutching this when he died …’

  Salim ran his tongue over the front of his teeth and looked down at the blackened body.

  ‘I don’t know. A prized possession maybe. We’ll know more about him as results come in, and we excavate more of the room, get some context.’

  ‘Not my usual kind of find,’ Katya said. ‘Plants are easier to read.’

  ‘I prefer stones,’ Salim said.

  Later that night, they picked up falafel and flatbread by way of celebration. It was a quick and furtive act like all their visits to public places. Salim made a show of being relaxed, but his eyes would move from time to time to the ends of the street, keeping watch for signs of trouble. As the vendor doled the rich amber sauce over their falafel, they talked about the find.

  ‘It’s not the first human remains we’ve found,’ Salim told her. ‘But it’s certainly the most interesting. You should be proud.’

  He told her about other bodies he’d uncovered, excavating in Babylon and Uruk. Katya
told him about a tomb she’d helped uncover two years before in Greece: the bodies of two young people, a man and a woman, both with garlands of olive leaves and blue cornflowers around their necks.

  ‘What is it about the plants?’ Salim said. ‘When everyone else dreams of finding brass earrings and arrowheads and lost cities …’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s their secret languages. They way they talk to each other in ways we’re only just beginning to discover: chemical secretions in the soil, pulses of electromagnetism. These silent conversations going on beneath the surface. And the secrets they hide. Did you know that the Colosseum in Rome used to be covered in plant life, before the Fascists stripped it bare? A wild and overgrown garden where people gathered hay and herbs. African plants grew there, some so rare they weren’t found anywhere else in Europe. The Victorians thought they might have been brought there on the fur of lions brought to fight in the arena.’

  ‘And what do you think?’

  ‘It’s a nice story. Sometimes that’s more important than the truth.’

  European football played on a fuzzy television in the corner. On top of the refrigerator, a bird flitted frantically in a cage, a dried piece of orange rind hanging inside. While they ate, Salim told her some Iraqi jokes.

  ‘A prisoner asks if the prison library has a certain book. “No,” the guard replies. “But we have the author.”’

  ‘Oh god.’

  ‘The Vice President asks the President, “How will you say goodbye to the people?” The President looks confused and replies, “Why, are they going somewhere?”’

  ‘That’s the worst one yet,’ Katya snorted.

  ‘They’re all like that. I have hundreds more.’

  The whole time, whenever Katya felt lost in the moment, she would think about the body in the earth. The evening sun caught Salim’s curls, and she would think about that hair curling out of the dust; he handed her the wrapped falafel, and she thought about the dry hand with its broken fingers clutching the seal, reaching out through the ages.

  It got colder. The nights were freezing, and there were daily blackouts – sometimes only a few hours, sometimes most of the day. Katya heard gunfire in the city some nights, Kalashnikovs like chattering birds. Some evenings the whole dig team went to a local shisha café and played dominoes while Iraqi pop music played. That’s when she started seeing her father in the city, too. It happened once or twice at first, on the drives. She’d see a man in a white shirt or a dishdasha, on a bicycle or selling petrol at a roundabout, and she’d think it was her dad. She felt it so strongly for a few seconds, and she’d crane her neck to see as they passed.

  ‘What is it?’ Salim would ask. A few seconds, that’s all it would last. Then she’d see that it wasn’t him, sometimes that the man looked nothing like him.

  ‘Oh, nothing. I thought I saw something.’

  But each time, the feeling stayed with her, the feeling that she was being haunted, or that she herself was a ghost, immaterial, blown like a cloud of dust through the streets. On the days this happened, she would return to the museum and go down into the basement storeroom where the newly found artefacts waited to be catalogued. She would find the little cylinder seal, its greenish stone unlike all the others. How it helped her exactly she couldn’t say – but she would take it in her hand and roll it around in her palm, test its weight and let its solidity bring her back down to earth.

  The first night this happened, three months after arriving in Iraq, Katya skyped her mum for the first time. She felt guilty about not doing it earlier. Their connection was patchy and full of long breaks, but the sight of their kitchen in Coventry, of her mother and the little lemon tree on the windowsill made Katya want to cry. She felt like she could see the ghosts of it all in the background: all the arguments they’d had, her mum’s depression and her new boyfriends trying to tiptoe around the sullen teenager, the slammed doors. She put her chin on her knees and rocked on her heels.

  ‘I’m doing fine over here,’ her mum said, in a moment of clear reception. ‘There’s some flooding, all the politicians are out on the news wearing wellies. How is it out there?’

  ‘Oh,’ Katya said, not knowing where to start. ‘It’s great. I mean, I’m working hard. Finding lots of things. Look,’ she said, moving the laptop around so her mum could see. ‘I’m staying in the museum.’

  ‘Oh. Is it safe?’

  ‘I think so. I’ve uncovered a building out there.’ Her mum’s image had frozen, broken into pixels. ‘There’s this white dust all over the ground; we don’t know what it is. Also I found a body. He could be twenty-six centuries old, left over from when the city was destroyed.’

  ‘What are you – I can’t –’ her mother’s voice stuttered at her down the line. ‘I’m sorry I can’t hear you.’

  ‘It’s okay, Mum, don’t …’

  Her cat Hugo jumped up on to the table and walked in front of the camera, curling his spine around her mum’s arm. She thought of the sensation of his fur under her fingers. Her mum tutted as she lifted him down.

  ‘Is it what you wanted, Kat?’ her mum’s voice buzzed. ‘Is it how you imagined?’

  ‘It’s better,’ Katya said. ‘I don’t know how to describe it. I feel closer to him – Dad – just being here. Like I’m still getting to know him, even after he’s gone.’

  ‘Oh, Kat. You sound so like him sometimes. He’d be proud of you, you know? If he could see you. Your father’s daughter.’

  ‘Thanks, Mum,’ she said, but the image had frozen again, and she didn’t know if she’d heard. They gave up a few minutes later, waving goodbye in the brief bursts of movement.

  ‘Please look after yourself, Kat. Please stay safe.’

  Later, when she slept, Katya dreamed of her dad standing in the city of Nineveh as it burned. She screamed to him, ‘Get out of there!’ But they were in different times, and he couldn’t hear her. That white dust coated everything around her, fine as icing sugar on his skin, and the crescent scars of the cigarette burns on his arm. He was writing something in the dust for her, something for her to find, but she couldn’t read what it said.

  Aurya

  Sharo held their father by the wrists, and Aurya looped his ankles up into her armpits. Together they carried his bulk between them, stumbling and scraping him across the unsown field behind their house, hushing each other. The moonlit world was grey-blue. Aurya tried not to look at her father’s slack face, the jaw bouncing on its hinges with every step they took. The flesh of his ankles had turned cold. Sharo gave a whimper of fear.

  ‘Keep going, Sharo. And keep quiet. We’re nearly there.’

  Aurya listened out for movements in the canebrake as they neared the bank. She could see the rushes and willow wands cut out against the blue night, the stars and bright half-moon. It was the kind of light that made her own hands seem unfamiliar, a stranger’s hands.

  ‘Aurya, please,’ Sharo was saying. ‘Aurya, I can’t.’

  ‘Sharo, hush! Someone will hear …’

  When they got halfway to the cover of the reeds, a lamp flickered to life in a nearby house. Aurya dropped her father’s legs and ducked down on the stony ground, lying flat. Sharo followed her, and their breath made little puffs in the night as they lay there and watched to see if anyone would appear in the doorway. It was the potter’s wife: she had nightmares since her daughter had died. She would light a lamp to drive away the ghosts while she prayed. Aurya counted to as high as she knew the words for. There was the smell of river water and smoke, along with vomit and urine from their father. The dry reed of tears rustled in the field all around, and the dawn blush grew a rind in the east. Finally the lamp in the potter’s house went out.

  ‘Let’s go, Sharo, come on!’ Aurya said.

  ‘Aurya, I can’t,’ he whispered, and she could see that he was shaking. ‘I don’t want to …’

  ‘Sharo, we have to. They’ll kill us. They’ll come for us and lash us and sink us in the river. Do you want that?’
>
  Sharo was making soft noises of terror in the dark. But he obeyed her, picked up their father’s wrists again, and together they heaved him into the forest of reeds, towards the ruin of the old village. Aurya had been here many times in her dreams. Their feet sank in puddles. Their wools caught on thorns, and the broken walls of old houses made jagged lines against the sky. More than once, she thought they’d taken a wrong turn, that they would be lost out there with their father’s body and the ruined ghosts until morning.

  Finally they reached the pit. Aurya and Sharo crept to the edge, peered down into the blackness. At first Aurya could see nothing. Whether it was her eyes that adjusted, or whether the moon came out from behind the clouds, she began to make out the shapes of everything below, the heaps of food waste and excrement and broken objects piled up against the pit edge. In the centre, she realised with a shudder that the massive black shape she was looking at was the trapped lion. It was completely still, looking up at her: a night dweller, awake now. It shook its great head, and she could just make out the hairs of its mane shifting like waterweed. Then it let out that baleful sound that made Aurya want to crawl inside herself.

  ‘It’s hungry,’ Sharo said beside her. Aurya thought she might faint.

  ‘Sharo,’ she said, with a pale voice. ‘Help me do it.’

  Her brother crouched behind their father’s bulk, rolling him by the shoulders and belly, while Aurya moved his legs one by one, so they didn’t cross over and stop him. The moonlight caught their breaths as they worked. Aurya could hear the lion’s noises in the pit below, pacing, sniffing the blood in the air. At the point where the ground sloped down into the pit, their father rolled on his own. At the edge, he teetered, came to rest on the very lip. He hung there, between here and the underworld, and then he tipped over and disappeared into the dark. There was a beat of silence, and then a crunch. Aurya burst into breathless, exhausted sobs. There was a growling breath from the lion, and then moments later a sound like tearing cloth. Aurya prayed: