All Our Broken Idols

by Paul M. M. Cooper

  ‘The police say there was a mix-up with the scheduling of guards. Another one. Funny the looters knew all about it too.’

  They made a map of the scarred site, marking little x’s where damage had occurred. Salim’s pencil jabbed angrily at his clipboard with each one. Dr Malik moved about the ruins with difficulty, the wind wrapping his dishdasha bandage-tight around his body. Dust and litter blew around him, and he gestured at the old tyres and water cartons, the plastic bags and shreds of barbed wire, the broken pipes and bricks.

  ‘So much rubble,’ he mourned.

  ‘I know,’ Salim said. ‘We’ll have to clear it before excavation can continue.’

  ‘Clear it, clear it, yes,’ the doctor said. ‘And there’s so much inside us too, Salim. Don’t you feel it building up every day?’

  When the doctor left, Katya and Salim continued working alone. They didn’t talk much. Since he’d told her about the dig coming to an end, something in Salim seemed to prickle and withdraw behind a shell of professionalism. She watched him as he moved around the site in his usual crisp shirt and wide hat, trying to guess what he was thinking.

  ‘There’s still this white dust turning up everywhere we dig,’ Katya said, trying to knock him out of his silence. ‘Have you heard anything back from the lab about that?’

  ‘No, nothing yet. I’ve chased them about it, and they say maybe next week.’

  Salim didn’t meet her eyes, and he crouched down in the trench. He ran some of the dust through his fingers. It had a silver sheen to it in the light.

  ‘Sometimes you shouldn’t hope too much for answers,’ he said, and shook his head, then sniffed. ‘I’ve found that out too many times. The stories down here aren’t the kind that end neatly.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she said. He took off his sunglasses, and she saw genuine sorrow in his face.

  ‘This place. Sometimes it’s all too much. Sometimes … I don’t know. It breaks my heart. It feels like something’s trying to claw its way out of the earth here. Does that sound crazy?’

  ‘Yeah, a little,’ Katya said. ‘It sounds like something Dr Malik would say.’

  Salim laughed coldly.

  ‘Yeah, it does.’

  They worked for the rest of the day to uncover what they could. Salim rolled up his sleeves. He swung the pick hard into the earth so his shoulder blades moved beneath his shirt, darkened by wings of sweat. They talked as they dug, or rather Katya talked: she told Salim about phytoliths, the microscopic silica skeletons of plant material that helped her map the seasonal work of a Neolithic village in Greece. She felt his mood improve as they catalogued the positions of lost objects, built their map of the damage. Later, in the car going back, he was quiet.

  ‘What will you do after?’ Katya asked him, as they drove across the river. ‘Once the dig is over?’

  She didn’t mean it to sound as sad as it did. He shrugged.

  ‘There’s always something more. Always more work to do. I’ll go back to Baghdad, look for more funding. What about you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Find another dig. Keep going until I’ve got enough to write a book, settle down and teach. You’ll have to let me know if you’re ever in London.’

  He nodded and looked sideways at her briefly.

  ‘I will.’

  ‘We can go and see the lion hunt carvings together. The real ones.’

  ‘I’d like that.’

  When they parked outside the museum, Salim reached into his pocket.

  ‘Oh, I nearly forgot,’ he said, and took something out. It was a little bottle of argan oil, the kind with a yellow label that Katya remembered her dad keeping in their bathroom cupboard at home. She felt overwhelmed at the sight of it suddenly.

  ‘Oh, my god. How did you find it?’

  ‘It’s everywhere here. Thought it might help bring back the past.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Before she could stop herself, she leaned over and hugged him. They were both covered in sweat, grit and dust from digging, but she felt the muscles of his shoulders against her hand, and something moved low in her belly.

  ‘I’m going to miss you,’ she said. He nodded. Katya got out of the car and he pulled away, drove off into the evening. She sat down on the museum wall and unscrewed the bottle of oil. She took a breath, and memory came back to her in flashes of sensation: summer in their kitchen, lying on her dad’s chest as a young child and watching the TV, him teaching her how to play football. The way he’d had nightmares sometimes and cried out in the night.

  ‘I waited for you,’ a voice said behind her, and Katya jumped. It was Lola, standing on the street outside the museum, keeping her distance from the guards and holding a blue plastic bag.

  ‘Oh, Lola. It’s good to see you.’

  ‘Yes,’ the girl said, with no inflection. ‘You were digging. But now we can go to the park.’

  Katya hesitated. She remembered her promise to Salim, never to go out on her own. But she’d spent months locked up in that museum, and this might be one of her last chances to see the city before going home. And anyway, she wasn’t alone. She nodded.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  They walked around the museum to the shade of the park and found a bench beneath a palm tree that was bending over a broken concrete fountain. A group of teenagers in jeans lounged on a rug beneath the tree, passing a shisha pipe. Lola opened her plastic bag and took out some grease-darkened newspaper wrappings.

  ‘This is for you,’ Lola said.

  Inside were two stuffed aubergines, the smell of mint, spices and oil rising off them. Katya felt her mouth begin to water.

  ‘Thanks,’ Katya said. ‘You made this?’

  Lola nodded.

  ‘This one is for me.’

  Katya ate it messily, with her hand cupped beneath her chin to catch falling pieces, which made Lola giggle. It was delicious, full of smoke and rich tomato flavours.

  ‘How is it?’ the girl asked as they ate.

  ‘It’s good!’

  ‘No, how is it?’ She made a spade motion. ‘Digging, digging.’

  ‘Oh, the digging,’ Katya said, rubbing the callouses on her palms. She thought of what Salim had said about the looters employing spotters and spies. But she felt she could trust Lola. ‘Yeah, it’s okay. But people keep coming in the night and stealing things from the ruins, destroying everything. Breaking things. I haven’t seen you out by the tree for a while.’ Lola shook her head.

  ‘It is so busy.’

  ‘Why do you stand out there?’ Katya asked. ‘Why are you so interested in the archaeologists?’

  ‘I want to be one, one day. I want to be an archaeologist.’ Lola moved slowly over the rough terrain of the word.

  ‘You can be,’ Katya said. ‘Come and visit one day, and I’ll show you around. You can see how we protect the site. How we dig.’

  ‘When you find treasures,’ Lola said through a mouthful, ‘you take them back to your country?’

  ‘We’re not looking for treasure,’ Katya said, swallowing. ‘We’re looking for pots, tools, the walls of people’s homes, the food they ate, so we can find out the stories behind them. I look for plants mostly. Organic remains.’ She picked out a seed from one of the aubergines, and held it out on her nail. ‘I could find a little seed like this in a broken pot and that could be worth more than any treasure. We could trace its path back through ancient trade routes, decode its DNA, paint a picture of the world as it was all those years ago. Sometimes the rubbish dumps of ancient people are more interesting than their palaces. That’s why the looting hurts us so much. People disturb the objects, take them out of their context. They break the story that’s been waiting for thousands of years to be told.’

  ‘But if you find something. A treasure,’ Lola insisted, rubbing her fingers together to show value, ‘you will take it.’

  ‘No. In the past that happened,’ Katya began. ‘These days it would stay right here. So you can visit it in a museum.’

 
; Lola didn’t seem to hear. She was distracted by two older men wearing keffiyehs who walked past, talking and gesturing at the museum building nearby. She laughed and covered her mouth.

  ‘They are talking about you,’ she said. Katya looked after the men.

  ‘What, why?’

  ‘They say that the museum is … maskoon. It means someone is living there.’

  ‘Oh. Word travels fast.’

  Lola nodded.

  ‘Yes. Maskoon. It also means “haunted”.’ She pulled a mock-scared face.

  ‘Great.’

  A warm breeze shifted, and the palm fronds overhead rustled in the silence that stretched out between them. Katya thought about telling Lola that she wouldn’t be around much longer, that their dig was coming to an end. She couldn’t find the words.

  ‘Lola,’ Katya said. ‘I’m sorry about your brother.’

  The girl turned her head away, and kicked her heels harder under the bench, crossing and uncrossing them.

  ‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘Do you have any other family?’ Katya asked. ‘Anyone to stay with?’

  ‘No. My family …’

  Lola made a hand sign that looked like birds flying away. What did that mean? It could be anything along a spectrum of tragedy.

  ‘You don’t have anyone?’

  ‘The woman owning the kitchen. She lets me sleep above. But she is scared. Maybe leaving.’

  ‘Scared? Of what?’

  Lola shrugged, and met Katya’s eye again.

  ‘There are things in this city. Moving, out of sight. Monsters. Now it is not safe.’

  ‘It’s not safe? Lola, what do you mean?’

  The girl looked away so Katya couldn’t see her face.

  ‘Even the gangsters are scared.’

  ‘What is it, Lola?’

  The girl refused to say anything more, just shaking her head when pressed. After another minute, she got up.

  ‘Now I go.’

  ‘Thank you for the food,’ Katya said. ‘It was delicious.’

  Lola just nodded.

  ‘If you dig up a treasure,’ she said, ‘you will give it to me?’

  Katya laughed.

  ‘You wouldn’t want anything I thought was a treasure.’

  Lola looked dissatisfied, but she ran off. Katya stayed there a few moments, watching the people come and go in the park, some families with children, birds pecking in the grass. She luxuriated in the feeling of being outside on her own. On the road, large trucks passed by, their horns as mournful as whale song. Then she got up and headed back to the museum.

  After working to catalogue some new items she’d brought in that day, fragments of clay pots and old matting, she sat in front of the lion carvings with the little bottle of argan oil Salim had given her. She unscrewed the lid and breathed in its scent, and looked over the pain in the lions’ snarls, the flying arrows finding their marks in their hides. It was only later, when she went back to her room and the dark of the museum at night descended on her, that Katya thought about what Lola had said: about the museum, and the city.

  She fell into a fitful sleep. She awoke at one point with the sensation that there was another person somewhere in the museum. She didn’t know what made her think that, but she felt it strongly. She lay awake and held her breath, listening for footsteps or any other sound outside the door, but there was only silence, just a bad dream blotting into the waking world.

  Mia the dig registrar announced that she was leaving the team for a funded position in an Australian university. Everyone tried to swallow their jealousy, snapped at each other for a few days and polished their CVs. An atmosphere of doom passed over the whole team. Giulia and Martina went on leave, making knowing comments in cynical tones, and Raad and Khawla extended their time in Baghdad for a wedding. Soon it would be just Katya and Salim working on the site, wrapping up the last fragments of the dying project.

  ‘Hey, do you want to hold on to my jeep?’ Mia asked Katya on her last day. It was a wreck, an angular and dust-caked beast of a car with what looked like shotgun blasts of rust eating into the wheel arches.

  ‘The jeep? I don’t know …’

  ‘Can’t you drive?’

  ‘I don’t have a licence.’

  Having seizures from the age of sixteen will do that to you, she wanted to say. Her mother had taught her anyway, in car parks and side roads.

  ‘Many people don’t, around here. Just give the police a few dollars if you get caught.’

  ‘Don’t you want anything for it?’

  ‘It cost nothing,’ Mia shrugged, and handed her the keys. ‘And she’s been a good car – I’d rather she went to someone I know. Look after her, will you?’

  And then she had a car. Driving gave Katya the kind of freedom she’d yearned for. As long as she was careful not to drive on the days she felt an aura, she could see the city without needing Salim: the winding alleys and long avenues of Mosul, the Friday crowds outside the mosques talking and buying sweet treats, the wooden doors and faded old domes and crumbling faÇades, the shopfronts and windows all broken in a different way, the cobblestones poured over with asphalt. In a shop with its shutter only half open, Katya saw an old tailor sitting at a sewing machine among mountains of coloured fabric. She saw a ruined mosque, with lime trees bursting their roots through its bricks and blue tiles. She drove with the back windows open, so the seats got coated in dust. That fine dust, settling over everything.

  Dust seemed to rule her days. It covered her skin and hair, got in her teeth. She tasted it in the back of her throat. And in the days that followed, dust began to fill her and Salim’s conversations too. They finally got their results back from the lab on the contents of the strange white powder that had coated the floor of the room with the body.

  ‘It’s gypsum,’ Salim said, squinting at the readouts. ‘Calcium sulphate. And some traces of other things. Ash, sand, organic compounds …’

  ‘Gypsum?’ Katya said. ‘So it’s stone? What’s stone dust doing all over that room?’

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine. There are alabaster and gypsum deposits all around this region. They used to bring the high-quality stone from the hills of Kurdistan, to carve. And the ash will be from the burning of the city.’

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. It might have been a workshop of some kind, a construction site working with stone. It might be evidence of what we’ve thought: that there’s a palace underneath that hill, beneath the Nabi Yunus mosque. Hopefully we can come up with an explanation before we pack our things. Can you extend your trenches, uncover more of that room?’

  ‘Sure, I think there’s time. I can join them up, see what else we can find.’

  ‘Sounds good. It would be nice to have a theory at least, to tie all the finds together. Something flashy.’

  As Katya got back to work, the heat baked the dig site. Her skin went red along the tops of her arms, while her nose turned pink and peeled. The dust became unbearable. At lunch, she and Salim had to eat with their hands covering their bowls of rice, and work facing away from the wind. As the heat worsened, men began selling slabs of ice on the roadside, cracking them with metal bars and heaving them with hooked tongs into coolers in the backs of cars.

  That night, she dreamed that she was out working in the ruins when that white dust began to fall from the sky all around her. It dusted the tops of everything, light as icing sugar, and then she realised that it wasn’t dust, but pollen. Plants began to germinate out of the stones, seedless and alien, pale rootlets and sprouts curling all around her in a writhing time-lapse. They burst into flower: the opening umbrellas of lianas, bromeliads, amaryllis, blood lilies and cyclamen. Tropical flowers that didn’t belong in this dry, desert place. And as they grew, the ruins beneath them crumbled.

  It was a Tuesday. Katya had been working alone that day, with Salim off wrapping up the last details of the dig. The heat was intense, and she kept sweating off
her suncream and having to reapply it every hour. The gypsum dust layer coated her hands and knees, got in her eyes. She excavated into the room’s centre, where the remains of wooden beams, chocolatey in colour, stretched out into the earth. She wasn’t expecting much as the trenches converged. But as midday passed and the sun began to slip back into the west, she uncovered a corner of stone. It was different from the baked bricks she’d been finding up until then: it was smooth and well-cut, stained by time to the colour of nicotine teeth. She kept going, sweeping the dust from it with her coarse brush. It looked like a paving slab. But as she went on unearthing its edge, she realised it was long. Perhaps a few metres in length. It lay flat on the earth, just in line with the white dust layer. Still she didn’t think much of it – it was probably a large flagstone or lintel, she thought – not until she dug laterally and found that its surface became patterned. An intricate lacing of lines and whorls. She heard drums beating in her soul, trembling loose the dust and sand.

  She continued brushing in a dream-like confusion. She was rushing and had to sweep away the earth that crumbled down from the trench wall above. The whole stone surface was carved. And as she dug, the patterns resolved themselves into shapes, the shapes into forms, until a whole image emerged, carved into the stone. At first, she thought she saw the gnarled branches of a tree. As she uncovered more and more, the branch became a claw.

  She scrambled to fish her phone from her pocket and mashed the buttons until Salim answered.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘You have to come here.’ She heard her voice as if through cotton wool.

  ‘Is everything okay?’

  ‘I think I’ve found something.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Just come and – come and see!’

  When she hung up, Katya got back on her hands and knees, and dug with the tips of her fingers, clay and gypsum dust compacting under her nails. She realised her mouth was open and full of flecks of earth, and she spat without stopping. Then she took out the tiny paintbrush she used for only the most delicate work. When Salim arrived twenty minutes later, she was sitting on the trench edge, coated in sweat, her shoulders heaving.