All Our Broken Idols

by Paul M. M. Cooper

  ‘You’re in the wrong place now.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’

  The English man kept his eyes on her as more gunmen filled the museum. He checked his notes and shouted more orders to his men, who filed into the galleries and past Salim and Katya up the stairs. Please don’t find the others, Katya prayed. She could hear the smashing of glass, and an alarm went off briefly before a crackle of loud shots silenced it. Salim was still doubled over.

  ‘It’s just you in here?’ the English man with the glasses said.

  ‘Yes. Just us two.’

  ‘You’ve been practising idolatry,’ he said, gesturing around at the museum, at the winged bull guardians in the hallway. ‘Worshipping these old gods.’

  ‘No –’ But the men grabbed her and Salim before she could say anything more and dragged them both beneath one of the displays. She glanced up at the implacable face of an ancient king. Men carried things away: small cuneiform tablets, pieces of jewellery, the cylinder seals on display. Then Katya heard the shouting of many voices from the mezzanine, and the booming voice of Dr Malik.

  ‘Take your hands off me,’ he kept saying. Men with rifles herded the doctor and Lola down the stairs. Lola’s face was set in flint, and she struggled and shrugged off the men’s grips every time they took hold of her.

  ‘They found them,’ Katya said. Salim’s fingers tightened into fists.

  ‘It was a bad idea lying to us,’ the English man said.

  ‘Thieves and brigands!’ Dr Malik was shouting as he was dragged to the bottom of the stairs. ‘Bandits!’

  As they came down the stairs, Lola swung out a fist that struck the cap off the head of one soldier. The man let go of her wrist, and she ran over to Katya and Salim, her eyes desperate. The skull man pointed at Lola and muttered something that made the girl’s muscles tense. Beside her, Salim groaned.

  ‘What did he say?’ Katya whispered.

  ‘He said this one is a devil-worshipper. They’re going to shoot us all.’

  Katya felt the world fall away around her. The men with guns clubbed the bellowing Dr Malik, and drove him towards the door. Another two soldiers grabbed Lola and ripped her from Katya’s arms as the girl screamed. Watching this scene unfold, Katya felt fury and desperation explode in her chest. The universe contracted: at its exact geometrical centre was that room, and the statue of the king that stood, hands clasped, above her. The idea came to her in an unexpected flash. She set both hands against that statue. Some of the men turned to look at her. Then she heaved. The statue moved easily, teetered past the point of balance and fell. The moment lasted for ever. Nobody moved. Every eye in the room fixed on her – on the falling statue as it toppled through its arc and hit the floor. It smashed into white-powdered fragments. The head snapped off, and the body split open. The room exploded with noise. The man with the skull mask rushed at Katya and grabbed her by the throat, pinned her against the wall. His rough-skinned fingers closed on her neck.

  ‘How dare you destroy our property?’ the English man yelled from across the hall.

  ‘Look,’ she croaked, pointing at the smashed statue. ‘It’s just plaster. A reproduction. A fake. Half of the stuff you’re stealing is just plaster.’

  The skull man tightened his grip on her throat, and her eyes bulged. She pawed at his arms, trying to loosen his grip. He was too strong, his eyes burning beneath his mask. As the thunder of her heartbeat rose in her head, she heard words passed back and forth between him and the English man. Then the grip on her throat lessened. Air poured back into her lungs, welcome and cool. She pushed his arm away; to her surprise, he let go, and she fell to the ground, gasped for air, coughed and massaged her throat. Guns were pointed at her from every direction. Even Dr Malik stopped his bellowing, as three soldiers held his massive frame against one of the bull guardians.

  ‘You’ll tell us which ones are real,’ the English man said blankly. ‘Or you’ll die along with the rest.’

  Katya allowed the silence to stretch out, gathering her words like scattered beads.

  ‘I’ll trade,’ she said.

  ‘Trade?’

  ‘Yes.’ She gestured at Salim, Dr Malik and Lola. ‘Their lives for the stones.’

  The skull man looked at her with a sneer she could see even through his mask, and turned away. But the English man shrugged.

  ‘Their lives for the stones,’ he said, and fixed Katya with cold eyes. ‘I have a list. We’ll come back tomorrow morning, and you better show us something good.’

  ‘Don’t give these animals a thing!’ Dr Malik boomed, his arms still pinioned by the three men with guns. ‘You jackals, you thieves.’

  The skull man glanced lazily at the doctor and muttered a word. On the floor, Salim gasped.

  ‘You sicken me, you animals,’ the doctor was shouting. ‘Iraq will outlive you. On the day of judgement, the waters will wash the earth clean of you!’

  Katya covered her eyes before the gunshots sounded, but each one still pounded through her, made her skin jump on her bones. Dr Malik’s voice became hoarse and then stopped. Katya’s ears went ‘eeeeeeee’, a reverberating tone like struck crystal, and as it faded, the sound merged with the screams of Lola and Salim beside her. She kept her eyes covered while they dragged the doctor away, taking all three men to do it. When she opened them, she saw a streak of red-brown on the floor. She slumped back against the wall. The English man with the glasses watched her.

  ‘I’ll be back tomorrow,’ he said. Then he gestured to Salim, still hunched over and groaning beside the statue’s shattered remains. ‘And tell your friend: the army isn’t coming back. They’re fleeing south and leaving their uniforms by the road. We are the lions of Mosul. A spark has been lit in Iraq, and the fire will burn until it covers the whole earth.’

  The English man turned and gestured to his men, who tied the hands of Salim and Lola. They came towards Katya too. And all of this – the dust in the air, the men with their weapons, the people sobbing – hadn’t this all happened before?

  When Katya came to, it was evening. She could hear the wind hitting the windows. She wasn’t in the entrance hall any more. She tried to lift herself, and found her skin come alive with bruises. She lifted up on her elbows, and saw she was back in the office room in the upper floor, lying on the mattress with the red glow of the auxiliary lighting making an eerie dreamworld of everything. Salim sat on the mattress edge, still hunched over and deathly pale. Katya’s throat burned when she tried to speak, and she remembered the man who had choked her. It felt as if she’d swallowed a ball of sandpaper.

  ‘Salim,’ she said, and he jumped when she spoke.

  ‘Oh, thank God. You’re all right.’

  ‘Where’s Lola?’

  ‘The girl? She’s fine, she’s sleeping next door. Katya, what happened to you?’ She shook her head and massaged her throat. ‘You were completely out of it,’ Salim went on. ‘Like you fainted. But your eyes were open.’

  She cradled her head for a moment, felt the weight of her skull, all its contours and fissures. And what did it matter now? What was he going to do, send her home?

  ‘It’s epilepsy. In my temporal lobe. It’s happened since I was a kid. Since my dad disappeared.’

  Salim turned to look at her. He had a sticky patch of congealed blood on his forehead, tidemarks of dust and sweat across his face.

  ‘You should have told me. How often does this happen?’

  ‘Hardly ever. Maybe once or twice a year. But since I got here, it’s been happening more and more. It gets triggered by stress, lack of sleep, dehydration …’

  ‘None of that here, then.’

  ‘I have pills,’ she said. ‘Or at least I did. I take them every day. But I’ve had two seizures now in the last few days. That’s never happened before.’

  ‘When you crashed the car.’ He looked at her, and she nodded. ‘God. You could have died.’

  ‘The temporal lobe controls memory, so I get this feeling of
déjà vu every time it happens. Like I’ve been somewhere before, like time is folding over itself. Usually I have a lot of warning.’

  He put a hand on her foot. She could feel its warmth through her socks, and his skin touched hers where she’d worn a hole in the heel.

  ‘What happened?’ she said. ‘With those men.’

  ‘They took our passports. They searched everything, tipped out all our bags, went through all the cupboards. They had me and Lola tied up, but they seemed nervous about what to do with you. Your head was rolling around on your shoulders, and these guys … they’re superstitious. You scared them. But that English one seems a bit softer than the others. A bit younger at least. The others wanted to split us up, lock us in separate rooms. But he told them to leave us.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘And they took everything?’ Katya breathed. Salim shook his head.

  ‘I managed to save these.’

  He pulled out both of their antique mobile phones and handed over hers like a precious bounty. She turned on the screen.

  ‘No signal.’

  ‘Yeah. It must be down for the whole province. Maybe the whole country. No Internet either, though they took the computers anyway. They took the chargers too, so we’d better save the batteries. I can duct-tape them to the underside of the desk.’

  Katya handed back her phone, and he took it. The screech of the duct tape unfurling made her jump.

  ‘I’m so sorry about the doctor,’ Katya said.

  ‘I can’t believe they’d do that.’ Salim sniffed, and massaged his forehead. ‘Those monsters. He was one of the best men I ever knew.’

  ‘He was like something from a myth. Larger than life.’

  Salim nodded. ‘I know what his heaven will look like.’

  ‘Full of bridges.’ A sob moved between them like an electric current passing from one body to the other.

  ‘So now we’re going to help the monsters who killed him,’ Salim said quietly. ‘We’re going to sell his life’s work.’

  ‘We don’t have a choice …’ she began.

  Salim shook his head.

  ‘They’ll take that stuff and sell it, you know. Thirty, forty thousand for just one of those little tablets. They’ll smuggle them to Europe and use the money to buy more weapons. Each one will make them stronger.’

  ‘This can’t go on for ever. And the pieces they want … the ones on their list. They’ll all have been catalogued, recorded. It’s the other pieces we have to protect, the ones that haven’t been studied yet. Salim, if we help them find some things, maybe we can protect others. Maybe we can buy enough time …’

  He looked at her with pain in his eyes.

  ‘Katya, you don’t know who you’re dealing with.’

  ‘Who are they? What do they want?’

  ‘If it’s who I think, then we’re in a lot of trouble. Real end-of-days types. They want to put a torch to the world.’

  In the dim red of the auxiliary lighting, Katya looked through the door to the carvings of the hunted lions, the stretched claws, the muzzles pulled back over their teeth.

  ‘What about the carving?’ she said. ‘The one out there.’

  Salim shook his head.

  ‘We have to keep it secret. If it fell into these guys’ hands …’

  ‘I won’t tell anyone.’

  Salim sighed and looked away.

  ‘This is the luck I’ve come to know,’ he said. ‘The greatest find of my life one day, imprisoned by madmen the next. Who’s the girl? Lola, did you say?’

  ‘Oh, you remember her? Her family’s shop burned down. Her brother was killed.’

  ‘Oh.’ Salim let out a long breath. ‘I remember. You nearly got us all killed, you know. Letting her in here. These guys despise Yazidis. They think they’re heretics. Worshippers of the devil.’

  ‘They would have killed her if she stayed outside.’

  ‘Or worse. Do you trust her?’

  ‘I don’t know for sure, but so far I think so.’

  Salim squeezed her foot in a way that made a tingle in her stomach. He got up in one laboured movement and turned to leave.

  ‘Well, you’re going to have to deliver on your promise to these guys tomorrow,’ he said. ‘You’re our ambassador to lunacy now.’

  She nodded and felt cold, wrapping her arms around her shoulders.

  ‘Katya,’ he said. ‘Be very careful. Please. Don’t be fooled into thinking you can reason with them. And don’t try to be clever.’

  She held his gaze for a moment and felt the urge to reach out her hand to him. She looked away though, and he turned to leave. She listened to the squeak of his shoes as he went, to the soft sound of sobbing echoing somewhere in the halls.

  Sleep didn’t come. Katya lay for a while, feeling her fear wash over her in waves. All at once, the thought of her mother hit her like a car. Memories from ten years before, of her mum crouched before the television in the days and weeks after they got the news, her face contoured in its coloured light.

  ‘Please be careful,’ she’d said to Katya at the airport. When Katya hugged her, she’d felt how little she weighed, hollow bones like a bird. She’d promised she would come home.

  ‘That’s what he always said too,’ her mum replied. ‘Katya … I don’t want to lose you to that place. Please. Please be careful.’

  Katya hit her skull with the heel of her hand, ran her nails over her scalp.

  ‘Idiot,’ she gasped, and sobbed. She tried to find the quiet place inside her, but it wasn’t where she had left it. She sniffed, got up and followed her feet through the hall. Salim was lying in his room. A mat was left out for Lola too, but there was no sign of her. Katya went out on to the roof, and jumped seeing a figure standing there, leaning against the balustrade.

  ‘Oh, god, Lola, you scared me.’

  The girl pulled a mock-frightening look. She wasn’t wearing her abaya, and she was smoking a thin cigarette.

  ‘I am very scary,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t know you smoked.’

  ‘No,’ the girl said, and drew on her cigarette so the ember crackled. ‘Not always. Coughing too much.’

  Katya leant on the ledge with Lola and glanced over the side. Guards with weapons walked up and down outside, pickups mounted with large guns were parked on the street corners. She tried not to think of the images that still haunted her from her childhood, the ones she’d searched for in moments of darkness: stills from grainy videos, masked men with swords, pale men kneeling. She thought of the man who wore the skull mask, the shining coals of his eyes.

  ‘Lola, what do you know about those men?’

  The girl shook her head. She leant over the balustrade too, and let out a long breath of smoke.

  ‘No one knows much. But they are the ones we are afraid of. They want to kill Yazidis. They want to kill Shia and Christians. I think they are the ones who killed my brother.’

  ‘They called you a devil-worshipper …’

  Lola tugged on the red-and-white thread around her wrist.

  ‘Yes, I am Yazidi. In our church, they teach that God created the world, and made the angel Melek Taus its king. He is the peacock angel. People think our Melek Taus is a devil. They see the black snakes on the doors of our shrines too. They are afraid of us.’

  Lola made her fingers into the shape of a gun, closed one eye and pointed it at one of the strolling guards below. Cigarette smoke ribboned her hand. She made a popping sound with her mouth.

  ‘Can you shoot?’ Katya asked.

  ‘Yes. My brother taught me. He always thought there was danger for Yazidis. He taught me to fight.’

  Katya reached out and took her hand.

  ‘I’m sorry you’re caught up in all this, Lola.’

  ‘Yes, I am sorry too,’ the girl said, and coughed. She offered the cigarette to Katya. ‘Thank you. For letting me in. I would be dead, out there.’

  Katya took a drag that tasted of burnt coffee
grounds and handed it back.

  ‘We’ll look after each other. I promise.’

  Katya watched the movements of the armed men on the road below, and when Lola finished her cigarette, Katya followed her down into the museum. As Katya lay in her room and tried to sleep, she remembered the words from the risk assessment form she’d filled out months ago, that practical, numbered advice. She rifled through her drawers for some time until she found it, crumpled and buried in the files.

  ‘In case of kidnapping, follow these four rules,’ she read aloud, feeling the solace of her own voice, in the firm and rational advice. ‘One: Befriend your captors.’ She thought of the English man, his voice hard as he’d threatened to cut their throats. Something to work on there. ‘Two: Be prepared for a long stay.’ No choice there. ‘Three: Don’t show weakness.’ She puffed air out of her cheeks and rubbed her eyes. ‘Four: Look for a chance to escape, and take it if you can.’

  She whispered the lines to herself over and over, an incantation against the night. When she finally lay down, she fell asleep fully clothed with her hands tucked into her sleeves. She felt a strange tow, as though the night around her were the water of a great river pulling her down its winding course.

  Aurya

  Aurya watched as the boats of the King’s flotilla landed one by one at the dock. Out of each one, the slaves drew a slab of stone bound to a sledge, just like the one they’d come with, until there were around a dozen lined up on the quay. With a shout from their handler, the ropes strained and the slaves dragged the stones all together through the towering gatehouse, and through the streets of Nineveh in a long line. They churned troughs in the roads and dislodged cobbles. The King, carried on his high seat, followed behind. Aurya and Sharo were caught up in the groups of soldiers and servants, clattering, fanning, all sweating and shouting and beating drums and clanging bells. The air was hot, with the smell of mud and cheese and baking peat. Through the gatehouse, Aurya saw pigs and dogs on the street. People pressed against the sides of buildings to let the procession of stones pass by, and many fell to their knees when they saw the King. People on rooftops whistled and cheered, called out, ‘Praise King Ashurbanipal!’ Others wandered as close as they dared to the lion in its cage, which looked more frightened than ever, letting out pitiable whines, its eyes wide and yellow. Everywhere the bright clothes and headdresses, the women’s veils, the shop awnings, flashed bright against the baked brick and whitewashed walls.