All Our Broken Idols

by Paul M. M. Cooper

  ‘Here we are then,’ Abu Ammar said. The bag came off, and Katya blinked in the harsh sun, blowing her hair from her mouth. Abu Ammar cut their ties with his hunting knife. The blade touched the skin of her wrist, and felt hot as if it had been lying in the sun. Her clothes were already sticking to her. She turned to Salim, and he wrinkled his nose as a bead of sweat ran down it.

  ‘In July, water boils in the jug,’ he said.

  ‘Quiet!’ Abu Ammar shouted at them from behind. He used the barrel of his gun to push Salim.

  They all made their way up the hill, the silvery mosque of Nabi Yunus glowing in the sun. Soon they were standing on the dig site, which looked abandoned and neglected since they’d last been here. The tarpaulin shelter where they used to eat lunch had come away on one side and flapped in the wind. Looters had dug more holes across the site, and tracks wound over the dirt in all directions. But the old tyre they’d left on top of the buried lion carving was still in place. She glanced at Salim, and saw that he was looking there too.

  ‘Get to work then!’ Abu Ammar commanded. He turned his back to them and popped a couple of Captagon pills from a silvery blister pack, swallowed them without water. Katya and Salim picked their way around the looters’ holes as they approached the main trench and laid out the tools on their tarpaulin. Abu Ammar sat and smoked with his rifle slung across his belly, and the two guards sat on the wall, eyes narrowed against the dust and glare. One flicked the safety on his gun off and on, off and on.

  Katya began to noisily move her tools around, until she thought it was safe to whisper to Salim.

  ‘What do you think?’ she murmured. ‘Did Athir bury the parts?’

  Salim took a deep breath, and glanced enviously at Abu Ammar’s cigarette. He shrugged.

  ‘It’s hard to tell. The earth’s been disturbed so much.’

  He didn’t look in the direction of the olive tree, and neither did Katya. She listened to its leaves in the breeze, and her whole body shimmered with that sound. They began work just like any other day, a surreal normality. Katya wasn’t wearing any suncream. The sun baked her, and she tried to cover her skin where she could, turned up her collar and rolled down her sleeves. They plotted out the squares using thread, and trowelled into the holes, marking depth as they went. The meticulousness of the work seemed ludicrous now.

  ‘So this is what you do,’ Abu Ammar sneered after half an hour or so of their digging. He seemed bored. ‘You come to this country and rob all its treasures.’

  Katya stood up straight, covered in dust and earth, and looked up at him from down in the trench.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘We dig to learn things. To find stories, to understand the past. They stay in museums in Iraq, where they’re kept safe.’

  ‘That’s the excuse of all thieves,’ he said. ‘“I’m just looking after it.”’

  Katya flushed.

  ‘We protect them from people like you,’ she said, and immediately regretted it. But Abu Ammar just scoffed and kicked a piece of shale in her direction. He turned back around to face the city with one finger in the air.

  ‘“Shall I tell you who the worst people are?”’ he recited to one of the men. ‘“The ones whose works in this life are totally astray, but who think they’re doing good.”’

  Katya noticed that Abu Ammar didn’t speak Arabic to the others, and they didn’t seem to speak much English. She stretched her back, felt the beginnings of heat rash across her skin. Gunfire crackled in the air over the city.

  Katya dug methodically, but with desperation tingling in her fingertips. The earth at that level was crusted with pieces of pottery, but she hoped she would find something at least a little impressive, a figurine or coin from a later era even. But significant finds were rare. She thought about taking off her cylinder seal necklace and pretending to find it in the earth, but she couldn’t bear to part with it, her guilty treasure, the comfort she squeezed during the night.

  Katya soon became aware of Salim edging towards the olive tree. Time was running out. She watched him from the corner of her eye, glancing his way as often as she dared. She could tell by the fact that he didn’t use a pick, just went straight in with the trowel, that the earth had been recently disturbed. Something in his tight, self-conscious movements made him seem unnatural though. She could feel Abu Ammar’s attention wandering over to him. She had to find something right away.

  ‘Hey,’ she called Abu Ammar, who swung around. ‘Look what I found!’

  He shot a look in her direction, and she reached for the first thing at hand.

  ‘What is it?’ He came over, army boots crunching.

  ‘It’s a pot.’ She tried to fill her voice with excitement.

  ‘A pot?’

  ‘Yeah – well, a small piece of a pot. You hardly ever see this kind. See this beautiful black paintwork on the outer rim? A dotted motif. You can tell the clay’s been brushed with a handful of grass after being moulded too. And see the way it’s bevelled around the rim? Shows the kind of rapid advances in pottery wheel technology you get around this time, mostly due to collectivisation of the …’

  ‘Well, how much is it worth?’

  ‘Worth?’ She blew away a piece of earth clinging to the side of the baked clay potsherd. ‘You mean in terms of scientific …?’

  ‘No, cash. C.A.S.H.’

  ‘Oh. Well, it’s not really worth anything. But it’s a fascinating example of –’

  Abu Ammar knelt down and took the fragment. He spun around and hurled it over the wall, through the branches of the olive tree. Salim flinched with an obviously guilty expression on his face as the piece flew over his head.

  ‘It’s a fascinating example of nothing,’ Abu Ammar said.

  ‘Whatever. Thought you’d be interested.’

  ‘I’m not.’ He scuffed his boot into the dust and put his hand on the black hilt of his knife. Katya watched as he walked back to his vigil on the wall. He swallowed another couple of pills with a grimace, and there was the thud of an explosion in the distance.

  ‘“And how many a city did we destroy while it was doing wrong?”’ he began to recite. ‘“How many fallen into ruin, and how many an abandoned well and how many a lofty palace?”’

  Katya’s heart pounded, but she gave the sharpest glance in Salim’s direction. He was wrapping something in the canvas, along with his trowel. She caught his eye, and he gave just the hint of a nod.

  In the car on the way back, the men had tied Katya’s and Salim’s hands again, but didn’t bother with the bags. The third man sat between them this time. Katya felt her body aching after the day of digging, her head pounding from the hours of sun. Her clothes stuck to her, but a fire lit her from the inside.

  ‘That was a fucking waste of time,’ Abu Ammar said. He kicked something in the footwell that clunked. ‘You didn’t find anything.’

  ‘It’s not something you can rush …’ Katya began, but Abu Ammar shot her a look that made her jaw clench shut. As they drove through the city, Katya saw burnt-out cars in the road verges, police cars with smashed windows. Huge queues snaked outside every petrol station, people holding empty jerrycans limply by their sides, hard looks on most faces. Men with guns patrolled everywhere, standing up in the backs of pickup trucks, many wearing American-style camo but with their faces covered. On the bridge near the museum, she saw some men driving an armoured car. More than once, she saw that same black flag, decorated with white script, on which she recognised the name of God. When they got back to the museum, the men left them there, but one spat a gob of phlegm on the floor as he turned away. The door thudded shut, and Katya counted to ten, closing her eyes and listening to the shouts and receding footsteps on the museum approach. Then she turned to Salim.

  ‘Did you get it?’

  He let out a long breath, and shook all over, as if he’d been holding in his tremors for the whole journey back. He unbuckled his digging tools, spreading earth, dust and clods of dry clay all over the floor. He pulled out a
long loop of black rubber, one side toothed like a gear wheel, and a large drinking bottle full of amber liquid, the kind she’d seen sold at roundabouts in the city.

  ‘The new fan belt, and some petrol.’ His eyes lit up. ‘My god, it worked! You did well with that potsherd. Did you hear him? “It’s a fascinating example of nothing!”’

  He burst out laughing, and Katya joined in, unable to hold it in any longer. The corners of her eyes bloomed with tears of fear and relief.

  ‘Can you get this on the van tonight?’

  ‘I think so. We still need a few more parts, though. Another couple of bottles like this, to get us south. And the fake permit. I guess Athir couldn’t get it in time. We’ll have to do this again. Just once more.’

  Katya rubbed her eyes, feeling the exhaustion weigh down on her.

  ‘That means we’re going to have to give them something bigger. You heard him just now. “A waste of time.”’

  ‘What can we give him, when looters are hitting the site every night? They’re getting away with everything these idiots would find valuable.’

  ‘What about the carving?’ Salim fixed her with a look. Suddenly all the warmth drained from the air.

  ‘The new lion carving?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Salim’s face set.

  ‘I’m not giving that to these bastards.’

  He turned up the stairs and towelled the dirt off the back of his neck with a handkerchief.

  ‘Salim …’

  ‘No way. That’s the greatest achievement of both our careers, Katya. And it’s my history. The history of my country. It doesn’t belong to us to give away.’

  ‘It’s my history too.’

  ‘Then act like it!’ he shouted, and she shrunk from the unexpected sting in his voice. She followed him up the stairs, past carvings of the Assyrian battles in the marshes, the campaigns of Ashurbanipal in Babylon, his civil war with his brother.

  ‘Salim,’ she said, ‘I’ve been down there in the storeroom with Abu Ammar. I know what he is. I know what kind of people these guys are.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry. I know who they are.’

  He pointed to the carvings on the wall: the marsh people cowering in the reeds and waiting for the spears of the soldiers who hunted them; the Assyrian soldiers dismantling the cities of Elam with hammers, patient and thorough as craftsmen; the gleeful soldiers stripping the skin off screaming men, impaling the flayed bodies on poles; a mountain of severed heads in the palm shade; the prisoners lining up to die as a watching king drank wine.

  ‘That’s who they are.’

  Katya felt caged in the museum. Every day she woke up surrounded by silent, watchful things. Without her pills, she had expected her seizures to get more frequent, but that hadn’t happened. Instead, she felt a kind of low-level aura all day, that feeling of having been somewhere before, walked all these same paths, thought even these very thoughts before. Planes were dropping more and more bombs in the city, rumbles and flashes in the night. The statues couldn’t hear her when she talked to them, but she talked anyway.

  ‘How are you today, King Ashurbanipal? Still dead? Good, good. Oh, me? I’m trapped in a museum by an army of maniacs.’

  Some days when she wandered the museum, all these strange objects gathered from every era of history felt ridiculous. What did they say about anything? The worlds they’d known were gone. Katya herself felt like a statue, a useless exhibit warehoused in a museum that never opened.

  Days passed, wrapped in cobwebs. The man with the skull mask returned and then started coming back more often. The three of them spent some dark nights in the cupboard, but the men left them water now. All three would sit with their hands tied, with Katya trying to lie back on Salim’s lap. On the other nights, when Abu Ammar came, they had some degree of freedom. Salim sneaked out and worked on the van then, which kept him occupied and seemed to fend off his despair. He cleared away all signs of his work every morning, not knowing what the next day would bring. Katya wished she had something like that, some act of resistance that would take her mind off the fear that crashed down on her in paralysing surges. But all she had was those objects, passing through her hands and into the crate. The fear was constant. It was an icy waterfall from her chest to her stomach that left her hugging her knees on her mattress in the office, listening to the sounds of chaos and ordinary life vie for control of the city outside. She thought of home, of her mother going through it all again: the Foreign Office, the appeals, the journalists. How much loss could one person take in their life, before it broke them?

  It was only when Katya was down in the museum’s belly, in the storeroom counting objects, that she really thought about what it would be like to die. What kind of death it might be. One afternoon, down there in the dark, she went to the pile of clay tablets where they’d hidden the knife. She shooed away a large spider and reached for it, felt the slight weight of its cheap red plastic handle, the blade slightly bent at its tip. She lifted it to her throat, and held it there for a moment, that line of cold against her skin. It couldn’t hurt to practise dying, she thought, just like you’d practise anything else. Her palms moistened a little, and she could feel her rising heartbeat through the handle and the solid architecture of her throat.

  Somewhere above, there was a deep boom like a roll of thunder, deeper than the low rumble of airstrikes. The floor shook slightly. Katya took the knife away from her throat, the spell broken. She put it down with a long out-breath and ran upstairs to the roof. She found Salim and Lola there, both wide-eyed and barefoot, leaning over the balustrade.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked. And then Katya saw it. On the hill above her dig site, over the site of the mosque of Jonah’s tomb, a huge cloud of dust and smoke rose. Where the mosque had once stood – its slender minaret, its arches and neat terraced gardens – was a plume of smoke. In the streets all around, people were beginning to flock in that direction. Wails were already rising up over the morning air.

  ‘What are they thinking?’ Salim muttered, in disbelief. The mosques around the city crackled into prayer at that moment. At the same time, another explosion went off, and Katya flinched. Another plume of grey smoke.

  ‘Another mosque,’ Lola said. In the streets, people were putting their hands in the air, on their heads, covering their mouths. Salim reached in his pockets for cigarettes, then remembered he’d run out and swore.

  ‘Do you think the carving will be okay?’ Katya whispered. ‘The lion carving?’

  Salim took a deep breath.

  ‘We buried it well enough, thank God.’

  He placed both his hands over his face, his breath whistling between the gaps in his fingers, watching the smoke settle over the shattered ruin of the Nabi Yunus mosque. Then he started to laugh.

  ‘Salim, what is it?’

  It started slowly at first, but his laughter grew until he bucked and howled with it, tears rolling down his cheeks. Lola stepped away from him. Salim bent over and pressed his back against the balustrade, trying to control the convulsions.

  ‘Salim, what’s so funny?’

  ‘I … I can’t help it. Do you know how long I’ve spent trying to get permission to dig anywhere near that mosque? How many forms and meetings with holy men and bribes to officials, just to get anywhere near that sacred place with a trowel? And now the city gets taken over by fanatics … and they just blow the whole thing up!’

  Katya watched as he collapsed in laughter, falling to the floor clutching his ribs. And she couldn’t help it: she began to laugh too. They stood on the roof rocking together for some time, with a bright clear laughter of the kind she hadn’t heard in weeks. Lola watched them both in bemusement. As the convulsions faded from their bodies, the three of them watched the lonely figures picking through ruins, the bright colours of European football jerseys among the salvagers and the dust falling in the air like snow.

  They had been imprisoned in the museum for six weeks. As evening approached, they watched the sun tur
n purple and orange on the horizon, the pinprick of Venus appearing in the sky. The dust gave a strange quality to the sunset; the jagged shadows of the ruined mosque stretched out over the rooftops, and night fell quickly. The city was blacked out still, but not dark at all. Where does the light come from, Katya thought? It was a soft, mysterious glow.

  As the light of the day faded, Katya talked about the plants that had flourished in the bomb sites of London after the war: the flowers of fireweed covering the ruins like a purple foam, coltsfoot and fleabane, ragwort and Yorkshire fog. Salim and Lola both listened glumly. She told them about the rare seeds that the bombs set free from Kew Gardens and the Natural History Museum, the Peruvian galinsoga and the fugitive mimosas brought from China that escaped their sealed hothouses and began to grow wild in the rubble. Later on, they became aware of people gathering in the park.

  ‘What’s happening down there?’ Katya said. A man with a megaphone began to shout. It was a strange sight since the city had fallen: people never gathered in one place now, but hurried around the streets with abayas or keffiyehs pulled over their mouths as if there was a plague in the air. Now there was a real commotion, and shouting, jeering. The coloured lights from the shops around the square were casting strange carnivalesque shadows across the park. Pickup trucks were arriving too, and the men with guns were clustered in groups. The one with the megaphone jumped up on to a bench, the same bench she and Lola had sat on weeks before, Katya thought. He was calling out to the crowd.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ Katya asked. Salim shook his head, let a long breath out.

  ‘The windiest militant trash.’

  Before long, a truck pulled up with a kind of metal cage in its back. Many fighters stood among the crowd, men in the uniform Salim called ‘the Afghan style’: herringbone and khaki jackets, camo trousers, checked headscarves and Kalashnikovs. They were the ones jeering. Most people in the crowd were watching silently. The megaphone man was announcing something over and over, striding up and down the long bench like an actor pacing the stage.