All Our Broken Idols

by Paul M. M. Cooper

  ‘Who are these?’

  One cat curved its spine around her shin and purred. Sharo turned and put his mallet and chisel in one hand, brushed his unruly hair from his eyes with the other, and took a glug from a blue-glazed pot beside his work station.

  ‘You remember the hungry children who used to beg on the hillside? I recruited them as my helpers.’

  ‘Do you need so many helpers?’

  ‘No, probably not. They don’t help that much, actually.’

  One of the younger children ran up to him, and he tousled the dust from their hair with the shadow of a smile. Aurya stepped carefully through the commotion and put a hand on Sharo’s shoulder.

  ‘Sharo. I’m going to have a child.’

  He put down his tools, and raised his hand to touch hers. Then all at once something cracked in his face, and he jumped up to wrap his arms around her.

  ‘That’s so beautiful, Aurya.’

  She laughed, and fought him off, the way they would when they were children. Close up, she saw the red in his eyes. Tears made tidemarks on his face, cutting rivers through the dust.

  ‘Sharo, I want to leave the city. And you should come with me. We’re going to go south. Maybe as far as Egypt. You remember what that man told us, about the giant water pigs?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘You’re going to be a good mother, Aurya. A great mother. But I can’t leave.’

  ‘Sharo …’ She felt tears in her own eyes. ‘I think something terrible is going to happen here. The wars are getting worse every year, and the King is losing his mind. It’s like the whole fabric of everything is breaking apart.’

  Sharo sat back down at his stone, and ran his hand over the surface, making whorling patterns in the dust.

  ‘I know, Aurya. I feel it too.’

  ‘So come with me, Sharo. You don’t have to stay. Once you’ve finished your carving …’

  He didn’t answer at first, just went on brushing the dust from the stone. Where her father’s hands had been dull slabs, Sharo’s were like small birds flitting between branches, alighting on whatever they touched, weightless and effortlessly precise.

  ‘Let me show you,’ he said. He clapped those hands, and all the children hurried to him, flocking around the stone, grabbing hold of ropes and pulling all together. Sharo helped them to pull, and the stone in its frame lurched up from the ground. The older boys joined him in heaving against its pulleys. The beams and ropes cackled together, and the stone lifted slowly from the earth. Aurya stood back to take it in. The dust fell off the stone in sheets. Finally, it stood completely upright, and she could see the finished piece: the lion jumping up to seize the chariot. The deep, mournful recesses of its eyes. For a moment, she couldn’t speak.

  ‘It’s beautiful, Sharo.’

  He nodded slowly.

  ‘Thank you.’

  She took in a long breath.

  ‘But Sharo … there’s something I need from you.’

  ‘What is it, Aurya?’

  ‘It’s the King. We’re trying to leave the city, but he won’t let us. Not unless you carve what he wants you to carve. Sharo, if you don’t, he’ll never let us go. And whatever happens to this city will happen to us all.’

  Sharo looked at the children hurrying around, playing games in the dust.

  ‘Aurya, I told you …’ She put out her hand to touch his arm.

  ‘Please, Sharo, I need to leave this city. I can’t have a child here. I can’t have this evil in its life.’ She looked up at the carving, at the cold look on the King’s face as he drove his spear into the lion’s back. ‘That evil.’

  Sharo’s eyes moved to follow hers. He took a deep breath and looked around the workshop, put his hands through his hair.

  ‘I have to carve the whole scene,’ Sharo said, staring into the lion’s deep-set eyes. ‘I can’t leave anything out. But if the King wants … if he wants, he can take only the pieces he likes. Let an apprentice change them later if he likes. I’ll keep the rest here. The ones he wants to forget. This will be the house of dust after all, just like you said. A place where things go to be forgotten.’

  Aurya laughed, and looked round at the powdered stone that coated the floor, coated the feet of the children and all of Sharo’s face and clothes.

  ‘The house of dust,’ she said. Around the workshop, the children’s voices started up again, and they continued with their work or their games, chasing the cats. She nodded. ‘I’ll ask the palace. I’ll ask them if that’s enough for them.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Aurya. It’s the best I can do.’

  ‘Sharo,’ she said, ‘how does the story end? I want to know.’

  Sharo licked his bottom lip.

  ‘It’s not really about the ending, Aurya. No story is ever about its ending.’

  ‘I still want to know.’

  Gilgamesh had failed to stay awake, and he wept.

  ‘I do not want to pass into the house of dust,’ Gilgamesh sobbed. ‘I do not want to follow my friend into that dark place.’

  The ancient one took pity on him. He told the King of a plant that grows on the ocean floor, which looked like the fruit of a dog-thorn.

  ‘Whenever you eat of this plant, you will return to the vigour of your youth,’ he told him.

  Gilgamesh left the land of the dead. He sailed out to the ocean and tied stones to his feet, and sunk through the gloom. He found the plant and plucked it, then swam to the surface.

  Many days Gilgamesh travelled down the river with the plant, back to the city of Uruk. He thought about all he had lost, just to gain the secret of life.

  And then one night, sleeping on the riverbank, a serpent slithered through the reeds. It saw the plant hidden in Gilgamesh’s bag, and swallowed it whole. When Gilgamesh awoke, he saw the flower was gone, and fell about in despair.

  ‘I have lost the secret of eternal life,’ he screamed. ‘This whole journey has been for nothing! I have not found what I set out for.’

  He followed the river flow, back to the city of Uruk. And on the riverbank, the people rejoiced that their King had returned. And when Gilgamesh stepped from the river, he stood in Uruk and looked out at the fine city walls, that would last until the end of time. He looked out at the palaces he had built, and the works he had created, and then he set his whole story down in stone.

  Silence. The children had gathered around, putting their chins on their knees. Sharo coughed once.

  ‘That’s it?’ Aurya asked.

  ‘That’s it.’ She looked at him for a long time.

  ‘Five years to tell a story, and it ends with no one getting what they want?’

  Sharo shrugged, and brushed dust from his stone.

  ‘They got something else, though.’

  Aurya wrapped her arms around his neck and squeezed him.

  ‘Sharo, I’m sorry about your lion. All those years ago. It was a good lion.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Thanks, Aurya. I’m sorry for telling you … you know. That day.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘It hurt for a long time. But I needed to know.’

  They held each other there for a few moments longer, and then Aurya reached up to her chest, where her mother’s seal sat.

  ‘Here. Sharo, I want you to have this.’

  ‘No, Aurya, I can’t …’

  ‘Take it, Sharo. I want you to have it. And if you’re ever afraid, or feel like you need strength, just squeeze it in your hand as hard as you can, and think of me.’

  He took the seal from her and held it in his fist, balled tightly around the little stone cylinder.

  ‘I will, Aurya. When I finish my work here, I’ll come to visit you, and your child. And then I’ll give this back to you.’

  Aurya nodded slowly.

  ‘You promise?’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘Will your work ever be finished?’

  He didn’t answer. Aurya felt a blockage in her throat, but she turned away.r />
  ‘Goodbye, Sharo. You can always find me, you know. If you follow the river.’

  He nodded.

  ‘I’ll remember that. Goodbye, Aurya.’

  She gave one last look back as she left, and saw her brother still sitting there, holding the seal in his hand. She saw his fist close over it and squeeze.

  On her way back down the hill, rocked by the donkey that carried her, Aurya looked out over the rooftops and courtyards of Nineveh, over the whitewashed temples and the brightly coloured awnings of the markets; the stork nests bristling from the walls streaked with white droppings and the smoking beehives of the kilns; the mountains of shattered pottery growing with weeds and the children playing with rag balls on the clay streets; the stone alley steps worn in the centre; the old melancholy wood fronts of the houses and the plants that grew in the cracks of the walls; the drinking houses and the mansions and the bastions of high stone from which the iron tips of soldiers’ spears glinted; the gaggles of astrologers in the gardens with their charts and the thin men with hammers and axes and adzes, slouching along the mud roads to their work; the tailors sitting in mountains of coloured fabric and the crumbling old houses gone wild with flowers and daubed with painted signs; the barges pulled by oxen along overgrown towpaths and the rickety wooden bridges polished smooth by feet; the belching drains and the clatter and clang of a thousand industries; the cemeteries crumbling beneath groves of cypresses and palms and the men leading their cattle out to water through the painted gates; the palace tiles flashing in the sun; the library and the great ziggurat with its overflowing gardens rolling like tangled hair down its slopes – and all of it looked as if there could be nothing else in that place, as if it would stand there until the end of time. Immovable as a range of mountains.

  She would think about that ride many times in later years. She would think of it many years later, in Egypt, when news of King Ashurbanipal’s death came to her. She thought of it many times as the feuds over his crown consumed the kingdom, and the enemies of Nineveh massed in the hills. She would think of it when the droughts came, and the hordes of the Medes and Elamites overwhelmed Assyria’s borders and marched down into the lowlands. She thought of it again when she heard of the final decisive battles fought in the river plains, and the fleeing of the bastard king. Then again when it was said that Nineveh was besieged, and she saw Judeans and Medes and scavenger tribes all celebrating together at the news, thanking their various gods. Every day she would wait at her gate, watching the road for Sharo, and that journey on the old porter’s donkey would come back to her. Later, when she heard the news that Nineveh had been burned, she sat down with her back against the wall for a long time and felt a bottomless feeling that was beyond tears. When she heard that the city had not just been burned, but reduced completely to ash and dust, that its lands had been tilled with salt and all its people put to the sword, she thought of it again. She thought of it every day as she waited by her gate, watching the narrow road from the north. And every time she thought of that ride, she could almost feel the rock of the donkey beneath her.

  Aurya watched the river birds flying overhead as the drums below deck began to sound, and the ship pulled away from the quay of Nineveh. She wrapped her wool shawl around her head and put her hand on Abil’s arm. The boat rocked on the water as it came untethered and men drew its weed-covered ropes back on board, dropping them in wet loops on the deck. She sat among the urns of alum and sesame and breathed in the air of new beginnings.

  It hadn’t taken long to sell everything too heavy to carry. Aurya and Abil had never owned much. Perhaps it was the inclination of orphans, to always be ready for the next upheaval, the next great migration. As Aurya looked up at the city walls, she thought of Sharo, and what he might be thinking right now. She felt at her chest, and for a moment experienced a shock to find the cylinder seal missing, for the first time in years. But it would come back to her, she knew. Sharo had promised. And if not in this life, then in the next.

  The boat edged away from the quay, and men shouted their goodbyes to the people on the bank. Aurya said her own farewell to the city of her mother. She said goodbye to Sharo, to the library and to the dream she’d always had of living in that place. She laid her hand on her stomach and thought of her mother, and the journey she had made away from that same city, years before, perhaps with Sharo already growing in her belly. She tried to imagine the feelings that must have passed over that young woman: whether fear, or excitement; whether her husband had seemed good to her then; whether he had sat beside her as Abil sat beside her now, with his hand on her shoulder. Aurya prayed:

  My tears I drink like the waters of the sea.

  Let the river carry me away.

  May the waters of the river flow cleanse me.

  She put her hand in that water and felt its cool run between her fingers, felt its flow pulling her endlessly onward. The wind tugged at her hair too, and all of it, the wind, the current, the soft light that fell over the tops of the city walls, seemed to be drawing her south in a ceaseless downstream tow.

  Katya

  Katya swam in and out of consciousness. Her tongue stuck like Velcro to the roof of her mouth. She was starving. Had it been a day or two days? A week? It was early morning, she thought, still cool, and birds were soaring in pairs in the pinkish sky. There were flies, too, wandering over her lips, her eyelids. She couldn’t summon the energy to swat them away. She managed to lift her head a little, and look out at the river around her, bounded with reeds. The boat rocked with her movements. Its floor was sticky with dark congealed blood.

  Where was she? As she lay there, she listened to the crickets nearby, the soft slosh of water, and ran her thumb over the cylinder seal that still hung around her neck.

  ‘I told you that you wouldn’t find me,’ her dad said from behind her. She jumped at the suddenness of his voice. She craned her neck to see him sitting on the edge of the boat just out of sight. She couldn’t make out his face, but there was something wrapped around his neck. A snake, red-and-white bands on its scales.

  ‘I wasn’t trying to find you,’ she said. ‘I was trying to forgive you. I was so angry you left me.’

  Did she say it or think it? She tried to sit up, but her foot slid in the blood and her arms were numb. Her thigh felt boiling hot, and she could feel her heartbeat in it.

  ‘It always hurt me so much to leave,’ her dad said. ‘And it was you I thought of, in the end. You appeared to me, you know. In those final moments, out in the desert. It was as if you were right there in front of me. And you said, “Don’t worry, Dad. It’s going to be okay.”’

  ‘It wasn’t, though.’

  He laughed.

  ‘No, I suppose it wasn’t. I’m sorry, Kat. Perhaps you’ll understand one day.’

  ‘I think I understand already.’

  ‘Maybe you do. But you told me something else too. You said you knew I wasn’t gone. Not really. That no one ever goes. They only change into something else.’

  ‘Into what?’

  But there was only silence behind her. When she turned again, he wasn’t there. High overhead, a white plane – not a military jet, but a passenger plane – glinted in the blue, a white crest of sky surf expanding behind it. It was the first one she’d seen in months. How far had the river taken her?

  Katya closed her eyes and dreamed a little. She dreamed that the boat would come to a stop somewhere in the reeds, that it would crunch on to the bank. She would hear voices, the feet of children nearby. Then a young face would poke over the edge of the boat. It would be a girl maybe, a young girl with a thread of hair falling loose, head cocked to the side. Katya would lie there, and their eyes would meet for a moment.

  Katya would croak out a plea for help. The girl would turn and call to her parents. More footsteps would come. Strong hands would reach down and pick her up, kind hands and gentle voices. They would call an ambulance, douse her wound with sharp-smelling iodine, staining her jeans yellow, bind it tight
ly with a patterned scarf. They would offer her tea. She would be too weak to eat. The women of the family would gather round her and pray for her while the ambulance came, a confusing scatter of details passing over her as she drifted in and out of consciousness: the flower pattern on the sofa cushions, the icon on the wall of a man with a green turban and kind eyes, the way one woman had a wine-coloured birthmark on her cheek. When the paramedics came, they would lift her into the white lights of the vehicle and take her away. In the hospital, the nurses would be warm to her, the doctors would know how to heal her, how to put her back together. She would lie in clean, cool sheets, listening to the reassuring beep of instruments as the painkilling drugs took hold. She would pass in and out of sleep, and dream of home. They would tell the reporters to leave her alone. They would send news to her mother that she was okay, that she was healing quickly. They would hold up a telephone for her to speak into, and she would burst into tears and murmur down the line, ‘I’m okay, Mum. I’m okay. I’m coming home.’

  She would ask about Salim. She would insist that someone send news about him, that he was travelling in an old white van with a young girl, that they should be careful not to shoot him at a checkpoint or turn him away. The doctors would be kind, but they would say that they had heard no news. Then one day when she was nearly healed, she would hear a knock on her hospital room door, and Salim would walk in. He would look exhausted, tears in his eyes. He would rush to her and wrap his arms around her, knocking the breath out of her. She would hold him there and grip her fingers in his curls, feel the warmth of his skin against her cheek.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he’d say, over and over again. ‘I’m so sorry we left you.’

  She would shake her head.

  ‘You had to,’ she would say. ‘But I’m alive. We’re all alive.’

  ‘It’s a miracle,’ he would say. ‘It’s a miracle you got away.’

  In the hospital’s acid light, they would hold each other there for an age, both their cheeks wet with tears. Later, Lola would arrive. They would tell Katya about their miraculous escape, the hair-raising near-misses they’d had at checkpoints, the locals who tipped them off to waiting patrols on the road ahead, the terror they felt the whole way, the bullets that thudded into the van when they had to speed away from one checkpoint, missing them both by inches. Lola would tell her how they’d found her family in Baghdad, how she’d started to go to school again and would become an archaeologist like she always dreamed. Later, when the doctors told them it was time to leave, Salim would grip Katya’s hand.