The Love of Stones

by Tobias Hill

  On 9 August 1649, Sir Henry Mildmay signed the Commonwealth order for the destruction of the English Crown. Keeper of the Jewels, Mildmay became known as the Knave of Diamonds. The regalia were melted down, the gems sold off or smashed with hammers.

  ‘Now Edward’s Staffe is broken,’ wrote the antiquarian Thomas Fuller. ‘His Chair overturned, Cloaths rent, and Crown melted; our present Age esteeming them the Reliques of Superstition.’ The inventory of that time is a catalogue of loss. A list of how fragile jewels can be. There is the comb of old stained bone, an artefact used in the ceremony of anointment since the time of Alfred; and the ‘Rock Ruby’ – the Black Prince’s ruby – wrapped in paper and sold for £15.

  King Alfreds Crowne of gould wyerworke sett with slight

  stones, and 2 little bells.

  One robe of crimson taffety sarcenett, valued at 5s.

  One livor cullrd silk robe. Very old.

  One old combe, worth nothing.

  The crown jewels were broken up. But the Three Brethren was no longer with them. Still whole, it passed onwards through the hands of bankers and merchants and royal consorts. Saved by the profligacy of the Stuarts.

  * * *

  My name is Katharine Sterne. These are notes for me to follow, notes for my head and feet. Footnotes. I am looking for a triangle of stones, connected by crude spurs and bones of gold.

  I read my pages over, in transit, in the similar rooms of different hotels. I find a story in them, although it isn’t mine. The account begins where it belongs, six hundred years ago, in the duchy of Burgundy. The beginning should be that of the stones, not of me, and that is what I have written. And that is how it should be. My life is part of the story of the Three Brethren, not the other way round. It is a question of perspective.

  It is very old, the jewel. Half a millennium. I see history only through the life of the Three Brethren, and it is like peering through the wrong end of a telescope. The dukes of Burgundy and the magistrates of Berne. Fuggers, Tudors and Stuarts. Twenty generations of humanity reduced to ants.

  I think that after a certain age jewels cease to be possessions. At that point they become the possessors. The Three Brethren is like a crown, or the third sarcophagus of Tutankhamun, the innermost, which is entirely made of beaten gold. These things are past ownership. The Brethren has been the turning point of many lives, and mine is only one. I am the footnote.

  For six centuries there have been people like me. We have all wanted the same thing. It connects us, a thick, deep rope of desire. Our lives repeat. There may be others now, although I don’t know who they are and I think that, if I’m lucky, I will never find out. But in five years I have become good at what I do. I have confidence in myself. I’ve even acquired a trade. I can buy jewels, sell them, transport them across borders. Sometimes it helps to be a woman, and sometimes not. The jewels themselves are always movable, despite any restrictions. They are carried from Ilakaka to Damascus to Baghdad to Geneva, London, Tokyo; by motorboat, aeroplane, taxi, hidden under the tails of sheep, in the guts of travellers. A great mercurial trade, always in motion.

  I look for what is precious and tangible, and my life becomes these things. There are worse ways to be. There is a substance to what I do. I have held jewels it is a privilege to touch. A girasol ruby with its phantasmal star. A cicada carved from mutton-fat jade, taken from the mouth of a buried emperor. Trojan gold, worn on my wedding finger from Ankara to Los Angeles. And one day I will find the Three Brethren. I know what I want from my life. It is not the physical value of the jewel. Objects can be precious in other ways.

  Ismet the merchant is thirty hours behind me. I think of the gun at the young man’s belt, the false diamond in its box. I wish I could believe we have nothing in common; but what the merchant said was true. He looked at me and recognised something in himself. The search, or the jewel trade, has changed me. I’m not sure which. It is a respectable business, mine, but an inhumane one. For the people who make lives from them, stones are more than ornaments or currency. They are a kind of drug, a crystallised heroin. A fetish. They attract violence.

  In sub-Saharan Africa, in diamond country, there are death squads trained to clear villages from alluvia-bearing land. The squads consist of children, some of them young as ten. They are cheap, a diamond expert once told me, and easy to train. Sometimes they hold their guns like toys. And sometimes not.

  In Muzo, Colombia there are guaqueros who sell emeralds scavenged from the government mines. The stones are laid out and talked up, the worst soaked in oil of cedars. And every dealer has a gun. Guns in handbags or strapped to ankles, to crotches. ‘My old woman is happy,’ says a man with an earring made of cemetery gold. ‘She has a TV and a chihuahua. It’s progress!’ There are two murders a day in the mines. Just as a precaution, you understand.

  There are trace elements of gold in human hair, in sea-water, and in trees. They are inextricable, these lodes. There are people who would mine them if they could. Ismet would wring them out and leave the waste behind. I saw it in his eyes. I am not so like him yet.

  I was on a night train through Russia. A man came into my sleeping compartment. He had a knife, and he asked for jewels. I don’t know how he knew me, I didn’t recognise him, but then he looked easy to miss. His features and physique were somehow anonymous, a big, grey, benign-featured man. It may be that he had been following me for some time.

  I gave him what I had, which wasn’t much: a bulse of poor diamonds from the open-cast mines of eastern Siberia. It is the only time I have had jewels stolen from me, although in the trade it is, of course, something of an occupational hazard. I gave him the packet of stones and he put it carefully inside his jacket, zipping the pocket shut, and then he tried to kill me.

  At the time it seemed natural, the escalation from want to extreme violence. I was scared – almost too scared to move – but not, at gut-level, surprised. Now I wonder why he bothered. Possibly he meant to rape me, although I had no sense of that. Possibly he was scared I would go for help, although he didn’t look scared; and he had time in which to be gone, miles of forest in which to hide. I wonder, sometimes, if he only wanted to kill me in the same way as he wanted the stones. He was shorter than me but heavy and it was hard to fight back in the small compartment. He didn’t bother to use the knife.

  Up close, his eyes smiled. They were blue under epicanthal folds. He was all baby fat. I couldn’t hurt him through its rolls and layers. He kept his face away from my teeth and his hands around my neck. His skin smelt of diesel.

  I wanted to hurt him back. It was important to me that he felt what he was doing. I turned under him and shoved my elbow as hard as I could, up into the side of his head. It struck the temple, and I think I felt the bone give. There was no blood, but he made a coughing noise and pulled off me, then fell back down. I felt a wet heat across my crotch as his bladder went.

  I believed he was already dead, but for some time I didn’t think about it. My first thought was for myself. I undressed and washed my clothes and skin with bottled water and soap, scrubbing the hurt off me. The body became a blind spot in the dark motion of the carriage. Forest and snow passed by outside. When the cleaning began to hurt I stopped and dressed again. Then I was surprised to see him.

  There was still no blood on his skin. I took the stones from his pocket. I carried him out into the gangway and left him, stained with his own piss, like a drunk. I locked my door and didn’t open it again that night. In the morning, when I got off, he was already gone. I think he lived, although he was a grey, ordinary man, not one to notice, and in Russia drunks die all the time. Sometimes I feel the weight of him when I am asleep or alone. I am often alone.

  I was in a hotel in Montreal. There were two sellers with an old French necklace. It was a delicate work, a fan of gold filigree set with riverine pearls and small sapphires, dark as caviare. My job was to wear the necklace out of the country on a flight to Marseilles. For a day we stayed in the hotel room, settling the pric
e, seeing no one.

  The sellers were a Californian and a Sri Lankan called Check. Check did all the work. He wore bright shirts and had round cheeks. On the telephone he spoke to the clients in Fanugalo, the complex pidgin of African jewel miners. The other man sweated badly. While Check got me clothes, a hired car, and a flight, the Californian took cocaine. He seemed to have an endless supply of white paper packets, like bulses of stones. He didn’t like the smallness of the room and he said so, often. He hated the French, the smell of our sweat, the way room service knocked, the way the light beat off the river outside and winked and twinkled through the faded orange curtains.

  Late in the afternoon I took the hired car to the airport. I was thinking of my father, somewhere in the country around me with his new life and, perhaps, new family. At the third traffic light someone opened my passenger door and got in. It was the Californian. He was sweating feverishly and he had a gun. He told me to drive out of town and I did what I was told. There were spots of blood on his shirt. I don’t know what happened to Check, if he was killed or if he got away somehow. I liked him. We drove until there were no houses or towns as far as you could see.

  The Californian didn’t bother to take the jewels off me. He sat turned towards me, with the gun cradled in his lap. I knew he was going to kill me. My head went empty waiting for a shot. Then after a few hours the tension became boring and I stopped thinking about it. I turned on the radio but he clicked it off and told me to keep driving.

  Outside the light was bright and low, I had to narrow my eyes against it. The air-conditioning was broken, and it was hot inside the car. I looked over and the Californian had begun to fall asleep. My hands were sweating, and sometimes they slipped a little on the wheel and he would wake up. Each time it happened he woke up less. His eyes looked red even when they were closed, the light illuminating the damaged skin.

  When there were no houses left I reached over and took the gun out of the man’s hands. He didn’t wake up until I stopped the car under a stand of pines. They were bent over, hunchbacked. It was almost dark. I pointed the gun at him and listened to him swear while I got out of the car.

  I began to walk southwards. My heart was slowing, the adrenaline burning away. I wondered if fear could leave any mark inside my cells, some permanent damage. I kept walking all night. At one point I left the gun and the car keys in the hollow trunk of a tree, pushing them down into the soft peat mud. Later I threw away the necklace too, in a shallow pool under the pines, green with cat’s-tails. I sometimes wonder if anyone ever found it. I imagine it’s still there. Like all jewels, it was a beautiful thing.

  * * *

  I fly east, over the crumpled earth of the Taurus Mountains. The lapidary is closed on my knees. I am going to Diyarbak’r, and the woman who buys old pearls.

  A flight attendant leans against her drinks trolley. Her eyes are washed out with air miles and dry humidity. The man in the next seat passes me over a coffee. He has too-white teeth, a creased suit, tanned skin. He smiles at the lapidary. ‘What are you reading?’

  ‘Work.’

  ‘Work, shmurk. Professional traveller, right? You like it? Same shit, different place, right? You want to borrow this?’ He flashes his novel, A Passage to India. ‘My wife gave it to me. I’m not getting it. We can swap.’

  I shake my head. ‘I don’t like fiction. Thanks anyway.’

  I look out of the porthole at lightless dark. I think, Jewels have a way of returning to their past. Perhaps the Brethren has been in Diyarbak’r before. But then the Brethren has been everywhere. I could follow it for a human lifetime and never search a tenth of the places it has been.

  The plane roars around me, the sound distant through its metal skin. I open the lapidary. My same shit. The endpapers are heavily marbled, like an image seen out of tune. The text is badly composed, a treatise on the Asian origins of the Tudor Crown Jewels. Details of a 1530s inventory, a folding altar from Ely, sold on the black market of the time: The Thinner part thereof plated with gold, and garnished with saphures, balaces, small sparckes of emeraldes, and course perles.

  There is a Bombay library register folded inside the cover. It is an antiquity itself, the few names on it already strange after a century – Ody, Shukla, Swaddling. Another name in thin handwriting, almost illegible, like someone trying to imitate a signature without understanding the letters themselves. To my tired mind it looks like ‘Mr Three Diamonds’. I put the book away and sleep.

  I dream of white hair. It is growing down through my head, into the muscle of my heart. I can feel it, cool and hard and thin. The way it grows inside me is crystalline. It is slow but it has momentum. The white hair is inside me, like a shaft of tourmaline underground. Now I have dreamed of it, it will always be there.

  The dream fades, strengthens. I am on the seafront near home. There are stones in my hand. Flints from the beach, two grey, one black. The sea crashes into the sunlight.

  The sound is deafening. I turn away from it and there is a woman coming, distant, down the steep avenue towards me. The trees hide her face, and as she walks closer the face remains hidden, the walker becoming taller, until at a certain point the trick of vanishing-points is overcome and I see it is myself and I stand, only realising I have been holding my breath as I cry out.

  I wake. It is almost light outside. The plane is coming in over canyonscapes and rocky flatlands towards Diyarbak’r. I can pick out a line of electricity pylons stretched out across the alluvial plains, every one collapsed like a shadow. The plane’s own shadow grows bigger, flitting across fields of watermelons, pocked tower blocks. In the distance a huge river creeps southwards, glistening like something cut open. Nothing else moves for miles.

  At the municipal airport the emergency power is on, casting ruddy light. I carry only hand luggage, and I leave quickly. Out of the runway bus windows I can see only two planes, one the Turkish Airlines Airbus 310 we arrived in, the other an unmarked 737-400, dull silver.

  Outside there are taxis waiting, the drivers smoking in the early light. I show my envelope to the first I come to. He screws up his face, then waves at the other drivers. They go into conference together, stabbing at the faint postcode. When the driver is satisfied, he waves me into the back of his cab, holding the door open.

  We drive out into the flat land. I sit back. Mountains rise in the distance, and ahead of us, looming up, I can see the office blocks and black basalt walls of Diyarbak’r. I close my eyes. My hands rest in my lap. I am searching for the Three Brethren. I listen to the windscreen wipers moving through constellations of dust:

  Hush

  Hush

  Hush.

  2

  Brothers

  Hush was the sound of the river rising. Years later, when he came back to Iraq, Daniel found that this was what had stayed with him. It was the flood tide of the Tigris at night he remembered, the sound of it gathering.

  He returned in the spring. It was April, the month of floods. In Mosul he bought new clothes for Salman and himself, black robes, slippers and socks, small turbans dyed with indigo. The drab clothing of Jews in an Ottoman country. Daniel traded them for four links of his gold watch chain. He helped Salman dress, pulling sleeves over his knotted hands. On himself, the chafe of linen felt alien. His body had forgotten it. The brothers were both thin from the year of travelling, and the robes flapped around their arms and ribs.

  It was a slow journey south to Baghdad. The Tigris was too high to navigate. Even with fresh coach horses at Tikrit, it took four days on the sodden roads. While Salman muttered in his sleep, Daniel looked out at the country where they had been born.

  Iraq. It was an Arab name, descended from the Persian. Its meanings overlapped like old tidemarks: Two Veins, after the rivers; the Country of Roots; the Country of Fighting. Daniel knew other words for the place now. European constructions, precise as land claims. Mesopotamia, the Land Between Rivers. There was rain over the eastern mountains, he saw, skeins of it drifting. He looked ou
t away, west towards the Euphrates.

  He was twenty-eight years old. For the first time, he saw clearly how the two great rivers defined the land. Among the rice fields and liquorice trees there were levees, faded meanders and marshes, canal systems from prehistory. The mounds of the old civilisations, nothing left but names and spars of stone. Babylon, Nineveh, Nimrud, Ur. The Tigris and the Euphrates shifted in their sleep, leaving cities beached in the dunes. The landscape was haunted by the two rivers. And between them lay Baghdad, he saw. Like a heart.

  They drove into the walled city through the Gate of the Talisman. It was evening. There were no gaslights in the streets, only lamps, the wink of tallow dips. The Kurdish coachman swore at the jam of horses and asses. Daniel thought, I am home, we are home, and he reached out for Salman’s hand, pressing it against the seamed, cracked seats.

  And then as the days passed, he found that they were not home. They had been gone too long. Even the course of the Tigris had been displaced, flexing through the desert. The rich Jewish families had gone east to Bombay, China or Japan. The poor had gone, fewer remembered where. In the house on Island Road, Daniel found three families of Druze. In their twisted Arabic, they told Daniel what he needed to know but did not want to hear. That the old Jewess had died. Three years ago now; had he known her? The synagogue had paid for her burial. No family to say prayers over her grave.

  Judah, the old rabbi, remembered him. They went early. It was hard to find the place. Daniel recited the familial prayer for the dead. The rabbi helped him when he faltered. He wept only later, alone, not letting himself frighten Salman. The sound clanging off the walls around him.

  They took rooms in Judah’s house. The granddaughter cooked for them. A quiet woman, her food, like Rachel’s, flavoured with vinegar and tamarind. Sour and familiar. At supper Salman talked in his wheedling voice, stories of jewels and crowns. Daniel didn’t let himself be ashamed of him.