by Tobias Hill
Daniel watched as he put the clear jewel down. It seemed to him that the Imam’s fingers lingered on it. Only for a moment.
‘Still, as it is you are rich men. I am glad for you. Where will you go, eh? Bombay? Sassoon ben Salih is doing good business there, I hear. You could do worse. India is best, eh?’
‘No.’ Daniel stood up. ‘Thank you, Imam. You have been most kind. I must go now. My family will be waiting for me.’
The stones were still on the old man’s lap. Unwrapped. The last light gleamed in them and was gone. ‘Wait, boy. You want something to eat? Stay with me. Talk. No?’
Hüseyin wrapped the stones with slow reluctance. When he was finished Daniel took them from him and left the way he had come. At the front of the house he began to walk north on the Island Road, towards home. But at the junction with Khadimain Road he turned east. Walking for the sake of it, down into the Old City.
The bundle of hessian felt warm under his arm. He kept his muscle tight against it. Around him lamps were starting to be lit in the wooden houses. In the Souk Hannoun the butchers were closing up their cages of chickens, the shohet slaughterers cleaning their knives at the old street fountain. Daniel walked past them, down the muddy roads to the city docks.
The Tigris was quiet. He stood by the fishing boats and river ships and listened to it, the faint hush of its tides. Overhead, across the water, the Citadel loomed. The battlements still red where the sunset reached them.
He thought of the stones. He thought of nothing. The city around him, which he knew was dying. He tried to keep it in his mind. So that when he was gone from here, he would forget nothing of it.
He turned back. It was uphill to the house with two doors. The low roads were mired and he trudged, bent over his bundle, the tiredness settling into him. The house was dark and he went in without lighting the hallway lamp. He tried to picture it all around him. The mezuzah in the eastern door. The pattern of the hall tiles, that could change according to the direction from which you came. The atmosphere of the rooms. The valency of light.
He walked through to Judit’s room. There was bedding here, ready for the winter. Daniel laid it out by the western door, where the vines shouldered their ways through the shutters. He undressed in the darkness. The air was warm against his naked skin. He unwrapped the stones, lay down and slept with them beside him.
He was alone in sleep. On the flat roof his brother lay awake, the mosquitoes chiming in the air above him. The breeze moved across him, warm as his skin. Salman dreamed of London with his eyes open. An empire on which the sun never set. New lives.
In the kitchen Rachel sat at the scarred table. She had made rice for Daniel. It sat in the bowl, cooling, unnecessary. The terebinth box was open in front of her. She took out the circumcision gowns and smoothed them in her hands. Waistcoats for babies. Brothers and brothers.
The buttons of coral and turquoise were cold against her fingers. She held them, trying to make them warm. She folded the gowns gently and cried to herself. Not gently, but silently. Her face monstrous with sorrow.
And in Judit’s room, Daniel slept in the humid air. The storm was still hours off, and unbroken. The bundle of jewels lay open beside him. The opal, the sapphire. The Heart of Three Brothers.
It phosphoresced. Daniel was not awake to see it. In the dark of the room, the diamond began to spill light. It bubbled out of the five facets without sound. The jewel glittered for no one but itself. As if it had been woken by sunlight.
* * *
I am following the traces of a broken jewel. It has been the turning point of many lives. Mine is only one.
I think of the Writing Diamond. I try to imagine it.
There is no other stone like diamond. It has particular qualities of purity, self-possession, and weakness. On the Moh scale of hardness the diamond is ten, the maximum from which all the rest are measured; but this is deceptive. For one thing, diamond is the only gem which will combust, burning with a clear, quick white flame. It leaves no ash. It is as if the crystal were somehow organic, like coral or amber, skin or bone. And diamond is brittle as bone. Drop a brilliant and it will shatter like glass along any internal flaw. There is hardness but no flexibility, and brittleness is an unforgiving quality.
It is a beautiful stone. A cut brilliant is spectacular. Its internal faces reflect light totally whenever it strikes them at any angle greater than 24°13’. Sometimes it can seem as if the crystal is more light than solid. There are even some diamonds which phosphoresce after exposure to the sun. They boil over, glimmering to themselves in the dark.
Still, the beauty of a brilliant is only half in the stone. The secret is in the cut – the balance of facets, the deep precision of geometry. And the brilliant wasn’t finally perfected until 1917, when Marcel Talkowsky arranged the sixteen facets (each of which has its own name – skew, skill, bezel, quoin). In the history of diamonds, the brilliance of light is a recent phenomenon.
It is an elemental jewel – pure cubic carbon. Diamonds are like a mathematical solution to what a gem should be. No other jewel has that simplicity. But again, the purity is deceptive. It is only terrestrial diamonds which always have a cubic structure. Sometimes diamonds are found in meteors, and their form is hexagonal. There are even diamonds which aren’t made of carbon at all, but boron, and these stones are blue as ice shadows. And there is the diamond’s skin.
Hold a diamond and you touch hydrogen. The nyf of the stone, its rind, is overlaid with a surface of elemental explosiveness. The arrangement of atoms in the crystal is acquisitive, reaching outwards like so many hands. The hands catch what they can, taking hydrogen from the oil of your fingers or throat, or from the air. In this way the diamond makes itself a second skin.
This is the first irony of diamonds. However much people try to be near them – and people waste their lives in this way – diamonds are never touched. People kill for them, pay fortunes, lose years. In return, the stones give them coolness, light, and a surface of violence one atom deep.
This is the second irony of diamonds: the crystal is a lie. The truth is in the hydrogen. Diamonds draw violence to them like magnets. They inspire a deadliness in humanity, a morality which values stone above life. They wear death invisibly, weightlessly, as if the lives of their owners were as transient and insubstantial as air.
3
The Function of Pain
The driver wears a cheap quartz watch. Its strap catches the hairs of his wrist in its metal backbone. Each time it bites he shakes his hand and the cab swerves towards the gutter. There are street children there, searching for something to play with. Stones and dust and broken fruit.
A glass eye swings over the dashboard. Above it is the rear-view mirror. In the mirror I can see the driver’s own eyes. I think he looks gentle. I know appearances are deceptive. He has long cheekbones and long eyelashes, dark and delicate, like those of a cow.
We don’t talk on the way from the airport. The radio is turned up loud, fading between local stations. Turkish pop, US Airforce FM. The driver sings along in a small, absent voice. We don’t talk. I’m tired from the night’s transit, I can smell it on me. And I have had enough of taxi drivers.
The music shifts from Turkish to English, East to West. The driver offers me a cigarette and I take it. The smoke wakes me up. I lean against the window and look out at Asia while the Kinks play in the trapped air.
I was born, lucky me, in a land that I love. Though I’m poor, I am free.
I am looking for the woman who loves pearls. It is not yet six o’clock by the driver’s watch. The window glass is already warm against my cheek. I see a mule cart between two crumbling high-rise blocks. The sound of the dawn muezzin begins. Beyond it, through it, comes the thunder of a Turkish fighter plane. I crane back to see.
When I’m grown, I shall fight. For this land I shall die, where the sun never sets.
We come to a junction crowded with trucks and ranked taxis. On the wide pavement is an empty fountain. Abov
e the dry cascades stands a statue of Atatürk surrounded by stone children in Western clothes. And over them all loom the buttressed walls of Diyarbak’r.
I didn’t think they would be so big. The ancient works are thick as houses. A London terrace with arrowslits. Black as grime in an industrial city.
From the East to the West, from the rich to the poor, Victoria fucked them all.
The driver clicks off his radio and pulls up. I feel in my pocket for money. Glött’s envelope is still there, and the remaining stone of my three Sri Lankan rubies. I pinch it, feeling its hardness. It is my last little wish, the means to my ends. It only took one stone to bring me here, and another changed into pearl. I am already one step closer to the Three Brethren. If I didn’t believe that, I would be nowhere at all.
The taxi driver has no change. I overpay him an amount which means nothing to me. He gets out of the yellow cab as I do, smiling the hurt smile of a shy man, waving a piece of paper.
‘Please. Lady. Yes.’
It is a simple map of the city. I can make out the wall and the airport. A big You Are Here arrow by the taxi rank, as if a foreigner could be nowhere else. I take out the postcode envelope and the driver nods and nods. He grabs the map back and points at it, his finger crumpling the district inside the city walls. The old centre of Diyarbak’r.
I thank him. We shake hands. The watchstrap nips his skin and he flinches away. He drives back west between high-rises, towards the air terminus.
I sit under the statue of Atatürk and look at the map. Above me, the stone children offer up their stone flowers. The area inside the city walls isn’t large; I could cover it in two days. But there are only two main roads, and between their cross, the warrens of backstreets are only sketched in. If Glött lives there, it won’t be so easy to find her.
The sun is getting stronger. Writing shows through the lit paper. I turn it over and on the other side is a Message of Welcome from the Diyarbak’r Office of Tourism: A NEW FLAVOUR IS COMING TO DIYARBAK’R. DIYARBAK’R, RENOWNED FOR ITS BIGGEST WATERMELONS, IS ALSO THE CULTURAL AND COMMERCIAL CAPITAL OF THE REGION. DISCOVER THE ATTRACTIVENESS – IN DIYARBAK’R!
I look around. In front of me a man is trying to sell a glut harvest of withered aubergines. Women in black pick at their purple organs and scrotums. Under the city walls are costermongers grilling entrail kebaps. I see no tourists, no foreigners. I wonder if the Office of Tourism would help me find a German woman in the old city. They must have time to spare.
The sun creeps up across my chest. It is hotter than Istanbul here, and I am already travel-soiled. Every time I move I catch the muggy smell of my own sweat. It would be lovely to be out of the heat for a while. Not for too long, just a few hours’ rest. The jewel can wait until I am clean.
I go and look for somewhere to wash and sleep. It takes some time. Three blocks behind the taxi rank I find a tourist district of two hotels. The larger building is called the Pansiyon Dijleh, and the smaller the Formula 1 Hotel with the ‘t’ missing. A cart full of vulcanised shoes has overturned in the middle of the road, and I pick my way through them to the smaller building.
In the lobby a woman is vacuuming in long strokes, leaning into it. The carpet is too old to ever be clean again. She turns her Hoover off reluctantly, takes my money, gives me a key on a chequered keyring. She tells me that breakfast is extra lira and that I am allowed no visitors. Her English is better than my Turkish. She closes the room door behind me.
The bed is overhung by an air-conditioner the shape and size of a washing machine. When I turn it on the air tumbles and clatters inside it. I put down my bag and go into the shower room, switch on the light. It catches me, frozen in the washbasin mirror. I look surprised to find myself here. The skin of my face is tanned, and the faint smell of aeroplanes is on my clothes, an aftertaste of air freshener and vomit. I shake off the shirt and chinos, throwing them out onto the bedroom floor.
When I am naked I stand in front of the mirror again. Transit is catching up with me, I look like shit. I also smell like shit and feel like shit. These are the days when I try to draw no conclusions about myself. I turn the shower on and step into its clean white noise.
The water is hot and good. I close my eyes and let the grime steam off me. I think of nothing. Not the Brethren or myself, not the woman who loves pearls. My head is cleaned out. When I’m finished I go out into the bedroom, close the blinds, and lie down on the cigarette-burned sheets. The moisture dries on my flushed skin and I sleep.
The smell of breakfast wakes me just after eight. Someone is burning sausages. I’m hungry enough for it to make me salivate. I get dressed in clean youth-regulation jeans, a Reebok towel T-shirt and sandals, walking clothes. The rest of my bag is packed, never unpacked. I check I have my notebooks, the last ruby, the conch pearl. Then I go downstairs.
The woman is still vacuuming in the same place, turning between the stairs and the entrance hall. It is a slow, lonely kind of dance. A single formula for life, a Formula 1. I go up and smile and give her the room key.
‘You come back tonight?’
‘Maybe.’
She looks down at the chequered keyring. ‘It is a good room.’
‘It was perfect. Thank you. Actually, I have to meet someone now. An old German woman, Deutsch – maybe you know her. Von Glött. Have you heard the name?’
She studies me, up and down, and turns away. Under her, the carpet has been worn to the consistency of old money or skin, and I leave her to it. Outside it’s cooler and I’m glad of it. There are clouds over the city walls, long herringbones of cirrus that filter the sun. I walk towards them, into old Diyarbak’r.
It is crowded here, and the crowd is unsmiling, occupied with existence in a hard place. I am not directing myself anywhere yet, not searching for Glött with any kind of method. First I want to see the city in which she has chosen to live. I am feeling my way towards her.
I watch the people. Their clothes, hands, faces. The old women with blue tattoos on their foreheads. The mobile phone man outside the Diyarbak’r Bank, with perfume to match his Armani jacket. I watch them watching me, and the last thing I do is listen to the words and voices. The street children working themselves into a giggling hysteria of where are you from? and what is your name? The women warding off my evil blue eyes with a kiss and a shake of the fingers. The sleek, bored young men at corners whispering after me: Hey fucky fucky, cheaper than tomorrow. Where are you going, pretty girl?
I don’t answer them. Not because they are dangerous, although some of them will be dangerous. Because I have no interest in them. I know where I am going, and why. It is more than most people can say for themselves.
No one lives on the main roads. The two big streets run between compass points, crossing at the centre of the old city. They are lined with banks and sixties shopping arcades, their concrete and marble already old with grime. Above the shops are windows full of dusty professional signs: Doktor, Avukat, Profesor.
The gutters are crowded with food stalls. I buy a paper cone of boiled chickpeas. A girl in shorts with go-faster stripes tugs at my sleeve and says something in Turkish or Kurdish, so fast I can’t tell which. I give her the cone and she eats quickly, while she has the chance.
The life of the city increases towards its heart. By the time I arrive at the crossroads the mucky streets have been swallowed up in a bazaar of technicolour plastic buckets, clotted cream, slats of honey. Crates of grapes, sacks of sumac. A fishmonger waits behind plates of Tigris carp, a smith mends an adze in shafts of blowtorched sunlight. Without even realising I have done it, I step off the main road, into the backstreets.
The sound changes first, then the light. A jet passes overhead and its sonic boom echoes down distantly, muffled by rooftops. I look up from a cart of burgundy armchairs and find I don’t know where the sun is. My sense of direction leaves me. It only takes a second. I don’t even have a name for the space I am standing in. Not a backstreet, only the space left by buildings.
/> The buyers and sellers mill around me. By necessity, people are closer here. I feel a hand caress the skin of my arm, from elbow to armpit, but when I turn there is no one to face. The hubbub of the crowd rises and falls, peaks and troughs. When I feel ready, I start to move again.
This is a different kind of Diyarbak’r. The old quarters feel permanent in a way the main roads and high-rise blocks do not. There is a sense of travelling backwards through time. I wonder if there is a conversion rate. One year back for every ten miles east. But it is not that simple: it is more real than that. I am not in a previous century here. Only a different one.
I stop by a meat market and buy bony shish kebap from a butcher’s wife. There are low stools and I sit and eat with my overnight bag tucked between my feet. Beside me, the sun comes through a side of goat. The meat stained with light. The kebap woman brings me a metal bowl of drinking yogurt with ice. I wash away the taste of salt and fat, get up, and keep going.
Now I am off the main roads, the street children follow me more openly. One of them has a plastic cone trumpet and he blows it, the note split with his effort. Each time I smile at him he skitters sideways, but he doesn’t give up. I don’t mind him. The men watch me more obviously here too. The children keep them back.
I feel my way. If she lives anywhere in Diyarbak’r I guess Glött will be here, in the old city. Often the snickets open into plain squares, washing strung out to dry over scrubbed concrete. Twice, though, I come to the locked gates of bigger houses. Through the bars I can hear doves and water. There are courtyards in there, striped colonnades of black and white stone, introspective windows. Wealth turned in on itself.
I take my time, looking at Diyarbak’r. I do it because Glött will have done the same. Jewels are the epitome of every physical thing – book, watch, city, face – that anyone ever covets. And those who love jewels tend to be covetous people. I look for what the German might desire. It is the only thing I know about her.