by Nathan Swain
“Here goes nothing,” Eastgate mumbled to Hadi.
“I certainly hope not,” Omid responded.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know you spoke English.”
“You were told that I could help you read the script on an ancient artifact, but you didn’t think I could speak the most popular language in the world?”
“Of course. You’re right. Please accept my apology.”
“You see, it’s really quite interesting,” Omid continued. “It would be impossible for a man like me not to know the language of the conquerors: the Greek of Alexander the Great, the Latin of Caesar Augustus, and the English of Bush and Cheney.”
Eastgate wondered if Omid was a Saddam sympathizer, and if Makiya had set him up.
This could turn to shit real fast.
He quickly scanned the shop and brushed his fingertips against the grip of his HK handgun.
Chapter 6
“First of all, I’m a political independent,” Eastgate told Omid, attempting to reduce the tension. “Truth be told, I was more of a fan of John McCain and Bill Bradley, but neither of them could get past the South Carolina primary. Second, I prefer to think of it as the English of Chaucer and Shakespeare.”
“I like that, Mr. Eastgate,” Omid responded. “The true language does belong to those great poets. But I can’t recall either of them employing such ugly words as ‘occupation’ and ‘regime change.’ ”
“Really? Aren’t half of Shakespeare’s plays about regime change?”
Omid managed a curt smile and extended his hand. “As you have already guessed, I am Omid, Mr. Eastgate. I’m pleased to meet you. Please, sit down.”
Omid led Eastgate and Hadi to a room in the back of the shop. It was decorated like traditional Arab salon with three arched doorways and fine carpets. Eastgate ignored Omid’s invitation to sit in a wing-backed chair facing the interior of the shop, stationing himself instead on a cushioned sofa against the wall. Hadi’s eyes were fixed on the front door.
There was a balcony looking down on them on all four sides of the second floor. Eastgate cringed. It would be the perfect vantage point for a sniper who wanted to cut Eastgate’s appointment short with a bullet to his head.
“Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Omid,” Eastgate said, deciding to plow ahead.
“Please, just Omid.”
To Eastgate’s astonishment, Omid sat immediately next to him on the sofa, placing a hand on Eastgate’s right knee. “I’m at your service.”
Strange. After a decade of learning the customs of Arabs, Pashtuns, and Kurds, the hand-on-knee treatment is a first.
“I hope you will not think me rude,” Omid said, patting Eastgate’s knee, “but I always require payment upfront.”
Eastgate nodded intently. “Is that right?”
“You see, nine out of ten artifacts I am asked to analyze are forgeries or fakes. When I tender the bad news, my clients often act as if I have cheated them when in fact I have only told them the truth.”
Eastgate withdrew five one-hundred dollar bills from a pouch in his pant leg. He took Omid by the hand, turned his wrist, and placed the bills in his palm.
If you’re going to get weird, then so will I.
Omid nodded sternly. “Now, let me see your artifact.”
Eastgate passed the briefcase to the turbaned assistant, who placed it on a wood leaf resting on Omid’s lap. With a soft click, Omid switched on a light attached to a large magnifying glass. He looked carefully at the black cloth through the glass lens and slowly removed the tablet from its casing.
Omid lowered his face to within inches of the tablet.
Eastgate’s eyebrows raised.
Omid stared without expression for close to a minute, lightly sniffing the tablet surface. The turbaned assistant looked on breathlessly, as if Omid was divining the secrets of nature.
Eastgate ran his hand over the stubble on his jaw. “Everything OK, Omid? Are you still with us? We’re on planet Earth. Where are you?”
Omid continued to stare.
A fat Persian cat rubbed against Eastgate’s leg, then sprinted across the salon and pounced, as if in pursuit of a mouse.
Eastgate was losing patience. He flashed a look of irritation at Hadi, who could only shrug his shoulders.
“You got any food around here?” Eastgate asked the turbaned assistant. “Chips or a Diet Coke?” The assistant ignored Eastgate, gently caressing the ivory handle of his prop sword. Eastgate took note. Don’t mess with me, Jeeves.
“Say, what are you supposed to be anyway,” Eastgate asked, “some kind of a palace eunuch?”
The assistant sneered.
At last, Omid stirred. “Mr. Eastgate, what can you tell me about cuneiform?”
Eastgate exhaled and relaxed his shoulders. “It’s a form of writing. They used it in Mesopotamia. That’s about all I remember from seventh grade.”
In reality, Eastgate knew far more than that. He had been reading up on Mesopotamian art and culture since McQuistad had ordered him to the museum. He saw no need to impress Omid.
“Better than most, Mr. Eastgate. You are correct. Cuneiform was a system of writing. The oldest writing in fact. Artifacts with cuneiform go back approximately six thousand years.”
“Are we talking Babylonian times, Omid?”
“We are talking Sumerian times, Mr. Eastgate. A few millennia before the Babylonians and the Assyrians. But they all used cuneiform.”
The turbaned assistant delivered a silver tray and poured tea into two clear shot glasses. He dropped three teaspoons of sugar into Omid’s glass and one in Eastgate’s. Eastgate had come to learn that, in Iraq, the amount of sugar placed in one’s glass of tea was as good an indicator as any of what your host thought of you.
Omid tapped the pad of his finger on the sharpened point of a pencil. “Cuneiform is from the Latin cunia meaning ‘wedge.’ Writers of cuneiform would have plucked a stiff reed off the banks of the Tigris and cut a wedge into its tip. They pushed the wedge into the surface of the clay at differing angles to make different shapes, and those shapes made different words.”
Omid’s eyes appeared to darken from brilliant green to muddy brown. He pulled at the collar of his shirt and straightened himself in his chair.
Eastgate sipped his tea. I hope he’s going somewhere with this.
“But your tablet is different.”
“How so?”
“The pictographs on your tablet weren’t written with the wedge-shaped reed, but a blunt, round-shaped instrument.”
Eastgate’s eyes narrowed. “Also, look at the spacing. It needs to be examined with better equipment, but I see vertical columns of text, not rows. Columns are present in only the oldest tablets. They were mankind’s first efforts to preserve ideas in written form.”
Omid primarily gave off the vibe of a bullshit artist. But Eastgate’s instincts told him the antique dealer was being straight with him now. This was Omid’s business. His reputation was at stake—at least with Makiya and the museum. Eastgate also detected the hint of a British accent in Omid’s intonation. He had probably studied or worked abroad. In other words, he wasn’t your garden variety Iraqi fraudster out for a quick buck.
Omid switched on a standing lamp next to the couch, illuminating a swirl of glowing dust particles floating above the tablet. “Mr. Eastgate, this tablet has the oldest writing I’ve ever seen. If my analysis is correct, it may be one of the earliest writings in human history.”
Eastgate tried to look unphased, but Omid’s conclusion made his stomach drop what felt like a foot and a half. “I wasn’t expecting that.”
“Nor was I.”
“Can you tell me what it says?”
“No, no, no,” Omid said, exasperated. “The symbols are too old. They are strange to me. Very strange.”
Well, that’s that. Eastgate sighed and prepared to show Omid the pin with the sword surrounded by the ruby-like stones.
But then Omid pointed to the bottom of the tabl
et. “Except for this.”
Chapter 7
Olivia reviewed the first half of The Origins of Mesopotamia in advance of her tutorial, and was doodling cartoons of her father—in her rendering, a mixture of John Bull and Robert De Niro—expressing various degrees of anger with her. She tapped the silver band of her purple amethyst ring against her desk like a snare drum. Finally, Samir walked into the seminar room.
She looked up at the clock. It was 1:10 p.m. Samir was routinely late, which Olivia recognized as a common affectation of the children of the very wealthy. The fact that he was smartly dressed in a navy hoodie underneath a camel-colored Ralph Lauren sports jacket somehow mitigated the offense.
If you’re going to be late, she thought, you might as well be fashionable.
Most intriguing about Samir’s wardrobe today was the small pin fastened to the lapel of his jacket. Were those real rubies? she wondered. What was that pin, the icon of a secret society? Or was it just a bauble from the men’s department at Harrods?
If you’re going to be late, it doesn’t hurt to be intriguing, either.
With only one rectangular window and a small circular desk, the seminar room adjacent to Olivia’s office had hosted tutorial meetings for more than five centuries. “People were much tinier then,” Olivia would quip to her students when they inevitably knocked knees for the first time. The cramped quarters never seemed to bother Samir. If anything, Olivia thought, it emboldened him. He seemed to luxuriate in his six-foot-three-inch frame, sliding down in his chair and splaying his legs.
Olivia glanced at her watch in silent condemnation of Samir’s tardiness. “Hello, how did you find your reading this week?”
Samir shrugged.
Affected nonchalance. He definitely comes from money.
Samir’s Omega wrist watch captured the afternoon sun shining through the window and reflected it back onto Olivia’s red blouse as a dancing dot of light.
Probably oil money. Or maybe construction.
“How would you summarize Applewine’s argument?” Olivia asked, trying to press forward into more productive terrain.
“The linguistic innovations of Sumer and Babylonia were quite complex, and influenced the Near East more than previously understood.”
“I see you’ve read the book jacket,” Olivia noted archly. She intended to push Samir a little today.
“No, I read the book itself.” Olivia began to respond but Samir continued. “I thought Applewine’s comments about Tell Eatiq in the foreword were quite interesting.”
“We don’t have to talk about Eatiq, Samir. He only updated the text to include some discussion of it, among other recent discoveries.”
“Yes, but how do you respond to his assertion that you’ve wrongly identified Tell Eatiq as Eden?”
Olivia put down her pen and placed her face into the palms of her hand, pulling her fingers down the sides of her cheeks in frustration.
“Samir, there’s more to the study of the ancient Near East than Tell Eatiq.”
“It’s what I found most interesting about the text and I’d like to hear your response.”
Olivia searched Samir’s expressionless face. Normally, when a student fixated on a specific subject, Olivia would redirect the conversation by turning to another student. But, contrary to custom, in which seminars typically were conducted with at least two or three students, the registrar scheduled this seminar with Samir alone. A power play, she suspected, executed by a father with influence.
I know all about the string pulling of powerful fathers.
“Well, if you must know, I think Applewine is knocking down a straw man. I never said Tell Eatiq was Eden. I just put forth the evidence and concluded, based on the extant information, it was a reasonable hypothesis.”
“He accuses you of reading the metaphor out of the story of Adam and Eve.”
“You’re right, he does. And he’s right. And I couldn’t be happier about it. I’m interested in the historical Bible. The actual people, places, and things identified in the book. Applewine can have the metaphorical side,” Olivia said, bracketing the word in air quotes.
“Is there really enough history about Eden to identify it as a real place?”
“There certainly is. Genesis 2 makes clear that Eden was an actual place at an actual time. It really provides an obscene amount of detail. It identifies a river that flows out of Eden and then divides into four branches. It names those branches and describes their location and direction. For the first branch, Pishon, it even identifies minerals and resin that can be found there—gold, onyx and bdellium. The writers of Genesis 2 intended to identify a specific location for Eden. That much is clear.”
“Applewine says these details were included only to give texture to the metaphor.”
“I think he’s likely wrong. There’s heaps of evidence to support the hypothesis: cuneiform glyphs, reliefs, satellite imagery. Where’s his evidence?”
Samir didn’t respond, but stared at Olivia intensely.
Olivia was incredulous. He’s doing it again.
Instead of looking away, this time Olivia met Samir’s silent gaze directly. Ten seconds passed. Twenty seconds. An itch emerged on the tip of her nose.
Bugger this. Olivia broke her gaze. I don’t need to play these games any more.
She cleared her throat. “We know two of the rivers are the Tigris and Euphrates. The other two can reasonably be surmised through satellite photography.”
Samir placed his elbow on the table and cupped his jaw in his hand. Olivia could have sworn he fluttered his eyelashes. “So, let me ask you,” Samir said, “is it true that you’re about to begin digging again at the site?”
Olivia tried to maintain a poker face but it was useless. Her department was leakier than the University’s plumbing. “Who told you that?”
“I think I overheard some faculty discussing it in the lounge.”
“Well, do keep it a secret. It’s what is supposed to pass for top secret, highly classified around here.”
“What do you hope to find?”
“Artifacts, pottery, utensils, writing. Anything that tells us about this historic place. And, best case scenario, a sign in cuneiform that reads: ‘Welcome to Eden. Yes, the one from the Bible. Please enjoy your stay.’ ”
Her comment deserved at least a token smile from Samir, Olivia reckoned, but he sat stone faced.
OK, then.
Olivia yawned. “Perhaps we should continue another time.”
“But, just to clarify, you are going to move forward with your dig, despite the war?”
“If you wish to join the chorus of voices telling me I’m crazy, don’t bother. I have long since ignored them, and don’t intend to allow anything to stop me. Not even this disastrous war.”
“It isn’t safe,” Samir said. “I’d worry for your well-being.” He extended his foot toward Olivia, brushing her open-toe sandal. Was it inadvertent, or a gesture of intimacy? Olivia wasn’t sure.
Samir looked directly at her. “You can’t underestimate the dangers of this world.”
Chapter 8
Looking through Omid’s magnifying glass, all Eastgate could see at first were infinitesimal particles of clay and tiny crevices and bubbles in the tablet’s surface. Under the microscope, it looked gray and pock-marked, like the lunar surface. But as his eyes adjusted, he began to notice curving, white lines.
“It’s this,” Eastgate said, holding up the black cloth that had covered the tablet. “It’s the same symbol. What does it mean?”
“It appears to be a lemniscate. What you probably know as an infinity symbol.”
Eastgate looked closer. Omid was right. The outlines of the two ovals intersected seamlessly, joining arms in a kind of mathematical dance. The design was unmistakable. “I had no idea the infinity symbol was that old.”
“It isn’t, at least not as a mathematical symbol. The earliest lemniscate I’m aware of is the ouroboros. The ancient Egyptian symbol of the snake co
nsuming its own tail. It was a symbol of self-destruction, but also renewal. In that sense it signified the eternal. But that was Egypt, and centuries later. This is not a cuneiform pictograph. At least not one familiar to me.”
“Then how do you explain it?”
Omid shrugged his shoulders. “It’s impossible to know what its meaning was to the person who etched it into this tablet. It could be that its meaning to the person who etched it was far different than the meaning we ascribe to it now.” Omid paused, apparently deep in thought. He pinched his upper lip between his fingers.
“And yet there is something inherently human about it, no? The lemniscate is stamped into the essence of all human life.”
“The double-helix of our DNA,” Eastgate said.
“Of course,” Omid replied curtly. “Regardless, it is triggering in my memory a profound association to a very special place.”
Omid looked at his turbaned assistant, who walked over to the front of the shop and began shuttering the windows. The light outside was starting to fade.
“What place?”
“You probably know it, Mr. Eastgate, as the place the Hebrew Bible refers to as Eden.”
Eastgate’s eyes widened. He looked over at Hadi.
Eden, he mouthed, silently, as if the words were too ludicrous or profound to say out loud.
Eastgate could feel his heart rate tick up. He needed a minute. “May I?” he asked, pouring himself another glass of tea. He slowly touched the glass to his lips, sloshing the minty liquid over his tongue and into the roof of his mouth. This op was getting stranger by the minute. He let the tea warm his mouth for two beats before swallowing hard. Damn you, McQuistad.
Eastgate smiled. He calmly placed his hand on Omid’s shoulder. “Ha, that’s a good one, Omid. Makiya didn’t tell me you had a sense of humor. You almost had me there.”
“I have been called many things in this line of work, but comical is not one of them.”
