The Eden Deception

by Nathan Swain

  These thoughts swirled through Dashni’s consciousness as he paced the gardens of St. James. Then his cell phone rang.

  “Hello daddy. I have just a moment. I’m just about to give a lecture,” Olivia said. “You know how important I am,” she added, chortling and full of self-mockery.

  “I’ve been trying to reach you for weeks, why haven’t you returned my calls?”

  “Are you angry?”

  “Yes, I’m furious with you.”

  “Oh dear. Well, I’m so sorry. I know I promised you I wouldn’t speak publicly but I felt compelled.”

  “That’s not why I’m upset. You’re a British citizen and have the right to speak freely, of course. If I’ve stood for anything all these years, I hope it’s at least that.”

  “Then why are you upset?”

  “I’ve had something important to discuss with you for weeks and you haven’t called me back.”

  “What is it?”

  “The looting. The chaos after the war. There is much more of an appetite for destruction than we expected.”

  “I hate to say I told you so.”

  “It’s not that. Democracy can be messy. Fine. It’s better than Saddam’s torture prisons. What I mean is that Iraq is not safe for archaeology right now.”

  “That’s all the more reason why we need to go in and secure Tell Eatiq under the protection of the UN. Criminals are targeting historic sites across the country, plundering them and selling what they can on the black market. The record of human history is up for grabs.”

  “The UN does not have the resources.”

  “So, we’ll use our own resources.”

  “What resources? Did the archaeology department recruit its own militia?”

  “If we don’t go, then the greatest artifacts known to man may be up for sale on eBay in six months.”

  “You will almost certainly be kidnapped if you go. And if that happens, you know there’s nothing I can do to help you.”

  “I understand.”

  “Then you’ll stay out of it.”

  “No, in fact, I am more determined than ever to proceed.”

  Dashni sighed. “He loved his truth so lewdly that he dared anything in order to destroy falsehood.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh, just some bit of wisdom I once read in a book.”

  “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

  “Perhaps it will. When you’ve come to your senses.”

  “Whose is it?”

  “Umberto Eco. The Name of the Rose.”

  “Oh, he’s good.”

  Dashni sighed. Olivia had made an art of empty banter.

  “Look. You know I can revoke your passport.”

  Olivia snorted. “The media would just love that story.”

  Dashni sighed dramatically.

  “Oh, daddy. You didn’t raise me to be afraid of armies and guns. If you think I’m pigheaded, you have only yourself to blame.”

  “You’re right. Extraordinary, isn’t it, how absurd the circles of life work?”

  “I don’t know what you mean, but I’m sure you’re right.”

  “I will tell you some day. Please be safe.”

  Dashni closed his cell phone. He looked up to see Buckingham Palace. He must have been walking for half an hour.

  He turned around and looked back at Whitehall. He could just glimpse the ornate white moldings of the Foreign Office building above the green tree tops of the park. After it was first built, the structure was universally derided as a classicist nightmare by his cynical countrymen. Even the original architect hated it, forced into abandoning his original Gothic design by the prime minister.

  But after thirty years of service to the Crown, the Foreign Office building still took Dashni’s breath away. It always had. Once also home to the India Office, Colonial Office, and Home Office, it was constructed at the height of Britain’s imperial power. Its columns and arches, even the statue of Clive next door, symbolized for Dashni all that he loved about Britain—its history, its might and grandeur. It was British power that threw out petty monarchists and corrupt dictators from countries across the empire, and instilled the common law and British tradition in its place, creating order out of chaos. This proud history is what motivated Dashni to serve his adopted country for his entire adult life. It would allow him, he hoped, to at last bring justice to the country of his birth and the Kurdish people.

  He had plans in place to see it through at last—to see it through to the end.

  Chapter 17

  “Do you not understand that your work actually contradicts the Bible?” asked a large middle-aged man, whose lisp sprayed the microphone in front of him with speckles of saliva. Olivia stood at a podium in Clothworkers Hall in the heart of London. As usual, the question and answer session after one of her talks had gotten off to a raucous start.

  “You say Eden is no older than Ur and the other city-states around it, but Genesis 2, Verse 8 says, and I quote, ‘And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.’ How could Eden be no older than these other cities and yet be the place where God first created man? It doesn’t make any sense.” The man looked like he might rush the podium and put Olivia into a head lock.

  Olivia was unflinching. “In many ways, the Bible is a wonderful historical document. But I prefer to filter out the hocus pocus. Homo sapiens evolved from apes some 150,000 years ago. The first man was not Adam, but some harry-knuckled fellow with an awkward gate.”

  The audience tittered happily. The man at the microphone was furious. “You’re an ignorant witch,” he shouted, his pasty face turning crimson with rage.

  The audience gasped at the man’s show of rage.

  Olivia, for her part, was fascinated. This wasn’t the first time she’d been vilified as a witch by one of her critics—more like the fiftieth. And embedded in such comments, Olivia saw a long strain of Western misogyny, much of it relying on a tortured reading of Genesis and the story of Adam and Eve.

  Beginning in the 4th century, Olivia had learned, influential Christians like St. Jerome began portraying Eve as a bewitching temptress who tricked Adam into eating the forbidden fruit. This new gloss on the story of creation helped the monastic orders of the day—which required abstinence from their adherents—explain the evils of the opposite sex and sex itself. Ever since, many church leaders instinctively thought of women as deceitful ambassadors of Satan himself. When Olivia challenged a literal reading of the Bible, it was not uncommon, she noticed, for her detractors to portray her in the same light: She’s a witch!

  Few people understood how the misreading of Genesis and the story of original sin continued to shape public attitudes toward women. But Olivia saw it everywhere—not just from her detractors, but in society at large. Examples included the guilt and suspicion cast upon female victims of sexual violence, the dreadful treatment by lawmakers of living mothers compared to their unborn children, and the inability of countries like the US to elect women political leaders, even when their IQs and leadership qualities dwarfed that of their male competitors. The social harm caused by the misreading of Genesis was incalculable. It was one reason Olivia continued to tirelessly stump for a historical understanding of Genesis based on fact, not propaganda.

  A distinguished looking man in tweed approached the podium. “Would you please maintain civility in your questions and comments? This is the Royal Geographical Society, not the House of Commons.”

  The audience clapped in agreement. For Olivia, the many attacks against her, from people who didn’t know her and hadn’t even read her book, had become routine and hum drum. She looked down briefly at her notes on the podium—long enough for it to appear that she was appropriately “distressed” by the man’s comments and “respectful” of his point of view. Neither was true.

  He’s an ignorant oik. So be it.

  The last pinkish hues of the setting sun shone through the stained-glass windows il
luminating the Hall. Olivia acknowledged the next question in the audience with a smile and nod.

  “How do you respond to critics who say that your research destroys a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible?”

  “I say that, quite to the contrary, my research affirms the Bible in many ways. My research supports, I’ll say it again—supports—much of the Bible’s record of Eden. It was a place. It did exist. On that point, many fundamentalist Christians and Jews are in agreement with me. Strange bedfellows, indeed.”

  “And yet, Tell Eatiq, you suggest, had no greater significance in its heyday than any other city.”

  “That is true. Look, is it really breaking news that Adam and Eve or whoever lived in Eden did not frolic around with a talking serpent? For the post-Enlightenment world, this shouldn’t come as a shocking revelation.”

  More clapping. The man in tweed swallowed a smile in the palm of his hand. Olivia winced. Too harsh by half. Damn. She tried to clarify her point. “Look, I happen to believe that science and religion belong in separate domains. As the author Stephen Jay Gould recently described, they each comprise separate magisterium of human understanding. I am interested in the magisterium of science and reason. Facts. Things that can be proved. I have no quarrel with those more interested in the magisterium of religion. I just ask that you not mix the two.”

  Olivia raised an index finger in the air. “For those interested in the spiritual basis for the creation of man, I direct you to Genesis chapter 1. Different writer, different story and purpose.”

  A young woman in a rainbow sweater and red trousers bounced on her toes in front of the microphone. “What do you hope to accomplish when you return to Tell Eatiq?” she asked.

  “Well, first of all, we have not yet been cleared to go.” Olivia fidgeted nervously with her gold bracelet. “Tell Eatiq is in a very sensitive area of Iraq, near Nasiriyah. It is a stronghold for Shia militants in Iraq and there are fears of a potential civil war between the Shia and Sunni.”

  Olivia cleared her throat. “With apologies to my father, even the British army is having difficulty accessing certain areas near Nasiriyah, including Tell Eatiq. Assuming we’re able to access the site, as I said in my talk, we only had a relatively short time to excavate our first go around. When we return, we want to excavate for several years and learn whatever we can. The information is there. We just need to find it.”

  “Are you going to try to find evidence of Adam and Eve?” the young woman followed up. The question presumed that Tell Eatiq was Eden. It was a presumption so often made by the public that Olivia had stopped tacking on her usual caveats.

  “I don’t think you can try to obtain any kind of specific information about a city that has been buried for thousands of years, much less people who might have lived in it. But, yes, there’s obviously great interest in any linkage between Tell Eatiq and its inhabitants.”

  “So, you might find evidence of them, of Adam and Eve?”

  Olivia sighed. The public’s obsession with Adam and Eve as individuals was unrelenting. Many scholars, even with a Christian orientation, believed Adam and Eve were merely representative characters, not actual people. Olivia was not ready to dismiss the possibility that Adam and Eve were real people. They could have been honored residents of Tell Eatiq, like a high priest and priestess. But she was quite sure that Tell Eatiq would yield no evidence of the first homo sapiens.

  “If by Adam and Eve you mean papa-human and mama-human, I think not. The science of human genetics is evolving, but recent studies have traced the bloke from whom all currently living men are descended to about 60,000 years ago. We call him the Y-chromosomal Adam. The most recent common ancestor of women, who we call the Mitochondrial Eve, dates back about 150,000 years. The fact is that the first humans came many, many years before recorded human history. If the Adam and Eve referred to in the Bible were real people, they could not possibly have been the progenitors of the human species.”

  The young woman stood at the microphone scratching her head, dissatisfied with the answer. “And, in fact, the Bible suggests as much,” Olivia continued. “You’ll recall that the Bible reports that Seth, Adam and Eve’s third child after Cain and Able, at the fertile age of 105 fathered a son named Enosh and then lived another 807 years and had other sons and daughters. Where did the mothers of Enosh and these other children come from? Unless Adam and Eve had a daughter, who was later married off to her big brother, it appears by the Bible’s own telling there were other people walking around at the time of Adam and Eve.”

  The man in tweed stood up.

  “Last question.”

  Olivia inwardly pumped a fist. She was exhausted from the rote boredom of the Q&A. A man stepped up to the microphone.

  It was Samir.

  Olivia was dumbfounded. Bollocks. What’s he doing here?

  Samir flashed a devilish smile. “Professor Nazarian, are you free for dinner tonight?”

  Chapter 18

  The crowd went silent. Such audacity was not a common British trait, particularly among the members of the Royal Geographical Society, whose tastes were at best stodgy. A few nervous giggles emerged from the back of the Hall.

  “Oh, ha ha ha,” Olivia said, trying to make light of the situation. “It’s one of my students. Hello Samir.”

  “I see, well, isn’t he cheeky?” said the man in tweed.

  “Yes, isn’t he?” Olivia mumbled.

  “Well, thank you everyone for your interest and questions,” Olivia said, turning to the audience. “I hope to see you again.”

  People filtered out of the Hall and through the building’s Victorian ceremonial gates. Samir lingered behind. Olivia was incensed. She waited for the room to empty before approaching Samir.

  “Well, that was brilliant, wasn’t it? Every scintilla of information that I managed to squeeze into their brains was erased in one bloody instant by your boob-headed question. Well done, indeed.”

  “I apologize,” said Samir, unapologetically.

  “Samir, it would be totally inappropriate for me to have a social relationship with a pupil. Moreover, I would be shocked if news of our little exchange wasn’t being tipped at this very moment to one of London’s leading gossip columnists.”

  “I have to apologize. I didn’t mean to imply that I was asking you out on a date.”

  “You didn’t?” Olivia asked, quizzically.

  He was asking me out. Or did I just hear what I secretly wanted to hear? She blushed slightly.

  “No, of course not,” she told Samir, “but you must understand how people perceive things.”

  “I should be going,” Samir said.

  “Now, wait”—Olivia gently touched Samir’s wrist—“I suppose it’s not as bad as all that. I did explain that you were my student.”

  As if that matters. Everyone knows that the ethical wall preventing professors from shagging their students is weaker than crepe paper.

  “Then, you’ll join me for dinner?”

  Olivia’s anger had morphed into self-reflection. She tended to assume the worst when it came to Middle Eastern men. It was one of Dashni’s favorite—and most stinging—observations about her. That, and how she would end up with nothing to hug at night but Sumerian-to-English dictionaries, if she didn’t find someone soon.

  Maybe he was right. She would give Samir the benefit of the doubt.

  “You did ask if I was free and the answer is yes.”

  Samir took Olivia by the hand. “Good, come with me.”

  As he led her down the building’s grand travertine marble staircase, Olivia noticed a shimmer of silver over Samir’s shoulder. It was that same pin with rubies Olivia noticed before, shining brilliantly from the lapel of Samir’s jacket.

  Chapter 19

  Samir drove his jet-black Mercedes SLS-class Roadster swiftly down lower Thames Street, past the Tower of London. Rolling scrolls of water rose from the Thames in the breezy spring air.

  As usual, Samir was inscrutabl
e, saying nothing. But Olivia had deduced certain facts. He clearly was the son of somebody. Many of Cambridge’s students were wealthy, but by the looks of Samir’s motor, he was beyond well-heeled. More likely he was stinking rich. He had probably attended one of the well-to-do English public schools that catered to the sons of Saudi oil barons and Jordanian royalty.

  Another fact: Samir was an Anglophile. A mound of British indie pop CDs was piled on the backseat of his Mercedes. A hologram of the Manchester United logo lit up its dash and floors. Stuffed in the glove box was a worn copy of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, which Olivia covertly inspected while Samir took a phone call outside. She didn’t care for the music or the football, but David Copperfield had special meaning for her. It was her father’s favorite book. The narrative resembled Dashni’s own ascension out of fatherless poverty, he would remind her. “This is my story, O,” he would say. “This is our story.”

  Samir returned to the Mercedes. Olivia turned to him. “Like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favorite child. And his name is David Copperfield,” she said, reciting the famous first line from the novel. Samir allowed an awkward smile, which Olivia deemed a massive achievement.

  “I’m sorry. I’m entirely guilty of snooping through your glove box,” Olivia continued. “In my defense, I’m a single woman in the motor of a virtual stranger. A very mysterious one at that.” Samir was expressionless. “I could quote you chapter and verse from that book,” she said, instantly regretting it, wondering why everything she said to Samir sounded like a dating advert in the New York Review of Books.

  Olivia had forgotten how off-putting the entitled silence of rich men could be. Her father behaved similarly. Indeed, Dashni was notorious at Westminster for refusing to dine or drink alone with a woman, even another member of the cabinet.

  Seeing this quality in Samir disturbed Olivia, but she had to admit that she had become intensely attracted to him. It may have been a genetic predilection kicking in for the first time. Since her university days at Oxford, she had only dated British men. Some of them curly-haired and sad-eyed. Others clean cut and sporty. To a man, they were all so very clever, and tried so very hard to be liked. It was an intriguing change of pace to be around a man who just didn’t care.