The Bible of Clay

by Julia Navarro

  "What's happened?" Gian Maria asked the foreman.

  "That man there hit the wall with his pick—it just collapsed. We've found another room full of tablets. I've sent for Clara."

  Clara herself ran up at that precise moment, with Fatima, her head still wrapped in bandages, not far behind.

  "What have they found?" Clara asked breathlessly.

  "Another room and more tablets," Gian Maria told her.

  Clara gave instructions to the laborers to shore up what was left of the wall and erect supports to hold up the ceiling—but first, wherever possible, to gather up the tablets. Gian Maria sat down on the floor to have a look at the new finds. His eyes were burning from trying to read

  so much cuneiform blurred by time, but he knew that sooner or later, Clara would want him to examine all these new tablets.

  He found none that were particularly interesting, but with Ante's help he carefully began lining them up so the laborers could transport them to the camp, where over the last few days they had been putting together some of the pieces that Picot had left behind when he and his team left Safran.

  It occurred to Gian Maria how fortunate they were that Ante Plaskic had come back. Ahmed had called Clara to tell her that at the last minute Ante had decided, against Picot's advice, to stay in Iraq and return to Safran. He'd then convinced Ahmed to arrange transportation for him, despite the fact that Clara would be staying no more than a week longer. But the effort had paid off—since Ante had returned to the camp, he'd done nothing but work; he was with them at the dig every moment.

  "Is there anything there?" Clara asked, walking over to where Gian Maria was concentrating on categorizing the tablets under Ante's watchful eye.

  "I'm not sure; there are shards of commercial transactions, and some prayers, but I haven't had time to review them closely. We'll gather them all up—I imagine you'll want to take them with you to Baghdad."

  "Yes, but I wish you'd try to . . . well, examine them more closely before then, just in case," Clara prodded.

  "I'll try, Clara, but we have to be realistic about what we can still hope to accomplish. There are hardly any laborers left. Ayed is doing all he can, but the army is calling up most of the men. And others . . . Well, you know what's happening; they want to be at home with their families."

  "We have two days, Gian Maria—in two days Ahmed is going to take us out. The ministry is terminating the expedition."

  Ante Plaskic listened in silence to their conversation. Clara had been keyed up and driven since her grandfather's murder; she seemed to have inherited her grandfather's all-consuming obsession with the tablets. It hadn't mattered to her that Ante had come back to the camp—she hadn't even questioned his motives. She'd greeted him ab-sentmindedly and put him to work with the others.

  It had been only a few days since Picot and his team had left, but to Clara it seemed an eternity. Where the camp had once stood, with all its frenetic activity, there was now nothing but the empty mud houses and the permanent calm of the desert. Time had stopped once more in the remote enclave.

  Gian Maria was right: There were hardly any workers left. And those who remained looked at Clara differently now. The absence of her grandfather had stripped her of her authority, even her ability to command respect.

  Only the presence of Ayed Sahadi fostered a certain degree of order and ensured that the workers kept at it.

  As for Clara herself, her mind was a mass of contradictions—she knew that the war was going to start on March 20 and that she had to be out of Iraq by March 19, yet she felt that something was holding her in that dusty land. She also knew full well of course, that if she stayed she could easily die. Fighter planes make no distinction between friends and enemies, those who betrayed the country and those who were loyal to it. And then there were the tablets . . .

  It was five a.m. when her cell phone woke her.

  "Clara . . ." Ahmed's unsteady voice scared her.

  "Ahmed! What's wrong?"

  "Clara, you need to get out now."

  "Has there been . . . has there been some change?"

  "I'm worried."

  "You're panicking."

  "Call it what you want, but you can't wait until the last minute. All hell is about to break loose. And listen, I spoke to Picot last night—you need to be there, keeping an eye on the exhibition planning."

  "Where is he?"

  "In Paris."

  "Paris?" sighed Clara.

  "He says things have already started coming together and he wants to know whether you're going with them." "Going where?"

  "I don't know, wherever they're putting it together. I didn't ask." "What about you, Ahmed? Are you going?"

  "I'd like to go with you," he answered carefully. He knew that the Ministry of the Interior recorded every conversation, and after the murder of Alfred Tannenberg an exhaustive investigation had been launched. Saddam and his circle had always been obsessed with betrayal, so of course they believed that Tannenberg's murderer must have been a close friend, family member, or ally.

  "It's five o'clock in the morning; if you don't have anything else to tell me—"

  "I'm telling you that you need to come out now. Today is the eighteenth of March—"

  "I know what day it is. I'm staying until the nineteenth; we found another room yesterday and several dozen new tablets. We're close, Ahmed. I can feel it."

  "Clara, you should be in Baghdad, in your own house. The army is mobilizing every man; you won't have any workers."

  "One more day, Ahmed."

  "No, Clara, no—I'll send the helicopter later today." "I'm not leaving today, Ahmed." "Tomorrow, then, at sunrise."

  Gian Maria hadn't slept all night. He'd stayed up to classify the last tablets they'd found, before the workers packed them up and sealed them in the container destined for Baghdad.

  His eyes were killing him, but he still had quite a few tablets to decipher. He picked one up at random, and as he looked at it, he gave a start and almost dropped it—across the top was incised the name Shamas. He could feel his heart beat faster and his breathing become shallower as he passed his finger over the lines of cuneiform.

  As dictated to me by our patriarch Abraham:

  In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and the darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

  And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

  Tears flowed from the priest's eyes. He was profoundly moved, and he felt an irresistible need to fall on his knees and give thanks to God.

  Here in his hands he held the story of the Creation, its words pressed into wet clay over three thousand years ago by the scribe Shamas himself so that men might learn the truth. This clay tablet bore the very words of Abraham the patriarch, inspired by God, the words which many centuries later would be gathered into the book called the Bible.

  Gian Maria could hardly go on reading, so great was the emotion he was feeling.

  And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

  He went on reading, not realizing that he was doing so out loud. He felt closer to God than he had ever felt before. And then he realized that in the stack of tablets he had not yet examined, there were yet others bearing the distinctive mark of Shamas.

  He began to search feverishly through the tablets, scanning the top of each one, where the scribes wrote their names. First he found one piece of tablet, then others, and in a while he had managed to find eight—eight pieces
, some shards and some whole, inscribed by Shamas.

  Gian Maria prayed, laughed, cried, such was the chaos of emotions that swept over him as he found clay tablet after clay tablet containing the words of Abraham.

  He knew he should tell Clara, but he felt the need to be alone with them in this moment so charged with a spirituality that probably only he felt. It was a miracle, and he gave thanks to God for having allowed him to be the one to discover this clay fired with the mark of the deity.

  The Bible made no mention of Shamas, so as Gian Maria tried to decipher the signs carefully incised by Shamas' stylus, he wondered who this scribe might have been, how he knew Abraham, and how Abraham had come to tell him the story of the Creation. He also wondered about the strange wanderings of this man who first announced that Abraham was going to tell him the story of Genesis on two tablets that had been secreted in Haran. And yet Shamas had left traces of himself here in Safran too, in the temple near Ur, where the team had found shards of legal statements, official reports and communications, lists of plants, poems. . . .

  The room where these new tablets had been found was not distinguished from the others in any way. It was rather small, actually, undec-orated, defined only by the slots in the walls where there had once been shelves upon which the scribes would line up their tablets. Clara had mentioned that it may not have been a ceremonial room in the temple but rather, a man's private room—the study, perhaps, of an um-mi-a, a master scribe.

  Gian Maria mused on the turn his life had taken over the last few months. He had left the security of the Vatican's walls, left the comfortable routine he shared with other priests, the tranquillity of spirit. He no longer remembered the last time he had slept comfortably through the whole night, since hearing that terrifying confession months ago.

  Once again, his eyes filled with tears as he read the words that transported him back to the moment when God created man:

  And God said, Let us make a man in our image, after our likeness: and let him have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

  So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.

  And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

  And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed: to you it shall be for meat.

  Light was beginning to come through the window when Gian Maria realized that Ante Plaskic was watching him. He'd been so engrossed in reading the tablets that he hadn't been aware of the Croatian's arrival.

  "Ante, you can't imagine what I've found!"

  "What?" he asked casually.

  "Clara's grandfather was right—he always thought that Abraham had been aware of the story of Genesis. Here it is. The tablets he spent his life looking for. They exist! Look ..."

  Ante came over to Gian Maria and picked up one of the tablets. It was hard to believe that people could kill over something as simple as a piece of dried clay, but they did, and he wouldn't hesitate to do so as well if anyone tried to stop him from taking them now.

  "How many are there?" he asked the priest.

  "Eight, I've found eight. Thank God for allowing me to do this work!" Gian Maria answered joyously.

  "We should wrap them carefully to keep them intact. Let me help."

  "No, no, we have to tell Clara first. Nothing can compensate for the loss of her grandfather, but at least she's finally made his dream come true. This is a miracle!"

  Just then, Ayed Sahadi entered the room and eyed the men.

  "What's happened?" he asked in a tone of voice that matched his suspicious look.

  "Ayed, we've found the tablets!" Gian Maria exclaimed, excited as a child, all traces of his characteristic shyness absent. "The tablets? What tablets?" Ayed asked.

  "The Bible of Clay! Mr. Tannenberg was right. Clara was right. Abraham told the story of creation to a scribe. It's a revolutionary discovery, one of the greatest in history," Gian Maria explained, emerging from the shock of the discovery and his spiritual reflections and growing more excited by the second.

  The foreman came over to the workbench where the eight tablets were laid out side by side, three of them reconstructed from broken pieces—pieces that fit together perfectly after Gian Maria had solved their jigsaw puzzle. The tablets couldn't be restored in Safran, though; that had to be done by experts, and Gian Maria prayed that Clara would let him take them to Rome, where they could be examined and authenticated by Vatican authorities, even reconstructed with the advanced techniques developed in Europe.

  Ayed assessed the situation instantly and asked Gian Maria to go to Clara's house to give her the news—he didn't want to leave Ante alone with the tablets. Gian Maria agreed, nodding eagerly, his eyes bright as he rushed out to tell Clara. When he got to the house, he found her already dressed, sipping a cup of tea with Fatima.

  "I see you're up early," she greeted him.

  "Clara, the Bible of Clay is real—it exists!" he blurted out.

  "Of course it exists, Gian Maria. I'm sure of it—I have two tablets that prove it."

  "No, I mean we've found it—we found the Bible of Clay!" Clara just stared at him, as though she couldn't understand what he was saying.

  "They were stored in the room we discovered yesterday; there are eight of them, eight tablets, Clara, each twenty centimeters long. I've read them and it's no mistake. It's . . . it's the Bible of Clay!"

  As Clara shot to her feet, Gian Maria seized her hand and pulled her out the door. They ran to the workroom, Gian Maria chattering and telling her what had happened during the night.

  Ayed and Ante were visibly tense when Clara and Gian Maria burst

  into the room, breaking off what looked to be a heated discussion, but Clara paid them no mind. She ran to the workbench where the eight tablets were laid out.

  She picked up one of them and was elated to see the cuneiform signs that denoted Shamas at the top. Then she began to silently read the wedge-shaped markings that had been pressed into wet clay more than three thousand years earlier.

  Tears came to her eyes, and Gian Maria was swept up in emotion all over again. They were laughing and crying, going over the tablets, touching them, as though to reassure themselves that they were real.

  Afterward, they wrapped them carefully, and Clara insisted on keeping them near her.

  "I'll put them in the same case as the first two. I don't want to lose sight of them for a second."

  "We need to put a guard on them," Ayed told her.

  "Ayed, you haven't let me out of your sight, twenty-four hours a day, so if the tablets are with me they're safe."

  Ayed shrugged his shoulders; he had no intention of fighting again with this impossible woman. He couldn't have cared less about her fate or the fate of those damned tablets. If the Colonel hadn't ordered him to protect her—with his own life—he'd have left when the old man died.

  "I want the workers to clear out a little more of the area where we found the tablets. There may be more . . . ," Clara continued.

  "No. I just called the Colonel, and he's sending a helicopter for us this afternoon. We're going back to Baghdad."

  "We can't go now! We have to look for more!" Clara cried desperately.

  "You know you can't stay any longer. Don't tempt fate, Clara, and don't risk everyone else's life in the bargain," Ayed Sahadi replied harshly, to Clara's surprise. "You've got what you came for. I have my orders, and I'm following them. Get everything ready you want to take—we're leaving before nightfall."

  49

  the buzz of the intercom woke george wagner from

  a brief nap. He open
ed his eyes in irritation. The buzzer sounded again, and his secretary's apologetic voice broke the silence.

  "Mr. Wagner, it's Robert Brown. He says it's urgent and can't wait."

  Brown was practically screaming when Wagner picked up the phone. "You'll never guess what's happened, George! They've found it! It fucking exists!"

  "What are you talking about? Stop babbling—get ahold of yourself, tell me what happened."

  Robert Brown swallowed hard, trying to calm himself.

  "The Bible of Clay—it exists. They've found it. Eight tablets, Genesis, signed by Shamas, as dictated by Abraham," Brown finally said, as coherently as he could.

  George Wagner could hardly believe what he was hearing. He gripped the arm of the chair, trying to keep control of his emotions.

  "How . . ." he said.

  "I just got word that yesterday, at their dig in Safran, another room was discovered in the ziggurat. Apparently it was a study where a scribe might have lived. They found several dozen tablets but didn't realize until a few hours ago that the Bible of Clay was among them. It's

  comprised of eight full tablets, three of them in pretty bad shape— they'll need to be reconstructed. But there's no doubt that they're Alfred's Bible of Clay," Brown said, slowing down.

  Wagner felt like someone had kicked him in the chest. A few days earlier, Alfred had been murdered, and now the Bible of Clay turned up. Destiny had played its last dirty trick on his old friend, denying him what he'd wanted most in all the world.