Hair Side, Flesh Side

by Helen Marshall

  The fateful words of dear Mister Nassar are burned into my mind forever: “The skin, ustatha,” he said. “It is not sheep.” And then he touched my hand. “Human.”

  It may seem a little thing to you, Jeffrey, that touch. A kind of well-practised ritual among friends, like breaking bread, a social nothing whose language is so banal, so often read, that the words mean nothing. Perhaps I should say nothing of it, perhaps it would be safer to admit nothing. But he had never touched me before that, and so the shock of it, to you a simple thing but to him taboo, forbidden, to me—it was electric! That touch. Those words. “The skin, ustatha.”

  A book written on human skins.

  A chill still runs up my spine when I think on it, even in this place, whose blank, dull walls leave me insensate, whose twilight is perpetual. I have been a scholar for some years, and I have given all of my energies and most of my eyesight to the study of books. When I sleep, I smell the musty scent of their pages; when I wake, my fingers explore them, probe their bindings, the threads that stitch them together. I know the soft velvet of the flesh side and the smooth, oiled surface of the hair side. I have studied the pattern of follicles, traced the network of veins that undergirds our most precious documents, the records of civilization, the rise and fall of human knowledge, and the Torah, most sacred of all precious texts. I have devoted my life to recovering the irrecoverable and rebuilding what was lost, searching out its ghosts and giving them flesh within monographs and articles.

  There is an old passage I remember having found, marked out in one of my undergraduate books, a simple image, you may recall, but a striking one, drawn from some apocryphal commentary, some pseudo-Dionysius or other such Church Father:

  In this way Christ, when his hands and feet were nailed to the cross, offered his body like a charter to be written on. The nails in his hands were used as a quill, and his precious blood as ink. And thus, with this charter he restored to us our heritage that we had lost.

  It seemed very beautiful to me, always, that image of Christ’s body stretched on the cross like an animal skin, like parchment; the blood, the wounds, the pierced heart, that holy alphabet, the covenant, mankind’s heritage, lost, restored to us through the purest form of sacrifice. . . . It should have been a thing of beauty, an act of the greatest love, but I cannot think upon it now without shuddering. . . .

  I looked to Mister Nassar, and he to me, and in his eyes I saw the traces of something crumbling, the vast architecture of a world dissolved into dust. It hurt me to see it. It hurt me to know that my eyes mirrored the same transformation. And with that pain, something else. His hand touching mine.

  That was twelve months ago, and it could have been twelve years. He and I, joined by the strange bonds of discovery, left Cairo that day, clutching the codex but borne down by the weight of its presence, for we knew, deep in our hearts, that it was not just one book.

  Indeed, Mister Nassar’s connections were invaluable, and discreetly, we were able to obtain samples of manuscripts from across the country—from Plato, Pythagoras, Aristophanes of Byzantium, Apollonius of Rhodes—all those great men you so adore, towards whose study you have given most of your life and, certainly, all of your kindness. For one and all, the answer was the same. “The pages, the skin of them,” he had said. “Human.”

  In the intervening months, we visited many archaeological sites, studied the ancient midden heaps of Heliopolis, Sharm El-Sheikh and Aswan. The travel was difficult, dangerous even then despite the British victories. There were soldiers everywhere, the British, the Egyptians . . . but somehow it meant nothing, we read the news sparingly, fearing it might divide us, I, a woman of Britain and him, a native of the country, but in truth we were absorbed entirely in the work at hand. It was necessary—you see that, don’t you, Jeffrey? You, at least, would understand!—we had to know.

  Beneath the layers of thousand-year-old refuse were bones, bones, bones, so many of them that it sickened me. Whole villages had been wiped out, their inhabitants sacrificed to the altar of the great gods of our civilization. A single codex could have required as many as three hundred hides, the young valued most highly for the smoothness, the freedom from blemishes. A seven-year-old child could provide enough for twelve folios; an adult, perhaps sixteen, though the quality would suffer for it.

  History’s secret, the silent conflagration, we called it, as we huddled in tents that clung to the edges of the desert. It became our secret, and we whispered it to each other again and again. “Skin,” Mister Nassar would repeat, until the words meant nothing and the charred midnight air snatched them away.

  What would you do, Jeffrey, with the weight of that knowledge hanging upon you? What would you do if you were offered a chance to set it right? The press of a button and that slaughter of innocents prevented? Would you have the strength of will to silence Aristotle, to let the words which shaped civilization go unremembered, unpreserved, reduced to whispers and empty air?

  It was men who did it. Men who desired books, who knew these things must last, that it meant more than those hundred thousand lives.

  The pyramids were built on such sacrifices.

  We could not bear that knowledge, Mister Nassar and I. As we walked through the densely cloying mass of the city, we saw nothing but books: the face of the old man who sold us pomegranates, the rind torn open to expose the sweet seeds beneath, nothing but a length of skin to be taken from the body, scraped, hung on a wooden frame, and whitened with chalk. That woman wailing for her brother killed by the Germans, would her grief be better written in ink? More legible? More permanent?

  It was not so different when we touched, in the evenings when the desert grew softer, the air hazy and us both drugged senseless with the horror of it, his hand on mine, the skin of him nothing but another book, his body an archive laid out before me, before my blindly groping hands. . . .

  I heard in one of the provinces a woman was stoned for adultery. There was a madness falling upon the land then, we could feel it. Mister Nassar would whisper, “We must be careful. We must be careful, ustatha.” And other things, softer things, there in the desert, when we were alone. It is the softness of him that I will remember, the way the light played upon the curve of his bones, the network of almost blue veins on the underside of his wrist, the smoothness of that skin, its beautiful, dark colour.

  They came for me in a small village where we were excavating: the men with their heavy boots and their guns. They said my visa had expired, that I was not to have left the Museum, I was not to have travelled, alone, with a man who was not my kin. Mister Nassar laid a hand upon one of them in protest, a touch, a simple thing, and they were on him like animals, beating him, kicking him, and I yelled for them to stop, I told them I would come, if they would please, just stop hurting him. . . .

  Oh, Jeffrey.

  They have held me for many days here. I do not know how long. Too long. I have not seen Mister Nassar for some time. Khaled, my love, yes, I believe he is dead. A man came in a clean white coat and I gripped a piece of wood in my mouth and pushed and pushed and pushed, and I held the child in my arms for only a moment, saw the fingers flex, each one tiny and perfect, the dark thatch of hair, the brown eyes, the skin the colour of milk stirred into sweet, black coffee. They took the child, Jeffrey, they took my daughter from me, his daughter.

  Come to the point now, Miss Bahr, you will be saying now, in the wake of chaos, Reason, even then! Perhaps you are impatient at the narrative, perhaps you are doubtful or perhaps, simply, you do not care. What should it matter, you might ask, this precious research, this great secret of History, this silent conflagration of the innocents? For dead is dead, you might say, and sheep or child, History would have swallowed them regardless, in plague or famine or war. Dead is dead. At least something of them lives on. In their skins. In the books.

  But it is more than that, is it not? Must it not mean more than that?

  After weeks of pleading, begging, they have
given me these scraps that I may write to you, Jeffrey, that I might bestow the terrible gift of knowledge upon you—my reluctant, recalcitrant teacher, the guardian of History’s most precious treasures, you, Jeffrey. This is my gift to you.

  I am afraid.

  The light is dim. My eyes are weak and strained, and the shapes of the letters blur in front of me. I write more by touch than by sight now, these hands of mine groping across the page, smooth, so smooth, with a texture like velvet, free, I hope, of blemishes, the colour white except where the chalk has rubbed away, where it is coffee-dark. I am afraid, Jeffrey, that as my hands move, they will discover in those scraps the shape of a child, or a lover, or a bullet hole.

  This is, I fear, the last thing I will write. But I don’t care. It is coming now. The charnel house. Oh, Khaled, my love.

  But I want to be heard, I want it to be remembered.

  And thus, with this charter he restored to us our heritage that we had lost.

  I do not want to vanish into this darkness so completely. It is selfish, I know, all these words, at the end, knowing what I do. But I am afraid, Jeffrey. I am afraid to stop writing. I thought you stripped all fear from me in those hallowed halls, in the great libraries, but I am afraid. I am nothing. I am nothing, but I want to be heard. It doesn’t matter. Please, Jeffrey.

  I must write.

  I must write.

  The parchment . . .

  [ teeth ]

  THE OLD AND THE NEW

  The catacombs were dark, and Becca felt a chill settling over her entire body the moment she emerged from the narrow, spiralling staircase. She could hear a rheumatic gurgling in the distance. Or perhaps it was close by. It was very hard to get a sense of the space, and Becca wanted to reach out and take John’s hand but the staircase had been too narrow, so she had had to go it alone, John in front, enthusing about the quality of the light, the patterns of the shadows on the stones.

  John loved the play of the light on the stones here.

  “Look at this,” he said. “We don’t have anything this old back home.” He patted the walls affectionately. “Nah, everything’s brand new—so shiny it could be made of plastic. But this—” pat pat “—this is the real thing, this is old. This reeks of history.”

  Becca looked around a little bit sceptically—not too sceptically, she wanted to be here, really she did, or rather, she wanted to be with John and John wanted to be here, and so, by association, she wanted to be here as well. She made an encouraging noise, kind of like an ooh-aah all run together. The stones really were old . . . very old. They had that sort of rough-hewn look to them, as if they were carved by peasants. They probably were, she thought. Not a sandblaster or an electric drill or anything like that, just hammers and chisels, or maybe even fingernails—who knew what the peasants might have been given to work with?

  “But that’s the problem with North America, isn’t it?” John asked. “Nothing old, nothing that sticks around that long. Nothing but teepees before the Europeans showed up, and they don’t last for more than a couple of years at best. Maybe you get a lighthouse here, a church there, but that’s nothing. This is it. Right here.” John had a happy look in his eyes, and so Becca smiled with him, and she oohed and aahed at the walls and the creeping dampness, and the smell of rot and dead things that had lived and died years and years before her country had even become a proper country.

  But then they hit the bones, and the rocks were nothing—the rocks were meaningless, because here were over six million dead Frenchmen (and women, probably, but Becca couldn’t remember if women were buried properly back then—maybe it was just the men, but the women had to be buried, didn’t they?).

  And the bones were . . . something. They were lined up, row upon row upon row of them, all these smiling bone faces with black eyeholes like another set of little caves for her and John to explore. But that’s what the brochure had said, some unreadable stuff in French and then in big letters: STOP! THIS IS THE EMPIRE OF DEATH!

  There were so many of them—that’s what amazed Becca the most, how many there were. Six million. Six million people had been buried here in the catacombs. Becca couldn’t even fathom that number. If she squinted she could almost pretend that they were rocks, that they hadn’t been people at all, they were just rocks that might look a little bit person-shaped.

  Becca didn’t like the way they smiled at her. It was creepy, all that smiling in a place where over a six million dead people had been put on display.

  When John slipped his hand into hers, Becca almost yelped, and she was thankful that the hand gripping hers had flesh and was warm and even a little sweaty. She was glad for it, that warm hand. So glad she gave it a little squeeze. Then Becca looked at John, she smiled but a shiver ran over her spine when John smiled back because right behind him were row on row of eyeless, skinless heads smiling right along with him.

  Paris was beautiful in a way Becca hadn’t expected it to be. Montmartre. The Eiffel Tower. All those lights winking at her from across the dark cityscape. She hadn’t thought much of Paris, really, until John had said he wanted to go, had always wanted to go, and that he wanted her to go with him. Then Paris seemed magical, everything about it seemed magical—the city of light, la Ville-Lumière, he had called it.

  Becca thought quite a lot of John, had always thought of him. She used to watch him while she was at the photocopier back when she first started working for the firm, fetching coffee and the like. Becca suspected that John hadn’t thought very much of her initially. John was one of those easygoing handsome sorts who tended to work at firms, effortlessly charming in conversation, with little streaks of silver running at his temples. John never spoke to her, but that was all right because John was married, and so Becca watched him while she did the photocopying. She didn’t talk to him. Others did. There were always people stopping by his office for a chat or a coffee. His wife, sometimes, with bags of take-out food from Pusateri’s or some other expensive place. They’d eat together in the office. She’d sit on the desk, and she’d kick her legs, long legs, perfectly slim beneath some sort of frippy little summer dress, and John would look at her and smile. She was a pretty woman. Prettier than Becca, with small slim hands and blonde hair Becca would have killed for.

  Not Becca though, she never talked to John. She was just an intern, so she didn’t exist, his eyes just skipped over her. When they rode together in the elevator there was nothing but silence between them, he wouldn’t even look up, not once. He only had eyes for her, his beautiful, blonde wife.

  One day, it was news around the office that John wasn’t married anymore. No one quite knew what happened—if she’d left him or what or why or for whom. But the ring was gone, and so was the charming smile, and the little streaks of silver became a bit more than that, like someone had smudged them, like he had aged ten years overnight. Becca felt sad as she watched him after that, people didn’t stop by his office anymore, they didn’t bring him coffee. Well, they did at first, all curious to know what had happened, but John would simply get a look on his face—a sad look—and then he would smile a sad smile, and they would feel bad that they had asked, bad that they were disturbing him. Pretty soon, they stopped visiting altogether.

  Becca felt sad for him too, sad for the way he shuffled around the papers on his desk as if he didn’t quite know what to do with his hands, as if he had forgotten why they were there, ringless. Once, when he was out on his morning smoke break, she snuck into his office and she left a coffee for him—two sugars, the way he liked it. She waited by the photocopier. She copied things. She decided that she had copied those wrong, that there was a smudge on the page, and her boss wouldn’t like a smudge on the page. So she copied those things again. But then that load didn’t look quite right either, so she decided there must have been something on the copying panel. Becca made quite a show of cleaning the copier, and she copied the pages a third time because that was what her boss would have wanted. John didn’t come ba
ck to the office though. And the third set of copies didn’t have a smudge. Not even a hint of a smudge, nothing smudgy or blotted or wrong with them at all. So Becca fiddled for a moment, hoping for something, for anything to be wrong with them, but there wasn’t so she retrieved her papers, and left.

  “How about a photo?” John said, smiling, but he wasn’t really looking at her, his eyes were rapt with the camera.

  “I don’t think so.” She said it with a smile so he wouldn’t think she didn’t want a picture taken with him, just that she didn’t want a picture with . . . them. All of them.

  “Just one. It’ll be nice. Just one? I don’t want to forget this. I don’t want to forget our first trip to Paris. We want to remember this, don’t we? We’ll never see anything like this again, and just think, we can be a part of it for a little while. We can show the folks back home that we were really, really here.”

  Becca didn’t want a picture, but John wanted it, and she wanted John to be happy.

  “All right,” she said. She squeezed his hand and let him manoeuvre her to the nearest shelf of bones.

  “Not that group,” John said after he had held up the camera. “The light’s no good there. Try this one—well, maybe this one. Much better ones here. Whoever did that lot wasn’t good,” and he laughed. “Probably didn’t get a promotion for that lot of bones. Must have been the dull one out of the bunch.”

  Finally, it was right and John was happy and he held the camera up and said, “Smile!” So she smiled and he smiled—and when he turned the camera around to show the tiny digital display, a thousand dead Frenchman smiled and winked alongside her.