Aurya felt the hot blood in her cheeks. Her free hand was a darting fish, down into the folds of her cloth, and then the cold sliver of the blade was in her hand. She pressed it against her father’s neck. He stopped mid-sentence, and his whole body went rigid. She had already gone too far, she knew. He would beat her terribly for this. But she kept her hand there.
‘Don’t speak about her,’ she said, her voice cracking like a boy’s. Her father’s nostrils flared, but he loosened his grip. He gently shook his head, and his mouth split into a huge, sad grin.
‘Aurya, little duck. Aurya, take that blade away.’
‘No. Get off me.’
‘Aurya.’ The lump in his throat bobbed up and down beside her thumb and the little metal shard. His grip tightened on her wrist, daring her, his teeth clenched. ‘Aurya, put the blade down.’
‘No!’
‘Aurya, put it down and I’ll tell you a secret. A secret about her. About your mother.’
‘What secret?’ she said, with strength in her voice this time. ‘There’s no secret.’
‘There is. It’s about the lion that dragged her away.’
Aurya gritted her teeth.
‘Tell me.’
He shook his head, the corners of his mouth damp with drool.
‘There was no lion,’ he murmured, his gaze wandering off through the walls.
‘What do you mean?’
‘She didn’t get dragged away.’
‘You’re lying,’ Aurya said. ‘Where is she then, if there was no lion?’
Her father trembled suddenly, a motion that racked his whole body.
‘She’s in the house of dust. That’s what she always called it.’
‘The house of dust? Where is that?’
A cruel grin worked its way across his face.
‘If you put the knife down, I’ll tell you.’
‘You’re lying,’ Aurya growled.
‘Aurya, little duck,’ he breathed, another waft from his stinking mouth. ‘The house of dust. Take that blade away and I’ll show you.’
The stubble of his beard sanded her knuckles.
‘Get off me or I’ll cut out your throat.’ She gave the blade a press with her thumb so he hissed through his teeth, and a warm wetness bloomed and trickled down her hand. ‘I’ll cut it right out and string it up like a rabbit.’
To her surprise, he let go. The feeling flowed back to her right hand.
‘Aurya, little coot,’ he slurred, lifting slowly off her. ‘You didn’t think – your own father …’
‘Get off me. All the way off!’ He raised himself, her blade still pressed against his throat. The usual sag seeped back into his shoulders, his hollow cheeks. Her father put both hands up to the air, his pink palms facing her, smooth of fingerprints. Aurya lowered the blade, and said each word slowly like she was speaking to a child.
‘Where is the house of dust?’
There was a moment of breath. The shadows around them felt charged with a strange energy.
‘I’m sorry, Aurya.’ And then he lunged like a snake. He knocked the air out of her, grabbed both her wrists. The blade slipped from her fingers, tinkled on the ground behind her. He pinned her to the floor, his lips pulled back from his teeth.
‘Put a knife to your own father’s throat, would you?’ he snarled as she kicked and struggled. ‘Just like your mother after all!’
He was a sack of stones on top of her. That gust of beer again from his mouth, rotting barley, and the stench of something dead, too, underneath it all. Those points of light in his eyes.
‘The house of dust!’ He shrieked with laughter as her legs kicked under him. ‘I told you, she’s there, in the house of dust! Let me show you where to find her.’
Aurya saw a shadow move fast over her father’s shoulder. He saw it too late. He tried to turn, but there was a crack and splintering. Grit and sharp fragments and dust filled Aurya’s eyes, her hair. Her father fell on top of her, crushing her ribs.
‘Aurya!’ she heard. It was Sharo. He held the broken half of an empty beer jar, and he was shaking. He stepped back in horror and let the heavy piece of clay thud to the ground. Aurya heaved her father from on top of her, and his arms flopped to the floor on either side. She ran to Sharo, held on to him: the two of them backed away into the corner of the room, waiting for their father to get up and turn his rage on them both. He didn’t. He just lay there, and a gurgling came from deep in his chest.
‘Aurya, I’m sorry,’ Sharo said. ‘Aurya, I heard voices. I heard Father shouting. I tried to be brave, like the wild man. Like you told me.’
Aurya put her back against the wall, slid down and hugged her knees. She was shaking as if a god had passed by. She couldn’t take her eyes off their father, lying there with his face in shadow. Still he didn’t move.
‘Sharo, get the lamp,’ she whispered. She lit some of the last linseed oil with her hands shaking; the room flushed with orange light and that warm smell. She saw their father lying in the centre of the room, his mouth and eyes open. His middle finger twitched as if plucking a stringed instrument. A dark pool was beginning to spread from the back of his head, and the smell of vomit seeped into the air.
‘Will Father be angry?’ Sharo said.
‘No, Sharo …’
There was still time to help him. Aurya could turn him on his side, thump him on his back, wash the vomit from his mouth. Instead, she watched as their father’s twitching weakened, slowed, stopped completely. His gurgling too. It took a long time. Eventually his chest was still, and the bulging veins faded from his neck and forehead. Crickets outside whispered their secrets to the ghosts and gods.
‘We killed him,’ Aurya breathed finally. Sharo let out a little whimper. ‘We killed him. Ishtar save us. Sharo, look at me. No one can find out. Do you understand? No one can ever find out. It was an accident – it was a …’
Her hands shook as she crept towards their father, afraid that he might suddenly gasp awake, reach out his hands and grab her. Hoping, almost, that he would.
‘Sharo. What day is it today?’
‘The fourteenth of Shebat.’
She felt cold spreading through her bones. ‘Sharo, tomorrow is the fifteenth. The King’s men are coming in the morning, to pick up the stone. Look outside. It’s already blue over the hills.’
Aurya knew what happened to murderers. She found out two summers ago, when a drifter came out of the desert and killed the potter’s daughter, when the guards from town marched down the road with a magistrate on a horse. Death, of course, but before that a hundred lashes, with salt cast on the wounds. Perhaps to have their noses or ears cut off. She hadn’t watched like the others, but she remembered the man’s shrieks: they could be heard all around the riverbank, echoing off the quarry walls. And before that, the river trial in the dark water, their hands and feet tied and left to sink in the forests of river weed and fish and silt and gloom. Already she couldn’t breathe.
‘We have to hide him. We have to hide him now.’
‘Hide him …’ Sharo said. ‘But Aurya, he’s so big. Where can we hide him?’
Aurya was shaking. She paced in circles, darting around as if getting ready for a fight, shaking the fear from her hands like water. The wound in her head was still thudding.
‘Somewhere nobody will look. We have to find somewhere.’
‘Aurya, I’m scared.’
‘Sharo, think – please, for once. Where where where …’
‘He’s so big,’ is all Sharo said.
‘He’s so big,’ Aurya echoed, wringing her hands together. ‘Come on, Sharo – we need a hiding place. We can’t just throw him in the – in the …’
With the light of the oil lamp washing against the walls of that small room, their eyes met.
Katya
Katya’s life in Mosul followed simple rhythms. Most of all, she looked forward to her drives with Salim to and from the dig site, when she would see the cracked blue tile-work of neighbourhood mos
ques pass by, the jewellery markets beneath their sun umbrellas and the antique wood-fronted cafés of Mosul, the men selling oranges on the roadside with weighted copper scales, wearing faded shirts and bright keffiyehs wrapped around their heads. When they talked on these drives, she would learn fragments of Salim’s past, hidden like beads in soil. She built her map of him like a dig site: how he had studied in New Orleans and seen the mists come in over the bay, seen the city drowned by hurricane waters and people searching through the ruins.
‘I went to New York too,’ he told her. ‘Before the towers fell. You should have seen them; I thought they’d stand there for a thousand years. They have our artefacts in their museums too. And in London. Iraqi artefacts, spread all around the world. I still dream about bringing them home one day.’
Iraq kept calling him back. There was the sadness in him that comes from dividing the heart between two places. But when he came back for good, he found that the country he’d once known was gone, reduced to rubble by what he called the Second American War. What relatives he had left had fled to the cold cities of Europe, to Hamburg and Glasgow, and forgotten him.
‘If a camera could see the whole universe,’ he said to her once, ‘it would see more evil than good. Many times more. And every generation we see that with a higher resolution.’
Sometimes in the breaks between their shifts, when they stood on the edge of the site and looked out over the blasted remains of Nineveh, Katya felt that they were the last two inhabitants of a sun-scorched earth, watching the sands roll forgetful over the world.
Salim’s vague promises about other accommodation never materialised, so Katya remained in the museum. She spent the evenings exploring it: the empty staffrooms and storage cupboards, the small library with books in Arabic and English on Iraqi art and history, the generators and boilers humming in their cages, the parking garage in the rear, windows furry with grime, where a broken-down van without tyres sat on cinder blocks. She found a fire exit up to the flat roof, which had a view out over the city, over the sprawling ranges of rooftops, its gardens of radio antennae and satellite dishes, over the river and the bridge nearby, the small park on the other side. In a back room, she found a Kalashnikov rifle left in an umbrella stand. She explored the recesses of the museum’s basement storeroom too, where artefacts sat in the dark on steel shelves. The daily finds of their dig were laid out here in meticulous order on steel tables, and she spent hours peering through her microscope at the different shapes of pollen grains she found in samples: citrus and pistachio, ribwort plantain, sea grape and tabor oak.
The Internet came and went. When she could get online, Katya would look up the new details she’d encountered in Mosul that week: the positions of stars, the traditional clothes of Assyrians and Turkmen and Yazidis, the lemongrass smell that drifted from the doorways of mosques, proverbs and the names of politicians, Iraqi football teams and Egyptian folk singers. She practised the sounds of Arabic, which despite her father’s influence wilted like implanted flowers on the hardy soil of her tongue. Online, she read the news about Iraq, but she didn’t recognise the country in what she read. She read about the civil war just over the border in Syria, the country’s rulers dropping barrels of dynamite on to its own cities from helicopters. She read about Homs and Aleppo – like Mosul, cities of limestone, being eaten down to their skeletons. She read about how the part of your brain involved in reading is the same one used to recognise faces. She read about how one hundred tons of cosmic dust descends from space each day and settles on the earth.
Katya knew the moment she woke up that she was going to have a seizure. They always started with that familiar feeling, as if something had come loose in the world.
‘Possibly connected to grief. A psychological root,’ the doctors had always told her mother as though Katya couldn’t hear, as though she didn’t know what the adult word meant. To her, they’d said, ‘It’s like you have a tiny thunderstorm in your head.’ This felt like a baby’s explanation even then, but as she got older she couldn’t shake the image: the aura’s gathering clouds, the rumbling as the storm let off its first sparks. The most unsettling part was the déjà vu, which always kicked in close to the moment of seizure. She also got a lot of false alarms. She thought about calling in sick, but she couldn’t bear the thought of disappointing the others, of sitting alone in the museum all day while other people did her time-critical work. She would be careful.
‘Get up, Katya,’ she muttered. ‘It’s time to get up.’
She took a pill, pulled on her boots, her hat and abaya, and went out to meet Salim. When she got in the car, she saw a young man of about eighteen sitting in the back seat, his hair oiled all the way to one side, thin wrists in a crisp white shirt like Salim’s.
‘This is my nephew Athir,’ Salim said. The young man touched his head and gave a meek ‘hi’. ‘Athir’s the only family I’ve got left in Mosul. He works in an auto repair shop, but he wants to be an archaeologist one day. I said he could come to work with me today. This is Katya,’ he said to the boy. ‘An expert in archaeobotany, the remains of ancient plants.’
‘And animals sometimes,’ Katya said. She gave a polite smile, but she didn’t need another person present while she tried to hold everything together.
‘You okay?’ Salim asked, brow furrowing. She nodded.
‘Yeah. Did you know that a hundred tons of space dust lands on earth every day? I read that yesterday.’
‘Feels like it’s all landing here,’ Salim said, and brushed the sand from his wing mirror. He talked to Athir in Arabic for most of the journey, which was a relief for Katya. She looked out the window at Mosul’s markets setting up: potatoes, cabbages, lemons, giant radishes in piles, watermelons sold from the backs of trucks. All the time she felt that growing sensation of lightness. It was happening faster than usual, and she knew it had been a mistake to come to work. She couldn’t go blank in front of Salim after lying on her health assessment form. Could she pretend to feel sick? She glanced over at Salim as he scolded Athir about something, and then at her own hands, which were tucked into her sleeves.
That car journey lasted for ever, and Katya hardly spoke the whole way. Something about it reminded her of the grief counselling she’d gone to as a teenager, the group circle, everyone taking it in turns to speak about the people who were no longer there: the wives and parents and children. One woman who’d lost both twins, who kept tissues in the sleeve of her cardigan to dab at her swollen eyes. Her mum came too: ‘It’ll do us both good.’ Katya’s mum spoke sometimes: about her dad’s insistence on returning to Iraq after the war, the way he’d had scars on his arm, cigarette burns from his time in one of the dictator’s prisons, and the way a piece of him seemed always to call him back. Katya had never been able to speak in those meetings. It felt like a slice of apple was wedged in her throat. She couldn’t talk about it, couldn’t cry in front of these people the way her mum did. She just sat and stared at the whiteboard on which the facilitator had written ‘GREIF’ in spidery capitals and waited for it all to be over. Katya remembered sobbing every day. She remembered stopping in the middle of a task – making a cup of tea, doing her homework – and just staring, without going on, like a wind-up toy that had run out of wind. She remembered the voice of her teacher in class, the drone of an engine in the background. And the worst part was how understanding everyone had been. How much space they gave her, as though she was a bomb that might go off. The girl who’d lost her father, who they’d all seen on the news. And then the seizures. The first time, she thought she was dying. It was a rushing, popping light in front of her eyes, her brain retreating back through the stages of its evolution: bird, lizard, fish.
There was a crunch of gravel and Katya realised that she was there. She’d made it to the site.
‘Here we are,’ Salim said. ‘Take care out there today. Stay safe in the sun.’
‘Thanks,’ she said, and to Athir, ‘Good luck. Don’t let him push you around.’
> The boy nodded and gave a wide smile that showed no teeth. Katya climbed up to her dig, flushing with relief. As she got closer, she noticed with confusion that the usual local workers were nowhere to be seen. No guard either. When she got there, she found out why. The earth was scoured and pocked like a battlefield. Shallow voids had opened in the ground, and a spaghetti of tyre tracks led off to the road. She knew immediately what had happened, and stood there for some time, looking out over the ravaged waste.
‘Shit.’
Why today? She phoned Salim.
‘My site’s been looted again,’ she said. ‘They’ve wrecked the place.’
He muttered something curse-like in Arabic.
‘It’s all right. It’s not your fault, Katya. Hold tight, I’ll be there.’
She walked around and examined the damage, puffing out her cheeks.
‘It’s not your fault,’ she repeated, but she didn’t feel any better. She could still feel the aura creeping up on her, but no hint of déjà vu: a good sign. She surveyed the sets of footprints printed in the sand, a used-up phosphorus flare and an empty packet of cigarettes. The looters had broken open the top of one wall she’d spent days carefully excavating, and disturbed the layer of white dust. Hollow shapes in the side of the trench showed where objects had been taken. Katya tried to measure and survey these, build them into her map, but she noticed too late that the cemented nail she’d used to mark the dig’s horizontal plane had also been moved, throwing everything she’d measured out of alignment. She slumped down on the edge of one hole and swore loudly until she felt better. As she did, she caught sight of something in one of the looter’s holes. It was a dark shape, jutting like a root from the earth. She stared at it for a few moments before realising what it was. A human hand. Ancient.
‘Shit,’ she said again. She jumped down into the hole and brushed away the white dust, inspected the carious bone and mummified flesh yellowed with sulphurous deposits. She made to fetch her brushes and sketchpad, but something stopped her. The hand was closed, balled like a monkey’s paw, and she could just make out a small object clenched inside. She fished out the small brush from her pocket and reached out to touch the hand. Then she felt something strange. Hadn’t it all happened like this before? Hadn’t she stood on that exact spot before, listening to the wind whining against the crest of the hill and the hollows of the olive tree? A sensation as if time was folding over itself like a ruffled fabric.
All Our Broken Idols Page 6
