All Our Broken Idols

by Paul M. M. Cooper

  ‘Oh, yeah, I’ve seen her out there a few times. Pass me the binoculars?’

  The distant tree swam into view. The girl looked like a teenager, dressed in a floral dress, jeans and an abaya. She was leaning against the trunk and watching the dig, eating something from a bag.

  ‘Moslawis are curious sometimes,’ Salim said. ‘But you should be careful. The looters put out spotters too, local kids they pay to keep an eye on us.’

  Katya waved to the girl, who ducked behind a wall just as before, disappearing from view.

  The afternoons were just as busy: Katya spent hours in the storeroom cataloguing new finds that came out of the dust room, taking photos and sketches, zipping them away in their self-seal polythene bags and building her map of the site. She spent time studying the body too, taking more samples to send off for lab analysis, scraping from beneath the fingernails to parse them for pollen grains and organic particles, scanning the skeleton for enthesopathic lesions. The whole time, she kept another object nearby: the little hollow cylinder seal. It sat on her desk in its clear sachet, with the printed scan they’d taken of the design that wrapped around its surface: a lion, a garden and a river. She glanced at it occasionally as though some new clue might have emerged on its patterned and greenish surface.

  Dr Malik arrived at the museum with Salim on a Saturday morning. Katya heard the museum door opening and came downstairs with her toothbrush still in her mouth. The doctor spread out his arms when he saw her, nearly filling the whole doorway.

  ‘It is time to see Mosul’s bridges!’ he announced. Behind him, Salim rolled his eyes.

  ‘Wight ngow?’ Katya said through the toothpaste foam.

  ‘Right now!’ the doctor boomed.

  Dr Malik drove the three of them at great speed down some narrow alleys near the river, overtaking cars on narrow streets and honking furiously even when he was on the wrong side of the road. Katya saw Salim gripping the seat in front with white fingers as they were thrown from one side to the other and pedestrians leapt out of the way. The men drinking tea and playing backgammon on the roadside looked up as they shot past. Katya tried to fix her eyes on the road: she saw a cartoon of Mickey Mouse painted on the wall of a school ahead, and an old lime tree with one half of its branches dead and shrivelled, the other verdant with leaves. Salim breathed out a long breath when the doctor hit the brakes and jumped out.

  ‘This is my palace,’ Dr Malik announced. It was a large, stately building with a long veranda, overlooking the reed banks of the Tigris. ‘Come, come, come,’ the doctor said, and boomed, ‘Ahlan wa Sahlan!’ in greeting to a man standing on a wall a few houses over. A concrete statue of Gilgamesh wrestling a lion formed the centrepiece of the doctor’s neat mowed lawn. It looked as if it had been modelled after him. A small white boat was moored at the bottom of the garden, half hidden by the reeds. On the opposite bank, a group of unsupervised cows grazed.

  ‘Get in, get in!’ Dr Malik urged them. The boat didn’t look large enough to comfortably hold all three of them, and when the doctor stepped in, the front end nearly lifted out of the water. Salim got in hesitantly, and then put out a hand to help Katya. When she took it, their eyes met for a moment, but he looked away instantly. The doctor gunned the motor and began to speak in a booming voice.

  ‘Listen! For thousands of years, our two rivers have fed this land with life. They carry silt down from the hills and fertilise everything you see around you: the wheat, the palms, the oranges. Head just one kilometre in either direction, and what do you see? Desert. Dust. But here – this is where life begins.’

  Salim lit a cigarette and caught Katya’s eye with a look that said: there’s much more of this to come. Katya let her fingers skirt the water as the boat pulled away from the bank and they made their way downstream, Salim’s blue smoke ribboning them all. The sun had been getting stronger every day, and it now baked her skin, dotted her with new freckles: her mother’s skin.

  ‘This is the first bridge!’ the doctor said after some time. ‘Made of iron!’

  It was shady underneath. A runaway goat had made a nest under the arch on the opposite side. The air smelled of mud and rubbish, and the sound of traffic went on overhead. Salim tipped his head at her encouragingly, out of sight of the doctor.

  ‘It’s amazing,’ Katya said. The doctor beamed.

  ‘Amazing. Yes, that is the word!’

  Salim nodded in approval, staying quiet as the doctor went on about the different arch designs and materials, the dates and designers of each of Mosul’s bridges, checking with Salim when he didn’t know English words.

  ‘You know,’ the doctor said as they picked up speed and the warm paper breeze smoothed Katya’s cheeks, ‘the problems in Iraq today are all the product of magnetism.’

  He raised one finger and gestured to the approaching bridge ahead.

  ‘The earth’s magnetic field follows a certain number of lines all around the planet, stronger in some places, weaker in others. Like lines on the surface of an orange.’

  Katya nodded, unsure of what to say. Salim was looking off to the side.

  ‘And this country lies right on one of those lines,’ Dr Malik went on. ‘All the violence of the earth occurs along them, and the world’s great rivers follow them too – look it up if you don’t believe me! The rivers follow geography, and people follow the rivers, though they don’t know why. Cultures flow down them, and dust, and stories too, and the dead when they go to heaven follow the rivers, flying over our heads. That’s why bridges are such powerful things. Lodes of iron. Yes, Salim? Lodes?’

  ‘Lodes. Sure.’

  ‘In Iraq, it is the same,’ the doctor went on. ‘The Assyrians, the Sassanids, Genghis Khan, the Ottomans, Saddam, the Americans. All of them without knowledge obeying the laws of magnetism, which is the most hidden but most powerful force there is.’

  ‘Maybe they should tear the bridges down,’ Salim said, looking away to hide his smile. ‘Might be an idea if they’re causing all these problems for us, Doctor?’

  ‘Salim, you might not believe it. You might joke about it. But you follow those forces too.’

  Every time the boat rocked, Katya felt her thigh touch Salim’s. Her lips were dry; she found herself watching his hand on the edge of the boat, noting its movements as it edged closer to hers, then further away. When they landed back at the mooring and all got out, did his hand flicker for a moment on her lower back? In the car on the way through the city, the doctor wound again through the narrow streets again at breakneck speed, and when he stopped outside the museum, Salim got out of the car with Katya.

  ‘Thanks, Doctor, I can walk home from here,’ Salim said, a little breathless. The doctor bellowed some farewell in Arabic as he shot away, making a yellow taxi screech to a halt at the junction.

  ‘That’s one way I don’t intend to die,’ Salim said, and caught her eye. ‘I’ll see you in the morning then.’

  ‘Well, I thought … do you want to come in?’

  ‘Come in?’

  ‘Yeah. There are some dominoes in the top room. We could play. If you’re not busy.’

  Salim looked unsure for a moment. Then he nodded and followed her upstairs. She still felt the rocking movement of the boat beneath her. They tried to sit on the museum floor while the statues of kings wrapped in plastic loomed over them, but the air conditioning was broken, and the only place they could find that was cool enough was the parking garage, where a breeze blew in under the sheet-metal gate. They sat on blankets near the old rusting van parked on its cinder blocks.

  ‘Why do they keep this old thing around?’ Katya said, and tossed a piece of gravel so it made a satisfying hollow sound against the van. Salim shrugged.

  ‘No idea. It hasn’t worked for years. Probably used to need a part they couldn’t get during the embargo, and now it’s too rusted to even screw the tyres on. Either that or it’s an important part of the system of magnetic balance around here.’

  Katya laughed. Salim did
n’t meet her eye, but he looked pleased. She had always thought dominoes was a child’s game of luck, but the way Salim played it involved constant calculation and conniving. He won three games, but then Katya’s luck changed and she won two in a row. Every time Salim placed a domino, he snapped it down triumphantly.

  As they played, they talked more about the dig, the room with the tools and basins and the body they’d found with the cylinder seal clenched in its hand. Then Salim told her about the First Gulf War, which he’d seen as a boy. He told her how one day when a large bomb went off in his neighbourhood, he went out into his garden to see the ground covered with the bodies of little birds, killed by the shock wave. How his grandfather, a lover of birds since he was young, had stood on their porch and quivered with rage.

  She told him memories of her dad, picking each one out like a polished marble from a bag: the crusty breads she’d eaten whenever he’d taken her to visit a friend’s restaurant; the cryptic crosswords he’d done and how he’d chewed the end of his pen as he did them; the scars on his arm that she’d thought looked like the marks of an alien language; how he’d rubbed argan oil in his beard, a kind that came in a yellow bottle.

  ‘Oh, I know that brand,’ Salim said. He looked like he was about to say something, but his phone buzzed. He frowned at it, then answered and spoke a few brief exchanges in Arabic.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I have to go. My nephew Athir’s got in some kind of trouble.’

  ‘Nothing serious?’

  ‘No. He’s just not very good at paying the right people. It’s a skill you need around here.’

  Katya knew her disappointment was written on her face, and she tried to hide it.

  ‘No problem. I hope he’s okay.’

  Salim got up with a sigh and gave her a bashful goodbye, leaving his dominoes on the floor in a little henge. Once he’d left, Katya let the air out of her lungs in one long breath and then checked what was left in his hand. He’d been letting her win.

  Katya took the seal back to the dig site the next day, with the aim of examining it further in its context. That inscrutable little stone, rolling around on her palm. That day, her trowel seemed to sense things hidden in the earth, nudging through the loam and dust. She turned up a beautiful shard of glazed pottery, and a mother-of-pearl bead before lunch, fallen in a crack between two sections of the wall. The next day she brought the seal back again. In her breaks, she rested in the sparse shade beneath the ancient olive tree, watched white birds roosting in the houses that climbed the riverbank, men with flocks of sheep in the wetland stretches. She breathed the smells of the rubbish fires, of sewage and barbecued fish, pear blossom and orange buds, petrol, kebab shops, crushed grass. In high winds, there was the sound of skittering shale, and the masses of antennae on the rooftops trembled as though the city itself were a sensitive instrument, detecting vibrations in the air.

  One evening, Katya returned to the museum to see a girl of about sixteen in jeans and a long-sleeved dress, sitting there on the kerb. The girl was crying, her head in her hands, taking little gasps of breath.

  ‘Hello?’ Katya said when she got close enough. ‘Are you okay?’

  The girl wore an abaya that covered her hair and shoulders, her face a white oval. Katya noticed the girl’s hands, tucked into the sleeves of her dress, her shoulders hopping to her sobs. Katya put out her hand. ‘Do you want to come into the museum?’

  The girl looked up at her sharply, and drew her abaya to cover her face. But after a few moments, she met Katya’s eye. She glanced around and then took her hand.

  ‘Come inside,’ Katya said. ‘What’s wrong?’

  The girl didn’t answer, but followed her into the museum. She looked around the dim entrance hall, at the huge bull guardians flanking the approach, and the statues veiled in their plastic coverings. When she pulled her hands out from her sleeves, Katya noticed a little red-and-white string around her left wrist, and a sooty stain on the palms of her hands.

  ‘Want tea?’ Katya asked in Arabic. The girl just shook her head, her face a mask of sorrow. ‘Want telephone?’

  ‘I can speak some English,’ the girl said a little hesitantly. ‘Your Arabic is very bad.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is. What’s your name?’

  ‘Lola.’

  ‘Lola. That doesn’t sound like an Iraqi name.’ The girl shook her head.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘In Ar-Rafidayn. Not far.’

  ‘Are you a student? In school?’

  The girl shook her head.

  ‘No. Cooking.’

  Lola had a young face, with freckles over the bridge of her nose like the marks on an egg. The girl pulled off her abaya with a brisk and frustrated motion that made hair fall over her tear-stained face.

  ‘Well, I’m going to make some tea,’ Katya said. ‘I’ll make two, and you can drink it if you want.’

  Lola just watched her. She kept rubbing her hands on her clothes, trying to brush off the sooty black marks. Katya led the girl to the staff kitchen, boiled some water in a pan on the gas stove and found some yellow packets of Ceylon tea. She gave the girl a towel to wipe her hands: the girl sniffed, and brushed her palms, but the black wouldn’t budge. It seemed to dirty everything it touched without ever lessening itself. Katya looked over the girl’s floral dress, her jeans and abaya, and a stirring of recognition hit all at once.

  ‘You’re the girl who stands under the tree by the river,’ she said. ‘You watch us at the dig site.’

  Lola gave a curl of embarrassment.

  ‘I’m sorry. I like to look.’

  ‘It’s okay. You always hide when I wave to you.’

  The girl nodded, and looked away with her face long and slick with tears.

  ‘So what happened, Lola?’ Katya asked eventually. ‘Did someone hurt you? Do you want the police?’

  ‘No. No police.’

  ‘Okay. But if someone …’

  The girl closed her eyes and shook her head, tried again to brush the black marks from her palms, each time the motion more furious as if the marks were burning her.

  ‘My brother,’ she said. ‘They killed my brother.’

  Katya felt herself suddenly unequal to the situation.

  ‘I’m sorry. Are you in danger?’

  The girl threw the towel to the floor.

  ‘Yes.’

  Lola sniffed and rubbed her red eyes with the hem of her dress, tugged at the red-and-white cord around her wrist. The two of them leaned against the counters, letting silence stretch between them.

  ‘The tea is terrible,’ the girl said after a minute, her voice tiny. Katya let out a little breath of a laugh, but the girl kept that same flinty expression, staring down into the floor. By the time they’d finished their tea, Lola had stopped crying. She pulled her abaya over her head, tidied herself as best she could in the reflection of a copper-bottomed pan hanging on a nail, and then said, ‘Now I go. Thank you.’

  Katya followed her to the door and watched as she hurried away through the litter that blew down the street in spirals.

  The next morning, when Salim came to pick her up, Katya mentioned her encounter with Lola.

  ‘She said, “They killed my brother”. What did she mean?’

  Salim puffed out his cheeks.

  ‘It could be anything. But I heard a shop got burned down yesterday. A firebomb. Near here.’

  Katya thought of the dark marks on Lola’s hands. The way she’d scrubbed at them. She shivered.

  ‘Yes. She had soot. Here, on her hands.’

  Salim nodded.

  ‘They were Yazidis. Kurdish-speaking, from the north. I bet she had a little cord on her wrist, red-and-white string?’

  ‘Yes, she did.’

  ‘A terrible thing. A young man died, sleeping in the back room. Might have been selling alcohol secretly, or just didn’t pay their protection money. The militias have their own logic, their own laws. And outside the
city these days, the whole countryside is run by them.’

  ‘That’s horrible.’

  Katya thought of the hardness in Lola’s face, a pain like a piercing arrow.

  ‘There are checkpoints of course, but these days anyone can buy a uniform and an ID card. There are gangs all over the city – and worse, too, though no one talks about it. That poor girl must have run as far as she could.’

  ‘Was your nephew okay?’ Katya said. ‘That trouble you mentioned yesterday …’

  ‘Yes, he’s fine,’ Salim said, shaking his head. ‘I feel so responsible for him. When we were teenagers, his father and I used to repair cars together for money, always telling each other it was so we could both go to college. Then when the time came, I got the chance to study abroad. He said, “You go, Brother. We don’t have enough for us both, and you were always the smart one.” He stayed here through it all, and I went. Then he died, and I was all Athir had left.’

  ‘I didn’t know you lost your brother. I didn’t know you had one.’

  Salim nodded.

  ‘Yes. What a world these young people will have to fix.’

  After that, he didn’t seem to want to talk. Something seemed to weigh heavily on his mind, and he seemed like a different man from the one she’d played dominoes with in the museum garage.

  ‘Katya, keep an eye on the news,’ he said as he left. ‘There are dark rumours going around. And it’s not good to be surprised out here. If it comes to it, we may have to get out of here at short notice.’

  Katya thought about Lola as she worked on alone. She couldn’t shake the image from her mind, of the girl with the blackened hands. She thought about her dad and what it meant to lose someone so young. She thought about the day her mum had got the call: her wail coming from the kitchen. She remembered going down to find out what was wrong and seeing the phone bouncing on its coiled cord, tapping lightly on the linoleum. Her mum curled on the floor with her head in her hands, and the cries coming out of her, deep, and unlike her voice. She remembered being taken to her aunt and uncle’s house, whose ashen faces betrayed to her the seriousness of what was happening. The tuna sandwiches they gave her with too much butter, and her mother coming to pick her up in the evening, looking like she’d shrunk by half.