All Our Broken Idols

by Paul M. M. Cooper

  ‘Who knows,’ Salim muttered. ‘Maybe it doesn’t even matter.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She heard his laboured breaths in the dark.

  ‘Maybe it’s all over. If they can take Mosul and hold it, who knows what they can do? They could take Baghdad. Maybe the whole world is unravelling.’

  They spent an eternity in the dark. They had to use one of the mop buckets as a toilet. There was no water or food. Katya felt weak. Her tongue felt like Scotch tape, sticking to the sides of her mouth. She kept wondering what was happening. Had the men found out about the seal she’d taken? Had something gone wrong with the fragment of tablet she’d given them? Had she made a mistake?

  The three of them talked to pass the time that first day, at first about nothing in particular. Katya talked about ancient plant samples she’d found in the ceramics and pottery of southwest Mexico, where wild grasses gave clues about the domestication of grains. Salim talked about the favourite finds of his career: the gold band he’d found in a sealed tomb in Uruk, the stone dice from Babylon, the 4,000-year-old clay brick from Dur-Sharrukin that still showed the paw prints of a dog that ran over it when it was drying. Then, as they got more scared and the darkness pressed in further on them, they began to talk about their families. Lola switched to Arabic, which she spoke more fluently than English, and Salim translated. She had a beautiful lilting cadence when she talked about her brother, how he’d flown kites with her from the rooftops and taught her to shoot, the way the village they’d left had irrigation canals she’d played in as a child, and about her father who had driven a bright yellow tractor. She recounted the day they moved to Mosul and how she’d explored the ruins of Nineveh on her own, pretending to be an archaeologist. Then about losing her parents, being left with only her brother, who ran the family shop while she worked in a restaurant kitchen. Then the day years later that she came to find its blackened skeleton still breathing smoke, and she knew she was alone in the world.

  Katya told them about her home, the tower blocks sprouting out of the bomb craters, the War Memorial Park, the shell of Coventry Cathedral. She talked about her mum’s depression, the way she’d never been sure which version of her would walk through the door. She told them about her dad, the way he’d sat at his computer and written with the cat on his lap and the sunlight passing through the steam rising off his coffee. She talked about the day she found out he’d disappeared, how she’d had to go to her aunt and uncle’s and had sat there eating tuna sandwiches though her mouth was dry, and her mum had come back to get her with her face puffed up and red with crying, unable to speak, shaking with what looked like rage; how Katya had thought this anger was directed at her, unable to understand what she’d done. She told them about the fights she’d got into at school, how she’d never been able to speak at the counselling sessions, and the men from the Foreign Office coming into her house and sitting there in her father’s chair, the awkward way they’d perched and muttered the same phrases, ‘So sorry for your loss,’ ‘Doing everything we can,’ each one seeming to contradict the last. The way she’d gone to see the lion carvings in the museum, and her mum had told her they came from the same place as her dad, the same place he’d disappeared into, a place that must have been like a fog, a place where people can just disappear and never be found.

  Salim talked about America, about his relations living in Europe and the nephews and nieces he’d never seen. He told them about his mother and father, how he wished he’d visited them more, how he sent money home to them but never had the chance to visit. He spoke about his regrets, how he had been a man living in two places, with two souls. He talked about when his brother had been killed, when they had taken his body to be washed and Salim had seen a pomegranate tree growing in the corpse washer’s courtyard, watered by the blood that flowed from the washing table.

  They could tell that night was coming: the soft glow of light that crept in under the door faded. Salim and Lola talked together in Arabic, and then he tried in Lola’s native Kurdish. Katya listened to the way they became different persons in each language, as though multiple souls bubbled up inside them.

  After the first night, they were too thirsty to talk. Lola sang weakly, lying at Katya’s feet. Delirium fell in the dark. Laughter and strange dreams. Katya rolled over and tried to lie on her side, but it was agony in her wrists. It was then she became aware of a presence moving there in the room with her. Was it Salim? Was he sleepwalking, or stumbling around in a fever? She turned and saw a dark figure standing in the corner, the shape of a man.

  ‘Salim?’ she said.

  ‘What?’ Salim murmured, from right beside her. The figure in the corner just stood there, tall and terrible.

  ‘Lola, is that you?’

  But Lola was still lying next to her.

  ‘Salim, there’s someone standing in the corner.’

  ‘There’s no one there,’ he said, and she felt his hands on her face. ‘Katya, it’s just us in here. There’s no one there.’

  She hid from the figure, but it remained for the whole night. Every time she dared to look, she could see it standing there in silence, and in the morning it was gone. On that second day, Katya’s dad appeared to her. He stood in the corner where the figure had been. She couldn’t see his face, but she knew it was him.

  ‘Dad?’ she said, almost too weak to speak. His voice came out of the shadows.

  ‘You’re not going to give up,’ he said. ‘Is that what I taught you? To give up?’

  ‘I can’t. Please. It’s too hard. I can’t.’

  ‘You have to keep going, Kat. Time isn’t done here.’

  ‘Dad. Why did you leave? Why did you leave me?’

  ‘Never hide, Katya. Run.’

  She looked up and he was gone. On the third day, she knew that they had been forgotten. They were going to die in that room. Time folded over itself, pouring in laps like treacle. She wasn’t afraid any more. She wanted death to hurry up and take her. Stop taking its time. When she heard noises down below in the museum, she thought she was dreaming. Then the door burst open.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ she heard. It was the English man. ‘Look what you’ve done to them. You fucking idiots. It stinks.’

  ‘Please,’ Katya croaked, squinting in the light. ‘Water.’

  The English man clucked his tongue.

  ‘Water!’ he shouted at the other man, who hurried off. The skull man didn’t seem to be there any more. The English man took a few steps into the room, wrinkling his nose.

  ‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘What a fucking mess.’

  She looked up at him, and for a moment felt a real burst of warmth towards him, so strong that she thought she might cry. He cut her zip ties and she tried to get up from the floor, but her legs wouldn’t hold her. She massaged the torn skin where the ties had cut into her wrists. When the water came, she gulped it down, and it tasted as sweet as peach juice. It took all her strength to pass it to Lola and then Salim. They all crept out into the light like cave creatures, blinking and weeping from reddened eyes. The English man stood and watched them with the hint of a sneer, and the pupils of his eyes a wide, pure black like polished stones.

  ‘The piece you gave us …’ he said. ‘It was good. Good stuff. The boss is happy.’

  Katya sobbed on her hands and knees. Behind her, Lola was crying too, and Salim was holding her.

  ‘You need to give me more pieces like that,’ the English man said. ‘So long as the pieces keep coming, you can stay out here in the museum, and there won’t be any need for my friend to come back. You understand?’

  Katya nodded, and despite herself, she glanced back at the dark cupboard where she thought she would die.

  ‘For how long?’ she said. ‘When will you let us go?’

  ‘If the ocean were ink for the words of God, the ocean would dry up before the words.’

  ‘What does that …’

  ‘Here’s my list.’ He dropped a folded printout on to the
floor beside her. ‘Two hundred items. Bring me these, and we won’t have any more problems.’

  ‘Two hundred,’ Katya murmured. She lifted her head weakly. ‘But if I work for you … shouldn’t I at least know your name?’

  The English man shrugged as though it didn’t matter, and this frightened Katya more than anything else. She looked up into the black wells of his eyes.

  ‘I’m Abu Ammar,’ he said. ‘Abu Ammar al-Britani, lion of Mosul.’

  With those words he left, and Katya slumped exhausted to the floor, listening to Lola’s sobs behind her and Salim’s voice as he whispered to her that it was going to be okay.

  In the hour after being freed from the cupboard, all Katya, Salim and Lola could do was drink glass after glass of water until their stomachs hurt. Then they cooked and ate handfuls of rice mixed with tinned tomato, and it tasted so good Katya thought she might cry. They piled into the showers, letting the water rinse the filth from their skin and their clothes, running almost black down the drain. They emptied the mop bucket, gagging a little as they did, and when they felt enough strength return to their bodies, they looked around the museum at the damage the men had done. Anything that remained of value had been taken: all the artefacts in the cases that were light enough to carry, all the electronics too, even the stationery. They had gone through the bookcases in the library and torn out the pages on Iraqi art and history, left them littered thick like a forest floor. Katya watched Salim from the doorway as he sorted morosely through the leaves, the fragmented images on the ground showing the minaret of Samarra, the gold dome of Karbala and the patterned intricacies of Kufic script. Salim smoothed them with his palm and put them back into their places, one by one. He lifted a copy of an old Safavid Quran from where it lay open on the floor and brushed the dust from its cover. She watched the gentle curve of his neck as his head hung, and remembered kissing him the day before they were imprisoned in the cupboard. It already felt like another life. She came up behind him and put her arms around his waist.

  ‘I thought we were going to die,’ she said. His hands moved up and pressed into her forearms, palms warm and soft.

  ‘Me too. It didn’t seem that bad, from up close.’

  ‘I started seeing things. I saw my dad. He spoke to me.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Not to give up.’

  ‘It’s easy for the dead to say.’

  She held on to him and felt the warmth of him next to her.

  ‘Did they find the phones?’

  Salim shook his head.

  ‘No, thank God. They took everything else.’

  ‘That’s some hope at least.’

  ‘Yes. But it won’t do us any good if the signal never comes back.’

  ‘Or the charge runs out.’

  He nodded.

  ‘In the meantime, we should take an inventory of everything we have here, anything they missed. We need a plan if that skull man ever comes back.’

  It was a way to keep busy more than anything, to regain a sense of purpose after their imprisonment. Lola helped them look, her face a sullen mask. At times like this, she reminded Katya of the teenager she might have been anywhere else in the world, in a different life. Katya checked the staff offices, but they had been thoroughly ransacked. The only thing she found was a length of string. She almost left it, then had a thought. The cylinder seal was still in the pocket of her hoodie, so she took it out, ran the string through its hollow and hung the seal around her neck like a necklace. A lucky charm.

  ‘Nothing useful back here,’ she said, her voice still hoarse. ‘Try the kitchen.’

  They didn’t have much luck there, either. They found a bag of dried rice and about thirty tins of tomatoes, some yoghurt and apricot jam and soft cheese, along with frozen diamond-shaped flatbreads. Salim clucked his tongue.

  ‘Enough food for … I don’t know, a couple of months, if we ration it. It doesn’t seem like those guys have any interest in bringing us more food.’

  Katya’s stomach growled in protest. When Lola pulled open one of the cutlery drawers, she shouted out.

  ‘Here!’

  Salim and Katya came over, and they both looked down at what she’d found. It was a kitchen knife, about three inches long with a cheap bright red handle, that had slipped under the lining paper. They all stared at it in silence for a moment.

  ‘I don’t – I don’t know if I could …’ Salim muttered. ‘You know …’

  ‘Me neither,’ Katya said. She felt her throat constricting a little.

  ‘But … we should take it and hide it somewhere,’ he said. ‘Just in case. For self-defence.’

  Katya nodded. She thought of what the English man Abu Ammar had said to her, down in the gloom: ‘You know what will happen if you ever lie to me …’

  ‘Let’s hide it down in the storeroom,’ Katya said. Lola nodded.

  ‘Yes, hide it there,’ she agreed.

  Katya and Lola went downstairs together and found a shelf in the corner where old clay tablets were piled up and wreathed in spiders’ webs. They located a place behind the tablets to hide the knife, and Lola gripped its handle.

  ‘I killed a sheep once,’ she said. ‘My father said I had to do it. He said girls have to be strong, because hard times were coming.’

  Katya watched Lola’s white knuckles on the handle.

  ‘Was it hard?’

  Lola nodded.

  ‘Yes. I loved that sheep. His name was Amir. I was crying the whole time. But my brother helped me. He showed me how.’

  ‘What’s the secret?’ Katya asked, and though she meant it to sound like a joke, she heard her own voice hushed.

  ‘No secret. You have to be fast,’ Lola said, and jabbed out with the knife to demonstrate, drawing it across an imaginary throat. Her voice was serious, her eyes hard. ‘Once you decide to do something, you can’t hesitate. You can’t doubt. You have to do it with all your soul.’

  In the morning, Katya and Salim continued searching through the artefacts in the storeroom for the 200 on Abu Ammar’s list. Lola helped, darting down the lines of shelves to fetch what they asked for. It was silent down there, the thick concrete walls muffling all sound, other than the hum of the fluorescent strip bulbs that fizzed and blinked intermittently. Katya ran her fingers through her hair.

  ‘The first thing we should do is work out what’s not on his list,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. We can hide them somewhere, make sure they’re safe.’

  Most of the finds from their dig were uncatalogued, so they gathered them together first. Katya remembered each moment of discovery as she went through them: her shard of blue glazed pottery, her mother-of-pearl bead, the blue-green coins and bone handles, some white dust from the workshop floor, stone-carving tools brittle as dry leaves, inscribed bricks, date stones, charred sesame seeds, olive pips and animal bones.

  ‘Not much to save,’ Salim said, letting some of the date stones tick through his fingers.

  ‘It’s something.’

  ‘And what do we give them in return?’

  Katya showed him the printed list again, and his eyes ran down it with a haunted expression.

  ‘Imagine the pigs picking this stuff out,’ he said, his voice curdling. ‘Americans, Russians, Europeans … going through our museum’s catalogue like a brochure. Turning my country’s history into a garage sale.’

  The power went out, so they worked holding battery torches. They were both still afraid of the dark, of the shadows beyond those two pools of light. As they sorted through the objects, they kept up a constant chatter to reassure each other that they were still there. Katya told Salim everything she’d learned from her meeting with Abu Ammar.

  ‘There’s always this rage hidden just below the surface,’ she said. ‘You can almost see him quivering with it. He’s young, I don’t know how young. He’s always quoting these religious passages, and he takes these little pills sometimes.’

  ‘Captagon,’ Salim said.
<
br />   ‘What?’

  ‘It’s an amphetamine they make themselves in Syria. Keeps them fighting for longer, makes them a little crazy. But I hear the withdrawal is pretty nasty. You should be careful around him if he’s coming off the stuff. And when he’s on it, it might be a good time to ask for things.’

  Katya nodded, and thought of the black look in the man’s eyes. Salim took a sharp breath. He was holding a small clay model of a cart, an ancient child’s toy.

  ‘I love this piece,’ he said. ‘I’d rather smash this than give it to them.’

  Katya felt the tension in his hands. She thought he’d do it. But then he sagged and handed the little cart to her. He covered his eyes as he did, and she heard him sniff through tears.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I keep thinking about the museums I visited as a boy. The Baghdad Museum. How much I loved that place. And after the war, hearing that the Americans let it be destroyed as if it meant nothing. Wondering what kind of monsters would do a thing like that. And now I feel like I’m losing my soul with every piece we give away.’

  Katya weighed the little cart in her hands and thought about the child who had first owned it, and what they had gone on to become.

  ‘Go upstairs,’ she said. ‘I’ll do the rest for today.’

  ‘No, you don’t have to …’

  ‘No, I mean it. We’re nearly done anyway. You’re exhausted. Get some sleep.’

  He nodded and wiped some angry tears from his eyes, then leaned forwards and kissed her forehead. He left her alone with the artefacts, and the reverberating sound of what he’d said. Was she losing her soul too? Giving it away, gift-wrapped and ready for sale? By the end of the day, the tips of Katya’s fingers were dry with the dust of the artefacts, and her eyes felt strained from peering in the dim light.

  They didn’t see the skull man again. Abu Ammar took charge of the museum, and his was a looser regime: he let the three of them wander the halls, even unlocked the roof so they could go out into the sun and look out over the city. The museum seemed to unsettle him, all its silent statues and strange gods, so he rarely came inside. In the evenings, some of Abu Ammar’s men would come into the museum and split the three of them up, lock them in separate rooms for the night, sometimes camp out in the halls until morning.