All Our Broken Idols

by Paul M. M. Cooper

  He sketched that too, the curlicues of decoration on the King’s lounger, the hanging tassels. The master strode over, squatted down in front of Sharo.

  ‘How is this possible? Are you making fun of me, boy?’

  ‘Sharo remembers everything,’ Aurya said, her voice soft as a reed pipe. The mason flashed her another look. The apprentices gathered around what Sharo had drawn in the dust.

  ‘He’s right,’ one said. ‘I remember that part with the tapering design along the lower edge.’

  ‘And those lion feet are exactly how they looked,’ another said. ‘I’d bet next month’s rations.’

  The master rocked on his heels, breathed through his nose and looked hard at Sharo.

  ‘If there’s one detail out of place,’ he said, ‘if there’s one little finial in the wrong order, the King will notice. Do you understand that, boy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It will ruin my career, my life.’ He reached out and took Sharo by the hand, squeezing him so he winced with pain. ‘And if it’s wrong, I promise you one thing, boy. However the King punishes me, I will punish you ten times over. If I go one month on half rations, I will make sure you go ten months. If he takes one of my fingers, I will cut off all ten of yours. Do you understand me?’

  Sharo pulled his hand away from the man’s grasp.

  ‘Sharo,’ Aurya said, ‘are you sure?’

  Her brother fixed his eyes on the master, and she could see the same hatred and fear he’d had when looking at their father.

  ‘I’m sure. I can see it in front of me right now.’

  The master stood up, put both hands on his head so his arms looked like two handles of a jar. Little puffs of dust rained down from his hair.

  ‘Fine. Draw it on the stone.’

  Sharo got up from the dust and went over to where the slabs lay. The crowd of apprentices backed away from him. He took a piece of charcoal and knelt over the stone. Aurya held her breath. Then Sharo sketched the same details on to the stone: the seat beneath the King, the table, both with their delicate ornaments and lion feet. He lingered over those feet especially. He never once looked back at his sketch in the dust, but when he was finished, the master mason and his apprentices compared the two and found them to be identical. Even the master looked down at Sharo’s sketch and nodded.

  ‘Incredible,’ one apprentice said.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  ‘Ashur is great …’

  That evening, the apprentices quizzed Sharo in a constant babble. They tried to catch him out at first, tried to overwhelm him with questions. They asked him what day of the week he’d first eaten a date, first seen a mountain, first heard Akkadian spoken, and then they’d ask the same question some time later, to check if his answers were the same. They asked him things they remembered: how the constellations had looked on days that were important to them: their weddings, their children’s births, when they’d gone to the star-gazers to get the signs read. Each one nodded in grudging agreement when Sharo told them, his eyes closed as he reeled off the constellations: ‘The furrow and the frond were in ascendance, the bull of heaven was high overhead … the mad dog and the true shepherd of Anu were each in the east and west … the great twins and the standing gods crossed the mountains and hid towards dusk…’

  By the end of the evening, they were getting him to tell them star positions for important days they didn’t know, so they could take them to their astrologers and find out if their new chisels would bring good luck, if their wives would be faithful, if they’d get good commissions for their work. Aurya watched Sharo get more and more tired, holding his head as their requests went on, but he kept telling them what he knew, alone of all the people of the world. Finally they moved on to asking him how it felt.

  ‘It makes me exhausted,’ he said. ‘I’ll be talking to someone, and at the same time, I’m remembering something. The things they say make all these memories come back. If I follow the memories, one leads on to another. It’s like a dark palace: so many winding corridors, the walls covered in images. I get lost quickly. I could spend the whole day chasing through those corridors. Sometimes I wonder if I went too far, would I ever come back?’

  Aurya listened in silence. Sharo had never said any of that to her. Perhaps she’d never asked him. Perhaps deep down, she’d always felt something like what her father told them: that Sharo was simple, incredible maybe, but simple. For just an instant, she thought she understood what it must be like to be him: the burden he carried, and why he hated to see suffering. As she listened to Sharo speak, she looked over the apprentices’ heads, to where the shadowy old palace sat empty and silent, cutting out a black outline against the stars.

  In the morning, the master announced that Sharo would be taken on as his newest apprentice. Some grumbled that he was too young, that he was just a boy from the hills, and how would he pay the fees? They didn’t grumble loudly. They all seemed to understand that the boy in front of them was something special, and it made them afraid.

  ‘With a few years of good training,’ the master said, ‘I could make you the greatest artist in Nineveh.’

  Aurya looked around the crowd and saw their eyes full of envy; shifting, dark expressions.

  ‘I will learn,’ Sharo said softly. ‘But I won’t leave Aurya. So if I learn, she learns.’

  ‘Sharo,’ Aurya said. ‘You don’t have to …’

  ‘No. That’s all. I’ll stay here if she can stay.’

  The master looked down at Aurya with a little twitch in his lip, and she felt as detested as a stray cat.

  ‘If that’s the price, then so be it,’ the master mason said, and clapped his hands. ‘It’s settled then! Quick, grab some beer from the store and let’s drink on it.’

  The fifty days of summer heat were a long way off, but the morning sun still beat down on the two children as they sat in the workshop. The seven winds blew a haze of dust that occluded the city. An apprentice brought two rough pieces of stone, and placed one down before Aurya and then the other for Sharo. The master held a reed in his hand that he swung idly, making a swooshing noise.

  ‘Stones like this one,’ he said, ‘grow like roots in the earth’s depths. They have seen the underworld and its creatures. They saw the birth of the heavens; they saw Anu, Enlil and Enki draw lots over who would rule the earth, the waters, the sky. They watched as the gods knitted our bones. Sometime after the flood, this stone was cut from the hills north of here and used to build a bridge. You can tell by the soft colour on its underside. Then it became the lintel of a house – see this cut here? And when that house crumbled, it was placed in the bottom of a wall. When the wall collapsed, men brought it here to Nineveh. The works of men, crumbling and cleared away, made new and new again.’

  The mason scored Sharo’s stone with a sharp copper tool. He left a shallow cut.

  ‘The stone will remember that mark until dogs screech and ostriches bark. Until Nineveh is just a pile of bricks in the dust. Until the flood returns, and the world is covered again with water.’

  ‘Until this speech is finished,’ Aurya whispered when his back was turned, but Sharo didn’t react. His eyes were fixed on the master, and Aurya felt a flush of irritation. She looked down at her stone, which looked more lumpish and uglier than Sharo’s. As the morning wore on, the master taught them the blessings to say before they began their work, how to ask the stone to remember, how to hold its form while they carved. Sharo repeated the blessings to his stone. Aurya leaned in close to hers.

  ‘You’re an ugly piece of rock and I hate you,’ she said, so the master couldn’t hear.

  ‘You can tell a mason by the smoothness of his hands,’ the master said. ‘While the farmers and builders roughen their hands, the dust wears ours away.’

  He held out his palms, and Aurya saw that they were just like her father’s, completely without fingerprints, padded like the feet of cats. He gave them each a chisel and a rounded mallet, and demonstrated ho
w to hold them. The tools felt heavy and dumb in Aurya’s hands, their wooden handles polished as smooth as bone. She watched Sharo fumbling too, his tongue sticking out a little while he knocked chips from the stone. He looked the way he always did when he drew in the riverbank mud: concentrated, content. Sharo took to the work naturally. He understood what the mason told him on the level of instinct, like a young bird realising that it had wings. Aurya struggled with everything. Every day, she pinched her fingers between the mallet and the chisel, and her eyes smarted with the whitish dust that rose in clouds from their work. On the third day, she struck the chisel too hard, and her piece of stone split along an ugly line.

  ‘Useless,’ the master said as he threw the cracked piece over the wall. ‘The stones always remember.’

  By the end of the week, Aurya was close to tears. Her new stone was a mess of chips and misstrikes, but Sharo had managed to carve the basic shape of a flower, which the mason gazed at with greedy eyes.

  ‘Well done, boy. Very promising.’

  For the rest of the day, they went back to their chores. They sat at the long stone water-basins and sharpened the chisels and scutching tools with rough stones, wetting them as they had been shown. At night, as they lay in the barn with the other apprentices, Aurya rolled close to Sharo, looking for his warmth in the dark. He was half asleep, but he put an arm around her, and she felt the soft papery texture of his hands. She kept thinking about her mother, about how she was no closer to finding her in this vast city.

  ‘I can’t do it, Sharo,’ she said. ‘The carving. I feel so useless.’

  ‘You’ll get it soon, Aurya. You’ve always been the clever one. I just remember things, that’s all.’

  ‘Sharo, I think we’ve made a mistake. I don’t think this is the house of dust. We have to go out into the city and find out where it is.’

  Sharo swallowed beside her.

  ‘Aurya, I don’t think you’ll ever find it.’

  A bitter salt feeling rose in her throat.

  ‘Don’t you want to find her, Sharo?’

  ‘She’s dead, Aurya.’

  A sliver of anger stuck in her heart like a stone chip.

  ‘If you know she’s dead, tell me how she died, Sharo. I know you’re hiding something. And I won’t believe it until you tell me. So was there a lion? Or no lion?’

  That little chip of stone dug in deeper. Sharo didn’t want to find their mother. He liked it in the workshop. He didn’t want to leave. Aurya sensed his breathing in the dark.

  ‘Do you want me to tell more of the story?’ Sharo said. Aurya nodded, trying to tease out the little flint wedged in her chest.

  ‘Yes, tell it.’

  ‘They killed Humbaba,’ Enlil mourned. ‘They cut down the cedars in my forest. Now I will bury them in their city’s dust. Send the great bull of heaven and wipe them from the earth!’

  The bull of heaven thundered down from the sky. When it roared, palaces burst into flames. People’s houses shattered.

  The King and the wild man took up their spears and went out to fight the bull of heaven. The bull dashed and gored, and the city burned. But the fight was long, and the bull grew tired from its wounds. Finally, the wild man leapt over its head and pierced it with his spear.

  They feasted, victorious, but that night the wild man had a dream.

  ‘For killing Humbaba,’ the gods said in his dream, ‘for killing the bull of heaven, one of these two must die.’

  And the wild man woke in the morning, knowing that he had been chosen.

  ‘The story’s getting sad,’ Aurya said, half asleep against her brother’s warmth. She felt him nod above her, and then he swallowed.

  ‘There’s an important part coming up,’ he said. ‘It might answer your questions. But I don’t know if you’ll want to hear it. I can start telling you a different story if you want.’

  There was something strange in his voice, but Aurya was drifting halfway between dreams and the real world. She didn’t have the energy to question it.

  ‘No,’ she murmured. ‘I want to hear how it ends.’

  When she fell asleep, she dreamed that she was trying to carve her mother out of stone, but her hands were too clumsy. Every time she tried to chip out a detail from her memory, the stone broke away in an ugly splinter. Before long, the whole piece was ruined and it looked nothing like her mother at all.

  Katya

  The next day, Salim didn’t come down into the basement. He consumed himself with dark muttering, making frantic notes on a scrap of paper pulled from a library book. Katya headed down into the dim-lit storeroom alone, and went on gathering the artefacts into crates. She apologised to each object as she went.

  ‘I’m sorry, Sumerian grinding stone. I’m sorry, Assyrian student’s tablet. I’m sorry, spun-glass bead. I’m sorry, figurine of Gilgamesh.’

  The little clay statue looked up at her with its wide pearly eyes. She felt its weight, the cool, dry surface, the patina of dust. What was wrong with Salim? She looked for him later, but he had locked himself in one of the maintenance cupboards. She could hear him praying inside. She put the tips of her fingers on the door, and felt his despair emanating through the wood.

  ‘Don’t leave me alone,’ she whispered to him through the door. ‘Salim, please don’t leave me alone here.’

  Katya went to find Lola instead. They played dominoes sitting on swivel chairs in her room.

  ‘Are you okay, Lola?’

  The girl nodded.

  ‘I hate dominoes.’

  When they got bored with the game, they rolled out into the hall on the swivel chairs and raced through the exhibits to the trundle of the little wheels. Lola shrieked with laughter while Katya chased her, and for a few minutes they both forgot where they were.

  Later, Katya found Salim pacing up and down in the lion hunt room, muttering to himself. His face was unshaven and his eyes were bloodshot.

  ‘Salim? Are you okay?’ He looked at her and his eyes widened. He grabbed her by the sleeve and gave a wide grin.

  ‘Katya,’ he said. ‘I think I’ve got it.’

  ‘Got what?’

  ‘I think I know how we can get out of here.’

  ‘You do?’

  He nodded and put a finger to his lips. He took her by the sleeve and led her down to the ground floor, into the gloomy staff area and through the utility rooms where the boilers and air-conditioning units sat silent without power. It was dark down here: little desert mice scuttled into their holes as Salim flashed his torch in their direction.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Shh, come on.’

  Salim opened the door to the parking garage, careful not to make a sound. It was empty but for the hulk of the old van standing on blocks in a pool of rust-orange water. Katya remembered sitting there and playing dominoes with him only months before, ghosts from another life. Salim motioned at the corrugated-iron entrance door, and put his finger to his lips.

  ‘There’s a guard just on the other side of that,’ he whispered. ‘They’ve locked it with two padlocks on the outside. I saw that from the roof.’

  He beckoned and crept across the concrete floor to the van. As she followed him, she saw that the bonnet had been wrenched open, and a tarpaulin on the ground had engine pieces laid out on top of it. Four tyres leaned against the wall. Katya felt a bottomless despair begin to rise through her body.

  ‘I found the tyres in the maintenance room yesterday,’ Salim said, his voice just a murmur. ‘Someone was using them to prop up a desk. They’re old, a bit rat-chewed, but they’ll still work. I spent all of yesterday looking the whole thing over.’

  ‘But … Salim, look at it …’ Katya began, and he put an urgent finger to his lips, pointing to the steel door. Outside, the crunch of footsteps on gravel. Katya lowered her voice. ‘Salim, look at it. It’s a heap of junk. And even if we get it going, we’d still have to get out of the city.’

  ‘It’s not as broken-down as it looks. It needs a
new fan belt, some petrol, new spark plugs. And we could make it, I think. I know the city roads. Half these guys are foreigners – Tunisians, Saudis, Egyptians – and most of the rest are country boys. I’ve known this city all my life. They’d never catch us. And I think I can get a good fake travel permit like they’ve been handing out to their drivers, in case we hit a checkpoint.’

  ‘Salim …’

  He put out his hand and touched hers.

  ‘My nephew Athir. You remember him? He works in auto repair. I can get a message out to him, and he can get us the parts we need. Then we just find a way for him to smuggle them in here.’

  ‘Smuggle them in? Salim, you’ve seen the guards. The locks on the door, the men patrolling in the streets. Athir’s just a boy. How can he smuggle anything inside here?’

  ‘We’ll find a way. We have to find a way.’

  Katya looked into his wide, wild eyes, and wondered if he had actually lost his mind. What was better? Madness or despair? That night she lay and rubbed her thumb over the cylinder seal where it hung at her neck. She thought about home, and wondered what her dad would say if he could see where she’d ended up.

  ‘Oh, Katya,’ she imagined him saying, as she felt the rough bumps and crevices of the seal. ‘You’ve gone and done it now.’

  When she slept, she dreamed that she was driving a large and powerful car down a hill, with Salim and Lola in the back seats. She dreamed that the brakes had failed, that the car wouldn’t stop, and all three of them were hurtling to their deaths. And who was it sitting next to her in the passenger seat? She couldn’t see their face.

  The next time Abu Ammar came to the museum, it was a hot day, the air full of car horns and the occasional crackle of gunfire. He brought a kebab wrapped in greasy paper, with a flatbread and lettuce.

  ‘It’s for you,’ he said, and placed it down on the table in front of Katya. The smell filled the basement storeroom, and she felt her traitorous mouth flood with saliva. She wanted to leap at it and stuff the food in her mouth, but she forced herself not to react.