‘Thanks.’ She didn’t know what else to say. Befriend your captors. ‘We have some of those artefacts for you.’
Abu Ammar nodded, and rifled through the crate of objects.
‘Great, great.’
His hands lingered over a plaster cast of the goddess Ishtar. He had long fingers, which drummed on the goddess’s waist. When he caught Katya watching him, he pulled his hand away.
‘Is Abu Ammar your real name?’ she asked quietly. ‘Or did you make it up?’
A flash of anger.
‘All names are made up. Your name is made up too.’
‘That’s true.’
‘It’s a kunya. They gave it to me when I came to fight.’
She looked around and tried to think of something else to say to him. She was desperate for some kind of news from outside, so she tried to probe.
‘It sounds very dangerous out in the city at the moment.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Nothing. Just, it must be nice to be down here, instead of having to fight out there.’
She realised immediately that this was the wrong thing to say. Abu Ammar took a step towards her.
‘I’ve killed men before,’ he said. ‘Do you think I’m too young?’
‘I didn’t mean that.’ She took a step back. His pupils were large and black again, the implacable eyes of a cat. She eyed the knife sheathed in his belt.
‘“The plants of the earth grow, then turn to hay and blow away in the wind.”’ He ground his teeth for a moment, then relented a little and rubbed his eyes. ‘They need me down here. I know the value of these things. I learned at university. From my life before. And we need money to keep up the fight.’
Katya thought about what Salim had said: was this man really as dangerous as he seemed? They were nearly halfway through Abu Ammar’s list of objects. And what happened to them when they were finished? She needed to buy time.
‘If you ask me,’ Katya said, ‘the real finds are still out there.’
‘Out there?’
‘Out in the ruins. Before you came here, we found valuable things every day, in the ruins of Nineveh. If you let us, we could try and find more. We know it better than anyone.’
She was overselling it, she thought, but Abu Ammar was listening.
‘We can’t let you out,’ he said. ‘We’d have to send guards with you, and we need the fighters. The imperialists are closing in again.’
She nodded, shrugged as if it didn’t mean much to her.
‘Sure, I get it. It’s too risky.’ She didn’t glance up, but she felt that phrase working on him. Silence stretched between them, and Katya felt her mouth watering at the smell still rising off the kebab. She held the silence as long as she dared. ‘What’s that poetry you keep quoting?’ she said finally. ‘It’s beautiful.’
Abu Ammar’s nostrils flared.
‘It’s not poetry. It’s the surah of the Cave.’
‘Oh.’
‘From the Quran. It’s about two men who go to sleep in a cave on a hill.’ He sniffed. ‘And when they wake up, three hundred years have passed. All their families have died. They go back to their city, and no one recognises the coins they carry.’
‘That’s sad.’
He shrugged.
‘Sometimes I wish that would happen to me. Just lie down and sleep for centuries.’
He laughed, his eyes challenging Katya to laugh with him. She didn’t.
‘Maybe things would be more peaceful then,’ Katya tested. Abu Ammar shook his head.
‘When the dajjal – when the Antichrist returns, only those who know that surah by heart will be saved. I read it every day. I know every line.’
Katya avoided his eyes. Outside, the crackle of gunfire sounded.
‘Well, here are your pieces anyway,’ she said, gesturing to the blue plastic crate. ‘They’ve been sleeping for thousands of years, just like those men in the cave.’
He watched her, and she sensed a tension in the way he held himself. Did he feel he had to prove himself? Whatever it was, it faded quickly. He bent and heaved the crate up, puffing out his cheeks.
‘Lift with your legs,’ she told him. ‘You don’t want to hurt your back.’
His footsteps clicked on the stairs, and she stood there running her thumb over her cylinder seal necklace. When she was sure he was gone, Katya felt the silence close around her. Then she fell on the kebab and devoured a third of it, licking the grease from her fingers. It looked like a slice of fresh lemon had been included, but she noticed that someone, perhaps Abu Ammar, had eaten its flesh, leaving only the rind.
She took the rest of the kebab upstairs and gave it to Lola and Salim, who were playing dominoes in the lion hunt room. They both looked up in astonishment.
‘He gave it to me,’ she said. ‘The English one.’
Salim took it suspiciously, smelled it, but then they both ate it hungrily. Lola dangled the shredded lettuce from her fingers and dropped it into her mouth.
‘Why?’
Katya shrugged.
‘It’s like I told you. He’s hard to predict. But some days he seems almost nice.’
Salim shook his head bitterly, and his lip curled.
‘I’d bet you anything he was the one who had us put in that cupboard. That’s how they work. They break you down, then act like they’re the ones looking out for you, protecting you from the others. Good cop, bad cop. They learned it from the American torturers.’
Katya tasted the oils and spices lingering in her mouth and thought about what Abu Ammar had told her about the story of the cave. She thought of the smooth tone of his voice and his slender fingers moving like the legs of spiders across the dry clay objects.
Later in the day, Katya read to Lola and Salim. After the destruction of the library, she only had one book: that old copy of Gilgamesh that Salim had given her when she first arrived in Iraq. She had already read it many times: it was battered and dog-eared. Katya didn’t know how much Lola understood, but she listened with her eyes staring off into the distance. Salim lay on his back with his head on Katya’s knee, and she couldn’t tell if he was asleep or awake.
The nights were broken by nightmares. Worse than anything were the ones where Katya dreamed that she was free, that she was home. More than once, she woke up sweating and chest heaving, and heard someone creeping through the halls, shoes squeaking slightly on the floor. The first few times, she thought this was part of her dream – but the third time, she blinked fully awake and went to her door. Salim was moving around in the dark again.
‘Salim,’ she hissed, not wanting to wake Lola in the office beside hers. ‘What are you doing?’
‘The van,’ he said, half turning to her in the dark. ‘I can’t sleep. So I’m going to keep working on the van.’
She took a deep breath.
‘But Salim, the parts. There’s no way to get them in here.’
He turned back.
‘I can’t sleep. And I can’t get it out of my head.’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Don’t get caught.’
‘I’ll try not to.’
‘Salim. Please don’t get caught.’
He shrunk away into the dark without saying anything more.
Abu Ammar returned at the end of the week, sooner than expected. He looked like he was dressed for war: a camo vest, a black sash wrapped around his head and a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder. He wasn’t wearing his glasses. He looked slightly ridiculous, but he stood proudly in the entrance hall waiting for her, eyeing the statues suspiciously, his pupils the same wide black as before.
‘Have you just come from a battle?’ Katya said, although his clothes were clean and new, and she knew this get-up had some other purpose.
‘Every day is a battle,’ he muttered. She took him down to the storeroom as usual, and they walked along the shelves, the barrel of his AK-47 clicking against its shoulder strap as they went. Abu Ammar was talkative and energetic, unusually curious about
the objects she handed to him.
‘What’s this one?’ he asked, picking up a cylinder seal like the one hung around her neck, but carved from ivory.
‘It’s for printing your mark on a contract.’ She took it from him and rolled it over her hand. ‘They wrote contracts in clay, back then. So you roll this over the surface, and the image comes out. Kind of like your signature.’
The seal left its print in white on her palm. He gave a little snort, making a show of mocking the primitive object, but it didn’t seem totally sincere. She looked at him. Without his glasses, he looked a lot younger than she’d first imagined.
‘How old are you, Abu Ammar?’ She’d meant it to tease him, but she heard it come from her mouth with a softness that surprised her. He flushed at the question, and she thought he wouldn’t answer.
‘Twenty-three.’ He adjusted the rifle strap around his shoulder so the weapon shifted behind him. Great. He was younger than her.
‘How did you end up here?’ He shrugged, about to say something, but then his face hardened.
‘We all follow secret paths.’
She turned back to the shelves, biting a thumbnail. But he reconsidered, puffing up his chest.
‘This is the only good place left now. We’re building a new nation here, free from the colonisers who’ve drained the earth dry, and drained people’s souls too, left them empty. Everywhere else is rotten, all the lands they’ve touched and spoiled. You can smell the rot on the streets.’
‘Oh.’
Katya watched him and felt the skin on the inside of her mouth with her tongue, the painful ulcers growing there. She tried to work out how dangerous this young man was, just by the look of his face. But you can’t tell anything from a face. She picked up a piece of cuneiform detailing an ancient cure for nosebleeds.
‘Want to know what this one is?’
‘No,’ Abu Ammar said. ‘It’s stuff to sell to fat Americans, that’s all. One dying empire amassing the remains of another.’
She nodded and handed him a blue plastic crate full of items, trying to force softness into her voice.
‘Here you go then. Hope it gets you all the money you need.’
He pursed his lips in a kind of half smile and turned to go, using his knee to lift the crate, making everything inside clink and rattle.
‘Oh,’ he shot back at her. ‘I told the boss what you said about digging out in the ruins.’
‘You did?’
‘Yeah. He said you can have a trial. You go out there and dig, and if you find anything worthwhile, you can keep it up. But if you try to escape, or do anything we don’t like, we’ll kill the lot of you. That apostate professor, the snake-worshipper you’re hiding upstairs.’
Katya nodded, her mind racing.
‘Okay. When is this trial?’
‘Tomorrow,’ he said coolly. ‘We start at dawn.’
He disappeared up the stairs, and Katya stayed frozen there for a few seconds. Then the power went out with a clunk somewhere deep in the building, and she was swamped in darkness. She walked upstairs in a daze, and halfway up began to run, taking the stairs three at a time.
‘Salim,’ she said, shaking him awake. ‘Salim, wake up!’
‘What is it?’
‘They’re going to let us outside. They’re going to take us out to the dig site tomorrow morning.’
He blinked.
‘What are you talking about?’ He rubbed sleep from his eyes.
‘Salim, tell me the truth. Could that van really work? Can you fix it?’
‘I don’t know. I think so.’
She looked into his eyes, which held her gaze without wavering.
‘Your nephew. Athir. Salim, this might be crazy. But maybe he doesn’t have to get in here, with the parts.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He could hide things for us. Out there, on the dig site. If he can bury the … the fan belt, all the other parts in the earth. And if we know where to find them …’
‘Shit,’ he said, his eyes awake now, darting back and forth. ‘It could work. It’s so risky. We’ll have to smuggle the things back inside.’
‘We can wrap them in the canvas with the tools. Those guys won’t know the difference.’
Salim poked the inside of his mouth with his tongue so his cheek bulged out.
‘It’s too dangerous. They’ll kill us if they find out …’
‘Salim, these people are fucking crazy. You were right before about that. We have to get out of here.’
He nodded and bit his lip so it turned white.
‘Okay, let’s do it.’ He glanced at his phone, his eyes far-off. ‘I’ll text Athir now. If the signal comes back in the night, he should get it before morning. But where can we tell him to bury the things?’
Katya thought for a moment.
‘What about the olive tree on my site? He could bury it down there, between its roots.’
‘Do we really want to bring them that close?’ Salim said. ‘To the lion carving?’
‘It’s the best landmark I can think of. Your site’s too big – too sprawling. But that tree is pretty hard to miss. Right in the middle of the city, beneath the Nabi Yunus mosque. And while we’re there we can check on the lion carving, see if anyone’s dug it up.’
‘Okay.’ Salim took out his phone, tapped furiously on its buttons. ‘Let’s fucking do it.’
That night, Katya could barely sleep. She drifted off in bursts and dreamt that she was back home: a painful dream. She saw her mother, and their house, their cat, but she realised that she had no right to be there. She didn’t have a passport, or any of the correct papers. Men would come soon and arrest her, send her back to the museum. The panic rose as she felt them drew nearer, as her mother begged her to hide. When they knocked on the door, she woke up.
Aurya
Before Aurya knew it, the month of Shebat came to an end in Nineveh. The swollen river receded from its high banks, leaving watercress stranded in garlands on the muddy banks. Adaar came to the city next with all its religious rites and the noisy crowds outside the shrines, and then the growing warmth of Nisan, and all the while she and Sharo laboured in the workshop, sweeping and clearing rubble, sharpening the metal tools in the wide stone basins, fetching implements and water and jugs of beer for the other apprentices. Each day, a little more of the garden scene carving took shape. Aurya watched in awe as the flat stone in the workshop courtyard transformed into the scene she’d witnessed in the palace: the trees, servants, birds and the King himself sitting in the centre and raising his cup, the head hanging upside down from the tree branch.
Throughout this time, Sharo visited his lion whenever he could, usually once or twice a week. He always came back with stories about how well the lion was doing, how strong its injured back paw had grown, how it had found a place in the mysterious ranking of the pride. It was one of these days, when Sharo was away from the workshop, that the servant Bel-Ibni came to inspect progress on the garden scene carvings. He brought Abil with him. When Aurya saw the boy, she realised how lonely she’d been.
Aurya was glad Sharo wasn’t there. This was the first time the palace would inspect the carvings since his contribution, and if his memory of the chair and table were anything but perfect, she hoped he would stay as far away as possible. While the apprentices watched in fear, and the master mason chewed on the hem of his cap, Bel-Ibni strode up and down the rows of white stone, his robe a deep blue, and tied with mother-of-pearl beads. He peered closely at the intricate designs. The master mason was white even beneath his patina of dust. While everyone’s attention was fixed on the King’s servant, Aurya edged around the crowd until she stood beside Abil. He nodded to her.
‘How are you, river girl?’ he whispered.
‘Oh, I’m …’ she sagged. ‘I hate it here. They’re trying to teach us to carve stone. My brother’s so good at it. I can’t do it at all.’
Abil nodded.
‘I could never be a craftsman. T
hat’s why I’m going to train in the tablet house.’
‘The tablet house?’
‘Yes, it’s next to the library. It’s where young scribes go to train. They learn to read and write in all the different languages. There are so many books there. When I’m older, I want to read every book in the world, like the King has.’
Aurya nodded, imagining all the stories there might be, locked up in those scribbling letters, all the different worlds and foreign lands.
‘I’d love to learn to read,’ she said.
‘You could,’ Abil said. ‘If you don’t like it here, you could come to the tablet house and learn to read and write with me.’
‘With you?’
He went red.
‘With everyone.’
She looked at Abil, at his pretty eyes and slender wrists. Even as she thought it, she knew it was impossible.
‘I can’t leave Sharo. He’s so helpless on his own.’
Abil nodded.
‘I understand. If I still had my family, I’d never leave them for the world.’
‘What happened to them?’
‘They were Babylonian. They were captured in the war. The Assyrians marched them into the desert, hundreds of them, and left them to die.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Me too.’
They were silent after that. Aurya thought of the desert sun, the heat and the crowing of circling birds. She noticed with a rush of fear that Bel-Ibni was peering down his thin nose at the table and chair in the garden arrangement, the part that Sharo had drawn from memory. He was running his tongue over the front of his teeth. The mason was practically dancing from foot to foot.
‘Who did this part of the carving?’ Bel-Ibni asked, his voice hard and clear.
‘The apprentices Harkhuf and Kibri-Dagan. But the sketching was done by the little river boy, my lord.’
Bel-Ibni nodded slowly.
‘It looks good,’ he mused. ‘A promising start. How long will it take?’
All the breath seemed to leave the master’s body at once, like a skin being deflated.
‘Several more weeks, my lord.’
‘No more delays,’ Bel-Ibni said, and then looked down at his chest. ‘Curses of Shamash, I’ve lost a bead … did anyone see it?’
All Our Broken Idols Page 22
