‘Abil … Abil, I want to leave the city.’
He opened one eye and looked at her, breathed out through his nose. He put one hand on her cheek, and his fingers were clumsy with sleep.
‘What? Aurya, why?’
‘I had a dream. It made me so afraid. And I think something terrible is going to happen here.’
Abil closed his eyes again.
‘Nineveh is the safest place in the world,’ he murmured. ‘You’ve seen the walls, haven’t you? Nothing can touch us here. It’s safer than the hills or the Sealands.’
‘I know, but …’
‘And you love the library, don’t you? Whatever happens out there in the world, we’ll always be safe there.’
Aurya bit her lip. He was right: she couldn’t imagine leaving the library, her sanctuary. She pressed her mouth against the palm of Abil’s hand, which was warm and still smelled of clay.
‘I know. I do. But Abil … I can just feel it. Something terrible is coming this way.’
Katya
The air in the museum baked. With the frequent power cuts and no generator, the refrigerators in the staff kitchen had cut out. Flies swarmed around the remaining food, and soon the exhibit hall was full of them. At night, the sounds of their journeys from room to room stopped Katya from sleeping. She would wake up feeling their legs tickling her face, her lips. So she slept with her coat over her head, and dreamed of the execution in the park, the look in Abu Ammar’s eyes as he’d approached the men with his knife. She dreaded seeing him again, knowing what he’d done.
In the morning, she woke up beside Salim, and they lay in each other’s arms for some time. When he spoke, he kept his eyes closed, and his voice cracked.
‘I wish I’d met you in some other place,’ he said. ‘Or some other time. I wish we’d met like a normal couple.’
‘I don’t know. I’ve had worse first dates.’
‘Yes, me too.’
‘Where would you take me?’ she asked. ‘Please no museums.’
‘Maybe dancing. Do you like dancing?’
‘Not really.’
‘I could teach you. I know a good place in New York.’
She laughed, but a sob sneaked up on her. It was painful to think of that other couple, that other Katya and Salim, taking walks through a city at peace, drinking in bars, eating meals in low-lit restaurants. She gripped his shoulder and pressed her face into his chest, breathing raggedly.
‘We have to get out of here,’ she muttered. ‘Salim, we have to get out of here. We have to tell them about the carving.’
Salim’s jaw clenched.
‘We can’t.’
‘Salim. They won’t let us go out to dig if we can’t show them something.’
‘Katya …’
‘And you still need more parts for the van?’
He combed a hand through his beard, which had grown thick, and let out a long breath.
‘We need new spark plugs. And Athir’s got the permit to travel. A good fake, he says; should get us past the checkpoints if we really can’t avoid them.’
‘That’s all we need?’
‘Yes. Just one more dig, and we’d have it.’
‘Salim,’ she said, and ran her finger along the line of his cheekbone, joining up three freckles in a triangle, feeling the fragile lines of his skull. ‘I didn’t tell you this before. But we’ve nearly run out of things on his list. This is the last box we’ve got to give them. And then what’s going to happen to us? We could end up in the park, like those people. Or in Syria. Or worse.’
He swallowed.
‘We’d be trading one of the greatest finds in history. To criminals. And it’s all just for a shot at escaping that doesn’t even have half a chance of success. I still don’t even know if the van will start. We’d still have to overpower the guards on the door, unlock the garage. And then we’d be driving it through a city controlled by murderers. The whole thing is madness, and if it doesn’t work, we’d have given that lion away for nothing.’
‘I know.’ He held her gaze.
‘They’ll destroy it, you know.’
‘Yes.’
‘One way or another. They’ll break it up to sell in parts. Or when they find out it’s too big to transport, they’ll just smash it out of spite. They want to erase the past.’
‘I know.’
‘And we’ve not even begun to understand what it represents. That lion: the mystery of it, the story behind how it got there. It could transform what we know about that world, about our own history.’
Katya nodded, feeling her heart heavy as a stone.
‘Yes. But would you die for that?’
Salim shrugged morosely.
‘Dr Malik did.’
‘Would you make Lola die for it?’
They got up and washed, finding comfort in all the old rituals. Salim held Katya’s hair while she poured the water through it, and she felt his fingers on the back of her neck. Then they all sat and ate chickpeas for breakfast. Lola looked glum, sensing the tension between them. Katya could tell that the same conversation was playing over and over in both of their heads as they sat there in silence. When they were done, they drank the sweet earthy juice from the tins too.
One of the ways Katya passed the time was helping Lola with her English, and teaching her what she could about archaeology. Since most of the books in the museum library had been destroyed, they had only two sources of material for their conversations: Katya’s copy of Gilgamesh, and the plaques and information signage of the museum. They walked around and Lola read out the descriptions of the missing objects taken by the men, or those wrapped up in their plastic coverings.
‘Statue of the Kings of Hatra,’ Lola would read, and Katya would look up at the empty pedestal and nod.
‘Very good.’
They wandered together through the halls where the carvings of the Assyrian wars still hung, too large for the men to have moved. Then they entered the room of the lion hunts and stood there for some time looking at the dying lions, the arrows sticking from their backs, the depths of their eyes. Then Lola pointed to one of the signs.
‘What does this say?’ she asked.
‘That’s a letter written by King Ashurbanipal in his old age. Can you read it?’
Lola squinted.
‘“I cannot do away with the strife in my country and the dissensions in my family,”’ Lola read, her voice halting. ‘“Illness of mind and flesh bow me down; with cries of woe …”’
‘Sadness,’ Katya said when Lola looked at her.
‘“With cries of woe, I bring my days to an end. On the day of the city god, the day of the festival, I am wretched; death is seizing hold upon me, and bears me down …”’
‘Very good,’ Katya whispered. They both gazed at the stricken lions together. Katya cast her eyes over the King’s commanding stare as he stretched his bow, his eyes blank and without feeling.
‘The people who are lived here,’ Lola said eventually. ‘Where did they go?’
‘The people who lived here,’ Katya corrected.
‘Yes. Where did they go?’
‘The Assyrians? They were destroyed. They started many wars. They were cruel. They thought they were invincible.’
‘Invincible?’
‘They thought they could never be beaten, that their empire would last for ever. But after King Ashurbanipal died, the whole empire began to collapse. It happened so fast. One day they were the greatest power in the world, making carvings like this, making art and music and war. Then, about thirty years after this stone was carved, all their enemies joined together. They defeated the Assyrians in battle and marched through their lands, burning their cities, emptying them and burying them in the sands. And finally they burned Nineveh too. Hundreds of years later, when the Greek writer Xenophon travelled through this area, he saw the great ruins in the desert and he was amazed by them. They were larger than anything he’d ever seen in Greece, but no one who lived there even remem
bered who had built them. These towering walls.’
Lola let out a long sigh, and looked up at the lions.
‘Enough learning today,’ she said. ‘Can you read to me now?’
They went upstairs and sat on their mattresses; Katya got out her Gilgamesh book, battered and softened to the texture of felt with use. Salim sat in the doorway with his back against the frame, his hands making the motion of smoking cigarettes, though he didn’t have any left. Katya watched them both, Salim and Lola, the quivers manifesting in different parts of their bodies: hands, eyelids, lips. She opened the book and read to them.
When the wild man Enkidu died, King Gilgamesh went mad with grief. He would not let the priests bury him, until worms fell from his nose. He wandered the wastes dressed in a lion skin.
‘I want never to enter the house of dust,’ he shrieked. ‘I want to bring my friend back from that dark place. I will go to the dead land and find the secret to eternal life.’
He walked through a world that had lost all joy.
The trees were grey and like the hands of the dead.
The sky was grey and like a washed robe.
The earth was grey and like the ash of a fire.
The King approached the gateway to the dead land. He entered the mountain gate, and dark fell around him.
Katya stopped reading when Salim began to snore, his head rocking low on his neck. Lola was asleep too, lying on her back. Katya leant over and kissed the girl on the forehead, careful not to wake her.
She knew it was a bad idea, but she went up to the roof anyway. The usual jets were circling overhead, the sound of them like a heavy ball of marble rolling on a stone floor, dropping their bombs with a flash and rumble in the city outskirts. It was strange, how some sights became normal, the more you saw them.
She went to the balustrade and looked over into the park. Even though she knew she would see it, she still wasn’t ready for the brown stains on the path, the grass trodden by the crowds. On the spiked railings along the park boundary, three dark objects were speared in a row. As she peered at them, the shapes rearranged themselves in the gloom, until she saw what they were. The hair on the heads was matted with blood, mouths gaping. She stifled a sob, covered her mouth with her hand and hid behind the balustrade, pressing her back into the stone.
When Abu Ammar came to collect the last box of artefacts, Katya tried to see if anything had changed in him. He was tired: his skin was grey and there were dark marks beneath his eyes, his hair unwashed. Katya couldn’t believe it, to look at him. He still looked so young.
‘How are you?’ she said. He just waved his hand.
‘My path is filled with hurdles and thorns.’
He walked close behind her as they took the stairs down to the storeroom, heavy footfalls. The power was out, and he used the light on his phone to send light branching through the shelves. He’d brought her another kebab, something that seemed to be part of their relationship now. She noticed again that the lemon’s flesh had been eaten. She never acknowledged the food in any way, and never ate until he’d left. Abu Ammar flashed his torch over her face, making her blind for a moment.
‘These are the last objects on your list,’ she said. She picked up the crate of artefacts and handed them to him. ‘What’s going to happen to us now?’
‘I’ve told you about asking questions.’ His voice sounded more like a mumble today. ‘Hurry up. I’ve got places to be. People counting on me.’
‘Abu Ammar. What’s going to happen to us?’
He turned away from her for a moment, and she heard the popping of those pills from the pack. He swallowed some with a grimace.
‘“And your Lord is the Forgiving, full of mercy,”’ he said. ‘“Rather, for them is an appointment from which they will find no escape.”’
‘What does that mean?’ she said, hearing the fear in her own voice. ‘Abu Ammar, stop speaking in riddles for a moment and tell me.’
‘“I will not cease travelling until I reach the junction of the two seas …”’
‘I saw you in the park,’ she said. He cut off his recital, and she saw his eyes flash towards her in the gloom. She regretted saying it instantly. Her throat closed as he looked at her, and – did she imagine it? – his eyes glanced at her neck.
‘Did you?’ Strange emotions passed over his face for an instant. Then it hardened. ‘Good.’
‘What did those people do?’
Abu Ammar tested the weight of the crate in his hands. She heard the wistfulness of the drug enter his voice.
‘Does it matter?’
‘I guess not.’
Katya looked at him, his features sharp in the light from his phone. She wondered where he’d gone to school, the first girl he’d fallen in love with, what his favourite flavour of crisps were. She knew the drug’s effect wouldn’t last long.
‘Abu Ammar, I have something to tell you.’
He looked hard at her for a moment.
‘What?’
‘There’s something buried out there, on the hill beneath the mosque you blew up the other day. Something very valuable.’
‘Another piece of pot?’ he snorted. ‘You can keep it.’
‘No. It’s much more valuable than that. Priceless, even.’
‘How priceless?’
‘You know those lion carvings they have upstairs? The plaster copies?’
‘Yeah. The real ones are in London.’
‘Not all of them. We don’t know why, but at least one panel was left out of the final display. It’s in the ground at the base of the mosque. And if you want, we can show you where it is.’
Abu Ammar stared at her, and something in his lip quivered. Then he lunged forwards and grabbed her by the throat, knocking the air out of her. Katya stifled a cry.
‘“Grave is the word that comes from their mouths,”’ he snarled, ‘“they speak not except a lie!”’
The phone light in his other hand sent a frenzy of lines and shadows darting through the shelves, but his face was in darkness. Katya’s back pressed painfully against one of the shelves.
‘Please …’ she managed.
‘What else have you been hiding from me?’ he hissed.
‘Nothing! I promise.’
Katya felt the shelf teetering behind her, about to fall, the clattering of objects as they tipped over and rolled to the floor around them.
‘Every day I’m trying to help you,’ Abu Ammar hissed. ‘Every day I tell the others you’re worth keeping around. And you repay me with lies.’
Katya tried to speak, but he closed his hand tighter. She felt her head swim. The objects on the shelf behind her knocked together as he held her against it, and she realised with a rush that he was pressing her against the shelf where the clay tablets were stored. The shelf where they’d hidden the knife. Her free hand felt behind her, over the cobwebs and dust, the dry edges of the tablets. Her fingers stretched out, and brushed the plastic handle. Abu Ammar’s torch lit up the veins in his throat and the blood vessels in his cheeks showing pink and orange through his skin, his lips pulled back from his teeth. His breath smelled like lemons. Katya took a deep breath and gripped the knife.
Then he let her go, all at once, and Katya sobbed in fear and gasped for air. She let the knife fall back down to the shelf. She’d been so close – and what would have happened then? Abu Ammar stepped back and rubbed his eyes, making the torchlight bounce. Then the power came on, and lights flickered on all around them. They both blinked. It seemed like a different world, and his face flushed with a surprising expression, something like embarrassment.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and rubbed his eyes as though just waking. ‘When people lie to me … it sets me off, you know? It brings back all the people who’ve lied to me in the past.’
‘It’s okay,’ she croaked, massaging her throat.
‘You don’t seem like the others,’ Abu Ammar said. He reached out and with his index finger brushed Katya’s hair out of her face and
behind her ear. ‘You could have a good life here you know.’ He didn’t meet her eye, but Katya stared at him. Don’t react, she told herself. Don’t react in any way.
‘They’re giving me a house round here,’ he went on, and rubbed his nose. ‘A big house, on Nineveh Street. Couple of servants. Luxury, you know? You could live there. If you want.’
Abu Ammar glanced down at the kebab, where he’d left it on the nearby desk. The smell of it was thick in the air.
‘I …’ she tried, but no more sound came out.
‘Just think about it,’ he said, still not meeting her eye. He picked up the crate of objects, and they rattled. ‘I’ll tell the boss about the thing you’ve found. If he thinks it’s worth it, we can go out digging in the next couple of days. Stay ready.’
‘Sure,’ Katya breathed, the terror of a hunted animal coursing through every corner of her body.
‘I hope you’re not lying to me, though,’ he said, his voice sing-song and strange. ‘Oh, Katya, I really hope you’re not.’
That was the first time he’d ever said her name. When he was gone, Katya put her hands on her face, and stretched the skin over her bones, pulling it away from her eyes. She stared down at the kebab sitting on the table.
‘Shit,’ she said out loud, and then the lights blinked out again with a fizz, plunging her into a darkness that seemed ancient somehow, the untouched darkness of a cave many miles below the earth.
‘Fucking fucking shit.’
All Our Broken Idols Page 28
