Come, Tell Me How You Live

by Agatha Christie Mallowan

  Women, children, hens, cats, dogs – all weeping, wailing, screaming, shouting, abusing, praying, laughing, miaowing, clucking and barking – depart slowly from the courtyard like some fantastic finale in an opera!

  Everybody, we gather, has double-crossed everybody else! The financial chaos is complete, and the angry passions aroused between brothers, sisters, sisters-in-law, cousins and great-grandparents are far too intricate for comprehension.

  In the midst of chaos, however, our cook (a new cook, Dimitri by name) continues calmly to prepare an evening meal. We set to and eat with relish, and after that we retire to bed worn out.

  To bed – but not to rest! I have never been one with an exaggerated distaste for mice. An odd mouse or so in a bedroom has left me unmoved, and I have even on one occasion had quite an affection for a persistent intruder named affectionately (though without any real knowledge as to sex) Elsie.

  But our first night at Amuda is an experience I shall never forget.

  No sooner have the lamps been extinguished than mice in their scores – I really believe in their hundreds – emerge from the holes in the walls and the floor. They run gaily over our beds, squeaking as they run. Mice across one’s face, mice tweaking your hair – mice! mice! MICE!…

  I switch on a torch. Horrible! The walls are covered with strange, pale, crawling cockroach-like creatures! A mouse is sitting on the foot of my bed attending to his whiskers!

  Horrible crawling things are everywhere!

  Max utters soothing words.

  Just go to sleep, he says. Once you are asleep, none of these things will worry you.

  Excellent advice, but not easy to act upon! One has first to get to sleep, and with mice taking healthy exercise and having their field sports all over you, that is hardly possible. Or it is not possible for me. Max seems able to do it all right!

  I endeavour to subdue the shrinkings of the flesh. I do fall asleep for a short spell, but little feet running across my face wake me up. I flash on the light. The cockroaches have increased, and a large black spider is descending upon me from the ceiling!

  So the night goes on, and I am ashamed to say that at two a.m. I become hysterical. When morning comes, I declare, I am going into Kamichlie to wait for the train, and I am going straight back to Alep! And from Alep I shall go straight back to England! I cannot stand this life! I will not stand it! I am going home!

  In a masterly fashion Max deals with the situation. He rises, opens the door, calls to Hamoudi.

  Five minutes later our beds have been dragged out into the courtyard. For a short while I lie gazing up at the peaceful starlit sky above. The air is cool and sweet. I fall asleep. Max, I rather fancy, breathes a sigh of relief before falling asleep himself.

  You aren’t really going back to Alep? Max inquires anxiously the next morning.

  I blush a little over the remembrance of my hysterical outburst. No, I say; I wouldn’t really go for the world. But I am going to continue to sleep in the courtyard!

  Hamoudi explains soothingly that all will soon be well. The holes in the bedroom are being stopped up with plaster. More whitewash will be applied. Moreover, a cat is coming; it has been loaned out. It is a super-cat – a highly professional cat.

  What sort of night, I ask Mac, did he have when he and Hamoudi arrived? Did things run over him all the time?

  ‘I think so,’ said Mac, calm as always. ‘But I was asleep.’

  Wonderful Mac!

  Our cat arrives at dinner-time. I shall never forget that cat! It is, as Hamoudi has announced, a highly professional cat. It knows the job for which it has been engaged, and proceeds to get on with it in a truly specialized manner.

  Whilst we dine, it crouches in ambush behind a packing-case. When we talk, or move, or make too much noise, it gives us an impatient look.

  ‘I must request of you,’ the look says, ‘to be quiet. How can I get on with the job without co-operation?’

  So fierce is the cat’s expression that we obey at once, speak in whispers, and eat with as little clinking of plates and glasses as possible.

  Five times during the meal a mouse emerges and runs across the floor, and five times our cat springs. The sequel is immediate. There is no Western dallying, no playing with the victim. The cat simply bites off the mouse’s head, crunches it up, and proceeds to the rest of the body! It is rather horrible and completely businesslike.

  The cat stays with us five days. After those five days no mice appear. The cat then leaves us, and the mice never come back. I have never known before or since such a professional cat. It had no interest in us, it never demanded milk or a share of our food. It was cold, scientific and impersonal. A very accomplished cat!

  Now we are settled in. The walls have been whitewashed, the window-sills and door painted, a carpenter and his four sons have established themselves in the courtyard, and are making our furniture to order.

  ‘Tables,’ says Max, ‘above all, tables! One cannot have too many tables.’

  I put in a plea for a chest of drawers, and Max kindly allows me a wardrobe with pegs.

  Then the carpenters return to making more tables – tables on which to spread our pottery, a drawing-table for Mac, a table off which to dine, a table for my typewriter…

  Mac draws out a towel-horse and the carpenters start upon it. The old man brings it proudly to my room on completion. It looks different from Mac’s drawing, and when the carpenter sets it down I see why. It has colossal feet, great curved scrolls of feet. They stick out so that, wherever you put it, you invariably trip over them.

  Ask him, I say to Max, why he has made these feet instead of sticking to the design he was given?

  The old man looks at us with dignity.

  ‘I made them this way,’ he says, ‘so that they should be beautiful. I wanted this that I have made to be a thing of beauty!’

  To this cry of the artist there could be no response. I bow my head, and resign myself to tripping up over those hideous feet for the rest of the season!

  Outside, in the far corner of the courtyard, some masons are making me a mud-brick lavatory.

  I ask Mac that evening at dinner what his first architectural job has been.

  ‘This is my first bit of practical work,’ he replies – ‘your lavatory!’

  He sighs gloomily, and I feel very sympathetic. It will not, I fear, look well in Mac’s memoirs when he comes to write them.

  The budding dreams of a young architect should not find their first expression in a mud-brick lavatory for his patron’s wife!

  Today the Capitaine Le Boiteux and two French nuns come to tea. We greet them in the village and bring them back to the house. Set proudly before the front door is the carpenter’s latest achievement – my lavatory seat!

  The house is now organized. The room where we first slept, and which is still cockroach-ridden at night, is the drawing-office. Here Mac can work in solitude, free from human contacts. He is, in any case, quite unmoved by cockroaches!

  Next to it is the dining-room. Farther along is the antika-room, where our finds will be stored, where pottery will be mended, and objects sorted and classified and labelled. (It is full of tables!) Then there is a small office-cum-sitting-room, where my typewriter reposes, and where the deck-chairs are set up. In what was the Priest’s house are three bedrooms – free from mice (thanks to our cat), free from cockroaches (thanks to the plentiful whitewash?), unfortunately not free from fleas!

  We are to suffer a good deal from fleas. The flea has abundant vitality, and seems to have a miraculously protected life. It thrives on Keatings and Flit, and every kind of flea-killer. Anointing beds with carbolic merely stimulates fleas to even greater displays of athletics. It is not, I explain to Mac, so much the bites of fleas. It is their tireless energy, their never-ending hopping races round and round one’s middle, that wears one out. Impossible to drop off to sleep when fleas are holding the nightly sports round and round the waist.

  Max suffers from fleas wo
rse than I do. One day I find and kill one hundred and seven in the band of his pyjamas! He finds fleas, he says, enervating. It would appear that I only get the overflow of fleas – the ones, that is, which have not been able to take up their abode on Max. Mine are second-class, inferior fleas, ineligible for the high jumps!

  Mac, it seems, has no fleas. This seems very unfair. They apparently do not fancy him as a sports ground!

  Life now settles down on its accustomed round. Max departs at dawn every morning to the mound. Most days I go with him, though occasionally I stay at home to deal with other things – e.g. mending of the pottery and objects, labelling, and sometimes to ply my own trade on the typewriter. Mac also stays at home two days a week, busy in the drawing-office.

  It is a long day on the mound if I go, but not too long if the weather is good. It is cold until the sun is well up, but later it is very lovely. Flowers are springing up everywhere, mostly the little red anemones, as I incorrectly call them (ranunculus is, I believe, the real term).

  A nucleus of workers have been brought by Max from Jerablus, Hamoudi’s home town. Hamoudi’s two sons, after finishing working at Ur for the season, have come to us. Yahya, the elder, is tall, with a wide, cheerful grin. He is like a friendly dog. Alawi, the younger, is good-looking, and probably the more intelligent of the two. But he has a quick temper, and quarrels sometimes flare up. An elderly cousin, Abd es Salaam, is also a foreman. Hamoudi, after starting us off, is to return home.

  Once the work has been started on by the strangers from Jerablus, workmen from the spot hasten to be enrolled. The men of the Sheikh’s village have already begun work. Now men from neighbouring villages begin to arrive by ones and twos. There are Kurds, men from over the Turkish border, some Armenians, and a few Yezidis (so-called devil-worshippers) – gentle, melancholy-looking men, prone to be victimized by the others.

  The system is a simple one. The men are organized into gangs. Men with any previous experience of digging, and men who seem intelligent and quick to learn, are chosen as pickmen. Men, boys and children are paid the same wage. Over and above that there is (dear to the Eastern heart) bakshish. That is to say, a small cash payment on each object found.

  The pickman of each gang has the best chance of finding objects. When his square of ground has been traced out to him, he starts upon it with a pick. After him comes the spademan. With his spade he shovels the earth into baskets, which three or four ‘basket-boys’ then carry away to a spot appointed as dump. As they turn the earth out, they sort through it for any likely object missed by the Qasmagi and the spademan, and since they are often little boys with sharp eyes, not infrequently some small amulet or bead gives them a good reward. Their finds they tie up in a corner of their ragged draperies to be produced at the end of the day. Occasionally they appeal to Max with an object, and upon his reply, ‘…keep it’, or ‘Shiluh, remove it’, its fate is decided. This applies to small objects – amulets, fragments of pottery, beads, etc. When a group of pots in position, or the bones of a burial or traces of mud-brick walls are found, then the foreman in charge calls for Max, and things proceed with due care. Max or Mac scrape carefully round the group of pots – or the dagger, or whatever the find is – with a knife, clearing the earth away, blowing away loose dust. Then the find is photographed before being removed, and roughly drawn in a notebook.

  The tracing out of buildings when they appear is also a delicate business needing the specialist. The foreman usually takes the pick himself and follows the mud-brick carefully, but an intelligent, though hitherto inexperienced, pickman soon picks up the art of tracing mud-brick, and before long you will hear him say confidently during his digging: ‘Hadha libn’ (This is mud-brick).

  Our Armenian workmen are, on the whole, the most intelligent. Their disadvantage is their provocative attitude – they always manage to inflame the tempers of the Kurds and Arabs. Quarrelling is, in any case, almost continuous. All our workmen have hot tempers, and all carry with them the means of expressing themselves – large knives, bludgeons, and a kind of mace or knobkerry! Heads are cut open, and furious figures are entangled with each other in fierce struggles and torn asunder, whilst Max loudly proclaims the rules of the dig. For all who fight there will be a fine! ‘Settle your quarrels in the hours outside the work. On the work there is to be no fighting. On the work I am your father, and what your father says must be done! Nor will I listen to causes of the dispute, or otherwise I should do nothing else! It takes two to fight and all who fight will be fined equally.’

  The men listen, nod their heads. ‘It is true. He is our father! There must be no fighting, or something of value and good price might be destroyed.’

  Fights, however, still break out. For persistent fighting a man is sacked.

  This, I may say, doesn’t mean permanent dismissal. A man is sometimes sacked for one day, two days; and, even when dismissed altogether, usually reappears after next pay-day with a demand to be taken on for the next shift.

  Pay-day is fixed, after some experiment, after a period of about ten days. Some of the men come from fairly distant villages, bringing their food with them. This (a sack of flour and a few onions) is usually exhausted in ten days, and the man then asks to go home, since his food is ended. One of the great disadvantages, we find, is that the men do not work regularly. As soon as they are paid they quit work. ‘I have money now. Why should I continue to work? I will go home.’ In about a fortnight, the money spent, the man returns and asks to be taken on again. It is annoying from our point of view, as a gang that has got used to working together is far more efficient than a new combination.

  The French have their own way of dealing with this habit, which caused them great difficulty when work was in progress on the railway. They used to keep their workmen permanently half-pay in arrear. This ensured their working continuously. The Lieutenant advised Max to adopt this system, but on consultation we decided not to do so, since from Max’s point of view it seemed basically unfair. The men had earned their money and were entitled to be paid in full. So we had to put up with the continuous going and coming. It makes a lot more work with the pay-book, which has continually to be revised and altered.

  Having arrived on the mound at half-past six, a halt is called for breakfast at eight-thirty. We eat hard-boiled eggs and flaps of Arab bread, and Michel (the chauffeur) produces hot tea, which we drink from enamel mugs, sitting on the top of the mound, the sun just pleasantly warm, and the morning shadows making the landscape incredibly lovely, with the blue Turkish hills to the north, and all around tiny springing flowers of scarlet and yellow. The air is wonderfully sweet. It is one of those moments when it is good to be alive. The foremen are grinning happily; small children driving cows come and gaze at us shyly. They are dressed in incredible rags, their teeth gleam white as they smile. I think to myself how happy they look, and what a pleasant life it is; like the fairy stories of old, wandering about over the hills herding cattle, sometimes sitting and singing.

  At this time of day, the so-called fortunate children in European lands are setting out for the crowded class-room, going in out of the soft air, sitting on benches or at desks, toiling over letters of the alphabet, listening to a teacher, writing with cramped fingers. I wonder to myself whether, one day a hundred years or so ahead, we shall say in shocked accents: ‘In those days they actually made poor little children go to school, sitting inside buildings at desks for hours a day! Isn’t it terrible to think of! Little children!’

  Bringing myself back from this vision of the future, I smile at a little girl with a tattooed forehead, and offer her a hard-boiled egg.

  She immediately shakes her head in alarm and hurriedly moves on. I feel I have committed a solecism.

  The foremen blow their whistles. Back to work. I wander slowly round the mound, pausing from time to time at various parts of the work. One is always hoping to be on the spot just when an interesting find turns up. Of course, one never is! After leaning hopefully on my shooting-stick
for twenty minutes watching Mohammed Hassan and his gang, I move on to ‘Isa Daoud, to learn later that the find of the day – a lovely pot of incised ware – was found just after I had moved my pitch.

  I have another job, too. I keep an observant eye on the basket-boys, for some of the lazier of these, when taking their baskets to the dump, do not return at once. They sit down in the sun to sort through the earth from their basket, and often spend a comfortable quarter of an hour this way! Even more reprehensible, some of them curl up comfortably on the dump and enjoy a good sleep!

  Towards the end of the week, in my rôle of master spy, I report my findings.

  ‘That very little basket-boy, the one with the yellow headdress, is first-class; he never slacks for a minute. I should sack Salah Hassan; he’s always asleep on the dump. Abdul Aziz is a bit of a slacker, and so is the one in that ragged blue coat.’

  Max agrees that Salah Hassan is for it, but says that Abdul Aziz has such sharp eyes that he never misses anything.

  Every now and then during the morning, as Max comes round, a spurt of entirely fictitious energy is shown. Everyone shouts ‘Yallah!’, yells, sings, dances. The basket-boys rush panting to and from the dump, tossing their empty baskets in the air and yelling and laughing. Then it all dies down again, and things go even more slowly than before.

  The foremen keep up a series of encouraging cries of ‘Yallah!’ and a kind of formula of sarcasm, which has presumably become quite meaningless by constant repetition.

  ‘Are you old women, the way you move? Surely you are not men? What slowness! Like broken-down cows!’, etc., etc.

  I wander away from the work and around the far side of the mound. Here, looking north towards the blue line of hills, I sit down among the flowers and go into a pleasing coma.

  A party of women are coming from the distance towards me. By the gaiety of their colouring they are Kurdish women. They are busy digging up roots and picking leaves.