by Tobias Hill
Over lime cordial, the rabbi explained how new people had come to the old town, Druze and Sabians. No one had known Rachel. She had stopped going out. Once an Arab family had broken into the house, insisting that it was empty. Rachel had chased them away, laughing, bare-headed, with a knife. She had died in her sleep, Judah said, on the flat roof in her summer clothes. So the Druze had found her, at least. They had been attracted by the birds.
In the days he walked. He tried to find the city and his place in it. Daniel went through the muddy roads of the Jewish quarter, the squat domes of half-abandoned synagogues giving way to the minarets of mosques around the Khadimain market. On across the river into the walled city.
It was late, the evening muezzin had already sung. He climbed through the Maidan quarter to the Citadel. Even the walk seemed harder. He found that he missed the ease of macadam. It felt to Daniel as if time had run backwards here, decades stripped away. On the public heights he had to stop and catch his breath before looking out. From here, he could see everything.
And everything was changed. It was like something from a story. The sailor waking from a night in the city under the sea, to find that a century has passed in his absence. Time falling away into some inconceivable vault. Daniel looked out over Baghdad and recognised nothing. The elephantine columns of the great synagogue, the oil palms in private courtyards, the noise of the evening markets and the children settling to sleep on roof terraces and balconies – he remembered none of it as it was.
The warm wind tugged at his eastern clothes. Daniel pulled the robe looser across his chest. As he did so, he felt the watch hanging there on its shortened chain. He brought it out. It was a repeater, the out-case of rayed gold. A legend chased small around the winding stub: Tempus metitur omnia sed metior ipsum. ‘Time measures all things, but I measure it.’ An Englishman had shown him what that meant, in the waiting room of a palace.
He opened the out-case. The works had run down. On the white face the maker’s name was illegible in the gloom. It didn’t matter. Daniel knew it by heart. Its litany of English words divided by black numerals.
He closed it and listened. Over the murmur of traffic came the sound of the river tides. If he closed his eyes, nothing had changed. It could be 1820 again. He could be nine years old. Lying awake on the roof, listening to the river. Dreaming of diamonds.
Nothing here is different, he thought. Except myself.
He looked down at the Tigris. Lights glistened in the current. On the far bank, the shanties by the water’s edge were dark. The tides were gathering around the bridge, piling up white against the brickwork piers.
Hush.
And as he listened, Daniel began to remember. He saw what it was he had gone searching for, love for his brother subsumed into his brother’s love of things. He stepped back, unsure of his footing, giddy with memory. As if he had fallen away inside himself. He saw what he had left behind and lost.
The house with two doors. The flight paths of bees. Salman made whole. Rachel made living. He closed his eyes on all of it and heard the sound of the Tigris rising in the night.
There had been no 1820: Daniel remembered knowing the year by other measures. 1820 had been 1198 by the Muslim count. The Jewish cycles no longer mattered to him, and instead of these he remembered himself. Nine years old. Alone in synagogue. Calculating the centuries since the Era of Creation. Outside Salman was calling for him. A child yelling the name of a river.
For as long as Daniel knew, there had been the river names. The brothers had been called after the Two Veins even before the state had given them a surname, ben Levy, a Jewish family recorded in Arabic in the Turkish viceroy’s offices. The words had felt part of them in the order they came, Daniel thought. First names first. River names second. Surname last and least.
1820. 1198. Even the names of the years changing. ‘Phrates, are you there? Where are you, ‘Phrates? A boy’s voice by an open window.
They had little family. Hagah and Leah Levy had died of cholera a year after Salman’s birth. Daniel remembered nothing of his parents he could be sure of. Rachel and Judit had become his family. They were more than enough.
It was Rachel who gave them the river names, although it was no longer her who used them. The surviving ben Levys had picked up on the habit, then the families they had once been tied to, the old in-laws. Finally it was the cast-net fishermen at the docks, the Bedu children drinking like goats at the street fountain, the Turkish city guard on its noon patrol.
Salman was Tigris. Daniel was ‘Phrates. They were good names. The brothers liked them because they made them liked. Salman was six and Daniel was nine. There was no other reason why a name could be good.
They were good names because they were fortunate. The rivers were one more thing to believe in, and Old Baghdad was full of beliefs. There were the Sabians, with their love of water and stars. Grandmother Judit, with her dark hints of Jewish cabbalism. Yusuf the honey seller and Yusuf the official beggar, with their Bedu superstitions. When the brothers were young, before they knew better, flood season had its consolations. There were offerings in the form of treats, as if Tigris and ‘Phrates were charms against drowning.
They were good names because they fitted. Nicknames are never accidental. Salman couldn’t have been the Euphrates, and Daniel was no Tigris. And then again the names were good because they were a concealment.
By the river, or killing time at synagogue, the brothers would hear the rivers called for, and in answering they felt themselves hidden. It was like dipping under shallow water. They were no longer Daniel ben Levy, Salman ben Levy. With the river names they could submerge themselves, raceless, out of the order of things. It was a kind of charm. A small magic. When he was older Daniel wondered if Rachel had meant it that way.
She looked like their father. Judit said so. She was strong, like Hagah had been. Rachel had contracted plagues three times. Her left eye was blind, pinked with blood where the fevers had burst the vessels. Her cheekbones were massive and angular. Behind her back, as she hollowed perfect dumplings in their kitchens, the wives of the rich Jews called her the Nag’s Head.
In the right light, making sweet lime cordial in the early morning, the slant of her face was beautiful. Daniel thought so. She had never married. When Daniel was nine she was still young; she only looked old. But then everyone did. The desert heat seamed their skins. Hunger drew it tight.
The Nag’s Head. There were other names for Rachel, too. She wore no hair cloth in the streets. She kept a kosher kitchen, kept the sabbath, but no more. She wore gold earrings outside her house. Stubborn, the rich wives called her. Mulish and disrespectful. Barely a Jew, they said. As if race could be lost with ritual. As if the laws didn’t make everyone something.
She did what she liked. She wore earrings when she wanted to. Two rings, thick heirlooms in Rachel’s thick and heavy ears – that was a clear blasphemy. Even the Karaites, who were unsure if they believed in God, were sure they were offended by Rachel’s earrings. She was left to her own ways only because she was unmarried. The zero of a childless woman in the house of Hagah Levy. A great family reduced to two odd boys and a pair of spinsters.
She worked every day. Even, in secret, on the night of the sabbath. Rachel’s religion was her own affair. She believed what she saw with her own eyes. She was sure she had never seen God. She had seen people die of plagues – slowly, sadly, in their own muck and blood. The mass graves and pits. And she watched those who had survived. Her brother’s mother-in-law, her brother’s children. They were hers now. She thought of them often as she worked.
While they slept she would sit up at the long kitchen tables, the one for meat, the other for milk. She would take off the earrings and put them with her other heirlooms. It was a miser’s habit, done without miserliness. It was selfish only because it was important to Rachel herself. She didn’t love the gems as gems. Objects are precious in other ways.
The earrings were Persian, white gold. They had belon
ged to Rachel’s grandmother. They reminded her of her childhood, four generations quarrelling under one roof. Beside the earrings there was a half-yard of cloth of murex, frail with age, traded by Hagah’s great-grandfather. Its purple dye was iridescent and precious: it was centuries since the last murexes were trawled up and boiled in the dyers’ vats. With the cloth was her mother’s ankle chain of Indian gold and topaz. She held the heirlooms in her hands. They took her back. They connected her to the dead by their crude spurs and bones of gold.
Under the cloth were the brothers’ circumcision gowns. To Rachel they seemed eerie. Waistcoats for babies. They had been worn by the brothers and by their father, and by Rachel’s own father: brothers and brothers and brothers. Their buttons were coral and turquoise, to ward off the devil’s eye. Rachel repaired their mothworn sleeves and folded them away neatly in a box of terebinth wood that lent everything it held the smell of turpentine.
The earrings were her resistance to the order of things. In Baghdad the confusion of life was deceptive. For Rachel and her nephews there were rules to be followed. The laws of the Jews and the laws of the Turks. What Rachel thought of laws was her own business. In her house people came and went, the Kurdish fishermen, Sabians and Muslims. On cold nights Yusuf the official beggar would sleep in her spare rooms, grinning his sumac-stained grin. A Muslim sleeping in a Jewish house. But the order was there all the same. Rachel couldn’t change it. It was fixed as the strata in desert limestone.
They were aliens in an Arab country. For as long as there had been Jews in the world they had lived in the land of two rivers. But here and now, Daniel, Salman and Rachel were dhimmi – tolerated peoples. Not infidels in the domain of war, not Muslims in the domain of peace. They were like the Christians and the Sabians, who believed in God but refused the final prophecy of Mohammed. Pitied, picked on, but not hated.
Above them were the strata of the rich Jews, who had moved out of Old Baghdad into the walled city. Sassoon the Prince in his courtyarded palace. The Exilarch in his great columned synagogue. The merchants who bought opium from China and shirts from Manchester, and whose wives conducted arms races of gold, but always behind closed doors. Higher than them were the Arabs themselves, and above them all were the Turkish ruling class. Their men wore gold fob watches, silk socks, green fezzes. They looked down at the provincial Iraqis in their charawiwa turbans, the northerners in their patterned headscarves, the potato-faced country people in kufik robes and head-dresses grown hard with a sweat that smelled of animals.
It was as if you could only have so much disorder in one city. Under the flooded sewers and jammed streets, there was the rock stratum of order. Rachel got away with her resistance because she didn’t matter. And her nephews got away with theirs because no one recognised that resistance could lie in river names. Least of all themselves.
At night, in spring, she would tell them stories.
‘Not a children’s story, Auntie.’
‘Not a children’s story. Lie back.’
Not the histories of the Jews, which they learned at synagogue. Rachel told the brothers the old tales of their country. The curse of the sirrusch, the dragon-dog with eagle feet, that hunted the grave-robbers of Babylon. The gods of the old cities, Sin with the blue beard and Ishtar the lover. A mass of deities swarming like flies above their sacrifices. Human gods, cowering on their walls like dogs as the great flood rose towards them.
‘I wandered the banks of the river, and as I watched it disappear into the cavern I struck upon a plan. “By Allah,” I thought, “this river must have both a beginning and an end. If it enters the mountain on this side it must surely emerge into daylight again; and if I can but follow its course in some vessel, the current may at last bring me to some inhabited land.”’
Her voice was low. Softer than a man’s. Changeable. Rachel the dumpling maker becoming Sindbad the Sailor. An old man telling tall tales. Daniel could feel her next to him, Salman further away, the sound of the river beyond them. It was March. The water was high.
‘Emboldened by these thoughts, I collected some large branches of Chinese and Comarin aloes and, laying these on some planks from the wrecked vessels, bound them with strong cables onto a raft. This I loaded with sacks of rubies, pearls and other precious stones, as well as bales of the finest ambergris.’
All through the warm months they slept outside. On the roof, where the slightest breeze might reach them. The space was crowded with Rachel’s sun-drying trays, their wood stained with the residues of date syrup and tomato paste. Next to the trays, the water jar perspired in the dark. In the morning it would be silhouetted, fat and dark and cool. Vultures high above it. Some nights the brothers heard owls and always there were the croaks of night herons on the river, the bloody smell of tomato from the wooden trays.
‘Then, commending myself to Allah, I launched the raft upon the water.’
She stopped, listening. The younger boy dozed with his mouth open. Rachel resisted the desire to lean over and close it. Daniel lay curled in on himself. A mosquito landed on the pale wing of his shoulder and Rachel brushed it away without touching the skin. She began the story again. Quieter, coasting between passages. Reinventing them.
‘The current carried me swiftly along, and soon I found myself in the house of ben Levy. I rejoiced to meet my nephews, Salman and Daniel, and my beautiful aunt, Rachel. I gave them gold, and distributed alms among the poor of the city. Such is the story of my sixth voyage. Tomorrow, my friends, I shall recount to you the tale of my seventh and last voyage.’
Her joints cracked as she stood. She stepped away to the stairs and went down into the house before allowing herself to stretch. She took off her earrings and placed them on the meat table. Above her, a desert breeze moved across the brothers, warm as skin. It was like sleeping without sleeping.
Hush.
‘Salman. Do you hear the river?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s high. Aren’t you scared?’
‘No.’
The moon caught in their eyes. Sometimes, when the floods came, they whispered themselves awake until morning. On other nights they were only talking in their sleep and neither would realise. Or one brother would only know it when the other stopped making sense.
‘No.’ Daniel’s voice croaked. His mouth was dry. He let his head drop to face the water jar. ‘We could swim away.’
‘We’ve got the names.’
‘And anyway, we could swim. All the way to Basra. Everything would be under the river. Yusuf’s beehives. The sand like the bottom of the sea.’
Salman wondered if bees could swim. He could imagine them underwater. A shoal of them, like small fish.
‘Basra is too far. I want to stay here.’
‘Yes. We swim up to the roof. We look down and there’s the synagogue.’ Daniel giggled in the dark, soft and whispery. ‘Wet as a shithole. The bimah floating away like a boat.’
‘Then we live up here. Me and Rachel. You and Judit. Yusuf’s bees.’
‘And Yusuf. And Yusuf’s family.’
‘Maybe.’ The moon moved across Salman’s face. He raised his hand and watched it scrutinise his fingers.
From across the rooftop came street sounds. One voice talking in Arabic. A late drover encouraging his flock. The ring and clonk of goat bells. Beyond that, the sound of the river.
In the morning Rachel would be there, sleeping next to them. Daniel remembered Elazar, too. He had been their last male relative, a great-uncle. On his visits to Baghdad he had slept by the water jar. He was a merchant from Basra, trading guns and medicine, steel and skins, silver and precious stones. He had three colours in his beard. White, black, rust. An Arabic dialect the brothers could barely understand. A tendency to sleepwalk. The last time he came, Daniel had found footprints in the residue of the syrup trays. The whorls of Elazar’s big toes had been impressed firmly into the brown lacquer. The footprints had gone towards the edge of the flat roof and stopped dead.
He never c
ame back. He died at sea. Daniel and Salman didn’t miss him. He was distant as their family name.
‘Daniel?’
‘Yes.’
‘How would you change the world?’
They smiled together. It was one of their games. There were always rules. Salman made them. Daniel broke them.
‘If I could change the world, I would make Rachel rich as the viceroy. All the Jews would have money. All the Arabs. Not the Turks. We would ride bay horses. We would have green turbans. You would have coral buttons. We would be rich as the merchants of Bombay. We would buy new slippers for Rachel. And tomorrow, mango pickle and rice for breakfast.’
The words ran out into the night air. He went quiet. He had forgotten the sound of the river while he talked. Now it came to him again, and along with it the one voice talking, and the night herons.
‘Salman?’
Above him were the stars. No cloud. A stretch of black without people. The sound of the Tigris, emptying into quiet. A loneliness crept into Daniel and he turned towards his little brother. Half-curled, a question mark in the dark. ‘Salman?’
‘You did ten things. You can only have one thing.’
He lay back. Muscles and heart easing out. ‘One thing?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s not enough.’
‘It is.’
‘Then what would you do?’
‘If I could change the world, I would make it into diamond.’
The light caught in Salman’s eyes. When he turned his hand, the moon was extinguished. Snuffed out in his fingers, like a candle.
He was with Rachel, shopping for rice by the Four-Footed Mosque. The crowd was slow and Salman bored. When he began to whine Rachel sent him back along the Island Road to the house, knocking at the western door.
No one answered. Grandmother Judit was sleeping off walnuts in the kitchen. Daniel was away downriver, looking for lion tracks under the tamarisks. Salman walked round to the desert door. When no one answered there he began to feel scared.
