The Love of Stones

by Tobias Hill

  Tavernier was a big man, barrel-chested, barrel-hipped. Heavy, as if desire could show in flesh. His eyes were attentive under tired lids. After years of travelling, Jean had finally married in Paris, and in Constantinople he was undertaking his sixth and last great journey to the East. He was travelling to settle his affairs, most of all with the Mogul Emperor Aurungzeb, before retirement and the quieter life of a family man.

  His journals don’t show whether he recognised the Brethren jewel for what it was, not yet. I believe he did. No one knew more about jewels than Jean-Baptiste. No one loved them more. Waiting for passage in Constantinople, passing hours at a minor auction house, I believe the merchant recognised the ruby as one of those from the lost Three Brethren. Buying it changed him. Tavernier spent the rest of his life trying to reassemble the jewel.

  Instead of returning home to his new wife, Jean-Baptiste travelled onwards for five years, crossing from Turkey to India and continuing to Afghanistan. There was no trace of the other balases in Asia, however, and it was only when he returned to Paris that Tavernier found the information he was looking for. In his private diary of 1686 there is a single sentence underlined. The quill stutters in the black ink: ‘Les Trois Balases! They are known to the merchants from Muscovy.’

  He was as an old man by then. Still, the next year he left Paris and his family again. Part Odysseus, part Sindbad, Jean-Baptiste undertook a seventh journey, travelling north for the first time in his life. In 1689 he died in Moscow. His grave is there. When I visited it there were frost patterns on the stone. Perfect crystalline symmetries.

  I think that he died content. His possessions were returned to his widow in Paris. Among them were three matched balas stones.

  Two years after his death, Tavernier’s unsold stock of jewels was auctioned by his family. The three balases were bought by a representative of the Mogul court in India. In fact, once Tavernier had possessed them, rumours of the Three Brethren rubies had begun to spread. What Jean-Baptiste valued, the world learnt to value, and there were fourteen separate bidders for the rubies at the Tavernier auction. Their buyer was Aurungzeb, last great Mogul Emperor of India, eleventh descendant of Timur the Lame.

  Aurungzeb had dealt more closely with Tavernier than with any other Western merchant. On the trader’s last visit to the East, the emperor had allowed him to see and hold the imperial jewels; in his journals Tavernier has beautiful line drawings of the most remarkable stones. They included the colossal balas known as the Timur Ruby, Khiraj-i-alam, Tribute of the World, and the Great Mogul diamond, the eye in Aurungzeb’s Peacock Throne, of which the Koh-i-Nur survives as a fragment.

  Still, like Tavernier, Aurungzeb was an old man. In late pictures his face looks both withered and overgrown, the eyebrows heavy, the eyes lost in folds of skin. He lasted for another sixteen years, crouched in his jewelled throne. In 1707 he died, and with him the great Mogul dynasty of India came to an end.

  It had survived for a century, and six generations of rulers. In its wake, the whole subcontinent began to come apart. Half the forces of India and Europe strained to regain it: princelings, tribes, the manoeuvrings of the French, the bribery and violence of the East India Company of England. In their acquisitive hands, the Mogul treasures were scattered across continents. And with them went the Brethren rubies. Their trail turned back on itself. As the histories of great stones often do.

  * * *

  Until the day he left Iraq, Salman believed that the world was flat. He was young then. He trusted what he saw with his own eyes.

  Much later, when his mind had gone, the idea returned to him in a more insinuating form. He began to insist that the world was not only flat but becoming thinner. The depth of the earth was finite, beyond it was abysmal space, and the exertions of humanity were wearing it away. In the cities, where the ground had been worn thin as a crust of sand, the wrong footstep could send one crashing into darkness. In that time of his life Salman sat unmoving, his eyes fixed ahead. His world became the fleshy curve in the step of a half-forgotten door. The flat earth was one more part of his paranoia, another hook on which to hang his fear.

  But that came later. When he was young, Salman only believed his eyes. He saw the slightest impurity in a bad ruby, the fleck of false gold in lapis lazuli. He saw how Rachel seemed younger as he and Daniel grew older, and that this was a deception. Their aunt was more than fifty years old, in a time and place when most people would die in their first three decades. As the brothers began to work, Salman saw how Rachel wore her heirloom earrings less, as if she meant not to harm her nephews’ business. But he also saw how the lobes of Rachel’s ears had grown stretched under the weight of gold. As if the earrings were still there, under her skin.

  His eyes were brown. It was a hard colour, thick as old blood. He saw that his brother’s eyes were mutable, altering from brown to green when light fell on them. He watched Daniel at a distance. His sinewed height and hooked face. Their father’s profile, Judit said. A long shadow trailing street children, stooping home along the Khadimain Road.

  He watched the city around him. The Jews were beginning to leave. They had been there for five millennia and they departed only gradually, over a number of years. Every spring a few more would go. They took ship at Basra for Bombay, Calcutta or Rangoon. East, always east.

  Salman sat on the step of the eastern door, mending a bartered gun, and watched sand blow in from the desert. It settled in doorways where no one lived to sweep it back. Beyond the end of Island Road, Yusuf’s beehives were engulfed by dunes, miniatures of Nineveh and Ur.

  Even at night and in the early mornings, the air in the streets smelt of bad meat. The odour settled everywhere, sweet and acrid. Without ever having travelled Salman knew it as the smell of dying cities, where things that have been drawn together begin to come apart.

  Salman watched it all with his eyes, trusted them, and thought of how he might alter things. He wasn’t a child any more. He didn’t want to change the whole world, only the lives of those he loved. At nights he lay awake on the flat roof next to his aunt and brother, planning their escape. But when he slept, he dreamed of the sirrusch. Ruined eagle footprints under the tamarisks. The desert passing over the city like a flood tide.

  He still had the determination of the child in the Khadimain bazaar. There was always something bitter in Salman, a store of violence. A sump of poisonous water waiting to rise. At nights he watched his aunt sorting the weevils from cheap rice, his brother carving a nine-holed flute from a mulberry branch for the street children. He saw their contentedness in small actions, and the frustration boiled inside him. He wanted to shout at them, to shake them by the necks until they were scared enough to listen. Salman wanted them to believe that there were better lives than this. He wanted to take them there. He had the fierce generosity of someone who needs love as much as they love others.

  The brothers became traders. For the Jewish men of Iraq, it was practically a racial profession. When they began to work together, Salman bought his brother a watch and chain. He did it on impulse, because he wanted to give Daniel something. Anything would have done. The watch’s casing was thick gold. Under the out-case its face was white. Salman bought it in secret from Ibrahim the Marsh Arab. Its glass was cracked and the hands were rusted together at a quarter past three, and Ibrahim traded it for the weight of its gold rather than its mechanism. He didn’t say where he had got it and Salman didn’t ask. He traded it for five gallons of paraffin, a dozen pairs of scissors and a meerschaum pipe carved with a map of the Levant.

  It took Salman five months to repair. He bought new glass for the face and polished it on Mehmet the lapidary’s wheel. He took out each cog and hairspring of the works, teasing the dirt from the blue steel, aligning the jewels. He liked the way each part served its purpose. There was nothing workless inside the watch. It was neat as the organs and bones of a fish.

  Once he had put it back together, Salman wound the watch and lay with his head beside it, listening
to it run. It gained five minutes every hour, to the second. He was immensely proud of its reliable raciness.

  When he was given it, Daniel held the watch in both hands, cradling its weight. He didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing. On the watch’s winding stub was a single spiralled line of unintelligible script, and on the white face two more lines of an alien language divided by black numerals. They were the first words of English that he learned to read. They said:

  Rundell & Bridge’s,

  of Ludgate Hill, London.

  Daniel kept them by him every day for the rest of his life. They became traders naturally. It wasn’t the life either of them would have chosen. It had begun with Mehmet the lapidary.

  As soon as Rachel would let him, Salman had apprenticed himself to the Marsh Arab. Mehmet did a regular trade in the cheaper jewellers’ stones. If there was sometimes not enough work for two men, Mehmet invented it. He lived alone in a shack on the outskirts of town. He had always been a quiet man. Age had made him gentle, and Salman had never known him as anything else.

  He was proud to work with a boy raised in the city. An educated young man, who could calculate the city tithes and write Hebrew and Arabic. He taught Salman to work stone in the simple ways he had taught himself. The step and table cuts, which reflect light but cannot catch it. The cabochon, which is less a cut than a polishing. Mehmet had even invented his own version of the brilliant by studying European jewels, and copying the order of their sixteen facets, although he never managed to balance them. The geometry of Mehmet’s brilliants was never true. They spilled light too quickly, like a step cut. They couldn’t hold illumination, the stone made into a vessel, a lobster-pot for the light. Mehmet the lapidary had learned his trade accidentally, by necessity, and beyond his four cuts there were methods he never knew of. The ancient Mogul. The double brilliant, with its thirty-two facets. The Star.

  Sometimes the goldsmiths brought beautiful stones. Seed rubies from India, or cloudy Egyptian emeralds from the old cities. Most days they came with the cheapest gems. Green turquoise faded by desert heat, grey-blue khesbet, runnels of chalcedony. Salman loved them all. Their colours capturing the light. The ring of their names. The smell of their dust.

  It was months before he knew anything was wrong. It was June. Under the market awnings, struts of light lodged themselves into the crowd. Salman was watching Aziz the Kurdish fishmonger across the aisle, combing his knife through the grain of a salmon.

  He looked back at his own business. He and Mehmet were working together at the polishing wheel, a stone to each side, when the marshlander’s hands began to shudder. He shook his head and said something – a curse, Salman thought, although it was incomprehensible. He stopped the wheel, thinking the lapidary had grazed himself, before he saw that he was crying.

  He was bow-legged, thin, with the slightly swollen belly of habitual malnourishment. Salman watched him as they ate, later, in the quiet of his shack. He looked no different from most other old men. There was nothing to show he was sick, although this was what he said, again and again. Salman, trusting his eyes, found that curious.

  ‘You are well enough to cut stone.’

  ‘There is such a thing as homesickness,’ Mehmet said. ‘There are so few of my people here, in the city. I remember, before you were born, they attacked Baghdad. I was already here then, you see? Fighting against my own people. There is such a thing as loneliness,’ he said. When he looked up at Salman again his eyes were wet with pleading.

  They left a week later. Salman had never travelled so far from Baghdad. It was six days’ hard ride to Mehmet’s country. No Jew was allowed to ride a horse, and Salman’s mule was slow and reluctant in the waterlands.

  As they rode, Mehmet began to tell him why he had come to Baghdad. His voice was old and cracked. He said he had wanted a son, and when his wife had given birth to girls he had killed them. Three children in three years. He had buried them alive in the wet ground, each as it came. When the tribal council found out what he had done, he had been banished for life. He didn’t know, now, if they would let him back. Or if he could let himself return.

  He told Salman he was sorry for what he had done. His old head nodded on its weak neck. The lines of his face made it look as if he was smiling.

  The waterlands smelt of mud and shit. After Mehmet had told him about the children, Salman found he couldn’t talk to him. His mouth tasted of bile. Once a red boar started up in the reeds. It was as big as the mules and they skittered sideways, almost falling. Salman and Mehmet stopped often, while the old man searched for the invisible roads along safe ground.

  Before noon on the sixth day they came to an expanse of water dotted with cat’s-tails. In the middle of the lake was an island, and on the island was Mehmet’s settlement.

  It was bigger than Salman had expected, five long wickerwork halls surrounded by huts and outbuildings. Tarada canoes, sleek and well kept, were pulled up by the far shore. They reined in by the water’s edge. For some time Mehmet only watched. Mosquitoes hung around them. Across the water, two children were playing with the carcass of a green lizard. A woman came out of the nearest hall and carried them both inside. When she had gone, Mehmet dismounted. He took Salman’s arm tight in his hand, thanked him, and waded out to the island and was gone.

  Salman watched until he was sure the old man wasn’t coming back. Then he reached down for the reins of Mehmet’s mule, and turned both animals to go.

  There were four riders behind him. Quiet men, waiting until he had finished waiting. Three of them had rifles, Salman had no weapon, and for a moment he thought they would kill him. Instead they led him to the edge of the marshes, then accompanied him home. By the end of six days Salman knew the name of one of them, Ibrahim, and that they were all Mehmet’s blood relations. Beyond that, they said nothing.

  Still, a month later they were back at the Gate of Darkness. Four horsemen in kufik robes, asking for the Jews with the river names. Ibrahim brought goods to trade, and he sold them cheap. It became a routine, and then a livelihood. Mehmet’s tribesmen would come each month, and Salman would buy what they had found or stolen on the desert roads.

  The Marsh Arabs needed bandages and bullets, kettles and paraffin. In return, they brought bitumened cowries and copper ingots from the mounds of Ur. Scraps of Babylonian gold, small as linseeds. Cylinder seals of carnelian on bronze axles. An English sovereign and an American fortepiano with eight keys missing, like teeth. A locket containing Christ and the Bleeding Heart. A broken watch with a white face.

  Daniel never believed the world was flat. Not even when he was a child, and the only globe in Baghdad was part of a Rowley orrery, a relic locked in the palace of Mahmud the Second. He knew the earth was round because he felt it. What Daniel thought and felt was his own business.

  He pictured the planet in his mind. Because everything in the sky moved, he imagined it in motion. He theorised that all movement caused erosion, and the earth would be polished into a sphere by space itself. He decided that the natural tendency of all things veered towards curves, not lines. Since the earth was a natural solid, its simplest form would be a sphere.

  He became a trader because Salman wanted him to. He didn’t mind it. If the choice had been his alone he would have done manual work, cast-fishing or harvesting. Anything with a rhythm of movements, a repetition in which he could lose himself. Trading never came to him naturally. The life left him no time to think.

  April, 1831. There was news of flooding to the south, where the limestone desert gave way to softer ground. It reached back to Baghdad overnight, the river’s hush deepening to a roar. It sounded as if the city was arguing with itself. Yusuf the official beggar came to the house legless with hashish, insisting that he could hear the voice of Noah in the tide.

  ‘We need animals,’ he breathed at Daniel, hanging from his shoulder. ‘Animals. Doves and elephants. A ship for the elephants. Boy, where’s your hammer?’ He slept on the roof for a month, his restlessness
keeping them awake. Muttering in his sleep. Old names from the stories of great floods, like curses: Noah. Shem. Nimrod.

  The marshlanders brought news. South, where the rivers met, the water had never been so high. There was no proof of anything worse. No death. Rachel waited for it, watching the poor digging bulwarks below the shanties. Listening to the mewl of buzzards. She slept as little as her body would let her. When she dreamed it was of the plague. The sound, from her childhood, of carts at night, piled with their soft dark lumber. She locked the grillework of the windows, closed the doors. Her brother’s sons helped the militia sandbag the lower streets, wading through water that was already ankle-deep.

  It was a fortnight before the Tigris began to ebb. The city stopped, the markets quiet, half-empty. On the eighteenth night of flooding a child of the Kurdish fishermen fell sick. By the time news of her death got out to the Jewish quarter her father was already dead himself. Plague had set into the low-lying districts like a rank wet rot. It was cholera, the disease which lives in bad water, which kills by defecation. As if the most basic acts, breathing or loving, could be contorted into something poisonous.

  Two days later Judit complained of a headache. She was in the kitchen, getting in Rachel’s way. The old woman’s face was flushed when she spoke. As if, she laughed, I have anything to blush about. They carried her to bed in her room by the western door. She died before morning, almost before the disease could show itself, a bowl of red halqûn left on the table beside her.

  She was the first death on the Island Road. When her body was done with Rachel nailed up the doors herself. Two of the Sabians fell ill that night, after baptising themselves in river water. Yusuf the honey seller’s children in the small hours. The youngest first, then one after the next, so quickly there was no time to mourn while Yusuf and his wife cleaned the sweat and faeces. The day the oldest’s body Was burned, Yusuf himself fell on his way to work, and found he couldn’t stand. His fever lasted six days. His wife built his pyre by herself. When it was done she went back alone to her desert people.