Page 18 of There Are Rivers in the Sky

—H ZALEEKHAH

By the River Thames, 2018

I nside the black cab that Uncle Malek arranged for her, Zaleekhah looks out of the window, watching the pedestrians, the cyclists, the restaurants flash past in a stream of blurred lights. London for her has never been a capital of solid, sturdy architecture and historical monuments and leafy public parks but rather a city carved by water, smoothed by tide and flow, an ever-expanding reservoir of fluvial memories, some obliterated, others repressed, still others forcefully gushing, like its many rivers and their tributaries.

They are everywhere – the ghost streams.

There is the mysterious River Fleet, for instance – the largest and most important of London’s subterranean rivers, the ‘hollow stream’. Once a broad tidal basin and an important artery bringing goods and business into the capital, it has repeatedly endured abuse at the hands of humans, choked and polluted with discarded carcasses and putrefying offal from the meat markets and tanneries lining its banks – next, all at once, it was deemed too filthy, too malodorous, too unpleasant to look at and therefore no longer of use. A solution was found to hide it from sight, cover its ugliness under stacks of bricks. It lay buried for about 250 years, until it was rediscovered and reopened – only to be buried again. A legendary river, then an open sewer, then an aimless canal, then an open sewer again and, eventually, forgotten by almost everyone. Still alive, though. A watery spectre that refuses to die.

Then there is the River Effra in South London, concealed and culverted, nowadays a conduit for drainage and waste matter, silently coursing under not only houses and offices but also cemeteries, whence it sometimes unearths and carries off buried coffins. There is also the Tyburn, a source of delicious fresh salmon in the distant past, though barely remembered these days, as it flows unseen and unheard underneath celebrated urban landmarks. The Walbrook, once a sapphire-blue river running through the Roman fort of Londinium into the Thames, shimmering like the wing of a dragonfly, provided residents with clean water; now it only feeds into a malodorous sewer.

Then there is the quaint and charming River Westbourne – ‘the royal stream’. When Victorian engineers could not find a way to build a Tube station above the river, they made the river run through the station instead. Today, invisible to thousands of commuters, hidden in plain sight, it pours through a pipe above the platforms in Sloane Square Tube station, after being entombed in London clay to make way for the prosperous terraces of Chelsea and Belgravia above. It has survived storms, and even a bomb blast in the Second World War. They are all there, roiling beneath the cement pavements and the tarmacked streets, rumbling and rushing under strata of concrete and bricks, buried under sediments of history and the weight of amnesia.

Sitting back, Zaleekhah closes her eyes momentarily, as if hoping to hear the water through the noise of the traffic. On a sudden impulse, she leans forward and says to the driver, ‘Excuse me!’

The man, busy chatting to someone on the phone, doesn’t answer immediately.

‘Sorry!’ Zaleekhah says, louder. ‘I’ve changed my mind. Can you take me somewhere else?’

Now she has his full attention. He looks at her through the rear-view mirror. ‘The postcode was for the houseboats by the shore. So you’re not going to Cheyne Walk?’

‘Yes, I was, but I’m not now.’ She gives him the name of a district in South-East London instead, a street of converted warehouses.

He nods, though in the driving mirror she can see his eyes tinged with a trace of suspicion.

The crepuscular light has drained into darkness by the time Zaleekhah arrives at a dull ochre, two-storey brick building in Bermondsey. A metal sign on the door reads Centre for Ecology and Hydrology . A not-for-profit, independent institute for research in biogeochemistry, water studies and biodiversity. Its flat roof, bland functionality and absence of ornament stands in stark contrast with the luxurious elegance of Uncle’s house.

Opening the door, she steps into the corridor and inhales the familiar smell of disinfected floors. The entire space is divided economically into small rooms and modest cubicles, except for the larger common areas, which are reserved for team meetings. A few items are dotted around here and there: Post-it notes, inspirational quotes, postcards pinned to cork boards; mugs with funny sayings, succulents in ceramic pots … the universal simplicity of office objects. Zaleekhah does not find the effacement of individuality, if that is what it is, unappealing. It is a place designed for collective endeavour, not for personal gratification.

She walks slowly, her footsteps echoing in the empty building. The last door on the right displays her name – Dr Zaleekhah Clarke . For a moment she stares at the plaque. Upon getting married, she took her husband’s surname. Now it will probably have to change again. Women are expected to be like rivers – readjusting, shapeshifting.

It is perhaps easier to justify the end of a relationship – both to yourself and to others – when there is a definite, tangible cause, no matter how painful. But it is harder to grasp the gradual evaporation of love, a loss so slow and subtle as to be barely detectable, until it is fully gone. Now she feels like a passenger on a sleeper train who awakens and draws back the curtains, only to find an unfamiliar landscape that had been there all along. She cannot pull the curtains closed again.

She is almost thirty-one years old. She has no children, no parents. This time last year she was certain that her husband was her family. Their colleagues always commented on how perfectly matched they were, which was meant as a compliment, and also the politest way of saying neither could have found anyone better. It was true, though: they seemed like a good couple, and there were times when they really were – if only she’d had the capacity for happiness . But she also knows that the fabric of their marriage had worn thin in many places . All it needed was one sharp tug for it to tear.

Zaleekhah lets herself into her office, which is small and spartan but clean. On the opposite wall there is a poster – a black-and-white picture of a single drop of water. At first glance, it seems to be plunging from a great height into a lake or an estuary, but it could equally be emerging from the depths of an ocean, ascending towards the skies.

Apart from this image, the walls are bare. Her research papers are arranged in folders on the desk, alongside a jar of pencils, all neatly sharpened. A fiddle-leaf fig droops listlessly by the window; it has stayed in its original, stunted form even though she has done her best to take care of it. On the left side is a slate-coloured sofa – also heaped with papers and folders. Good thing Uncle has never visited her workplace. He would have found it depressingly drab. But she loves her job, and cherishes this space she can call her own.

She moves aside the clutter on the sofa. Under a scratch pad, attached with a paperclip, as if it were an afterthought, she sees a note.

How to Bury a River Build concrete troughs along both sides of the riverbed. Add a roof to the troughs. Encase the river completely on three sides, turning it into one long, winding coffin. Cover the roof with earth, making sure no trace is visible. Build your city over it. Forget that it was ever there.

Zaleekhah doesn’t remember when she wrote this; she must have scribbled it in a moment of distraction. She crumples the paper and tosses it towards the bin, narrowly missing it.

On a shelf behind her desk, amid clusters of books stacked every which way, is an arrangement of photographs in silver frames. In the first she is with her husband, on their honeymoon in Marrakech. Sitting under a tree whose pomegranates droop ripe and rubicund above their heads, after a stroll through the souks in the medina, they look carelessly happy, spent and sunburnt. The next picture is a slimmer and younger version of herself, taken at her university graduation party. A palpable pride in her features, she leans over a sumptuous table, in the company of Uncle Malek, Aunt Malek and Helen, glasses held aloft in a toast. Beside that is a photo of her parents. Her father sports his customary charming smile, his eyes crinkling at the corners. Sitting by his side, her mother beams at the camera, her hair draped over one shoulder in a long, dark braid. She wears a green dress cinched at the waist, the soft curve of her belly suggesting the early months of pregnancy. This is how her mother would have looked, Zaleekhah assumes, had she ever appeared in her dreams.

The fourth frame – smaller in size – is tucked away at the back of the shelf, not easily visible. A photo of Zaleekhah at a conference in Dublin with a tall, slender man in his fifties. Her mentor, her colleague, her friend. Professor Berenberg was an eminent hydrologist, biochemist and climate scientist. Highly respected in his field, he was known not only for his brilliant intellect and contribution to the discipline but also for his kindness and generosity towards staff and students. They collaborated on various projects for long years – until he left the lab, alone and publicly disgraced.

Towards the end of his life, the professor became preoccupied with a hypothesis he referred to in his notes as ‘aquatic memory’. He argued that, under certain circumstances, water – the universal solvent – retained evidence, or ‘memory’, of the solute particles that had dissolved in it, no matter how many times it was diluted or purified. Even if years passed, or centuries, and not a single original molecule remained, each droplet of water maintained a unique structure, distinguishable from the next, marked forever by what it once contained. Water, in other words, remembered .

Consumed by this hypothesis, Berenberg dropped all other research. Expanding and diversifying his team, he hired biologists, chemists and immunologists to work alongside hydrologists. He was convinced that if they could prove that water possessed some kind of memory, this would have groundbreaking implications, not only for hydrology and biology but also for medicine, homeopathy and conventional attitudes towards healing. Satisfied with his results, he submitted his findings to peer-reviewed scientific journals – and one agreed to publish his paper.

The backlash was almost instant. A tide of scepticism followed. His arguments were found to be weak, his conclusions insufficiently supported by evidence. It did not help the professor’s case that independent researchers could not verify his results when they repeated his experiments under similar lab conditions. Scepticism gave way to disbelief, disbelief to rejection and rejection to ridicule. Berenberg did not back down, insisting on the validity of his method. The more he held his ground, the more he was lambasted. His reputation tarnished, he was forced to endure a swift downfall. Old friends stopped calling him. Young researchers distanced themselves. Shunned, he lost his lab and funding. Still he carried on doggedly, moving to the basement of his home; and when his last remaining grants ran out, he covered all the costs of his research out of his own pocket. There he worked with limited means and barely any staff – until one morning, two years ago, he was found dead on the floor, felled by a heart attack.

Ever since then, he has been a ghost river in Zaleekhah’s life, pushed into the dark recesses of her past. She rarely, if ever, mentions his name, although she thinks about him often. Aquatic memory has been a contentious subject for her – professionally and personally. Her husband believed that the late professor, though well intentioned, was misled by his own unconscious confirmation bias, seeing in the findings what he simply wished to see. Whereas Zaleekhah is convinced that more studies are needed to understand water and its many anomalies, and until then it would be as absurd to conclude that Berenberg was deluded as it would be to suggest he was triumphant.

Following the death of the professor, without telling anyone, Zaleekhah continued his experiments for a while. The results were often confusing, neither stable nor clear. At times, she felt on the verge of proving the hypothesis. At others, the data were so weak she doubted the proposition altogether. With such wide variation, it was impossible to submit anything definitive to respected journals. Despite her disappointment, she carried on testing and tenaciously recording the results – until her husband found out.

‘Are you out of your mind? Why are you wasting your time with a failed hypothesis?’

‘I just want to see where the research will take me.’

‘Isn’t it obvious? It’ll take you nowhere. It’s poetic nonsense – not science.’

‘Maybe they’re not worlds apart – science and poetry, I mean.’

The glare in his eyes, the sudden withdrawal of his patience. ‘I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but please stop it – for your own good. Unless you want to risk your job? I’ve never understood why you took the guy seriously. I’m sorry, but he was pathetic. He was clearly losing his mind.’

That is when Zaleekhah told her husband. Speaking slowly, she explained to him how much the deceased scientist meant to her and how she was not ready to let go of the theory of aquatic memory. She said she missed working with Berenberg and then she said something that she thought she would never voice out loud: Berenberg was her mentor at first, and a close colleague and a good friend, but, somewhere in between these stages, for a passing time, she had also been in love with him.

‘In love?’

‘Yes, but that was before I met you. Before we got married. I’d known him for a long time.’

Few things harden the human heart as fast as jealousy. Cold and commanding, it settles quickly in the warm spot left by affection, chilling it with its bitter touch.

‘All these years you were working with your ex-boyfriend, and you didn’t even think to tell me?’

‘He was never my boyfriend!’

‘What was he, then?’

‘Nothing. He was just –’

‘Special?’

‘No, not like that. He was different – okay?’

‘Different from me, you mean.’

‘Brian, that’s not what I’m saying –’

The silence that followed did not surprise her. But she was not ready for his anger, which felt too close to hatred.

‘I can’t believe you’ve kept this from me when you know how much I’ve given up for you.’

Once again, there it was, their one unresolvable debate, always ready to rear its head.

‘Why are you bringing this up now? Because you knew when we got married I never planned to have children.’

‘You never even wanted to want them!’

She looked at him, expecting him to hear the awkwardness in his own words. But in that moment, he lifted his chin and said, ‘You wouldn’t have my child, but I bet you would have had his.’

A few minutes later Zaleekhah packed a few belongings, put them in a cardboard box and left.

She will sleep in the lab tonight again. As long as she has her sleeping pills, she does not mind. With the water from a Thermos she swallows two pills. Then she rummages in the cupboard for a blanket that she keeps for times like this. She takes out the book she borrowed from Uncle Malek. She was planning to start reading it tonight, but her eyelids are closing. So instead she wraps her cardigan around it. Nineveh and Its Remains will be her pillow. Maybe she will dream of human-headed, bird-winged lamassus feathering earthwards from laden clouds.

She switches off the lights. In the dark, she is ambushed by a memory – unbidden and unexpected. They were packing his things, the two of them, the day Berenberg left the office. The temperature had fallen that morning, their breath condensing in front of their eyes. She asked him if he ever regretted studying ‘aquatic memory’, given the price he paid for choosing such a controversial subject.

‘Not for one second. I wanted to research an unknown property of water, and I treasured every moment of it.’

‘But it cost you so much.’

‘True … but you and I both love the work we do and that love is beyond all personal success or failure. You’ll pick up where I’ve left off, and, if you falter, someone else will take on your research. We do this to keep scientific inquiry going – with or without us.’

Thinking about these words now, Zaleekhah curls into herself and hugs her knees. The sofa is shorter than she is, but that’s not the cause of her discomfort. She feels guilty for never having told Berenberg how much he meant to her and she feels guilty for telling her husband how much Berenberg meant to her. She was silent when she should have spoken; she spoke when she should have been silent. Either way, guilt is her most loyal companion. And regret, too – not so much for her acts as for her failure to act. She was drawn to Berenberg’s dedication and perseverance, a devotion so selfless as to seek only the good of its object, an unreasonable commitment perhaps more commonly observed in ancient mystics and ascetics than in the modern workplace.

As she closes her eyes, waiting to descend into a drugged sleep, she can hear a gentle lapping in the distance. They are all there. The lost rivers of time, out of sight and out of mind but notable in their absence, like phantom limbs that still have the power to cause pain. They are here and everywhere, eroding the solid structures on which we have built our careers, marriages, reputations and relationships, evermore flowing onwards – with or without us. Zaleekhah knows she may not be one of them, but she will always be attracted to people who are pulled towards something bigger and better than themselves, a passion that lasts a lifetime, even though it will consume them in the end.