Page 39 of There Are Rivers in the Sky
—O— ARTHUR
By the River Tigris, 1872
E arly one morning, Leila accompanies Arthur to the excavation site. She likes to forage for herbs and plants, and occasionally they walk together. The air smells musky, earthy, and the entire landscape, carved by a relentless sweep and spill, wears the shape of the wind.
Leila explains that every Yazidi, wherever they might be in the world, should have a spiritual brother or sister. She uses the word axiretê – the ‘next world’. This sibling – not by blood but by heart – has to be a trustworthy companion both in this life and the aftermath.
‘So do you have a heavenly sister yourself?’
‘I do.’ Leila smiles placidly. ‘My sister of the next world lives on the upper shores of the Tigris, close to Castrum Kefa. I live downstream. We always joke, whoever dies first will turn into a drop of water, and that way she can easily flow towards the other.’
Arthur tries to join her smile, but he cannot. It makes him uneasy to hear her talk of death, after her harrowing divination. He wants to reach for her hand, find a way to show her that he cares for her well-being. Yet the Yazidi codes of honour are strict. So, he pushes away even the thought of touching her.
‘It is a good thing to have a spiritual companion,’ says Leila. ‘If something bad were to happen in my life, I would go to her for help.’
Arthur listens carefully. A part of him understands. Only those who have often felt unsafe would want to have such a bond with someone outside their immediate family, a kindred spirit that might offer help in one’s hour of need.
Her eyes meet his as she asks, ‘Do you have a heavenly brother yourself, your own birayê axiretê , back in your country?’
Arthur considers the question.
‘I had a younger brother … Very sadly he died after drinking contaminated water. I have never been able to forgive myself. I was the one who brought the water home.’
And, even though they are talking about completely different things, Leila respects his need to speak about his loss. She listens without judgement, and somehow that is enough, that she attends to what he has to say, the compassion in her eyes, her readiness to share his sorrow.
An emissary storms into the excavation site the next week, bearing a message from the Pasha of Mosul. Wiping the mud from his hands, Arthur reads the letter. He is urgently expected at the pasha’s house. It is clear that he has no choice but to attend. It is not so much an invitation as a summons.
‘Look at you, Englishman, you have acquired a suntan,’ says the pasha, an interpreter by his side.
‘I must have. We work every day.’
‘So I heard.’
A servant walks in carrying a tray loaded with pastries and coffee in tiny cups. After serving them, he retreats.
‘Enjoy,’ says the pasha.
Arthur takes a sip: the coffee is too sweet, too strong.
The pasha bites into a halva, watching his guest. ‘It has reached my ears that you are spending too much time with heathens.’
Arthur knows he must tread carefully, if not for his sake, then for that of the faqra and her people. ‘The village is close to the excavation site; it is convenient for me to stay there.’
‘But you know they are devil-worshippers.’
‘They are good people.’ Arthur places his cup on the saucer, his hand slightly trembling.
‘You speak Kurdish now, they say.’
‘I am learning. It takes time. But I have the best teachers: the children in the village.’
‘You are a strange man.’ The pasha crams another halva in his mouth. ‘About the excavation … the English and the French have taken away many statues over the years, small and large. Is it some kind of idolatry? Do your people worship them?’
A moth flies in through the open window. Flapping its wings, it bumps into a lamp, retreats, tries again, an incipient panic building.
‘Those statues are displayed in museums,’ says Arthur. ‘As for me, the pasha knows I am looking for a poem.’
‘A poem … You travelled all this way for that? Are you sure there is nothing more? You will get something out of it, though – power, money, fame, the admiration of women …’
Arthur reddens slightly.
‘So it is not only a poem,’ says the pasha, smiling as though he can see through him. He reaches out for another piece of halva. ‘You are not eating?’
‘I am known for my poor appetite.’
‘But I heard you enjoyed the food of Yazidis.’
Arthur lowers his gaze, lest his face gives away his feelings. Before he can think of anything to say, they hear footsteps in the hall. In a few seconds, the door opens, and a tall, heavily built man with a puckered face and a thick beard marches in, sweeping past the servants.
‘Oh, the venerable high qadi!’ exclaims the pasha, rising to his feet. ‘How generous of you to visit; you should have let me know you were coming, I’d have made preparations.’
‘Stop the masquerade,’ says the qadi. ‘Is this the Englishman you were telling me about?’
Without waiting to be introduced, the judge takes a seat. There is a hardness to his expression that makes Arthur think of dungeons – hidden, closed and dangerous.
‘We were talking about the devil-worshippers,’ says the pasha. ‘Our friend is rather fond of them.’
The qadi says nothing whilst his coffee is being poured. He doesn’t pay attention to the sweets on the tray, but he seems keen on the coffee. When the servant leaves the room, the man gives Arthur a sidelong glance.
‘Why do you like them? They are not people of the book. Muslims, Christians and Jews are people of the book. But the Yazidis are not.’
Arthur peers out into the garden, though in that moment he sees nothing. The two men’s eyes trained on him, assessing his every gesture, he feels so strong an urge to run away that he has to clutch the cushion he is sitting on to suppress it.
The pasha smacks his lips over a mouthful of sugared pastry. ‘Venerable qadi, I have a question I could use your advice on. Tell me, if I swore an oath to these Yazidis promising them peace, and in consequence thereof, believing their lives to be safe, they surrendered their arms and trusted me, how far am I bound to keep my word?’
‘The Yazidis are kaffirs . Therefore you do not need to worry about lying to them. In the eyes of God, it is lawful to snare a heathen; you can deceive them into thinking you mean them no harm and then do with them as you please.’
Arthur feels his heart accelerating. His body reacts to these words faster than his mind can deal with them. He finds his feet, his head pounding.
‘You are leaving?’ asks the pasha.
‘I must go – I am expected at the site.’
‘Go, then, but if I were you I would stay away from infidels. I am sure you know the old adage, those who sleep with dogs will rise with fleas.’
That evening, like every other evening, Arthur returns to the village with newly excavated tablets. During dinner with the sheikh and his family, he considers telling them about what happened at the pasha’s house, but he wants to refrain from worrying them. Distressed, confused, he eats little, toying with his food, for the first time since he arrived. When he lifts his head, he finds Leila watching him and he has the feeling that she already knows about his meeting with the pasha.
Later, in his room, he cleans the artefacts, brushing away layers of deposits. Then, by the light of an oil lamp, he begins to read one of the tablets. As soon as he deciphers the first line, his chest tightens. Placing a finger on the clay surface, he goes over the signs to make sure he is not imagining it. The wedge-shaped characters swim before his eyes, forming the words he has been yearning to see all this time: ‘deluge’, ‘ark’, ‘waters on all sides’ …
He has found the missing portion of the Flood Tablet!
A poem is a swallow in flight. You can watch it soar through the infinite sky, you can even feel the wind passing over its wings, but you can never catch it, let alone keep it in a cage. Poems belong to no one. Arthur has always feared that an epic of such significance, shared orally for millennia before it was written down and scattered over a landscape this vast, is bound to remain out of reach. Even as he embarked on a journey that would take him many miles away from home, setting off in search of the missing verses, he tried to prepare himself for his inevitable failure. But now the swallow has fortuitously alighted in his hands. He can cradle it inside his palms, listen to its heartbeat. He has the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh in its entirety.
Tomorrow at first light he will send word to the proprietors of the Daily Telegraph that he has succeeded. They will be delighted by the news and rush to publish it. People in England will hear about his ‘Assyrian discoveries’. Maybe the prime minister will be interested again, and members of polite society, perhaps even Queen Victoria. There is a chance he may finally be offered a respectable contract by the British Museum. But Arthur is not keen to return home. All his thoughts keep circling, unable to settle, like seagulls when the water swells.
He opens the window and leans over the sill, peering out into the darkness. The smell of wild herbs is intoxicating, and there is a musky fragrance in the air that he cannot identify. Then he sees Leila, sleepwalking, silhouetted against the wall. The moon, a waxing crescent, is liquid tonight. It rains on her hair in silver drops. She threads her way through the garden, slipping in and out of the shadows.
‘I found the missing section of the Flood poem tonight,’ Arthur whispers, even though he knows she cannot hear him. ‘I have to inform the sponsors of my trip, but I do not intend to return any time soon. I would like to stay here longer, studying the tablets, although I cannot pretend that is the only reason.
‘Your divination, on Red Wednesday, concerned me. Since then, there hasn’t been a day, a wakeful hour, that I haven’t thought about it – about you.’ He swallows, feeling light-headed. ‘In Ancient Sumerian, ki-ang was “to love” – strangely, the word meant “to measure the earth”. Love was not a feeling or an emotion as much as an anchor that rooted you to a place. All these years I have never yet found myself compelled to measure the earth.
‘Recently, I came across a medical tablet from Ashurbanipal’s library. It said if the patient keeps clearing his throat, and seems lost for words, or talks to himself even when clearly no one can hear him, he is probably suffering from lovesickness. It’s interesting how the same word – hip libbi – could be used both for emotional and physical distress, a “shattering of the heart”, though why that should be so, I cannot explain.’ Arthur pauses. ‘And, as I was reading this, I suddenly understood: that is what I do when you are around, Leila. I have the same symptoms when I am near you. That is when I knew I … love you.’
The silence extends. She tilts her head in his direction.
In that moment he has an uncanny feeling that she can hear him. He feels frightened then. But now that he has begun, he cannot stop speaking.
‘I used to help publish books when I was younger. So I read many stories about love, and concluded early on in life that I am not, and never will be, the sort of person who experiences passion. This is not a complaint but a simple statement of truth. I try to approach life in full awareness of my limitations – by which I mean to say that I have no expectations and I shall never even dream of troubling or distressing you in any way.’
Arthur inhales the night air. Everything about him pulses: the river, the earth, the mountain. When he became enamoured of Mesopotamia he does not know, but it has happened and now cannot be undone. An ancient poem spools through his mind. In the distance glow a pair of gems. An oryx is watching him in the darkness. Such a beautiful creature! And, as he observes the animal move with grace, he feels he is glimpsing a remote future, an instant in someone else’s life. A time he will no longer inhabit, but a time, nevertheless, that will be connected to this very moment , which is already fading, already gone.
He says, ‘You and your people have treated me as a God-sent guest, and I am not ignorant of Yazidi codes of honour and modesty, which are absolute and strict, leaving me in no doubt that you are, and will always be, outside of my reach. So it is not with any hope, and it is certainly not with any expectation, that I tell you these things. No one ever needs to know how I feel about you. Not even you – especially not you, Leila.’
The breeze ruffles the loose tresses of her hair. She moves towards him, slowly and effortlessly, as people do in dreams. The shawl draped around her shoulders slips a little. Arthur no longer knows whether she is awake or still sleepwalking. She stands so close he can inhale the scent of her hair, and he thinks of jasmine, clove and geranium. Then she does something he would never have imagined her doing: she kisses him on the cheek – a touch so unselfconscious, it feels not like skin against skin but rather two drops of water finding their way to each other.
Then she is gone.