Page 43 of There Are Rivers in the Sky

—O— ARTHUR

By the River Thames/Tigris, 1876

T he next time Arthur travels to Nineveh, everything feels different. He does not have a private sponsor as before, no newspaper supporting him. Leaving his family behind proves difficult now that the twins are old enough to miss him. They line up by the door, their faces scrunched up with apprehension. He holds the girl in one arm, the boy in the other, promising to bring them presents.

His son has drawn a picture of him with a crown and a sword. ‘Are you going to Messy-pota-mina, Papa?’

‘Yes, Mesopotamia,’ Arthur corrects, though a part of him wonders what the name means to a child who has never left his little corner of London. ‘What’s the sword for, young man?’

‘To kill the barbarians,’ pipes up the boy.

Arthur quails. ‘They are not barbarians. They are people just like you and me. It is the land where civilization began.’

The boy purses his lips.

‘One day, I’ll take you with me, and you’ll see for yourself.’

A smile, revealing missing teeth, blooms on the child’s face.

‘I’ll treasure this and keep it with me all the time.’ Arthur stows the picture inside his jacket. He looks towards his wife. But Mabel hangs back, holding herself ramrod straight. All week she has been markedly withdrawn. She wants him to know she has not forgiven him for deciding to travel again so soon, when the children are still young.

‘I will return as fast as I can,’ says Arthur.

‘And when might that be?’ says Mabel. ‘You could have asked the museum to send someone else.’

‘But I know the region and I can read the tablets. I am the most suitable candidate. I have worked on the poem for so long.’

‘For too long! For the love of Christ! What kind of man neglects his family for a poem ?’ She lifts her chin. ‘Or maybe you are deceiving me. You have an Oriental lover, and that’s why you are so desperate to return.’

Arthur flushes red.

‘Come with me, little ones! It’s past your bedtime,’ chirps the nursemaid, ushering the children inside.

They leave the couple standing in the doorway, eyes fixed on their shoes as if looking for scuffs.

‘I do not wish to upset you,’ says Arthur. ‘I do not have a lover there – or anywhere. I’m duty-bound to go, but it is more than that … when I read the tablets, broken as they are, I feel complete.’

Mabel shakes her head.

‘Ever since I saw the winged sculptures as a boy, I felt destined to go to Nineveh. There are men who are adept at politics, business, warfare … My father was gifted with his hands – he could carve exquisite woodwork. My talents do not lie in any of those directions, but, when I am alone with ancient tablets, it is as if they were written for me. I know how preposterous it sounds, but that is how I feel.’

‘Pray, stop. You are embarrassing yourself,’ Mabel says flatly. ‘Such sentimentality. No gentleman would speak in this manner. It is unseemly – no wonder people find you effeminate, and surely you know that, with your foppish clothes and mawkish poems. I do not mind if you have a mistress. I might have cared once, but by now it is a matter of complete indifference to me. The plain truth is you love your job more than you love us.’

‘But you knew what my work meant to me when you married me. Back then you regarded it fondly.’

‘I did, true.’ Her voice rises. ‘I was even prepared to be interested in your old bits of clay. You seemed different from the other young men I met. I found your quirkiness rather endearing. But I am tired of it. I certainly didn’t expect to have to spend long months on my own, worrying about money all the time. I thought your responsibilities as a husband and father would make you into a man.’

‘I see,’ says Arthur, and then there is nothing more to say.

Arthur Smyth arrives in Constantinople in the early summer of 1876. The city is a hive of frenzied activity, bedecked with bright purple, this being the season when the Judas trees are still in bloom. Against the blue of the Bosporus, the branches burst into a riot of ethereal blossoms. The colours, exquisite though they are, cannot mask the tension percolating in the air. There are uprisings in the Balkans, and discontent is spreading fast across the Ottoman Empire.

As he disembarks from the ship, the news has broken that the sultan has been found dead in a pool of blood, having slit his wrists. There are rumours that Abdulaziz might have been assassinated, his death made to look like a suicide. The city swarms with conspiracies.

‘Delighted to see you again,’ says the ambassador. ‘This time your firman will be granted faster, I’ve every reason to believe. But, if I were you, I wouldn’t rush.’

‘You told me this before, sir: As they say, in this part of the world, if you run too fast, you will miss the safe place where you might have hidden yourself .’

The man’s mouth hangs slightly open. ‘Your memory is outstanding. But what I meant is that there are obstacles on the way.’

‘Obstacles, sir?’

‘Plague, for one thing … The last I heard it is ravaging the area south of the River Tigris. There is also cholera. And, in the north, several tribes are at war. It will be a perilous journey.’

‘I need to be back in Nineveh, sir.’

As soon as Arthur receives his firman , he leaves Constantinople. At every place he sojourns, he makes sure to write to his family, describing the people he has met, the food he has sampled. He adds drawings, knowing how much his children will enjoy them. He depicts the landscape in detail – grassy pastures and fields of alfalfa, slopes tufted with copses of oak and birch, hidden waterfalls that take you by surprise, streams with water so fresh you would never wish to stop drinking. Always he finishes by saying how much he misses them, sending kisses to his ‘little cherubs’. Repeatedly, he asks Mabel to write back, informing her of the towns he will be passing through so that she knows where to address letters. But his wife does not reply.

Her words keep ringing in his ears – You have an Oriental lover …

As Arthur approaches the Yazidi village, his heart starts to pound so loudly he worries his companions might hear it. He observes the small houses with flat roofs, the conical tombs, the fruit trees … they are all there, just as he remembers them. He will meet the faqra again, hear her sing. He will learn more Kurdish words from the children, and this time he is intent on teaching them some English. It has been four years, two months and sixteen days since he last spoke to Leila. He wonders if she has changed. She is probably married by now. He cannot help a twinge of jealousy, which he well knows is unbefitting in a family man with children.

His guide, a kind soul very different than his previous one, rides in front. Mahmoud repeatedly glances at him out of the corner of his eye. He has been silent on this final stretch of the journey. There is a nervousness in his manner that becomes more pronounced as they approach the Yazidi village.

‘Is something wrong?’ asks Arthur, slowing to a halt.

Mahmoud pulls on the reins. ‘I didn’t know how to tell you. This place is no longer what it was.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Things happened while you were away. I am very sorry.’ The young Arab’s expression is so pained that it is clear Arthur will get nothing more from him.

Arthur dismounts from his horse. Zêrav appears through waves of heat rising from the scorched earth. A group of men are smoking in a corner. A woman ducks past carrying a jug of water. All these people around and not a single familiar face amongst them. For a moment he thinks he must be in the wrong place. Another village that looks eerily similar. It is only when he sees the pomegranate tree with the mark of water carved on the trunk that he stops doubting.

Several villagers walk towards him. The one in the middle, judging by his clothes, seems to be their leader.

‘We heard you were coming,’ the man says, waiting for his words to be translated. ‘We heard you were a learned person. Welcome.’

Unable to respond with the appropriate pleasantry, Arthur says, ‘Where are the people who used to live here?’

‘Devil-worshippers? They are gone, good riddance.’

Trembling, Arthur spins round and strides towards Mahmoud. ‘Where are my friends? Pray, tell me!’

Mahmoud lowers his eyes. ‘The Pasha of Mosul and the qadi … they mustered an army and attacked. Not many survived. I am so sorry.’

A roaring fills his ears, a pounding like a drumbeat. Without a word, Arthur staggers away, his steps unsteady. No one stops him. No one calls him back.

What happened in the village of Golden Waters will never be mentioned in history books. Only the grandchildren of the survivors will remember. It will remain unvoiced in their unfinished sentences, uneasy silences, resurfacing nightmares. The memory of the massacre will be carefully handed down from one generation to the next, like passing someone a lit match protected from the wind in the shelter of your palm.

One day itinerant bards will sing about the firman . Luring the ghosts from their burial places, the ballads will tell how the pasha and the qadi, joining forces with the Beg of Rowanduz, known as Mir Kura, put hundreds of Yazidis to the sword in a matter of hours. Together they organized an army, instructing the soldiers to kill all the men and boys, and keep the women and girls as spoils of war.

The songs will lament how, outnumbered and outgunned, the villagers – women, men, children – tried to outrun their fate. Some fled towards Mount Judi and T?r Abdin, others towards Mount Sinjar, but a larger group made for the River Tigris – the waters roiling and rising with melted snow. To their horror they found the makeshift bridge had disappeared. They searched for a boat, a raft, anything to help them cross, but there wasn’t one to be found for miles. Unbeknownst to them, the qadi had had the bridge destroyed and the vessels removed. And so the people of Zêrav were trapped, the river rushing past in front of their eyes. Those who tried to swim were drowned. Paralysed by fear, they ran back to the mound of Nineveh. As the sun began to set, they were surrounded by troops. No one was left alive.

It happened here, in this soul-stirring land where thousands of years ago Assyrian kings built palaces, canals, gardens, and an enormous library with protective spirits at each entrance to make sure no harm would ever come to such a beautiful paradise. It happened here, by this archaeological site where Arthur now has permission to dig for the remaining lines of the Epic of Gilgamesh .

The name of the mound is Kouyunjik, ‘little sheep’, and someday the bards will sing of how human beings were slaughtered here like sacrificial lambs.

Every day, Arthur sits by the mound, his eyes gritty and red-rimmed from lack of sleep. Like a cave holding the last vestiges of wind in its depths, not ready to let go of the encounter that hollowed it out, he carries the memory of his friends. He keens for them – the sheikh, the children, Dishan, the faqra … Leila once told him she was descended from the river and that is where she would like to return someday. She said she would become a raindrop or a snowflake, a vaporous nothingness in the ether before she alighted on this earth again. Now Arthur looks around, hoping for some sign, anything that will prove she is present, a watery spirit borne along by the currents.

Under a sky so vast it seems to stretch to infinity, Arthur observes the Tigris thunder past without pause, leaving stories in its wake like chalky sediment, oblivious to the suffering of humans. He feels a surge of anger inside his chest. It is this river that caused the death of innocents, forming an impassable barrier as they tried to flee. But, most of all, he is furious at himself. If he had stayed in the village longer or if he had returned earlier, might he have been able to do something to avert the calamity? Deep within he knows such thoughts to be as futile as they are arrogant. It is vanity to assume that our mere presence can alter the course of events. Heroes belong in myths, in which time stretches out dreamlike, and mortals blend with gods. He is no hero in anyone’s story.

The sun etching imperfections in his skin, Arthur broods on how life has let him down and how he has let down others. What puzzles him most is that he had not heard about the bloodbath when he was back in England. He considers himself a voracious reader. Everyone says he is a cultured man. He is a scholar, a thinker, a researcher. An intellectual. But he has not encountered a single line in the newspapers or anywhere else about the slaughter of the Yazidis in the very place where British, French, German and Finnish archaeologists have been digging for the remnants of ancient Nineveh. Archaeology, for him, had always been about excavating past artefacts and unearthing the verses of an epic. Whenever he disinterred human remains, he regarded them dispassionately, as he assumed they were of antique origin. But now he finds himself faced with the idea of exhuming the fragments not of long-dead people but of those he has known and loved.

Days pass. Duty loses its urgency. It is as if a fog – dense and blinding like the ones he experienced in London as a boy – has descended over the Tigris, covering everything with its breath. To date he has perceived the world in clear-cut oppositions – West versus East, new versus old, science versus superstition, civilized versus unenlightened, and somehow, without putting it into as many words, he has also set the Thames against the Tigris … Such polarities have provided him with the certainty he needed to carry on. But his previous beliefs have been shattered, and all he is left with are splinters of doubt. In his fantasies the Tigris flows into the Thames and the Thames makes love to the Tigris, borders keep blurring into each other. For the first time in his life, Arthur is unable to apply himself and neglects his work. It has been weeks since he arrived in Nineveh, and he has yet to move a shovelful of earth. Nor has he been able to read a single new tablet. He feels submerged in sorrow, like a candle drowning in its own wax.

He fears he must be losing his mind, for he is aware of a presence by his side, the faqra watching over him. She speaks to him in that uncanny language she used when she was divining and he listens rapt, as if her words will soon reveal their meaning. Were his father to see him now, he would laugh. So this, then, is what he has become at the age of thirty-six – a man conversing with ghosts. He is indeed his mother’s son.

It is an odd thing, to lose faith in the beliefs you once held firmly. How strange it is to have carried your convictions like a set of keys, only to realize they will not open any doors. Arthur no longer knows how he feels about excavating antiquities and carrying them off to England. He is unable to recall the thrill of discovery that once drove him. How will he continue to grub for buried relics when he is struggling to unearth his own sense of self? Has he, in his fervour for uncovering the library of Ashurbanipal, failed to give the same respect or attention to the living as he has to the dead? A sense of disquiet suffuses his every moment.

The heat is insufferable. If they do not break ground soon, it will be impossible to dig later in the summer. He is already behind schedule. Every day Mahmoud asks whether they can start hiring labourers. Every day Arthur responds with the same shake of the head. He feels hollowed out, outwardly the same but as empty inside as a blighted tree, its layers peeling back to dry heartwood.

A letter – short and dispassionate – arrives from his wife. Her tone is milder, as if she senses something is wrong. She tells him that the children miss him. She says they are keen to get a pair of canaries and asks him to suggest some names. Lapis and Lazuli , spring to Arthur’s mind, but he cannot find the strength to put pen to paper.

Mabel inquires about the excavation, asking when he will be back home with ‘his treasures’. Arthur wishes to respond in the same light, breezy tone, but his fingers are stiff as they grip the plume. He cannot collect his thoughts; and his sentences, when he finally manages to write, dangle awkwardly, like broken limbs that have yet to be set.