Keys of Babylon Read online

  Li went first. Always first.

  Okay, she said. Okay. Once I remember we went all the way from Huangshan to the Yellow Mountains, up into the air on the cable car, higher than I ever thought I could go. How the cables groaned. The mountains had sharp points that came through the clouds. But the mountains were purple and green; I don’t know why we called them the Yellow Mountains. And we had our picnic and then it was time to come down. But it was a public holiday, said Li, and Mic thought her eyes were black moons. So more and more people had come up in the afternoon. The paths were too crowded. We walked on the ledges and were pushed to the very edge. And more and more people were coming down through the trees to our trails, and more and more people coming up the tracks to where we stood.

  Soon we were stuck. There on the mountainside. No one could move and it was already evening and I remember the evening star above Golden Turtle View of the ocean. It was winking at us like a warning. Children were crying and women fainting. Some westerner had a panic attack right next to me, a tourist, a fat white man, weeping. That made me feel better. Feel strong.

  And then I heard a voice. It was a young woman in uniform, party uniform, telling us what to do. She was telling us to sing and what songs to sing, and soon after that the pressure began to ease.

  I knew we’d be safe then. How beautiful she was, the party girl, how gallant. We all loved her, up there in the mountains in the mist, so close to the edge. Yes, we loved her and her strong voice, singing about our heroes. It was a miracle. I was ten years old and in love with the party girl. The boy next to me, with his flat Mongol face, flat as a plate it was, he loved her too.

  The party, laughed Mic. My father was in the party. Not that he cared. In the end nobody cared because only the black market made sense. Once he showed me the dictator’s grave and I saw him spit on it. At night in the capital we used to walk across Skanderbeg Square, my friends Pjeter and Flutura and me. Sometimes we saw Chinese people. They were the businessmen who were building our factories. My father said it couldn’t be right; it was crazy to have Chinese factories. But Li, maybe I saw your people from Huangshan, wandering the square.

  Li’s eyes were heavy now. Something she had taken was wearing off. Or kicking in. But she roused herself.

  Squares are dangerous places, whispered Li.

  Under the few lights, Mic continued, the square looked like a frozen ocean. Pjetr said Tirana meant tyranny in English, and sometimes the army boys in their green uniforms would chase us away. It was something for them to do. It’s boring being a soldier.

  But that’s what I always remember, looking out across the square and shivering. It was so empty, so huge. I felt crushed, but now I understand that’s what they wanted me to feel. And the dogs were barking in the night, the dogs with rabies, the dogs with mad eyes out there in the dark, the darkness where the witches lived, where everything was broken and spoiled and all used up.

  But we still took the BBC man we met to a bar where he could buy arak. He bought everyone in the room a drink. Even us kids. All he had was a card that said BBC, but to us he was like a god. I remember he took a quince from his coat pocket and gave it to Flutura. A golden quince. Like a magician he seemed to me then, that BBC man. And soon he was gone.

  Mic looked around. The Champagne Bar was busy now, and the announcement for the Paris train was being made in French.

  Li, he said. Li?

  She was picking at a thread in her red dress. If Mic looked closely he knew he would see the dress was stained, that the crimson paint on her toenails was cracked, that there were scabs on the insides of her arms. Li’s fingernails were bitten to the quick. As to Mic, his hands were now his father’s hands. Mic had built the Tirana apartments, he had knocked them down. His shirt was from Age Concern, his jeans the blind shop. At least the hostess had moved away.

  Li, he said. Li? Please marry me. Marry me, Li. You can escape and we’ll go to another part of London. London’s so huge no one will ever know where we are. We can go today, Li. Now. Go now.

  He touched her arm.

  Don’t go back, Mic said. One day they’re going to kill you.

  Li raised her glass and sipped, gargled the warm champagne like mouthwash, swallowed and made a face.

  I’m drunk, she said, getting up unsteadily from the stool. Mr Mic, you got me drunk again, you fucker.

  In those days there were lions in Iraq

  Poole in Dorset, that’s Dorset, UK, is not a strange place. But perhaps it’s a peculiar setting for this story.

  I’m Macsen, Max to you, and I’ve been part of what you call the environmental movement for thirty years. That’s long before it became fashionable or cool. Or dreary.

  Now, in those days, start of the 1980s, if you had told me that campaigning against new roads or pollution would become a career choice, offering a good pension, a car, ha ha, opportunity to travel and the rest of it, I’d have slapped your face.

  Yet most of the people I’ve worked with over the last decade never did a day’s volunteering in their lives. They certainly haven’t waved a placard or organised a protest meeting. Or got down and dirty with a multinational trying to opencast a Scottish hillside.

  Funny, isn’t it. We won the battle. People like me. We bloody won. We raised the profile of all things environmental. Showed how everything was linked – clean air, good food, humane values. Raised the awareness level to such an extent that there’s not a telly programme without some greenspeak in it. Chefs and weathergirls spouting off.

  Well, great. Sort of. Sustainability rules. Now no one can claim ignorance of climate change or junk food. No councillor, no MP. Not anyone with power. We won.

  And as proof of that, there are all those jobs in all those environmental organisations. Everybody saving the planet. But claiming time in lieu. Everybody with a computer and broadband someone else is paying for. With offices. With office cleaners for Christ’s sake. With parking spaces. With the internet to do their thinking for them.

  Yeah, but without the remotest clue about the people who created it for them. The pathfinders. The originators. That’s right. People like me. And don’t tell me I’m wrong because you can’t. I was there. On the front line. And I don’t remember seeing you.

  These days, if I walked into that new Greenpeace office there’s not a soul would know me. Friends of the Earth? They’d call security. Should have seen it coming, I suppose. But I was too busy saving your arse.

  After a while I became more like your high-street green than a campaigning type. Fair trade, local and organic stuff. That was where the action was. I was part of a co-operative and we had this place in Cheam. Coffee bar, radical bookshop, performance space all in one. Ahead of its time? I’ll say. That’s been my curse.

  Well, okay, after a couple of years, I left. Disagreement, you understand. Us greens are notorious for knifing one another in the back. And I was knifed. The Cheam place was awarded a Lottery grant and that really messed us up. There was money to pay a co-ordinator. Frankly, it should have been me. Unquestionably. What it created instead was internecine warfare. Divide and rule? Works every time.

  Been around, haven’t I? Communes, squats. That tipi village in west Wales? Couldn’t stand another rainy summer there. Or the ayatollah who ran it. Tarifa? Extreme climate. It’s where Africa makes the jump into Europe. But try talking eco-politics with surfers and hang gliders.

  Since then I’ve been writing, for Resurgence, Grave New World. Had some luck too, and that’s what I want to do now. Writing’s giving me the biggest kick I’ve had in a long time. It feels good.

  And that’s why I’m in Poole. Canford Cliffs to be precise, looking at how the new money is spent. Down there, in the harbour, are the bankers’ yachts. Above me, the bankers’ mansions and apartments, their second, third homes. Yes, Canford Cliffs is the place to be. An English Monaco. Paid for out of the credit crunch.

  I’ve done a bit of filming too, with Earth First and others. There’s some great indie oper
ations out there. But there would be wouldn’t there? Everything’s digital. Just point and press. Not like when I started.

  So filming is where the story begins. In a way it is the story. Of the film I made once. And the man who made it possible. Because this is his story. Mine will be told another time. You haven’t got time for mine.

  Ever hear of depleted uranium? DU? Back in 1996 I hadn’t either. But out of the blue comes an invitation. A friend of a friend knows somebody. This rich Egyptian, she’s a campaigner, a believer. She’s trying to get a team together to film in Iraq. I’m like, known to be up for things. Will give anything a go. And I can write, can’t I? I’m a journalist? Well, sort of. And I’ve all the green contacts haven’t I? Yes, well... Jonathon Porritt owes me a fiver.

  A week later there’s blossom all over Queen’s Gate. The colour of old bones. My mouth is at a silver intercom. Then I’m in a room lined with portraits of Saddam Hussein. He’s saluting. Hand in greeting, hand on heart. In a corner is a TV tuned to the news, but we ignore that because a clerk is matching photographs to papers and then something is being printed in purple ink. It permits me to spend ten days in Iraq.

  Two weeks later I’m in a Baghdad hotel room reading a manual on how to work a Sony movie camera. I’ve got it on charge but the electricity is dodgy. From the balcony I can see the Tigris. The green tigress I call her. I have this feeling I’m already out of my depth. That I could drown in Baghdad.

  Well, I say to myself. It’s better than the tipi. Beats pissing out of a tree on Twyford Down. There’s a knock on the door. It’s Fatima, the Egyptian who’s paying for everything. Who believes I’m a BBC hotshot.

  Max, I’d like you to meet Mohammed, she says. He’s our government guide.

  Goon, I think. But next thing I remember I’m lying on a divan. I’ve just quit smoking this najila a yard long, hung with falcon feathers. Mohammed had chosen the pipe specially. You know, I thought I could take my draw. I stayed in Amsterdam’s Bar 98 for a while and even the white widow didn’t phase me as long as I kept off the wine. But that Baghdad hashish? I dreamed I was that falcon drifting over an ocean of dark stone. A black speck in the endless blue. Or maybe it was a 109 Tomahawk with a nosecone painted like a draughts board. Coming to a street near me, courtesy of McDonnell Douglas. And no, they don’t make shortbread.

  Then the next thing I recall is I’ve got the runs and we’re filming an hour’s interview at the Department of Transport. Still got the complete thing on tape. Mohammed’s in the room. Mohammed has set it up. He’s our ticket to ride, our official heavy with influence. And when he smokes he tells jokes about Iran and the US. The stupid countries he calls them. Schools? hospitals? We film them. Crowd scenes? Safe on tape. Babylon? I’ve got Babylon coming out of my ears.

  Had this Babylonian party once in a place in Cornwall. Films showing empty temples. Weird creatures on the walls. Euphrates kingfishers faster than Scuds. Look at this, I kept telling the guests. You won’t see this again. What you think this is, the Discovery Channel? This is fucking real.

  Well, we made our uranium film. Ten hours cut to twenty minutes. So sometimes I think about what we left out. There was this British soldier we interviewed in Birmingham. Depleted uranium victim. His friends said his nickname was Prettyboy. Well, I tell you, Prettyboy wasn’t so pretty anymore. They’d given him thirty thousand pounds compo for everything that was wrong with him. Not that the words ‘depleted uranium’ were ever used.

  Want to know what Prettyboy did with thirty thousand quid? He drank it. That could have been thirty thousand cans of Special Brew. Or ten thousand bottles of bad Rioja. Well, forget all that. Prettyboy cut to the chase. Necked five thousand litres of Krazy Kremlin. In three years. That’s why he’s not so pretty now. His mates told us they would take him to the Fox and Grapes in Digbeth and ask D U want another vodka? Good joke, eh?

  With hindsight, he should have been in the film. With a lot of other material. Anyway, it was shown at CND meetings, a few arts centres. Didn’t win an Oscar. But did it make a difference? Of course it did. And still does. If you don’t believe that you might as well be a fossil. But as I keep saying, this is not my story. Or Prettyboy’s. My story comes later.

  So I’m in Poole for a few days, billeted with friends out of town. The Canford Cliffs area is exclusive and I’ve become used to seeing the same people. But there is one man I notice having coffee on the cliff, surveying the ocean, who is differently familiar. One morning I decide to act. I take my cup to the next table on the patio and look out.

  Hello, I say. A decent morning.

  The man turns to me. He’s puzzled.

  How are you these days? I ask.

  He looks closely at me then.

  Oh, he says finally. Takes him a while, like. I expect him to be embarrassed but he’s not.

  The last time we saw each other, he says carefully, I believe I was crying. You might think that a difficult thing to admit. But it no longer matters.

  We’re alive, Mohammed.

  He lifts his cup in a brief toast.

  Remember that hotel room in the madman’s capital, I ask. (I know that’s an odd thing to say but in Baghdad everyone told me never use the boss’ name. And don’t even think of pointing that camera at one of his statues.)

  Yes, Mohammed replies. You and your companion laid out the money on the bed. Black dinars I wouldn’t wipe myself with. Royal Jordanian pounds that were more like it. But no dollars, my friend. Not a George Washington to be seen. And I needed dollars. All that work I had done. All the special services.

  But the government paid you, I say.

  Pistachio shells. But to repeat, it doesn’t matter now.

  How did you get away?

  From the insanity? Surprisingly easily.

  We order more coffee.

  Do you know, says Mohammed. I was in a restaurant in Amman when that fool, the Information Minister, came on television and said there were no Americans. And no American tanks.

  What’s that then? the journalists asked. There was a Challenger coming down El Rashid Street behind this oaf. A Challenger tank with a barrel long as a palm tree.

  Oh, pardon me, gentlemen, says the minister, I have an urgent appointment. And he disappears.

  How we all laughed in that café. Or maybe I was still crying, but the coffee was very strong. Yes, that café was an excellent place. There were CIA there, braying and bragging, but I wasn’t afraid. Small fry, you see, I was never more than that. My picture wasn’t on their screens. Not one of the playing cards, not even close. A different game entirely.

  How did you get here? I laugh. Poole!

  Mohammed smiles again and looks into the harbour.

  I live here, he says.

  Now that just blew me away.

  And I live well. You must come up to the apartment.

  He looks at me tolerantly.

  You will remember the museum? I had it opened especially for you and your friend.

  It was unbelievable, I say.

  Yes, a marvellous place. But walking with you there, something occurred to me. So before I left I paid the museum a visit. And then another visit. By the end I knew every corridor. The storerooms too, the crypts, and what they held.

  It was a privilege, I say.

  Now Mohammed produces his wallet and from it a plastic wrapper three inches square. Out of this he takes a piece of bubblewrap. Within it might be a dark coin.

  It’s a stamp, he says. Or a seal. A stamp, a seal.

  I look at the broken disc. He doesn’t let me touch it. There are designs of antelopes upon it and men who might be hunters.

  Pretty isn’t it, he smiles. And, guess what?

  What?

  It is six thousand years old.

  He sits back, the bubblewrap on the table between us, the disc catching the sun. It waits like a tip for the waiter.

  Such a charming thing. And there is so much more, so much you wouldn’t believe. You see, we Mesopotamians are a civi
lised people. Six thousand years ago there were kings who craved such fine art. When your people were rubbing sticks together, our artists and craftsmen were learning their trade.

  You looted the museum?

  Loot? Of course not. I went with a friend who knows Nineveh, who understands how Babylon and Ur were built. Who knew what wouldn’t be missed and what the country could afford to lose. Oh, we were careful in that. We were scrupulous.

  We both look down at the harbour.

  You see, says Mohammed, we walked along the aisles of the museum and were the only people there. Just like when you paid your visit. No wardens. No professors muttering or students sketching. And no glass on the floor as there soon would be.

  We came to a hall. In a cabinet was a copper mask, a king’s head. The king’s beard was cut in curls and ringlets. There was a copper crown upon his head. But his lips were a woman’s lips, red and royal and alive. I looked at that king in the twilight and thought, yes, I could love that man. For that man is an imperial leader, maybe a cruel man, perhaps a murderer of his people, a sacrificer of children, a lunatic, a psychopath. But here he is; here is the king. After five thousand years, here is the king.

  And my hands were on that cabinet and I said we must take this, we must. And you know what my friend did? He touched me on the shoulder. Such a beautiful touch. It explained everything. And the passion passed. And we walked on through the museum and we left Nebuchadnezzar’s dragons and the Assyrian magicians with their square whiskers and we took what would not be missed.

  Tiny gods. It was only the tiny gods we took. The smallest gods who never really mattered. Do small gods matter? To small people perhaps. We took not the gold gods but the alabaster gods. As tiny as chessmen, those gods. My gods now. And seals like this. Some tiles from Babylon. A sphinx from the back of a cupboard. And a red cheetah that fits my hand.

  Because I am silent, Mohammed thinks I am critical.

  I saved them, he says. I saved them for the world. Where is the great king now? Where are the lions of Uruk or the golden bulls? Where are the chariots? Where are the tablets with the world’s first writing? Gone my friend, gone with the smugglers who lacked my sensibility. Gone with the idiots who exchanged eternity for cigarettes. I sell what I took to dealers who make ten times the money I could ever do. But my tiny gods will be safe in Tokyo or Los Angeles when the rest of it is dust in the street.