Keys of Babylon Page 3

  Yes, I say. I agree with you. And I wish I had done the same.

  And I smile because I remember now a statue of a woman. I had stood before it and seen my mother’s face, my mother’s 1950s’ hairdo frozen in Parthian limestone, the statue’s drapes my mother’s dressing gown, its inlaid eyes the eyes that would never grow old.

  Another time, he says.

  You mean for coffee?

  No, says Mohammed. It was all another time.

  He looks at me then.

  Now, he says, you must come up. I want to show you my home.

  We walk past a pub called The Nightjar which is opening its doors. I haven’t heard a nightjar in thirty years. I was on a dark road once, listening for footsteps behind me. Crossing a moor. I heard it then, the nightjar. An old, old song. A lonely song.

  My grandfather used to say nightjars sounded like knives held to a grindstone. In Cheam there was this travelling tool sharpener who used to pop in for coffee. Don’t worry, all those trades are coming back. They have to.

  Mohammed takes me into the foyer of an apartment block. The deskman calls him Mr Haifa. The lift feels as if it’s made of glass, but it’s burnished steel. I can see my own reflection, Mohammed’s cotton jacket, thin and a pale mauve. Jaeger, I’d say. He was pudgy over there and has put on more weight.

  I remember our last meal, eggs and figs in the hotel. Tea in a glass. We were all agitated, Fatima and I scared we’d miss the Jordan bus. She’d spent all her money by then. Turns out she had medical training and the hotel staff used to consult her in her room. She gave them money. We’d brought in boxes of medicines because we knew there was nothing in the hospitals. That was breaking the UN embargo, by the way. So I’m a smuggler too. A badge of honour.

  But that last day we were stony broke. Think of it, broke in Baghdad. Mohammed didn’t believe our backsheesh was enough and was sulking. I liked him better when there was coffee or hash inside him, and he told us stories. Mohammed was a survivor. Which means he must have been complicit in the murders, the disappearances. I had time to think about that on the way back through the desert. And, you know, I couldn’t bring myself to condemn him. A plump man in a sweat-stained white shirt. Little moustache. Say he was fifty. The skids already under him.

  The corridor was silent. Like walking on a lawn. And his apartment? The same thick felt in emerald green. I saw armchairs, a divan. That first room had a view over the harbour and cliffs. We stood on the balcony.

  Yes, he said. I love to sit here in the dark and watch the lights, listen to the boats’ rigging, the ships’ bells. Mournful music to some, but remember, the sea is a wonder to me. For a man such as I, the ocean is a dream.

  Are you homesick? I ask.

  Of course. Always. Such is life. You know, when I was a boy I’d sleep in summer on the roof of our house. Every night I’d look at the stars. In Iraq, each star has a story but I’d make up my own. Even in the heat I would shiver. But with excitement. It’s that excitement we feel homesick for. But I know I’ll never find it again.

  The bathroom is decorated in gold and onyx. But everything’s black. There’s a black whirlpool air spa bath. The toilet I piss into is black. It makes me think of an eisteddfod chair. Mohammed’s bathrobe is black embroidered silk. When I come out I join him on the balcony.

  What happened to the lion we saw? I ask. The great carved lion gnawing a slave?

  No one knows, he says. But there are still people alive who remember lions in Iraq. So many of our artists have honoured lions. The sculptors of Babylon were hired out all over the world to make stone lions. Or lions of alabaster. Even gold lions. Dragons and lions guarded Babylon. But they couldn’t stop the tanks.

  He pauses and smiles. Listen, you are the reason I am here. You and your companion.

  We only wanted to film the museum, I say. But we cut it out of the film.

  Yes, but history roared in my head, answers Mohammed. I was in the museum crypt. The lights were dim. There was silence. It was a holiday and even the scholars were absent. Dust floated in the air and lay underfoot. Only Haji Abid was there. He had worked in the museum for fifty years but if he understood what was going on, he didn’t say. Then there it was. A red lion on a desk. Its mouth open, its mane like armour. It sat like a cat watching me. A terracotta cat on a newspaper. I would have sworn it was alive. The museum cat, licking its chops.

  Mohammed sips his tea.

  I stroked that lion’s cold fur, he says. I’m told the statue was smashed in the looting. Knocked to the ground and trodden to pieces. All those idiots looking for riches. They didn’t have a clue what they’d done. Some used hammers and saws to break up statues too big to move.

  But there were others, hired by high-ups in the party. They came with shopping lists and explosives to open vault doors, emptying whole cabinets into ministry cars. What could old Haji do, holding his broom? I found him once hiding in a pot discovered in the temple of the sun god at Hatra. Old Haji, like someone from the Arabian Nights.

  Mohammed and I come inside. On glass shelves are women, voluptuous in pale alabaster, men of clay like red chess pieces. A copy of FI Magazine lies opened on a cream leather armchair at a picture of the new Ferrari.

  How did you escape? I ask.

  Mohammed inflates his cheeks. By then, he says, we were a nation of smugglers. I hired two men who owned a transit van. Cash, I said. One quarter now, three on delivery. It was a risk because I was using my savings. I told them we were going to Amman, so they had to have their papers. It was up to them if they came back. Neither turned a hair.

  We actually used the museum’s own crates. The hired men didn’t understand what I was doing. Boxes of stone? The head of a boy with no eyes? At first I had the idea that we should hide it all. I was going to buy a load of watermelons and pretend we were farmers. Then I decided there was no need. Because I knew what would happen at the border.

  Delay, I said. Two check points.

  Yes, said Mohammed. I recall you were detained there. But on our side they didn’t care any more. Maybe they had never cared. All those grandmothers sitting in the dirt, looking through their bundles for a scarf to shield their eyes. And the children crying because of the wind, the men standing together, smoking, the buses unloading, reloading, the empty petrol tankers parked up.

  Then no-man’s land, I said.

  Indeed. That stinking part of the desert between two nations. As if both refused it. Razor wire, a burned-out car. Then more old people opening their cases. Doing it all again. Half the time the officials didn’t bother to look. They were dead with boredom, sick of that screaming wind full of grit. It sounded like metal tearing. What a place. The road was scattered with shredded tyres, there were glaciers of black sand behind black rocks. They knew what was going on and that there was no way of stopping it. Some people slaughter a sheep and look at its liver. No need there. We all understood what was coming.

  The Jordanian troops were smarter than ours. Not hard. Our men were the scum of the army, illiterates off the streets. They lifted the sheets and opened one crate. Builders’ rubble? they asked.

  To decorate a villa in Amman, I said.

  They shrugged and waved us through. Jordan did the same. We were part of the convoy. The troops even made jokes with my companions.

  After that we only stopped to take a leak. Why else would we? That’s a wasteland where nobody lives. Not a tree, not a house. I remember we passed a Bedouin shepherd. There must have been a wadi somewhere about, but God, that land looked as if it had never known rain. Everything the colour of ash. Pebbles like peachstones burned black.

  The shepherd stared down at us from a rise, and I could feel it didn’t matter to him where the border was drawn. Because he was the desert king and his fathers had always been rulers there. They lived in some scrape of the ground. At night they were cold because there was no wood to burn. So they slept in goat skins. Maybe a lammergeyer would take a kid. But what did it matter if it was camels or tankers on the
road? Bedouins don’t need roads.

  As far as I was concerned he was welcome to his wilderness. Badiet esh Sham? It means the desert of the left hand. No Babylon there. No astronomy either, though the stars sparked like coals when a pipe is lit. Where would that shepherd find a wife and not a goat? I like houses and automobiles. A city glow spreading out before me, headlights heading home.

  There was petrol where the road forks to Damascus and we reached Amman not long after dawn. It was like a dream, and everything since has been a dream. Amman, the white city out of the black land. Amman on its hills, as I think Athens must be. A big Marlboro sign. People at the roadside offering tea and coffee. We stopped on the outskirts and bought bread from some Palestinians. They had baked thyme into the crust and it tasted good. The first taste of civilisation.

  Looking back, it was so easy. But everything was easy. I was a man of some importance. Sometimes I forget that. We drove to my cousin’s home who lived near the bus station in Abdali. I remember the van drawing up outside his apartment. The streets were busy, people were going to work. It could have been Athens. Or New York, maybe. Buy this chewing gum, a boy was shouting. Buy this chewing gum, he called at us, as if it was the most important thing in the world.

  We took fifteen crates of Mesopotamian history up in the lift to the apartment. Nothing really heavy. My cousin’s wife had a feather duster, trying to brush away the dirt of the left-handed desert. Hey, what’s in the boxes, Mohammed? she asked. I need a food mixer.

  I was exhausted and thought the drivers would want to rest. But no. We gave each a can of Sprite and I paid them in the lobby. Then they went back to the transit and drove off. Just like that. Good business men. They took a risk and were rewarded. I paid them well.

  The leather of my chair is cold. It feels like no one has sat in it before.

  So you live here alone? I ask.

  My wife and I were apart, says Mohammed. It was my son I cared about. But my son was a soldier. He had been admitted to the Imperial Guard. A great honour, some would claim. Others might call it a curse.

  One of his first duties was to patrol the British Embassy. Oh yes, the irony is not lost on me. Exquisite is it not? The unit sergeant at the gate would let me through because of who I am. Or was. But a small consideration smoothed the way, destined for the captain, whose office lay in the embassy itself. After all, gentlemen understand one another. The protocols must be observed.

  I remember those walks up the embassy drive. There were unusual palm trees in the gardens, loaded with dates. The soldiers harvested them and had a good business going. Sometimes they played football on the lawn. Yes, the World Cup had been held in France, and bloody Saudi was part of it. Iran too, for God’s sake. So it was Iraq against the Rest of the World. All the boys wanted to be Ronaldo or David Beckham. Michael Owen scoring that goal. His greatest goal, they tell me. They couldn’t remember our own golden generation. And what a pitch. The croquet hoops were still in place. But that’s where the captain organised his own World Cup. On the croquet lawn. Sometimes he’d referee. Said it let off steam.

  I remember once I brought him a tin of Russian Caravan tea. It had come from Fortnum and Mason in London. The captain called me into his room and we shared a pot. He looked at me, then at the tin and read aloud: ‘Its light, almost nutty flavour and distinct character evoke the unique position of Imperial Russia on the world’s crossroads, and its rulers’ domestic passion for really superior tea.’ Hmm, he smiled. Rather like imperial Iraq. World’s crossroads and all that.

  He offered it the English way, but the milk was sour because the electricity was off. Tea with milk remains a curiosity. By the way, that’s the tea we’re drinking now. But what an office the captain had. Wood panelling and a glass-topped desk with a reading light under a silver scroll. A picture of the queen on the wall, a picture of Margaret Thatcher. Fine women. They were much admired in Baghdad.

  He was an immaculate man, the captain, his uniform spotless, his holster gleaming like oxblood. We shared Turkish cigarettes and once a pipe. But when the time came, he disappeared with the rest. Hid the imperial uniform, walked away a civilian. He already knew that at the crucial moment, it was not the black Mercedes or the deposit box in Geneva that would save him. Wily Bedouin blood still counted in the capital.

  Your son does well, he would exclaim. He scored against Brazil.

  How we laughed.

  He will make a soldier yet, he added.

  We both knew this was nonsense. But the game had to be followed. The real game. The end game.

  You play chess? Mohammed asks me. Well, the end game had not yet commenced. But we guessed it was very close. All of us would have to escape, each after his own fashion. A little like death, I suppose. But it was understood without speaking. Saddam’s picture also hung on the wall. In this incarnation he was a civilian in a double-breasted suit that might have come from Savile Row. But Baghdad used to have the world’s best tailors. A handsome man, Saddam, I always thought. You could see why the women loved him.

  Now please, the captain would say. Your son is waiting. And I would meet Tariq in the banqueting room, the table still polished every week, the lords, the ladies with their hunting dogs looking down at us from the walls.

  You see, unlike the British, we remember our history. And we do it honour. In Baghdad there is the British cemetery, from the 1920s. All those young men were killed by cholera and sunstroke. And yes, some by bullets. But we have tended it ever since, cutting the grass, revering the dead. Again, unlike you, we remember the dead. Our tribes study their genealogies like you do your scratch cards.

  We sat together at that banqueting table, Tariq and I, exchanging pleasantries. It is hard for fathers to talk to sons. I gave him chocolate and money. But he had changed. No, not because of the army. He had met a girl. Just at the wrong time, he had met a girl.

  They used to see each other when he was off duty. I explained as carefully as I could that it was wrong to tie himself down. The day was coming when he too would need to get out.

  But Tariq laughed and spat date stones into an ashtray. The woman had turned his head, as women will.

  And yes, I confess, I followed him once. It seems she worked in an office. I watched them go into a tea house near the old baths. No hijab, nothing. And I approved of that. Oh, but she was a gorgeous creature, black eyes with long lashes. To me her high cheekbones meant an Iranian family. Yes, she had the blood of Shiraz within her. Irresistible. I understood exactly his excitement. God help me, I still picture the gold thread she had woven into her hair.

  When Tariq gave her the chocolate her eyes grew even wider. Like a schoolgirl’s. The sanctions meant the people were starving. There were beggars on the street and malnutrition in Baghdad. One of the world’s great cities. It was unheard of.

  Tariq, I thought. She will pull you back. She will hang chains on your soul when you need to be free. Those eyes will work a spell.

  What happened to Tariq? I ask.

  Oh, another irony, says Mohammed. Irony followed him until the end. He became a tank commander, in charge of a T-72, the Arad Babil. You know what that is in English? The Lion of Babylon.

  I gaze at the gods on the glass shelves. I’m still unsure how Mohammed reached the UK, but he senses the unspoken question.

  Yes, this is home now, he says. Maybe Amman was a little fraught. Eventually I hired other drivers and took my belongings to Beirut where I have a friend. Then, when the money started to come in, I decided to travel. See the world. This is a pleasant apartment, no?

  Canford Cliffs means money’s no problem today, I say. But it was in Baghdad.

  Mohammed looks hard at me. He is a man of sixty now, his moustache grey.

  I apologise, he says. For crying that is. How crass it must have seemed.

  Those were strange times.

  No, my friend. Those were good times. Well, better times, despite the embargo. These are the strange times. The dangerous times. He whose name we cou
ld never speak, he whose photograph was in every room, he was maybe not so mad after all.

  You miss those times?

  The certainties? Yes. Being able to sit in a restaurant or walk down the street without some imbecile blowing his useless carcass up beside you? Yes I miss those times.

  There are no terrorists in Poole, I laugh.

  Not on the London Underground either, he says.

  We’re silent for a while. Mohammed has served almond biscuits. They’re too hard for my teeth.

  You know, he laughs, they bombed our national archive. Most of the old documents went up in flames. What was left was put into freezers but the electricity was always off. On, off. Then, a little later, the Americans arrived in Babylon. They built a helipad there. Bulldozers flattened a site in the immemorial earth. America, the stupid country, the new Mongols, brought history to an end.

  We’re quiet again and I’m still looking around. The leather, the tiny gods. On the plasma widescreen a dancer in a yellow bodystocking is silently circling on a black stage. She looks like an ash key falling to earth. Round and round in the darkness she goes.

  Mohammed has made the best of things, I think, glancing up. He understood what was valuable. The time to stay, the time to leave. But when have I ever done that? That Lottery job would have sorted me out. Given me a chance to show my strengths. And the bloody film. All those hours we recorded were reduced to a fragment. At night in Baghdad I would lie awake and look at the green light on the battery charger. If it winked I would panic. But the film we cut doesn’t tell the story. How could it? Ten hours of tape wait unseen in an attic and nobody gives a damn. It might have been a masterpiece. Maybe it still could.