The 13th Tablet (3 page)

Hassan was sipping tea in his favourite haunt. The establishment was renowned for surviving two Gulf wars and serving Mosul's finest coffee. Hassan didn't care much about the coffee but loved the café's atmosphere. He often conducted his business in the small backroom with its medieval windows framed by old marble slabs, which had probably been looted from some long-forgotten Roman building.

Life was a strange commodity these days. The war-torn country was on the brink of collapse, but Hassan seemed to breeze through all the horror. He had been brought up by a tough father and a doting mother and had quickly learned how to survive in a place that could be a war zone on Monday, a Green zone on Tuesday, and a survival zone the rest of the week. The constant sense of urgency made men either crumble or survive. War and its corollaries could bring out the brightest light or the darkest night in every person, but Hassan, like most people in the city, was focused on getting on with his day-to-day business.

 

The café owner gave Hassan a wink and nodded to a dishevelled man standing at the door. Hassan looked him over and waved him to approach. A year ago, he used to feel pity for the poor labourers who seemed out of their depth in the city. But in the last few months he had met so many of these poor souls, fumbling in their pockets, watching over their back, waiting for him to take a look at some ancient object that – without losing his kind nature entirely – he felt he had become more selfish and indifferent.

‘Are you Hassan?' asked the hesitant man, whose weary eyes seemed older than the rest of him.

‘Yes I am.'

The man sat down.

‘Don't worry so much,' said Hassan affably. ‘I work for the university, not for the police.'

The old man looked up at Hassan with a crooked smile. ‘It's so difficult to know who to trust. I used to work my own land, now I try to survive in the city. They took everything from me, except my wife and children whom I need to feed.' He lingered on his last words to give them more meaning, but Hassan pretended not to notice.

‘I know. Believe me when I say I've got nothing to gain from our meeting, except the pleasure of doing my work, which is to collect and catalogue all these objects.'

It was a fixed dialogue, rehearsed a thousand times and Hassan knew how to keep the upper hand. This was pretty easy when the seller was desperate and the buyer picky about what to purchase.

‘Let's go to the backroom for privacy,' said Hassan, as if all he cared for was the labourer's reputation. They walked through to the backroom and sat down side by side on a bench. The man reached into his tattered satchel and brought out a rectangular object, tightly wrapped in a rag. He opened it carefully and Hassan, who had identified the object straight away, rolled his eyes. Yet another clay tablet. He took it slowly, pretended to read the cuneiform writing and nodded appreciatively.

‘This is a very interesting tablet you've got here. I will take it to the university today. Thank you very much. You've done the right thing.'

The man looked embarrassed but was not leaving, so Hassan dug his hand in his pocket and gave him 30 US dollars. The man thanked him warmly and hurried away. Hassan turned over the object in his hands, he thought it was a little heavy for a clay tablet but did not make much more of it. He decided to call Bibuni right away.

 

‘Yes?' asked a smooth, deep male voice.

‘Salam Aleikum Mr Bibuni. How are you?' asked Hassan.

‘Aleikum Salam my boy. I'm well. I've been told someone came to see you.'

‘News travel fast,' said Hassan, thinking back to the café owner who had been fiddling with a phone while he was sitting with the old labourer.

‘So, my boy?' asked Bibuni, unwavering.

‘It's a beautiful tablet, with cuneiform writing. I'm sure it's an important text.'

‘Scoundrel! Only a few months in the business and already trying to hustle me. Look here Hassan, find me sculptures, gold or silverware, even bronze amulets, but keep your wretched clay tablets. No-one wants to buy this stuff and those who do are more trouble than they're worth; before you know it, they show you an official UNESCO list of looted objects and refuse to pay up, or demand to see other tablets. You never hear the end of it.'

‘So what should I do with it then?' asked Hassan.

‘What do I care!?' Bibuni yelled down the phone. ‘Use it as a chopping block, a wall decoration, whatever you want but don't try to pull that one on me again.'

‘Alright Mr Bibuni, I'm sorry.'

‘Have you got anything else?'

‘Nothing for a couple of days, but I'm sure something will crop up. Any chance of a small advance?'

‘Advance on what? Clay tablets? You must be joking. Call me when you've got something decent and I will give you all the advances you could want.'

The line went dead. Hassan took a deep breath, put the tablet in his bag and left the café.

Mina and the professor walked briskly through the University campus, both tightly wrapped in traditional woollen shawls. Soon enough, they arrived at a block of flats. Mosul was a strange city: it had seen 8000 years of history and yet today, much of it was a concrete sprawl. The old city kept its charm of course, with its old Abbasid houses and romantic, meandering streets but many academics tended to live just off the campus. It was close to their workplace, cheaper and more secure than other parts of Mosul.

As soon as they entered the professor's flat, Mina recognised the mouth-watering smells of Mrs Almeini's cooking. The old scholar was almost toppled over by his grandchildren, who rushed up to the door to greet him. Their son's children often stayed with them during the day while their parents were at work. Both parents were interpreters for the US army and had a heavy workload. Mina always felt a pang in her heart when visiting the professor's home; there was so much warmth. It was very different from her own home, where her parents were busy trying to be ‘American' and her mother rarely prepared Mosuli food. Despite the run-down location, the Almeini's flat was tastefully decorated. Mina knew that most of the silverware, rugs and paintings had come from another house, which the family had been forced to flee in an emergency. No-one ever talked about it. Mina suspected that the couple had had another daughter who died there but she had never found the courage to enquire about it.

The professor's wife, a delightfully warm and feisty brunette, was always impeccably dressed and constantly tried to fatten her up, ‘You must eat more Mina,' she said, ‘you seem so unhealthy.' To this, Mina ritually answered, ‘I assure you, Mrs Almeini, I never felt better.'

Mina was always amazed by the old couple's ways. Although Almeini was a modern academic, aware of the latest theoretical twists in scholarship, he still lived traditionally at home. Mina had tried a few times to ask Mrs Almeini about her own thoughts on a variety of subjects but the old woman never engaged in intellectual discussion. Mina could not figure out if it was because she could not, or if she considered it inappropriate to do so in her husband's house.

After dinner, while they sipped tea and nibbled on small crunchy biscuits, the professor turned to Mina. ‘Tell me about your research, Mina. Have you made any progress?'

‘I have and I haven't. I applied for a travel grant from Columbia, to pursue my PhD investigations in Israel.'

‘I guess it will be easier to get this grant than a visa for Israel.'

‘Ah Professor, you forget I'm American!'

‘True,' he answered. ‘So, have you had any luck?'

‘I don't know. Nigel hasn't given me much hope on this front. I think he feels that I've dropped out of ‘his' programme since I've come here.'

‘Would you like me to write to him?'

‘No, thank you Professor. I'm sure things will straighten themselves out when I send him some substantial chapters to read. Until then…'

‘Until then you're on probation!'

They both laughed.

 

In his office at Columbia University, Professor Nigel Hawthorn was pondering the letter of recommendation he had promised Mina he would write to the travel grant committee on her behalf. He was one of that peculiar brand of scholars who never left their office, certainly not to travel to the country they worked on. He deciphered cuneiform tablets from Nineveh but felt no need to know what Mosul looked like, or engage in joint projects with Iraqi scholars. He did not feel much of anything. In more ways than one, he was a sort of Victorian scholar stuck in the wrong century. He didn't understand Mina's need to travel, which he interpreted as an unscholarly pursuit. He remembered an email she had sent him when she had just moved to Iraq. It was full of descriptions of Mosul, its monuments destroyed by the war, the flavours and fragrances of the food. Her writing was more intoxicating than persuasive. She recorded the romantic beauty of ruined Abbasid homes in the old city and wrote at length about the piled-up houses that overhang the banks of the River Tigris. They seemed to her as though they had tried, at some point in time, to race for the riverbank and to have been stopped – just in time – by a magician's wand.

Nigel was tired of what he saw as Mina's inadequacies as a scholar. She had been a good student whilst in his care but he felt she had now strayed completely off rails and needed to face up to reality. He knew how damning his letter would be to Mina's application, but he did not care that much. Picking up his fountain pen, he wrote quickly, and subtly in her disfavour. Without the support of her own PhD supervisor, any chance Mina had of getting this grant faded away.

 

Chapter 3

 

December 2nd, 2004

 

 

 

In the arid landscape of the Mosuli countryside, a young boy was running as fast as he could down a dirt track. The twelveyear- old was as scrawny as they came but quite resilient. He slowed down as he approached a group of workers, where he spotted his hero, the tallest, strongest, coolest guy he'd ever met. ‘Jack, Jack!' he shouted.

The ruggedly handsome 35-year-old American turned around to greet the boy with a smile. Jack had a square jaw, thick dark hair and piercing blue eyes that always seemed to see and know everything. But what Muhad liked best about Jack was the crescent-shaped scar above his left eyebrow.

‘Muhad? Catch your breath and tell me what all this excitement is about.'

‘Jack,' said the excited boy, breathing heavily, ‘we found the
qatan
.'

Jack laughed. ‘The qa
nat
. You found the
qanat
. Now that's great news. Take me there.' He turned to the villagers, ‘Guys, take a break.'

Jack was relieved. He'd worked in this village and been around Muhad long enough to know that the young boy was not only very resourceful but usually spot on. At last, his small irrigation project might just take off. He had almost run out of funding and had he not met that old scholar at the university, he'd never have thought of looking for a
qanat
, one of the numerous ancient underground irrigation canals that crisscrossed entire regions of Iraq.

 

Muhad had run on ahead and was standing on top of a pile of debris, with a huge smile on his face. He was so proud to show off his find to Jack, whom he idolised. He had lost both his elder brothers in a roadside bombing a year earlier and Jack was the next best thing.

As Jack approached the small mound, he knew Muhad had found what they had been searching for. He unclipped his faithful trowel from his belt and started cleaning the clay canalisation. He looked up, trying to trace the progress of the
qanat
in an imaginary line. He wondered if it joined a spring or a subterranean river. He picked up his mobile phone and dialled a number.

‘Hi. Jack Hillcliff. May I speak to Professor Almeini?' asked Jack, in his strong East coast accent.

‘Yes of course,' said the secretary, patching him through to the professor's office.

‘Hello Jack,' said Professor Almeini, always happy to speak to the engineer.

‘Hi there Professor.'

‘How's work going?'

‘Very well; we found the
qanat
.'

‘Wonderful! Was it in the quadrant we spoke of?'

‘Yes. Young Muhad found it this morning.'

The old scholar laughed. ‘I might borrow him someday; he could help me find some long lost papers in the departmental archives.'

‘The problem is I can't see anything remotely watery in my line of sight. Also, even if I triangulate the potential direction it might have taken to find the water source, the landscape may have changed radically since antiquity.'

‘I agree and as we discussed, some of these
qanats
go for many miles underground.'

‘Yeah,' said Jack, ‘I can't start drilling holes all over the place.'

Both fell silent.

‘Jack, why don't you pass by my office later today, and we will go over the maps once again. Maybe there is something we missed. I'll also introduce you to someone who is more versed than myself in the archaeology of the region. I am a linguist after all.'