by Patience Mackarness

The jingle-jangle she hears might be alcohol tinnitus or last night’s investment banker, tossing up his car keys and catching them as he goes out the door. Her head’s swimming like a pearl-diver with the bends, the sheets are bunched and sticky, her mouth tastes of sand. Why do I keep doing this?

For thousands of years, sand covered the library of a dead Assyrian king whose name she can’t remember, a vast trove of clay tablets bearing symbols only scholars can read. No one could, until a trilingual inscription was found on a mountain in Iran, the key to cuneiform script. So the grizzled archaeologist told her, last night.

He looked like he was at the wrong party. He loved Bob Dylan, said Isis was the song that led him into archaeology. He high-fived her when Dylan’s voice on the stereo sang Everybody Must Get Stoned, but left before the dancing and the craziness began. By then she’d agreed to meet him next day at the dig where he worked. She was already half-drunk, said “Cuneiform, sounds dirty! Is it dirty?” He laughed, and promised to show her.

It was one of those parties. A villa on the edge of the desert, smelling of money. Huge sofas, marble floors, every kind of booze. Pills and powders too. Older expatriate men, bankers and civil engineers. A few local men, with royal connections that allowed them to duck the ban on nationals drinking alcohol. No wives, all the women were young and single. Air stewardesses mostly, and a couple of office workers like herself with what the expat community calls a reputation.

The investment banker must have been watching her from across the room, because he came over as soon as the archaeologist had left. He brought out a joint, later some pink pills. After that the night was mainly blank spaces.

Her mother had said, Good luck finding yourself a rich sheikh, as if coming out here was all about money, or marriage, rather than getting as far as possible from the toxic bombsite that was life at home, the booze and indifference, the parents’ evenings missed and truant officers lied to. Believing her father when he said, People like us don’t go to university and You’re no good, everything you touch turns bad. For years the suspicion it was all her fault would worm back in, and when that happened she wrote them letters, like a daughter would write to parents who give a shit. She told them about dhows and camels, seafood and pearling and date-palm plantations. The skyscrapers of the financial district, the quiet encircling desert. There was no reply.

She checks the time, finds she’s already late for the archaeologist. She stinks. She needs black coffee and a shower, then it’s a twenty-minute drive to the dig. She’s scared he won’t wait.

Her hands can’t feel to grip the steering wheel, already hot to the touch as the outside temperature climbs past thirty. She almost rear ends a pickup truck with three goats in the back. What were the pills? She didn’t ask. She never asks.

He’s waiting by his Land Rover in the dig’s car park, a patch of sand with broken-down fencing.

She says, “Sorry I’m late, it was a rough night.” She really is sorry. Anyone who grins that wide, like he’s just found the world’s biggest pearl, is sure to be disappointed.

Here everything’s the color of sand, even the herd of camels crossing the desert with their lazy slow-motion stride. When the archaeologist gives her a book called Cuneiform Inscriptions of Mesopotamia, she nearly laughs. They walk together along a broad strip of sand that slopes downward, flanked by the low remains of stone walls. He says, “This is the main thoroughfare, those are shops and houses either side.” She tries to see what he sees, a living, busy street, and fails. It’s all the same dull sepia, too dead for dreaming.

The archaeologist’s eyes fire up as he says, “We think this street led down to a harbor. We’re miles inland now, but the shoreline’s moved a long way in four thousand years.” She trips on a stone, part of the ancient roadway, and just for a moment the archaeologist’s hand touches her arm. He says, ”Do you know, we found rubbish heaps full of fishbones and oyster shells? People’s lives never changed here till the last century; for millennia it was all about the seafood and the pearl diving.”

And now finally she sees it, the teeming street, houses and courtyards roofed with palm-leaves, sweet-water wells, the green of date plantations. Back when the trading-ships of Assyria sailed here down the Euphrates and over the gulf they called the Bitter Sea. She sees fishing boats pulled up on the home shore, beyond them a pink sunset shading to crimson, then to deep blue with stars. The Tambourine Man’s diamond sky.

She asks, “What was that king’s name? The one with a library under the sand?”

“Ashurbanipal.”

She repeats the syllables, first slowly, then laughing aloud because her hangover’s gone, and she’s ready to dance.

Photo by Chris Linnett on Unsplash