Chapter 2

The blaze of sun wrung pops of sweat from the old man’s brow, yet he

cupped his hands around the glass of hot sweet tea as if to warm them. He

could not shake the premonition. It clung to his back like chill wet leaves.

The dig was over. The tell had been sifted, stratum by stratum, its entrails

examined, tagged and shipped: the beads and pendants; glyptics; phalli;

ground-stone mortars stained with ocher; burnished pots. Nothing

exceptional. An Assyrian ivory toilet box. And man. The bones of man. The

brittle remnants of cosmic torment that once made him wonder if matter was

Lucifer upward-groping back to his God. And yet now he knew better. The

fragrance of licorice plant and tamarisk tugged his gaze to poppied hills; to

reeded plains; to the ragged, rock-strewn bolt of road that flung itself

headlong into dread. Northwest was Mosul; east, Erbil; south was Baghdad

and Kirkuk and the fiery furnace of Nebuchadnezzar. He shifted his legs

underneath the table in front of the lonely roadside chaykhana and stared at

the grass stains on his boots and khaki pants. He sipped at his tea. The dig

was over. What was beginning? He dusted the thought like a clay-fresh find

but he could not tag it.

Someone wheezed from within the chaykhana: the withered proprietor

shuffling toward him, kicking up dust in Russian-made shoes that he wore

like slippers, groaning backs pressed under his heels. The dark of his shadow

slipped over the table.

“Kaman chay , chawaga?”

The man in khaki shook his head, staring down at the laceless, crusted

shoes caked thick with debris of the pain of living. The stuff of the cosmos,

he softly reflected: matter; yet somehow finally spirit. Spirit and the shoes

were to him but aspects of a stuff more fundamental, a stuff that was primal and totally other.

The shadow shifted. The Kurd stood waiting like an ancient debt. The old

man in khaki looked up into eyes that were damply bleached as if the

membrane of an eggshell had been pasted over the irises. Glaucoma. Once he

could not have loved this man. He slipped out his wallet and probed for a

coin among its tattered, crumpled tenants: a few dinars; an Iraqi driver’s

license; a faded plastic Catholic calendar card that was twelve years out of

date. It bore an inscription on the reverse: WHAT WE GIVE TO THE POOR IS WHAT

WE TAKE WITH US WHEN WE DIE . He paid for his tea and left a tip of fifty fils on

a splintered table the color of sadness.

He walked to his jeep. The rippling click of key sliding into ignition was

crisp in the silence. For a moment he paused and stared off broodingly. In the

distance, shimmering in heat haze that made it look afloat like an island in the

sky, loomed the flat-topped, towering mound city of Erbil, its fractured

rooftops poised in the clouds like a rubbled, mud-stained benediction.

The leaves clutched tighter at the flesh of his back.

Something was waiting.

“Allah ma’ak , chawaga .”

Rotted teeth. The Kurd was grinning, waving farewell. The man in khaki

groped for a warmth in the pit of his being and came up with a wave and a

mustered smile. It dimmed as he looked away. He started the engine, turned

in a narrow, eccentric U and headed toward Mosul. The Kurd stood watching,

puzzled by a heart-dropping sense of loss as the jeep gathered speed. What

was it that was gone? What was it he had felt in the stranger’s presence?

Something like safety, he remembered; a sense of protection and deep well-

being. Now it dwindled in the distance with the fast-moving jeep. He felt

strangely alone.

By ten after six the painstaking inventory was finished. The Mosul curator

of antiquities, an Arab with sagging cheeks, was carefully penning a final

entry into the ledger on his desk. For a moment he paused, looking up at his

friend as he dipped his pen-point into an inkpot. The man in khaki seemed

lost in thought. He was standing by a table, hands in his pockets, staring

down at some dry, tagged whisper of the past. Curious, unmoving, for

moments the curator watched him, then returned to the entry, writing in a

firm, very small neat script until at last he sighed, setting down the pen as he

noted the time. The train to Baghdad left at eight. He blotted the page and offered tea.

His eyes still fixed upon something on the table, the man in khaki shook

his head. The Arab watched him, vaguely troubled. What was in the air?

There was something in the air. He stood up and moved closer; then felt a

vague prickling at the back of his neck as his friend at last moved, reaching

down for an amulet and cradling it pensively in his hand. It was a green stone

head of the demon Pazuzu, personification of the southwest wind. Its

dominion was sickness and disease. The head was pierced. The amulet’s

owner had worn it as a shield.

“Evil against evil,” breathed the curator, languidly fanning himself with a

French scientific periodical, an olive-oil thumbprint smudged on its cover.

His friend did not move; he did not comment. The curator tilted his head

to the side. “Is something wrong?” he asked .

No answer.

“Father Merrin?”

The man in khaki still appeared not to hear, absorbed in the amulet, the

last of his finds. After a moment he set it down, then lifted a questioning look

to the Arab. Had he said something?

“No, Father. Nothing.”

They murmured farewells.

At the door, the curator took the old man’s hand with an extra firmness.

“My heart has a wish: that you would not go.”

His friend answered softly in terms of tea; of time; of something to be

done.

“No, no, no! I meant home!”

The man in khaki fixed his gaze on a speck of boiled chickpea nestled in a

corner of the Arab’s mouth; yet his eyes were distant. “Home,” he repeated.

The word had the sound of an ending.

“The States,” the Arab curator added, instantly wondering why he had.

The man in khaki looked into the dark of the other’s concern. He had

never found it difficult to love this man. “Goodbye,” he said quietly; then

quickly turned and stepped out into the gathering gloom of the streets and a

journey home whose length seemed somehow undetermined.

“I will see you in a year!” the curator called after him from the doorway.

But the man in khaki never looked back. The Arab watched his dwindling

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