Muck by Dror Burstein

Author:Dror Burstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

21

EASTERLY WINDS WHISTLE in the cracks of the desiccated shower stalls in a distant military base on the border between Babylon and Elam. There are three battlement walls, in concentric circles, and a ziggurat that once rose arrogantly until it was knocked over by the Assyrians some forty years ago is still there, waiting for better days. On the lower floors, however, there are sufficient rooms with ceilings that were spared, and so the place was transformed from the temple it once was—no one remembers anymore whether to a Babylonian or an Elamite God—into a Babylonian military base, which in turn was made over into a royal archive. It is so dreadfully far to the east, so dreadfully far from anything, that one measly old guard is all that’s needed to safeguard the site. He and his dog have been living there for twenty years now. Evenings, they sit on the battlement walls to breathe in the air after spending long hours below in the archive, and they play chess, or, rather, a kind of chess, a different version of the game, as is customarily played in such far-flung outposts. There’s no king and queen on the board but, rather, a guard and a dog—always a guard and a dog—they’re the center of the world, and they must be protected, and he who strikes at the guard or at the dog wins the game. The chessboard is older than they are. When they arrived and were appointed to guard the site, the chessboard was already there, waiting: it had been waiting since the days of Uru, which is to say Ur, which is to say City—the city whose name was City. The rules of the games were written on the sunbaked board, but since they were written in ancient Sumerian, the guard and his dog could only stare at the signs that they were unable to read, and in the end make up the rules for themselves.

This is where they keep the documents and other plunder the soldiers of the Babylonian king bring back from their campaigns of rape and pillage at the far ends of their expanding kingdom, from the neighboring nations, which are slowly but surely being condemned to servitude. The stuff accumulates here as in the basement of a museum. Soldiers take their booty and transport it to Babylon in order to catalogue and secure it—which is to say, in order to save it from destruction in the now subjugated lands. If it were possible, they’d ship every one of the Egyptian pyramids to Babylon. Here you’ll find an entire wing dedicated to fallen idols and various temple utensils. There are statutes of the Moabite Chemosh, of Anat from Tyre and Sidon, and now of the Assyrian god Ashur, too—thousands of figurines of Ashur, newly deposited in the archives: small ones as well as some pretty gigantic ones, all bearing his terrifying beard, wings, and hooves, hooves that have been trampling over nations and peoples for generations;

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