Servant of the Bones (5 page)

“This happened a thousand times over in those centuries. Even the cruel Assyrians would do the same thing. They’d put to the sword the soldiers and then drag off the man who knew how to write three languages, and the boy who could carve perfectly in ivory, and so it was with us. The Babylonians, they weren’t as bad as other enemies might have been. Imagine being dragged back to Egypt. Imagine. Egypt, where people live just to die, and sing night and day of dying, and of being dead, and there was nothing but village after village and field after field.

“No, we didn’t have it bad off.

“By eleven years old, I had been to the temple itself, a page, as many a rich Hebrew boy was, and I had seen the great statue of Marduk himself, the god, in his high sanctuary atop the great ziggurat of Etemenanki. I had entered into the inner shrine with the priests, and the strangest thought had occurred
to me! This big statue looked more like me than the little one I had which I had always thought bore a distinct resemblance.

“Of course I didn’t chirp this out loud. But as I looked up at mighty Marduk, the great gold Marduk, the statue in which the god lived and ruled, and should have been carried each year in the New Year’s Procession, the statue smiled.

“I was too clever to say anything to the priests. We were in the process of preparing the inner sanctuary for the woman who would come and spend the night with the god. But the priests noticed something. And they saw me look at Marduk and one of them asked, ‘What did you say?’ and of course I’d said nothing. But Marduk had said, ‘Well, what do you think of my house, Azriel? I’ve been so often to yours.’

“From that moment, the priests were on to it. Yet things might still have gone differently. I might have had a long human life. I might have had a different path. Sons, daughters. I don’t know.

“At the time, I thought it was hilarious and wonderful, and loved Marduk for this little trick. But we continued to ready the chamber, which was truly magnificent in plated gold, and the silken couch where the woman would lie to be taken by the god that night, and then we left, and one of the priests said: ‘The God smiled on you!’

“I was stiff with fear. I didn’t want to answer.

“Rich Hebrew hostages or deportees like us were treated very well, as I said, but I didn’t really talk to the priests, you know, as if they were Hebrews. They were the priests of the gods we were forbidden to worship. Besides, I didn’t trust them and there were too many of them and some were very stupid and others very sly and smart. I said simply that I had seen the smile too and thought it was sunlight.

“The priest was quaking.

“I forgot about that for years. I don’t know why I remember it now, except to say that that might have been the very moment when my fate was sealed.

“Marduk started talking to me all the time then. I’d be in the tablet house, working hard, you know, learning thoroughly every text we possessed in Sumerian so that I could copy it
out, read it, even speak it, though by then nobody spoke Sumerian. Ah, I must tell you a funny thing I heard only recently here in this twentieth century world. I heard it in New York in the days after it was all over, finished with, Gregory Belkin I mean, and I was wandering around trying to make my body take the form of other men—and it kept changing back. I heard this funny thing…”

“What?” I asked at once.

“That nobody even now knows where the Sumerians came from! Not even to this day. That they came out of nowhere the Sumerians, with their language which was different from all others, and they built the first cities in our beautiful valleys. Nobody knows more about them even to this day.”

“That’s true. Did you know then?”

“No,” he said, “we knew what was written in the tablets, that Marduk had made people from clay and put life into them. That’s all we knew. But to find out two thousand years later that you have no long archaeological or historical record for the origin of the Sumerians—how their language developed and how they migrated into the valley and all of that—it’s funny to me.”

“Well, haven’t you noticed that nobody now knows where the Jews came from either?” I asked. “Or are you going to tell me that you knew for a fact in those days, when you were a Babylonian boy, that God called Abraham out of the city of Ur and that Jacob did wrestle with the angel?”

He laughed and shrugged. “There were so many versions of that story! If you only knew. Of course people wrestled all the time with angels. That was beyond dispute. But what do you have today in the Holy Books? Its remnants! The whole story of Yahweh defeating the Leviathan is gone, gone! And I used to copy that story all the time! But I get ahead of myself. I want to describe things in some order. No, I am not surprised to hear that no one knows where the Jews came from. Because even then there were just too many stories…

“Let me tell you about my house. It was in the rich Hebrew quarter. I’ve explained what exile meant.

“We were to be citizens of quality of a city filled with people
of all nations. We were booty, set free to increase and multiply and make wealth. By my time, as you can guess, Nebuchadnezzar had died, and we were ruled by Nabonidus, and he was not in the city and everybody hated him. Just hated him.

“He was thought to be mad, or obsessed. This is told in the book of Daniel though he is given the wrong name. And true, our prophets did go try to drive him crazy with their predictions about how he ought to let us go home. But I don’t think they got anywhere with him.

“Nabonidus was driven by secret ideas of his own. Nabonidus was a scholar for one thing, a digger into the mounds, and he was determined to keep Babylon in glory, yes, but he had a mad love for the god Sin. Well, Babylon was Marduk’s city. Of course there were many other temples and chapels even in Marduk’s temple, but still, for the King to fall crazy in love with another god?

“And then to go running off for ten years, ten years into the desert, leaving behind Belshazzar as the ruler, well, that made everybody hate Nabonidus even more. The whole time that Nabonidus was gone, the New Year’s Festival couldn’t happen, and this was the biggest festival in Babylon where Marduk takes the hand of the King and walks through the street with him! That couldn’t happen with no King. And the priests of Marduk, by the time I came to serious work in the temple and palace, were really despising Nabonidus. And so were many other people too.

“To tell you the truth, I never knew the whole secret of Nabonidus. If we could call him up, you know, as the Witch of Endor called up the dead prophet Samuel, disturbing his sleep, remember, so that Saul the King could talk to him…if we could call up Nabonidus he might tell us wondrous things. But that is not my mission now, to become a necromancer or a sorcerer, it’s to find the stairway to heaven, and I am done with the fog and the mist in which the lost souls linger begging for someone to call a name.

“Besides, maybe Nabonidus has gone into the light. Maybe he’s mounted the stairs. He didn’t live his life in cruelty or
debauchery but devotion to a god who was not the god of his city, that’s all.

“I only saw him once, and that was during the last days of my life, and he was all caught up in the plot of course, and he seemed to me a dead man already, a King whose time had passed, and he seemed also blessed with an indifference to life. All he wanted, on that last day when we met, or that night, was that Babylon would not be sacked. That’s what everybody wanted. That’s how I lost my soul.

“But I’ll come to that awful part soon enough.

“I was talking about being alive. I didn’t give a damn about Nabonidus. We lived in the rich Hebrew quarter. It was filled with beautiful houses; we made the walls then about six feet thick, which I know sounds mad to you today, but you cannot imagine how effectively it kept our houses cool; they were sprawling affairs, with many anterooms and big dining rooms, and all these rooms surrounded a large central courtyard. My father’s house was four stories high and the wooden rooms above were full of cousins and the elderly aunts, and they often didn’t come all the way down to the yard, but merely sat in the open courtyard windows taking the breeze.

“The courtyard was Eden. It was like a small portion of the hanging gardens themselves, and the other public gardens all over the city. It was big. We had a fig tree, a willow tree, and two date palms, and flowers of all kinds, grape vines covering the arbor where we could take our evening meal, and fountains that never stopped sending their rivers of sparkling water down into the basins where the fish darted about like living jewels.

“The brickwork was glazed and beautiful, and had many figures in it, having been built by some Akkadian before us, before the Chaldeans came, and it was full of blue and red and yellow and, flowers, but there was also plenty of grass in the courtyard, and then the room off it where the ancestors were buried.

“I grew up playing among the date palms and flowers, and I loved it till the day…the day I died. I loved lying out there in the late afternoon listening to the water of the fountains, and
ignoring everybody who kept telling me I ought to be in the scriptorium copying psalms or some such. I wasn’t lazy by nature. I just sort of did what I wanted to do. I got away with things. But I wasn’t bad by any stretch; in fact, I was far and away the best scholar of the family, at least as I saw it, and many times, my uncles, though they didn’t want to admit it, would bring to me three versions of a Psalm by King David and ask me which I thought was the most nearly correct, and then they’d follow my judgment.

“We had no official gathering place for prayers, of course, because we had such grandiose plans for going home and building the Temple of Solomon all over again; I mean no one was going to throw up any little street-side temple in Babylon. The temple would have to be done according to sacred dimensions, and after I was dead and cursed and had become the Servant of the Bones, the Jews did go home and build that temple. In fact, I know they did, because I saw it once…once, as if in a fog, but I saw it.

“In our Babylonian life we gathered at private homes for prayers, and also for the elders among us to read the letters we received from the rebels still hiding on Mount Zion, and also the letters coming from our prophets in Egypt. Jeremiah was imprisoned there for a long time. I don’t remember anyone ever reading one of his letters. But I remember a lot of mad writing by Ezekiel. He didn’t write it down himself. He walked about talking and predicting and then other people wrote it down.

“But so we prayed, in our homes, to our invisible and all-powerful Yahweh—reminded always that before David promised him a temple, Yahweh and the Ark of the Covenant had been housed only in a tent, and that had its meaning and its value. Lots of the Elders thought the whole temple idea was Babylonian, you know. Go back to the tent.

“On the other hand, our family had for nine generations been rich merchants, city men, living in Nineveh before Jerusalem, I think, and we had little concept of the nomad life or carrying about shrines in tents. The story of Moses didn’t make a great deal of sense to us. For instance, how could the
people be so lost in the desert for forty years? But, I repeat myself, don’t I?…What am I saying…

“A tent to me was all the silk over my bed, the red-tinged light in which I lay with my hands cupped under my head talking to Marduk about the prayer meetings and listening to his jokes.

“At some of these prayer meetings we had our own prophets, whose books are lost now, who did a great deal of ranting and screaming. I was frequently pointed to, and told that I had found favor in the eyes of Yahweh, though what this meant nobody was certain.

“I guess they all knew in a way that I could see farther than others, look into souls, you know, see like a zaddik, a saint, but I was no saint, only an obstreperous young man.”

He stopped. The sharpness of memory seemed to cut him off and hold him.

“You were happy,” I said. “By nature, you were happy, truly happy.”

“Oh, yes, I knew it, and so did my friends. In fact, they often teased me about being too happy. Things never seemed all that difficult, you see. Things never seemed dark! Darkness came with death, and the worst darkness for me was right before it, and maybe…maybe even now. But darkness. Oh, to take on the world of darkness, that is like trying to chart the stars of heaven.

“What was I saying? Things were easy for me. I enjoyed them. For example, to be educated I had to work in the tablet house. I had to get a real Babylonian education. This was wise, this was for the future, this was for trade, this was to be a man of learning. And they beat the daylights out of us if we were late, or didn’t learn our lessons, but usually it was easy for me.

“I loved the old Sumerian. I loved writing out the whole stories of Gilgamesh and ‘In the Beginning’ and copying all kinds of records so that fresh tablets could be sent to other cities in Babylonia. I could practically speak Sumerian. I could now sit down and write for you my life in Sumerian—” He stopped. “No, I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t because if I
could have written my life, I wouldn’t have climbed up this snowy mountain to commit it to you…I can’t…I can’t.…write it in any tongue. Talking lets the pain flow…”

“That I understand perfectly, and am here to listen. The point is, you know Sumerian, and you can read it, and you can translate it.”

“Yes, yes, yes, and Akkadian, the language that had been used after, and the Persian which was creeping up on us all then, and Greek—I could read that well—and Aramaic which was taking the place of our own Hebrew in daily life, but then I wrote Hebrew too.

“I learnt my lessons. I wrote fast. I had a way of plunging the stylus into the clay that made everybody laugh but my writing was good. Really good. And I also loved to stand up and read out loud, so whenever the teacher took sick, or was called out, or suddenly needed some medicine, otherwise known as beer, I’d stand up and start reading Gilgamesh to everybody in an exaggerated voice, making them laugh.

“You know the old myth of course. And it’s important to our story, stupid and crazy as it is. Here is this king Gilgamesh and he is running wild around his city—on some tablets he is a giant, on others he is the size of a man. He behaves like a bull. He has the drums beaten all the time, which makes everybody unhappy. You’re not supposed to beat the drums except for certain reasons—to frighten spirits, to call to nuptials, you know.