Twilight in Babylon (48 page)

Agog describes Cheftu’s expression, Chloe thought. Then she remembered—he’d never even seen the Eiffel Tower—it was built eighty years after he left France. They’d seen huge, impressive buildings before, gold-covered or emblazoned with jewels, majestic in their sprawl and simplicity, but never tall.

The building was
tall.

They reached the outskirts of the tent city. No one stopped them, or even seemed to notice them as they walked through. Again, Chloe was struck by her understanding every word everyone said. Gossip, arguments, children’s bribes, jokes. “It’s the beginning of the day here?” she asked Cheftu. Despite the lack of sun, these people were all acting like it was morning. Washing, dressing, eating, and setting off for the structure.

Smells of scalded milk and urine mixed with the sweet aroma of the palm groves and the fetid smell of the river. A group of women were doing laundry in the water. A small group of boys gathered fallen straw among the grasses. Oxen and onagers, goats and sheep; every ten steps or so, there was a miniature barnyard.

Garbage piled up everywhere. Beside tents, behind them. Blood stained the dirt, offal, human and animal, provided a minefield for walking. Chloe saw the flicker of rats’ tails and the scurrying insects as they fought to stay alive in this chronologically confused world.

Cheftu’s expression had become almost a sneer as he fought against the smells, which grew worse and worse. Chloe gave up and covered her mouth with a cloth. They’d passed through the tents, now people were just camped under the sky—no shelter at all. “They sleep under the sun?” she asked Cheftu.

“They obviously have no leadership,” he said with disgust. “This place is infested.”

They were at the foot of the building. And they were wrong. A group of men organized the mass of workers into sections, and each had a different assignment: carrying bricks to the structure; carrying them up the dirt road that ran parallel to the structure; slicking the just-laid bricks with bitumen; hauling bitumen. And a dozen tasks in between.

The foreman saw Cheftu and assigned him brick duty immediately. “We just arrived,” Cheftu said. “Who is in charge?”

“Of the Esagila?”

“Is that what this is?”

“Sure is. Next time a flood comes, we’ll all be able to hide on the structure and the gods won’t be able to wipe us out. Floodwaters will never get that high. Are you ready to work?”

“I’d like to, uh, settle in, speak to someone about what you are doing here.”

“We’re building a mountain to hide on, that’s what we’re doing here. Are you interested in being a day person or a night person?”

“What do you mean?” Chloe asked.

He sighed and barked a few orders at a ragtag group of men and boys who were hauling bitumen. “Do you know how to work ovens?” he asked Chloe.

“Uh, yes.”

“Good, one more for the ovens,” he said, and made a crude mark on his clay. It wasn’t filled with writing, just the most basic scrawls for counting.

“What did you mean?” Chloe asked again.

“You came in from the south?”

They nodded.

“Keep going, around the base of the Esagila. You’ll come to the other camps.”

“There’s more?” Chloe asked.

The man went back to his job. Chloe and Cheftu meandered away.

“Don’t forget to tell them at the ovens!” the foreman shouted.

They walked around the western side of the structure and found the brickmakers. A portion of the river had been hewn out, and a mud pit put in. What looked like miles of bricks were drying, laid out as far as the eye could see. Even in the dark, men and women trudged straw into the mud, and others slung the mud into forms, then hauled those forms out to dry.

“The rains start soon,” Cheftu said. “They have to work while they can.”

“I’ve never known a Middle Eastern culture that was nocturnal,” Chloe said. “The Bedouin travel at night, but only sometimes and… my God, there are a lot of people here.” They had to step carefully to avoid the rats, the sewage, the garbage, and a few dozing people. The reflection of the copper plates wasn’t as strong here, but still daylight-powered.

They walked on.

In one moment, they were in false twilight, the next was pure nightfall.

The Esagila cast a shadow over the sleeping side, and except for the glow in the sky, you would never guess the hubbub on the other side. Tents, another sea. A few flickering fires, whinnies and snorts, but all in all, a sleeping town. They couldn’t see much, but they could smell it.

“What are these people eating?” she asked. “There are so many of them.”

“The eastern side must be fields,” Cheftu said. “Those ovens he mentioned, they must be to feed these people.” Here, they could tell morning, natural morning, was approaching.

Chloe’s second—ninth?—wind had worn off. She was dead on her feet. “It stinks.”

“Truth,” Cheftu said vehemently. “Shall we keep walking around and see if it smells better on the other side?”

“They don’t have garbage pits? Latrines?” In the military, designation of those two locations was priority one in the job of setting up camp. “There’s no organization.”

“Not in the community,” Cheftu said. Keeping close to the base, they walked on.

By the time the sun had risen, they were on the eastern side. More tents. More of a brick factory. And the ovens—were not for food—but for bricks. They walked along a path, lined with baked bricks, painted and waiting to be set. “Facing bricks?” Chloe said, pointing to the colors that corresponded to all the stepped temples she’d seen. She couldn’t see the top, so she didn’t know how many levels the Esagila had, but she could see from the ground, they’d only made bricks for four levels, thus far.

“What are these people eating?” Cheftu asked.

By tacit agreement they walked through this side of the tent city until they were out of range of smell and sound. The Esagila was revealed by the dawn’s light, piercing the pastel dawn. “That’s just amazing,” Chloe said. “There’s some organizing going on, somewhere.”

“They’re not dead,” a voice said, sotto voce. “They aren’t buggy.”

“They aren’t working,” another voice said. “If you don’t work, you die.”

Chloe opened her eyes, just a crack. Two children stood looking at her and Cheftu. One had a bucket, the other had a basket. They couldn’t be six years old.

She moved.

They screamed and ran off, dropping their bucket and basket in the process.

“They’ll be back,” Cheftu said as he stretched and yawned.

They came back, with adult reinforcements. The men’s questions weren’t rude, but they were brusque. Who were they? Why were they there? What skills could they lend? Cheftu was designated as a workman and Chloe got oven duty.

“What about food, shelter?” Cheftu asked.

“You use what you have,” the men said. “Glean from the palms, the fields, or someone will sell you food, I’m sure.”

“We—” Chloe started, but Cheftu put a hand on her arm.

“Does it matter where we pitch our tent?”

“Wherever you can stand the smell of the shit,” one of them said. “Your shift starts in two double hours. You work for twelve, so get settled before then.”

After they left, Chloe and Cheftu pondered what to do. The plan had been to meet Nimrod, and everyone else, here, at Bab-ili. Neither of them wanted to stay, but it didn’t look like they could stay and not work, and if they left, they would never find Nimrod. They could backtrack, and risk running into the
lugal’s
soldiers.

“A few days of work won’t kill us,” Chloe said. “It can’t be that bad, or this many people wouldn’t be here.”

Fourteen hours later, she wanted to rip her tongue out from those words. As she trudged through the tent camp to the perch they’d shared, she saw why people just slept out in the shadow of the Esagila and let life take place around them.

She was exhausted. Every muscle, every joint, every tendon. The ovens handled thousands upon thousands of bricks a day. These were the facing bricks. In her dreams, Chloe worked up to being a painter and getting to sit most of the day. Otherwise, her job was kneeling to pick up as many bricks as she could carry—about eight, at five pounds apiece—then walking them to the painter, kneeling to unload them, stacking them for ease to the painter, then kneeling to pick up dry ones and carrying them to the wheelbarrow that would take them to the side where they needed to be. Then back to the ovens.

Chloe had always been thin, fit, she’d kept up her regimen from the military in the years she’d lived in Jerusalem, but this was something new. And on a mostly empty stomach. A friendly coworker had told her about some date palms. Dates, Chloe thought. That’s why the camp smells so bad, everyone’s stomach is sick from green dates. And it was true… everywhere, piles. Flies, rats, bugs—she was glad her shift had been in daylight so she could at least pick her steps carefully. This was the most repulsive environment she’d ever lived in.

On her stumbling path home she’d seen two or three fights break out over space, about water and fires. Spectators stood and cheered as the opponents’ words turned to violence. When both were unconscious, the fight was over.

We’re living like rats,
Chloe thought as she left the tent city and collapsed on the spot—she thought—where Cheftu had been. Cool fell a while later—nighttime. Cheftu showed up with some raw grain and… dates. Not green, but only slightly. “We’ve never had this conversation before, but I’m going to dig a hole and—” she started.

“We don’t need to have this conversation now,” Cheftu said. “I’ll dig the hole. You sleep.”

When she woke up with a stomachache and diarrhea, he pointed her toward the hole. Water, at least, was plentiful.

After three days, Chloe had reached tolerance level. Her diarrhea had turned into something else and she feared dehydration. On the fourth morning, she didn’t get up.

“I think you have dysentery,” Cheftu said. “We have to get you out of here.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “At least in Kish, you would have food and shelter.
Chérie,
I am so sorry to have put us in this position, I—”

She put a finger to his lips. Her hand felt almost too heavy to lift. Dysentery was serious, even in the twentieth century. “It was my suggestion.”

“God did not bring us here to die in this stupid stinking hole,” he said. “Building some fool’s dream of escaping the gods’ punishment! We’ll head north, I don’t care if we find Nimrod or not. I’m not going to let you… get sicker.”

She was falling asleep, or passing out. They felt the same. She heard Cheftu say he’d be back; he was going to find someone in authority.

Her dreams were horrible: roaches crawling on each other, fighting for room. Rats turning on each other because of hunger. Chloe woke, it was dark, Cheftu was still gone. She crawled to her hole. Cheftu found her there. “We’re saved,” he said. “I found the designers of everything! We can live with them and be above all of this.”

Sounds lovely,
she thought.

“They have work for us, not slave labor, but skilled tasks. Chloe—
chérie,
is that blood?”

She nodded.

*      *     *

Chloe woke up in a different world.

Inside the Esagila.

There wasn’t sunlight, but there were sesame-oil torches burning and a fresh bed of palm fronds. Her clothes, filthy beyond belief, were gone, replaced with a new woolen skirt. Cheftu had bread for her, beer.

She was too weak to lift her head.

“It’s an apartment building,” she said in amazement when he told her where they were. “The haves stay inside, the have-nots, out?”

“It is completely different here,” he said. His voice was less sure than she recalled.

“It’s certainly luxurious. What’s troubling you?”

He smiled and patted her clasped hands. “Nothing, now that you are well.”

“Where did the food come from?”

He didn’t meet her eyes. “Bartering.”

“With what? Because of my wisdom, we don’t have anything.”

He grunted. “I have to leave, to work.”

“What are you doing?”

He kissed her cheek and left.

Leaving Chloe puzzled, but too relieved to pursue it.

She was up and around in a few days. Considerably thinner—and most of what she’d lost was muscle off of the marsh girl’s lean body. There was no way to see what was going on; claustrophobia clawed at her. She begged Cheftu to take her out, or with him to work.

They climbed twenty flights of stairs from their rooms, to reach the opening to the outdoors. Chloe fought vertigo. She could see all of Bab-ili, and much of the plain, from here. Wind threatened to carry them both away, so Cheftu held her around the waist as they looked around.

“This can’t be Iraq,” she said. “Look at it.”

Green, blue river, and green. At the edges of the green, she saw a swath of silver before the desert began. Mostly, green. “Turn around,” he said.

“Oh no.”

It became so clear, instantly. How Iraq became the barren wasteland. A whole forest of palms had been cut, the light wood was perfect for making molds for brick, for the infrastructure of buildings, for firewood, for looms, for arrows. The bark could be shoes, or flooring, or roofing, or stripped into fiber for ropes, or soles, or thread. On the outskirts of the northern and eastern tent cities, was another. A logging city.

Palm trunks looked like toothpicks from her position, but Chloe could see where the soil was eroding without them to anchor it. “What’s the silver?” she asked.

“Salt.”

Fortunately, the wind had blown the oil cloud away from them, though Chloe knew it would come back—in just a few weeks, after it had wreaked destruction on the rest of the world.

Thousands of people worked on the building, lived in their tents and beneath the sun. They scurried and stumbled. Chloe wanted to cry. “We can’t stay here, Cheftu. There isn’t enough space for everyone. Even when they finish this, it’s not going to accommodate all these people.”

“It’s not designed to,” he said. His tone was grim. “You don’t want to know,
chérie.
Trust me.”

“Why are we here? Where can we go?”