"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.
3
"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.