Raymond Khoury - The Sanctuary

Ramez had driven her down to the village that morning. He was from a nearby town himself. An elderly local man, the only villager to have stayed in Zabqine during the bombing — it had left him half-deaf — had led them up the carpet of shattered masonry to the remains of the small mosque. Even though Ramez had described it to her, the sight that greeted her when they finally reached the hilltop was still unsettling.

The mosque’s green dome had somehow survived the bombs that had wrecked the rest of the small, stone structure. It just sat there, propped up bizarrely on top of the debris, a surreal installation that only war can conjure up. The shredded strips of what once was the mosque’s red carpet fluttered eerily from the bare branches of nearby trees.

In pulling down the mosque’s walls, the bombs had ripped the earth open, revealing a crevasse under its rear boundary, and exposing a previously hidden chamber underneath. The biblical frescoes on its walls, though faded and eaten away by time, were unmistakable. It was a pre-Islamic church, buried under the mosque. According to the Bible, the coast was well traveled by Jesus and his followers and was dotted with relics from biblical times. The church of St. Thomas, close by in Tyre, was built on what was thought to be the oldest church anywhere on record, a first-century edifice built by Saint Thomas upon his return from Cyprus. But Islam had swept over the region in the late seventh century, and many places of worship had been supplanted and taken over by the new faithful.

Poking around a Shi’ite shrine for the remnants of another, earlier faith wasn’t going to be easy, especially not now, with the war still a fresh, gaping wound, and with emotions running even higher than they normally were.

Evelyn had imagined the day would be challenging.

But not in this way.

A gale of disappointment swept through her. She looked at Farouk with undisguised sadness in her eyes. “What are you doing, Farouk?” she asked softly. “You know me better than this.”

The Polaroids in Evelyn’s hands showed hastily taken images of artifacts, treasures of a bygone age, relics from the cradle of civilization: cuneiform tablets, cylinder seals, alabaster and terra-cotta figurines, pottery vessels. She’d seen many similar shots since American troops had stormed into Baghdad in 2003 and international outrage had erupted over their failure to secure the city’s museum and other sites of cultural importance. Looters had run amok, accusations of inside jobs and political machinations were made, withdrawn, and reinstated, and estimates of the number of stolen objects had rocketed up and down with breathless unreliability. One thing was certain: Treasures dating back thousands of years had undeniably been stolen, some had been returned, but most were still missing.

“Please, Sitt Evelyn—” Farouk pleaded.

“No,” she cut him off harshly, pushing the Polaroids back into his hands. “Come on. You’re bringing me these — what? You really expect me to buy them or help you sell them?”

“Please,” he repeated softly. “You have to help me. I can’t go back there. Here.” He was hectically going through them, looking for something. “Look at this.”

Evelyn noticed his yellowed fingers were shaking. She studied his face, his body language — he was clearly frightened, as he should be. Smuggling ancient artifacts out of Iraq carried some rather severe penalties, penalties that could prove fatal depending on which side of what border one was apprehended on. But something was nagging at her. Admittedly, she didn’t know this man intimately and hadn’t seen him in years, but she thought she had a pretty good handle on understanding people and what they were made of, and for him to stoop to participating in the pillaging of his country, a country she remembered him caring about deeply…Then again, she hadn’t lived through several bloody overthrows and three major wars, and all the horrors in between. She reined in her judgmental instincts and had to admit she no idea of what his life must have been like since she last saw him. And what desperate measures people resorted to in order to survive.

He pulled a couple of shots from the pack and his eyes settled on her again. “Here.”

She watched him as she drew a calming breath, nodded, and turned her attention to the photographs he was handing her.

The first shot showed several old codices lying flat on what looked like a table. Evelyn examined it more closely. Without being able to look inside the books, it was hard to tell how old they were. The region had such a rich history, pretty much a continuous parade of civilizations stretching over several thousand years. A few telltale details, however, hinted at their age: They had cracked leather covers, some of them gold-tooled and others stamped with geometric designs, mandorla medallions, and pendants. Ridges running over the lacings across their spines were also clearly visible, all of it placing the books as pre — fourteenth century. Which made them potentially very, very attractive to museums and collectors.

She moved on to the second shot and froze with a chill of recognition. She brought the photograph up closer, studying it intently, her fingers brushing over it in a futile attempt to make it clearer, her mind trying to swim through the deluge of memories that the image had triggered: It showed an ancient codex, sitting innocently between two other old books. Its tooled-leather cover cracked and dusty. The leather envelope flap of the back cover was extended out. A distinctive feature of medieval Islamic books, it was normally tucked in under the front cover when the book was closed, used as a bookmark as well as to preserve and protect its pages.

Taken at face value, there was nothing remarkable about the old book, except for the symbol tooled into its cover: the ringlike, circular motif of a snake feeding on its own tail.

Evelyn’s eyes shot up to meet Farouk’s gaze. She couldn’t fire off the words fast enough. “Where did you find these?”

“I didn’t. Abu Barzan, an old friend of mine, did. He also deals in antiquities. He has a small shop in Al-Mawsil,” Farouk explained, using the Arabic name for the town Mosul, a couple of hundred miles northeast of Baghdad. “Nothing illegal, you know, only what we were allowed to sell, under Saddam.” Exporting the most valued antiquities, preinvasion, was the exclusive turf of Ba’ath Party officials. The rabble — the rest of the population — were left to fight over the crumbs. “Saddam had informants everywhere, as you know. Now it’s different, of course. Anyway, my friend came to see me in Baghdad, around a month ago. He goes around the north, to old villages, looking for pieces. He’s half-Kurd, and when he’s there, he conveniently forgets his half-Sunni side, and they open their houses to him. Anyway, he’d come across these pieces — you know how it is now. It’s a huge mess. Total chaos. Bombs, killings, death squads…People running around scared, doing what they have to do to keep out of danger and put bread on the table. Selling what they can, especially now that they can sell them openly. But there aren’t many buyers, not inside Iraq anyway. Anyway, Abu Barzan had this collection he was trying to sell. He wanted to leave the country, settle somewhere safe — we all do — but it takes money. So he was asking around, quietly, looking for a buyer. He knew I had some good contacts outside the country. He offered to split the proceeds with me.”

Farouk lit up another cigarette, glancing around furtively as he did.

“Anyway, I thought of you when I saw the Ouroboros,” he added, reaching out and tapping the snapshot of the codex. “I called around to see if anyone knew where you were. Mahfouz Zacharia—”