Tomáš Zmeškal - A Love Letter in Cuneiform

And then one day it occurred to me — all important things occur to people one day, or at least that’s what they always write — that there were still languages that hadn’t been deciphered. Professor Hrozný had done it; maybe I could, too. I still remember what she said when I told her. “That would be fabulous, Josef. That would be absolutely, positively fabulous.” We had just been swimming in the pool at Žluté lázně, and maybe it was the way her hair was blowing in the wind that made what she said seem so attractive. Maybe I wanted to impress her. Yes, I wanted to impress her. I wanted to be with her, in the realm of her imagination with her hair blowing in the wind. And unlikely as it may sound, I must admit some limitations on my part as well. It had never crossed my mind before that there might be languages that hadn’t been deciphered. Even with a star like Professor Hrozný there in front of us the whole time, even with all the newspapers reporting his latest discoveries in the Middle East, even with all that going on, right in broad daylight, so to speak, it had never dawned on me personally. Květa and I had been once or twice to public lectures by our famous professor. I sat beside her, looking at her, and as we were walking home I realized I had no idea what the lecture had been about. All I knew was it was the closest I had ever been to being jealous. The professor had had her undivided attention for forty minutes. As we walked home, she was in a wonderful mood, cheerful and sweet, laughing the entire way. I couldn’t concentrate at all. And that’s when it came to me: I would try to decipher a language! Květa and I could do it together. Needless to say, as soon as I had this bold idea, my very next thought was that I was indulging in dangerous fantasy. Nevertheless, I was intrigued by the idea. It was childish in the same way as wanting to walk through ancient catacombs, or trying to discover treasure on a deserted island. Today I can see, even if I was unable to admit it at the time, that I felt a bit like Abbé Faria and the Count of Monte Cristo crossed with Heinrich Schliemann, the discoverer of Troy. I beg you not to judge me too harshly, Lieutenant. All I wanted was to impress a woman, a feeling that was new to me. I had never had much of an imagination before, so the idea excited me. Without mentioning it to Květa, then, I attempted to find out how one went about deciphering an unknown language. I knew nothing about it, but my sense was it had nothing to do with static calculations, a subject I had always mastered with flying colors. Eventually, by way of a few subtle questions, I learned that cracking a language would impress Květa even more than I had initially thought. I still had a memory of the photo I had seen in a biography of Heinrich Schliemann. He was wearing a black suit and his wife, Sophia, stood beside him, adorned in jewelry thousands of years old, which they had discovered together. I wanted to give Květa something, something extraordinary, stupendous. Something entirely beyond my capabilities and strength. Foolish, obviously; how could it be otherwise? It is foolish to try to express affection and love.

I got started. The first thing I learned was that everyone who ever deciphered anything was a brilliant linguist. I was neither brilliant nor a linguist. All of them were proficient in their own mother tongues. I was proficient in mine. All of them were proficient in the languages of Europe’s great powers: unfortunate German, elegant French, and imprecise English, as well as the dead languages Latin and Greek; some also knew the languages of the Old Testament. The stupidity of my endeavor was gradually revealed to me. Nevertheless I didn’t give up. After all, I knew from the start it wouldn’t be easy. The most important thing is a system, I told myself. A system and accurate, logical thinking. Somehow I neglected to pay attention to what they said between the lines about brilliance and intuition. I had a new hobby. Having a hobby was in itself a new and fascinating experience. Unfortunately, history intruded on our lives as it had on the lives of the ancient Hittites. The times we lived in were all too interesting: a brief, frantic two-year run of democracy after the war, followed by a communist putsch. I was allowed to work a while still and then I was arrested. The reason is irrelevant now. What does it matter when my marriage to the only woman I ever loved is ruined? I don’t harbor much hope that anything can be repaired in my case, at my age. I would just like us to be able to forgive each other. Or rather, for me to be able to forgive, since after all, I can’t speak for her. I would like to be free of the bitterness that eats at my heart. I would like to forgive. And now forgive an old man for taking up your time with his blather. If you are losing time, I am losing my mind. I loved her alone, which is probably seen as something of a material defect nowadays. I come from a different time, though, a time that is on its way out. In fact, it is nearly dead and gone. I could still afford the luxury of not choosing from one of the other options.

I was arrested, taken away, and when they brought me to the interrogation room and sat me down, there was Hynek sitting across from me. Hynek Jánský, my dearest friend, my tennis partner. A polished attorney at law. First he tried to convince me to sign something, then he begged, then he swore up and down, and then he practically started crying: “Josef, dear Josef, my friend, if you don’t do what I ask, there are others who will come after me. And they will be like wild animals. That’s how they are, believe me. I know them and they will kill you. You won’t survive even one session, Josef. We both know that. Even the bravest hero couldn’t stand up to them, and you and me, we’re no heroes. We’re just ordinary men, tennis partners.” And he was right. I never have been a hero. But at first I didn’t sign. I hadn’t yet realized that it wasn’t just about me. It all happened so fast, it hadn’t hit me yet. The arrest happened so suddenly I had trouble getting my bearings. And he was right, the ones who came after him really were like wild animals. What he neglected to tell me was that they were at his command. Little by little, I saw my friend Hynek change before my eyes into Ullikummi. Ullikummi, a giant made of stone, was also deaf and blind. His father, the Hurrian god Kumarbi, made him that way so he wouldn’t be susceptible to beauty or compassion. If you want to know more, by the way, you can read the Kumarbi cycle of myths. But at any rate, Kumarbi was the father of all the Hittite gods, until he was dethroned as ruler, for reasons that are beside the point now. In order to regain his throne, he fathered several monsters, including Ullikummi, whom he spawned by having intercourse with a rock. Once he was born, Kumarbi deposited his hell-spawn on the shoulder of the god Upelluri, who stood in the netherworld holding up the earth and sky, kind of like our Atlas. Nothing could move Upelluri. He was oblivious to everything. He noticed nothing even when heaven and earth were separated and cut apart from each other with a copper saw. A deed that shook the universe. A deed that made worlds wonder whether they would crumble into atoms. A deed that caused the gods to stop breathing and their hearts to pause in flight. And because Upelluri alias Atlas felt none of this, Lieutenant, Kumarbi placed his spawn, the stone monster Ullikummi, on Upelluri’s shoulder. And indeed, Upelluri felt no pain until Ullikummi started to grow. After fifteen days the stone giant towered all the way up to the sky, and the god of the sun noticed him, and then all the other gods saw he was there and were seized with panic and dismay. They called for the storm god, but even he didn’t dare do anything, and so his sister Ishtar, who was possessed of many womanly charms, decided she would enchant the stone giant. Kumarbi, however, had counted on this, which was why he begat his son from a rock, creating Ullikummi deaf, blind, and devoid of feeling. The storm god set in motion a sort of general mobilization, calling up thunderbolts, gale winds, hailstones, and his two sacred bulls, but good fortune was not on his side, Lieutenant. Teshub the storm god and his seventy godly allies lost the battle. Ullikummi continued to grow, threatening the storm god’s palace itself, a place where all dreaded to set foot. It was forbidden even to mention, and its master could be spoken of only in riddles, never by name, lest its owner be summoned. Ullikummi was threatening the palace of the storm god, his shadow covering more and more of the land as he grew. The sun god had to change his path for fear of Ullikummi, leading whole landscapes to perish for lack of sunshine. The lack of sun caused hunger, misery, and death, but the gods were even more fearful than the people, because they had more to lose and Ullikummi was growing without end. The gods, yes, the very gods themselves were at a loss, and so they had no choice but to seek the advice of Ea, god of wisdom. Nowadays they would call in a consulting firm for an assessment, but different country, different customs, as they say, Lieutenant. Now, when the god of wisdom realized that Ullikummi was growing on the shoulder of Upelluri, he consulted the ancient annals for guidance and learned that he had to cut Ullikummi off, detach him from Upelluri, using the same tool that had once been used to cut apart heaven and earth. This all happened in Hittite myth in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago, and the name of the deaf, blind, and unfeeling stone giant, Ullikummi, sounded so harmless to me, so onomatopoetic, so innocent, just like the name of my erstwhile friend and tennis partner, Hynek — an outstanding amateur tennis player who I later found out had denounced tennis as a bourgeois sport and played it only in secret — a friend of mine and my family’s, my friend Ullikummi. And then all of a sudden my friend Ullikummi explained to me that I was just a harmless fool, a regular idiot, if I couldn’t see that this wasn’t at all about me, but part of a master plan of tyranny and revenge by one set of people against another. It was under way even as we spoke, and my role in it was negligible. He said that if I didn’t sign the statement they had prepared for me and learn it by heart, it would only take one call for them to bring in my wife as well, and who was going to take care of my little daughter then? He spoke with his back facing me. It was springtime and we could see a cherry tree blossoming in the yard out the window. But I knew, I could feel, that he was savoring the effect of his words on me and the fear that they evoked. He knew he just had to mention two names, just a casual comment — Oh, say, by the way, how are Květa and your dear daughter Alice? — and I would do whatever he wanted, whatever they wanted me to. Anything. I still couldn’t believe my senses. Which for that matter by that point were considerably damaged. By then I could hear in only one ear anyway, because when they fire a gun off next to your ear, it’s not just the pain and the pulsing of blood and the earthquake that shatters your body, from your spine to your muscles and spilling into your capillaries … by then I just couldn’t believe that what I was hearing was the voice of my friend Hynek proposing blackmail to me. I didn’t know and I couldn’t understand, because no one had bothered to tell me that at some point along the way he had changed into Ullikummi. Into a blind stone giant who had come to destroy me, and keep on destroying me, blind and deaf and heartless, with no concept of love or beauty, let alone compassion or friendship.