Tomáš Zmeškal - A Love Letter in Cuneiform

“Before sunset we reached the valley, and the first village was in sight. Judging from the houses, it looked to be a settlement of about two hundred souls. It was divided down the middle by a narrow river with a bridge arching across it, whose pillars were adorned with decorations of an exquisiteness I had never seen before except in Baghdad as a child, when I went there on my first business trip with my father. But my main concern was to find a doctor. In fact there were two in the village. At first neither of them would agree to see her, explaining that we were foreigners and according to their custom they weren’t permitted to visit foreigners after sunset. When I offered them money, one of them accepted and went off to treat my wife. The other just shrugged and started back to his home. Wanting to be sure my wife would live, however, I proceeded to break a few of his ribs to make him understand that I wasn’t about to leave my most precious flower in the hands of a single village healer. After changing her dressings, brewing her a tea of medicinal herbs, and rubbing her down with ointment, they realized that all their friends and loved ones were imprisoned in two rooms at the local inn, which I had occupied with my men. I told them in no uncertain terms that if my wife died, she would not die alone. That was all I had to explain, and I doubled my guard in the evening.

“The next morning, awaking from dreams in which I tried first to persuade and then to bribe Azrael, the archangel of death, with several years of my life in exchange for the life of my wife, I went for a walk and spied one of the healers bathing my wife’s shawl in the river under the bridge. I was infuriated. Only my brother kept me from beating him to death. That was their treatment? I was enraged! Pleading and wailing, the healers’ families tried to convince me that the water under the bridge had healing properties. I didn’t really believe it until the next day, when the skin on the healer’s face was once again fresh as a newborn’s, bearing no trace of my fists or my boots.

“Before I went to sleep that night, I quietly entered the room where my wife lay sick. I prayed for her, truly at my wit’s end as to what I might promise God in return for her life. I had already offered mine long ago, but it seemed that was too little. I reflected on it a while, then went for a walk at the foot of the mountains and checked up on my guards. The next morning I waited outside my wife’s door for her to wake up, and when I heard her softly singing her favorite song, I walked in and saw that she had been restored to health. Her hair sparkled, her skin glowed the way it used to, and as I quietly surprised her with a hug and a kiss, I saw the shine had come back to her eyes, almost too bold and as ever before with a tinge of vanity, thank God, whose power is invincible. I paid the healers and set their families free. They bowed their heads to the ground, having never seen so much money before, since they were even poorer than us. A few hours later they came back, saying they didn’t want to keep it all. So I told them to give it to those worse off than them, and they walked away with a lighter step, fully satisfied.

“I stayed in the village a few more days with my people and goods, wanting to be entirely certain my wife was cured, then we set out from the village across the bridge to one of the roads stretching south through the nearest pass. We set off at dawn with no one around for miles except the innkeeper’s son, whom we had hired as a guide to lead us to the pass. As we were crossing the bridge, the horses got spooked and reared up in panic. Seeing that my wife was in danger of being thrown by the dapple gray, I leaped down from my horse and scooped her up amid the crush of people, four-legged beasts, and goods. As she gazed at me in gratitude, one of the horses swung its rump around and knocked me off the bridge into the water. I was lucky. If he had kicked me, I wouldn’t have come out of it alive. The river was shallow under the bridge, so I waded out, climbed back in the saddle, and we went along our way. In a few hours I was dry. But I couldn’t fail to notice that our guide’s behavior had changed. He looked deeply alarmed when he saw me fall in the river. ‘I’m right here next to you, friend,’ I told him. ‘Nothing wrong with me. Just a little dip in your healing waters, that’s all.’ The glummer he looked, the harder I laughed. The expression on his face even lifted the corners of my wife’s mouth in a smile. He asked if my whole body had gotten wet. I said yes. He asked if my head had gone under as well. Again I answered yes. ‘Then God have mercy on you,’ he said. ‘How come?’ I asked. ‘The water of four streams flows into this river,’ he said. ‘Scholars say this river is the last remainder of the Garden of Eden, which according to the holy books was located here on our lands near the border of Armenia. And that means,’ the voice of the innkeeper’s son rose to a tone of desperation, ‘that the water of this river causes immortality. As a result of the world’s corruption, its power has been diminished, but if you immerse your whole body in it, it is said you cannot evade immortality.’ I tried to correct him, pointing out that we talk about evading an enemy’s sword, or a deadly illness, or a bullet, but not immortality. ‘God, have mercy on him, for he knows not the power of your deeds,’ said our guide. He lowered his eyes to the dusty road and the first spring flowers breaking through the patches of melting snow, and didn’t lift them again. ‘Superstitions,’ said my brother. ‘Nothing but the superstitions of backward folk who have no idea there are wars raging and governments falling all around them every day. All they’ve got is their old, uncultivated minds.’ He laughed so hard he almost fell off his horse. Superstitions … I laughed along with him. We reached the pass, bribed the guards, and crossed over the border. We were in Persia now. The path to Tabriz was wide open.

“I bought a house in Tabriz, my wife bore me several children, I founded a business, and my brother and I sold goods all over Persia, Turkey, and Armenia. It felt like my family had finally begun to flourish. Then one day, on the outskirts of Baghdad, we were negotiating the price of turmeric with another buyer, when he began regaling me and my brother with criticism. Finally he said, ‘Your older brother is the one who should be running your business, not you.’ I just laughed in his face, but the next day at the market I looked in one of the mirrors they had on display for sale and froze. My brother’s hair was streaked with silver, but not mine. His hair was thinning, but not mine. Every day my brother’s skin was creased with a new set of wrinkles, while mine remained the same. In horror I mounted my horse, which by the time I reached home had been run ragged, like all the others before it. I opened the door, knocked over the servant, and dashed with a trembling heart up to my wife’s room, seized her in my arms and carried her out to the balcony to count her wrinkles in the full midday light. She laughed aloud but then began to choke on her laughter, baffled by the meaning of my behavior. The number of wrinkles on her face had increased since our last journey, since her illness and the births of our children. She had lines that hadn’t been there the year before, laugh lines and lines of worry, lines of surprise and amazement, lines from determined prayer, from gritting her teeth while making love and from naughty gossip and women’s talk. I took the biggest mirror we had in the house and held it up to my face. Again I froze, transfixed in horror, then I smashed it to pieces. My face hadn’t changed over the past few autumns. All the scars I had acquired were fully healed. I could no longer even find them. The number of wrinkles on my face was still the same. Now I realized what had happened: I had become immortal, I was cursed. Doomed to see the death of the one dearest to me, my beloved wife. Doomed to see her change into an old woman and deprived of the chance to repose beside her in my old age. Doomed to see my brother, my children, my friends and enemies, transformed into a host of shadows led away by the archangel Azrael, while I alone remained the same, unchanged, cursed. May God, whose majesty knows no bounds, forgive me my pride and suffer me to wash away my sins. May God, who is eternal, grant me to see the end of my days.