G
We don’t know how, and under which circumstances they left from that place, whether they in fact abandoned the city and during which time frame. Whether they set out in stages, or all at once, if they moved somewhere else and to which place exactly, and if something happened to make them emigrate in a short span of time. We don’t even know whether a small number of them had stayed there until the end and when the last of them departed. We did not discover any evidence of resettlement within a reasonable distance. We concluded that the first phase’s population of about one hundred and fifty people kept growing rapidly and in a short time had rose to one thousand, then three, five and finally eight thousand approximately. The original settlement on the plain had started on the eastern mound and subsequently spread to the opposite side, to the place where at present the western mound is presently situated. The river crossed the dual community as a natural border and meeting point. Heading towards the settlement and following the course of the river, one could discern from a considerable distance the two mounds like a fork-shaped embankment of sizeable height, which contrasted with the almost perfectly flat plain that surrounded it, and also gave the vague impression of an inverted tooth. This impression may perhaps be more vivid now due to the almost complete lack of vegetation. By now, except for low xerophyte bushes, one notices only a few remaining trees of the cedar family, vestiges of forests that have been felled. Now, like then, on one side the ground seems to be more fertile, while on the other, at a distance of two miles approximately, we can discern a surface that is smooth and reflective like a mirror: a hypersaline lake and exactly beside it a complex network of pools. Salt ponds.
From the banks of the river, a slight incline begins and gradually the mounds gain in height. The eastern mound rises Seventy feet from the level of the riverbed, the western mound is visibly lower. To the east, the residential area was denser, and started six feet from the highest point of the canal level. The western settlement was more sparsely built and almost circular. Both had followed an unconventional vertical construction plan, as every new layer was built on top of the layer below it, and it was evident that either the houses had crumbled, or that they were demolished and built over, the new ones exactly above the earlier ones. After comparing the consecutive layers, we arrived at the conclusion that each house was almost the same as the one right below it, one would readily say it was a faithful copy, as if they had wished for the story of the previous house to continue seamlessly into the next. But again, we don’t know why they followed this practice, since some among those dwellings that were situated at a lower level appear to not have been demolished, they were well-preserved, they were simply filled in with dirt. It was evident that, for some unknown reason, they had covered them and then built exactly above them, as if the house had died and they buried it. On the eastern mound, moreover, where, as already mentioned, the construction grid was significantly denser, the houses were tangential and the walls of one house merged with the walls of the other. The ground plan evoked a curved honeycomb divided into square cells that covered the whole of the mound down to the foothills, a complex of open cubes slightly curved, and – more rarely – on the outskirts of the settlement, there were several houses whose external side was fairly wide but kept getting narrower as their walls converged, in a wedge-like shape, as it were. The general idea was always, of course, that, along the way, each new house would stand on the remains and rubble of the former ones and thus the settlement would grow in height. In the long run, the iteration of the vertical construction on top of the existing residential debris gave shape to the dual mound formations we observe today.
We were startled since the very beginning – and it still seems startling to us – by the lack of room of any kind between the houses. No streets at all, not even narrow passageways, and obviously, since there were no openings on the perimeter, the houses had neither doors nor windows. Each house was glued to its neighbor, as can be evinced from what I have mentioned earlier, with a door at the top end of a ladder as the sole way out, or, rather, a hatch that functioned as a door and opened and closed an aperture in the roofs of the building. From there they could go outside, this was the free public space, and the roofs, which were joined together, equally functioned as streets and as squares. Life happened on top of the city, not in it. On a summer night, one might perceive people sleeping up there, as they longed for some cool air to escape the heat. Or, on a quiet afternoon, crowds would gather there for some feast, cooking in outdoor ovens, talking, or eating, companies entertaining themselves, perhaps in a manner not unlike our own.
The houses, since they could not possibly have windows, except for those on the perimeter of the settlement, were only illuminated through the aperture on the roof, which also provided ventilation. A white shaft moved around like a beacon during the course of the day until evening, when the only available light was the glow of the hearth or the embers inside the oven. Above the oven a rope ladder extended diagonally to meet the aperture on the roof, from where the smoke came out when food was being cooked, and the heat in the summer. There was no other way out for the smoke and if the ceiling happened to be a little too low or the weather wasn’t cooperative, the situation would become quite unbearable; without windows, or a chimney, it would be impossible to resolve this problem, and as long as the fire kept burning the smoke would stay inside.
The rooms were not large, there were usually three in each house, one a bit wider than the others and two smaller ones. The smaller ones were mostly warehouses, with an entrance that was a simple opening placed approximately in the middle of the main room, oval or square, not more than thirty inches in height. In the main room – on average eighty square feet including the oven, and the hearth we mentioned above – the floor was slightly raised, clean and hard from repeated plastering. It looked as if the room were divided into three parallel sections of about the same size, the first containing the oven, the cooking utensils, and the ladder above leading up to the hatch, the second, in the middle of the room, a strip of free space, and the third with the low platforms, where they probably slept. The burials were located just below them.
Looking from a higher vantage point, one could distinguish, like clearings in a forest, the courtyards, every so often a cluster of houses overlooking them. Let’s say they were like small neighborhoods organized around these courtyards, that served as both toilets and a garbage dump, based on the remains of which we consistently found. Remnants of burnt food, reeds, shells, paleofeces containing worms’ eggs, as well as small clay animals that looked like toys. Here, too, the smell, especially on warmer days, would probably be hard to bear, or, upon second thought, just barely tolerable, as it would mingle with smoke from the main room.
In the main room, platforms and benches were embedded in the wall, and the graves we uncovered were exactly below them. Low platforms-beds and entrance to the underworld coexisted. How often did they have someone buried and then slept on the door of the grave? Rather often, as often as they died, and they died more often than we do. Under certain platforms we discovered more of them, in one case I remember fifty-two. The skeletons had to be separated for us to decode the customs of burial. Many were found sleeping on one side, with their knees bent next to what were once plants, probably flowers. Or they were wrapped in a carpet of reeds. The children were placed in baskets.
Imagine a child, a little girl, asleep in this bed. The wall next to her would be painted, mainly a red, now faded. And abstract shapes, we now don’t understand, a geometry that, for us, is deprived of meaning. And handprints. And animals. You can imagine the child waking up and staring at this animal, enormous in scale, much larger than the people surrounding it. Some are missing their head. The little girl gazes at the animal that has someone behind it pulling its tail. In front, she sees someone else who pulls its tongue. Maybe they are playing with him, this man gave him something to eat and when he stuck out his tongue, he grabbed it and pulled it.
On the adjacent wall, protruding figures, cones, perhaps a woman’s breasts, but mostly plaster animal heads and horns and, here, in the corner, a small doll in the shape of a human, again without a head, and the figurine of a four-legged animal, but we cannot say for sure what it is. The same as the ones we singled out in the trash, mixed in with a pile of shells. A toy, or maybe something else, but you can imagine this little girl taking it in her hand and using it as a seal on the fresh clay on the opposite wall, imprinting various shapes. Not too far from the point where she had noticed her mother, the other day, pouring water and pressing the jaw of an animal into the wet mortar, and then the girl went to ask her why she would do that. Her mother, or some other woman who lived in that place with them.
Over the years, the mound would grow, and the houses would crumble, or they demolished them and kept building upon them, one might say that by stepping on, or rather lying down with the dead, the living continued to climb ever higher. One might say that they all traveled upwards together.
At 42, there was this woman who was holding a head in her arms, it was for us a clearcut picture – nothing else was in there. At first, I thought it was definitely the head of a loved one, her dead husband maybe, the skin covered over with clay and painted red – indeed, we had discovered plenty of those. Then we determined it was a woman’s head. A woman holding the head of another: she was turned to the side and she held it in the angular cavity formed by the bones above her knees.
Again, in a niche on the wall, two more heads. Two heads, plus that of the girl, who approaches them, the girl, now a young lady, now an old woman. One more afternoon and the evening that falls, she takes one head in her hands, looks into the eyes for a while and puts it back in place. Maybe it was the one they put in her arms when they buried her. Or in the process of evacuating the city, they may have taken her along with them while she was still a child, she may have grown up elsewhere, or, she may have lived among the last inhabitants there, this might have been her only world, as well as this house. Or she may never have lived in this house. This is an image that does not stay long in the mind, many details are missing, nothing here really speaks, or tells personal stories. Our feelings belong entirely to us, they are no more than a rough set of stage directions in a simplified script. Which is a way, nevertheless, to connect and to understand, some shadows of moments from the life of a child whose eyes we borrow, as well as a way to organize the data. The hypothetical story assists us in reconstructing the scenery a little better. Since we are now the ones that uncovered this city, we must write this book. Just as one day someone else is bound to uncover the city to which we will return tonight, before we come again here tomorrow, to the holes we dug today, the ones being filled, and the others about to open, as we keep searching, dusting in the dirt and drawing a map of the injury and the orbit of the projectile, nudging the edge of the weapon the nearest we can to the wound.
ANDREW BARRETT is a translator and musician who lives in Detroit, Michigan. He translates from the Ancient Greek and Modern Greek languages. Currently, he is working with Greek poet and writer Dimitris Lyacos on Until the Victim Becomes our Own, the follow up to Lyacos’ Poena Damni trilogy. Andrew was also one of forty translators that contributed to a new translation of the Dionysiaca of Nonnus, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2022. He teaches Greek mythology at Wayne State University.
DIMITRIS LYACOS Dimitris’s Poena Damni trilogy is one of the best-selling and most highly regarded works of contemporary European poetry in translation. Developed as a work in progress over the course of three decades the trilogy was published in its final form in English in 2018, when Lyacos was also mentioned for a Nobel Prize in Literature. Poena Damni has been translated in 20 languages and has given rise to sister projects across various artistic media. Renowned for combining, in a genre-defying form, themes from literary tradition with elements from ritual, religion, philosophy and anthropology, Poena Damni reexamines grand narratives in the context of some of the enduring motifs of the Western Canon. New editions are forthcoming in Brazil (Relicario) and Turkey (CAN) in 2023.
NELSON LOWHIM was born in Tanzania. He’s also lived in India and all over the United States. He’s an army Veteran currently living in Seattle with his wife. He has several short stories, non-fiction essays and art pieces published. You can find more of his work at nelsonlowhim.blogspot.com.