There Are Rivers in the Sky

by Elif Shafak

Ashurbanipal loves stories. He believes that, in order to succeed as a leader, you do not have to embark on a perilous journey like Gilgamesh. Nor do you have to become a conquering warrior of brawn and sinew. Nor do you have to traverse mountains, deserts and forests, from which few return. All you need is a memorable tale, one that frames you as the hero.

This is the work of a junior scribe, One of the many bards, balladeers and storytellers who walk the earth. We weave poems, songs and stories out of every breath. May you remember us.

As ripples of heat rise into the air, the raindrop will slowly evaporate. But it won’t disappear. Sooner or later, that tiny, translucent bead of water will ascend back to the blue skies. Once there, it will bide its time, waiting to return to this troubled earth again…and again. Water remembers. It is humans who forget.

In that instant the baby feels on his tongue something cold, crisp, faintly metallic and hugely exciting. He clenches his fingers and stuffs his fist into his mouth, trying to seize this marvel—and failing. He cries then, for the first time. It is his first disappointment in life, his earliest sorrow, not being able to hold on to a beauty that has touched him briefly and, just as suddenly, melted away.

Grown-ups are not good at masking their concerns, although they can hide their delight and curiosity surprisingly well. Whereas with children it is the other way round. Children can tactfully mute their anxiety and conceal their sorrow, but will struggle not to express their excitement. That is what growing up means, in some simple way: learning to repress all expressions of pure happiness and joy.

“That is what happens when you love someone—you carry their face behind your eyelids, and their whispers in your ears, so that even in deep sleep, years later, you can still see and hear them in your dreams.”

“Listen, my soul, there are those who say wrong things about us. They utter harmful lies and hurtful slanders. They’ve no right to do this, but they do it anyway. They vilify us not because they know us well. Quite the opposite: they do not know us at all.” “But that doesn’t make any sense. I don’t go around saying horrible things about people I don’t know!” “Of course you don’t; that’s because you’re wise.”

Reaching into the pocket of her dress, Narin takes out the bottle brought from the Valley of Lalish. She holds the glass up to the sun, feeling the caress of the light reflecting off its surface. Then she turns it upside down, waiting for the last drop to fall. Water in its liquid form. This she cannot know, but that drop was a snowflake once upon a time, in a land far away. It passed through what was then the world’s richest and largest city, its chimneys belching clouds of smoke and sulphur. It witnessed the birth of a boy, the force of another river. Ephemeral though it is, it carries within the memories of its previous lives. Gently, it alights on the girl’s hand, quivering.

In a little while, dusk paints the horizon bright orange, until the smog, back with a vengeance, blots out all colors with its dull brush.

Good and bad. Perhaps it is the same with past and present—they are not completely distinct. They bleed into each other.

“People like us”…immigrants, exiles, refugees, newcomers, outsiders…Too many words for a shared, recognizable sentiment that, no matter how often described, remains largely undefined.

Even after all these years of studying it, water never ceases to surprise her, astonishingly resilient but also acutely vulnerable—a drying, dying force.

Arthur senses his father has no chance, no matter how much he toadies before these well-dressed gentlemen with their brocaded waistcoats and silk cravats. They look at him with obvious disdain; in their eyes there is only contempt. Witnessing this makes the boy sad. We never want our parents’ weaknesses to be seen by others. Their failures are our own private affair, a secret we would rather keep to ourselves; when they become public, for everyone’s consumption, we are no longer the children we once were.

Healing, she often says, resembles kite-flying. While a kite may aspire to drift freely in the skies, flying in all directions at once, its string needs to remain tethered to a fixed point. One can therefore master only a particular field, two at most.

Narin sighs pensively. Her great-great-grandmother Leila sounds like an amazing woman. What a pity she will never get to meet her. The world would have been a much more interesting place if everyone was given a chance to meet their ancestors at least for an hour in their lifetime.

While it is true that the body is mortal, the soul is a perennial traveler—not unlike a drop of water.

But everyone is asleep at this hour, including the river. Dark and satiny, the Thames folds itself into pleats, dreaming of its previous lives.

disappointment. Time is circles within circles. It neither dies nor declines but whirls in epicycles. Like a wheel that continues to spin even after its power is turned off, family conflicts live on long after the individual members have passed away.

Being an outsider is all about survival, and no one survives by being unambitious; no one gets ahead by holding back. Immigrants don’t die of existential fatigue or nihilistic boredom; they die from working too hard.

The world is immense, and the life he has tasted but a mere speck in the spectrum of possibilities and destinies available to human beings. Beyond the shores of the River Thames, there are other capitals, old and modern, each with its own tempests and tides, meandering, flowing. He is seized, and not for the first time, by an urge to travel far and wide, a frightening impulse for an introvert like him.

Arthur arches his shoulders as a stark realization dawns on him. However passionate a supporter of the poor and downcast, however fervent a champion of the oppressed and downtrodden, the author takes a dim view of societies other than his own.

My dear Arthur, I greatly enjoyed our exchange and I have subsequently given much thought to your words. You are a young man of considerable talent and commendable intelligence. I believe you must go to Nineveh and see the River Tigris for yourself. For reasons beyond your power, London has broken your heart. Perhaps when you arrive in the Orient, you will find it within yourself to forgive your home city, and its redoubtable river, the Thames. One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it is left behind. Ever your affectionate friend, Charles Dickens

Rivers have personalities. Some calm down with age, winding ponderously across fertile plains and meadows; others become bitter, surging with rage, tumbling through steep gorges; while yet others remain agitated and confused till the end. No two rivers are alike. The Tigris is, and has always been, “the mad one,” “the swift one.” Not like its twin, the Euphrates, which, having a gentler disposition, courses at a slower pace, taking its time, absorbing its surroundings as it passes by. These two mighty currents—though both spring from the womb of the Taurus Mountains in Turkey and run parallel for most of their lengthy peregrinations until they perish together in the Persian Gulf—are strikingly dissimilar—much as two siblings can be very different, despite sharing the same parents.

As the old woman applies almond oil to the child’s dark chestnut mane, she relates magical tales. She says one should never claim to know a story but merely to carry it. For that is where chiroks must be kept—cradled in the warmth of your breast, close to your beating heart.

“Wisdom is a mountain capped with snow. I’ve yet to meet the person who’s given it a hug.”

It occurs to him, in that moment, that poverty has its own scent, an odor that emanates from his pores, easily detected. It is an awful, debilitating thought. Drawing in a sharp breath, he turns around and hurries in the direction he assumes to be the exit.

The divisions that make up class are, in truth, the borders on a map. When you are born into wealth and privilege, you inherit a plan that outlines the paths ahead, indicating the shortcuts and byways available to reach your destination, informing you of the lush valleys where you may rest and the tricky terrain to avoid. If you enter the world without such a map, you are bereft of proper guidance. You lose your way more easily, trying to pass through what you thought were orchards and gardens, only to discover they are marshland and peat bogs.

Zaleekhah knows she may not be one of them, but she will always be attracted to people who are pulled toward something bigger and better than themselves, a passion that lasts a lifetime, even though it will consume them in the end.

I believe I have finally found my calling: it is my duty to piece together what has been broken, to help people to remember what has been consigned to oblivion throughout the centuries, and to retrieve what has been lost somewhere along the way.

“Cousins, friends, books, songs, poems, trees…anything that brings meaning into our lives counts.”

Clock-time, however punctual it may purport to be, is distorted and deceptive. It runs under the illusion that everything is moving steadily forward, and the future, therefore, will always be better than the past. Story-time understands the fragility of peace, the fickleness of circumstances, the dangers lurking in the night but also appreciates small acts of kindness. That is why minorities do not live in clock-time. They live in story-time.

Home is where your loved ones are, but the reverse is also true. Those you love are your sanctuary, your shelter, your country and even, when it comes to that, your exile. Wherever they go, you will follow.

Through the open window, a languid breeze, saturated with the smell of reeds and peaty waters, creeps along from the shore. The river now feels imminent in the same way that tomorrow seems just around the corner.

capital. But there is something else separating these communities, something less visible and tangible. It is their relationship with time. The wealthy do not have to rush after ticking clocks; they simply glide through each day, dandling the hours in their hands, wearing them like elegant gloves. For the poor, however, time is mere rags, tattered scraps that are never enough, no matter how much you pull and tug at them, neither covering goose-pimpled flesh nor providing any warmth.

Arthur swallows. As often, he is perplexed by the way the upper classes speak. They have a circuitous way of expressing themselves. He can never tell whether he is being genuinely praised or subtly mocked.

After that, he is careful. He observes the other customers, who hold themselves utterly still, as though they are not smoking but meditating on the ways of providence. Time slows down; the bubbling of water in the crystal bowl soothes.

Arthur is beginning to suspect that civilization is the name we give to what little we have salvaged from a loss that no one wants to remember. Triumphs are erected upon the jerry-built scaffolding of brutalities untold, heroic legends spun from the thread of aggressions and atrocities. The irrigation system was Nineveh’s glowing achievement—but how many lives were squandered in its construction? There is always another side, a forgotten side. Water was the city’s greatest asset and defining feature, yet it was also what undermined it in the end. The large amounts of salt deposited by torrent and tide wrecked the soil. Rivers raised, rivers razed. Sometimes your biggest strength becomes your worst weakness.

He is endlessly baffled as to how a culture can sustain itself with the spoken word alone. Stories and poems and ballads seem to be the mortar that keeps them together, keeps them alive.

It occurs to him on that night that there is a side to friendship that resembles faith. Both are built on the fragility of trust.

“I doubt any therapists would send their patients to the British Museum, but when you’re next to something so impossibly old, it kind of puts things in perspective. Whatever is troubling you in this moment means little in the sweep of time. I think everyone should hang out with a lamassu every now and then.”

“But how do we find our passions?” says Nen, as if debating with herself. “I really haven’t a clue. Most of the time it’s pure coincidence—a book we encounter in the library, a teacher who leaves an impression, a film we can’t forget…When I look back, I realize I’d have gone crazy if I didn’t have other places to retreat to—the further away from my own reality the better.”

guess what water is to you, history is to me: an enigma too vast to comprehend, something far more important than my own little life, and yet, at some level, also deeply personal.

Nowhere does time slow down more gently than inside a museum, Zaleekhah thinks, appreciating how everything around them feels fluid, the borders between one region and another, one century and the next, turning porous.

Arthur listens carefully. A part of him understands. Only those who have often felt unsafe would want to have such a bond with someone outside their immediate family, a kindred spirit that might offer help in one’s hour of need.

A poem is a swallow in flight. You can watch it soar through the infinite sky, you can even feel the wind passing over its wings, but you can never catch it, let alone keep it in a cage. Poems belong to no one.

An ancient poem spools through his mind. In the distance glow a pair of gems. An oryx is watching him in the darkness. Such a beautiful creature! And, as he observes the animal move with grace, he feels he is glimpsing a remote future, an instant in someone else’s life. A time he will no longer inhabit, but a time, nevertheless, that will be connected to this very moment, which is already fading, already gone.

The Ancient Mesopotamians believed mountains to be alive. Borders connecting the terrestrial and the celestial, in-between spaces. The fingers of earth jutting out as though hoping to touch the skies. One of the oldest words found in archeological excavations is hursag—“mountain.”

You go to distant lands hoping to find something entirely different from what you had at home, never suspecting that you will return a changed person.

Stories venture beyond city walls, traverse deserts and span ravines. To write is to free yourself from the constraints of place and time. If the spoken word is a trick of the gods, the written word is the triumph of humans.

Narin knows two mighty streams flow through every human being: the good and the bad. Which course we choose to follow—through heart, spirit and mind—ultimately determines who we are. Some people will do everything they can to avoid hurting another person, even in the most desperate of situations, while others will inflict suffering as casually as if they were swatting away a fly.