There Are Rivers in the Sky

by Elif Shafak

Like one of those sunflowers that grows along the bank, tilting its head toward the first rays of light, Arthur cannot help but turn toward Leila whenever she is around.

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.

All his life Arthur has made every effort to broaden his experience and expand his knowledge. He never thought there would come a day when he would wonder if it were preferable to live in innocence and die in ignorance instead.

“Oh, I thought you grew up in a loving family—” Nen returns her gaze. “You can grow up in a loving family and still struggle.”

It’s just so easy to feel lost when you feel low, like you’re drifting alone in endless floodwaters. But you’re not alone. There are many of us on this wooden Ark—sailing without knowing if there is land ahead. Sailing in hope nonetheless…”

Nowhere does time slow down more gently than inside a museum,

“In Ancient Sumerian, ki-ang was ‘to love’—strangely, the word meant ‘to measure the earth.’ Love was not a feeling or an emotion as much as an anchor that rooted you to a place.

opprobrium,

It feels wrong to find the artifacts of Nineveh displayed for the amusement of the wealthy and the powerful. The people of Mesopotamia, the descendants of the scribes who composed the tablets and the artisans who chiseled the statues, will never have a chance to see these pieces.

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.

“I envy happy people,” says Zaleekhah. “Not in a jealous way—it’s more that I’m puzzled by them. I want to study them—put them under a microscope like a specimen. How do they even do it?

when we look at a person all we see in that moment is a partial image of them, often subconsciously biased. They appear successful and content, and so we conclude there must be something wrong with us, since we cannot be more like them. But that image is not the full reality and nor are we that simple or static.

“We are all like clay tablets, chipped around the edges, hiding our little secrets and cracks.”

Is there such a thing as absolute happiness? Never-ending success? A perfect marriage? A quick fix to cure anxiety? We want to believe there is—just like Gilgamesh wanted to believe he could live forever. Then we’re defeated, humbled. We learn to accept there’ll always be something amiss, something broken, and unless we are kind to ourselves it won’t change, this feeling of incompleteness.”

“Use my eyes as a mirror to admire your own beauty.”

Nisaba is born of the union of heavens and earth, realms that seem so different and distant that it may not be clear what they have in common, and thus her gift—the art of writing—will always represent a desire to efface dualities, dissolve hierarchies and transcend boundaries.

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.

Justice, if it is to be at all meaningful, needs to be recorded.

Centuries pass by; time leaves its traces like the bronze patina on a mirror’s surface.

Writing is a craft like any other. It must be learned from the masters, pursued with dedication and practiced daily, until your fingers blister, your back hunches, your eyesight starts to dim.

The memory of the massacre will be carefully handed down from one generation to the next, like passing someone a lit match protected from the wind in the shelter of your palm.

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.

How can anyone assume they will please the Creator by hurting His Creation?

Rivers are fluid bridges—channels of communication between separate worlds. They link one bank to the other, the past to the future, the spring to the delta, earthlings to celestial beings, the visible to the invisible, and, ultimately, the living to the dead.

In the sweeping currents and tidal pools shelter the secrets of foregone ages. The ripples on the surface of water are the scars of a river. There are wounds in its shadowy depths that even time cannot heal.

Water has memory. Rivers are especially good at remembering.

“Life is full of the unexpected, my friend. As if we are walking in a river of mud, and we dare to dip our hands every now and then, searching for a button of hope, a coin of friendship, a ring of love. We are mudlarkers, all of us.”

what they call civilization is, in truth, a storm in waiting. Powerful, protean and perfectly destructive, sooner or later it will burst free of its barriers and engulf everything in its insatiable path.

It gives him comfort to see someone pleading with God for all those in need, regardless of race or creed, as this is an area where Muslims, Christians, Yazidis, Jews and Mandeans have for centuries lived side by side. If cholera does not pay heed to such differences, he feels, neither should the living.

The Ancient Mesopotamians saw portents everywhere—in the glow of embers in the hearth, the murmurations of starlings in the skies, the swirls of smoke from incense burners, the fall of Knucklebones in the dust, the formations of the clouds…They read omens in the intestines of sacrificial animals, the contours of spilled flour, the patterns of oil on water…No

No one was indifferent to the auguries: kings and servants, all yearned for a glimpse of the unseen. Partly because they understood how fragile life is and how close the breath of death. And partly because they retained a naive hope that, despite the inequalities and injustices of this world, someone or something from another realm might give them counsel and assistance in their hour of need.

A decade ago, in the chaos following the American invasion, museums across Iraq were emptied. In a matter of days, thousands of artifacts disappeared—even those in the vaults of the Central Bank. Some curators tried to resist, barring the doors, risking their lives. Employees at the National Museum, in a last-ditch attempt to safeguard the exhibits, hung a sign warning that the building was under the protection of Western armed forces. A desperate lie.

from the finest of the Lyres of Ur—the

Its pitiful remains will someday be found discarded in a car park, smashed to pieces.

The statue of the Assyrian king Sargon II travels to London and New York, before it is finally returned to Iraq. A figurine of Entemena, the Sumerian king of Lagash, turns up in a warehouse in Queens. Inside elegant emporiums, stylish shops, respected auction houses, Mesopotamian artifacts await their next buyers, while others resurface in street stalls. Several treasures from Nineveh trade hands on London’s Portobello Road. But the easiest targets are the tablets; those from the library of Ashurbanipal are much soug...

Arthur is convinced that everyone has a gift. Given a chance and a modicum of support, anyone can elevate their skill. In the end, perhaps what separates one individual from another is not talent but passion. And what is passion if not a restlessness of the heart, an intense yearning to surpass your limits, like a river overflowing its banks?

With a clarity that is almost painful, he recognizes that only when studying the past has he felt at home, only when sorting broken shards has he felt complete.

Time is a river that meanders, branching out into tributaries and rivulets, depositing sediments of stories along its shores in the hope that someday, someone, somewhere, will find them.

To whom does the object belong—the itinerant bards who recited the poem, traveling from city to city; the king who ordered it to be put in writing; the scribe who labored in setting it down; the librarian who scrupulously stored it; the archeologist who unearthed it centuries later; the museum that will keep it safe—or does it belong only to the people of this land, and, if so, will minorities like the Yazidis ever be counted among them?

The emotions we hold but fail to honor, we try to express through the things we create, trusting that they will outlive us when we are gone, trusting that they will carry something of us through the layers of time, like water seeping through rocks.

It is our way of admitting we were weak and flawed, and that we made mistakes, some inevitable, others foolish, but deep within we appreciated beauty and poetry, too.

Each historical artifact, therefore, is a silent plea from ancestors to descendants, “Do not judge us too harshly.”

—H2O— NARIN, ZALEEKHAH, ARTHUR

Tomorrow, when the last remaining poems of Mesopotamia are submerged and all that was Hasankeyf has drowned, people will speak of the destruction of culture and environment and the memories of the land, though no one, not even the river itself, will remember that it all began with a single raindrop.

An eternal cycle starts to repeat itself, from liquid to vapor to solid.

Tears from the destroyed cities of Mesopotamia mingle with the haze of torrents yet to come.

As the cloud passes over continents, it freezes into crystals. A snowflake falls over London, seesawing rapidly toward a newborn baby lying on the icy ground. And the infant looks up at the mystery that is water, all flurry and mov...

And if we could only see the world through a baby’s eyes, gazing up with innocent wonder, we could watch the rivers in the sky. Mi...

This novel 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.