Ishtar Read online

  Ishtar pinched my cheeks. Her fingers felt soft. “Oh, he is greasy and smelly and his cock is the size of a lamb’s. But he told me that Anu blessed our union.”

  I laughed then, good and hearty with very little envy. “How many men have said the father of all gods blesses a union? Oh, Ishtar!”

  I did not expect her reaction. She picked up her spear, which she mostly used for poking pigs, and pricked me with it. “Soap your mouth, washerwoman.”

  Mostly, I didn’t mind what my goddess did. But I wished she had shared Tammuz. I loved him too, with a physical ache in my blood.

  Without her, who knows? Would Tammuz have become the fifth king of the Land of the Rivers?

  It was the kings who were written in history; Ishtar was only remembered for how she changed their lives and the lives of those around them. Every judgment Tammuz made, he made with her influence. He didn’t like to judge alone.

  “I have them all wailing in my throne room,” he said one morning, shaking his head. They had loved together for a long time and could communicate without speaking sometimes.

  Ishtar sighed. I myself hoped she would never pick another man who lacked wisdom.

  Waiting for them: a young girl curled up in a ball on the floor. An agitated young man. Two sets of parents, full of fury. And an older man, beaten bloody, near the door. He tried to crawl, leaving a dark trail on the floor.

  It seemed that the older man raped the young girl, a virgin affianced to the young man. The couple had been engaged for many years, saving the dowry and the bride-price. The bride would have been twelve at the wedding, due to take place very soon. If her husband was a good man, the marriage would not have been consummated until she was sixteen. That was how a good man behaved.

  “He has stolen their right to a pure love,” the groom’s father screamed.

  Tammuz heard from each of them. The older man did not defend himself apart from to say, “She was so beautiful and the weather was right. I could not think properly.” His teeth were so broken it was hard to make sense of it.

  “Drown him,” Tammuz said.

  “And the girl?” Ishtar said.

  Tammuz looked confused. “That is our problem, too?”

  The families wanted judgment.

  Ishtar stood. “I say the girl will live with me for one month. If her next bleeding comes, we know the line is pure. If not, I will ask my father to clean her, purify her, and whatever seed that man placed in her will be expelled like the poison it is.”

  There was silence. The families and Tammuz stared at Ishtar, in awe of her great wisdom.

  “And also,” Tammuz said to the father of the bride, “You may take that man’s wife and rape her.” This was standard in the law.

  The rapist, who had accepted his own death sentence with fortitude called, “No!”

  The girl’s father shook his head. “I do not wish to take up that right.”

  When the family left, Tammuz called for beer. He was Tammuz of the beer, of the ababu. Then he and Ishtar drank and made love for all to hear. Usually, after making love with Ishtar, the Green One walked in the desert and in his footprints sprang pennyroyal, mint; beautifully aromatic herbs.

  For her part, after making love, Ishtar loved to have doves flying around her. Their cooing calmed her.

  This time though, they stayed together and drank beer. Ishtar poked at her lover. “Do you think of your sister when you are with me, Tammuz? Do you think you are entering her as you did when you were young?”

  His sister was the wine goddess Geshtinanna. Sometimes, I knew, Tammuz got his women confused. It was as if they were twins to him. Or the same person. Sometimes, the women would use it to their advantage. There was much between them, though. Jealousy and mistrust.

  Tammuz wouldn’t answer Ishtar when she asked these questions.

  Some would say Geshtinanna did not cause trouble between Ishtar and her brother, but she made suggestions, placed hints, which led to trouble. Led to the Underworld, and to dust and to death and to starving children. Crop failure. Many would not blame Geshtinanna, but I asked: Why not blame the one who is to blame?

  Tammuz did not expect to die. He expected to live forever. But you should not anger a goddess. He sat, drinking wine and laughing with his sister’s friends. Geshtinanna, annoyed that those women, who had come to visit with her, sat laughing with Tammuz instead. She ran to Ishtar, a beru or more away.

  “They adore him,” she told Ishtar. “You can almost hear the laughter from here!” Geshtinanna knew that Ishtar did not like women to make him laugh; he should laugh only with her. It was pure trouble-making to tell Ishtar.

  Ishtar picked up a hoe, rusty but still sharp, and spun in a circle, twisting and twisting until she was a blur. Then she let it go, and it shot like a star through the air, vanishing from sight.

  She closed her eyes, put her hands on her hips. “There. That will strike that viper down.”

  I wanted to run to him, gather my skirts and run through mud and stones until my feet were shredded. But I knew she wouldn’t allow me that. “Should we follow it?” I asked. “Perhaps he will have some last words for you.”

  “Washerwoman, you are right. He will whisper something; of course I should be there to hear it.”

  But all he whispered was, “It hurts.”

  Ishtar was not given to guilt, but she was a terrible victim of loneliness. She did not change her clothing for two weeks after the death of Tammuz, and I began to wonder if I should look for other work. Finally, I managed to strip her, give her new clothes and convince her to bathe.

  “I wonder if he is suffering down there?” she asked.

  “We are suffering up here,” I said. At least in the Underworld you were free from the sun. In summer, this world was dry and unliveable, although of course we lived. The plants died and no one could work. We did not converse because we were too hot and thirsty.

  It was the sun god’s great power which did this to us.

  With Tammuz in the Underworld, dead babies slipped through their mother’s cunts, skin, bone and blood. Root vegetables rotted in the ground, fruit fermented on the trees, stored wheat had the taint of mould. The people starved as they had never starved before. In summer, there was usually an end in sight. When the winter comes, or when next year comes, or when the crop grows or the cow calves. There was nothing for us, though. With Tammuz the Green One dead, all lay fallow. His mother the Cedar Tree began to coarsen, the smooth planes of her bark now rough to the fingers.

  As to who really did descend into the Underworld, that is for history to tell.

  Geshtinanna came to Ishtar and said, “I know that the earth is dying because you sent my brother to the Underworld. I will go there to ask for him back.”

  “I will go,” said Ishtar. “But not this week. This week I have things I need to do. My father will not let me go.”

  “I will go,” Geshtinanna said. “I will go now. This day.”

  “I will go,” Ishtar said. But her mother, wise and loving, whispered to her from the clouds, “Let the other one go. She is no goddess. Let her go.”

  Ishtar dressed Geshtinanna in layer upon layer of beautiful clothing. But she only got as far as the first gate; this place is not for you, she was told. There is nothing for you here. It is Ishtar, Ishtar who must enter.

  Geshtinanna pulled out her pins and tore her dress with them in fury and frustration.

  All was not fair in the Underworld. You carried with you all that you had done in your life. In life, if you were good, you had family and friends. If you were bad, you ended up alone. In the afterlife, a good man was attended by his loving parents and by his wife, once she travelled there.

  The bad lived on the dusty cold streets of the Underworld. I saw such people in Aššur, tragic in their loneliness.

  Ishtar always had me. I followed her no matter where she went. Except into the Underworld, where I would be stopped. Not worthy.

  But Ereshkigal, goddess of Irkalla, the Un
derworld, hated Ishtar. Ereshkigal liked things to be straightforward, with no need to assess. Things were what they were. She thought that Ishtar blurred reality with sex-lust and blood-lust. She thought Ishtar filled the Underworld with people not ready to be there.

  Ishtar hated her in return, though without such passion. Their last meeting ended with Ishtar saying the words: “I am the one who will be remembered. You will only be known for your habitat, for having a home thick with dust.”

  It would not be a happy reunion, but Ereshkigal wanted Ishtar in her own domain.

  ****

  Ishtar returned from the Underworld, triumphant against Ereshkigal, Tammuz tired and happy to be breathing fresh air. Ishtar could barely move for the dust thick in the folds of her hair, her clothing. She told me she had been forced to strip naked, but she had enjoyed it, that the freedom of bare skin bolstered her rather than weakened her. Her nostrils were clogged with sand, her ears filled, so she breathed though her mouth and could not hear me.

  Once home, she stripped and bathed, a long, long bath lasting almost a day. Her servants fetched jug after jug of water and we took it in turns to scrub at her.

  The dust seemed immovable. Ishtar told me that in the Underworld, surrounded by it, she felt like she couldn’t move or escape. Nothing could grow in it, so those dead folk ate it, yet took no benefit from it.

  When Ishtar saw Tammuz, thick with the dust of death a day later, she felt such relief that she wept tears enough to fill a bowl of lapis lazuli. Tammuz caught her tears and wiped her eyes with a piece of red wool. These colours calmed her. The two stripped naked, their clothes merged in a pile.

  I beat their clothes at first, but the dust didn’t move. Water turned it into a thick and sticky mud, which dried back to dust. This stuff sat in your lungs.

  No matter how hard I had scrubbed, I couldn’t get the bloodstains out of his shirt. I didn’t want to know how the mess got there, but I knew all the same.

  A washerwoman knows everything.

  Ishtar told me to give the clothing to the impoverished, so I took it home to my sister. The poor often wore the clothes of the dead. This was how it should be. Washed out, dried in the sun, washed again; there was nothing diseased about a dead man’s clothes, although a deep, rich stench of the Underworld came off them still. Somewhere, there was a beggar with a long shirt carrying a dark, faded stain of the blood of Tammuz.

  When I gave them to my sister she said, “What have you slaughtered? A great black cow?” In return, she gave me a beautiful piece of cloth she had woven, the colour of the sand at dawn.

  I took the cloth to Ishtar and she fingered it distractedly.

  “The colours,” I said. “Aren’t they bright?”

  She tossed the piece to the floor. “Where I have been, there is no colour.”

  Ishtar told me how Ereshkigal realised her mistake in bringing Ishtar to the Underworld and stripping her naked.

  Ereshkigal called Nergal her consort, though I heard he didn’t agree. He was a god of fertility, fever and death, and he had almost murdered her. She offered him a shared place in the Underworld and he allowed her to live.

  Nergal loved singers, though this love was what sent him to the Underworld in the first place. On special occasions, when he was alive, he would have criminals set free to sing for him, if their voices were heavenly. To him, the voices meant innocence. One of these men sliced Nergal’s throat for the rings he wore.

  In the Underworld, singers fought to be his entertainer.

  Ishtar said, “I did not find Nergal attractive. So pale. Bloodless. But Ereshkigal was still jealous. She regretted her decision to strip me of my clothing. She thought it would make me vulnerable to disease, to shame. That without clothing I would be barbaric. I stood there, dressed only in the dust of her terrain, and her man smiled at me so foolishly I thought his brains had been sucked out through his nose.

  “That’s why she gave me Tammuz back again; she didn’t want me stealing her man.”

  Ishtar was so thirsty when she came out, nothing could quench it.

  We did not know it at the time, but this would happen time and time again and into the future. Tammuz died and lived again, as did the fruit and the grain, and Ishtar would have to bring him back. Eventually, though, Tammuz and Ereshkigal became lovers, and that made life easier for all of us. Ereshkigal was a fickle lover and a few weeks of him was enough. She would send him back, only to miss him and want him again.

  Fickle.

  ****

  It was never the same for my goddess and Tammuz after their trip to the Underworld. He would weep as she took other lovers, his tears making the ground too salty to grow vegetables.

  ****

  Ishtar became so popular that women would queue for days to say one sentence to her. Many of them said: “Stay with us for all eternity, because your strength means we are powerful too, and we will be able to make all our own ambitions reality.”

  Ishtar did not know or care of my life when I was not near her. She imagined we all stopped moving, that we shut down, when we were not serving her. She was not alone in this; there was not a god alive, nor a wealthy person in all of the Land of Rivers, who worried for the welfare of the people. My belief was that this would cause their downfall. To live without caring was a dangerous way to exist.

  I believed the only way that humankind would ever have a future was if the starving masses were given a voice. We were so close to savagery. Three days without food, maybe four, and neighbours would be slashing each other’s throats over a sheaf of wheat.

  Ishtar took many lovers. They could not say no. Even knowing the outcome, they could not say no. When she tired of them, she destroyed them in ways I didn’t want to remember. She turned them into sea creatures, she blocked their veins so the blood didn’t flow, she jellied their bones and softened their brains. She did not feel that love making was complete unless there was suffering.

  Despite her disinterest in death, Ishtar dealt in it on many days. I remember that one evening, she arrived on the doorstep with the impression of a hand on her back and her garments stiff with gore. Her face was drawn; some nights, being unable to control the consequences of war seemed too hard for her to bear. Her fingernails were dirtied with it, and the creases of her skin. She wanted her clothes washed, even though I was ready to go home to my family. She liked to wake each day with everything washed away.

  I hung the small items from the thorn bushes. Ishtar watched me work. I didn’t like that.

  “You are getting older. You should have a child.”

  “I have sons.”

  Ishtar shook her head. “You need a strong daughter. I will send someone to you. Your husband is no good for it.”

  I did not know then what she had in mind, but oh, wonderful goddess. Oh, kind and generous goddess, so loving.

  She sent Tammuz, who made love to me in a way my poor husband would never match. That is how the gods did it! Still, I would have to take my husband that night, because there was no doubt, no doubt at all, that I was impregnated.

  It was late when I walked home. The town changed in the evening. Goodly working folk were at home, settling their children, and out and about were the other sorts, the ones who would drink beer, ababu, for their evening meal. None knew what I had done. Who I had lain with.

  I knew my husband would like some ababu with his stew that night, and I wanted to be sure he would make love to me, so I walked one street wide, to the inn where my sister worked. She told our mother she was a cleaner there, but she worked on her back more often than not, and I couldn’t judge her. Ishtar gave it up for free any time of day; why should not my sister be paid so she could feed her family? I wished my hands were not so rough, my face so lined, or perhaps I would make some money myself.

  She was at the bar. “Sister!” she called. We were always happy to see each other, regardless of the secrets we carried. Secrets made us strong. Secrets gave us eternal life. We kept the secrets from our men, because
they were innocent souls who didn’t need to know everything.

  I spent some time with my sister at the bar and left, numbed with beer. I hoped Ishtar would not call for me; my tongue was filled with truth and I would not be able to hold it.

  I went home to my children. Four boys I had, and they were all hungry, though this hunger was only a day old. Other children went hungry for weeks, until they lost the desire for food. The mother would scrabble along the street in piles of refuse; the father would catch rats to boil. With enough yoghurt and salt, you couldn’t tell what you were eating.

  Some days when Ishtar had her friends for a meal, they were so busy laughing, drinking wine, preparing for sex, that they would not eat much more than a few mouthfuls.

  The cook and the table-clearer took the food home with them; that was fair. Sometimes they would sell a piece of bread with tooth marks. People will pay good money for the discards of the gods.

  My husband was sleepy, but I gave him beer and I made sure we spent the night together.

  Ishtar was happier after my girl was born. She did not incite war, and she took fewer lovers and was less cruel to them afterwards. She wanted to make the world a better place for my daughter, she said. This was during a time of terrible flood; we lost mothers, fathers and children to the raging waters. Ishtar’s father told her it was because of peace. That some must die and it may be in war and it may be for lack of food. Regardless, people must die.

  Ishtar took it upon herself to plant wheat and other crops to help feed the people. Dressed in drab robes, she walked from home to home with new seeds. She was not sure if the floods were her fault, but it broke her heart to see hungry children crying.