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125 V Ford said: A museum. You don’t mean that, A said. I agree, I said. A museum. I had been to Berlin and seen the Babylonian gate: it was housed in its own wing on an island mid-river in a foreign city. When, following your museum map, you turn the corner to see it, it’s bigger and bluer than you could have thought. The tiles stretching endlessly, cobalt and smooth. I described it to them. There was an enormous corridor leading down to the gate through the desert, it cannot be imagined . Of course they can’t reconstruct the whole thing; there’s a portion preserved, and then a model. And along the walls, in relief , lions, aurochs, mythical creatures. The people would stand in rows, the animals to their backs, in the heat, the blue shining, watching the king’s procession. Even the replicas have been looted, Ford said. The ones left on the original sites. 126 Is the aurochs a mythical creature? A asked. No, I said, it’s real. Are you proposing we all fly to Europe and destroy a museum wing? Sara said. You have a very literal mind, I told her. • Outside the museum, children had scattered from their school groups, backpacks in bright colors, shrieking and goading pigeons into flight. In many languages teachers tried to bring them to order. I sat on a café patio taking notes, the other tourists smoking and drinking sparkling water, the tabletops all sticky. Were the other creatures dragons, Z asked, the ones in relief? I had forgotten he had been there with me, that whole trip. No, I said, that’s not right, too European. Though when I thought about it, that’s how I remembered them too. • Where had I read: children gathered in the sewage-filled streets to throw stones at a tank. Which would swivel its gun toward them, but never fire. One day a stone might shoot right down the gun barrel, obstruct it. This isn’t impossible—so many other things happened, almost everything, if you think about it. ...
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