fine houses in which to live so that we might set up shop and serve the markets of Babylon and serve the temple and the Court.
"This happened a thousand times over in those centuries. Even the cruel Assyrians would do the same thing. They'd put to the sword the soldiers and then drag off the man who knew how to write three languages, and the boy who could carve perfectly in ivory, and so it was with us. The Babylonians, they weren't as bad as other enemies might have been. Imagine being dragged back to Egypt. Imagine. Egypt, where people live just to die, and sing night and day of dying, and of being dead, and there was nothing but village after village and field after field.
"No, we didn't have it bad off.
"By eleven years old, I had been to the temple itself, a page, as many a rich Hebrew boy was, and I had seen the great statue of Marduk himself, the god, in his high sanctuary atop the great ziggurat of Etemenanki. I had entered into the inner shrine with the priests, and the strangest thought had occurred to me! This big statue looked more like me than the little one I had which I had always thought bore a distinct resemblance.
"Of course I didn't chirp this out loud. But as I looked up at mighty Marduk, the great gold Marduk, the statue in which the god lived and ruled, and should have been carried each year in the New Year's Procession, the statue smiled.
"I was too clever to say anything to the priests. We were in the process of preparing the inner sanctuary for the woman who would come and spend the night with the god. But the priests noticed something. And they saw me look at Marduk and one of them asked, 'What did you say?' and of course I'd said nothing. But Marduk had said, 'Well, what do you think of my house, Azriel? I've been so often to yours.'
"From that moment, the priests were on to it. Yet things might still have gone differently. I might have had a long human life. I might have had a different path. Sons, daughters. I don't know.
"At the time, I thought it was hilarious and wonderful, and loved Marduk for this little trick. But we continued to ready the chamber, which was truly magnificent in plated gold, and the silken couch where the woman would lie to be taken by the god that night, and then we left, and one of the priests said: 'The God smiled on you!'
"I was stiff with fear. I didn't want to answer. "Rich Hebrew hostages or deportees like us were treated very well, as I said, but I didn't really talk to the priests, you know, as if they were Hebrews. They were the priests of the gods we were forbidden to worship. Besides, I didn't trust them and there were too many of them and some were very stupid and others very sly and smart. I said simply that I had seen the smile too and thought it was sunlight.
"The priest was quaking.
"I forgot about that for years. I don't know why I remember it now, except to say that that might have been the very moment when my fate was sealed.
"Marduk started talking to me all the time then. I'd be in the tablet house, working hard, you know, learning thoroughly every text we possessed in Sumerian so that I could copy it out, read it, even speak it, though by then nobody spoke Sumerian. Ah, I must tell you a funny thing I heard only recently here in this twentieth century world. I heard it in New York in the days after it was all over, finished with, Gregory Belkin I mean, and I was wandering around trying to make my body take the form of other men-and it kept changing back. I heard this funny thing ..."
"What?" I asked at once.
Part I Chapter 3
3
"That nobody even now knows where the Sumerians came from! Not even to this day. That they came out of nowhere the Sumerians, with their language which was different from all others, and they built the first cities in our beautiful valleys. Nobody knows more about them even to this day."
"That's true. Did you know then?"
"No," he said, "we knew what was written in the tablets, that Marduk had made people from clay and put life into them. That's all we knew. But to