But then Steve broke in: ‘Cool your jets…’
Rob felt his excitement ebb. There was something in Steve’s voice. This wasn’t a war story. ‘Steve?’
‘Rob, mate. What do you know about archaeology?’
Rob looked out to sea. A paraglider was soaring over the waves. ‘Archaeology? Nothing. Why?’
‘Well there’s this…dig…in south-east Turkey. Kurdish Turkey.’
‘A dig?’
‘Yep. Pretty interesting. These German archaeologists have…’
‘Cave paintings? Old bones? Shit.’ Rob felt a piercing disappointment:
Steve chuckled. ‘Now now. C’mon.’
‘What?’
‘You can’t always do Gaza. And I don’t want you anywhere dangerous. Not at the mo.’ He sounded solicitous, almost brotherly. Most unexpected. ‘You’re one of my best reporters. And that was a nasty spill in Baghdad. You’ve had enough bad shit, for a while. Don’t ya think?’
Rob waited. He knew Steve hadn’t finished. Sure enough, Steve explained: ‘So I’m asking you, ever so politely, to go and look at this fucking dig in Turkey. If that’s OK with you.’
Rob detected the sarcasm: it wasn’t hard. He laughed. ‘OK, Steve. You’re the boss! I’ll go and look at some stones. When do you need me to go?’
‘Tomorra. I’ll email the brief.’
Tomorrow? Not a lot of time. Rob started thinking about planes and packing. ‘I’m on the case, Steve. Thanks.’
The editor paused, then came back on the line: ‘But, Rob…’
‘What?’
‘I’m serious about this assignment. These aren’t just…boring old stones.’
‘Sorry?’
‘It’s been in the news here already. You must have missed it.’
‘I don’t read the archaeological press.’
‘I do. It’s highly fashionable.’
‘So?’
The sea air was warm. Steve went on: ‘What I mean is. This place in Turkey. What these Germans found…’
Rob waited for Steve to elaborate.
A long pause. Then at last his editor said, ‘Well…it’s not just bones and shit, Robbie. It’s something really quite weird.’
3
On the plane to Istanbul Rob sipped at his watery gin and tonic in a little see-through plastic cup with a tiny swizzle stick. He read the print-out of Steve’s email, and some other stuff he had found on the Net about the Turkish dig.
The site being unearthed was called Gobekli Tepe. For an hour Rob thought this was pronounced Teep, but then he saw a phonetic spelling on one his printouts: Tepe was pronounced Tepp-ay. Gobekli…Tepp-ay. Rob said it himself-‘Gob-eckly Tepp-ay’ and then munched a mini pretzel.
He read on.
The site was apparently just one of a number of very old settlements presently being unearthed in Kurdish Turkey. Nevali Cori, Cayonu, Karahan Tepe. Some of them seemed incredibly ancient. Eight thousand years old or more. But was that really so ancient? Rob had no idea. How old was the Sphinx? Stonehenge? The pyramids?
His gin and tonic finished, he sat back and thought about his lack of general knowledge. Why didn’t he know the answer to questions like this? Because, obviously, he didn’t have a university education. Unlike his colleagues who had degrees from Oxford and London and UCLA, or Paris or Munich or Kyoto or Austin or wherever, Rob had nothing but his brain and an ability to speed-read-to digest information quickly. He had fled education at the age of eighteen. Despite his single mother’s cries of despair, he had spurned the offers of several colleges and universities, and instead had gone straight into journalism. But who could blame him for this, really? Rob swallowed another mini-pretzel. He’d had no choice. His mum was on her own, his dad had stayed in America being a mean brutal bastard; Rob had grown up poor in the furthest reaches of dull suburban London. From an early age he’d wanted money and status as soon as they were available. He was never going to be like those rich kids he used to envy when he was a lad, able to take four years off to smoke dope and go to parties and drift into comfortable careers at a leisurely pace. He’d always felt a need to get a move on.
The same desire for swift progression had governed his emotional life. When Sally came along, smiling and bonny and clever, he’d grabbed at the happiness, and the stability, she offered. The birth of their daughter, soon after their precocious marriage, seemed like a signal that what he had done was a Very Good Thing. Only then had he realised, belatedly, that his kinetic career might be in conflict with settled domestic tranquillity.
The El Al economy seat was as uncomfortable as ever. Rob sat back, and rubbed his eyes. Then he asked the stewardess for another gin and tonic. A pick-me-up, and a help-me-forget.
Reaching in his bag beneath his feet Rob pulled out two books from Tel Aviv’s best bookshop, one on Turkish archaeology, and one on ancient man. He had a three-hour stopover in Istanbul and then another flight to Sanliurfa, way out in the wild east of Anatolia. Half a day to do some speedreading.
By the time they arrived in Istanbul, Rob was quite drunk-and fully apprised of the recent archaeological history of Anatolia. Particularly important, it seemed, was a place called Catalhoyuk. Pronounced Chattal Hoy-ukk. Discovered in the 1950s, it was one of the oldest villages in the world ever unearthed-maybe nine thousand years old. The walls of this ancient settlement were covered with pictures of bulls and leopards and buzzards. Lots of buzzards. Very old signs of religion. Very strange images.
Rob looked at the pictures of Catalhoyuk. He flicked through a few more pages. Then they landed at Istanbul airport and Rob carouselled his bags and threaded his way through the crowds of jowly Turkish businessmen, stopping at a little store where he bought an American newspaper with one of the latest reports from Gobekli Tepe, and then went straight to the gate to wait for his next flight. Sitting there in the departure lounge he read some more about the dig.
The modern history of Gobekli Tepe began, it said, in 1964, when a team of American archaeologists were combing a remote province of south-east Turkey. The archaeologists had found several odd-looking hills blanketed with thousands of broken flints: a sure sign of ancient human activity. Yet the US scientists did no excavating. As the newspaper phrased it: ‘these guys must now feel like the publisher that turned down the first Harry Potter manuscript’.
Ignoring the snoring Turkish lady asleep in the airport seating, right next to him, Rob read on.
Three decades after the Americans’ near miss, a local shepherd had been tending his flock when he had spotted something odd: a number of strangely-shaped stones in the sunlit dust. They were the stones of Gobekli Tepe.
Tepp-ay, Rob said to himself, remindingly. Tepp-ay. He wandered over to a machine, bought a Diet Coke, then wandered back and went on reading.
The ‘rediscovery’ of the site reached the ears of the museum curators, in the city of Sanliurfa, fifty kilometres away. The museum authorities contacted the relevant government ministry, who in turn got in touch with the German Archaeological Institute in Istanbul. And so in 1994 ‘experienced German archaeologist Franz Breitner’ was appointed by the Turkish authorities to excavate the site.
Rob scanned the rest of the article. He tilted the paper to have a better look. There was a picture of Breitner in the American newspaper. And underneath the photo was a direct quote from him: ‘I was intrigued. The site already had emotional significance for the villagers. The solitary tree on the highest hill is sacred. I thought we might be onto something’.
Armed with this insight Breitner had taken a closer look. ‘Within the first minute I knew that if I didn’t walk away immediately, I would be here the rest of my life.’
Rob looked at Breitner’s photo. He certainly looked like the cat that had got the double cream. His smile was the smile of a man with a lottery win.