The Archaelogist's Lover

The Archaeologist’s Lover
By Sharmini Aphrodite

I was the archaeologist’s lover; I was something he could hurt. Not in a way that was particularly violent, but he did to me what he could not do to the dead or to history. All day he slaved beneath the heat, on his hands and knees in the dirt, moving in a way that was both lovemaking and lament. At night he would come back to his makeshift home – a sparse rented room with red clay floors – and grab me by the neck.


I had long left the church when I met him but could not shake off my thirst for holiness. It was something I was not aware I desired until I found that I was looking for it in all manner of sin. In the Catholic imagination, of course, everything is holy. No wound goes unblessed. The red pebbles on the feet of Christ. Candlelight. A palm leaf still wet with the previous night’s rain. Even water. Especially water. You may leave a religion but you might never leave that desire for baptism. All those dark roads I travelled alone in, in the aftermath. A tunnel country.


When I first met him it was night. There was music coming out of every room in the street. We were both in a country half a world away from the countries of our birth, yet which was familiar: the drumbeat of a torrential storm, the skin of humidity like a shroud. I had come out of a room in which I had been sad, and he was walking down the street towards me. Yellow lamplight behind him, his back bowed, directing one’s gaze to his arms, his hands, in which he was carrying a small bird with the grace of a priest carrying the bones of a saint.


Some things I would find out about him over the course of our year together. He had come from the country just below mine; his life before this had been urban. He had not been wealthy, had been raised in a flat with two bedrooms: one for his parents, one he shared with two younger brothers. His parents’ room and the kitchen faced another block of flats: a vivid memory of his was of a stranger’s bamboo laundry pole one storming afternoon, the white sheet clasped to it whipping in the rain. All the memories he would relay to me had this sense of contained wilderness: a whisper-shouted fight between a married couple heard through the wall late at night; an elderly neighbour with a particularly crooked back, whose face was perpetually taut with grief but who never spoke. Other people, strangers, were never far from his memory: that was the curse and blessing of his country.

My memories, meanwhile, were full of vastness. I was not wealthy either but I’d grown up in a country that had space. A sudden field in my neighbourhood with white-tailed lalang drifting over my head, shivering with the sound of little animal lives. Driving through interstate expressways that cut through plantations in the deep night. Distant blue hills at dusk. But we had grown up eating the same food, and we missed that here. Once a week we would go on a morning market expedition, arms clasped around each other, walking through hardening sunlight to the sound of chatter and bleat, of trade and gossip. We would scout for bags of rice that we doused in chopped chilli – green for him, red for me – for packets of coconut milk.

One day we brought fruit from the market and ate everything that same afternoon, which was sodden with storms, the sky a pale and sticky yellow. We had to shut the windows against the force of the rain so that the only ventilation in the room came from a creaking standing fan, blowing stale air into our faces at random, cutting through the humidity. We could have been in the country of our births, of our childhoods and youths. On the cool clay floor of his room, we tore into familiar fruit with our bare hands – the bruised, engorged fingers of bananas; the sweet juice of golden mangoes; the pure white flesh of a shared, stripped coconut; pale pips of mangosteen. We ate until our wrists ran sticky with sweet blood – then we licked them, laying our arms against the floor, as, bloated, we fell into a feverish slumber.


The bird did not live. Its right leg was broken and with it something in it had also gone. But what I remember of the bird years later was that its eyes were alive that night, that they were sharp with life. It had no fear, none at all. It was safe in his hands.


He was part of a crew that was excavating an ancient city. Some locals had discovered, not long ago, a pair of twin sherds that were suspected to be half a millennium old. He showed me pictures of them, set against a black background; this was after they had been cleaned, and centuries of history and dust husked off them so that they gleamed. They were the colour of eggshells, made holy only because of the passage of time. Can you imagine how it must have felt to discover them, he had whispered, shaking his head. Where I come from it was a big deal when we had one dig a few years ago. And here they just stumbled over these! It happens quite often…

He had continued to talk, and was telling me about the museum next to that dig site in his country that housed ancient artefacts from the region. He was saying something, I think, about a Tibetan brass Kuan Yin, her thousand arms glinting in dim light. It was night when he was telling me this, and there was a blackout so we had lit a lamp and the window was open. Dark trees outside made darker by our lamplight; the familiar sound of night-time animals. So he continued to talk and the conversation moved to an old girlfriend of his, if only to mention his jealousy because his great-grandfather had been a peasant, had come to his country to work as a coolie, while the old girlfriend’s lineage was that of wealthy traders, who had come on a whim, for adventure. He knew nothing about his history beyond the province that his grandfather had come from, while the old girlfriend had attended clan meetings, knew the exact ancestral village of her maternal line, had books filled with genealogy…

You know how it is, he said, and I did. Whatever history I had was dimmed; my tradition was oral, undocumented for the most part. Anyway, it was so hard for history to keep where we came from, I replied. All that humidity, all that mulch, that equatorial belt causing everything to replenish itself forever, to live forever – ours was a land where nothing died in the first place to resurrect. He drew my knuckles to his lips and said, yes, of course, but if it exists here it must exist there… we share this climate, right? We just don’t know about it yet, and how… He had the eyes of someone in the grip of fever and I closed my own and let him talk, let his words, his voice, run over me like water.


When I say that he was prone to violence I do not mean it violently. He wasn’t the sort of man who hit women, for example. Sometimes he could be a little brusque, get a little carried away… but all those things aren’t what I mean. He just had a way of looking at you across a room, a sort of look that claimed you. A sort of danger in the grip.


He had a nervous sort of quality to him. Even when he slept he would be twitching throughout; his body temperature would rise in his dreams until it was scary to touch him. He had a drummer’s tic, would always be tapping out some rhythm – on the table, my knee, the balcony railing. So it surprised me the few times I would watch his digs, sat beneath a piece of tarp, with a glass of a bitter, dark drink next to me – a syrup brought up from a few countries down that had to be diluted in water. It had a little alcohol, so none of the diggers would have it until the day’s end; I was always offered a glass when I tagged along. I would sip this bitter drink and watch the supreme calm of the diggers. The way they moved: there was nothing accidental about it. His movements, in particular: precise, distilled, the opposite of the way he was when we were together. His dark eyes with something of a war about them as he stood beneath the shadow of the tarp. He never looked at me while he dug. I don’t play around, he had said to me later. So I would raise my eyes away from the dig too, to the distant mountains beyond, beneath the sweltering heat, the ripe smell of the jungle, and feel completely at home.


Over the year we were together, the city revealed itself to be a town, or the remnants of a town. A few small houses with flat roofs; the archaeologists suspected they were used to dry grains, or perhaps fish, there being a nearby river. They found more sherds of pottery, ordinary things. Because they were so ordinary, I felt tender towards them. They were more sacred to me than gold. That they might have held milk for a child, or beans, that their existence was so quiet: it made me ache in a way that previously I had only felt during evenings as a child. He held one such piece up to me after a dig, just before it was to be taken away, a slip of white between gloved fingers, with the same sort of reverence that he had held the bird.


Later that night he held my ankle in his hand and said, in a thousand years this bone will be holy.


I went to mass a few times while I lived there. When the priest asked me if I had been baptised I said yes, because I had been, even though I had not stepped into a church for years. I was also brown-skinned, also dark haired like the rest of the congregation, so my presence in the pews would not have been novel to an outsider. Of course, the prayers were the same, the liturgies, even if the main language was not the English I was accustomed to. We made the sign of the cross in the same way: the men in their pants pulled high, the women draped in all manner of colour, the children snapping their hands so they appeared like little birds. I would dip my thumb into the Holy Water and press it against the part of my forehead between my brows, feel its cool against the animal heat. I would look at the crucifix, Christ with His eyes raised towards the thatched roof of the chapel, and hear my grandmother’s voice in the back of my head. A crucifix pendant that she had pressed into my palm on the day of her death, saying, my mother stole this, you know, from a missionary… I had removed the pendant from its necklace after I left the Church but I kept it on my person always, would brush my thumb across the Crucified Body whenever the sky grew dark, urgent with electricity. Whenever I was struck by both terror or grace. So often during that year there, when I was with him, I found my hands moving to my pocket, where the Body gleamed between the cloth.


I was the archaeologist’s lover; I was something he could be angry at. Some days the dig went badly, or he would be struck by a certain memory. One days like that he would behave strangely, he would not talk to me, and when he did he would snap. Sometimes he insulted me, said things with the brusque arrogance one expected from his country. And afterwards he would apologise, and I would turn my back on him so that he would have to hold my shoulders until I could not move and whisper into my neck and then only I would forgive him.


One night while he was burning beside me I put a hand on his forehead to cool it. He clapped his own hand onto my hand with a strength that was familiar and I could not remove my hand even when I tried. I did not sleep at all that night. He liked doing things like that, even when he was awake. Just grab and hold on, even when we weren’t talking, just lying next to each other; or sometimes on the bus on our way back from the market. Sometimes I think that he wasn’t even aware of what he was doing. His eyes were always far away.


The day before the day I had to leave, he invited me again to the dig. They had revealed four buildings in total that were still left standing. Normal everyday houses. He had gained permission for me to walk through them and so I did, descended below the earth down a ladder and walked through the entrance of one of them, was immediately blanketed by cool shadow. There was nothing in the house; it was just a square room and a single, clumsy sort of bare window. Immediately I wanted to go down on my knees. I knew then that wherever I went, faith would not leave me; it was more stubborn than a jilted lover. A family lived here, I said to him, raking my eyes over the bare walls, imagining cots being pushed against them. Imagined produce or meat hanging from the ceiling. Imagined smells: the milky smell of children, the flowery smell of the old. The smell of sunlight on skin. The smell of sunlight on cloth. How many years had this house existed without sunlight? What had happened to the family? What had happened to the town? There was another site a few miles away; a discovery of a more recent event – the slaughter of students, of leftists, a burial more violent and modern. The same story, throughout the earth. And he put his hand on my shoulder, slid it down the bare skin to the crook my elbow. That was the gentlest he had ever been to me, and I didn’t want to leave.


Sharmini Aphrodite was born in Sabah, Malaysia, and raised between the cities of Singapore and Johor Bahru, where she still lives. Her short fiction has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and placed on the Australian Book Review Jolley Prize and Singapore’s Golden Point Awards. Her art writing appears online. She is a submissions editor at Smokelong Quarterly.