Cover Page

BOWL OF CHERRIES

—A NOVEL—

by
MILLARD KAUFMAN

Dedication

To Lorraine Paley Kaufman with love and gratitude, for her warmth and wisdom shared day and night, in every season

BOWL OF CHERRIES

ONE
THE LAST MILE

If you look closely at a detailed map of Iraq, you’ll find somewhere to the south, between the western shelf and the equally monotonous eastern plain, the province of Assama, a flat depression in the shape of a chicken.

The more ironic of Middle East scholars have for years hypothecated that the name comes from some sour old joke, lost in antiquity, because Assama is Arabic for “Paradise,” and this place isn’t even close to the minimal consolations we might expect on earth, much less heaven. There are in Assama geographical nooks that are yet to be charted, chronicled, demarked, but unless they turn out to be a decided improvement from what we’ve seen so far, you might conclude from Assama that the earth is a very grotesque and tacky planet.

Even remotely, Assama has never reflected the exotic Araby of the Europeans who romanced about it more or less convincingly in the nineteenth century, managing to assure their armchair readers that they, the talespinners, were living in the middle of a travel poster chock-full of exotic flora and fauna. Lions and panthers (much bigger than presently existing species) did at one time, according to no less an authority than H. G. Wells, roam the wasteland, which is to say the entire province. These days there’s nothing to kill around here but humans and gerbils, the sand rats of the desert, and a few other wee beasties that manage to survive the desolation of the Rub alKhali, the Empty Quarter of Mesopotamia, as the region between the lower Tigris and Euphrates was called for millennia.

A rumor persists among a minority of the locals—the majority are skeptical and secular—that Qurna, where the rivers converge, was the biblical Garden of Eden (perhaps the source, however dubious, of Assama’s name). Down through the centuries, the province has never achieved anything to match its mythic eminence. Triumphs are rare; history has behaved disruptively with the place. With the oldest cities on earth, Mesopotamia is often called the cradle of civilization. It might with equal certainty be called the birthplace of sustained barbarism. There were clashes from 4500 BC on, hot spots, flare-ups, skirmishes, even pitched battles among Arabs, Persians, Mesopots, Assyrians, Babylonians, Berbers, but manhood didn’t show signs of deep, irreversible impairment until warfare on a grand, gangrenous scale was introduced around 2076 BC, when the first big parade of bullies and kleptocrats stormed into Assama.