Would she recognise us?

                Would she recognise us?


                By Thomas Djerak



 
Or would she simply recognise the same human beings, burdened by different names, different borders, and different empires?
That single question changed everything.
Little by little, I stopped writing about Enheduanna.
Instead, she began writing about me—using my own hand.
Through her voice I found myself speaking not only about ancient Akkad, but about Dostoevsky's belief in the immortality of the human soul, about Crime and Punishment, about Camus, and about the moral boundary beyond which no empire has the right to pass.
One sentence eventually became the ethical foundation of the entire play:
"An empire that demands the tears of its children has already lost in the eyes of eternity."
No political ambition can justify human sacrifice.
Not a single tear of a tortured child.
Remember this—and then you will be destined for greatness, for together we have forged the weapon of your future victories.
Those were Enheduanna's words to Naram-Sin.
Yet beneath those words there remained an image that continued to escape me.
For days I struggled to see her.
Every attempt to describe her appearance felt false.
Jewels turned her into an exhibit.
Royal robes imprisoned her inside a museum.
Every historical reconstruction pushed her farther away instead of bringing her closer.
Then, one morning, she appeared before me entirely dressed in white.
No gold.
No crown.
No ceremonial splendour.
Only white linen.
Wide sleeves moving gently in the desert wind.
She stood upon the highest terrace of the ziggurat.
The wind moved around her as though it had known her for thousands of years.
At that moment I finally understood something that no archaeological reconstruction could ever reveal.
She did not resemble power.
She resembled light.
She moved with the quiet grace of a swan gliding across still water.
Effortlessly.
Silently.
Almost without touching the earth.
That single image became the key to everything that followed.
From it emerged the sentence that eventually became the spiritual centre of the play:
We are of one breath, one clay, one eternity.
Before a child speaks, it breathes.
Before it belongs to a nation, it belongs to humanity.
Its tiny hands touch the earth long before they learn to salute any flag.
And after death every human body returns to the same clay.
Empires arrive later.
Borders arrive later.
Names arrive later.
Breath comes first.
And perhaps that is why I gradually realised that I was no longer writing a historical drama.
I was writing about something infinitely older than history itself.
I was writing about the human voice.
About that fragile inner voice which compels people to love, to forgive, to weep, to embrace one another, and sometimes simply to remain silent together.
The scene that became dearest to me was not one of war or politics.
It was a kiss.
A quiet kiss shared through tears at the summit of the ziggurat.
Not because it belonged to antiquity.
But because it belonged to life.
That kiss, suspended above the city beneath the endless Mesopotamian sky, was never merely a theatrical scene.
It carried with it a memory from my own life.
Many years earlier, in the freezing winter night of a Baltic capital, I had kissed my future wife for the first time.
Snow covered the empty streets.
We walked together without speaking.
There are moments when words become unnecessary because silence says everything that language cannot.
I remember only one thing with complete clarity.
I held her hand as tightly as I could.
Years later, while writing Enheduanna, I
That kiss upon the summit of the ziggurat carried no theatrical grandeur.
It carried recognition.
It was the moment when two human beings ceased to speak as priestess and king, as symbols or historical figures, and simply became a woman and a man.
Perhaps that is why the scene touched me so deeply.
It echoed something from my own life.
I remembered a winter evening many years ago, in the snow-covered capital of one of the Baltic countries, when I kissed the woman who would later become my wife.
Afterwards we walked for a long time without speaking.
I remember only that I held her hand with all the strength I possessed.
Silence itself had become our language.
When Naram-Sin says to Enheduanna,
"...like a woman who secretly waited for these words for as long as I hesitated to speak them..."
I was not inventing poetry.
I was remembering life.
Theatre became memory.
Memory became theatre.
Perhaps that is why those words came so naturally.
Every sacred vessel eventually longs to become simply human.
Even the High Priestess.
Even the disciple.
Even the king.
As the play slowly unfolded, I discovered another image returning again and again without any conscious intention.
Hands.
At first I scarcely noticed them.
Then suddenly they were everywhere.
Enheduanna's hands.
Naram-Sin's hands.
Lugal-Ane's hands.
Elissa's hands.
Hands blessing.
Hands destroying.
Hands embracing.
Hands letting go.
Only later did I realise that the central symbol of the play was neither power nor love.
It was the human hand.
Scientists may continue arguing whether language or the hand transformed our ancestors into human beings.
For me the answer became unexpectedly simple.
The Word and the Hand were born together.
One cannot exist without the other.
For what is language if no hand ever reaches toward another?
And what is a hand if it never learns compassion?
Little by little I understood that a human being is remembered not for what he possessed, but for what his hands chose to do.
The hands that receive a newborn child.
The hands of parents protecting a frightened son or daughter.
The hand of a father teaching confidence without speaking.
The hand of a mother calming fear before words exist.
The wrinkled hands of a grandmother carrying generations of memory.
The hand of a sister remaining faithful through an entire lifetime.
And finally...
the hands of my own children.
Watching those hands grow from infancy into adulthood allowed me to witness something no philosophy can adequately explain.
The quiet miracle through which one generation silently entrusts the future to the next.
Perhaps every civilisation ultimately survives only through such hands.
Empires rise.
Empires disappear.
But hands continue passing bread, books, tools, affection, forgiveness, and hope from one life to another.
That thought eventually led me toward what became, for me, the deepest meaning of the entire play.
May this hand never forget
that we are,
before everything else,
of one breath,
one clay,
and one eternity.
Would she recognise us?
I eventually realised that the answer was simpler than I had imagined.
She would not recognise our machines.
She would not understand our satellites, our computers, or our artificial intelligence.
But she would immediately recognise our fears.
Our pride.
Our loneliness.
Our love.
Our longing to be remembered.
Human beings have changed less than we like to believe.
We have learned to cross oceans and planets.
We have not yet learned to cross the distance that separates one human heart from another.
Perhaps that is why Enheduanna still speaks.
Not because she belongs to history.
But because she belongs to us.
When I finally completed the play, I understood something that had escaped me from the very beginning.
I believed that I had been writing about the first known author.
In reality, I had been writing about the last question every human being eventually asks.
What remains after us?
Not our titles.
Not our victories.
Not our possessions.
Not even our failures.
Only the lives we have touched.
Only the words that helped another human being remain standing.
Only the love we gave away without calculation.
Empires disappear.
Libraries burn.
Even stone returns to dust.
Yet sometimes a single voice survives.
Not because it was powerful.
Because it was true.
Perhaps that is why, after four thousand years, Enheduanna found me.
Not to teach me history.
But to remind me that every generation receives the same fragile responsibility.
To leave the world a little more human than we found it.
If these pages accomplish anything, I hope they will encourage someone to open her hymns, to discover her voice, and perhaps to hear, behind that ancient voice, an unexpected echo of their own.
Then the journey that began in the temples of Ur will not yet be finished.
It will simply continue.
As for me, I no longer believe that I found Enheduanna.
I believe she was patiently waiting until I became capable of hearing her.
And for that unexpected gift, I shall remain grateful for the rest of my life.

               

                THE END