How a Woman Dead for 4000 Years Changed My Life

          How a Woman Dead for Four Thousand Years Changed My Life



I did not seek Enheduanna. She found me.

When she entered my life, I was approaching my seventieth year. By then I already knew that my life had definitively chosen its direction, leading me toward that quiet harbor after which each of us leaves behind only a handful of ashes and, perhaps, what we call the fond memory of those close to us.

I received an engineer's education. My world was built of calculations and measurements, where every problem had its determined solutions. In this measurable world, every beam of my life, literally and figuratively, carried its precise load, allowing the bridges of my fate either to hold or to collapse from decisions I had wrongly made.

I approached literature as an amateur, for whom, as for my entire generation, it was the only way to dream and to travel. My whole generation, long before the Americans, walked on the Moon with Wells. We sailed around the world and explored the depths of the sea with Jules Verne. Each of us was not only a fifteen-year-old captain, but also the Sea Wolf of my beloved Jack London, with whom I had to pan for no small amount of gold in the Klondike and live through the fate of Martin Eden, with that question — WHY? — which my boyish mind did not yet fully understand.

My tranquil childhood, when Agatha Christie's heroes rivaled Sherlock Holmes in cunning, when Tom Sawyer might have met the children of Huckleberry Finn, when the warmth of Uncle Tom's Cabin comforted us while we calmly washed our feet in the wide Mississippi — not in the small basin in which our mother washed our feet every evening, pouring warm water from the kettle — no, that was not water from a kettle, those were the waters of the Mississippi murmuring between our little fingers, recalling that tender touch which only a mother's hand can give.

The trilogy of The Three Musketeers, which I reread several times and which taught us not only Gascon bravery but also, or so it seemed to me then, certain "adult sides of life," as well as the fact that failing to distinguish Burgundy from Bordeaux, for a true Frenchman like Porthos, was a genuine crime. And how could I have known then, running about our courtyard in Tbilisi, that my fate would settle me near the town of Dieppe, from which our Gascon had sailed off in pursuit of the diamond studs… And that friendship, described with such force in Erich Maria Remarque's Three Comrades, with whom we could not help but love our neighbor, could not help but pass beneath the Arc de Triomphe, and, strolling through Paris, could not help but encounter Hemingway in its many bars… And of course, having once met the Americans, we had to pass through the horror of An American Tragedy and reap The Grapes of Wrath, which still could not fully convey the hopelessness of The Great Gatsby's situation. I know I must stop here, for if we enter Galsworthy's endless sagas, march through War and Peace across all of Europe — we will have no choice but to go mad with Dostoevsky: either from our own Crime and Punishment, or by becoming equal to The Idiot, if we manage to survive The Brothers Karamazov.

And how could I have known then that the child's tear shed by Dostoevsky would cause such an earthquake in my consciousness, to the point where I could no longer stay silent without saying that "an empire that demands the tears of its children has already lost in the eyes of eternity." But that would happen much later.

And yet — despite the endless literature assignments in the school curriculum — the very art of writing belonged, for me, to others. And just as history, whose love my father instilled in me, belonged to learned historians, ancient Mesopotamia belonged, for me, to museums. Or so I believed at the time.

My ideal of an engineer was Engineer Smith from The Mysterious Island, and that is why I rejected my parents' idea that I become a doctor, after a career as a violinist had been definitively ruled out, at the mere thought that I might have to sew heads back on, as in Professor Dowell's Head. My father often told me: "There is no such thing as superfluous knowledge." I believe this saying is rooted in Socrates' "I know that I know nothing."

And so, against this backdrop of literary eclecticism, one quiet day, without asking my opinion or my permission, a woman who had been dead for over four thousand years began asking me questions. Not about history. About myself.

I cannot explain why this happened. My past gave me no way to answer the question of how a person who decides to write first hears the voice that tells him: you must do this! I do not know whether a writer can truly explain the moment when a voice begins to sound from somewhere beyond books.

For me, it all began with a simple wish to help my son. And it began with his Christmas gift for the three of us — for mother, for father, and for himself. Must I recall this today — at first we took it for a "poisoned gift." Tickets to a theater in Le Havre, for the play La Distance by Tiago Rodrigues!

Yes — it all began with that play, and the subject of Enheduanna, which had already occupied my thoughts for a long time, became the natural way to accomplish both goals at once — to help my son, and to help Enheduanna.

At first I thought I was simply writing about the first known author in the history of humanity. But I soon realized that I was listening more than I was writing. Then, without noticing exactly when it happened, I discovered something even stranger — I had stopped listening. I had begun to answer.

Most people know Enheduanna as the daughter of Sargon of Akkad, the first great builder of an empire. Historians remember her as the High Priestess of the moon god Nanna. Scholars study her hymns because they represent the earliest signed literary works known to humanity. All of this is true. But none of it explains why she refused to leave me.

A biography alone cannot explain a presence. Libraries preserve facts. Theater seeks breath.

And I gradually came to understand that I was not interested in reconstructing Enheduanna's life. I wanted to know whether her voice was still alive. Writing a historical play suddenly turned into something entirely different. It became a conversation across four thousand years. Every morning I asked myself the same question: "How would she speak today?" Not how she spoke then. Today.

How would a woman who had lived through exile, humiliation, political violence, and the collapse of all certainty look upon our own age? Would she recognize us? Or would she simply recognize in us fellow human beings? This question changed everything.

Because little by little, I stopped writing about Enheduanna. And it was she who began writing about me, through my own hand. It was in her language that I spoke to Naram of his grandfather's conquests and of the price these conquests demanded from ordinary people — and it was thus that my own formula was born, one that became the axis of the entire play:

"An empire that demands the tears of its children has already lost in the eyes of eternity."

This thought is not a quotation, but my own conclusion drawn from the story of Naram-Sin, the first emperor in human history. But it unintentionally echoes the same moral intuition that lived in my beloved Dostoevsky: no goal, no victory, is worth a single tear of a tortured child.

"Remember this — and then you will be condemned to become great… for it is thus that together we have forged the weapon of your future victories!" — so spoke Enheduanna to Naram-Sin.

But behind all these words stood an elusive image — one that came to me at night, but which I was unable to describe by morning! There were mornings when I spent hours trying to describe her appearance. Nothing seemed true. Every costume looked theatrical. Every ornament looked merely decorative. Every attempt seemed to lock her away inside archaeology.

But one morning she appeared to me, fully clothed, entirely in white! And nothing else. No royal majesty. No jewels. Only white.

In that moment I understood something no history book had ever told me. She was never meant to resemble power. She was meant to resemble light. This single image stayed with me throughout the writing.

The white garment… the open sleeves… and the wind atop the ziggurat. From that moment on, I no longer saw a historical queen. I saw a swan. Not because she was fragile. But because she carried silence the way a swan carries water. Without effort. Without sound.

And suddenly another phrase was born. It later became one of the central ideas of the entire play: "We are of one breath, one clay, one eternity."

I did not invent this phrase as a slogan. It came as a recognition. Before acquiring language, every child breathes. Before acquiring a nationality, every hand touches the earth. After death, every body returns to clay. Everything else comes later. Empires. Borders. Flags. Victories. Defeats. Names. And only breath comes first.

And perhaps that is why I could no longer write a historical drama. I discovered that I was writing about something infinitely older than history itself. I was writing about the human voice. Yes — about that human voice which, resounding within me, made my characters speak and argue, love and weep, embrace and kiss!

That tender kiss through tears atop the ziggurat. When your love is that "most tender sacred vessel," for which you are ready to go "through fire and water." How it reminded me of that first kiss with my wife, also at night, but in the snow-covered capital of one of the Baltic countries.

And the words Naram speaks to the Priestess: "…like a woman who had secretly awaited this for as long as I feared to say it." Yes — sometimes even without the sacred Sikaru — that sacred temple drink — every priestess-woman waits to shed her sacred veil, just as we are ready to shed our "disciple's" obedience. I still remember, after that kiss, how we walked in silence, and how I held her hand in mine.

Human hands. Scholars will long continue to debate what was decisive in the emergence of Man — the Hand or Language. In this play, the question was resolved differently. Language, that is, the Word, and Hands — are the two cornerstones of the work. And while the question of the Word never needed to be settled — it was evident from the start — the hands, independently of me, kept slipping into the play and remaining present throughout. And, independently of me, hands became one of its principal symbols.

And this is true: I never decided in advance — "now I will create the symbol of hands." It was born on its own. I do not know how this symbol came into being, but I suddenly discovered that it existed. It appears in almost every scene.

Not war. Not power. Not love. Hands. In Enheduanna. In Lugal-Ane. In Naram-Sin. In Elissa. Hands became, entirely unconsciously, the central symbol of the play.

And this is true: a man is defined by what his hands do. The hands of those who receive him at his first appearance in the world, out of his mother's womb. The hands of parents, as they cradle him longer than any other creature on earth. The father's hand, in which the son feels protected in this world. The mother's hand, from which peace flows into the infant's soul. The grandmother's hands, through which time passes down the memory of ancestors. The sister's hand, passing on the joy of childhood and the loyalty of the heart. The hands of your own children, through which, for me as a father, the whole evolution of their growing up passed, leading to the eternal question of "Fathers and Sons."

May this hand never forget that we are:

OF ONE BREATH! OF ONE CLAY! OF ONE ETERNITY!




Thomas DJERAK