One of the men of Sodom (Q.) reported, Two of the messengers landed very near where I live, dropping out of the sky in the first wave of paratroopers. They were the first of their sort we’d ever seen and they seemed huge, dazzling. They were some sight, I tell you. Later, many more came, and quite soon we’d become, well, inured to the way they looked and the way they did things and the excitement wore off. As it does even with the most beautiful boys. You know that. But for a short while before… before the attack, you’d have to agree about their look, their bodies, their style. All that gear they wore, it hung off them from buckled harnesses on their backs and thighs, and ankles, even. Yet they moved unimpeded, light on their cleated boots, as if they were carrying no weight at all. It turned me on, you know.
But afterwards, well.

Another of the men of Sodom (W. ) remembered, The first messenger took off his helmet. It was hard -moulded and stuck with leaves and grasses. His hair underneath was pale yellow-brown too, like fresh dates. It was damp and sticking to his brow from the flight. These first arrivals seemed to float in effortlessly on the current, held by the updraught that filled the silken shrouds of their vehicles, but it was clear that the equipment requires stamina and control. So when I first saw him, his exertions showed, in his flattened moist hair, the flush on his fair skin and the patches of sweat on his back under the trellis of the harness he loosened when he landed.

Q. continued, I watched them move down the road. They strode forward with a smooth, rhythmic swing, gathering speed, heads up. They joined the physical ease and grace of wild animals with precision-tooled engineering. They looked immortal. Engines, not humans. Angels. Invincible.

A third man of Sodom (Z.) interrupted, There’d been warnings over a long period before those first messengers arrived and brought news of the attack in person. Broadcasts, diplomatic communiqués. Messages were even dropped from the sky on their own small parachutes. Written in different languages– the attempt to write in ours full of hideous errors of grammar and orthography, of course. But all this was before … before the attack.
They promised us …

Q.: …Freedom: the first angel called out us his name at the city gate, as he stripped the wrist guards he wore from his arms and fastened them to dangle from his belt.

W.: Justice, the second angel cried out, as he shook himself out of his buckled harness and rolled his parachute into a narrow sleeve and packed it away in his rucksack.

Z.: I tried to tell my friends, Don’t be taken in by their blandishments.

A Commander of the Joint Alliance announced, Operation By His Love Regenerate begun this day at 0600 hours with full deployment. One front opened to the north: 1,400 men; the airborne division landed to the south: 1750 men. On the road, three armoured divisions, heavy artillery, 7,500 men. In the bay, two aircraft carriers. In the air….

Lot: I was looking out for the first signs of their arrival, after days and weeks and months of waiting, after so much turmoil and tension, so many promises and warnings. They certainly took their time. They blew hot and cold. They weighed their conflicting interests. They discussed the principles of warfare. They prevaricated. But when I saw the first of the angels, my long frustration evaporated. I ran into the street from my house. I welcomed them to our city. I invited them in. They looked at each other, and asked me if I knew about their mission. It was still secret at that stage, though as I say rumours had been spreading and we had received word of great events in the offing. Yes, I cried out, My friends and I have been hoping for this moment. You’ve come at last to liberate us from the vicious tyranny of our present rulers, and to institute the rule of law.

Freedom reported, We were greeted with delight by our contact, Lot, who offered us board and lodging. We accepted and were shown our quarters. His daughters brought us soap and towels. I said to one of them, a young one with curly hair, After Operation By His Love Regenerate, things’ll start moving round here. You’ll see.

Justice expanded, Our contact, Lot, can speak English fairly well, and told us there are many who support us, like him. But they’re afraid of reprisals. The prisons here are overflowing with men like himself, dissidents with independent minds, who haven’t given in to the prevailing corruption and tyranny. Many of them have died in the ruler’s rat-trap cells and torture chambers.

Freedom again, Life under the dictator was cheap. Like their morals.

Meanwhile Lot’s Wife muses, I remember when I was young, farmers used to travel in from miles around. Fruits and greenstuff, grains, pulses and spices. Our cellar at my parents’ house was stacked with sacks of this and that, with jars and pots, and it all smelled so delicious, I’d pester Granny to let me go and fetch what she needed, even though it was dark down there and sometimes I was scared. Of anything that scuttled or scrabbled about in the corners. Of snakes. Snakes are quiet, and they like the cool of the shade. But now, when Lot said, We have guests, the angels of the Lord who is coming to save us, I looked in our stores and saw only scarcity. After many years, during the long protracted prelude to this battle that we’ve been waiting for so long, trade dwindled to a trickle, supplies were harder and harder to lay hold of. So for our guests that day, I took the last of the dried fish and Elvira and I took turns to pound it to a creamy paste with the best oil still remaining, oil that we’d have thought rubbish a few years ago. Your father has plans, I told the girls. He is your father and he’ll do his best for us. I apologised for the greyness and coarseness of the bread at our table, I explained that it was impossible to find white flour. The taller of the two visitors smiled at me when I passed him the basket of breads and said…

Justice: Up in those palaces, they’ve been hogging white bread all these years. No more need to worry about that now. The future is here, now. You’ll have more white bread than you’ll ever want.

Lot’s Wife is saying to herself, Honey and fat. Salt and water. These are the essentials. I knew they must never run low, if we are to survive. Belsaba’s young man brought us a piece of honeycomb recently: his family keeps bees on their roof. Bees can drink from the scraggiest weeds that creep out of cracks in the dust. Honey feeds the will to live. It turns into fire in the blood. Honey, the nourisher.

Elvira, the eldest daughter, aged sixteen, recalled, Father was always getting together with friends late at night in our house. It was absolutely forbidden to mention their meeting like that, anywhere, however much we might think someone was our friend. So father made us swear. Secret forces burst in at night and took anyone away they thought was an enemy. Or even just a possible enemy. Anyone who wasn’t a hundred per cent enslaved. So Father kept all his information in his head, but he hid bundles of things in the cavity behind the big toy chest in our bedroom where there was an old chimney, with my bed against it. This was the stuff he used for his work, that he needed to make contact with the angels and their cohorts. At their meetings, he wasn’t aware that I’d grown up enough to understand what they were talking about – to him I was just his little girl and he’d call for more mezés, more coffee, more water and more wine, as they grew more vehement, more desperate, more determined. They spoke of the silencing of this friend and that in the ruler’s torture chambers. Of the people who kept disappearing. Of the danger and the urgency. They railed against the corruption of the court, the placemen and the hirelings who did his bidding. They denounced his immorality, the bathing parties he held at his summer house, the supply of boys he secured by sending his servants round the town to pick out children on the pretext of joining the palace guards, and then debauching them till they were never heard of again…Terrible things, terrible and fascinating.

Lot’s Wife is thinking about, Water, how it is strong and firm and wilful but as life-giving as sleep. Water is like a gentle hand that soothes anxieties that build up through the agonising sleepless night, water is granny’s face. I remember how, when I was a child, she winced with pain at the sight of the hurt I’ve done to my knee where I fell. Then she splashed it patiently, dipping a cup in water again and again and letting it run over the wound and loosen the grit and wash it away. Water the healer, the comforter.

Lot described his city: Sodom was the way it was. It had been so for so long that we could hardly remember another time, a time before. We – my friends and associates – longed for our ruler’s death, but he surrounded himself with quacks who fed him hormone extracts of young animals to prolong his wicked life. Of his evil lubricity and vices’ demands there was no end. It was years ago that the plan first began to form in my mind. That we must take charge of our destiny and overthrow him. Our survival depended on it, even at a high cost of betrayal and conflict and struggle to the death. We dreamed of a new beginning. Of this new beginning.

Lot’s Wife continues to muse, to muse on … Salt. I remember when I was a child on my grandparents’ farm, how I looked at cows in the field, and one of them was curling the thick soft flesh of her tongue around the loaf of salt set on a spike by the water trough. I felt the animal’s newly primed energy as she licked the slab to the steady rhythm of her lapping. We kept a box of dirty grey salt crystals in the kitchen, where Granny buried carcasses which gradually lost their warmth and softness and turned brittle and dry as she cured them to keep over the hot summer and into the barren winter. Salt changes dead meat’s nature; it stops the blight of mortality: salt, the preserver!

Belsaba, their younger daughter, aged 13, described how, After Father’s new friends arrived, they closeted themselves together in his study. Elvira took in a tray, with coffee and wine and cakes and dried fruit. She came out dimpling and blushing. She said to me, with that self-important face she puts on when Father’s on her mind, I’ll be really really nice and let you come in with me when I fetch the tray, so there, you can’t snivel around me any more.

Lot’s Wife: Salt is a poison, it can spoil a dish, and it’ll foul water, of course. It stings: the sea, tears. But it clears and cures and purifies too, and as I say, Granny showed me how it keeps foodstuffs from rotting. It cancels time. And unlike honey, it doesn’t dominate a dish afterwards, if you use the right dosage, unlike honey, which always tastes of itself. Salt enhances and sharpens flavours, without seeming to alter them.

Elvira reflected, It was early in the morning of that day, it seemed an ordinary day, but it was to be the most extraordinary day I’d ever known. Everything changed at last.

Belsaba: It was then, soon after, that Elvira and I heard shouting at the back door.
I was in the kitchen when someone began trying to get in – then, when they found it locked, they started banging and yelling to be let in. I ran under the table and hid there, because we’d been told to do that in the case of a raid. Then someone said, Let’s go round to the front, and I realized I was being an idiot, that they just sounded excited, and anyway, the sirens hadn’t sounded. But I was in a muddle – it was so confusing, the two tall fair foreigners with their boots and harnesses and all over metal paraphernalia and their pink faces and short hair, shut up with Father, and Mother fussing about how we hadn’t anything decent to give them, and Elvira licking her finger and smoothing her eyebrows and trying to keep her lips fixed in that stupid smile she puts on when she’s trying to make herself oh so irresistible.

Q. complained, The messengers were being monopolised, they’d been taken over and kept from the rest of us. It was too much. Lot worshipped anything and everything with a label from somewhere else, not from here. He’d be giving them a false picture. He wasn’t the representative any of us had chosen. I wanted to show them around, too. I wanted to take them to the baths and them to hear some of our singers. Nothing more pleasant than sitting under the moon in the cool of the night in an inner courtyard of our city, with the trees exhaling their perfume in the dark while one of our musicians plays an old tune…. At those times, you can forget ancient hostilities, forget want and pain, and close your eyes and drift off into a dream of …. I thought our visitors might like that – I wanted to take the first one by the hand and lie beside him and make him hear through the song the beauty and the peace of our ways-

W. echoed him, I was angry, it was late, I wanted to take one of the angels and shake him. I wanted to say to him, Look around you! Don’t go by hearsay! Don’t listen to the filth our enemies pour into willing ears. Sodom and Gomorrah, bywords for vice and luxury, for perversion and cruelty. Yes, it’s true, for some. But not for all. Like everywhere, like anywhere. I wanted to talk to them, I wanted to make them see it - before it was too late. But it was - too late.

Z. protested, I joined the crowd outside Lot’s house: in times of crisis you can’t pick and choose the company you keep. We had to sink our differences and join forces, though there wasn’t one person in that crew to whom I’d give the time of day in normal circumstances. But these weren’t normal circumstances. I was there beating on Lot’s door with the worst of them. I wanted to make the strangers come out and find out what they intended. I wanted to have things out with them: the punishment we’d taken over the years, the obloquy we’ve been subjected to, the ferocious cutting off of our supply routes. As if we were all the same! As if there weren’t many among us who hated the tyranny we lived under and wanted something different. But at the same time, didn’t want them – not the powers who had sent them on their mission.
But it was far too late for all that. It was the start of the end. It was the last of times for us, for the cities of the plain.

Freedom proclaimed, You’re history.

Justice promised, We’re bringing a new day.

Lot went over the sequence of events: I didn’t let them in. I called everyone together and we dragged a table against the front door and heaped what we could find on top of it and under it, and did likewise at the back entrance with a cupboard. Our visitors took up positions, looking down on our unexpected night callers from the first floor window. I stood firm, in spite of the danger to myself and my wife and family. The door shook in its frame and the mob bayed for my guests – but Lot is no coward and I shouted right back at them. Told them they couldn’t frighten me. Then I …

Belsaba added, Our father called for us – Elvira’s supposed fiancé, her so-called beloved husband to be, came rushing into the kitchen where we were huddled with mother, and said Father wanted us to join them, in the front room.

Elvira continued, He told us to straighten up and stop looking like whipped bitches and show a little pride. Then he said, Go up to the balcony, and open the shutters and look down on the mob. Hold your heads high: you are my daughters.

Lot swore, I observe the laws of hospitality, I called out to them. I will never hand over a guest for you to abuse.

Elvira remembered: I could see it was terrifying, what father was doing, but I really admired him for it, for refusing to give way. Mother didn’t understand, she never really understood. She was crying and tearing her hair, and she set off Belsaba too.

Meanwhile, Lot’s wife is thinking: I want the girls to help me pack, but Lot has some fool notion of sending them up on the roof - to pacify the crowd, he says. I’m scared of that mob. In this kind of atmosphere anyone might do anything. I want them to help me choose what to take: my mother’s coffee set or the one Lot and I used before she died and left hers to us – you know I love the bent spout of my mother’s and the pattern of intertwined poppies and pheasants that’s chased into its lovely full-bellied body and has worn away to a ghost of itself on the very roundest part. But it’s brass and so it’s not as valuable as the silver set we were given when we married – but I thought, Who knows, we may have to bargain with this and that because the currency is collapsing …When we go. Lot keeps saying we’ll have to go. Like others before us, leave so that we can come back to a new time and a new world, a place to start again. But where will it be if this has gone? If everything I know has vanished?
And I know there’s only so much we can carry. And we must take water. Water is so heavy.
I need you girls, we can sew one or two things into our clothes. Look, here’s the old sewing basket: I remember every button in it, from every outfit I ever wore, which Granny snipped to save bits and pieces when I grew out of it and it was too worn to hand down.
I want you to stitch big baggy pockets on to our clothes, so we’ll be able to take more with us.

Freedom said, I had laid aside my weapons to eat, but the kit’s made so that you can buckle it on again, full rig, in no time at all. I was ready, ready for anything.

Elvira remembered, The taller of our guests wriggled into the padded jacket he’d taken off, and strapped on his equipment again, round his thighs and on to both his arms and slung his weapons from a belt slantwise across his chest.

Justice added, A single grenade, that’s all it would have needed to take out that mob. But our orders were, Easy on the collateral.

Elvira: One of our guests snapped together a light gun which he took out of his back pack – and that pack didn’t look big enough to take a change of shoes - he soon had it set up at one of Our windows, trained on the street. Then Father gave me the signal and I pushed open the shutters and went out on the balcony, and the morning was growing hotter, and the shoving and shouting down below us was getting louder and more violent. But I did what Father said, and I made Belsaba stand beside me and hold her head high.

Belsaba: Father shouted something through the door and the heaving mass in the street let out a kind of huge concerted howl and they all looked up at Elvira and me. She held my hand so hard she made marks with her nails and hissed at me to stop squirming and stand still as Father wanted. He was putting us on show. And she was pleased about it. She was mincing and dimpling at them. She makes me sick.

Lot: Elvira’s young man was storming at me and that silly boy who hangs around mooning after Belsaba began crying –I told them, fair and square, stop that, this is no time for tears.

Lot’s wife: And I remember how before all this when I was young we were so happy, me and my sisters and my mother telling stories while we prepared food – and it was overflowing then, the kitchen table was wonderful to see, what a spread of plenty – sometimes we were clearing out an old trunk or sometimes making one of us a new dress and we were always laughing as we passed on the latest song and the latest scandal – the secret love affairs of Sodom and Gomorrah! I remember when the son of --- and his uncle, who was, well, very well placed, you might say… oh well they were outrageous, completely outrageous. After that there was a fashion for blue kohl applied to the whole area under the brows and between them… amazing. .

Lot: I’ll hand over to you everything my own. Even my girls, my lovely daughters, but you’ll not touch a hair on the head of my guests.

Elvira’s fiancé: I wanted to kill him, her father’s no better than a pimp. I was going to hurl myself at him, that weasel, Lot, that fixer. But one of the strangers was right beside me with his slung garland of grenades and he grabbed me and pulled me to him and I felt the force of his presence in the heat of his body and the breath of his voice. Here, he said, ‘Take this piece’, and he handed me a pistol and I followed him, up the stairs. They all have a way of making it impossible not to do what they say, our visitors, the angels.

Lot: When I’ve undertaken something, I’m loyal. Freedom and Justice came to seek shelter and sustenance under my roof and I am pledged to stand by them. My daughters understand that. I haven’t excluded them from my thinking. They’re educated young women, as well as beautiful, and they share my ideas, of course they do. They’re the apple of my eye. I’m so fond of them.
Elvira!

Elvira: Yes, Father?

Lot: Belsaba!

---

Lot: Belsaba!

Lot: Can’t she hear me calling?

Belsaba’s boyfriend: I went after her and pulled her back off the balcony and down the stairs and into the kitchen and I was trying to tell her she had to come with me, to leave that place, and get away from her father and his plans and plots.

Freedom: We’ve come to clean out years of filth.

Belsaba’s boyfriend: Lot saw me and came after me. He was furious, he ordered Belsaba to let go of me and he threw me down on the floor. .

Belsaba: I really thought Father was prepared to toss us to the crowd – just to show what a big man he is. How he’s above petty considerations of family. How he serves higher things, God and Country.

Justice: We’re here to end decades of corruption.

Together: We’re the beginning of the new time.

A spokesman for the commander of the Joint Forces: According to our campaign strategy the soldiers fighting for By His Love Regenerate are advancing towards Sodom, and have met no resistance. The people show enthusiasm in their welcome. Seventeen arrests have been made by the local police, who are working normally. There have been no casualties.

Lot: I was waiting for the vanguard.

Z.: Look, I said, they don’t want to give us their powers – their freedom, their riches. They intend our destruction. But my friends did not listen.

Lot’s Wife: It’s been such a night. The confusion seems to be going on for ever, the crowd outside’s still bellowing and cursing us and hammering at the house, and we’ve used every single stick of furniture to pile up against the shutters and the doors. Lot tempted them with Elvira and Belsaba, but they were intent on business, they aren’t to be distracted, oh no. So he’s called them back down from the balcony, thank God. I was so afraid for them. I’m still so afraid. But my husband knows what to do. He has his plans, and he’s always had a mind of his own. At last everything is beginning to quieten down outside – some natural law is asserting itself perhaps, hunger and thirst and sleeplessness. One or two of our rioters are trying to keep up the hubbub and rally their friends to start chanting and banging again, but they’ve all mostly all decided to go home, or perhaps to look for action elsewhere. As long as they go away, I don’t care what they do.

Lot announced: God watches over us. The party’ s over, my friends. Elvira, Belsaba! Wife!

Freedom: Given the tension of the situation, it was decided to implement our plan immediately, no delay.

Justice: We were under orders to evacuate the city, then destroy it. If we could not find the means to effect the former, we would proceed. Despatch was necessary for the success of By His Love Regenerate. There was to be no dithering.

Freedom: No looking back.

Justice. We had to leave immediately and move swiftly under cover of the last hour of darkness that last day.

Together: Start moving, now.

Lot’s Wife: The second angel is telling me, No Packing. The strategy has changed. Our forces aren’t circumventing the city in their advance on the capital. Their orders are now …

Freedom: … to evacuate all citizens who wished to follow us.

Justice: Before divine justice befell them.

Lot: You see, wife! I told her, I told my daughters, This is the moment. A design and a purpose guide all things. Every individual existence and all of history move towards their designated end, dictated by the hand of our God who is faithful and loving to his people. You can take what you can carry. But no more.

Elvira: He wouldn’t come. My love, my husband, he wouldn’t leave with us. He said he wanted to marry me but when Father said, We’re leaving, we’re leaving now, and he dug in. He wanted to stay behind in Sodom. After we were gone, after the air strikes were called in, in the ruins.

Lot: He thought there’d be prizes: the spoils of war! More fool him. I told Elvira, If he reacted that way, he didn’t deserve her. My daughter!

Elvira: I could see all this but I still loved him, and I begged him. But he taunted us. He insulted Father.

Lot: You’ll see, I said. And I was right. The vengeance of God will clean Sodom of disease and poverty, of filth and corruption.

Belsaba: I was scared. I thought, Father will leave me behind – with him, with that silly boy who hangs around and doesn’t know anything. He just kept crying. I pushed him away and I ran to Father and I begged him to take me with him.

Freedom: Like new growth that bursts from charred fields after the stubble has been torched, so new life will begin from the devastation of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Elvira’s young man: I’ll believe that when I see it. Elvira, don’t, don’t go with them.
Belsaba’s boyfriend: Belsaba, don’t go with your … father. What shall I do without you?

Lot: Our visitors were listening to the devices in their ears, relaying the state of the advance. There was no time to be lost. I told the young men that if they were so foolish as to choose to stay behind and submit to God’s punishment, they did not deserve to be my daughters’ husbands.

Elvira: There was such dreadful confusion. I was furious with him, I told him he had to act now, he mustn’t dither, or put off the moment. I can’t respect a man who can’t make up his mind to move, then and there, when the time demands it. It did something to me, to see him floundering about like that. I lost my respect for him, and I can’t love a man I don’t respect. I want my man to be bold, like Father, to seize hold of history with both hands and go…forward.

Angel of Freedom: Operation By His Love Regenerate: Phase Two, Fire & Brimstone was called for 21.00 hours Mid-Asian PlainsTime. I told them, Start moving. NO packing.

Angel of Justice: We comforted them, we told them they’d be able to put it all behind them, that once they'd made the break, they wouldn’t feel it any more, and they’d never think of these bad times again.

Lot’s Wife: Lot says I mustn’t look back, on our life here, ever, that we’re embarking for a new world, arranged according to the will of God, where everything will be clean and pure and strong, not like Sodom, not like our slovenly, womanish ways.
But I am not sure what’s happening to us and I can’t believe that we are really leaving home, this place I’ve lived in all my life, first as a child then as a wife and mother and, as I was hoping so hard, a grandmother. Like my own granny whose smile was the portrait of love for me. I remember her … But Lot says I mustn’t reminisce, that it saps the will, it’s a softness of the brain. He puts his hand across my mouth as if to gag my thoughts whenever I start again like that, saying, When I was young, I remember… The truth is that I can only understand what I am and what we have become and who others are through my connections to our old ways, to our houses and our streets, to the home I’ve always known, and I feel that if they vanish, I shan’t be held any more in the mesh of the past. It will tear and I’ll fall out of it.
Lot has always looked forward to this very rupture. The clean break with the dirty past.
I remember when I was a young girl – there I go again – when we first had a camera at home, we took pictures of one another. It was my sister’s birthday present and we piled up on her bed and took it in turns, Some of us pulled faces (I was only doing it to cover up because I didn’t think I could ever look pretty) and others posed wantonly all legs and eyes in imitation of the pinups we’d stolen looks at in our fathers’ hiding places – we could always detect them! God, how we laughed. But it’s not just the ways we have lived because even I can see that we can live like that elsewhere, that the pleasures we took and the fun we had could be recaptured in another world. It’s the combination of familiar faces and old friends and streets and furniture and ways of setting out produce for sale. The look and the feel, the sounds and the smells of attachments you’ve made all along the time you can remember. Like family, for even when you’re exasperated, even when you’re at your wits’ end with your mother or your father, or, in my case, with my old grandpa, smelly old groper, grouching and grousing over the food you set in front of him and the next minute waggling his tongue at you for a big wet slobber. Even when a baby cries all night long and sicks up on your silk top when you’ve dressed to go out for the evening- if you’re lucky, as I have been – the feel of all this is the very act and presence of reality and your love stretches and widens and deepens and fills you up.
But the angels tell Lot and Lot orders me, Don’t look back. Still I want to see I want to know what is happening to my home to my city. I had to turn and look, I had to. So I did look back.

Elvira remembered, The rising heat of the day was already fierce when we reached a place where the angels said we were safe to stop. Behind us, the thunder of the strikes crashed once, twice, then again and again over Sodom and Gomorrah. We’d hit such a pace in our flight I’d had to shed layers and layers en route. Nothing was left of the coats Mother had filled with old china and brass pots and insisted we carried. And my best evening shoes, with the lovely beadwork – when I reached the ridge and caught my breath and drank from father’s precious flask, I couldn’t believe that I’d thrown all of this away with everything else. I wanted to go back .. But of course I knew that it was impossible.

Belsaba noticed, Mother was doing really badly. She’doften seemed younger than she was, because she was so fond of laughter and singing and keeping busy. She was always full of life: she’d never indulge any gloominess, but offer solutions that maddened me. Nobody was ever allowed to be sad or empty. She’d send me to a cupboard full of old knick-knacks to do out, or a chest of old photos to look at. She wanted Elvira and me to know who everyone was – all her old neighbours’ children and their children. She was a living archive, she said. Memory was the human proof of existence, she said.
She could be weird and she was getting weirder. Once, when I was mooning about, she took a kitchen knife and put it in my hand and said, There, cut yourself, you’ll feel better. You’ll feel something. At least you’ll feel.
As we left home that day, she was floundering, it was obvious.

Lot’s Wife: Snicking living flesh – see how even a tiny bit hurts.

Belsaba remembered, I’ve seen her prick herself on purpose, and then suck her finger grimacing and smiling at the same time, and saying with her eyes shiny, Like this I know I am here, I have a body, I can feel.

Elvira: Mother could make me really angry when she complained - and to me – Sometimes, with Father I don’t know that I exist. I’d ask, Mother, what do you mean? And she’d say, When you’re older, you’ll find out. There are some men – so I am told, she’d say – who make you feel you’re alive, you’re real, you’re there. They can make your blood leap inside you, like in the songs. Then she’d start singing, her voice all reedy and breath cracked from smoking - she always liked smoking. Father was cross with her about it but Mother insisted on her two or three or four scented fags in the evening. I like to sit under the stars, she’d say, and drift away as the smoke lifts my head from my body and fetches me up towards the black soft night.
But when we were fleeing from the bombing of Sodom you could see Mother had suddenly become an old woman, and she began making no sense at all with things she was saying. It was embarrassing.

Freedom: Darkness fell as we brought out the citizens designated for safe conduct. Phase Two: Fire & Brimstone began with the onrush of a cool wind. It came blowing across the plain like the healing breath of God himself. I knew it to be the whirling air around the missile’s passage over the earth, planing to the contours of the terrain as it sought the target. Through my infrared shield it came into view, speeding gracefully towards the evil city.

Justice: The sound follows the flash of the fire, so first we saw bright magnesium, flaming gold, in signs like writing against the sky. Then black towering clouds began roiling from the central district where the missile had struck with pure precision, as fore planned. The conflagration climbed upwards toward heaven before we heard the roar of its impact and the cataract of shattered glass and stone that followed. The fire resonated across the plain, as if everyone in Sodom were howling and banging, in the same way as the mob last night, a thousand fold.
Listen to the wrath of God, I told our small party. But keep your back to it and your eyes shut: it is not intended for your destruction.

Lot’s Wife: In the way they say happens this is what I am seeing: the face of God smiling, and his face is familiar. It is suddenly all clear. There’s no difference between his face and the face of Lot my dear husband for he is part of the life I lived and love – he’s with me in my flesh, a part of me, inside my body. For in the end even the bad odour of the breath of a loved one smells at least real.
I want to hold the moment. Its actuality, its reality. Reality is the rhythm of the day, the fitfulness of sleep in older years, the ebbing of appetite too, the buttons you remember from the dress you wore when you were ten, it’s the way your granny’s hair smelled when you leant forward to kiss her goodnight, it’s the crying of a baby next door through the wall, and the prostitute who lives in the next street and stands on the corner of ours, scratching her thighs because her skin’s alive with itching from the drugs she’s taking, it’s the talk against the regime and the dream of the time that will come after it’s gone. It’s the sounds of our house in the night and the lumps in the mattress we’ve had since we were first married. I want to make an inventory of all the stores in our larder. We’ve cooked the last of the salt fish, but some cured meat remains. Half a sack of lentils, some rice. Pots and pans and cooking spoons. Knives. Whisks. Jars and bottles for keeping and preserving. Salt, honey, oil.Fruit bottles. Cake tins. I know they’re irrelevant and I’m being sentimental. Lot is never sentimental, he says, because it weakens the will to make change. He’s right, I know he’s right. He plans cleanliness and health; he dreams of strength and simplicity, and this makes him pious, I shouldn’t criticise him (I am his wife), but piety is another kind of sentimentality. It won’t put up with mess, with loose ends, with mixed feelings, with double meanings, with the bad person who is also good, with weeds and worms as well as all the pretty flowers and twinkling streams in the perfect arrangement of paradise. You will say I suppose that none of what I’m remembering is irreplaceable, that it’s not valuable in itself. Or you’ll say, that none of it will be lost. What I ask is, Can we remain when all around us is different? Will I be what I know when all of it – the past, the stories we lived, the stones we touched and wore down with our footsteps – exist only in memory? Can I live and still be me when my history has been …cancelled?
I’m standing with my hands over my ears and my eyes tight shut with my daughters and my husband and the two angels who are taking us away from the condemned city but I can hear the crash of the buildings and the roar of the flames, the bursting water pipes and the falling glass and the tumbling masonry, and I think I can hear too the cries of the people trapped, my friends and my daughters’ lovers, their possible husbands, the future fathers of my grandchildren.
I want to cry out, For what are we being punished?
The wind will rise again and sweep past us driving ash and dust and grit across the plan. I’m making a list of what I must keep with me, but it can’t be done, I realise. I’ll have to remember. Remember everything.

Elvira: She turned round and looked back and began to run towards Sodom.

Lot: Rahab!

Rahab/Lot’s Wife: He’s calling me, like he used to when he cried my name when I was his young lover, I remember, when he held me to his body and said, It feels so good to be inside you. I tried to turn again back towards him because he also belongs to the world I’m losing, where all bad things are also partly good and everything must be a mess and mixed feelings are just in the way of being here. I am turning to the call of my name with my pulse rising to his voice, but fire’s falling from the sky for me. Its heat takes me in its arms and wraps me close, so close. Memories are racing through, and in the crackle of the flames I can see Sodom and the songs and the photographs and the paving stones and the jars and pots and food and the chairs we used to sit out on the balcony in the night and the days when we forgot about divine providence and His plans for us. The fire is trying to eat me too, from my toes to the tips of my fingers and the ends of my hair, till all that’ll be left of what I’ve been and the love for living I’ve known, will be a lump of clinkers, like the residue at the bottom of the stove that I used to riddle with a bent old bit of iron to get the chimney to draw and bring the oven up to roasting temperature for dinner.

Lot: We’re on the threshold of a new time. This is history in the making. It’s a shame she isn’t here to see it all happen. She would have seen how wrong she was.

(Written spring 2003 during the march on Baghdad and Basra, and inspired by Kiki Smith’s sculpture, ‘Lot’s Wife’.)

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