The Wings of Çatalhöyük
By Aaron Polson
The paintings only tell a piece of the story. A fragment.
Seven millennia ago, the painter was a boy: a thin, wispy thing with long fingers echoing his lanky arms and legs. He began painting in his tenth year, under his uncle’s tutoring, but his eyes had always carried the artist’s gleam, the dark, brooding silence of Çatalhöyük’s best muralists, weavers, and potters. His hazel gaze drifted far away. Since he could walk, he traced patterns into the sand on rooftop walkways with his fingertips and scratched glyphs into the walls of his family’s house with sharpened sticks. His fingers and eyes were deft; his legs and feet were not. Because of this, the other children mocked his awkwardness in games and spat on him. On the best days, the bigger boys simply brushed him aside. On the worst, they left bruises on his arms and threatened to drop him through rooftop doors onto stone floors some ten feet below.
All of this pressed his mother’s heart, and she wept for the boy, wept the soft tears of mothers for their sons. If his father had lived, she imagined Nan would be a stronger, faster child. She imagined with the terrible power of all lies, but a mother’s hopes for her child outreach the limits of sinews, bone, and blood.
Her brother simply said, “The boy will be what he will be.” He held patience for Nan’s oddness; he encouraged the boy's love for painting. He explained pigments for the bright colours in the community halls, which flowers gave which hue, the special blend of pigment and resin to make the paints, and how the men would venture into the wilds to find the fuel for their art. He talked of inspiration, of the horrors and beauty in the world, all of the world, which could be open to the artist's touch. The artist must take chances. The artist must have wings.
Nan listened, lapping his uncle's words like a thirsty goat.
His uncle traveled frequently, off gathering the raw materials for his work with other artisans of the city. It was on such a trip that a wild boar, mad with fever, gored him. The others carried his lifeless body back to the city.
***
The walls of the city bore witness to a millennium of history, and altars bore the record of family lines under their heavy, sandstone feet. Old hieroglyphs detailed burial traditions for generations. A funeral party laid the corpse on a wood frame atop the home as tradition dictated. The sun shone bright and high in the afternoon, but the clouds came, as they always did when the people of Çatalhöyük offered their dead. Stories told how the spirits of ancestors, by permission of the gods, would come in the storm clouds and take the body away, skin, flesh, and organs, leaving the bones for interment below, under the family’s altar. It was forbidden to watch.
The people knew their duty, and word of a funeral spread quickly. The population would shut itself away during the storm. Nan’s family processed past the funerary platform while the storm gathered. The boy lingered away from the crowd, behind his mother’s protective presence. When her turn came to pay homage, he refused.
“I will not,” he said, small arms folded in a shield across his chest.
His mother knelt, meeting his eyes with her own. She held a small fire in her palms, her boy, a child with gifts and burdens beyond her comprehension. She studied him. She tried to understand as she had since the boy first showed his gifts or the first time he fell at play with the others and bloodied his knees.
“Stay close to the ladder, Nan. The clouds come, and we must be away.”
But Nan crept away when his mother turned toward his uncle’s body. He wanted all the horror and beauty of which his uncle spoke. Inspiration: the clouds, the storm, the ancestors. Instead of lingering by the ladder, the boy hid, pressing his body against the rise of a nearby roof, and waited while the others gathered below.
Wind whipped and shoved pebbles across the earthen rooftops of Çatalhöyük, scattering Nan’s most recent creation in a confluence of dust and sand. The last of the mourners descended below and brought the trapdoor closed. They huddled in the quiet dark, only a few dim candles offering a dull, but warm light. Nan’s mother looked from face to face, counting her closest relatives, and realized, with cold fingers clutching her heart, that Nan was not among the family.
“Nan! He was with us above,” she said. Her eyes swelled wide and wild, filled with terror. “My son is…” Her face tilted up the ladder, toward the door in the ceiling. She scrambled to her feet, knocking over a lamp. Hands clutched her arms, pulling her back, away from the ladder, the only exit from the house, any house in the city. She fell, weeping, into the embrace of her sister, as the thunder rumbled through the burnt brick walls and her kin muttered ancient prayers for the spirits of the dead.
***
When the storm quieted, Nan’s mother, face pale with tired, red eyes, made for the ladder. Her hands shook as the wooden ladder groaned. She flinched under the harsh sun after two hours of forced cloister. Her brother’s bones lay on the scaffold, picked clean and startlingly white under the blue sky. Dark clouds clung to the rim of the horizon, moving off in the distant East.
It was her sister who found the boy, Nan, cowering against a wall. His mother squeezed him in a rib-crushing embrace, reviving his senses. He would not blink, and his eyes had darkened.
“Nan, my love.”
“There are no ancestors…” The boy pushed away from his mother. He moved through the small gathering. Around the city, other families opened their rooftop doors to feel the sun’s warmth. Nan descended into his aunt’s house, into the darkness. His mother followed.
He began to paint, using his uncle’s pigments. He mapped out a rough skyline of the city, figures like men on the rooftops. When he started the wings, he used a blend of ochre and Madder Lake. The wings swallowed the sky in his mural, and they were not the wings of birds, but broad jagged things. Long crooked tendrils fell from between the wings, swallowing the rooftop watchers.
His mother approached, reaching out with trembling fingers, but her sister caught her arm.
“No,” she said. “Let the boy tell the story.”
And Nan painted for the ages.