by Susan Daitch
We looked for groves and tree-lined roads, backtracking, trying other ways out of the city. I turned the dial up and down on the car radio, but all we got was crackling buzz. Forget it, Javad said. I slumped down in the front seat. Was he giving up already? You’ll find no music was all he meant. Rostami nodded and switched the radio off.
In the forty years since Javad was a child, the trees could well have been cut down, if not for McDonalds, oil pipelines, poppy fields or interstate highways, then for something. We spent days driving around with the retired oil rig worker, but as we turned off a particularly bad road, he jumped up in his seat. We stopped the jeep and continued on foot as he instructed. An outcropping of red rocks shaped like a pod of whales looked familiar to him. Javad was sure the cave had been close by. The rocky cliffs, the stunted trees marked the entrance to a cave.
“This is where the camels were loaded. There were no roads, but they traveled east of Zahedan, then followed a trail up to these hills and this cave.”
“How do we know this is the one?” Jahanshah asked, but he was grinning slightly.
“I remember exactly,” Javad answered, squinting into the sun.
We spent days exploring the cave, looking for some remnant, some fragment the Nieumachers might have left behind. After about a quarter of a mile slowly sloping underground, passages branched in many directions, some with precipitous drops. The channels, Jahanshah had warned, were not safe, prone to pockets of toxic gas, cave-ins, and not well explored. In 1939 with equipment not as good as ours they had no chance of going far into the cave, even allowing for seismic activity that could have altered some passages and sealed others completely.
One afternoon I went a little ahead of Javad and Jahanshah and down a passage that inclined steeply while becoming so narrow I had to duck, nearly doubling over. A ledge containing what could have been fragments of pottery jutted into the space, but the pieces were so small I couldn’t positively identify them as anything. Pottery or crap? Bits of bone no bigger than a fingernail were scattered nearby. Even Le Plongeon had his glyphs and chacmools to misinterpret. Here was only dust. Though the three of us explored the area with high hopes, there was nothing more in the cave, and we never found any further evidence of human habitation. Leonardo Da Vinci designed a kind of lethal chariot, a plan that expanded on the Roman Scythian chariot. He added four large scythes which would rotate and cut down everything in their path, but the problem was that the horses themselves were vulnerable, too, and if they bolted, they could themselves be sliced. I felt as if, like this faulty vehicle, I was taking a few steps forward, but I ended up shooting myself in the foot and going nowhere. What once seemed like a brilliant plan turned out to be a dangerous waste of time. I paid Javad for his time out of the Zafar money, but finally all we had were dead ends.
Why young Englishmen wear top hats, which were prevented from engulfing their entire countenances only by their ears puzzled me for some time afterwards. I subsequently learned that the supply of these social weapons is limited in Tehran and as they are hard to transport over the Elburz Mountains, they are treated by the junior diplomats as official heirlooms. From which I take it, megalocephalia was prevalent among their predecessors in office.
W. Morgan Shusterx
Strangling of Persia, 1912
I BEGAN TO NOTICE THAT we were followed whenever we went anywhere; even if we were in the desolate area near the caves, someone would appear with a goatherd who could have passed as a villager, but somehow the glasses were too new and modern looking, or shoes were an odd color, something wasn’t entirely convincing. In the city an unmarked car trailed Jahanshah’s beat-up Paykan, and when we walked on the streets of Zahedan or stopped in cafés there seemed to be a pair of men or one man not far behind. The tails were simultaneously identifiable and anonymous; they looked like any number of other men on the street wearing sunglasses. Sometimes they wore western clothes, sometimes traditional dress or a combination: baggy dark pants and long jackets, buttoned-up shirts. Renting rooms a few blocks from the Rostamis, it was easy for us to meet without necessarily having conversations via telephone to make arrangements. Apart from one day when I did ask him about these shadows, we never acknowledged the peculiarities of the situations we avoided, commonplaces like using a phone or lowering our voices in a crowd. If I was by myself, no one dogged my steps that I was aware of, so it seemed the tails weren’t interested in me, the American, but there was no way of knowing this for certain. Jahanshah was evasive in his answers so I didn’t ask again. It was a time of transition in Iran. The men could have been agents of anyone or no one, freelancers of a sort. My father who traveled all over the world looking at rocks, appeared to know little about what he saw as the less permanent forces fighting it out above the topsoil, and somehow, for the most part, he always came home as if he’d only been taking a nap on a fishing boat on a peaceful river. The last time I saw him alive he’d just returned from Argentina where prisoners rounded up from their homes were dropped out of planes, and I argued with him, how can you not know? Unlike my father, I couldn’t concentrate on exploring caves to the exclusion of the men lurking in the shadows. Needing to know what they wanted, what they were looking at, was more than a continual distraction; it was a survival mechanism my father ignored.
During my months in Zahedan, Jahanshah did disappear for periods of time without warning, and if I asked his wife where he was, she grew nervous, and only said she didn’t know where he was. She removed the photographs of the dead brother, the group of international rock hounds, the statuette of Aladdin, and Mickey Mouse. A crooked blue-black arm still stuck out of the coils of the hookah snake, Batman’s hiding place. Each time Rostami returned without warning, it was as if by magic. Mineralogists, like Rostami and his father before him, could read rocks like books and could be seen as gatekeepers or interpreters: what kind of oil might be found where, what rocks were signs of the presence of bauxite, gypsum, chromite, glass sand, iron ore, gold. What began as a child’s fascination with the crystals hidden within a geode or the phosphorescent rocks that glow in the dark turned into a useful profession and then into a job with risks. Rostami’s post had involved making detailed studies of field structures, overseeing drilling, maintaining a history of oil production, and most important, estimating the size of the oil reserves that remained. One day when we were on one of our hikes, looking for evidence — a cornice sticking out from the ground, a pottery shard etched with an unknown script, the tops of long-buried capitals, the gateway to a lost city, an old shoe, anything — he told me the story about his job and how he had lost it. We were looking for ancient footprints, but we talked about the present.
“I’m not organized and left papers lying around, but in any case nothing was under lock and key. A few days later the file reappeared with my signature on it, but it wasn’t the same file. I remembered enough of the original findings to know that the replaced file exaggerated the size of untapped fields under my purview. The director of my division was a man who was rumored to have dined on gilt quail eggs and the most rare golden Caspian caviar with the Shah and Queen Farah, but it’s also possible he never in his life was anywhere near them. It’s possible he only glimpsed them inspecting an installation or new facility. In any case, I had stumbled across a dangerous piece of information that linked me to him. Had this man deliberately overestimated the size of the reserves? Maybe, maybe not, but by coming across these adjusted numbers, by being aware of them, I was the man who knew too much.”
“So what did you do?”
“The question was: did the adjuster of numbers know that I was aware of the altered figures? I think he did.”
“How could he, whoever he was, have suspected?” I stopped, my shoes filled with sand.
“At first I made no secret of the discrepancy. I talked about it, calculating that if I did talk about it, I couldn’t be blamed for a deliberate miscalculation I knew was wrong. Talking outright about the inconsistency, dumping the scorpion from
my shoe so everyone could see it, seemed the safest thing to do. This was naive optimism on my part. I was told ink doesn’t change its position once laid on paper. The molecules don’t realign themselves overnight. How did my signature get on the file? It did look just like mine. I was set up to take the fall if the incongruity was discovered. The file had my signature, while the file with the accurate numbers was nowhere to be found. To save my life, I resigned and moved back here.”
Being the supposed author of a doctored file wasn’t the only reason he was a sitting target. His work was seen by those who watched neighborhoods as a symbol of the west and its appetite for oil. No matter who he said he worked for, Rostami was considered to be leaning towards traitorous by nothing more complicated than blind association. Like his father before him he went into semi-retirement in Zahedan, but the remote province wasn’t a foolproof escape hatch.
I often wondered what would happen if I was mistaken for him, and I was picked up off the street and questioned? Two men grab my arms as I’m about to pay for a spare set of batteries in an outdoor market. Coins, water bottles, sunglasses all go flying. No one says anything or appears to notice. I’m led out of the market and shoved into the back seat of the car. My passport is pulled from a pocket, and one of the men yells it’s a fake, and that I should shut up, even though I haven’t said a word. The taller of the two, maybe he’s wearing an eye patch, maybe he accepts I’m not Jahanshah Rostami, but he demands to know if I’m not Rostami then where’s the spy hiding? The other one, a man with a low, calm voice tells me he knows this Suolucidir business is a ruse to infiltrate, destabilize, steal reserves, sabotage pipelines. It was the same with the English, French, Russians, and Americans. I pretend not to understand their Farsi. Shrugging holding my palms out, they punch me again as the car careens down the Zahedan road. A hood is placed over my head. I don’t know where we are. One of the men hums a Bollywood film song. Finally the car comes to a halt, and I’m ordered out of the car, but I still pretend I don’t know what the man’s talking about. Out, he says in English. I obey because what choice do I have? My feet touch something soft: sand. It’s not easy to walk on but I’m told to walk, and I listen for the sound of a gun going off, the last thing I’ll hear. I imagined many such Spy vs. Spy scenarios: the beak-nosed spies pop up from beneath blocks of pavement that fan apart and hit the sidewalk with a resonant clunk, they emerge from panels in a ceiling, invisible joists sliding apart with loud creaking noises, they spring from spandrel-shaped doors and bungee cord from lofty arches to bop me from behind. Despite the loud noises, I’m oblivious, my head is in the clouds. In a year or so the spies will be sent west to Khorramshar when Iraq will invade with an eye on the oil fields of Khuzistan. Once, in the street, someone really did address me as Jahanshah Rostami.
Not only that, but the unveiled women of Zahedan looked uncannily like Ruth, as if some branch of the Koppek family had wandered from Tehran to Baghdad to Lvov, retaining their black hair, mad dash of a single eyebrow, yet benefiting from a strain of aggressiveness, grabbing the last place on the last boat or caravan west, grabbing the last bag of rice or couple of potatoes, and so they survive. Ruth’s grandmother, Ada, would personally sew tumans into her headscarf and bribe her way over the border while humming Ladino songs she no longer remembered the words to.
A few miles outside of the city I set up camp in an abandoned hut with an awning made of woven palm fronds that looked like it would blow away with the first strong breeze but never did. From here I made my day trips to outlying areas. I didn’t have an infinite amount of funding and consequently not much time. Also, since the revolution had ousted the Shah, there was growing anti-American sentiment in the country, though more so in the cities than in outlying areas. Every day brought word of more violence in the capital. The Shah’s people met with firing squads, and though many thought this day couldn’t have come too soon, at the same time there were protests and shootings; newspapers, radio stations, and movie theaters were closed. Even in isolated Zahedan of white stone buildings and nightingales, there was a sense of foreboding. It had become a major gateway for drug smugglers sending product in from Afghanistan and Pakistan. While pretending to look for oleaginous rocks, Jahanshah had told me, some apparent geographers were really posting couriers, so the dangers of poking around outside the city were many and unpredictable.
Rostami returned for a few days. One night when I was back at my hotel he called uncharacteristically late and asked me to meet him at his house as soon as possible. I got dressed, ran out, and was at his door within an hour of receiving the call. The house was dark. His wife and children were asleep. He gestured that we shouldn’t stay in the house. Words, even those that hang in the air, can never be made completely invisible.
“Just keep walking,” Rostami said. A few cars still prowled the streets, and overhead lights glowed intermittently. We passed a large dress shop, windows empty except for decorative plastic columns, fluted with winged lions for capitals, intentionally broken to look like Sassanid ruins. Behind folding screens you could make out dresses and mannequins peeking out from purdah. They were posed for women customers only. Rostami told me he needed to leave the country. Dust had settled in the curved flutes of the plastic columns. In the depths of the shop a dummy winked, frozen, perched on high heels, mini-skirt a slash of red. Her wig was askew as if she, too, needed to depart in a hurry.
Leaning against a stone wall I took out my passport, opened it to the page with the photograph and ran my thumb around the edge of my picture as if to remove it.
“Put your picture here. Jahanshah Hossein Rostami becomes Ariel Bokser, born in Flatbush, educated at the University of Chicago, briefly married to Ruth Koppek, present whereabouts unknown. As soon as you’re safely in New York I’ll report my passport missing or stolen.”
Rostami shut his eyes and repeated the bare facts: address, phone number, date of birth, social security number. His English was actually very good, but the pronunciation couldn’t fool even the most stoned customs official at JFK.
“Say you lived in Jerusalem for years, that’s why you have an accent. They won’t know the difference. Look, you have the stamps on your passport to prove it.”
I flipped to the Israeli stamps. Rostami took the passport from my hand, snapped it shut, and put it in his pocket. He was vague about how and exactly when he would depart, but I assumed the urgency of his situation meant it would be as soon as possible.
“We’ll give Javad’s caves one more attempt,” he said. “One last try before I leave.”
We walked a few blocks together, reviewing the dead ends of our search. I was uneasy discussing the Nieumacher notebook with my Iranian host. It had exited his household ten years ago like a hot potato.
“Your father had the opportunity to destroy the notebook, why didn’t he?”
“My brother was much older than me. Just before your father’s visit he was already attending university, and he was interested in Sidonie’s papers. He’d found an old Persianist from Berlin who had sat out the war in Tehran and remained until the 1960s. This man was willing to translate the notebook.”
“What happened?”
“My brother was killed in a car accident, though his injuries didn’t resemble the kind you would receive in a head-on collision, or so I was told.”
The Persianist, too, disappeared, but it was rumored he landed in Tel Aviv, though this could be neither confirmed nor denied.
“I have here a dish of ‘mud’ which represents an oleaginous amplitudes of pellets.”
George Herriman’s Krazy Kat
Ignatz to Offissa Pup. March 3, 1940
I STOPPED BY HIS HOUSE the next morning as planned, intending to pack Rostami’s equipment into my rented car, then we would drive out to the foothills together. The house was dark, shutters drawn. His wife let me in, closed the door, but made it clear I was not to sit down or step far into the house. The children were watching television, what sounded like Tweetie Bird in F
arsi, in another room. Somewhere between our parting on Fazl Street last night and this morning, he had vanished. Mrs. Rostami put on a headscarf though she wasn’t going anywhere, just opening the door enough, so she could be seen showing me out. She asked me to leave, not in an unkind way, but she was afraid my presence put them all at risk, and I should understand that. Fedeyroon Rostami dismissed Suolucidir as a phantom city, a hoax. She saw me as an American adventurer who had gotten her husband involved in something that should have been left alone. There was little I could do to persuade her otherwise. I had nothing to do with Jahanshah’s disappearance, but my voice sounded feeble and unconvincing, even to myself. She gently pushed me out the door, then slammed it shut.
I drove out to the foothills alone, as I had already done on numerous occasions since I’d arrived. It was blistering hot. Usually I brought adequate supplies with me, but that day, in my despair at certain failure, I’d only packed a small bottle. Jahanshah had had the maps and other equipment for caving in his car. Even after more than a month spent in Iran, no new proof that Suolucidir ever existed had been unearthed. I sat on a rock and stared at the horizon, swatting flies. Soon my water bottle was empty. Though sheep and goats dotted the landscape, no shepherds were visible, but I assumed someone must be watching in the vicinity of the flock. It was a habit of mine to converse with people I met in the region, always hoping, naïvely, that someone would know of a cave somewhere that held untold archaeological riches. I’d gotten to know a few of the inhabitants, since I had some knowledge of the local dialect. They were friendly and eager to talk, share meals, and they tolerated my presence with my jangling tool belt and backpack full of inscrutable objects, even if they secretly believed me to be a crackpot, referred to among themselves as Shovel Man.
