The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir

by Susan Daitch

  What else do you have there? You mentioned something else. His voice was soft and gentle, not impatient that I’d wasted his time, but eager and still curious. I took the simurgh out of the bag, handed it to him, and then his demeanor changed. I’d like to think that if he could have risen from the chair, he would have. The creature, you will be surprised to learn, though unusual, has nothing to do with the Lost Tribes. Some uninformed, or marginally informed amateurs in the far-flung corners of Europe had made that mistake. Nor was it unique to Suolucidir, though it was nevertheless an interesting find. Interesting, that was the word he used.

  Unlike your fake, the Nieumacher scroll that had been in the Tehran archive was genuine, as far as he knew. Sometime during the period of his arrest, that part of the archive, the annex, had been burned. The location of that scroll, if it had survived at all, was unknown, at least that’s what he’d been told. The Nieumacher scroll now exists only in his memory. Ra’ashan stretched and clawed at the carpet.

  As he rolled his gloves into a ball, the buzzer that activated the front gate sounded. Haronian shifted uneasily in his chair. It was by now close to midnight, but Haronian, who had little family and few friends, seemed to know what this call was about. Uninvited guests, he said, have come for my teeth. He told me in the kitchen was a closet, and if I pushed carefully behind the brooms leaning against its back wall, I would gain access to a tiny room, nearly another closet, and I should make myself at home in it until whatever voices I might hear ceased. I asked if I could wheel him into it, but he shook his head; there was no point. Even as I left Haronian, the noise of almost, but not quite, soundless footsteps echoed in the corridor, coming from the entrance into the rest of the house.

  The kitchen was in disarray but smelled of warm roasted walnuts; garlands of dried chili peppers had fallen on the carpet and crunched under my feet. I froze for a moment, then found the closet, just as he had described it, and pushed the panel aside. I guess you could call it a room. There would have been space for a wheelchair, but not much else. It was empty except for an electric light whose base had been a small hookah. I sat on a rug that covered an earthen floor, listened and waited, perhaps fell asleep.

  When I woke the house was completely silent, no, not quite. Somewhere was the sound of Oum Kalthoum, but the record was scratched and the same words were repeated over and over, no one was lifting the needle. I ventured out of Haronian’s hiding place. The house was empty. Even the cat was gone. The room where I’d been received had been ransacked. I lifted the needle from the broken record; its album cover, a picture of Oum Kalthoum wearing sunglasses and a turban, lay on the floor. The simurgh was gone. No wings or talons poking out from under a pile of clothes or books. The scroll lay in shreds. What I did find however, among the papers scattered over the floor, was a copy of a police report, an interrogation of Ramin Kosari, the Nieumacher guide in Zahedan, which I have enclosed with this letter. There were also a few typed pages in English, written by an Alicia Congreaves-Sutcliffe about an earlier expedition to Suolucidir by a pair of British explorers, one of whom must have been a relative of hers. I am sending all of this to you, in appreciation for having saved my life. As far as the lost city is concerned, it has cost me too much, from the moment my father acquired Sidonie Nieumacher’s field notes, if that’s what they were, to the present, and I’m done with it. The pages are radioactive, I’m convinced.

  Wishing you all the best and hope we meet again with our feet on the ground, not under it.

  Jahanshah Rostami

  September 18, 1936

  You could feel the sun on your face, the warmth of Turkish coffee through thin yellow cups, and even inhaling the decaying salty smell of the pier, you felt as stable as a tripod on flat ground, utterly still. The waiters who asked to be paid straightaway melted into the walls. Men tapping spoons against glasses of absinthe managed to arrest their jitters, spoons frozen in mid-air. Bruno stopped reading his paper for a moment and stared out to sea, as if with telescopic sight he could clear the Balearic Islands and watch a man in a café in Algiers drink the same cup of thick coffee with the same amount of sugar and curl of lemon peel floating on the foam. If the camera had frozen us at that moment in that sea of calm, if all other fitted gears stopped turning the world at that moment, September 9, 1936 wouldn’t have been such a bad place to come to a halt, but soon enough the ground tips. Waiters re-appeared, Bruno resumed his scrutiny of a speech by the populist mayor of Vienna who used the word mongrel oftener and oftener, unknown cargo was unloaded on the docks while women with nervous frowns, brows like plucked ledges, wheeled prams on walks that skirted the piers. Seagulls snatched and scattered rinds, fruit cores, broken clams, whatever they could scavenge along the edge of the sea. Algerian and Senegalese seamen didn’t even look up at the city, sprawling gate to what? Bruno read on, falling deeper into the bottom of his paper. I couldn’t concentrate on anything. Coming down the street toward us a man pushed a wheelbarrow full of junk: old clocks, bundles of cloths, dusty books and magazines. As he got closer I could hear his singsong croak, alte zahken, alte zahken! His jacket was expensive and badly mended, big stitches sewn in the wrong color thread said some unskilled person had used whatever was at hand. After sizing one another up, we each instinctively turned away from each other. A woman on the dock pleaded with a tall man who listed to one side as if he might tilt into the sea. Her suitcase was tied with string, and a child picked at the stickers that covered the case: Odessa, Bremen, Trieste, Rimini. I can’t actually see that far. I’m just imagining. Bruno yawned. He noticed nothing. A man to my left complained about someone named Mirabelle, she was too expensive, he tapped his glass as if doubly communicating the statement in Morse code. To my right a woman said, no one could have feet that large. I looked at mine just to be sure she wasn’t talking about me. Then out of nowhere, maybe sprung from a trapdoor in the pavement, a voice crackled, directed at myself and Bruno and no one else.

  “Excuse me so much for interrupting, but I’ve got something to sell. Perhaps I could interest you. A treasure you’ll know as soon as you see it.”

  The outdoor part of the café was full of people whose clothes were made to order, whose shoes were polished with something other than black ink. Why did the old woman hook her talons onto our table and perch there so tenaciously, so absolutely sure we, alone, would be interested in what she had to offer? The woman spoke to us in broken German. Bruno, his crinkly brown hair oiled back, arched one eyebrow above his glasses and told her in perfect French to go away, please, then descended back into his paper.

  The woman tottered, mildly rebuffed, but she was nothing if not persistent.

  “Look, really. I think you’ll find what I’ve got to show you quite interesting.”

  Her French was slow, with long pauses as if the right word was adrift at sea, and she was trying to retrieve it without a net. I couldn’t place her accent. She warrents close description: rail thin, bent, nervous as a starling, wrapped in a cocoon of tattered silk shawls leaving a trail of fringes and tassels. No dress underneath, no shirt either. As she re-wrapped herself when these coverings slipped, the upper part of her body was a frightening stark white and entirely visible. Legs encased in dirty silk pantaloons worn out at the seat – no underwear discernible. Her face was powdery white, heavy black lines rimmed her rheumy eyes and false eyelashes like whiskbrooms weighted down her lids. A net veil hung from a small, black felt hat, and it was tied behind her head. She lifted the veil to speak more clearly, but that didn’t really help. The words tumbled out in a blizzard of sound, some English and Arabic poking through the storm. When she calmed down, I took a closer look at her face. She wasn’t as old as I first thought, but disease and sleeping on the streets, I’m guessing, had taken their toll.

  “Let me show you. Please. I’m not asking much. A few thousand francs for something that’s worth millions.” She drew up a chair. “My name is Esme Canonbury,” she slurred the syllables of her name so it sounded as if she
were saying K’onburee. “I’ve come upon hard times as you can see, and I need to sell my last treasure. It was given to me by a man who made the pyramids speak, who danced like a hooligan on skates.” Her eyes rolled upwards in ecstasy. I wondered what a hooligan on skates was or what such a dance might look like but didn’t interrupt. An English music hall performer in a plaid suit, bowler in hand, flailing his arms and hopping around?

  “What makes you think we’ve got a spare few thousand francs?” Bruno looked over his paper again. I could see he was annoyed. When we lived in Berlin he’d acquired that air, that manner of dismissing someone in such a way, so that they ought to take the hint that he was done with them and had no interest in giving second audiences.

  “I can tell. I can spot you people.”

  Bruno stood up. Did other café patrons turn from their drinks, pause from organizing their baggage and tickets, their last farewells? Perhaps I only imagined he drew attention to us. I pulled on his jacket to indicate he should sit down.

  “Do you want me to call the police?”

  “You’re not going to call the police.” She waved at the waiter, a little girl wave, waggling fingers as if playing a clarinet made of air. “Gin and tonic, if you please.” She smiled a big, how-delightful smile.

  I knew she’d tilt her head toward Bruno when the bill came. One hand released its grip from the table’s edge and rummaged around in her morocco leather bag. She placed an object wrapped in newspaper on the table. The dry old La Provence (the paper was the local one and gave no clues as to the woman’s origins or peregrinations) crackled as she unwrapped the package about the size of a hammer. There were so many layers to be unfurled until she got to the thing itself, and the noise was so loud, once again I imagined everyone was staring at us, though Bruno later observed one is rarely under scrutiny when one feels most raucous, guilty, or red-faced. It was a heavy bronze creature, sort of like a phoenix but not entirely, half-human, half-bird maybe? Some other creature was clasped in its talons.

  Bruno picked it up in a desultory manner, then handed the monster to me. My hand nearly dropped to the table with the weight of it, yet sinewy Madame Canonbury lifted and carried the object as if it were a bundle of feathers.

  “Sorry, I can’t help you,” he said, “I don’t know what this thing is.”

  “This is all I’ve left, and it costs me to part with the creature. He has been my only comfort, though princes and archdukes have offered kingdoms for him.”

  Bruno picked it up and turned the thing over and over. I could tell he was a bit curious about the odd hybrid animal that landed on our table and wasn’t surprised when he announced he was going to make a phone call. It wouldn’t take long. I fingered the gold cross around my neck. It was small and unobtrusive, so sometimes I held it out a bit, especially when introducing myself.

  “So your name is Sidonie,” the woman’s gluey eyes grew even more glazed, and she took a gulp of gin. She pronounced the name as if it made her tongue stick to her palate, and the nee at the end gave her trouble. “What’s your brother’s name?”

  I explained Bruno wasn’t my brother.

  “Sidonie and Bruno what?”

  I would not have been a very good lawyer. I always let other people grill me, and even strangers, from the moment they laid eyes on me, sense here is an easy mark, a complete pushover.

  “Nieumacher.” I pronounced our name: New-ma-shay in a quick sprint. “Noy-mach-heir,”she said, giving the ch a guttural shove and underscoring the r. “Sounds German to me.”

  “We’re from Alsace.”

  “That might explain it.”

  I didn’t ask what it was. The alte zahken man appeared again in the distance, coming toward us. No, don’t stop, I secretly pleaded, hoping to telegraph to him, to this stranger. No alte zahken here. The first gin had disappeared, and Madame Canonbury ordered another. I looked around for Bruno. He was still at the bar speaking into the telephone.

  “Where did you get your crucifix?” She pointed at the centime-size sliver of gold I still pinched between thumb and forefinger. The little silver man, nailed on, imprinted on my fingers.

  “It belonged to my grandmother.”

  “I suppose she was from Alsace, too.”

  “Why wouldn’t she be?” Bruno had returned.

  Madame Canonbury smirked into her glass and mumbled about the man who sent the phoenix, how they used to meet in Cairo hotels, how he would disappear into the night smelling of rancid cooking oil, smoke, a number of things, but she didn’t mind the odor, even grew to find that it reduced her to feeling like a wind-up toy, a mechanical drummer who’d hit a wall and could only drum frantically in bursts of nervous energy. I think that’s the analogy she was making. She attenuated the syllables of every word as if each one were wet clay. It was not easy to understand Madame Canonbury. She looked at me, then at Bruno, as if drawing an invisible line, and raised her eyebrows as if to ask, could you say the same about him? No, Bruno never made me feel like a wind-up toy that had hit a wall.

  In a low voice Bruno stated the news I’d been expecting. He’d telephoned a colleague, a former professor of ancient history from Berlin in retirement here in Marseilles. Doctor Feigen would be happy to look at the ornament.

  “It’s not an ornament,” Madame Canonbury grumbled, restoring her veil. “It’s a simurgh, a figure from Persian mythology, winged with a dog’s face and lion’s talons. It was supposed to be copper-colored, large enough to carry an elephant. Sometimes a simurgh would have a human face, but as you can see, this one doesn’t.”

  A car standing in front of a shipping office a few doors down suddenly backfired. I jumped as if a bomb had gone off and crossed myself.

  “Interesting you Alsatians cross yourselves right to left. I believe it’s usually done the other way round; hand touches your heart first.”

  I looked over her head as if I hadn’t heard, but Bruno glared at me, a stage glower that telegraphed: Don’t be jumpy. Calm down. Let’s get the old goat to Feigen as quickly as possible before she scurries off weighted by treasure that could be ours, leaving only a trail of tatters.

  Shuki Fingers Feigen, formerly Dr. Frederick F. Feigen, had traveled a long way from our first meeting at his apartment in Oranienburgerstrasse. During our first year in the city, Bruno had been one of his students, and their relationship opened a new and entirely unfamiliar world to me. Feigen had worked with the archaeologists in Mesopotamia who brought the Gate of Ishtar to Berlin’s Royal Museum. It was a massive structure of pure blue stone. How did they do it? An inventory number had been given to each fragment, the pieces were desalinated, then the whole edifice put back together again. All of Europe marveled at their achievement. The directors of Royal Prussian Expeditions declared the monument had been saved from certain destruction and now had a home in Berlin. Feigen had been very young when he traveled to Iraq, and felt as if he’d been transported to Babylon as an exile. Though the expedition had made everyone connected to it famous, years later he confided to Bruno that he was happy to return to Berlin, to take up teaching. He never again wanted to leave the comforts of rapid trams, reliable newspapers, butter and sugar. He presented himself as a native of the city of clocks and statuary where stone wings on a Schlossbrucke angel never lose a feather, and no one paints an obscene word or a pornographic image on the pilings under the bridge, and then blows the whole thing up. Over the years many students became his devoted followers, though not everyone was chosen or invited to bask in his illuminating light. To be chosen by Dr. Feigen, singled out for praise about one’s work on demons and monsters, drought and flooding in Mesopotamia, made Bruno feel as if he’d been knighted. It was an honor the person Bruno left behind in his parents’ house could not have dreamed of. That person was in the final stages of evaporation anyway, and his replacement grabbed the trophy with such joy I can’t in any way cast discredit on him.

  Invitations for dinner at the Feigen household were met, on my part, with a mixture of excitem
ent and dread. I still wore long sleeves and long skirts, as dark as the bottom of the ocean, that first year, and you couldn’t travel in Feigenische circles dressed like a small-town hermit who only emerged on Friday mornings to beg for bread. Shops in Berlin I entered as if blindfolded and bought whatever my hands touched first. These box-like shops, smelling of primroses, walls covered in feathery silk, were rosy Venus fly traps, and I wanted to flee as soon as I entered, yet felt hopelessly stuck in these sites of ridicule, making small talk with smart shop girls. I didn’t want them to look at my body, or size me up in any way, to tell me what color I should wear or how to arrange straps so they fell or stayed in place. I learned to change my accent, say as little as possible, and eventually talk down to them as if I knew or cared what dress was a knockout and which looked completely ridiculous.

  The Feigen apartment — or was it a house? I couldn’t be sure which. You entered through a series of courtyards to end up at a narrow building at the very end. Their apartment occupied several floors, so it was as if I was swallowed in the dark by an animal I hadn’t really seen, I was only judging its size by the dimensions of its stomach. Such a place I’d never seen before. Flowers spilling over balconies, there was a telephone in almost every room, tall radios, wooden replicas of cathedrals purred and buzzed with concertos, arias, news in several languages, and not only that, but the Feigens had an actual music room, domed and enclosed in long narrow panes of tinted glass. The dining room was painted with murals of allegories (warriors in ridged helmets dropped out of a wooden horse, a man with the head of a bull squatted, cornered and snarling, four children hatched from a blue egg). I couldn’t identify these characters and hoped I’d never be asked my opinion of the trials they represented. I always attempted to mirror the accents of the other students, young professors and their wives, but had no clue as to how well I succeeded. When Bruno commented that I used my hands too much when speaking, I took up smoking as a way of doing something with them that wouldn’t draw attention. You flap around like a Russian crow, he said.