The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir

by Susan Daitch

  “I was picked up on the Rue de Forbin and locked up in St. Pierre prison. I thought it was a random sweep.”

  He described being thrown into a cell with a group of skeletal lice-ridden people he described as Judeo-Boches. They’re particularly at risk because they need special police permits to move from place to place, which they rarely have. Bruno was sure his arrest was a mistake.

  “There were a few depleted, vahntz-ridden straw mattresses on the floor percolating with bugs, and a small barred window overhead. I was the only one whose suit was intact; the other inmates wore tattered clothing, cuffs so frayed they looked fringed, buttonless jackets held together with pins or with their hands. Some had been interned for months or even years, but the majority of them arrived at St. Pierre prison already in bad shape. Some spoke neither French nor German. One man wouldn’t leave his post from the furthest wall where he rocked, hitting his back against the stone. He feared flood, waters rising, no way out, everyone struggling hopelessly to keep their noses above the surface, but then when someone managed to light a cigarette he grew afraid of fire and tried to climb near the window. Though the men paced and shifted like a mass of fish all swimming in the same circle, I tried to stay away from him. It was because of this choreography that I struck up a conversation with one inmate in particular. Pinza, sitting on the floor, cleared some space beside himself with one hand and extended a hairy, dirty paw. It felt like a limp wharf rat. I told him my name.”

  “‘Nieumacher is a funny name for a yid. What were you picked up for?’ “I shrugged, not sure why myself, really, so I said, papiers. Pinza pretended not to understand this simple word, as if he were egging me on for a different language choice, so I finally said, papiren.

  “‘Yeah, we all have no papiren,’ Pinza said with a tell-me-another-one shrug. ‘What we got here,’ he made a sweeping gesture to include the whole cell block, ‘are all slaughterers but no chickens.’

  “Who was this Pinza? Pinza was a ganef, a thief, he admitted it himself, and he was a fountain of slang.

  “Each word I thought I knew was, from the mouth of Pinza, twisted into a different meaning.” So they used a language he knew and didn’t know at the same time. It was as if every word were turned on its ear and had to be interpreted according to some kind of core meaning, the meaning one ordinarily took for granted.

  “‘I shouldn’t be here at all. I’m here because of my worthless shutaf. It’s all his fault and no one else’s. We’d been on a job, and the shithead hadn’t alerted me to the fact that the handful of gold necklaces I was about to lift was treyf.’”

  “Treyf? You mean he had ham in his pocket?” I was confused. Bruno leaned against the wall with a bit of a smirk on his face.

  “No, not ham. At first I didn’t understand either, what he was talking about, then he explained, in the language of thieves treyf means there are police around, and the things about to be lifted turn into treyf, that which shouldn’t be touched,” Bruno explained. Even after what was really only a few hours in this cell Bruno sounded peculiar. How seamlessly he hopscotched between student, leonardo, black marketeer, and jailbird.

  “Even in the prison Pinza had managed to keep his black felt hat pulled down to his ears, and he spoke with confidence, tapping the hat to the back of his head with a flick of his forefinger. His coat with a ratty fur collar had once been snazzy and may have had another owner or two before it fell into his hands. That we weren’t wearing uniforms, that our clothes hadn’t been taken from us, hinted to me we wouldn’t be in the cell for long, but Pinza said, ‘Hey, Sherlock, I wouldn’t be so sure.’”

  “How long had Pinza been in the cell?”

  “A few months, he guessed, but it could have been weeks just as easily.

  “Pinza pointed out members of the Waks, Feintuch, and Lipsker gangs, all stuck together in the lockup. ‘Ha, ha, those three mobs, they hate each other and now look what they got. The Russians who have split into two factions have the north and northeast side of the city, the Moldovans have the northwest slice, and they all have to deal with the Sicilians. Now look at them with no turf and nowhere to go in the middle of a machlokets.’ A machlokets means a rabbinical dispute, but in their slang the word referred to a shady business deal or a gang-style fight on the street.”

  Just underneath the surface of Bruno the student, the careful artisan, dealer in black market reichsmarks, was the deal maker who, within the span of maybe a couple of hours, felt at home with gangsters, as if they were his family, and truly, for all I knew about Bruno before I met him, this was entirely possible.

  “Could you follow what he was saying to you?”

  “Most of it. A meline, Pinza explained, a hideout full of stolen things had been raided, and both groups were arrested, though each blamed the other for the tip-off. Pinza was the calmest crook I’ve ever seen. He just leaned against a wall, watched the turmoil around him, and explained things to me.”

  How did he recognize Bruno as an ally? Who knows, but his intuition would turn out to be right. A few oddball Yids, as Pinza called them, had, like Bruno, been picked up off the street for no reason anyone could figure out. Though he looked down his nose at them, a pretty much undifferentiated mass, this was the soup he was going to have to swim in.

  “One of the prisoners, Rudnicki the Stutterer from the Waks gang, had fashioned a screwdriver out of a spoon handle and was working at the door hinges. No escape was possible. Even if we could get out of the chamber, there were guards everywhere, and how would we get out of the St. Pierre unnoticed? No one in the cell had the power of invisibility. But the three men who worked at the hinges in turns were obsessive about it. They had nothing else to do, and Pinza kept assuring me you didn’t have to be Houdini to get out of a Marseilles hellhole. It wasn’t so hard. He’d done it before, though there was a shift in the air lately. There was some conjecture among the prisoners as to what would happen to them. Once in a while one or two would be hauled out seemingly at random. They were never spotted again, whether freed, deported, or shot, no one knew. Being let go seemed an extremely unlikely outcome to me. Clank, the doors open, and out you stroll, it’s over.

  “After twelve hours, two gendarmes and a couple of men who wore no recognizable uniform looked into the cell, pointed at me and Pinza, handcuffed us together, and yanked us into the corridor. One of men nodded, affirming that I was the one. Pinza, it appeared, was going along for the ride. We were marched into the prison courtyard and pushed into the back seat of a large black Fiat. Two other men were already sitting in the front seat. Prison gates opened, the car was driven out into the city, and then to its outskirts.

  “The men in front spoke between themselves and paid little attention to us, only squinting back once in a while. Pinza inched to the right, pulling me with him, trying the car door, slowly, quietly, just trying the handle, and figuring with the satisfying way the handle met with no resistance when he pressed down on it, that it was unlocked. Our guards were very sure that even unlocked doors offered no promise of escape because we were traveling through a landscape where no one could or would help us, so why bother? I shook my head, no, don’t do it. I imagined falling under the wheels of the car, chained to Pinza, the thief whose pockets had briefly contained tangles of golden treyf. If we were being deported back to Germany, I could live by my wits again if I had to, but dead in the road because I jumped from a moving car — that’s a stupid choice. Pinza whispered, ‘You don’t get it; we’re going to be shot.’ How did Pinza know what he knew? Pinza’s body was tight against the door. The men in front talked between themselves and never turned their heads to look in the back seat.

  “Rounding a curve in the road, Pinza suddenly lurched out of the car, yanking me with him. We rolled down a steep embankment, over and over each other until we came to a stop near the bottom of a ravine. The Fiat veered sharply and screeched as the driver hit the brakes. However, the momentum of curves and brakes was too much to keep the car on the road. As if its occup
ants all leaned to one side with the swerving, it tipped over the edge and fell off the road, somersaulting downwards almost in slow motion before exploding into flame when it crashed into the bottom of the ravine. The shock of hitting the ground fast, nose smashed against weeds and grass, the momentum of the fall, was like a film run super fast, then the projector suddenly lost power. I was able to sit up and I stared at the burning car, stunned. One of our captors burst out of the wreckage, completely on fire, running toward me, his uniform glowing orange and black, before he collapsed into a heap of burnt flesh, bones, and cinders.”

  Bruno, small-time fixer, pushed into it by circumstances, a fellow whose crimes were all non-violent and based only on the need to survive when he couldn’t be a gentleman scholar, lost his footing and was unable to stand.

  “I lay back in the spiky stalks of lavender and rosemary. Pinza lay a few feet away, the chain had come apart in the fall where it was joined to the handcuff. Only his nose was bloody, but his head was snapped at an odd angle. A few centimeters in either direction and it might have been me who smashed his head open on a rock.” He rubbed his wrist still encased by the band of metal. “The good fortune of being shackled by lousy equipment, a weakened, rusty solder, saved me, but not Pinza — still grinning — so at least you know his death came fast. Which was a shame really, because had Pinza been a magician he couldn’t have caused a better outcome, apart from his own demise, of course.”

  Bruno, alchemical genius though he was, turning thin paper into identifiable cash, would never call himself a hero or someone with large stores of nerve to draw on, most of the time. For a man who lacked such qualities, he was so lucky that night, and when I told him this, he answered that any croupier in Deauville or Monte Carlo or a barely identified back room will tell you sometimes a poor joe comes along who’s just plain lucky. It sounded like an explanation someone else would give. Since when did he know anything about the odds at the tables in cities we’d never been to?

  “The road was deserted, nothing but scrappy pine and olive trees as far as I could see, but a small-town train station lay close by. I caught a night train, largely empty, no one asked for papers, and I was able to arrive at Feigen’s shortly after you had left.

  “Feigen wouldn’t open the door, and only barked at me that if I caught a cab I would make it to the pier on time. He said a doctor was due to arrive any minute, and I shouldn’t be seen by anyone, leave immediately, a flat bundle of franc notes slid into the gap just above the threshold. Not so much, but it all helps. So we said our goodbyes through wooden panels. He said he hoped to hear of our travels and to see us again as ambassadors from Suolucidir.”

  He didn’t care if the cab driver could later identify him. He would never set foot in Europe again. We had no choice now but to become the Franco-Soviet Friendship Dig. Just as the ship pulled out of port he declared he felt like the Count of Monte Cristo. I replied, this is no time to imagine you’re royalty. We have a long way to travel and not much money to our names. The Franco-Soviet Friendship Dig is poor indeed and will have to rely on the generosity of strangers in lands that are entirely unknown to us.

  December 10, 1936

  Le Faroan isn’t exactly a pleasure cruise or even much of a passenger ship at all. It’s more like a freighter with some odd rooms fixed up so the captain could take on a few passengers who paid him in cash with no guarantees they’ll be welcomed at destined ports, and then they’ll have to pay for the return trip, as well. As Fingers promised, Le Faroan is bound for Alexandria, but it’s not a sure thing that all will be able to disembark there. Though we go on deck and wander around the ship, we feel like stowaways. Almost as soon as Marseilles disappeared from view, a Mr. and Mrs. Spektor from Vienna approached us like two skaters looping from one side of the pond to the other until they finally reached us, temporarily putting aside suspicion and reluctance. Then it was as if Mrs. Spektor, at least, was magnetized. She spoke to me familiarly and stood very close, assuming we were both on the ship for the same reasons. Her children were put on trains bound for Dieppe—she gestured open-palmed at the ocean as if to indicate they’re out there somewhere—and from Holland were supposed to go to England, but they’ve had no letters from them. Mrs. Spektor is tall, smells of a grapefruit-like perfume, and peers through perfectly round tortoise-shell glasses like a hawk, looking around the deck as if a gunman might suddenly appear from behind a coil of heavy chains or pop out of a hatch. The agency that organized the transport assured her the boy and girl had been placed with a family in a town called Jarmouth, pronounced Yarmouth, but Mrs. Spektor imagines they should have received letters by now. She doesn’t know if they ever reached England. No longer in Vienna and not at all certain where they are going, Mr. and Mrs. Spektor have no address that can be written to. Sometimes we pass tiny islands with little more than a couple of trees on them.

  “If we’re not allowed into Egypt perhaps the captain could let us off on one of those small islands that don’t belong to anyone,” she said.

  I’ve actually considered the same thing myself. To be planted on an empty principality ruled by ants and gulls would be bleak, but safe from armies and unmarked cars. Though if we were on the same island as the Spektors, I suspect I would be called upon to wait on her, find shade trees, fetch water, invent soothing lies, and over time begin to feel protective of my mistress who had suffered so, eventually forgetting there had ever been law books in Berlin, a thriving, though risky, black market business in Marseilles, and a city-state somewhere in Persia waiting to be unearthed. Mrs. Spektor has that kind of hold on people. I snapped out of it when she asked how many days do I suspect it will be before we land in Alexandria? She doesn’t like to approach the captain. She admits she’s a little afraid of him, but says we are fortunate to have gotten on Le Faroan. There aren’t to be many more such opportunities.

  Mr. Spektor, a retired diamond cutter, never had his own business and always worked for others. Mrs. Spektor has repeated this several times already. He had an offer to go to Argentina two years ago, but they stayed, and it was her fault that they did. Had they gone she wouldn’t be here now staring into the water. All her family, aged mother, beloved aunts, uncles, cousins who were like siblings to her, were in Vienna. She hadn’t wanted to leave them, and so now here they are stuck on this freighter in rooms little better than steerage. Mr. Spektor, a crown of spiky hair blowing in the breeze, pulls his jeweler’s loupe from his pocket, spins it on the edge of the gunwale, always catching it before the little glass-eyed cylinder topples into the sea. He carries it with him, I assume, because it’s one of the important tools of his trade, but it turns out they have no bags. Last night there was some kind of fried octopus and garlic for dinner, which they didn’t eat, though Bruno dove into it with gusto, as if it were his last meal. Mr. Spektor referred to a movie called Monkey Business in which Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and I think he said Zeppo Marx hide in a ship, concealing themselves in barrels of kippered herring, in closets, under desks.

  “Where on this tub could you hide if you absolutely had to?” Ernst Spektor asked. “In the water ballast tanks? Just for a few minutes, of course. The cargo hold, crouching between crates of car parts, spools of wiring, imported dogs in their cages, the only living things to keep you company? This is possible. You are like these Marx brothers playing pinochle and singing while everyone searches for you. Maybe, as you prowl around the hold, you find bottles of wine, olive oil, wheels of cheese, you can eat and drink, be happy, and then you find a box of 45 Mausers with clips, of course. If so, take one. You may soon need it. Now not only are you drunk, but you can defend yourself. The cargo hold is the obvious place they will look for you. Another choice: maybe in the engine room, dodging pistons and the engineer as he makes his rounds. Maybe this is a better place, though there will be no food. Or in the pilot’s cabin. But can you be sure you can trust the pilot?”

  Bruno, elbow propped on the table, a ring of octopus pierced on the end of his fork, dripping oli
ve and garlic onto his cuff, looked at Spektor as if he’d just popped out of a barrel himself.

  “We are like these brothers Marx,” he said, trying to sound jovial. His smile faded, and his wife pushed her plate away, untouched, and told him to take a walk. I felt sorry for him.

  Mrs. Spektor is very shrewd, so sure of her opinions there is no membrane between what she thinks and what she says. It’s difficult not to accept her confidences and the intimacy they usher in, and then it’s as if we’re close friends, but only on her terms. She’s suspicious, asks questions, but it’s only to figure out how we might be useful to her at some unknown point in the future. It’s difficult on the ship with few places for passengers to congregate to avoid her, to find a room or a few feet of deck she might not likely be. Today she found me on deck just as we passed Malta. The shore with its white city could have been another planet, it was so remote, and perhaps unfairly, I imagined people going about their lives with no one chasing them and no fear of a knock at the door.

  At first we stared out in silence, then she suddenly said, “You’re not from Alsace. Like my husband you come from further east. I can hear it when you speak German. Only a native Austrian with good ears, like myself, could hear this in your accent.”

  Under a peel of gray paint, Le Faroan had been blue, and under that was a lighter gray. Scraping at a peel of paint with my fingernail, I told her she was mistaken, and she smirked. “You don’t have to tell me anything. I know what I know. So your husband is a rare book dealer. Why did he leave Alsace for Marseilles? I would suppose business would be better there. Marseilles is a city of foreigners and thieves. Why do you speak German fairly well? Why does your husband have an iron bracelet around his wrist? How are you going to get into Alexandria?” Is it an exaggeration to say her questions came at me like bullets? Yes, but there was a note of anger behind her questions, as if she was saying, don’t think you’re so smart, missy, don’t think you’re so different from me. I fled as soon as I could, finding Bruno in our cabin. He stays there most of the time reading books on Persia that Feigen had given to us. When I told him about Mrs. Spektor’s inquiries and assumptions he turned prickly, the old condescending Bruno was back.