by Susan Daitch
“Just stay away from her.” He lay in his bunk with his back to me as if I was an annoyance who couldn’t figure out how to solve simple problems.
“How can I avoid her? What am I supposed to do? Follow the sailors around while they wind up rope and oil gears? There are hardly any other passengers on this ship.” Bruno barely knows the layout of the boat, much less who the other voyagers might be. “She misses her children. She wants to talk to me.”
You see her here, you see her there, that damned elusive Mrs. Spektor. Bruno quoted Leslie Howard in The Scarlet Pimpernel, a movie we saw long ago in Berlin. He used to repeat lines from it as we newcomers found ourselves going in circles in the city, but now he only shrugged, while his eyes roamed the page from left to right. Absorbed in reading about Suolucidir, he was no longer listening to me. Since we’d left Marseilles Bruno was more and more submerged in reading about the lost city. Sometimes trying to talk to him was like taking a crowbar to a manhole cover heavily rusted in place: almost unpryable. Whether I opened the subject of lost children or the fog blowing in from the east, he made me feel as if I spoke another language reserved only for articulating trivialities, and I was reminded of our early days in Berlin when he constantly corrected my accent, told me not to use my hands to carve the air, spoken words were enough, and to wear shorter skirts, we’re in the west, please.
So my only company, and I took her on reluctantly, was Mrs. Spektor. A desperate conversationalist, she was stymied on Le Faroan for lack of an audience. I once saw her hesitate on the stairs to the bridge and again at the door to the officer’s cabin. Captain Raffarin is half Algerian, speaks French to us, Arabic to his crew. He’s remote and clearly concerned with running the ship, not to be bothered with us once he’d taken our money for passage. We are here at his sufferance, which could be rescinded at any moment. She’s afraid Raffarin will ask for more money before he lets them off the ship, or threaten to turn them in, and they’ve nothing left to pay him. Even if they could meet on some imaginary neutral deck, no demands made either way, what would Mrs. Spektor say to him? I backtracked but later ran into her on the steep stairs that connected our cabins to the deck. Going in the opposite direction, she was impossible to evade. It was as if Mrs. Spektor could be in several places at once. Taking my arm she steered me to a corner of the deck near the bow light, and before she could pepper me with any more questions, I asked her about the doctor in Vienna I’d heard about so many years ago, the one who listened to your dreams.
“We were diamond cutters. It was a dangerous business, and we didn’t talk to anyone about our dreams. My husband was hired based on a particular lot of stones that came from South Africa via London or Antwerp. He worked in a secret shop. The location was always changing, and he never had his own business, though this was something we both wanted. Now he’s old with unsteady hands, and it will never happen. Who would pay a doctor to listen to their dreams? You really must be from some Russian backwater.”
She put her hand on my sleeve and started to talk about what would happen if they were sent back. I so wanted to get away from her, and at the same time there was something that kept me listening to her, as if when I did so, I was outside myself, watching an old print of Dr. Caligari once again. These things would never happen to me, only a silent witness lost at sea. Her husband, I rarely saw after he compared us to the stowaways in the cargo hold of a movie-set ship. Perhaps he was researching hiding places, secret berths, filling his pockets with walnuts for the day when the food ran out. I noticed Mrs. Spektor had no wedding ring and the holes in her ears were without stones or gold. The sea was black, then grey-blue. We’re almost there.
December 13, 1936
The port with white domes and palm trees looked nothing like Marseilles or anyplace I’ve ever seen. In the crush of porters and crates being carried off Le Faroan, I lost sight of Mrs. Spektor and her husband who wanted to be a Marx brother, and never saw or heard from them again.
December 27, 1936
From Alexandria we traveled overland through Egypt, Palestine, stopping in Amman, and it was here that the Franco-Soviet Friendship Dig came under the most intensive scrutiny. We had no trouble entering the city, but leaving with the intention of traveling to Tehran and beyond alerted the attention of the British authorities. Until this point Bruno and I traveled more or less on our own, just as we had in Europe, sometimes joining a caravan, sometimes not, but the next leg of our trip couldn’t possibly be made by ourselves alone. The iron band had disappeared from his wrist, but he wouldn’t talk about how and when this happened. While in Amman we heard about a caravan of local merchants: Turks, Persians, Armenians, and Frenchmen who were traveling east for reasons unknown to us, but it seemed wise to join up with them. As we made our way through the last gate on the outskirts of Amman, the convoy of jeeps and camels was stopped. The Arabs grumbled. They had never needed papers to travel across the desert before. The Turks shrugged. The French and Armenians took the randomly established checkpoint as a nuisance, but matter of course, and indifferently handed over their papers for inspection. Especially the French, even a lowly merchant, was at pains to barely make eye contact as a way of letting the English know their soldiers would be tolerated but not aided and abetted. Some years the French were in charge, sometimes the Turks, sometimes the British. Finally they arrived down the caravan to us. Some sort of custom agent or army officer in charge of the crossing stuck out his hand for our papers.
“Friendship Dig,” he said in English, translating aloud, and never once looking up. The skepticism and suspicion in his voice couldn’t be misinterpreted even by optimistic shyster mystic Yanek Motke in his grave.
The man’s khaki uniform was starched and without wrinkles, but he had a dusty moustache, as if he’d been at this post for so long he no longer bothered to tip the sand from his boots. Though young, the skin around his eyes was a web of fine craquelure from exposure to desert wind.
“Friendship Dig,” he repeated, then took a pair of glasses out of a pocket in order to review our documents again, more closely, then called another officer over, pointed to the page allegedly from a government in Tehran. The glasses alarmed me. Could their magnification reveal blots of ink, inauthentic roundels in script, pens pressed too hard that would reveal us as no more Franco or Friendship or Dig than Winston Churchill? The two men spoke in English, an opaque language of hard k’s, no lilt, a certain sibilance, and an excess of interrogative sounds. Bruno knows a little, but he insisted they speak in French, asking them what was the matter, everything was in order as far as every other border we’d crossed, could we please proceed? We needed to make a wadi, an oasis, before nightfall.
“We don’t understand,” said the one with the monocle, “how you came to have a paper from a Persian governor we’ve never heard of.” His voice was as bland and crisp as dry toast.
Bruno countered. “These papers have been authorized in Moscow and Paris,” as if to say he couldn’t explain the ignorance of two English officials, delaying a whole caravan for no concrete reason.
The two whispered for a moment, then turned to Bruno. “We will need you to come with us. A few more questions, if you don’t mind. Papers issued in other capitals don’t automatically guarantee transit through third-party sovereignties.”
Obviously, whether we minded or not was immaterial. There was no combination of phrases that would convince them to let us go, so we were put in a car with the one who seemed in charge and driven to a building in the interior of the city. Out the back window I watched the caravan pull itself together and move toward the gates of the city. We would have to pay for another to travel with, and in the meantime had no money to bribe these English, nor was I sure a handful of paper was what was needed at that moment. To pass them a bundle of francs or dinars would be to acknowledge we were frauds, and perhaps we weren’t quite ready to lay bare the origins of the Franco-Soviet Friendship Dig.
Bruno and I were taken to a large white-domed building, led u
p a wide marble staircase into a hall that echoed a kind of controlled opulence I hadn’t seen since we left Berlin, and even then it was only from a distance. We were ushered into a room with high ceilings, portraits of British generals and maybe a king or two, a fat queen stuffed into a diamond-studded dress. Her cousins, the tzaritzas, wore hidden diamonds that deflected bullets aimed at their hearts, but were killed anyway. You can’t cover a whole body in diamonds. Englishman #1 put our papers on the desk of a large bald man, addressed as Major Blanckenship. Standing by a window, he looked, in profile, like the letter D. However, Blanckenship gave the impression that he was solid muscle, or close to it. Not happy to be disturbed (perhaps he’d been interrupted too many times already that day from nervous checkpoint officers who rarely turned up anything truly suspicious) Blanckenship walked toward us looking grim and annoyed. His uniform, looped with gold braid and covered with medals, looked like a costume from an opera. He nodded to a lean, sharp woman he called Rigg or Mrs. Rigg, who bent a goose-necked lamp over our documents. She looked as if she were about thirty and had narrow eyes that had migrated outward, cheekbones like a ledge, a pointed nose that led the way. Rigg said little, but the few phrases she spoke were uttered in a precise bone-china English I couldn’t follow. In a navy blue suit, buttoned up but closely fitted and tight, she looked at me only once, briefly, registering my presence in the room, then never acknowledged me again. Her hair was waved, and she continuously ran her hands through the waves as she bent over our documents. Hair undone made her appear as if there were something hidden under her severity. Both of our interrogators were confident in their power and authority, their sense that all citizens in their dominion were like children, easily placated and manipulated. Blanckenship studied the Franco-Soviet papers through half-lidded eyes. Pages with black and red seals flew by, signatures like tangled threads, Russian diplomas, letters of transit in scalloped Arabic. I didn’t look at Bruno. How much of a crime is it to be an imposter? Would we be sent back?
Rigg held a cigarette in clenched teeth. Really, she did, and I could see where some of her mannish confidence might seem seductive to a certain kind of officer who hadn’t been home in a very long time. Blanckenship held a paper up to the light. His face was immobile. Then he spoke to us, not in English, but in Russian. His Russian wasn’t very good, but he asked us who we really were. Did we face another Mrs. Spektor, another clairvoyant in the guise of a British major stationed in Amman? Bruno stumbled at first, giving him an opportunity to tap his cigarette into a china ashtray shaped like a turbaned head. Truly, when I leaned in to get a better look, in so far as I was able, I could make out the ceramic man’s face, long curling moustache, and a scimitar in his teeth. Then Bruno collected himself and answered in French.
“My wife and I were born in Moscow. We studied archaeology at Moscow State University. In 1926 we were fortunate to also study in France, where we have remained since. When the offer came to set up an organization to encourage joint archaeological projects between our former and our adopted countries, we were eager to forge ahead with the possibility that the work of our organization would lead to the discovery of great antiquities.”
Where this idea came from I had no idea; perhaps Feigen’s books on Persia, or something Bruno cooked up while lying in his bunk in Raffarin’s ship. A servant entered with a tray of tea in small gold-rimmed glasses. Bruno paused while tea was poured, sugar added, spoon hit the side of the glass while stirring. No tea was offered to us.
“We’re looking for the lost city of Suolucidir, believed to be a kind of aquapolis, a utopian city-state, in the desert. The Suolucidiris were fiercely isolationist, the Switzerland of their era.”
Within a moment Bruno turned into the Feigen he remembered lecturing in Berlin, addressing a room full of students. I barely recognized him. His voice and posture changed, and he spoke to the English as if they were Germanic tribesmen accidentally rounded up by Trajan’s army – these two look half bright, let’s toss them a few random ideas and see if they have any skills. The two of them leaned forward to follow his every word. He sensed this, and with a surge of confidence, continued.
“I’ve never heard of Suolucidir,” Blanckenship admitted. The woman shook her head, no, she hadn’t either. Though I never heard her speak a language other than English, she appeared to follow whatever Bruno and Blanckenship were saying.
“My theory is that in the seeds of Suolucidiri success lay their undoing. The inhabitants of the city were not particularly self-sufficient, and by turning their backs on their neighbors they stagnated and disappeared. Water was a valuable commodity, the oil of its time. The Suolucidiris would want to hoard water and keep it from other people. Suolucidir was a child prodigy of a city with an amazing water system, a city-state that leap-frogged over others, but despite their great talents, its citizenry perished. The moon, as with the ancient Babylonians, was a major figure in their cosmology, and over time their corner of the desert became like the moon, distant and inhospitable despite the city that once flourished within its narrow confines. In their isolation they were buried and vanished.”
“And you plan to find this city?”
Bruno nodded. I believed, prematurely, that he’d convinced them.
“But you don’t have Russian names, then do you? They sound French.” Spoon clinked against the side of the glass. Monocle removed, polished, replaced.
Bruno paused. I could sense him pulling bits and pieces, unconfirmable and untraceable, from here and there. Switching briefly to Russian, he explained, the name was Germanic in origin, that his ancestors were among the Germans Catherine the Great had brought to Saint Petersburg to rebuild the Imperial Porcelain Works, but in the course of the two hundred years that followed his family had been completed Russified. Only the last name, Nieumacher (which he pronounced the way Madame Canonbury had, as opposed to the French sound we’d been using since arriving in Berlin), remained.
“Newmaker,” said Mrs. Rigg with a smirk, though Blanckenship ignored her. “You know Iran is forming an alliance with Berlin. The Shah is an admirer of your Führer.” She wasn’t able to finish her sentence. In a clipped, impatient voice Bruno interrupted her.
“This is no concern of ours. Our first names, our Christian names,” Bruno enlightened her, “had been Benyamin Mikhailovich and Eliana Zoyakovno, but because we became French citizens, these we changed to Bruno and Sidonie.”
The Englishman looked at us over the tops of his thin glasses as if Bruno was a schoolboy reciting a well-known poem imperfectly committed to memory. He made up alternatives for the lines he didn’t know, thinking no one would be the wiser. Blanckenship nodded, either with indulgence, or he was finally taken in, I wasn’t sure.
“And when you reach Zahedan you expect,” he looked down at the papers again, “Gennady Pavlovich Antonov and Ivan Sergeevich Bezymensky to join you?”
Bruno nodded, though one could wait the rest of one’s life for Gennady Pavlovich Antonov and Ivan Sergeevich Bezymensky, old Tsarist-era pedants, inventions of Shuki Fingers Feigen.
“There are already many Russians in Persia. Did you know you would find some of your compatriots in the area you wish to travel to?”
“No.” We shook our heads. And neither, apparently, had Feigen or his skillful cousins.
“So you don’t know why they’re in Persia?” Our D-shaped interrogator stood, and navigating the room’s furniture, he walked over to a table, picked up a cut glass bottle, poured out two whiskeys, one for himself and one for the woman. I imagined his voice was the product of the green estates of Yarmouth or London or Dover – places on an island I’d pictured as populated by men who carried briefcases and women who rode horses. He swallowed the contents in one gulp, little finger arched over filigreed glass. He picked up his cigarette from the figurehead ashtray, inhaled long and hard, as if to imply, who’s the barbarian now?
“Just before the Great War, Shah Muhammad Ali was in exile in Odessa, guarded by the Tsar’s own offfice
rs, eventually meant to travel on to Vienna and Carlsbad. We were informed that he had, indeed, left Odessa, but had arrived via Russian steamer, The Christophoros, at Gumesh-Teppeh, a small Iranian port on the Caspian Sea. Though his passport declared he was a Baghdadi merchant by the name of Khalil, and he sported a false beard, so that he matched his photograph, the Shah had, indeed, returned to his kingdom. His cargo, boxes labeled ‘Mineral Water’ were actually crates of rifles and cartridges. Only one box did not contain armaments. It contained the only sentimental possession the Shah had taken into exile: the tusk of a narwhal given to him on the occasion of his fourteenth birthday. It bore Perry’s autograph, a souvenir from his last polar expedition. It was the only box that was opened, and so no one opened any of the other crates to check what was inside them. The Shah was back in Persia, as had been Russian intentions all along, you see, to re-install their useful puppet. What kind of fox was guarding the chicken coop? Let me assure you, there are no vegetarian foxes. The country was being sold to them, but what is the motive behind this Russian chicanery? I’ll tell you: a naval base on the Persian Gulf, within striking distance of India, and most importantly, oil. The Tsar is now gone, but as far as Kremlin designs on Iran, nothing has changed. Just as your ancient Suolucidiris looked for water, we have Soviets looking for as yet untapped oil fields. They have been sighted traveling in squads or individually, cavalierly exploring what we claim as our territory, territory they have no right to. Sometimes they are secretive, other times quite open. You have Russian connections, and it seems to us you could be very useful. We know you’re not really Russian, though you speak very well, but we’d like you to keep an eye on your people. It would serve the interests of all concerned if you would agree to do so.” The if was inserted in his sentence as a formality. The way if you would be so kind . . . really means, the barrel is at your temple, and the safety is off.
