The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir

by Susan Daitch

  “We can offer you a British escort as far as Baghdad. After that you’re on your own, but we would like you to agree to send us certain dispatches during your time in the eastern provinces.”

  “How will we meet these people? If you can’t give us names we’re just trudging through sand and haze.”

  “In 1912 when the Russian army uncurled its tentacles and laced them around parts of Persia, it had soldiers of your tribe who, lo and behold, found Persians of exactly the same tribe. The territory isn’t called Yahudistan for nothing, turns out. Here they were, from entirely different nations, but with a language in common, making all kinds of nice alliances to the detriment of their respective host countries. You people can always find one another, and when you do,” D-shaped officer said slowly, as if speaking to idiots, “you write to us at this address.” He passed a folded piece of paper to Bruno. “You describe your encounters. You don’t have to think very much. Just send us your observations, vis-á-vis your Soviet colleagues, your chance encounters, and so on. It should be easy.” He didn’t say even for you, but that was the implication.

  “It’s up to us,” Mrs. Rigg leaned into the cone of lamplight so her sharp face was briefly illuminated, “to interpret your data.” She poured more whiskey for the two of them, swirled the liquid in her glass, then held it close to her chest, glass magnifying a comet trail of blue tweedy fibers, waiting for our answer. She spoke in English. Blanckenship repeated in French.

  “You don’t understand our mission. We’re not film cameras set into place sweeping up, recording everything in our paths. We have urgent business and no grievance with our country of origin.” Bruno eyed her glass pressed against pearl buttons and collected a few shreds of fraying self-assurance. “If we don’t find this lost city there are others, German and Greek looters, who have already established camps in the province. We don’t have time to waste bumbling around, looking for some vague Ivanovich smelling of petrol, and as far as spying on Bezymensky and Antonov, I’m not in the business of ratting on those I work with.”

  “As far as your equanimity towards Moscow, I must say I am surprised. This attitude strains our credulity. Truly, it does. You are defectors, more or less, and defectors always have grudges, remorse, the things they long for and are angry about missing. We’re looking for defectors. This is the reason you were stopped on your way out of Amman. Your ticking clock is of little interest to us, and as far as the parties right in your midst, Bezymensky,” he picked up one of our papers before handing it back, “is of particular interest.”

  “Bezymensky is a recluse. He studies early forms of written language, with a special interest in questions of when the first laws were written. What determines when a crime has been committed and how it is punished? When are some acts considered crimes and when is the same act of theft or murder considered a legitimate solution to a problem? He’s an old man and barely ever left Moscow; he has no interest in oil or where to find it.”

  Bruno could just as easily have agreed to spy on Bezymensky, a nonperson. He didn’t need to make all this up.

  “I think you’ll find it’s in your interest to do what we ask. You seem like intelligent people, and I don’t believe you’d really like to be sent back to France. Since you speak Russian with such competence, we want you to keep us informed of Bezymensky and Antonov’s activities. Your wife looks like a native Persian, and so do you a bit, if you don’t mind my saying so. You’ll do just fine.”

  January 23, 1937

  The further east we traveled, the less we fooled anyone anymore.

  Once Amman was long out of sight we entered a territory of which there are no definitive maps, and boundaries are unclear. Bruno says he can make Bezymensky into whomever he wants to, he can betray him with no qualms, no guilty conscience, send dispatches into the oblivion that the west will soon become. The English can chase shadows. Who will ever know?

  Bruno writes long into the night, a labyrinth of field notes documenting the phantom Soviet half of the Friendship Dig, and in the morning he reads some of the pages to me before posting them to Amman:

  We met Gennady Pavolich Antonov and Ivan Sergeevich Bezymensky in Baghdad as arranged, thus uniting the two arms of the Franco-Soviet Friendship Dig. Together we will travel to Tehran and from there to the eastern part of the country to search for Suolucidir.

  When they removed their hats and tucked them under their arms, the Russians were considerably shorter in stature than they initially appeared, and both men look as if they’ve lived on burnt rice scraped from the bottom of the pot. Bezymensky, dark circles under his eyes like a raccoon, isn’t as old as we’d been led to believe, though I have some doubts about his physical ability to make the arduous trip to Sistan-va-Baluchistan. Sidonie suggested they may be more spry than they appear. It happens; some people who look like they’re held together by pins and rusty hinges turn out to have the ability to draw on invisible reserves of strength and swim the Sea of Azov. Carrying worn, leather suitcases that are never out of sight, they greeted us in a rush of tortured, well-intentioned French, then we all switched to Russian. Bezymensky, excited to the point of agitation, grabbed my arm and questioned me about Paris, a city I’ve never visited. He wanted to know about the descendants of the giraffe that was given as a gift to Napoleon by the Ottoman Viceroy of Egypt, the street where Balzac dreamed of the Countess de Hansa, the Polynesian collections in the Musée de l’Armée des Invalides. They had a difficult journey through the Caucasus, beleaguered by bandits brandishing curved scimitars whose chests were bound by crossed bandoliers studded by dull green bullets, as if they’d been cast during the last great war. Their supplies ran out, and they had to live on berries and ferns since neither of them could hunt so much as a squirrel or a starling. Both Bezymensky and Antonov are tremendously relieved to be in Baghdad where it is quiet and peaceful. Antonov, younger and taller, smells of stale tobacco and stirs his drinks with one of his fingers. He also eats the local food with his fingers, in the style of Punjabi. Why he does this I can’t say. It wasn’t Napoleon who was given the giraffe but Charles X.

  Bezymensky claims to have a map of the region, but it’s a nineteenth-century map, allegedly employed by a Tatar division of Tsar Nicholas’ Imperial Army, and its accuracy is, in my opinion, highly debatable. Bezymensky claims the document is as precise as any contemporary rendering, but the map looks crude and has obvious mistakes in terms of the position of foothills and bodies of water. Better than nothing, maybe, but a great deal is left out; you trip on a model electric train, your hand falls into something that feels like eyeballs, but it’s a bowl of boiled eggs. Finally maybe you find a locked door.

  Bezymensky believes Suolucidir was the first civilization to maintain written laws and is eager to find evidence to support his theories. Evidently he has never heard of Hammurabi, more hints that his academic scholarship has been restricted and parochial. According to his theory, the Suolucidiris believed every act leaves a mark of some kind. With laws and rules based on a concept of evidence, the trial system evolved, so the truth can be ferreted out, constructed and contested, if necessary, with the Suolucidir system. You now have procedures for how the thief, the adulterer, the murderer will tell their tales, and the procedure for how those tales may be argued for and against is based on a concept of hard evidence. When laws were written down they became less arbitrary, less liable to abuse by tyrants. Such faith in the power of certitude and written language is touching and when Antonov burps in response Bezymensky looks deeply wounded. He’s convinced we’ll find statutes, not statues, codes of ethics and codicils, not caryatids.

  Antonov believes Suolucidir was a center for ancient pornography. He isn’t joking. The two Russians glare at one another across the table. Bezymensky pounds one side of the table for law while Antonov gives a laconic shrug on the side of pleasure, and their arguments accelerate as if we’re invisible.

  “When crows fly backwards you’ll find written laws, and they’ll be pliable, sub
ject to infection, gross misinterpretation, miscarriages of justice and bribery.”

  “You could write your own sex palace manual and try to pass it off as the genuine article.”

  Sex Palace Manual. I translate loosely.

  “Mr. Archaeolosexologist,” Bezymensky was disgusted. “These people have come all the way from Paris. They don’t want to hear your disgusting repulsive theories.”

  Sidonie wanted to hear more and took Bezymensky’s arm. No, no, let’s hear what Antonov has to say.

  Licking his fingers, Antonov posed the question: when is a piece of pottery not just a piece of dried mud? There exist plates, bowls, urns, you name it, painted as how-to sex manuals. All kinds of erotic scenes, like nothing you’ve ever seen before, he says. Our lost city specialized in this. Bezymensky accuses him of looking for a Suolucidiri Philaenis, a Sodom and Gomorrah franchise.

  He pushes himself away from the table and indicates he has given up on Antonov, travesty artist. He only wants to find the city, then return home to his wife and family in the USSR as soon as possible. He misses them terribly, and his colleague’s theories turn valuable artifacts into cheap toys. Sheer and utter C-R-A-P! He spells out. Antonov, on the other hand, makes it clear he is in no hurry to return. He leans over the table and goads Bezymensky, pointing to the ceiling with turmeric-stained fingers, and says your wife can’t do anything for herself, not tighten a screw, not pay her bills such as they are, and will look elsewhere for service when her husband is away. This, apparently, is a well-known fact.

  A look of anxiety crosses Bezymensky’s face. Antonov has hit a nerve of some kind. Antonov, though he is intrigued by the idea that people who had very short life spans had sex in frequency and in ways modern people can’t imagine, rolls a cigarette and launches a question into the air: could Suolucidir be a fraud? We have the only very flimsy evidence: a letter here, a footnote there, the story of two English-men currently residing on the bottom of the Gulf of Oman, yet we’re happy to pack our bags. He shrugs; he himself leaves nothing behind but a communal apartment overlooking blighted horse chestnut and ash trees and rusty scaffolding downwind from a factory that leaves baseboards or even the slightest indentation in a wall coated with oily grime. Even your frown lines are filled in with black the next morning. Smell the sex lives of people who shook hands with the Sassanids? Find a lost city? Meet French people? Sure, why not? Who wouldn’t jump at the chance?

  Bezymensky is serious. Suolucidir is not a hoax. He believes in the possibility of the lost city, of early attempts at parsing truth-tellers and liars on opposite sides of a cave. If they find the lost city he can achieve a permanent post, respect, tribute and honors from university chancellors and general poobahs. His wife grew up in the Crimea. She had an uncle who told her stories of a lost tribe that found a foothold in the east, in a place so isolated, these people so abandoned and scattered, set up their tents and prospered. The tribe delighted in every aspect of this corner. They found a way to tap water from the desert and jealously guarded their secrets and their laws. No one would ever find them again, until they vanished.

  His wife comes from Odessa, and you know what that means, Antonov says, but we don’t know. We’re totally in the dark here as to what he is referencing. She doesn’t eat pork, he winks. Sidonie and I look blank. Not shellfish either, though the city is known for its rich Black Sea oyster beds. He keeps dropping hints until we finally understand what he’s trying to tell us. This means, Antonov explains, that my poor Bezymensky is under even greater scrutiny than the rest of us. He really has to watch his step.

  Bezymensky turns on Antonov and lists his companion’s debts, and the tailor, the bookshop, the doctor are only the ones he knows about. Debt collectors dog his heels. Until they hopped a late train traveling south Antonov was almost daily beaten by thugs sent by those parasite lenders Stalin has yet to eradicate completely. They already took everything he owned and some things that weren’t his, but belonged to others in his communal apartment, and now those people hate him, too. Bezymensky accuses him of wanting to find the lost city because he needs cash. The sex part is optional, a sideline developed as a distraction.

  We let them bicker until it was late and they ran out of steam. We pool what we know about Suolucidir. Their language is related to Farsi, Aramaic, and Samaritan but written in boxy, jagged letters. Nouns have gender, Antonov winked. This is very important, many Suolucidiri jokes are based on these linguistic relationships and slippages. Bezymensky speaks of human dictionaries: people tattooed and pictorial, guaranteed to disappear with the last speaker disintegrated. It was a painful honor to become a walking reference, your body pricked by bone and injected with cuttlefish ink. As the body goes, there goes your pornography, he glares at Antonov. Antonov parries that tattoos were taboo for the Lost Tribes and their descendants, so which is it? Epidermus Bibliophilus or Day of Atonement mourners, make up your mind. Bezymensky wonders how Antonov knows so much about these beleaguered, secretive people. Maybe you’re half one yourself? Was your mother’s name Lydya Moscovitz? There is acid on Bezymensky’s tongue, and this shuts Antonov up for a moment.

  Bezymensky believes the city was full of gardens and fountains, an emerald in the middle of the desert. Dwellings were constructed around courtyards, life was internalized, centered around extended family and clan. The architecture, mirror of Suolucidiri society, reflects their secretive culture. Antonov, recovering from the stunner issued by his colleague impugning his ancestry, disagrees. He rolls his eyes. Though he had been slouching, he now sits up, no you’re wrong. There is evidence their buildings were flimsy mud and reed affairs, and like the human dermal lexicons, none survive. Every aspect of life from government to market transactions, from eating, sleeping, and defecating was conducted out in the open. They had rooftops supported by columns, but the concept of walls did not exist. Everybody could see everything. The Russians call one another names: scoundrel, fraud, back stabber. The schisms in Soviet Suolucidiri scholarship seem unbridgeable.

  On day three Sidonie encouraged them to explore Baghdad: visit the Abbasid Palace with its silent vaulted corridors and muqarnas arches, tessellated and shadowy, walk along the banks of the Tigris, look for the footprints of Kahramana as she went to the caves to pour oil on the heads of the forty thieves hidden in jars there. At first they were resistant, then wanted us to accompany them. No, we said, we’ve seen the sights, we need to arrange transport for the next leg of our journey. Finally we got rid of them for what we estimated would be a few hours.

  With Sidonie as my lookout I gained access to their rooms. The locks were insubstantial and easily picked. In Antonov’s chamber there was nothing of any interest except, as you might imagine, cheaply produced Soviet pornography of ridiculous characters doing predictable things, not so different from what you find in the West. Maybe the settings were slightly different, the battleship Pomtemkin in the background, say, or the Odessa steps. The magazines were worn, pictures blurred, ink smeared, and left out carelessly; anyone entering would have seen them. Perhaps, apart from the person who cleaned his rooms, he expected no visitors, at least none who would have minded his traveling collection. In Bezymensky’s room I found photographs of his wife and letters to her, mostly complaining about Antonov and what a tragedy it was this dirty old man was selected to be one of the representatives the Soviet arm of the Friendship Dig, what a burden he is, how one must always explain this embarrassment of a human being to others. He also had a variety of Russian books on archaeology, which I paged through. Bezymensky is the owner of the usual array of the small tools one uses for digging. Among them was what looked like a small meter. This object is used to send electric current through sample rocks. Even the most dense rock contains microscopic pockets that may contain water or oil depending on the density of either material in the area from which the rock was removed. Rocks containing tiny droplets of oil are poorer conductors of electricity than those containing water, therefore the conductibility of an electrical c
urrent could be a sign of a hidden cache of either substance. The Suolucidiris found water, therefore this instrument would be useful for finding relics from an aquiferous city. Though it’s not unusual for him to have such an instrument, it was located in a cavity hollowed out of a large out-of-date and irrelevant book on czarist-era expeditions to Siberia.

  When I left Bezymensky’s room, the corridor was empty. Sidonie was nowhere to be found. Bezymensky had returned prematurely due to a squabble with Antonov, who has no interest in Baghdad beyond finding the nearest Fun Palace. Bezymensky was intent on returning to his room, but Sidonie, who claimed she just happened to be walking down this hallway and had paused at the top of a flight of stairs, insisted he not cut his touring short. She would be delighted to take him to see the sights; they really should not be missed, having traveled so far. He was suspicious. There was no reason for Sidonie to be lurking near the stairs of his corridor. We will in future, have to be more careful around our Soviet colleagues.

  Bruno folded the pages and posted them from a street that ran along the Tigris.

  A collection of characters exploding like firecrackers, just as quickly absorbed by the night, poof they’re gone. Where did all this come from? A man with an ourobouros tattooed on his ankle seen while he checked valves in the engine room of Raffarin’s ship, he answers. He might just as well have answered: the moon.

  What is oil? Highly compressed fossils. We’ll all be oil some day. Oil is formed by organic matter under intensely high temperatures. Diatoms that once floated on the surface of ancient oceans are eventually converted to oil. They sometimes left the impressions of their bodies in shale.