The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir

by Susan Daitch

  I stood and walked across the room, so I blocked the front of the bookshelves again. He followed me, then reached around to my left, and picked up a pottery shard I’d brought from the site. He balanced it in his hand as if feeling the weight of it, then he held it up to the light.

  “The body can also be looked at as a map, you know. Veins are highways, let’s say, the heart is a metropolis, the brain is the control tower, eyes provide radar, but the map changes. The body map of a child isn’t the same as that of a twenty-year-old or an old man, to say nothing of fossilized remains.”

  I didn’t enjoy being looked at like an example of topography, not by Petakhov. When he entered a room, everything changed. He became the prime minister of all he surveyed. He appeared to be telling us a great deal about himself, yet I had the feeling he was learning more about Bruno and me than he revealed about Maksim P.

  “What do you think this is?’ he asked, holding up the shard.

  “Part of an oil lamp, maybe,” Bruno answered him.

  Petakhov replaced it, then picked up my book of drawings and paged through them.

  “I don’t recognize any of these rocks.”

  Of course he didn’t recognize any of them, they’re paper. I’m not a geologist and didn’t make detailed drawings. The angular shapes could have been shale, basalt, giant pieces of feldspar, mountains of diamonds and gold.

  “You brought back rock samples from this site you’ve been visiting every day? No? Darya and I are very curious about this area. Rocks tell stories if you know how to read them. We could help you. We’d be delighted to be of assistance.”

  “It’s dangerous. There is a constant risk of cave-ins. A loud sneeze could cause a roof to collapse.”

  Maksim shrugged. “We will need to travel to the western edge of the country in a few days time and will be leaving you. It’s best if we go to your site tomorrow.”

  Much to my horror, Bruno gave in while I glared at him from behind Maksim’s head. He was running out of ways to say no, sorry, comrade. The prime minister had spoken, but how did he become prime minister? Petakhov said something to the effect of delighted, he and Darya Vasilisa would meet us early in the morning.

  After Maksim left, Bruno wouldn’t speak to me about the ground he had just ceded and the problems that would come from Petakhov and Darya Vasilisa knowing what they knew. How could they or anyone else find us, here at the ends of the earth, pulling stones out of the ground that may or may not have been walked on by the Lost Tribes? His response was to sleep with his clothes on, or pretend to fall asleep, so he wouldn’t have to answer my, now whats? Unable to sleep myself, I looked for my hairbrush but could find it nowhere.

  The somnambulist only mumbled. Near our bed I kept one of Feigen’s books on Benjamin of Tudela, one of the few associated with the search for the Lost Tribes who hadn’t been considered a fraud. Hidden on page 118 was a fragment of a document I should have destroyed, but when I opened the book the bit of paper had been moved to the back, folded, tucked into the endpaper. Who had done this? Perhaps I had and didn’t remember doing so. If Bruno had found these papers he would have burned them, and the fight we would have had over my keeping them would have been heard as far away as Baghdad. It was a scrap from our katuba, a marriage document, with our real names: Benyamin and Eliana Katzir of Grodno Gibernia. The rest of the katuba was lost, destroyed, left behind, but these two names, I saved.

  April 12, 1937

  True to Petakhov’s promise, the next morning the Russians were waiting for us on the street. I was not happy to see the pair with their surveying tripods and private cook who accompanied them everywhere. Unfortunately the weather was good, and we made quick time through the chasm to the city’s cave-like entrance.

  Maksim and Darya marveled at its dimensions and the sophisticated design of its gates. They scrambled through the opening we’d made, and explored the caverns and chambers talking excitedly of underground topology and sources of water. Every few minutes Darya would hold up a fragment of rock, they whispered between themselves as if in a library, and put rock samples in leather pouches they each carried. When I asked him why he needed or wanted these small chunks of sandstone, he said they were only collecting souvenirs and would take nothing valuable, nothing man-made, from the site. The lintel with the symbols of the lost tribes, they didn’t even look at. Petakhov tailed after me because Bruno, who’d abandoned the methodical sectioning off of the city into cubes, had become intent on finding its outer limits. Ignoring the Russians, he disappeared. No one would see him until the end of the day.

  I knew nothing of what Bruno actually did in those remote regions, but in one of his explorations he found a cavern that he thought had been a prison cell. It was completely empty except for a skeleton whose head lay several yards away. There were a lot of tracks in and out of the space, and they looked almost like those of contemporary boots, though a landslide had blocked the way out of the cave. The footprints ended at a wall of rocks, but through a multitude of pinhole-sized dots, sunlight pricked the cell. A firmament, he said, lay before him, but the boulders couldn’t be budged. On the ground near the sealed-off entrance Bruno had found a fragment of rough canvas, perhaps part of a bag, broken open and discarded. On it were stamped the initials, H & C, in block letters. Someone had been in this part of the city before us. Was the skeleton either H or C? Bruno thought it was much, much older than the scrap of cloth. Each day he explored deeper into the ruins, but he never found any other evidence of H & C. That was all Bruno told me about what lay in the remote parts of the city, though I asked several times. We were on our own in Suolucidir, and I was convinced that no others who had come before us knew what they had really found.

  At night, exhausted, Bruno might barely speak to me but that morning, en route from Zahedan to the lost city, he talked his head off to Ulanovskaya and Petakhov. Bruno, who was usually so reserved and aloof, who didn’t have much faith in the whole enterprise, became uncorked. The Lost Tribes meant little to him. Have you ever been to Marseilles? The smell of the ocean, the sun setting over the Pyrenees, but what I miss most about Moscow is the way the snow sits on top of lampposts like a line of sugar cones down a street . . . Blah, blah, blah. Did he think they were idiots? Of course the geographers knew you can’t see the Pyrenees from Marseilles. Each scene, whether actually remembered or forgotten was part of a long branching story that got so complicated and layered, earlier circumstances, so vivid at the time, become fossilized and reduced to some compressed aggregate of memory. Grodno, Berlin, Marseilles, Amman, Baghdad. Childhood at the bottom, under the most pressure is compressed into coal, diamonds, oil.

  April 15, 1937

  Maksim’s moral tales about cities that disappear as if they’ve never existed, continue to haunt. What did he actually know? Maksim and Darya Vasilisa didn’t leave as they promised but came with us again for several more days. I asked Bruno why he allows them access to the site, but he claims he has no grounds for refusing them; they’ll leave soon. I don’t like the way they sniff at my steps. Petakhov, in particular, has no off switch. He talks incessantly.

  Today, in order to get away from Petakhov and Ulanovskaya, I went into the north side of the dig, pausing as soon as I entered the city, stuffing my scarf into my backpack; it absorbed the anger and distrust I felt toward the two interlopers. I didn’t go as far into the maze-like ruin as Bruno, but wandered instead into a large room he had recently mapped out. A small rockslide sounded like a waterfall hitting with enormous pressure. It startled me, and I had to make a quick decision: shout at everyone else to leave immediately, though the sound waves of shouting could cause a cave-in? But then it could be a small rockslide, nothing more. I was terrified of cave-ins, being buried alive in total darkness with the skeletons.

  Kosari found me frozen in place. He grabbed my wrist and tried to get me to leave at once, I shouldn’t go into remote parts of the labyrinth alone, the city swallowed people whole, it was easy to get lost here, and no one
would hear you shout. But the rockslide was actually very small, and soon all was quiet. It was nothing really, as those things seem once the danger has passed. His Russian was mixed with Farsi, and sometimes his sentences were like loops of sound, lulling, compelling, but unclear to me. Was he communicating alarm or something else? Finally letting go of my wrist, he put his hand on my shoulder. What happened next? I put my hand on his arm. I looked over his shoulder. What had this room been used for? It was just an empty space with no history of its past use in evidence, little more than a cave. The cave of re-invention, of rebirth; I remembered Maksim’s monastic maps. A room where you can do anything and nothing will remain of it, where you can re-invent yourself in a way that’s totally unpredictable and will never be revisited. We could do anything we wanted to, but in an instant I glanced up to see Petakhov in a doorway, his grin disappearing around a corner like an afterimage that morphs into amoeba shapes inside your eyelids. I jumped backward, nearly knocking over a cluster of cracked, empty vessels. They were plain, ordinary pottery jars, examined days ago. The intact ones were empty, and my hand grazed their rough surfaces. What had he seen, the man with his bag full of rocks? His boots made no sound, nor did his equipment jangle, nor bag of stones click together. Petakhov, the orienteer, even underground, was sure-footed, as if he knew exactly where he was going. Kosari hadn’t seen him and leaned against a wall, waiting for me. What did I want? To stay? To go? An ancient abandoned city was suddenly crowded. Maybe I did want to stay and listen to Kosari’s strange Russian, just for a little while. It wouldn’t have been so bad, no? A narrow stairway led down from this room to a curved space like an apse just below it. I hadn’t looked into that room. No one yet had. He motioned to the stairwell, and I followed him down the steps so worn the passageway was like a child’s slide.

  Our footsteps tapped along the stone floor while our flashlight beams circled the lower room illuminating more plain clay jars. As with the ones upstairs, some lay in fragments. Others were intact. If Feigen was expecting golden oil lamps and silver yadim, silver hands used for reading sacred scrolls, he would be disappointed. We found no rare precious objects, everything was made of stone and clay and smelled like even the air had died. I held my light over the opening of one of the jars, and that’s where I saw a black spiral curled inside. I touched the outer edge. It was parchment, fragile as smoke. Holding the flashlight in my left hand I carefully pulled the scroll out of the jar, held it out in front of me. The scroll was only about thirty centimeters wide, and so brittle it was risky to unfurl more than a little. It was impossible to know how long the parchment was. I uncurled a small edge, maybe a few centimeters. Even by flickering light I could make out boxy letters, a calligraphy that was much older than the writing in the margins of Feigen’s map. I felt as if I had stumbled across a dinosaur skeleton in a park, in a square thousands of city dwellers walked through every day, but no one ever noticed the edge of giant rib striations breaking through the dirt.

  I unwrapped the scarf from around my neck, covered the scroll with it and quickly placed the bundle in a small basket that fit inside my backpack. To Kosari, I think, these fragments of old things a few seconds away from crumbling into dust and nothingness were of ambiguous worth. Pottery, tile, metal, he understood their value. Actually, I don’t really know what he thought. Perhaps it was just a job to him. He had stopped talking to me, and a little later led us back out of the city as if nothing had happened. It was already growing dark.

  A few meters from the entrance Darya had set up her surveying equipment, and Petakhov was taking her picture. They said Bruno hadn’t felt well so he’d ridden back to Zahedan. Did Petakhov’s grin only increase in size as he motioned down the rocky alley, the only way in or out of the site? Darya looked fierce, a nasty you-broke-the-rules kind of face, though what had I done, and what business was it of hers? She often looked this way, like someone in a crowded train was pinching her, and Petakhov’s standard mug was that icy parody of a grin. In the growing twilight perhaps I only imagined their expressions, these Soviet imps dancing around a bonfire, pitchforks in the air. The only concrete thing they knew were the angles measured by the theodolite they set up when they surveyed a stretch of sand. I looked around for Kosari but couldn’t see him; whether he had already ridden out of the site while I was talking to Petakhov or had gone back into Suolucidir, I didn’t know. For a moment I was alone. Sitting on a rock some distance from the others I glanced quickly at the scroll inside my backpack. I could do little more than identify letters, the lightning lameds, the tets like rooms whose only door opens inward, and the smallest letter, yud, sprinkled in many places on the scroll. The first letter of the word for the exodus, yud represents the cosmic messenger, change the u to an i and then what? I carefully unrolled a bit more, but the scroll was so brittle, so near to splintering into a hundred fragments, I unfurled no more than a few inches. The columns of letters ended. The following section was a pattern of hands made of letters. One of the hands had been torn away. I was anxious to show Bruno the scroll that had been waiting three thousand years to be found by refugees from a land the original scribes couldn’t possibly imagine or predict. He had been able to read the marginalia written on Yanek Motke’s map, and would know whether the ranks of letters represented a parable, a riddle, or an interpretation of dreams. We didn’t have much time. Twentieth-century oxygen was fatal, and the fragile text wrapped in a scarf was close to disintegration.

  April 16, 1937

  When I got back to our rooms Bruno was nowhere to be found, nor had he ever arrived. No one had seen him. Each hour of the night is more urgent than the last. I keep expecting him to walk in the door. Also disappeared is Esme’s simurgh and Feigen’s map.

  At dawn Petakhov and Ulanovskaya knocked on my door looking for Bruno. They were the last people who had seen him. Darya said something to the effect that, yes, it would appear your husband is missing.

  “My apologies, profoundly.” Her eyes looked empty behind her glasses, uncertain whether to view me with suspicion or pity or to say: maybe this is all your fault — for a moment’s pleasure you can lose everything, and end up in a cattle car headed to Niski Novgorod. “Maksim and I will help organize a search.”

  For a couple of days they divided the landscape into square areas, trackers, hunters, and guides going over each plot whether it contained only a rocky outcropping, a wadi, or a cluster of huts. Ulanovskaya and Petakhov, the fantastic orienteer who can travel without a compass from the Shoals of Disappearing Desires to the Infinite Regrets Range, got a group together of local men who knew the terrain well, and though they combed the area between Zahedan and Suolucidir, no trace of Bruno has been found.

  April 18, 1937

  Though their commitment to finding him was short-lived, I was astonished and convinced by their sorrow when no clue to his whereabouts surfaced. I was splashing water on my face when Petakhov knocked for the last time. The front of my dress was wet, and I wiped my hands on the skirt, then threw a shawl over my shoulders, so almost my whole body was covered before I opened the door. Petakhov rubbed one of his sunburnt ears, and it occurred to me, didn’t he know by now that you shouldn’t go into the desert without your head covered? He explained. They were, as they had said, the last to see Bruno, and for this they were sorry — if only they had detained him for whatever serious or light-hearted reason, and then tragedy could have been averted. But be that as it may, their work was completed, and it was time for them to return to Tehran and from there to Moscow. Here are our addresses in case you ever return to the city where your acrobat father left you with the porcelain-firing Nieumachers. They hoped, for my sake, the rest of the Franco-Soviet Friendship Dig, Antonov and Bezymensky, would arrive soon.

  April 19, 1937

  I wandered the city looking for Kosari and found him about half an hour before the sun would have gone down completely. Lamps were being lit, and in their hurry to pack up, a merchant’s assistant spilled a bag of rice, which made a so
und like a waterfall as grains hit flagstones. Bolts of cloth from Egypt, bars of olive-oil soap from Aleppo, bottles of dye from Kurdistan were all packed up or locked away. Kosari stepped out from behind a coppersmith’s stall, shallow dishes and jazvahs jangling behind him. He said it was time for him to return to his wife in Alibad — he had worked for the Russians before, and probably would again when they or another group returned. Kosari was done and owed nothing to me, or to his former employers, for whom he’d already taken great risks.

  Before we married, Venyamin and I, before we became Bruno and Sido, we met only once in a room that smelled of dried peppers, cloves and vinegar in my aunt’s house; my aunt, the arranger. Venyamin slouched in a chair spinning a gyroscope on the edge of a table. I couldn’t untangle the strings and wind them up properly; for him it was effortless. He read comics in two languages when he could get his hands on them, a child chess prodigy, a champion who won local tournaments, but he wanted to go backward and read about ancient people who lived on the Euphrates River, those who invented glyphs, pictorial writing, and ur-chess. Uncles were angry: why would you want to do that? Feh, rank stupidity, nareshkeit. Do something useful: furs, grain, accounting. In a blink we changed our names, our identities. In a blink we, who’d never left this gibernia, were on a train traveling west to Berlin. I could never have imagined becoming marooned here in a cave. If Bruno could escape the Saint Pierre prison, he could escape from anywhere, or so I kept telling myself.

  Could I continue the Franco-Soviet Friendship Dig on my own, waiting for others who will never arrive? Maybe. Back in our rooms, I began to pack like an automaton, not taking everything, entirely unsure where I would go. Among Bruno’s papers I found a letter from Amman. What have Bezymensky and Antonov done since last report? Has Bezymensky showed you the meter? Has he spoken about it? More information was demanded, and if a substantive report was not made within a fortnight, arrests would be made and deportations begun. In the same folder I found a half-written account on the movements of Petakhov and Ulanovskaya addressed to the British Governor General in Amman. Last among the papers was a love letter from Natalya Bezymenskaya. The handwriting looked unfamiliar, unlike any I could immediately recognize. Who wrote this letter? Bruno could have forged the handwriting, or perhaps Natalya Bezymenskaya was a real person, a flesh and blood Russian beauty. I don’t know where they were supposed to have met, but she was trying to make her way south to join him in Istanbul. She signed her letters, “your N.” She knew about his studies in Berlin, his failed business, the scar behind his left knee. She longed to spend the cool nights with him in rooms with a view of the Bosphorus. I could hear Feigen saying to me, to Bruno, to his Oranienburgerstrasse acolytes, and desperate customers at the edge of the sea: what do you know? You know nothing! He was always right about that. Venyamin K. is like the Chelmite who falls asleep on his way to Warsaw leaving his boots pointing the way to the city. While he sleeps a blacksmith, a prankster, turns his shoes around so they face back to Chelm. Then Bruno wakes, puts on his boots and walks back in the direction of Chelm. Upon arrival at the city gates he believes he’s reached Chelm II, an identical city, but not the real Chelm I where his real wife and children reside. Even the elders come to believe they preside over Chelm II, and there must be Chelms III, IV, perhaps one hundred Chelms. Why not? But each contains at least one foolish traveler. In this case: Venyamin Katzir. I left the love letter out in full view on top of the tales of Firkowitsch, the Con.