The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir

by Susan Daitch

  Unlike Antonov, Venyamin wasn’t interested in finding treasure in Suolucidir in order to pay off creditors and thugs. Unlike Feigen he wasn’t interested in fame for discovering the city of the Lost Tribes. He never wanted the spotlight on himself for any reason. Suolucidir was about forgetting, for enabling him to resume his old life in Berlin, to turn back the clock, to pick a universe parallel to the one we now seemed to occupy. On one of our first nights in the city we were walking around somewhere on the edge of the Tiergarten, not knowing where we were, sort of happily lost. A man in a black overcoat and hat had set up a telescope on a street corner and was focused on the stars, of which there were not so many. It was a cloudy night, but you could still see something marvelous, he said. His coat billowed in the breeze, making a flapping sound, otherwise the street was quiet and empty. It was to us he addressed his celestial comments. The amateur astronomer waved at us, holding his hat in his hand before replacing it on his head. Smiling broadly he asked us if we wanted to see Saturn, the planet with the rings. A city with friendly star-gazing citizens, what a marvel, I thought, let’s take a look. For a moment I was no longer homesick. He told me where to stand and what ribbed band to turn in order to bring the planet into focus. Saturn was tiny and grey, like a black-and-white photograph. The rings were vertical, as if it had tipped.

  What if those men who tucked their pants into their boots hadn’t ever taken power, but had been laughed at instead, scuttled into a corner? Venya-min steps onto Oranienburgerstrasse, while a woman shakes a carpet from a balcony, and all that will ever fall on him is twentieth-century dust. He studies Mesopotamia and the ancient culture of the Euphrates, and never has to produce fake books, or identity cards, or anything else that isn’t true. Suolucidir means Bruno can put his hands over his ears and shut his eyes. Suolucidir is one big what if.

  The Soviets who knew so much, did they know Bruno was spying on them, but not really spying, making up stories? To those who tell jokes about Stalin and penguins eating ice cream on hot days, it doesn’t really matter. They could have had him spirited back to Moscow, to Lubyanka or Lefortovo prisons: neither one of these can one leave as easily as the leaky St. Pierre. Bezymenskaya with her luminous bituminous coal-black eyes and her broken nose like a macaw’s beak would be waiting for him: cellmate or escaped and lingering on a Turkish barque, what do I know? I know nothing.

  April 26, 1937

  A knock on the door in the middle of the night. It was the Soviet surveyors, Darya Vasilisa and Maksim, who had returned, or perhaps never left. I began to greet them, what’s happened at this hour that they should pound so, but they pulled pistols out from their jackets. Against whom? What revolution had snapped into place at half past midnight in the middle of nowhere? I looked around for enemies of the state, but there was no one else here. Darya had a face like a heel of stale bread and was just as silent. Maksim told me only that I wasn’t going anywhere. Am I a prisoner, I asked him? He gave a funny shrug, like, isn’t it obvious, then bolted my door from the outer hall with what must have been newly installed hardware.

  Not only the door, but the shutters to my windows have been sealed, and it feels as if everyone has evacuated Zahedan. I can’t see the streets, and can’t hear the sound of merchants unrolling carpets in the morning, so I imagine the city empty and silent. My room feels as if it’s been turned into a submarine floating in limbo without bearings or radar. The person who brings me meals will not speak to me.

  Two days later Petakhov unlocked the door and this time entered unarmed to tell me I’m under house arrest. Eliana Katzir, he pointed at me as if I had any doubts as to my identity, will soon be deported. Whether he has the authority to keep me locked in this room I don’t know, but no one from the hotel or the city seems to be standing in his way. When I asked if this is arrest or kidnapping, he said, the state has long arms, you see. Then Darya joined him, shifted her gun to her left hand and snapped open an empty suitcase, which she handed to Maksim. While Petakhov proceeded to search my room, confiscating a variety of papers and objects, Darya Vasilisa kept the gun aimed at my head. When he finished Petakhov informed me of their intentions.

  They are preparing to dynamite Suolucidir, so no trace of it will remain. The entrance has already been sealed. Reason? It lies over an oil field, and if no city ever existed on this spot, no city will need to be preserved. Oil drilling can begin as soon as the smoke from the explosions dissipates. However, the erasure must be total, and any evidence of Suolucidir that exists above the earth’s surface must also be destroyed. Relics removed from the city were so far very few, most had remained at the site. He knows about the scroll. Darya saw it. I have three days to hand it over or disclose its location.

  Three days came and went, but I’m still here. If I’m executed, he’ll never find the parchment, so it’s in his interest to keep me breathing. I’m kept alive as long as I’m of use to him, but there are limits to how long I can keep Scheherazade animated. Petakhov, anxious to begin the drilling process, explained something called the Zagros fold belt in the western part of the country. These folds contain enormous reserves of petroleum, and he believes there is just as much below the surface here, directly under what he calls my ridiculous city, a pit of nothingness. All I can do in the face of the oil bursting from under my feet is to buy a little time in the hope of preserving one message in a bottle, one document that will prove Suolucidir existed. Even if he doesn’t succeed in finding the scroll, he’ll blow up the city anyway. No one here will notice or care about an explosion somewhere in their desert. He is quite certain of this because all will benefit from the oil field. No one, he assures me, cares about your city.

  “The British Legation in Tehran is a secret power, like the Vatican. Nobody knows what they’re really up to,” Maksim says. He holds up papers from a file, and I recognize the letters Bruno wrote to the Englishmen who held us up on our way here. He’d had his eye on us for quite some time. Intercepting communications was all part of surveying and surveillance.

  “The Imperial Bank of Persia,” Petakhov continues, “is actually a British company. The English get their way here by economic maneuverings so complicated no one knows they’ve been hit on the head until they’re carried out feet first. Their skullduggery, so deft at de-stabilizing a viable if shaky economy, is a marvel, but they underestimate,” he taps his fingers on the table as if lecturing a daydreaming student, “the military force Stalin can command just over the border. You can only slap the bear so many times before he hits back. The capitalist corporate hydra isn’t the only entity capable of unseating archaic civil governments.”

  This is a new Stalinische Maksim P., adept at mixing zoological and mythical references, very different from the sentimental cartographer who fooled us so completely. But maybe underneath the hard-as-nails apparatchik is a less confident orienteer feeling for the lichen-covered side of the tree to point the way north.

  Petakhov drunk is much more frightening and unpredictable than when he’s sober. He can be very careful about his clothing and hair, but now he smells, his clothes are stained, and his cuffs are streaked with dirt. His glasses slip to the end of his nose, and looking over the tops of the frames with half-lidded eyes, he doesn’t bother to push them back up. He reads files with raised eyebrows; to a microbe the ridges on his forehead become the Himalayas. In a haze of vodka or anise-flavored arak, he describes the smell of singed muscle when the soles of the feet are burned, torn joints, stretched limbs, memories from his days in Lefortovo prison. Geographically, he’s on the thin edge of what was familiar to him, but these tales meant to scare are exercises in nostalgia, I think, though what isn’t nostalgia to a drunk, it’s hard to say. A drunk, a shiker, a word used to describe an embarrassment at a wedding, a word that for me, is its own pill of nostalgia.

  Maksim believes I know where Bruno is hiding: Marseilles, a city full of Pinzas and Feigens, where new St. Pierres with less beneficent-sounding names will begin to pop up at every turn. He would slip a
way without telling me, it was very like him, I tell Petakhov, if he planned to find some safe place, Palestine or the United States, somewhere he could send for me later. Or was he meeting this Bezymenskaya who remembers scar tissue, the names of his lost sisters, and the name of the street in Grodno, not Moscow where the Katzirs, not the Nieumachers, were poor nobodies who could barely spell porcelain, much less have fired plates and bowls for Katherine the Great.

  Perhaps Maksim wants to keep one or two things for himself. They’re worth a fortune, and with them in his possession he could find safe haven in Bern or Monte Carlo should the Stalinist bear, the one he’s so fond of, decide he merits a good and permanent zetz, a smackdown. He talks about the relationship between visualizing maps and visualizing the course of pain through the body, traveling from limbs to brain, for example. The topography of waves of pain, relief will come in small shallow moments, but remember, these won’t last long before the next wave arrives. Imagine another map: plateaus of respite, underwater banks of unconsciousness before shoals of throbbing and stinging. Pain occurs over time, while as a geographer, really, he’s more concerned with space; the analogy he says, adopting his whispery, almost gentle voice, is not a perfect one. It’s possible some part of Petakhov believes me when I tell him I don’t know where the relics are. Who would endure torture for the sake of a little evidence that may or may not prove a city exists?

  The worst is when he strokes my hair with long dry fingers and talks about what a good shot Darya is. How he and Darya Vasilisa, he claims, were ambushed by Pashtun tribesmen, but she is such an excellent markswoman, many were killed. They need to return to those hills, but how can they do so with this history of shoot first, ask identities later? Here’s a solution, Petakhov proposes, answering his own questions and moving his hands from my hair to the place where my jawbone meets my neck. He presses hard. I could be given to the Pashtun in exchange for safe passage. This way everyone gets something. Pretty girl can stop wandering from place to place looking for a city where she can finally hang her hat. He’s been reading a confiscated book by the British Kipling. He sees himself as a king of the Khyber Pass; the natives worship him as a god, at least for a while. How will Petakhov travel to that gap in the mountains? The torture artist is so drunk, he can barely stagger in and out of my cell.

  Yesterday he pulled a table from the side of the room and motioned for me to sit a few feet away. From his case he retrieved not pincers and clamps, but Bruno’s report on Antonov and Bezymensky. In the first dispatch Bruno had written an adventure story about how the other half of the Franco-Soviet Friendship Dig had been followed from Moscow through the Caucasus. In the second posting he described the papers and books they read on particular trains and what they bought in markets along the way: flashlight batteries, aerogramme paper, a kilo of apples, cardamom tea with milk and sugar. Antonov grew ill, and to pass the time retreated to his pornographic reverie, which frustrated Bezymensky in what he saw as a lack of seriousness. Antonov fed Bezymensky’s suspicions about the wife he left behind whom Bezymensky could never reach by phone. The two men argued between one another. They didn’t trust the Nieumachers, and referred to a man in Marseilles with particular distaste and suspicion, a rare book dealer who, though erudite, had been reduced to survival by treachery, his only goal was to save himself. What seemed like a great opportunity to expand international scholarship and co-operation had a dark underside, and Bezymensky believed they had to be vigilant so as not to be taken as dupes. Antonov accused him of being overly cautious. So little attention is paid to this part of the world, the people who live here don’t appear in films, radio, are rarely photographed. They assured one another: you can do whatever you want, no one is looking, express doubts, walk around naked. The pair sounded as if they had something to hide. Maksim had swallowed all of it.

  Did I know who the man in Marseilles might be? Any idea? Petakhov asked several times. A man who got rich from the suffering of others? You know this person? I shook my head. Feigen who used to trace around the bottom of inkbottles with a pen, then filled in the space with drawings of a half-naked woman as if sitting on a crescent moon, who believed in a phantom from his childhood no more solid than a ratty shadow, a former self-declared skeptic who would hang by his fingernails from a ledge, then suddenly pray like crazy before he dropped to the ground, who might never run back into a burning building to save anyone else, and well can you blame him after all, you might ask?

  “Gennady Pavolich Antonov and Ivan Sergeevich Bezymensky have arrived in Zahedan, too late for the dig, unfortunately. They’ve been detained and are being held in cells in another part of the city. Sidonie, I have run out of patience with you,” he sighed. “Unless you hand over the scroll, not only you, but they will be executed. You have twenty-four hours.”

  You can’t kill people who don’t exist, but then Petakhov pulled out a wad of cloth. He unwrapped it to reveal a severed finger. It couldn’t have belonged to any Soviet member of the Friendship Dig, so whose was it?

  When he’s gone, lessons in the art of forgery in the accidental classroom, a Berlin apartment, turn out to be useful. Among our trunks is a case of parchment pieces Bruno bought in the market as incidental souvenirs, not that old, but the average person wouldn’t know they’re not worth much at all. Also, I’m figuring Petakhov can’t tell the difference between ancient ink made from cuttlefish or lampblack or carbon and a bottle lifted from the desk of an Englishman in Amman. I’ll finally hand over this invention, then he can finish his job. Thinking it’s the original, he’ll bury the copy in the city’s entrance before it’s completely sealed off and blown to bits.

  I imagine riding out to Suolucidir, but the entrance has been sealed, and I can hire no one to help me open it again. I pull at the stones myself. A boy wanders by with his sheep, and he asks me who I am, what am I doing at bottom of the ravine sitting on a pile of rocks? Eliana Katzir, I tell him, a citizen of Suolucidir. I’m not going anywhere.

  Bruno is in the city waiting for me, knapsack packed with the mythological creature, half-lion, half-bird, scarves against the windstorms, pistachios, a map from an old man’s childhood.

  POLICE REPORT

  Department of Alien Affairs

  Motahhari Boulevard

  Zahedan, Iran

  Date: April 20, 1936

  MISSING PERSON: BRUNO NIEUMACHER AKA VENYAMIN KATZIR

  DESCRIPTION: Approximately 5’ 10” Brown hair, brown eyes, thin, moustache, beard. Approximately thirty years of age.

  LAST SEEN

  Interview with suspect Ramin Kosari, an employee of the Franco-Soviet Friendship Dig, conducted by Nurallah Sahim

  NS: Tell us about your last conversation with Bruno Nieumacher.

  RK: He was very anxious and wanted to return to Europe as soon as possible, even though his work in Zahedan wasn’t yet complete.

  NS: Why did he confide in you?

  RK: I’m not sure. You work for someone long enough, and they tell you things.

  NS: This is not a typical experience with the French or the Soviets, not here, not really. How did you come to work for Nieumacher?

  RK: Through Russian geographers who were already working in the region.

  NS: Are you referring to Maksim Petakhov and Darya Vasilisa Ulanovskaya?

  RK: Yes. They had arranged for me to work for the Franco-Soviet organization.

  NS: So let’s talk, for a moment, about your other employer, Petakhov. He claimed to be a geographer, a guest of the Shah’s Royal Ministry of Cartography. Is this an accurate representation, in short, of his reason for being in this part of the country?

  RK: No, not at all, though I didn’t learn the true reason for his residency here until Nieumacher did. I, too, believed they were geographers commissioned by the Shah, nothing more. I had no reason not to believe them. Russians and Germans were often hired for surveying and engineering.

  NS: How did you first come to be in the employ of Petakhov?

  RK: I met them
when they came to the region last year. They would leave for periods of time, then return for a while. While residents of Zahedan, they paid extremely well. Also, they spoke some Farsi. When the Nieumachers arrived, Petakhov set me up to work for the Franco-Soviets, but at the same time I was to keep an eye on them, and my pay was doubled. In fact, the Friendship Dig probably would have been harmless, like so many others, but they found an archaeological site in a place that Petakhov believed to be the source of large oil reserves. The site needed to be destroyed, not excavated, to get to that oil. This was his concern.