The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir

by Susan Daitch

  We ran to the station with as much lead as it took Petakov to pull up his pants. At this point I had no idea Katzir intended to accompany me. I was hoping to get on a train, any train traveling in any direction away from a city where I had no business, and as far as possible from the kidnappers who thought I was their ticket to a big apartment in Moscow or a new life altogether. Zahedan was small, but it was still a city. There was a station, there would always be trains going somewhere, but when we arrived, the station was shuttered. No one was about; there would be no trains that day. Tracks had been blown up in the Zagros Mountains, or there had been a derailment on the edge of the Caspian, I no longer remember the reason, but I had a sinking feeling there was no exit here.

  We walked quickly further and further from the center of town. Making our way through narrow dirt streets to a group of outbuildings at the edge of Zahedan, where I saw a caravan was getting ready to depart the city. Katzir grabbed my arm, and we ran to catch up to them. As we ran I felt as if I was in the last frame of a movie. I would get to the plane and fly off just as soldiers, hunters, predators were nipping at my heels. The group was traveling west to Susa, but Venyamin insisted we should make our way to a city that had a railroad station, and Susa was isolated in the west of the country. This made no sense to me. Petakhov and Ulanovskaya would round the corner any minute. Trains weren’t running, and this outpost was a logical place they would look for me, just as you would search in a bus or train station for someone anxious to leave town. This edge of the city where caravans departed was actually very dangerous. They need me alive, I told him, you’re the one who’s going to be shot. To not leave immediately was like waiting for the right color car while your house was on fire. I considered leaving alone, but not able to speak any language that was usable within hundreds of miles, I was also afraid to be completely on my own.

  So we waited for another caravan. We waited all day, all the while watching for Petakhov and Darya. At night Zahedan is completely still. No person can be seen on any street; even alley cats and feral dogs are huddled somewhere out of sight. Venyamin didn’t seem all that worried but did keep asking around about when the next group would be departing. I listened closely to his voice. His accent sounded as if he came from a town similar to the one I left behind in Russia, but this was mostly at the end of the day, after night fell, when he was tired and less guarded.

  We sat on the ground, our backs against the walls of a burnt brick house. I was bundled in so many layers of cloth, I felt invisible. We bought tea from a man across the road, and as we drank, Venyamin smoked the last of his cigarettes, and told me something about how he found himself in Zahedan.

  There was a locksmith he apprenticed to, a tyrant over six feet tall with fists like boulders. To work for him was to be a slave. The boys he indentured were forced to work long hours every day of the week, given minuscule amounts of food: cold boiled cabbage and a little fried onion, the burnt bread a baker threw away. They hunched over workbenches in a cavernous basement where you either turned to ice or roasted. In the winter the metal numbed your already frostbitten fingers. It would take a long time to finish a piece, and the master would all but urinate on the slow boys. In the summer the same molten substance burned your fingerprints off from an arm’s length away. Their tasks were repetitive, assembling locking systems that would insure an infinite number of filing cabinets, trunks, and boxes would be extremely difficult to open unless you knew exactly the trick the master had invented to keep them sealed shut. Before and after the revolution, the business had no shortage of clients, as rows of indentured little pishers, and some not so little any more, fashioned boxes for state secrets, files that held informants’ names, and other valuables, whether paper or mineral. The intense boredom was relieved at odd moments when the master descended into the cellar and boasted of the time, years ago, when he had seen Houdini just before he was locked up in a Siberian Transport van. Launched from Moscow, the key to the van lay thousands of miles away in Siberia, but Houdini walked out in only 18 minutes. 18, remember, a number of enormous kabalistic significance. The boss had even gotten fairly close to Houdini, the Prince of the Air, and yes, he had a broad forehead, his face shaped like an upside-down pyramid. He’d always remember that face. The story changed a bit each time. Strolling past a café he’d stopped to ogle Houdini eating herring, drinking vodka, chewing a sprig of dill. The famous escape artist had repeatedly and without question swirled his tongue in his mouth where some claimed between cheeks and gums he kept an assortment of small tools for picking locks.

  As Venyamin grew older, he became a trusted head apprentice. He was relied upon to make deliveries, and little did the master know that Katzir was pocketing money customers paid him on the side. He soon found other ways to steal from the company, and at the same time planned his own escape. One day after delivering a set of locks to a factory that specialized in high-powered drills, he got back on his bicycle, rode to the Moscow train station, and bought a one-way ticket to Odessa. As the train, which ran through the night, rocked him back and forth, he slept for what seemed like the first time in his life. In Odessa Katzir set up his own small shop, but he’d stolen quite a sum of money over the years, and the man who shut his eyes in deep concentration when he described Houdini’s face understood, in the immediate aftermath of Venyamin’s sudden absence, that he was, in fact, a spectacularly skilled thief.

  One morning Katzir arrived to find his shop a wreck. Very little was salvageable, and left on a counter was one of the old Soviet lock boxes that had always defeated him. Who had robbed him? All his neighbors were suddenly blind and deaf. No one had seen anything, yet the signature of the crime was clear. He had been found. Thugs, who could have been sent by no one else, had appeared out of nowhere and destroyed his shop in the middle of the night. Property vandalized today, proprietor tomorrow, so Katzir decided the time had come to leave the country once and for all. There was no life for him in Russia. Abandoning what was left of his business, with only a few tools in a bag, he crossed the Black Sea, and made his way south until he eventually reached Zahedan.

  In this part of Persia, he believed or had been told, he would find veins of titanium ore, a valuable metal used for submarines, artificial limbs and the most unconquerable locks. Let others waste their time drilling for pockets of oil. He would become rich in no time. He searched the surrounding foothills, but hadn’t found any titanium yet or anything remotely resembling this miraculous mineral. Grabbing my arm again as he spoke, he insisted that titanium lay hidden in the hills, he was sure of it. What he did find were the ruins of what might have been a city, but there was practically nothing left of it, and he considered the site worthless, little more than a pile of carefully arranged rocks. (You can call it Suolucidir, if you like, but it was an empty nothing, completely forgettable.) No magnificent temples, plazas, hanging gardens, not even a fragment of a wing showing above the ground. There were only a few scattered ashlars carved with intertwined symbols: eagle, olive branch, goat to show any humans had ever inhabited the place.

  When he got to this part of his story he handed me a piece of shale with a trilobite etched in it. I didn’t know it at the time, but since then I’ve learned he’d found the leavings of Cambrian-era creatures: some looked like pincushions with legs, some like coiled spirals with eyes on the ends of antenna. I have the piece of rock still. The whole region was once under water, you see. Katzir found no titanium mines, but he did find flinty bits of these records of earliest life, amazing in their own way, though they meant little to Katzir. Imagine these rocky records as fossil filing cabinets. Eventually most life imparts no trace whatsoever: footprints, red blood cells, writing on clay, celluloid film, monuments to King Tut and Stalin all eventually disappear, but what Katzir found in the lost city was like a hand signaling above the ground. Trilobitic tenacity, even if we had known the word back then, was not what either of us were looking for. I turned the stone over and over in my hand as we waited. The evening appr
oached, and it grew cooler. I worried that we would have to find a place to sleep on the outskirts of a city far from any home we had ever known. Finally a camel driver told us of a group that was leaving in a few hours for Shiraz. We joined them.

  If the story of Katzir, the locksmith, sounds like I’m telling you about a man who remains calm even when being chased by Soviet police, Moscow gangsters, and extreme poverty, then I have given you entirely the wrong impression. Katzir was always alert and nervous, always ready to sprint away, a good survival trait when you think about it. Even Houdini was said to have gotten panicky and claustrophobic when he was buried alive and had to dig his way six feet to the surface. Imagine someone who has the potential to be an escape artist, and sometimes is such a person, but most of the time is as nervous as the Prince of the Air was that moment when he realized he had five and a half more feet to dig. Short and solid, spine permanently curved from years hunching over a workbench, some part of his body was always motorized, always moving, a foot jiggling, fingers tapping. When he removed his jimidani, his receding hairline was a severe W shape, but as if to compensate, he grew a beard, which allowed him to blend in more with the local people. I, too, traded in my old clothes for veils, a skirt worn over trousers, an embroidered jacket, and tragacanth gum, a substance used to straighten hair.

  Traveling together was awkward. Caravanserai, if they noticed at all, assumed we were married, and I didn’t mind so much, to tell you the truth. We were both completely alone in a strange country, but soon we would reach a border where we would need documents that proved we were married. In Shiraz we found a small Mizrahi community living in a mahellah, a warren of lightning-shaped alleys. The cul de sacs were important, in case of mob invasion, the better-off families lived at the end, the most difficult part of the mahellah to gain access to. We had the ceremony in a place where few asked us questions about our families or what we were doing in Iran. Venjamin bought me a yasmahi, a chain of gold coins and small fish that’s meant to encircle the bride’s face. Our wedding was sort of like what you have in Las Vegas in your country. We had barely known one another a week, but I tried on the idea of being married to this ex-locksmith, and allowed myself to enjoy the warm bath for as long as it lasted. It was quite a while since I’d had any contact with my family, and the news, such as it was, from that part of the world seemed entirely invented. If it was true, and as you know, it did turn out to be so, I had no family left. So in this place of white stone buildings, and the ruins of Persepolis, I became Eliana Katzir. I never truly knew how he felt about me. A market arcade near where we were married was beautifully lit at night and filled with shoppers. Men carried large trays on their heads, selling all kinds of things from them. Women and children had yellow dots made of turmeric and water on their foreheads to ward off evil, though many of these people were later killed in a Farhud. I know this because I saw a photograph of a foot covered with dust sticking out from rubble. The caption said it had taken place at this market, but I would not have recognized the place from the image itself without the words underneath.

  The Shah was an admirer of Hitler, and the country was filling up with Germans, from civilians to abwehr agents who had been in the country since at least 1936. Some were easy to identify, if only by the way they held their cigarettes and peered through glasses. Tangled up with their appearance were tales of the Shah and his family. His first wife, a beauty named Fawzia, was said to take baths in milk while her subjects starved. However the shah’s twin sister, not loved by the people either, was said to have mixed caustic acid into the milk, purely out of personal spite. I heard these stories and wanted to leave the country as soon as possible. From Shiraz we were able to take a train to Esfahan and from there another train for Tehran. At some juncture we switched to the Hejaz railway, and made our way to Amman where two British officers stopped us, jug ears translucent red as the sun set behind them. I had a Soviet passport, but Venyamin had no papers whatsoever. The Englishmen were ready to let him wander the desert completely stateless, but he was not allowed to stay in Amman. They assumed I would go with him, but by then it had become my plan to get into British Palestine, though this had hardly been my destination at the start. I had no intention of wandering in the desert with him or anybody else. Our last conversation, with the reddish-haired English officers watching, was awkward. We behaved like strangers who had met by accident on a train and now had to go separate ways. He assured me that after he found his titanium mines he would look for me in Jerusalem. I didn’t believe him, and if it were possible to hand back a coat that said ‘Eliana Katzir,’ this I would have done, but some coats you can’t take off, and I stuck with the name all these years.

  I arrived in Jerusalem to find that the British military had set up a brothel called the Sodom and Gomorrah Golf Club by the Sea. As you might imagine, it was on the Dead Sea. You couldn’t get away from them, everywhere you turned there they were, jug-eared and sunburnt. Once I followed an English officer traveling from a Russian neighborhood, my neighborhood, in fact. What was he doing here? After he’d walked a couple of blocks, just before he got into a car, he handed his homburg to his assistant, who handed him a tarboosh hat, which he put on his head, and they drove off in the direction of east Jerusalem. Though we, too, now went to plays and concerts in work clothes, shedding hats. Some of my fellow Russian immigrants began to prefer narguiles to cigarettes, and thimble-sized glasses of thick coffee to tea with jam.

  Did Venyamin make it all the way back to the site of what you believe was Suolucidir and was he the body in the ruins? This, I can’t tell you. He could easily have come by the papers of your Kosari person and, as I’ve already written, passed for a number of identities, and few would be the wiser. It’s a common enough name. There are surely many of them about. In 1964 I had a student from Haifa who got into a car accident with a man who claimed he had left a mine and a fortune behind in Iran. He promised to pay the fellow a large sum, however my student was never compensated for any damages or injuries. Was this Katzir? Who knows? Needless to say, I never saw Venyamin again.

  You had your fragments of clay, your bits and pieces. I have a piece of shale, a kind of geological daguerreotype, an accidental death mask of early life forms. This piece of rock reminds me that we are nothing more than a microscopic intersection of two rays that extend out into infinity, behind and ahead of you. They cross, then bleep! That’s it! You’re done!

  So now I’m in Ashdod, a city on the edge of the Mediterranean, as you probably know. From a café on Ha Tayelet Street, a chess teacher tells a boy about the Sicilian Defense. From here, if you had a very strong telescope perhaps you could see Sicily or even Marseilles, and watch someone there drinking Turkish coffee and playing chess. In the evening, the elderly residents sit outside and watch everyone else who might be more ambulatory. I call them, my fellow gossipy residents, the Knesset. They watch, make judgments, issue useless edicts. A one-armed mechanic who claims to have been a pilot during the 1967 war describes flying to Cyprus in the middle of the night, a woman talks to her to her cat in Yevanic, a Yemeni travel agent who rarely leaves his room joins once in a while, a record producer who recorded something called Yiddishe Mambo and Ladino marching bands for weddings. He hums and sings constantly as if he’s still in business, and dispenses advice, such as, if you drive just a little in the middle of the road, you avoid certain kinds of accidents.

  When I was 18, I had a choice to go west or east. If I’d taken his advice, I might have stayed put. Either direction, provided one survived, would, I thought, lead to very different outcomes, but now I’m not sure it didn’t really matter which way I went, I might still have landed exactly where I now sit.

  I’m sorry I can’t be of any further assistance.

  Eliana Katzir

  THE TWO ELIANAS WERE OPPOSITE ends of the same barbell who would never meet, or perhaps in a feat of pumping iron, ore and alloy amalgam had been bent, and they passed each other while walking through the corridors of a no
nexistent train. Though I’d found the site of Suolucidir, propelled by Sidonie’s account, it’s still possible she didn’t write those pages at all, and my father, in his translation, made the whole thing up. There are days when the fact that I have nothing genuine remaining from the lost city, makes me wonder what it was I did find.

  In Berlin, or even Marseilles, in 1936, Mar Eldad’s story about a principality somewhere in the east where “Hebrew, Persian, and Tatar” are spoken, and “all are at peace” and you live openly with your own king, for Feigen, what could be better? He sends the Nieumachers (Russian Katzirs trying to pass as Alsatians) east with little more than tape measures and string, and waits for a postcard from Suolucidir. I arrive about 40 years later with trigometric tables, mason lines, clipboards, diamond-shaped Marshalltown trowels made in Ohio and a Theodolite, which measures angles, especially useful on rough terrain. It’s manufactured in Russia and looks particularly cool. Maybe the Nieumachers used a Landrover jeep. We used a Toyota landcruiser. After the Revolution, some of us pack our bags and look for these lost, wandering souls. The worse things get, the more attractive the search appears. Trying to catch the Lost is like trying to pin down your shadow or the memory of a particular shadow. It looks like you, but can’t ever be captured or questioned or embraced. Feigen believed if the lost tribes would suddenly return, all human suffering would end. I finally found Sidonie Nieumacher, only for her to pull another hood over her head and deny everything, or almost everything, but I think I’m going with Feigen. The story of the lost tribes extends a hand to those who might want to reinvent themselves. Travelers and emissaries in search of the lost tribes are called shelihim, a word he surely knew and used with pleasure.