The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir

by Susan Daitch

  At the end of her field notes Sidonie Nieumacher revealed her real name was Eliana Katzir, and Bruno’s real name was Venyamin. They took on new names in Berlin. Will the real Katzirs please stand up? The other contestants shuffle in their chairs, rise slightly, knees bent, they sit again. If I had to choose, if the television cameras pan to me, who do I chose? Or perhaps — and yes I know the audience will gasp as two people stand to acknowledge their legitimacy — they’re really one and the same person.

  But what about the second Eliana’s version, which undermines the Nieumachers, Feigen, the Berlin-to-Marseilles trip, substituting an eastward trajectory through Moscow? It’s full of holes. A direct train from Moscow to Zahedan? There weren’t any. There still aren’t. Titanium mines? Never existed. How could Eliana reference the murder of Solomon Mikoels whose assassination, clumsily made to look like a car accident, wouldn’t happen until 1948? Also, the alleged doctor’s plot against Stalin had yet to form in the dictator’s head. Perhaps there was no actual arrest, but she was trapped by sheer geography, unable to leave. Somehow she escaped from the house. She has her reasons for laying a false trail, for a partial invention of what might have been, and believing in it. It’s too late to pull her back from the edge. For whatever reasons, she doesn’t want the lost city to be found again. Now sitting in a café on Ha Tayelet Street, the umbrella has shifted, she’s getting too much sun and perhaps becoming a little delusional, turning the rock with the markings of a trilobite’s exoskeleton over and over in her hand, not knowing where it came from or how she got it. From here, her letter, too, turns into an adventure tale. Katzir keeps some part of herself locked away, hidden so securely, only she has access.

  There were no broken bones in Bruno’s body when I found him. Eliana left him to die, leaving her identity as Sidonie to be buried along with him. There was no one left in the city of her childhood. It would have been impossible to return to it. Sidonie Nieumacher served her purpose. Her story had gotten her out of Grodno, Berlin, Marseilles, and Zahedan. Now, once again, she was only Eliana K., as if that was all she had ever been. The sojourn in Moscow was all conjecture. What if she’d gone east instead of west? Could she still have ended up in the same place? She tried to put herself in Suolucidir, in ur-Chelm, a city that attracts fools, via a railroad that hadn’t ever been built.

  There remained untouched one part of the documents that Jahanshah had sent. The papers of Alicia Congreaves-Sutcliffe. I had shelved them, thinking who cares about Kipling-era plunderers? Now there was nothing left of Suolucidir to unearth but these.

  His First Attraction

  The Crystal Palace was not known to be a dangerous place, but it wasn’t without risks. Besides the pickpockets who harvested tourists and preyed on daydreaming citizens, freakish accidents grabbed headlines away from the death of Edward VII, the Dr. Crippen poisoning, the exploration of Antarctica by Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition. A man had died in a hot air balloon accident. There were no photographs, but detailed descriptions of two people tumbling through the glass, fragments of burning balloon landing in trees, were provided by those who happened to be in the park. On a second occasion a man was trampled to death by an elephant that had escaped from its pen in one of the exhibition spaces. Deprived of space to roam and removed from their hierarchical clan relationships, elephants will become disoriented and unpredictable.

  Ryder Congreaves, who had grown up in Rhodesia, could not imagine a beast contained in the filigreed cage allotted to it within the Palace. Any keeper who stepped inside its confines to feed or groom the animal would risk his life, but was this known to those responsible for housing the animals? His experience in England made him guess that it wasn’t, and he was curious to see this phenomenon, animals on display. The explosive crash of the hot air balloon, though not likely to be repeated, was also something he would have paid money to see.

  Ryder had come to England to study and was at Oxford, working with a protégé of the great Persianist Henry Rawlinson, famous for deciphering the Behistun inscription, a panel engraved on a rock of the same name, which was a kind of Rosetta Stone for ancient Persian. Born to civil servants stationed in Rhodesia, England was a country he knew mainly through children’s stories, and so it appeared to him to be fantastic and dreary at the same time. No sooner had he arrived than he was impatient to leave, to go on his own excavation party, to discover ancient directories of gods and laws, as if all the attention that needed to be paid to the Rawlinson protégé and the world of cold rooms and warmed-over tea was a quick nod, then you could be on your way again. In photographs Ryder was a tall man with a long neck whose pants were always too short, whose jackets pulled at the shoulder seams, a man who found the need to stoop increasingly irritating, putting the blame on lesser beings: men, women, tables, shelving, flowering shrubs, who all failed for not rising to meet him. He was dogged by lack of funds. When he lost a hat he couldn’t afford to replace, either his colleagues thought him hatless, and therefore rude, or they didn’t understand the cheapness of those who must go without. At Oxford, Ryder, with a big smile on his face, was repeatedly high-hatted and cold-shouldered, and more than once overheard the word common attached to his name. No one would introduce him to anyone. His clothes were unpressed, his hair uncombed as if he was always in a hurry, and words tumbled out in an excited cataract. He needed to slow down, he was seen as an upstart, too enthusiastic when more reserve was called for, and so he wasn’t entirely trusted. An embarrassment, better to get him out of sight. He’d heard of England all his life, but it was a house he couldn’t get into, and he was left peering in through grimy windows. The furniture within looked comforting and about to fall apart, layered with dust; he could rub the panes, but towers of moth-eaten upholstery receded out of reach.

  About a year after his arrival in England, on one of his infrequent trips down to London, he decided to view the Crystal Palace, which had by then been moved to Sydenham. He told none of his acquaintances, who would have looked at the Palace as a venue for cheap thrills, five-pence beers, and low-lifes who spoke in rhyming slang.

  After paying for his ticket, he wandered from one hall to the next, finally joining a tour led by a guide who was exceptionally animated, ushering the crowds from the dinosaur park to the model of the sphinx with great enthusiasm. Sunlight glinted off her frazzled auburn hair, making a red halo. The Crystal Palace behind her looked like a Hall of Diamonds. Looking up at the iron fretwork, Ryder felt as if he were in a huge stringed instrument. It felt good to get away from lectures about ancient Persia. At Oxford he was often made to feel like a gormless colonial, educated by his mother, betrayed by his accent, a man who fussed over bills and lost things.

  “Here,” the woman said, “in the year 1911 the coronation of King George is to take place. To your left you will see a three-quarter-size model of the Australian parliament building, part of the Festival of the Empire.”

  The young woman who navigated the model parliaments of the British Empire with such knowledge and ease represented a different empire altogether. Ryder, who was lonely and missed the suburbs of Bulawayo, was entranced. When they arrived at a hall of stereoscopes, as others peered through magnifying lenses at illusions of three-dimensional Eiffel Towers, birds in flight, a marksman in a costume of the American West, he stayed close to her, trying to think of a conversation he could begin. She looked through a stereoscope at an image of an Egyptian Sphinx.

  “Here, look at this,” she said, and her hand guided his to the sides of the walnut box. She pushed his head down to the lenses. The brilliantine he’d slapped on earlier in the day left sticky patches on her fingers. “Isn’t that amazing?” She made him look.

  When the tour ended, he lingered. He asked her out for coffee, which she didn’t drink, but she went with him anyway. There was a café on the grounds of the Crystal Palace, and the guide, when she was allowed to go on a break, led him there. The sound of a gramophone from the bar did little to overpower the sound of nearby conversatio
ns, but she liked the loudness, the sense of business, and other people’s urgencies. She shouted that her name was Edna. A waiter swept crumbs from the table in a desultory fashion as if to communicate that they were hardly worth bothering with, slopped tea, looked into the distance. Ryder wanted to go somewhere else. Despite the waiter’s rudeness, Edna wasn’t sure she wanted to be in a secluded place with this Ryder who had trouble coughing out a sentence and couldn’t look straight at her. Edna’s mates at work, Simon, Nigel, even the fallen-on-hard-times Carrington, were nothing if not smooth talkers. That was their job, flooding the acreage with explanation and did you knows. They knew all kinds of astounding facts: world records, the fastest human, a girl who looked like a monkey, and famous people (Wilde, the fellow who wrote Peter Pan, Disraeli’s ghost), seen out for stroll right here in this very place. Edna fidgeted and tried to turn her head to look at the clock in a way that wouldn’t appear obvious. It was impossible.

  “I do like my job,” she gestured with her arms to include the whole of the palace grounds. He looked startled. It hadn’t occurred to him this was a job you could like.

  “From the time I was about seven or eight I’d come here and pretend to be the Empress of the Crystal Palace. The problem was my subjects. The wax figures in the foreign exhibitions—Japan, Romania, Brazil—would threaten one another with continual war and annihilation. I mean, they couldn’t help themselves, could they? In order to insure peaceful co-existence I figured they had to live in entirely separate municipalities, all within my domain but with distinct boundaries, currency, traffic laws. Even the model dinosaurs would have to be entirely fenced in.” Her sleeves slipped and Ryder noticed she had sinewy arms like a junior lady weight lifter, and she had a laugh that came up from somewhere down her throat as if it had been trapped there for quite a while. He watched her mouth as she said the word megalosaur.

  “So when I applied for this job I already knew every square inch of the place, every fountain, every amusement, every parliament.”

  “Are you a despot, ruling all these tribes?” He tried to sound cynical and smart, but was afraid his words came out forced and parrot-like, like the people he knew at school; it was a tone he disliked, but now he found himself speaking just like them. Ryder mistook the queen of costumed dummies, plaster elephants and model parliaments no bigger than the desk of an assistant bank manager for a ferocious imaginary sovereign, posing in high-heeled boots, one foot balanced atop the head of her prey. That wasn’t exactly Edna. She was fine on her own, ironing her own uniform, but she didn’t really want to be a custodian to anyone else.

  “What do you mean?” She wasn’t sure of the word despot, how he used it, and what he meant to imply, but didn’t want to let on this was so.

  “Are you a benevolent dictator or a tyrant?” He leaned forward. He sensed Edna’s confusion, and he was still timid enough to censor himself, but it was too late. He tipped his head to one side, as if he could make all the conclusions he jumped to slide into bunkers on the right side of his brain and lie there in secret forever. He also tilted his head to one side because he was slightly deaf in one ear.

  She could see threads straining through his shoulder seams, sleeves about to separate, fall to the floor, make a hasty getaway. Behind the friendly puppy eyes was the flicker of a pitiless Darwinist, intrigued by carnivores who aimed for more than just successful subsistence. Ryder believed if you weren’t coded or hadn’t mutated to survive, off you went down the extinction chute with no questions asked. In Edna he saw a girl buccaneer ready to cross swords. Once again he misfired, and she still looked confused. Tyrant? How much longer until her break was over? What was she meant to say to him? She twisted her napkin into a topographical map and laughed again, nervously. Finally able to catch a glimpse at the clock, she saw that in fifteen minutes her break would be over, and she could run back to her post. Another tour needed to be led at four.

  American girls at the next table complained about the cheapness of their hotel and the smallness of their allowances. To Edna and Ryder they were complete aliens who happened to speak in a language they understood as they figured conversions from dollars to pounds aloud. Their voices filled the silence when Ryder should have said something. He looked at his hands.“Walking through the dinosaur park made me homesick.”

  This, too, baffled Edna. How could monster lizards made of brick, tile, stones, and cement make anyone miss their home? Where was this fellow from? How soon could she dump him and get back to her job?

  He pushed his chair back over the tile, finished with Edna who understood so little of what he hoped was clear, but tried one more time to explain himself before he would leave her to her kingdom. The dinosaurs reminded him of the pods of hippopotami he used to see along the shores of the Zambezi River. If you could put them end to end, he imagined, you could span the river, and by walking on their backs you could reach the other side. One of their servants had died from a hippo bite, but still, for him this was one of the images of the home he left behind.

  “Really?” Edna tilted forward in her seat. She didn’t want to appear too interested, but now Ryder’s strange ideas, these awkward outbursts had a history, now the guy had his reasons. She began to be sucked in. She imagined he’d grown up in a jungle outpost with no other children; his only companions were clans of chattering chimpanzees and servants’ children whose language he learned when his parents were away.

  “Well, they have very blunt snouts. They may look round and slow and jolly, so you may not realize their mouths are huge. You have no idea how lethal their teeth really are.”

  The American girls laughed into their hands.

  “Were you yourself ever bitten?” The Sultana of the Crystal Palace ignored the Anglophones, crass and ruffle-edged.

  “Not by a hippo, no, but by a boomslang snake once, yes.” He crossed one leg over the other, rolled his trousers up over his knee and showed Edna the pink-white scars — tiny fang marks, twin jagged trails. Edna ran a finger over the raised skin several times as if they were braille characters she needed a bit of time to decipher.

  “The boomslang isn’t fatal, but its bite stings for days, like someone stuck a knife in your shin, and you have to walk around with it poking out of you for quite a while. You can’t ever entirely pull the blade out. That’s how it feels, but the ’slang’s not like the puff adder or gaboon viper or black mambo.” He drew snakes in the air. “Once that venom hits your system, it’s curtains, I assure you.”

  She gradually became spellbound when he described sleeping out in the veldt, hunting knife clutched in his hand, and she knocked over a glass of tea as he reenacted the time he found an altar to Ndebele ancestor gods under the stairs in his parents’ house. When he spoke about his future, returning to Africa or traveling further east, Edna nodded, transfixed. He rolled down his trouser leg, but she traced the map of the snake bite on the tabletop. She wouldn’t have minded looking at those tracings on his leg one more time, but worried that he would get the impression she would like to see him again. When he spoke about how he planned to follow spice caravans and look for the Babylonian hanging gardens, she thought he meant traveling among the wax figures of palace. It was what she did every day, no holiday in that, she said.

  After two years of finding no one who would listen to him, Ryder thought he had discovered the girl who would chuck everything and take on the difficult life he projected for himself once he was able to leave England. He’d never seen a woman lecture large crowds of tourists before, and if she was capable of handling the Berliners harrumphing in skepticism when she referred to the future King George, she could, he thought at that moment, handle the demands of life in far-flung parts of the Empire. She invited him to try the flying machine with her, with its cranky music and gravity-defying cars attached to a very high pole by mere filaments. The vertiginousness made him think the day was full of hope and promise as London spun into a cyclone of tilting buildings, and he flew higher and higher into the air holding Ed
na’s hand.

  Ideas of Home

  Ryder and Edna married and quickly had two children. Alicia and Ryder II needed too many things and made too much noise. They tipped over bowls of soup and pulled down books, picture frames fell into teacups and the soggy mess crashed to the floor. Though pouty and fat-cheeked, cute as daguerreotypes of baby fairies, the pair of them kept him up all night with squalls and illnesses that required all kinds of costly attention. It does him no credit to say at this point Ryder was less and less at home.

  By marrying Ryder, Edna had been looking upwards. She thought her husband possessed African coffee plantations and platoons of servants, but during the brief time they were together she learned wicker chairs set out on a long porch with a view of the savannah was as much a part of Ryder’s inheritance as her glassy fiefdom in Sydenham. If his parents sent letters asking for English tea, tins of biscuits, bolts of cloth, then Edna passed the employment ads, suggestions circled, to Ryder over breakfast. He passed them back to her. Edna grew uneasy. She already felt the pull of the greengrocer’s, of Wallingford’s, long before she even knew of the shop’s existence, as if some voice was saying: if you stay in London you walk on these flagstones, and this is as far as you’ll ever go, so make the most of it.

  Ryder joined a club, which didn’t, to Edna, seem so very unusual. The club was called the Possum Club, not after the animal, but from the Latin word for able. The members of the Possum Club believed they were able to go anywhere on earth, to triumph over adversity, hence their motto: potestas triumphalis supero adversus, ability triumphs over adversity. Stuffed wombats and cheetahs haunted the stairwells, studies contained bookcases supported by elephant legs and lamps with bases made from coiled cobras, wiring threaded within. The map room housed tens of thousands of maps from the charts purportedly used by Magellan to the more helpful, especially if you were headed to Antarctica, navigational charts of Admiral Perry. Globes of all sizes, not just of the earth, but of the moon as well. Their archives contained the journals and papers of great explorers. Ryder attended lectures about Central American tropics, matriarchal clans of the islands off Nigeria, how to survive in Greenland should your food supply peter out. He was supposed to feel at home with the stuffed lions and gorillas but didn’t somehow. Increasingly anxious to not be in England, and feeling increasingly stuck in the fog and mud, he felt out of place everywhere he turned.