The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir

by Susan Daitch

  I can tell you the pictures of Ryder sent back from Cairo reveal a different person, less browbeaten and more in charge of things. Though it may have been downhill from there in the looks department for generations of Congreaves, RC I looked like a blond Errol Flynn, and I think he knew it, even if he’d never seen Errol Flynn — no one yet had — but you get the idea.

  Apart from my grandmother, Alicia, no Congreaves has left the country since the doomed 1914 expedition. Edna, who didn’t believe in luck or fate or astrology, only hard work, joked about the Curse of Suolucidir, that obsession that caused Ryder’s early demise and now dogged all his descendants. (Well, let’s say they haven’t left in any serious long-term way. My father visited Spain once, and I did a holiday in Amsterdam, if that counts.) We Congreaves stay close to home fearing the curse of Suolucidir is still with us, that you’ll wander so far, returning is impossible, and you’ll end up dashed to pieces, falling head over heels for some siren’s song. Suolucidir passes A levels in mirage manufacture if you ask me.

  My grandfather went into the printing business, and my father later joined him, forming Sutcliffe & Sons, Ltd. The printing works made money for a while. My grandfather died of a blood disease, induced, one theory goes, by exposure to chemicals in the inks he worked with. Every night he and my father came home covered with the stuff before it was known or even suspected that adequate ventilation was necessary. I still remember the smell of ink, how it would be present even when we were walking blocks from the works, so you always knew you were getting closer to it. My father had that smell about him all during the week, and he met a similar fate. Odd, we take it as a matter of course, chemicals = precaution, an old science teacher of mine used to write on the chalkboard, but back in the early days of Queen Elizabeth II, I guess they didn’t. Perhaps this could be construed as yet another black mark against RC I, rakerottercad, who ran off to the ends of the earth chasing skirts and djinn so his children couldn’t better themselves, Edna would say, and as a consequence, his descendants suffered early deaths due to the inhalation of plumes of benzene or whatever chemical lodged in their bloodstreams, mutating, blocking, doing monstrous things.

  I was very small when Alicia left, so I don’t remember her very well. Coral beads, a serious smoker, her hands were stained with cherry juice, handling soft unsold fruit when she helped Edna out, but she did not get along with her mother at all, as you can see by the way she wrote about her at the end. Alicia was difficult, like her father, she wanted to be somewhere else, I’ve been told. She had no interest in the printing company, only insofar as the money it earned launched her on her trip to the east. Her writing came back to us, these few pages, but she never did, not even a body was found. How she died in Iran is unknown. The consulate learned that she ventured into the Black Mountains, where people often vanished — even with experienced guides it was considered a lawless borderland. My grandfather made inquiries through the embassy, but was left empty-handed, saying only that nobody wanted to cause an international incident. My grandfather clung to a number of conspiracy theories: what she learned cost Alicia her life. These ideas were fueled by a reporter who interviewed him, but never published his story. Maybe my grandfather was right to believe in the man’s ideas about secret arms deals, but at this point in time, I say it was the Great War, who cares anymore? My grandfather was a homebody who liked his life’s geography to remain in what was a known and familiar city. His wife wanted to be a citizen of a larger world, and she dumped him. Say it was the curse of Suolucidir and be done with it. At any rate, Alicia wrote in the third person, to keep herself out of the story, as if she herself already no longer existed.

  The printing works I remember as a child are long gone. I’ve pictures of the company at its height, a blocky red brick building, blackened windows never opened. Its demise came with my father’s death. Congreaves & Sons was shuttered, and until the building was sold it was a shopping mall for rats and feral cats, who may have developed blood diseases, too. After the building was sold, the quaint brick shell was converted into luxury condominiums. My installation includes photographs of the business from thriving industry with humming presses and busy loading docks to vacant husk to deluxe accommodations complete with doorman and atrium.

  Wallingford’s, the greengrocers where Edna worked, is still there, in case you’re wondering. A Pakistani family now owns it. Who knows, perhaps their ancestors traded with your Suolucidiris a millennium ago. I photographed the shop for my installation on a day of pouring rain. In black-and-white it looks much like it did seventy years ago, I expect. See enclosed.

  I’ve included miscellaneous photographs taken in Cairo of a cook holding a skinned sheep, an unveiled Egyptian woman in a harem, urchins collecting camel dung for fires. It’s a sort of August Sander-like collection. I don’t know who took these pictures, or how Ryder acquired them. Also, and this is really interesting, a copy of a newspaper clipping regarding the sinking of the HMS Dorchester. It was, as you can imagine, in all the papers the day after the disaster, but Edna didn’t know her husband had been aboard until she received a telegram from the company that owned the ship. His name and Hilliard’s were on the manifest. Bodies were never recovered, nor was any cargo, that I know of, ever raised from the ship itself. Divers, treasure seekers, have made a few failed attempts over the years, but the Dorchester wasn’t a splashy ship like the Titanic, nor was it known to be carrying anything extravagant or particularly valuable like the Atocha, although it certainly was. Sometimes I wonder if RC I and Hilliard were ever actually on board. Perhaps it was a ruse, and they reinvented themselves in Tahiti or Auckland or Johannesburg. Somewhere, with slight variation, there’s another Tilda Congreaves looking out at the Pacific or Indian Ocean, putting together her own self-destructing history.

  Before I leave off, your letter inspired me to take a closer look at what might well be considered my property stored in the basement of the British Museum. It wasn’t easy to track down the few surviving relics of the Hilliard-Congreaves loot, those shards that, for whatever reason, weren’t on the Dorchester but were sent back, donated to the museum. The antiquities department is vast, so I first tried ringing a Pamela Nargezian, listed as curator of the Persepolis Division. She referred me to a Mr. Caterva, archivist. A few more calls were made, and just as I was about to give up on this chain of referrals, I finally reached a Mr. Vaismin in charge of storage, the man who knows where everything is.

  “Just show up anytime, no appointment necessary,” his annoyed, croaky voice gave the impression I was interrupting something of critical importance.

  On a day when I had no classes I made my way to Great Russell Street. A young man directed me to the south stairs, which would eventually take me to Vaismin’s. He gave me directions as if knowing he was sending me into a downward spiral toward an elephant graveyard ruled by an angry despot who, despite near blindness, knew with extraordinary acuity when some adventurer with black market connections thought he could take advantage of the haphazard storage system and make off with an Incan mask or a handful of Roman coins. The office was located on one of the lower floors of the museum where many paintings, objects, and documents are stored right out in the hallways, lying in stacks against the walls. At the end of the corridor was a pebbled-glass door, the entrance to Mr. V’s office. Opening the door, my eyes reddened immediately from dust and a distinctly vinegary smell. The narrow octagonal room had a very high ceiling, with bookcases whose upper shelves bowed under the weight of masses of papers, books and catalogues accessible via wheeled ladders. Vaismin himself, small and buzzing like a fly, was leaning against a ladder, leafing through a catalogue. He stood on small spatulate feet, and his black jacket, shiny at the elbows, sported a lapel pin of a sphinx and a button that read: How may I be of service to you? Rings of keys jangled from his belt, so I guessed I was in the right place. I have to say the archivist was so white and crumbly looking, perhaps he lived in his office with no one ever checking on him. He might do, e
ating in the cafeteria, bathing in the bathroom after hours. Honestly, I couldn’t imagine him outdoors, wrenched from his octagon and walking down an actual street.

  Storage, it turned out, was helter skelter, all over the place, there is no system, objects are mainly catalogued in Mr. Vaismin’s head. He’s ancient and irritated at everything and everyone, so if the stuff is all to be moved to new storage facilities and registered in a computer, the board of directors better get a move on. My guess is Mr. Vaismin is closer to one hundred than to eighty. No hello. Just a “What do you want?” He pushed up his shirt and jacket sleeves in a way that’s fashionable with people a fraction of his age to reveal long arms, perhaps lengthened from a working life spent reaching for things. I caught a glimpse of a blueish black number, written or tattooed, I couldn’t tell before he quickly rolled his sleeves down again, picked up links lying on his desk, put them through his cuffs.

  “Persian,” he muttered. “We’ve objects in this category that haven’t been touched since landing in this domicile.” He slid sleeve protectors over his jacket sleeves, motioned for me to follow him down a hall, and opened a hatch door. Really, a hatch door, like the kind you might find on a submarine, I kid you not. Then we descended a metal ladder. I worried about Vaismin’s frangible old bones, but he scrambled like a howler monkey. His long, curved hands opened cabinet after cabinet, unwrapping clay bits and pieces, he would then hold a cup or bowl up for my inspection, but none looked like plates. Air rushed out through his nose. “This, you should be aware, is taking up a fair amount of my time, escorting you from A to B. I have many places to be instead of spending time shifting boxes. You sure you want Persian?”

  “No, I’m not sure at all. Perhaps Suolucidiri.”

  “Make up your mind what it is. If you want Suolucidiri, that’s only a small quantity of material. No one has asked to look at these things since I’ve been at this post. Invisible cities sometimes leave no trace of themselves. Who knows what cities lay under out feet? We could evaporate violently, leaving burnt shadows on walls if we’re lucky, and become just as traceless, but here we have just three objects to hint at a metropolis no one has ever seen. Follow me.”

  Back up the metal ladder, down a series of corridors to the main lobby of the museum. He unlocked a door under a flight of stairs. This door was so hidden you wouldn’t notice if you didn’t know it was there.

  Mr. Vaismin flipped a light switch, and the rhomboid-shaped space was illuminated. Boxes were scattered all over the place, but Vaismin knew exactly where to step, what to lift, and what to pry apart. Raising a dented and damp cardboard box, he pulled off the lid, and the surviving relics of the Hilliard-Congreaves expedition were before me. At some point, a person living in the twentieth century had Krazy-glued the shards back together again, and so three large plates or circular platters were assembled. Figures painted in sequential “frames” ringed the borders in much the spirit, if not the style, of Edward Muy-bridge’s photographs.

  “Dated by testing thermoluminescence and radioactivity, but never been on display.” He might have been saying, “Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.” Vaismin pulled a pair of white gloves sheathed in a plastic wrapper from a pocket and handed them to me.

  “Always wear these, whether handling museum property or performing surgery.”

  I obediently slipped on the gloves and lifted the plates from their beds of wood shavings. For the first time I held them in my hands, and tried to imagine my great-grandfather’s hands had been in exactly the same place mine were. I ran my fingers over the web of lightning cracks.

  “I’ve no time to sit with you. Keep the gloves. Just shut the door behind you when you leave. It will lock by itself.”

  When Mr. Vaismin left, I shut the door, sat on the floor and spun the plates as if they were tops. These figures, painted on ceramic, might be the first examples of animation ever discovered, and yes, they did look like filmstrips.

  Plate 1. A man walks to table, lifts a cup, puts it down, backs away. Process begins again.

  Plate 2. Two men fight with daggers and swords. One is an apparent fatality, but after one revolution, he’s reborn and the fight begins anew.

  Plate 3. Man and woman — erotic, cycling endlessly with no rest.

  I sat under the stairs for quite a while, surrounded by the heaps of stuff from god knows where, all left forgotten in storage purgatory. Three stories: drinking, fighting, fucking. If the plates weren’t so large I could easily have smuggled them out, but then Mr. V would, if he ever checked, know the identity of the thief, more or less, that is to say if he remembered me at all. So, what little evidence there is of Suolucidir may not be very impressive, insofar as it’s not grand-scale stuff, and one can’t help wondering why would anyone bother? But then four thousand years from now, who will concern themselves with my art installations? I wrapped the plates with great care, shut the door behind me and made my way back to the surface of the earth. On my way out of the museum I bought a postcard of a winged creature with a human head, a Persian symbol so old, the back of the card said, it had witnessed the destruction of the world over and over again.

  The copy you sent me of my grandmother’s writings on our family matches the copy I own. How your copy came to be in the possession of a fellow in Tehran I don’t know, except that Alicia did spend time in that city, and could have mislaid or given a copy to a researcher or translator who assisted her. There is only one difference between your papers and mine. Alicia added a postscript in which she says that she had discovered Esme Canonbury was a patient at the Kierling Sanatorium in Austria, and it is there where she, Esme, died.

  I hope this answers your questions. It’s the best I can really do, given there’s just me left, but your letter came at the right time. The family pictures and documents I’ve been collecting for my Experimental Studios class are quite a pile. The project is taking the form of a giant installation, which, as I said, I plan to burn when the exhibition comes down. It will be a kind of ekphrasis moment. Once my art piece eats itself I expect I’ll feel free from the shadow of Suolucidir, and all the bitterness the expedition cast over generations of Congreaves. Perhaps the curse will be lifted, and yours truly can then swim the Channel if she feels like it. I’m off now to Brixton to see Three Mustaphas Three, Orchestra Jazzira and Frank Chickens, an all-girl band from Japan. They come out screaming: We are Frank Chickens! What a great bill. One more thing. I just saw Quartermass and the Pit, a movie about a man who digs under the London Underground and finds an unexploded German bomb left over from World War II. My advice is: be careful what you dig for — just when you think you’ve found Queen Isabella’s emeralds, you’ve got your hands on one of Saddam Hussein’s gas canisters circa 1980, and suddenly the fog is impenetrable.

  Please don’t hesitate to write again if should you have any further questions.

  Yours truly,

  Tilda Congreaves-Sutcliffe

  THE KIERLING SANATORIUM NO LONGER exists to claim or disclaim records of Esme Canonbury, but the sanatorium had some famous patients, Kafka among them, so there was a chance those records were kept somewhere, in a university or medical facility with a wide-ranging library. That somewhere turned out to be the Zwieg Institute, an Austrian foundation located in a five-story townhouse around the corner from the Morgan Library. The New York location was due to an American donor and, like the Friendship Dig, presented itself as a fortuitous union of two cultures. As I stood outside for a minute rehearsing a set of bogus reasons for my interest in the Kierling Sanatorium, tourists wandered by on their way to Fifth Avenue: a little girl in a Lady and the Tramp tee shirt seemed to be saying something about the building I was about to enter.

  The man at the front desk told me the archives were housed in the library on the top two floors and directed me to a glass and wrought iron elevator just behind him. Though the interior of the Institute was Bauhaus-like in its austerity, the elevator appeared to have been imported from an era of telegrams and carrier pigeons
. It was a vertical box that had space for myself and the operator, an Austrian teenager happy to have a summer job here in the States, who cranked the metal wheel, moving the handle from notch to notch, announcing the offices that occupied each floor with gusto until we reached the fourth. There, a woman with short, spiky blonde hair was typing with a thoughtful, preoccupied air. Seeing us, she quickly hid a cup of coffee that was probably not allowed in the library and came out to ask me how she could be of service. It was not the kind of library you could wander around the stacks, and I got the impression she could sit typing for a long time before anyone disturbed her, a good job for a writer or a student.

  No one, she told me, not even Kafka scholars, had ever looked at the Kierling records, but she never asked me why I wanted them. She would be happy to show them to me, and discussed the matter in accented English, relying on the subjunctive tense, as German speakers tend to do. The files were in the basement, but she would allow me access, and so we, all three of us, squashed back into the elevator, this time descending to a pristine, well-ordered cellar, rows of boxes, books, and files stretching back perhaps an entire city block. The donor had wanted to preserve these records: data, all kinds of documents related to citizens of her country in the years surrounding the last war. The librarian pointed out the Kierling section, two rows of shelving organized by year. I was guessing I needed 1939. She handed me white gloves, I pulled down the acid-free archival box, and she showed me to a desk, complete with adjustable overhead lighting.