Vellum

by Hal Duncan

  “Tell us about your expedition to Aratta. What did you find there?”

  “We didn’t find anything. The expedition was a failure.”

  “You won’t cooperate? Perhaps we should take a short break.”

  15:46.

  “Now, tell us what you found at Aratta. Why are you so reluctant to talk about it?”

  [voice muffled]

  “Louder.”

  “Go to Hell.”

  “Hardly, Mr. Carter. Now. Look at the papers on the desk in front of you and tell me what’s missing. Fill in the gaps for us, Mr. Carter.”

  “Ask Pechorin. He was there.”

  “We have, and he has given us a wealth of information. But his memory is a little…broken. Just what did happen to you in Aratta?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Let me show you something, Mr. Carter.”

  “These notes, Mr. Pechorin tells us, are transcriptions of Sumerian texts about Aratta. These are Hittite texts about Aratta. This is from an Arattan tablet referring to ‘The Greatest City of the North’—which must be Aratta, yes?”

  “That’s what you would think.”

  “These transcriptions here, though, where Hobbsbaum used both Roman and Cyrillic alphabets, these are not Sumerian, they’re not Hittite, and they’re not the language of the tablet. I do not understand them.”

  “Nor do I.”

  “And these marks, here under the writing, or here, on the backs of the sheets, these curves and dots, what are they? They are like no language I have ever seen. Certainly not cuneiform.”

  “No.”

  “What do they mean?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Strange. That’s exactly what Pechorin said. Can’t or won’t, Mr. Carter?”

  THE BONES OF THE GIANTS

  September 6th, 1942, 16:20, Majkop

  “You know, Mr. Carter, I have heard many people praise your Juden friend’s work on Northern Anatolian prehistory.”

  “That would be why you had him thrown into a labor camp?”

  “His articles linking the Arattans to the Sumerians, comparing the Sumerian language with Magyar and others of the Turanian family are…unique. He was the first to theorize a racial link between the Arattans and the Sumerians, first to establish the trade bonds between prehistoric settlements on the Danube and in Anatolia, yes? But I should have realized a Jew would never tell the whole story.”

  “That is the whole story.”

  “You seem unwell. A small drink to relax you?”

  “I don’t need one.”

  “Still, you want one. No? Well. I was saying. You agreed with the professor that Aratta was the elder culture, that Jericho and Catal Huyuk might be only outposts of an empire built in wood and leather and bone instead of clay and stone. No? So you went looking for Aratta and you found it. You found the relics of the elder culture. The bones of the giants, so to speak.”

  [laughing] “Relics! Relics?”

  I lay these pages of the interview out on the floor and shuffle through the shoe box for the journal page that references it. My grandfather didn’t write his journal in a book but on loose leaves of paper. There are pages torn from hotels’ headed notepads, foolscap, A4, letter, tiny fragments on lined pages ripped from little notebooks.

  Relics, he writes on the page I place beside the interview like the next piece of the jigsaw puzzle…

  There was never any doubt in my mind, he writes, from what fragments of Arattan existed that it and Sumerian belong in the Turanian family [the languages of the Ural and Altaic mountain ranges of Central Asia, I am told] or that the origins of Sumer lay in Aratta. But everything points to the Lake Van area as the only conceivable site for the city. To go looking for it in the Central Caucasus was simply insane. It still is.

  What baffles me is that Pechorin knows. He must know, unless…is it possible his memory really is disturbed? He talks in his sleep, and not in Russian—muttered singsong words all too familiar. But perhaps his dreams are only that; when he is awake he is largely silent. But whether he works with the Nazis or is as much a prisoner as myself—and I cannot fathom his motives at all—when he looks at me I see the same cold eyes I stare at in the mirror. I have tried to drown my memories of that expedition in alcohol and hashish. Perhaps he was more successful.

  I must speak to him alone, find out how much he truly remembers. Does he know the meaning of the words he’s speaking in his sleep? Does he really not know what we are headed into? I fear he has laid out a string of lies before the Nazi, only to lead us all back to that godforsaken place.

  LET SLEEPING GODS LIE

  Pechorin denies everything.

  Dear Mr. Carter, the letter dated August 4th, 1999, reads, I have looked over the copies of your grandfather’s papers sent to me and I can only apologize for my lying. I ask for forgiveness and, please, for trust, but I beg you not to bring up matters best left forgotten. Let that nightmare stay where it belongs, in the past, in obscurity, dark and sunken. Every day of my life I regret the decisions and judgments of my past. But after fifty years in a gulag, what is there I can change about my life? What can I do or say now to redeem myself? Let me serve only as a warning to others, to you. Let sleeping gods lie. Do not ask for the truth and I will not have to bury it in lies. Please let the matter rest with—we did not go to Aratta.

  And yet:

  20 March 1921. We have barely left the surer footing of the Old Military Highway and already the weather has taken a turn for the worse. With the sun shrouded in storm clouds and the mountains around us cloaked in mist and sleet, the gray rock faces before us seem an even more daunting prospect than ever. Following the Terek River back toward its source leads us north and west, and ever higher.

  My suspicion that the professor is keeping something from me grows. He seems preoccupied, as if turning some idea over in his head as he walks. If there is something I should know, I would be glad if he would let me in on it, rather than keeping me in the dark. He spends much of the journey with Pechorin who, it turns out, is something of a linguist himself, not that you’d know it to look at him.

  Pechorin’s men look more cutthroat than ever, but I wonder if I may have underestimated him. For all his savage appearance, in the nuances of his words and habits he betrays an education and a privileged upbringing. I suspect he is the classic nihilist, assured of his own destruction, romanticizing his own life and death, choosing to hide his background behind contemptuous silence. There is a fierce intelligence in those eyes, though, if he would only choose to use it. Still, this may sound petty and spiteful, but I really do not like that man. I do not trust him at all.

  THE TABLETS OF DESTINY, THE BOOK OF THE DEAD

  10 September 1942, near Karacaevsk. From Majkop’s burning oil fields, we moved east with the SS tank battalions to split from the main body somewhere north of Cerkessk, then started moving down through the rugged countryside, along the River Kuban, toward the Caucasus proper. Our escort is comprised of the select of SS Division “Wiking,” a unit of twelve men put together under the command of Strang. All seem uncomfortable in their stolen NKVD uniforms—far too unstylish for these German jackboot dandies.

  The whole army seems low on fuel and ammunition. Strang claims that Himmler is more concerned with the covert, esoteric aspects of the mission than with the mundane act of capturing the oil fields. I had heard that the Nazi Inner Circle had some strange ideas but it seems inconceivable Hitler would stake so much on the success of one small mission, even if we were to rediscover a lost city of Aryan ancestors. Yes, it would be, for them, the single most momentous sign of racial superiority. But even the Nazis cannot be so mad as to place that much faith in a mere symbol; Strang must be covering for the failures of his leaders.

  Unless Pechorin has told them. My God, those words, that language, in the mouth of a Hitler!

  I look at the neat printing on a crisp white page, so distinct from the tattered scraps it sits amongst. Times New Roman. Twelve poi
nt. A translation from the German, done by an old friend of mine, a linguist who…who I should never have involved. We used to joke about it, my crackpot conspiracy theory bestseller. Nazis and ancient artifacts. You don’t believe any of this, he used to say. Do you?

  I place the page beside my grandfather’s journal entry.

  All goes well, writes SS-Sturmbannführer Strang. The trucks are provisioned and the men ready. They are all good, strong children of the fatherland. Oberführer, I believe that not only will we find Aratta and conclusive proof that the Sumerians stole their wisdom and learning from the great Aryan civilization that preceded them, but that we can take this treasure that Pechorin speaks of right from underneath the Russians’ noses. He is, I admit, still elliptical about its nature. The Tablets of Destiny. The Book of the Dead. When he talks of it there is an emptiness that comes into his eyes. Of course, he is a Slav. The power of the ancients is not his birthright. It is ours, Oberführer, and I will bring it back to Germany where it belongs.

  You asked me once if I trust Pechorin. He is in no position to lie to us, and, indeed, seems almost eager to cooperate. He claims he has virtually deciphered the tablet fully now, says there is no doubt at all that the language is indeed Aryan. The Englishman, Carter, still insists it is a bastard tongue off some obscure branch of the “Turanian” family, as if the yellow-skinned pygmies of Asia could be the Fathers of so grand a culture. The man is demented—I suspect from too much of the Turkish kif. Sometimes I feel we should have left him in the stinking hovel that we dragged him from. If we did not need him to lead us to Aratta, I swear I would have him shot.

  THE TIME OF NOMADS

  23 March 1921. If it is not snowing, it is raining; if not raining, then snowing. The scree of the lower slopes has given way to ice and rock, as we move out of the Terek valley and into North Ossetia. Going is slow and I regret ever joining this damn-fool expedition. The tablet—oh yes, I finally saw the tablet—is spectacularly detailed, true, but I was shocked to say the least when Hobbsbaum told me how he’d “translated” it.

  To say that his interpretations are “free” would be generous. He is virtually claiming that we have before us the original Turanian protolanguage, the ancestor of both Arattan and Sumerian. I realize now that in his need to prove his theories he has thrown reason to the wind and made idiots of us both. And yet, I still want to have faith in him. I still want to believe him. But how can I countenance this insanity, this mad idea of an antediluvian civilization wiped out by a flood not of water but of ice? For the period we are talking of is not neolithic but paleolithic. I am not half the archaeologist or linguist Hobbsbaum is, that’s true (my studies were rather rudely interrupted by the Boche), but even I know that if we are talking of a language like Turanian, the original Turanian, we are talking of a period long before Mankind first built his little clay villages on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, long before the walls of Jericho or honeycombed cells of Catal Huyuk. This is the time of Indo-European, of nomads, of cavemen. Civilization in the Ice Age, destroyed by it or by the floods that came with its ending? It is ludicrous.

  28 March 1921. Hobbsbaum and I talked all last night, sat up drinking and laughing, celebrating a find that, if we died right here and now, would make it all worthwhile. We still haven’t found Aratta yet; I don’t believe we will. I don’t believe we were ever really looking for Aratta, no matter what Hobbsbaum says. There is a sly wink in his eye even as he insists that the tablet surely must refer to that city. Where else could it be talking about? What other Great City of the North is there in Sumer’s sphere of knowledge? At times I feel that he is dropping hints, clues, trying to lead me to a logical conclusion he himself has long since reached, unwilling to put it into words because to do so would be to admit insanity. But I am sure now we were looking for something else, something older. I am sure now because we have found it.

  The cave is carved all over with the cuneiform that Hobbsbaum calls Turanian. Not Sumerian cuneiform, not even Arattan cuneiform contemporary with Sumer, but a whole horde of carvings, some in the language of the tablet and some obviously older. Looking at it, one might trace the whole history of the script over time on the walls of this cave, the stylization of pictographs into symbols, into syllabic cuneiform. Although “runeiform” might be a more appropriate term for these, lacking as they do the characteristic wedge shapes of writing imprinted on clay with a reed. Hobbsbaum is enraptured, taking sheets and sheets of notes. I must admit that I am too stunned to do much more than stare. Dear Lord, we may have found the oldest written language in the world—and carved on stone!

  Pechorin only scowled, saying that of course his people had writing before the rest of the world. The man’s as arrogant as a Hun.

  Hobbsbaum’s Notes

  I keep Hobbsbaum’s notes separate from the rest, sitting up on the desk in my room, hidden in one of those manila folders used in filing cabinets. I still have the photocopies and the translations, though I’ve already deleted the scans from my laptop. I know that they’re part of this story but I can’t bring myself to look at them again, because when I do all I can think about is a good friend of mine now locked up for his own safety.

  So what I lay on the floor is sort of a placeholder.

  Email to jack.carter@miskatonic.edu, 10/04/99 14:45:

  Jack. That stuff you wanted me to have a look at came through garbled, so can you send it through again? Sounds fascinating. If it looks like a mixture of Roman and Cyrillic, it’s more likely your grandfather or the professor or whatever was just using the symbols to transcribe phonetic values. Are there accents on the vowels or diacritics, because if there are, I’d say you’re definitely looking at some other language that’s been written out in a sort of early “phonetic” alphabet. Maybe some Caucasian dialect or something? Still, I’d love to see it. You know, I mentioned it to my adviser and he said Hobbsbaum was really a bit of a pioneer in his field. Reckons if it hadn’t been for the Nazis he might have got a bit more recognition.

  After I got that I did some research. I mean, I didn’t even know what “phonetics” meant until I started trying to put this puzzle together, but what it is is that our normal alphabets—the Roman alphabet, the Cyrillic alphabet, the Greek alphabet—don’t really relate accurately to the sounds we make. The letter C can be a “k” sound or an “s” sound, or a “ch” or even a “ts,” depending on where you come from. There are sounds like “sh” or “th” which don’t even have a letter of their own in the Roman alphabet. But people who study these sounds, these phonemes, and the way they’re made, they can classify them exactly, and they use a sort of artificial alphabet to transcribe them. They take a letter from here, a letter from there, a Greek theta or a Norse thorn. They can represent the way a sound is spoken with a breathy “h” of aspiration, nasalized or held back in the glottis. All that’s missing is the pitch and stress of intonation.

  Hobbsbaum’s notes are written in exactly that sort of cobbled-together alphabet. But as well as the diagonal dashes and umlauts over this letter or that, there’s these other little ticks and wavy lines running above the texts, rising and falling like a voice telling a story. The pitch and stress of intonation. A pause for emphasis…A whisper.

  It’s as if he was transcribing not a written language but a spoken tongue, listening like an anthropologist to an old man telling a tale around a campfire, scribbling furiously in the flickering shadows as fast as he could, just trying to keep up with him and using whatever sign or squiggle seemed appropriate to that sound, transcribing the full complexity of the oral tongue as best he could. That’s what Hobbsbaum’s notes look like.

  And then there are the sketches, the direct copies of the writing that the ancients left behind them, that this tiny, forgotten expedition came across in 1921. I wonder if they felt the same thing looking on it as I do.

  Fear.

  THE MASTER RACE

  12 September 1942. 10 km south of Tyrnyauz. Strang’s trigger finger was itchy today. He
placed the barrel of his Luger at my temple and swore at me in German—Schweinehund, Scheisser and so on. More a scholar than a soldier, I know that he’s as uncomfortable with the uniform as with his own bizarre hypothesis. Strained, strung-out Strang trying to be strong. A weak man caught up in his fantasies of power. So I goaded him and he pointed the barrel of his gun at the side of my head. Pechorin, inscrutable as ever, reminded him that only I could lead them to their destination. I heard the tone in his voice, subtle and persuasive, the quiet, deadly music. He remembers. I’m sure of it now. The bastard.

  “You really think we found the ‘great Aryan city from which all civilization sprang.’”

  “I know you mounted an expedition after which the professor never published another word, while you disappeared off the face of the earth. I think you found it, then buried your research, covered your tracks, denied all knowledge of it for some twenty years. Why? Because it didn’t suit your Jew-loving ideas.”

  “It’s some story.”

  “You didn’t want the world to know the truth of Aryan superiority. Of a master race who ruled this world long before the weak and decadent races of the East built their pyramids and ziggurats.”

  [Carter laughs.]

  An email to jack.carter@miskatonic.edu, 10/05/99 14:53

  This is a joke, right? You need to get a girlfriend or a hobby or something, Jack. How long did it take you to put together, anyway? I mean, 23 pages of pseudonostratic. What are you on? I mean, whatever it is, Jack, I swear you must be tapping into the old racial memory, or mass unconscious, or a higher plane, or whatever you want to call it, because I know you don’t know shit about this stuff. Come on, Jack. Where did this stuff really come from? Who was it put you up to this?