by Susan Daitch
“History my foot, it’s money!”
Shirley Pemberton
Passport to Pimlico, 1949
A MAN ON A MOTORBIKE, rolls of carpeting stacked behind him, cut off another biker who toppled over, hitting the curb. Cylinders wrapped in brown paper spilled from the back of the bike rolling into traffic, some, tied with twine, came undone and streamed red, gray, and blue into the road. The injured cyclist managed to stand, and a fight ensued. I watched along with a group of men leaning against the glass window of a kebab joint, listening to them argue in Farsi with a smattering of Arabic words. Whose fault was it really? The carpet man has a knife. Look out. Was that other fellow in the proper lane? Perhaps he turned a bit to the right when he shouldn’t have. I could have been anywhere, maybe, but I had arrived in Tehran. Shouting insults, one of the two combatants, limping, managed to get back on his bike and drive off. The other sat on the curb and waited for help. Fight over, the men discussed a public hanging that was to take place later in the day. A convicted murderer would be suspended via crane. I listened to their conversation a bit longer, then made my way back to the hotel.
The university archive was on the outskirts, some distance from my hotel. Flattening the letter I’d received on archive stationery I memorized the number and made my first call in order to make an appointment to view the scroll the Nieumachers had found on the site on the outskirts of Zahedan, the document that, according to Sidonie’s field notes, was the remains of detailed records of daily life in the city of Suolucidir. I’d written to the director of the archive, and our correspondence was part of the basis on which I was able to obtain funding for the trip. In his letter Dr. Haronian assured me the Zahedan scroll was accessible and available for inspection.
I hoped my Farsi didn’t betray an American accent. It was something I’d worked very hard on, and though I was often told my accent was undetectable, you never know how you really sound with any consistency or when in a difficult situation. I practiced a few lines before I picked up the telephone, then dialed. It was with a great deal of anticipation I listened to the clicks of the Tehrani dial tone. Soon I would finally be able to see the only physical proof I knew of that confirmed the existence of Suolucidir. After many rings a man picked up, saying only hello, not stating the name of the archive as businesses usually do in the west. For an instant I wondered if I had the wrong number.
“I’d like to speak to Dr. Haronian.”
Some shuffling that sounded like boxes being moved came through the line, the scratching sound of cardboard pushed across a gritty, unswept floor. I looked out at the street while I waited, half expecting to see a person leaning against a wall looking up at me, but the street was empty except for a woman carrying a bag with branches of dates poking out the top of it. Across the narrow street I could make out a room filled with blue TV light. A man came to the window, looked up, noticed me, and pulled the curtains shut. Finally a man got on the line.
“This is Mr. Bastani, at your service. I’m sorry to tell you Dr. Haronian is no longer at the institute. He’s retired.” As far as I knew, Haronian was not very old, so I was surprised to hear he was no longer at the archive.
“I have letters from him.” I immediately regretted blurting this out. If Haronian was gone, there was nothing I could do about it, and so I tried to take a more conciliatory tone. “Are you his replacement?”
“No. I’m just answering the telephone in the interim.” Bastiani didn’t know where the former archivist had gone, so it was impossible for him to give me a forwarding address.
“Can I speak to Dr. Haronian’s replacement?”
“No one has yet been appointed.”
Pacing the carpet, one foot after the next, I tried to pull something out of my brain to prolong the interrogation before the line was cut off. One foot covered the border pattern of linked diamond shapes, the other was planted solidly in the middle of a quatrefoil design. I asked Bastani if he could help me, then, in viewing the Suolucidir Scroll. Dr. Haronian, with whom I’d been corresponding for nearly a year had assured me it would be possible to spend some time studying them, as much time as I wanted, in fact. This accessibility was critical to my funding from the Zafar Institute. Without access to the Suolucidir relics, I felt like a fraud.
“The Suolucidir Scroll? We have no such documents. I’m familiar with our entire collection.” He paused, and I heard the sounds of a match striking, then Bastani inhaling. He was smoking a cigarette. In an archive? The idea that I had misdialed again occurred to me. It was the wrong number, and some knucklehead was playing along as a kind of impromptu prank. I hung up and carefully redialed the number, but the same affectless voice of Mr. Bastani answered. I mumbled about a lost connection, sorry.
“The Zahedan Scroll. It could be archived under the name of the site where they were found.”
“Zahedan? There’s nothing here Zahedani. Zahedan is a city of dust.”
“They could be filed under the city’s former name, Duzdab.” Duzdab meant the Watering Place of Thieves. When Reza Shah came to power he changed the name to Zahedan, which means place of noble people.
“If you like, arrangements might be made for you to view some scrolls from Susa. This I could fix for you. Susa, the town where the Hammurabi Stele was kept until it was removed to Paris, as you know. These items are very old and can be viewed for only two hours on Monday afternoons.”
I explained that as interesting as these might be, they were of no use to me for my current project. The Nieumacher Parchments, I asked again. Could they be filed as the Nieumacher Parchments? I could hear Bastani laughing.
“Why would we call anything here by such a name? Our archive goes back to the time of Darius and beyond, but includes nothing Germanic. You haven’t told me why you want to see our archives. We aren’t a museum. We don’t ordinarily open to random passersby, even if they have a letter from the late Dr. Haronian.”
“He’s dead?”
“No, I meant the former Dr. Haronian is no longer working here, as I told you.”
I explained my research, what I was looking for, but Bastani then asked me if I had a girlfriend or sisters? This he would like to know about, and had they accompanied me to Tehran? Even if I had sisters, why would I bring them with me?
“You have girlfriends then?” He repeated. “Maybe several.” This was a statement, not a question.
“No.”
“That’s unfortunate.” He paused, inhaling and exhaling smoke. “You can’t just walk into the archives,” he said. “I don’t care who you think wrote to you saying this is possible.”
I mentioned a sum of money. It wasn’t much, but it was all I could offer him. For a moment neither of us spoke. I walked over to the window of my hotel room and twirled the cord around my index finger. Finally the man on the other end of the phone told me that until such time as Dr. Haronian’s successor was chosen, it would be impossible to view any of the archives. To do so, for whatever stated urgency, would be considered a grave security risk. People, even foreigners, have disappeared for less. When I asked when the next director would be at his desk, Bastani had no idea, nor would he tell me if he did.
The door to a shop across the street was locked. The shopkeeper vaguely looked up at the array of windows presented by my hotel, but he didn’t appear to be watching anyone in particular. I heard more shuffling noises from the phone receiver, then the line went dead. I dialed one more time. No one picked up.
That was to be my last conversation with Mr. Bastani. In the morning I packed my bags. I was anxious to press on to Zahedan and the site of Suolucidir itself, if I could find it, leaving the study of the scroll for my return trip, despite the knowledge that reversing the order of reading, then excavating would be far less useful. During the excavation of Esther’s Tomb in Hamadan in 1971, in the hurry to build a new temple that would attract visitors, all kinds of ancient significant objects were tossed out. On the one hand I understand at a certain point the bathtub is full an
d overflowing, you can’t hold on to and read everything; on the other hand the lost museum is something to be mourned, no? It was possible I’d never see the Nieumacher relics. There was nothing I could do about it.
“I yama sad dictapator. Me sheeps ain’t got no sense. I yam king of 10,000 fatheads.”
E.C. Segar
Popeye August 21, 1935
JAHANSHAH ROSTAMI, SON OF THE mineralogist who gave my father the Nieumacher field notes, was very eager to help with the search. He had already collected old survey maps and interviewed tribal leaders and shepherds who traversed the area from the Burnt City in the north to Zahedan and farther south as well. On my way to his house I stopped to watch a man with an orange-hennaed beard sit on the floor of his shop hammering copper bowls into shallow lakes; other smaller vessels like jazvahs for making coffee were strung from the roof over his head. I walked on, the sound of hammer against copper following me down the lane. At a fruit stand a bare bulb swung above a pile of cherries and baskets full of branches of green dates. A pile of garnet-streaked pomegranates spilled into the road. Filling a bag with them, I bought some to bring to Rostami and his family. I knew they were well off and lived in a wealthier quarter of Zahedan. Like his father, Jahanshah worked for an oil company, determining the structure of oil fields hidden as deep below rocks and sand as a Suolucidir courtyard.
Expecting me to call on the very evening of my arrival in Zahedan, he opened the door almost before I knocked. Jahanshah remembered my father’s visits from when he was a child and claimed he could see the resemblance, but since he was only a few years older than I, more likely his memory was helped by a photograph of a group of geologists taken at a meeting in Tehran at which our fathers were both present. I had a copy of the same picture at home. Rostami had curly black hair receding in a V shape, ’70s-era sideburns and a moustache. Actually it was he and I who looked similar, though people who look alike rarely recognize the similarity themselves; others usually point it out.
I was not to spend much time in Rostami’s house, but in some ways it resembled the house I grew up in. Apart from turquoise tiles decorated with Kufic script, the Rostamis had the same feldspar bookends, probably from the same conference in Pikes Peak attended decades earlier, a relic, for both of us, of another age. Next to the bookends was a picture of Jahanshah’s brother, who had died in a car accident. Also on the shelf was a rocket-shaped mug from NASA and a statuette of Aladdin from Disneyworld as well as a small rubber Mickey Mouse. I was told that Rostami no longer studied rocks, now he taught math at a local school. Mrs. Rostami stood in an arched doorway tapping red fingernails against the jamb, waiting to be introduced. Her eyebrows met like a black tiara that had slipped down her crown, and she smiled in my direction, but also looked at me as if I were a large, new piece of furniture whose use was unclear, the kind of thing that would cause as many unforeseen problems as provide dubious entertainment, like a record player that arrives with no needles. Nice in theory but presenting complications before it can fulfill its promises.
Rostami had two very young sons, one who pushed himself in a sitting position from one stair to the next, making a thumping sound as his butt hit one step after the next, accompanied by a humming at the back of his throat, while the other one hid, reluctant to meet me at all. I presented them with a box of Batman figures, which they swooped down upon. I had opted for several varieties of Batman (Batman the color of blue Jell-O, Batman with armaments, Batman with a long voluminous cape) but forgot the batteries that would make the superheroes light up at knee and elbow joints. Near the bookcase, displayed on a pedestal was a silver hookah, the red snake wound around its engraved body, ending in a silver nozzle. One of the blue plastic Batmans quickly made it his lair, riding the snake like a fiend.
That first night we ate jeweled rice and chicken with pomegranate, and drank cardamom-scented tea. Rostami was gregarious. Holding the small glass of tea up to his eye he swirled the leaves and cardamom shells as if it was going to explain something to him. Finding Suolucidir would be like driving a stake into the ground, making a claim for a story that would be definitive and unalterable. His wife went to look for batteries for the Batmen. She didn’t like me very much; that was clear. It was as if she feared I was some kind of thief.
Like many Zahedanis, Rostami had visited the Burnt City site to the north, the way Americans would tour an Iroquois village, but he confessed he’d had an odd feeling at the site, as if he were looking at the severed half of a Siamese twin. In the 1970s Maurizzio Tosi, an Italian archaeologist working in the Burnt City, had found the oldest known dice, caraway seeds, a backgammon set made of turquoise and agate, skulls that exhibited signs of brain surgery, and an artificial eye made of gold and bitumen paste, the iris engraved with sun-like rays. Rostami felt the Burnt City couldn’t have been an isolated prodigy city-state. There had to be others. Something was missing.
“You must understand there have been major earthquakes in the region since the Nieumachers were here. Whole villages were flattened in one spasm like so many houses made of cards.” Jahanshah picked up the rubber Mickey Mouse and referred to him in English as the Hebraic mouse who pops everywhere. He was skeptical about the Nieumachers, I could tell. The shape-shifting Nieumachers were far more troublesome to him than the English who had come before them. The British had just wanted loot. It wasn’t clear to him what the Nieumachers, who had come to Persia under the auspices of something called the “Franco-Soviet Friendship Dig,” had wanted. They were protean, ambiguous, claiming land, maybe, more meddling and more dangerous, he thought, though in this he was mistaken, not recognizing the true fox that had had every intention of biting Persia on the ass.
He, too, knew about Hilliard and Congreaves, the pair of Englishmen who had come looking for Suolucidir maybe fifteen or twenty years before the Nieumachers arrived. Of the English not much was known, but he was acquainted with a man, Javad Eyvani, who claimed his father had worked for the Nieumachers, and he might have some clue as to the exact location of the site.
The next day we drove to a block of low, anonymous apartment flats that looked as though they had been built recently. A child peered at us from a doorway; a woman in black passed us on the stairway, her chador making a swishing sound against the tile. We made our way up a staircase that smelled of garlic fried by the fistful and the sourness of dried limes left too long on a windowsill.
Jahanshah knocked on door number nine, which was guarded by a blue glass orb intended to ward off the evil eye. He zipped and unzipped the pockets of his leather jacket as we waited. Somewhere in the building, or just outside it, dogs barked. After a few minutes an older man in billowing sherwal trousers, obviously annoyed at the sound, opened the door and yelled down the hall, but when he recognized Jahanshah he smiled in a ‘what do you want?’ sort of way, glad to see Rostami, but suspicious of the cause of the visit. Rostami introduced me to Javad, a retired oil rig worker he knew from years ago when they had both worked in the western part of the country in Khuzistan. When living on the gulf, both men had reminisced about Zahedan, the city of their childhood, and both had since returned to it, although for different reasons. Javad now lived with his daughter and her family who were rarely home, either out at work or school, so he spent much of his days alone in the apartment or at cafés. Javad wore a long white shirt like an Indian kurta, a brown coat, and had a piece of cloth wound around his head like Marat in the bath. He had very dark circles under his eyes and, though finally smiling when he showed us in, he didn’t really look very happy. Muttering something about the Sikhs down the hall he motioned us in with the wave of a cigarette. We walked through the kitchen to a small room lined with pillows and sat cross-legged on the floor while Javad poured tea. A news anchor was visible on the television, but the sound was turned down. Bollywood music played softly from a cassette on top of the television. Javad and Rostami asked about one another’s families, then got down to business.
“Do you remember the city you used t
o talk about when we were out in the oil fields in Khuzistan? Do you remember those stories? Was it your father or your grandfather who worked for those what were they, Russian? Long time ago.”
“It was my father,” Javad said, offering us a bowl of green pistachios.
“Do you think you know where the site was located? Did your father ever say?”
Javad laid his hands out palms up to indicate they were, by and large, empty, but there were possibilities. His father had taken him to the site once.
“A road lined with cypress, a grove of almond trees. It was over forty years ago, but perhaps not a great deal has changed since then.”
He grabbed a fistful of pistachios, cracked them open, then popped them into his mouth. If it were possible to do so, the city would be an interesting thing to find, he said, licking salt and green dust from his fingers. The search would get him out of the apartment building and away from the Sikhs who irritated him on a daily basis. He would make some money from us and a lot more if any Suolucidiri treasure remained to be unearthed. I found myself grinning and humming along with the music, tapping fingers on knees. This was turning out to be easier than I thought.
The next morning we picked up Javad and headed out of the city, driving south by southwest. It had been a wild desolate place where people hunted, Javad remembered. The almond grove and line of cypress trees perhaps marked a tamer part of the route closer to Zahedan, before you got to the real wilderness. Not as much hunting now, Javad, said, but then it was more common.