by Susan Daitch
A soldier pointed his Kalashnikov at me and yelled I should stand in line with others on the edge of the pit. One by one each man was asked his name and to surrender his identity papers. I had thirty seconds to decide whether to say Ariel Bokser. Ariel Bokser, I’m American. I lost my passport, and no I haven’t yet reported it missing.
It just came out instinctively with no premeditation. Ariel Bokser was back in the United States explaining that his accent had been acquired during years spent in Jerusalem living in an apartment above a falafel stand named Shushan. Ramin Kosari’s papers had been lost or stolen. I groped my pockets like a cartoon character who’s just been pickpocketed. The last thing I heard was an explosion near my head, and I felt a searing pain as I fell backward.
I passed out for the second time in Suolucidir. It was as if something in the underground city could snatch your consciousness if you weren’t vigilant. When I came to, it was night. I’d been thrown over the side of the pit, landing on a mess of straw and sand. Around me were the bodies of six of my fellow diggers. They had been shot and then toppled over the edge.
A jumble of limbs lay under me. If I knelt to get up, my hands and knees pressed into someone’s spine and shoulder blades. Finally standing, I backed away, retreating into the site. The passages were dark, but I made my way to the arsenal, where I picked six weapons and wrapped them carefully. They were among the most valuable objects we’d found. In the early morning hours I made my way back to Zahedan and left the tridents, hammers, and notched shields at the doorsteps of the six men who had been shot.
Arriving in Tehran from Zahedan without a passport, and with the American embassy under siege, I was trapped. My hotel was full of journalists hoping to outlast the hostage crisis, enjoying martinis poolside, comparing the backgrounds of their drivers and their skills at navigating parts of Tehran where you could get into trouble. They listened to tapes of Duke Ellington, Mahler, Sting, and Abba. They had photographs of Khomeini’s family, of tortured corpses dumped in a street behind a half-burned-down movie theater, they had addresses of apartment towers where secret parties were held and where alcohol could be found and people danced like crazy until their drivers came for them early in the morning. I was in limbo, had the language to clink glasses with my compatriots as if I were in any random office celebration, but also stuck, unable to go forward or backward. The Zafar money was nearly depleted, and the person at the institute who was supposed to get back to me never did. I’d written about the killings at the site, but wasn’t sure whether my letter had yet reached them or whether it ever would. One night I heard a story about an American woman in Isfahan whose passport was stolen along with all her clothes. She borrowed a chador and made her way to the British Embassy in Tehran, even traveling part of the way on foot, but she was able to get her documents and finally depart. Waking at sunrise the next day, I tried the British Embassy and was able to secure emergency temporary papers from the skeletal staff still going to work. I could now leave. But did I want to go? No, I didn’t.
With just one day before my flight I called the university archive for the last time. Stating that my name was Kosari, I asked for Mr. Bastani as if I’d never had any conversations with the man before. I mentioned a payment that would accompany my access to the documents. He murmured a sound I interpreted to mean the sum I named could open certain doors.
“I’m afraid they aren’t available for public viewing. In any case they’re out on a temporary loan. Call back next week, and I’ll see what I can do.”
“But if they’re loaned out then somebody must be allowed access.” I asked him who’d borrowed the scroll, though I didn’t expect an answer.
“They’re being restored in a lab in another part of the city.”
Restorers, as opposed to conservators, were notorious for destroying as they attempted to preserve. Christian monks used scotch tape on the Dead Sea Scrolls, doing so much damage, it was commented the parchments had survived more successfully underground for thousands of years. I was worried.
“It can be a slow process, as I’m sure you’re aware, Mr. Kosari. Call back in a few weeks, just to be sure. I’m optimistic we can accommodate you sometime next month.”
At night I could hear the sound of gunfire, and soldiers patrolled the streets. Tehran was motionless, as if someone put a spell on the city at nightfall, and almost no one went out on the street at all. On television people held pictures of the missing, hoping for information about friends and family members who had disappeared. On their way home from school, children dipped notebook paper in blood found on the street. They waved these small flags as they went on their way to let others know a demonstration a few blocks away had turned violent.
The next day I got a cab to the airport, sharing the backseat of the rattling old Paykan with all kinds of interesting stuff: an electric mixer, a radio, a small TV, a shoebox of GI Joe dolls, objects found on the street after the Americans left.
“If you know where they lived you can find strange and astonishing things: photographs of Jimmy Carter, hair dryers, an Elvis lamp with a beard painted on, furniture of all kinds, a Madras porkpie hat, which you shouldn’t wear outside, since it will arouse the suspicion of those who watch the neighborhoods,” explained my driver, a lean man with a long moustache. Many of his fares, in the past, had been American, and so though he spoke in Farsi, he said porkpie hat in English. “I wouldn’t want to look like one of the fun-loving Shahi who ate gilded oysters filled with real pearls while Israeli soldiers fired on Iranian citizens.”
He talked non-stop about the Zionist Iraqis at the border, the use he might have put the Elvis lamp to, but he hadn’t, in the end, taken it. “What to do with such a thing?” We negotiated the price of the ride, and he threw in a couple of miles gratis, even if I was going back to my paymasters in Washington or Tel Aviv, he said. I hadn’t fooled him. I wished the driver well and faced the crowds and security checkpoints.
At the airport it looked as if all the hotel rooms in the city had emptied out. Reels of Super 8 film, video and tape cassettes lay in piles, confiscated. My photos taken at Suolucidir were confiscated. Perhaps for the customs agent I was the kind of American who was so spacy that, while intending to travel to Kathmandu or Dharamsala, I had wandered into Zahedan by mistake, and so I deserved to have my things taken from me. Or maybe the confiscation was executed on nothing more than a whim. I’m not sure what value or significance the pictures would have had, but for whatever reason all my photographs and negatives were seized. I felt no remorse or regret because I was certain I’d be back.
I boarded one of the last flights out of Tehran having had what seemed like only a glimpse of the treasures of Suolucidir.
Somehow I got through Customs. I won’t divulge here the manner in which the valuables taken from Suolucidir were hidden in my bags. Though nervous when I reached Kennedy Airport, it wasn’t for nothing that my previously mentioned college roommate had also been a small time drug dealer whose contacts were ingenious in smuggling and devising hiding places — useful knowledge he had freely passed on to me, but I’d no reason to draw on until now.
But for sorrow there is no remedy provided by nature; it is often occasioned by accidents irreparable, and dwells upon objects that have lost or changed their existence; it requires what it cannot hope, that the laws of the universe should be repealed; that the dead should return, or the past should be recalled.
Sorrow, Samuel Johnson
Tuesday, August 28, 1750
SONGBIRDS HAVE ACCENTS . THE SONG of a Montreal robin sounds slightly different from the song of a Nova Scotia robin. With each generation there are slight changes. A robin raised in isolation invents his own song, and it doesn’t sound very melodic, but over time, with each generation raised in isolation, slight improvements are made, and the song gradually begins to sound more pleasant to the human ear. Each bird knows how to imitate and improve. Experiments have also been done with the zebra finch and other birds. Finally each bird’
s trill converges to a species standard. Where, in each DNA strand, is the code for this song?
I was back, but I wasn’t back.
Joe Lewis died in Las Vegas, subway workers threatened a strike, it was already freezing cold, and Ada Koppek kept calling, looking for Ruth, not remembering that she’d just rung and confusing me with her grandson, Adam, who was working as a pothead eighth-grade science teacher in Los Angeles. Ada complained that her vision was failing her. Ruth’s grandmother was my only caller, and that was only because she didn’t know who I was.
“Adam, Adam, why don’t you know where your sister is?”
“It’s Ariel, Mrs. Koppek.”
“Ariel? I don’t know any Ariel. What are you doing in my granddaughter’s apartment?”
I explained to her.
“I don’t remember Ruthie getting married. That I would have remembered. Why wasn’t I invited?”
“You were there, Ada, really you were. You must have photographs somewhere in your apartment.”
Ada was fantastically disorganized. Pictures were stashed in desk pigeonholes in between bills and receipts going back to the Nixon era. She used to know where everything was, but now it sounded like she was defeated by her own stacks of memories she didn’t have the strength to sort through, so all were equally reduced to irritating detritus she couldn’t get rid of.
“You danced with your cousin’s husband, whom you hadn’t seen in years. He spilled wine on your dress when someone knocked into him. It was an accident, but it really pissed you off.”
“No,” Ada said. “I’m a drowned rat.”
I was on my way out to see Marcello Pagliero’s Roma città librera at Bleecker Street Cinema, a 1946 movie about four characters wandering around Rome at night. For two dollars, you could sit in an air-conditioned room and see two movies, and wandering around an ancient city at night was an activity I was familiar with. Anxious to be on my way, while Ada spoke I punched my fingernails into the collection of Styrofoam cups collected on my desk. Crescents outlined eyes, nose, and mouth, teeth punched out. Kufic script written in fingernail impressions decorated another, random parabolas a third. On a fourth cup I’d engraved the Hebrew letters lamed, followed by vov, spelling lamed vovnik. The lightning-shaped lamed zigzagged down the side of the cup. Following the lamed I engraved a vov, the sixth letter of the alphabet, the Hebrew prefix that acts as a conjunction, the letter responsible for joining two halves of a sentence, sometimes linking two recalcitrant clauses that shudder when joined. At any given moment there are supposed to be 36 (twice 18, a number for miracles) lamed vovniks or holy men in the world. They may not know they’re lamed vovniks, and they could be almost anyone: an ambulance driver cursing at the traffic, a drunk who runs into a burning building to save a stranger he only half heard cry out, the woman who puts children on a train out of the country and remains behind to an uncertain fate. Personally, I like to think lamed vovniks aren’t perfect, each is flawed in some way. Andalusian Sephardim believed that if you found a rock shaped like a teardrop it was the petrified soul of a lamed vovnik who had suffered a great deal. So I sat punching lameds and vovs into a Styrofoam cup, as if doing so would will one to appear at my door. I missed the movie.
Hope dwindled for the fate of people I’d befriended in Tehran, Zahedan, and other parts of the country. In September 1980 Iraq began bombing Iran, and I followed the path of the explosions on the news and in the papers as best I could. Once again Suolucidir might have been saved by its isolation. Mines went off, chemical weapons full of nerve and mustard gas, agents whose formulas went back to the Battles of Ypres. The gas is heavy. It settles to the bottom of geographical depressions, poisoning low-lying towns, villages, train stations, cities only partially buried. The reporter described how you didn’t smell the gas immediately, then it did its corrosive work. By the time you smelled the vapor, a process that took a few minutes, the damage to your lungs had begun. The screen blinked to footage of people coughing violently, unable to speak. The camera backed off. Outside the hospital, palms were split or sheared off to half their former height. Buildings of stone, steel, and clay were equally reduced to clouds of smoke in an instant.
I put on white gloves and unrolled the smuggled parchment that could so easily crumble to nothing. I’d barely looked at it until I returned to the States. I’d been afraid to open the cylindrical case while still in Zahedan, afraid once exposed to the atmosphere it would completely disintegrate unless examined in a controlled environment. Now I was confronted by the problem that, because the thing was stolen, I couldn’t take it to the Metropolitan or any other institution that would ask questions about the object’s provenance. With the images of gassed, inert bodies lying in village streets came the gradual sense that there would be no going back; those people and things I had assumed were in some way retrievable, were no more. I unscrewed the lid of the black enameled cylinder, its top and bottom rims rusty and corroded, marking my hands with stains and red rings that remained for days. As Alfred Döblin said of photographer August Sander, he created an atlas of instruction, and this, with unreasonable optimism, is what I hoped to find in the Suolucidir scroll, at atlas of everything Suolucidiri.
The first inches were as Sidonie Nieumacher had described them in her notebook: intertwined hands made of Hebrew letters giving way to blocks of text. What surprised me was that beyond a few inches the text was written in a Hebrew I was able to read. Like many Judeo-Persian manuscripts it would jumpcut from medical advice to Talmudic commentary to interpretations of dreams to a form of local gossip in verse, all in a range of styles from formal literary to colloquial. I sat at my table with a view of the clock atop the Williamsburg Savings Bank and began to translate the document before me, which at first explained a social system organized around a strict set of laws.
Suolucidir, a lost world extinct several times over, seemed reasonable and orderly with its judges, scribes, legal system with no intentional death penalty. These laws tied language to act to punishment. Capital punishment, when it occurred, was accidental, almost comic. Unlike the images of the war flickering on the television screen, the concept of retribution, to the isolationist Suolucidiris was an embarrassment, something you didn’t talk about very much in public. If you ignore something long enough, their legal system seemed to say, it will depart.
According to their legal code, the Suolucidiris took literally the concept of eating your words, although their language didn’t include that idiomatic expression. Neither could a Suolucidiri talk about eating his hat, or crow, or swallowing his or her pride. A burglar had to eat a clay tablet bearing the words for thief as well as a description of his crime; a killer was compelled to consume the word for murder and a narration of the circumstances leading to the crime; an embezzler, and apparently the crime existed even then, had to chew the phraseology for cheat, and so on. Depending on the chemical composition of the clay and the length of the crime’s description, which could be extensive, the felon might be lucky enough to get off with just a stomach ache, but fatality was also a common outcome. Swallowing your words could kill you. Those falsely accused and convicted might protest, declaring the tablet before them represented neither their words nor deeds, but the luminaries who ruled Suolucidir enjoyed absolute power within the city, and their inedible words were final. There was one advantage to the Suolucidiri penal code. This wasn’t even the age of incunabula, and obviously since there were no presses or means to reproduce copies, each piece of parchment or tablet remained essentially unique. Once consumed the record of the crime disappeared as well, so if the perpetrator lived, he was more or less granted a clean slate. Forgiveness was an important moral concept in Suolucidiri life, but the scribe who made the words that were to be eaten was enormously powerful. Since few could read, he could write whatever he felt like.
Specific examples followed the legal code, and here I began to wonder if the scribes did, from time to time, make things up. For example, and I translate loosely, Citizen Q is ac
cused of making unwanted overtures towards Citizen L. Q makes suggestions. They should meet in the alley around the corner from the baths. L states she finds Q repellent: his vanity, self-absorption, lack of control. (He exposes himself in the middle of a crowd, he deliberately makes loud sucking noises when women walk by.) On one occasion he suggested what he claimed was a primo location for trysts, promoting its virtues by saying: the noise of running water covers all sound, it’s a part of the city no one ever goes to, and so on. Q now says L is imagining things. He never uttered a remark more suggestive to her than have a nice day. Maybe a wink once in a while, but that’s it. No law against that as far as he knows. Although Q annoys her no end, the commentator reports L has the cynical composure of someone who’s sure she’s facing a liar who will only choke himself given enough time. L accuses Q of stalking her, of lying in wait outside her house to the point where she felt she was a prisoner in her own home. Liar! Prostitute! Q shouts. Why would I do such a thing? You’re not worth that kind of effort, that kind of desire and scrutiny — you’re not worth it by half. The city is full of women just like you. What makes you think I would give you a second glance? Q continues to deny the charge, shouting: You can’t make me eat words I never uttered. There were no witnesses who could say L was in the prostitution business. There were no witnesses to Q’s alleged stalking her, although he had often been seen in the vicinity of her house. L seems at Q’s mercy, overpowered by the accelerating rock slide of his accusations, but Scribe X notes that Q does seem obsessed with L. She isn’t just anyone. She has something Q covets, something he wants to possess. Scribe X chuckles behind his glass of wine. With the bat of an eye he can have white clay fed to both of them. He writes, don’t vomit on my feet and tell me it’s a divine sign. Scribe X, they may not realize, is a god, at least for the moment. I remember the clay tablets found in Suolucidir still smelled 3,000 years later. Eating them must have been a frightening and nauseating experience. Perhaps so few of the clay tablets survived because everyone was a criminal, and so everyone had to eat his or her words. Maybe that was the true apocalypse for a city in which every citizen was guilty of something.