by Susan Daitch
Eventually Cindi and I got on each other’s nerves. She was taking too much, giving me too little percentage, and we argued without resolution. When I packed my things and quit, she shrugged, said whatever, no big deal, and went back to sewing rhinestones — just as the time I first caught sight of her.
So I returned to the squat on Avenue C. The Neapolitan had died, and everyone I’d known had moved elsewhere, apart from the Korean War veteran, who was not very interested in talking to me. He referred to me as Mr. Arab or that Arab here. So many people I met here, from junkies to Daisy, said, I can fix you up. Let me fix you up. But all these good intentions hardly amounted to anything.
A few days after my return I saw the photographs of your ersatz simurgh, a copy of a Persian phoenix made of gaskets and diced circuit boards, in the gallery. You were the only person who could have constructed such an object; you must have returned. I found your number (I have no phone and you are, as you may know, the only Ariel Bokser in the phone book), and called to arrange a meeting, finally, at Mezzanotte Pizza. When I arrived I was very nervous and, to make matters worse, while I waited I noticed the man behind the counter started drawing me, or so I thought. It must have been a slow afternoon, few customers, he had all the time in the world — that was one explanation — but I was still afraid of informants, those shadows that dog some emigres, not all, but a few. I heard rumors of Iranian exiles disappearing in London, Paris, Washington, under the bright sun of Los Angeles with a view of the Pacific Ocean and the Beach Boys on somebody’s boombox. How much farther from Tehran could you get? But still they could find you. So I left Mezzanotte’s, walking out on you, and I’m sorry, but I expected you would understand. Of course, I was followed from the restaurant. The sound of footsteps grew closer, sped up when mine did, and so on. I lost the man when I ducked into the subway. A train had just pulled in, I jumped the turnstile and left him, a man in an oversize baseball jacket, standing on the Q platform at Kings Highway.
Afraid to telephone you again, even from a phone booth, some time later I just knocked on your door. When no one answered I broke in. What did I see when I entered? I discovered you had found the city of Suolucidir.
The creature you modeled out of grommets, tie pins, and deadbolts lay next to its ancient twin, and that, of course, was the crown jewel. Without hesitation I wrapped the original in newspapers and put it in my backpack, along with some other things, a couple of books, a watch. A farewell drink seemed in order, a bottle of scotch beckoned, and when I looked in your freezer for ice I found the last treasure, the scroll, in a clear plastic snap-lid container nestled between a hoary frost-covered bottle of Stolichnaya and orange juice concentrate. If you had put the scroll in an opaque container, I would have assumed it was food, and never had seen it. You must understand this was a great opportunity for me. By claiming these objects and repatriating them, I could return home a hero. I also wanted the Nieumacher notebook, which would tell me more about Suolucidir than you were willing or able to. I would find someone to translate it.
I ran from your apartment until I was breathless, and at this point I made a critical mistake. Running to the edge of the city along East Tenth Street until I got to the river, I wanted to be alone with the things I’d taken, and the apartment on Avenue C was full of strangers. I should have known — standing still, alone at night in a deserted part of the city is a bad idea. Someone came up from behind like Iron Man, no attempt to mask footfalls, and hit me on the head. When I awoke, the most valuable things I’d ever seen were still in my possession, but my wallet, your watch, and papers that identified me as Ariel Bokser, such as a driver’s license, library card, fairground permit and ID, all those were gone along with about sixty dollars cash. The mugger or muggers probably believed the funny statue and old papers were worthless. You might look at this as retribution for breaking and entering, thieving, in some abstract form. I suspect the body in the Gowanus Canal belonged to the gangbanger who mugged me, than got fatally assaulted himself.
Enmeshed in one urbanography, you blink, and you’re somewhere else entirely. I didn’t return to Zahedan immediately, but felt Tehran would offer the cloak of a big city, where few knew me. My wife and sons visited, and in that first moment when they walked in the door, all the strange visions of my American sojourn seemed to have happened to someone else. The boys had grown up, almost, and knowing the war with Iraq was being expanded, one of my first wishes upon seeing them was to get them out of the country as quickly as possible, and indeed they now reside elsewhere. The moments between hugging them hello and goodbye seemed a slice of time no bigger than a sneeze.
Upon returning I needed to find a person who could tell me something about the Suolucidiri relics I took from you. Such a person would most likely be found in certain cities like the capital, though the search would not be easy. Blocks of half-burnt buildings were barely recognizable. Movie theaters, markets, banks, all were reduced to shells identified by the bits and pieces that survived: a teller’s station, a shattered projector, a movie screen turned to flags, the shell and metal ribs of a refrigerator case.
I looked for the remains of neighborhoods called sar-elchal, edge of a pit, because shops, businesses, houses were centered around a trench into which garbage was both thrown and removed from time to time. There is a reason, you see, occupants of these ghetto-like neighborhoods have long been considered impure and to be avoided. By rule of law residents of the sar-elchals had to stay indoors when it rained, for example, so they wouldn’t pollute others. (Please note, this concept came to Iran via the Spanish Inquisition, which considered even conversos or chuetas to be pollutants, if you know what I mean.) It’s possible sar-elchals no longer exist, but I had to start with what I knew, as little as that might have been. In the mahellahs, down streets so narrow they’re called forgive-and-forget streets because if two estranged friends should happen down one of them from opposite ends, they couldn’t pass one another without touching, I might come to a series of brick arches ending in plain doors, easy to miss. Frankly, these people didn’t want to be found, but occasionally I found something, a temple, a ritual bathhouse, a butcher shop; however no one within would talk to me. Some of these places smelled of ground metal, like what you inhale when a dentist drills away old fillings, others looked as if they hadn’t been swept in centuries, a path through dust and debris led from the door to other rooms or sanctuaries. In one temple I was told to wait in a genizah, a kind of final resting place for books so old and brittle, it was if they lay in a quarantine of meaning before totally disintegrating. From this place, I got no further, and after waiting nearly an hour, was ejected the way I’d come. My interlocutors were old men, distracted and suspicious teenagers, women veiled just like their Muslim counterparts, but the answer was always the same. As soon as I gave my name or said anything about Suolucidir, the door was essentially shut in my face. The scene was more or less repeated at maybe a half dozen locations. But at one point someone to whom I gave my name must have passed my number on to someone else, because after about a month of searching, I got a call from a man named Dr. Haronian. Dr. Haronian agreed to meet me, but not in the city, rather, at a house in the hills on the outskirts.
I drove out the next day, objects safely stowed in the back of my car, in the same backpack from which they were conveyed from your apartment. (Think of what that faded green knapsack has seen, from New Jersey street fairs to the aftermath of riots in Tehran.) Dr. Haronian lived in a neighborhood that was unknown to me. His house, like many of its neighbors, lay behind a high-gated wall. After waiting maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, I was about to turn around and leave, when I was buzzed into a garden that looked as if it hadn’t been tended for years. A small tiled pool surrounded by a tangle of untended grape vines, pomegranate and fig trees lay to one side of the path as I made my way to the house that, too, must have been kept up better in the past. I pushed the door open, and a man’s voice instructed me to walk down a hall to the back of the house, and ther
e I found Haronian sitting in a wheelchair.
He was old, maybe older than he looked, not exactly crumpled into the chair, the lower half of his body hadn’t yet atrophied in it. His hair was at one time colored black, but had grown out of the dye job. The white parts surrounded his head like a halo. A cat was curled up in his lap, and he spoke to it in a language I didn’t understand, though it sounded something like Farsi, and maybe a bit like Arabic, too. Scratching behind the cat’s ears, he introduced himself, and the cat, whose name was Ra’ashan. A large cluttered desk almost filled the room. I could see access to the desk was important to him; he never wheeled himself far from it. In terms of navigation Haronian was unable to sit on the floor, because he would be unable to rise by himself, and for this, as he pointed to a chair, he apologized. His housekeeper, who looked after him, was visiting her daughter so he was alone in the house.
An Oum Kalthoum record was playing; he wheeled himself to the record player and carefully lifted the needle. Not a simple task — his hands suffered from tremors — but he waved away my offer of assistance. Since we were strangers, he told me a bit about himself, going off into all kinds of side alleys as he did so. As a result of some of his injuries, it was very difficult for him to stay focused on one subject, he explained, and once again asked my indulgence. When Haronian smiled I noticed he had a gold tooth glinting in the recesses of his mouth. In repeating his story to you, if he comes off like a meek, shuffling behind the bookcase kind of person, this is a mistake. Haronian grew up on Eslambol Street and never left Tehran as far as he knew. He had always believed in minding his own business, but his father, who owned a small dried fruit and nut shop, had not. He changed the color of the displays on the sidewalk in front of his shop according to a complicated set of signals: sacks of green pistachios, red sumac, fresh yellow dates all meant that riots or violent incursions into the mahellah were imminent, and in this code he gave others in the warren of streets a rough idea of the location of the storm about to befall them. If things were really bad, nothing was put out, and the shop was closed. How his father knew or was informed of such things, Haronian never found out. Like many of his generation, his family was able to provide the means for advanced education, and he had no intention of staying behind to run the store with its complicated obligations and warning systems. Talented in linguistics, especially interested in Aramaic and languages from the Safavid era, after university, Haronian got a job in a state archive.
It was while employed here that he became curious about the Nieumachers, whose names were attached to a pair of boxes he came across accidentally in one of the archive’s basement annexes. As if someone had forgotten them, they had been left on top of a stack of folding chairs. A label read Nieumacher in Latinate letters, which Haronian could read. The name, he assumed, was German, and the date, though the ink had bled and faded, looked like 1930-something. He knew Persia had been full of Germans building railroad lines, and after 1936 agents of all kinds had turned up, in cities mostly. Germans, even then, weren’t new to the region. Haronian mentioned a Berliner, Robert Koldewey, who while digging in Iraq had discovered the ancient city of Babylon and invented a way to excavate and preserve mud bricks. He packed up the Gate of Ishtar, blue and crenellated, fourteen by thirty meters, it all went off to Berlin where it resides to this day. But who were these new Germans, the Nieumachers? He assumed they were German, but then it wasn’t clear. Maybe they weren’t. He looked things up, made inquiries, unaware his work was becoming troublesome, as if the parchments and papers he handled were actually growing hotter in his hands. He found a reference to the Franco-Soviet Friendship Dig. So maybe these Nieumachers were Russian. (His father had encountered Hebrew-speaking Russian soldiers decades earlier and had hoped to arrange marriages between them and Haronian’s sisters. Hands trembling, my host removed a brittle old photograph from a stack on the desk. Seated in a row were six Russian soldiers participating in some kind of ritual meal eaten in a hut made of palm leaves. After they returned to the Soviet Union the Haronians corresponded with the Russians for many years, but then at some point, all replies ceased.) At any rate, were the Nieumachers Russian? Haronian was unable to determine their exact country of origin. There were gaps in what he could learn about them, but then he came into possession of a surprising document: a copy of the police account sent from Zahedan when Bruno Nieumacher was reported missing. Yes, such a document existed, it had been stored in Zahedan, located and obtained by a lawyer of his acquaintance. Its acquisition was the source of Haronian’s undoing.
Or perhaps the Nieumacher business had nothing to do with his arrest. Haronian’s shoulders lifted to his ears, he held his palms outward as if to indicate he no longer was asking these kinds of questions or expecting answers. It was in 1974, the occasion of the 200-rial-note scandal. You remember, he said, it had a six-pointed star printed on its reverse side, and of course I did remember. Haronian recounted this was the currency that launched a thousand conspiracy theories, or you might say some people have an uncanny ability to see the figure in the carpet, even if there was nothing there at all. Though a six-pointed star will be formed when hexagonal tiles are placed in a ring, a common pattern all over the country, the rumors about the star-studded money gained momentum. According to one rumor, the notes had been printed in Ashdod, underneath a nuclear facility. Everyone who handled them would become radioactive. Some claimed the notes did, in fact, glow in the dark. The Shah was selling cheap oil to Israel, he was being bankrolled by Jerusalem. The 200-rial notes only existed for a few hours, then they were burnt, but Haronian reached over, pulled open a drawer and reached in the back for a crumpled wad. Pale green and blue, with the Shah looking out from under a dangerous, unscrupulous watermark in a vague and unfocused way.
Haronian’s arrest happened in a way that many did. Two armed men soundlessly descended the steps to the archive basement where he pored over documents, hands sweating inside disposable plastic gloves, one of the few luxuries the archive indulged in. They always seemed to have an inexhaustible supply, to be found one day, Haronian smiled, lining some 36th-century archaeological dig. Without saying a word of protest, knowing there was no point in doing so, he let them lead him into a small white van. What could he do? Neither he nor his co-workers made eye contact with one another as he left the building. The van, though undersize, was divided into cubicles. Haronian sensed there were other people in it also, but no one spoke. They were driven somewhere, he didn’t know where, or what he had done, nor did he have any sense of how long he was held in a solitary cell. He had seen this before. Many people he knew went about their business in their homes and workplaces; there one day, gone the next. Sometimes they returned, sometimes not. Unlike his father, who took great risks, but died at home, Haronian had thought he lived outside the boundaries of arrestable offenses, even though that perimeter didn’t really exist. You could get arrested for using the word oppressive when talking about the summer heat, you could get picked up for using the same pay phone more than once. He described himself as an ordinary man with no attachments. (His wife had run off with the owner of a carpet company years previously. It sounded, he admitted, like the beginning of a joke, but this is true, she left him for a man whose main topic of conversation seemed to be questions of whether it was halachically okay to mix cotton, silk, and wool threads.) In his day-to-day life Haronian had been careful to voice no criticism, offer no speculations about what might or might not happen in the vague future. He informed on no one; he knew no one to inform on. He made no comment about the inventory of disposable gloves. Until he himself was picked up, he shrugged, he would say, that’s the soup we swim in, but it was impossible to interpret your own imprisonment with that kind of matter-of-fact fatalism. I don’t know if he was the simple dried fruit and nut heir he presented himself to be, but of what happened to him during this period I could only ascertain that previous to his arrest he had not been in a wheelchair.
First I showed him Sidonie’s notebook and a
sked if he could translate it for me. He knew the alphabet, but not the language, so he returned it to me. Since it’s useless to me, I’m returning it to you. I do know that she titled her notes “The Book of Smoke.” I’m guessing she was referencing the ephemeral nature of writing, its ability to disintegrate physically, or to be written in a language that will eventually become extinct. That her notebook set so much in motion, events she could have no knowledge of, is a testament to the poisonous nature of smoke, even if it’s short-lived.
Next, I took the scroll out of the bag and slid it across the table to him. Haronian slipped on a pair of white cotton gloves and carefully unspooled the parchment. He moved his lips as if reading out loud, though no sound came out of his mouth. Reading rapidly, which surprised me, he stopped, unspooled and read more, but then began to laugh until tears ran from his eyes. What did I learn? Your artifact was a worthless invention, something about a man and woman, L and Q. It made no sense. He wiped his eyes with gloved hands, and pushed the thing aside. I was incredulous. Had I unwittingly taken one of your fakes?