The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir

by Susan Daitch

  October 1, 1936

  The phoenix re-emerges after perhaps thousands of years underground. Feigen had been looking for it without really remembering what he searched for, getting lost in Berlin, which turned out to be a long detour, he said, and now an old woman wandering randomly down Rue de la Canebière produced bronze proof and patches of a story to go with it. The ghost of Yanek Motke, breadcrumb cleaner, had returned. But Fingers was no longer thirteen years old and aching to travel. Someone else would have to follow the map and make the trip to Suolucidir, but how were his nominees to get out of France?

  “I have a cousin in Kaliningrad,” Feigen said. “He’s a printer with no academic credentials whatsoever, but like myself, he has needed, in recent years, to develop a sideline. He’s a very good printer; he once engraved for the tsar, but of this we don’t speak. A small shop, just two people besides himself, and both of them are relatives by marriage. In this sideline they have developed, the business is very discreet. We need papers whose provenance is in part Soviet, part French, whose description and raison d’être I will draw up. I’m about to launch the Franco-Soviet Friendship Dig. We will obtain patrons, funding sources. The Friendship Dig will be based on my scholarly investigations and fronted by you: Bruno and Sidonie Nieumacher. With grants provided by investors you will pack your bags, book passage to Beirut, and from there travel either overland directly to Zahedan, or by sea through Port Said, and then on to Bandar Abbas.”

  Feigen unrolled maps. They covered the surface of a dining room table—not his, this one, designed for large dinner parties was for sale, and it was the only surface large and clear enough of debris for his purposes. From all these names, my head was whirling. On top of the maps of the Mediterranean, Arabia, Persia, he laid a list of designations, contacts in Tehran, an old catalogue from the British Museum, lists of supplies we should purchase before we left, lists of supplies we should collect when we arrive. On top of the layers of contemporary maps he laid the fragment left behind by Yanek Motke.

  Bruno, however, wasn’t convinced. He leaned against the doorjamb, cool as a cucumber, yet I knew Bruno wanted nothing so much as to bolt from those suffocating rooms. Despite the years spent on his own, he was still a student whose shoes were too tight, and he couldn’t quite come right out and say to his teacher that the whole thing sounded like a lot of hooey. It was, as far as Bruno was concerned, not a time to be launching out to sea in a boat full of holes when there were enough problems and promises on dry land.

  Fingers raised an eyebrow. Suddenly he was Feigen of the pearl tiepin having to put up with a moron. “This,” he pointed to the simurgh on the map, “is an amalgam of several symbols of the lost tribes. The eagle is the symbol of Dan, the lion of Judah. It stands for the city, itself a symbol of Simeon, and just by it is an olive tree, symbol of Ariel, and a goat, symbol of Naphtali.”

  I bent over to look closely at the Motke map. The faded ink drawings were just as he described them.

  “I’m not getting run out town on a wild goose chase. We have a business here. What do I care about your lost tribes? Why chase djinns in a desert?” As he backed away he knocked over a Chinese umbrella stand filled with canes, and horn bills, silver tops, and carved ivory clattered to the floor.

  Feigen stopped short of saying, You may soon wish you had a choice; I knew he did. He turned the pages of the old catalogue, pointed a dry, blunt finger at a plate, a frieze, a column. His narrative sounded like a well-rehearsed one, something he’d stored and had only just now revived.

  “This is a golden opportunity. A woman who barely speaks any language at all sees you on the street, and picks you of all people to sell her last treasure. Bruno, listen to me. Yes, you could have become an old snob of Oranienburgerstrasse with students and sycophants and hangers-on scratching at your door, just as I did, but you got washed up here. Just when you feel your accounts are in order, and the black columns outdistance the red, there’s an earthquake, and the dirt under your feet breaks into unstable clods. The wharf turns into a prisonhouse, and the hospital that was once down the street is now an abattoir. You feel the way to fight back against all this running from place to place is to say no to me, to drive a stake in the ground, and refuse to go anywhere.”

  I have to admit he had me a bit puzzled. Bruno looked annoyed, but he nodded and went along with Feigen’s tirade.

  “Of all the people in the city, and with very limited means, a woman who is half blind, without even a cane or a dog, finds you, and gives you a creature that I, who once studied these things, have only seen one other time.” Fingers reduced his voice to a whisper, as if he’d given up arguing or pretended to give up. “Until I saw this phantom, Yanek Motke’s map was buried, dismissed by Berlin Persianists as the illusion of a primitive people beneath consideration. I showed it only once to one of my teachers, and he barely glanced at the chart that had sent me west to his city where I got stuck for what looked like the rest of my life. To him, it was the chimera of an uneducated wanderer, mad and completely fraudulent. You’re more fortunate than I was. You can follow the map to its source. If the map is right, then what you trusted to be an empty desert, won’t be empty at all; you’ll find the lost city and the remains of the people who lived in it. Should you look in the right place you’ll discover its minarets poking above the surface, and from there you dig. You come back a rich man, if you want to come back at all. Maybe you won’t be interested in returning here. Please Nieumacher, don’t raise your eyebrows at me. If you find the city of the lost tribes no one can touch you. I’m too old or I would be on the next boat to push off from the Vieux Port.” He referred to himself as an alte kahker, and in the accents of those four syllables were the footprints of a young man who traveled west, far from the printing business, and re-invented himself in Berlin, rarely writing back to those cousins and relatives by marriage, and only when he absolutely needed them.

  “Why Franco-Soviet?”

  “Some time at the end of the last century Shah Nasr-el-Din granted France extensive archaeological rights in order to settle his debt to a brothel in Paris. These rights were the envy of Germany. Since you’re from Alsace, you already have French documents, but you need exit visas, letters of transit. My cousins should be able to provide these. Soviet, because the Soviet Union already has a foothold in the region; it’s a marriage of mutual interests.”

  Feigen wasn’t asking me what I thought of leaving for Persia; it was assumed Bruno would make this decision. Had Feigen thought to enlist my help I would gladly have become his representative and ally. You know how cloth feels against skin when you have the flu or the beginning of an illness and the sense of touch seems hyper-aware, hyper-sensitive? As soon as the possibility was raised about traveling to the desert, that’s how I felt. Berlin and Marseilles had each seemed as solid as paper umbrellas, temporary shade from the sun, soon to dissolve in the oncoming storm. Like thirteen-year-old Feigen, I was ready to leave whatever ersatz makeshift nest I found myself in, and toss it all in order to engage in a venture that at best could be described as highly risky. The sinkholes didn’t seem to register for me as they did for Bruno. If the phoenix was an agent of transmission for a virus, a contagion that induced the desire to search for the home from which it had been snatched, then I’d caught the bug. My bags were packed. Swindling the old woman was unpleasant to witness, but that was part of the price out of Marseilles.

  From the balcony the sun could be seen setting, and Feigen braided and unbraided the fringes of his prayer shawl as he looked out the window. “The word for travelers and emissaries searching for the lost tribes is shelihim. Think about it,” he said, and he left to join his Tunisians for the mincha service.

  December 1, 1936

  We continued to do business with him for many weeks, over a month. Nothing more was said directly about the lost city, but he gave us short lessons in archaeology and the Lost Tribes. Feigen’s lectures took the form of non-sequiturs, fragments of information, seemingly unrela
ted to moving merchandise from one part of Marseilles to another.

  “It took Benjamin of Tudela eighteen days to cross Arabia to reach the City of the Lost. Eighteen,” Feigen said, “is the number that signifies good luck and life itself. According to Dr. Gustave Solomon Oppert, orientalist, who held the chair in Sanskrit at a university in Madras for twenty years before taking up a post in Berlin in 1894, the Lost Tribes could be found in India. Rumors of kingdoms in the east were blank pieces of paper on which any metropolis could be drafted, and these whispers have only increased when a mass murder, deportation, or exodus is about to occur, as if to say, by looking for lost peoples you’ll be redeemed.”

  Trying to catch the lost tribes is like trying to pin down your shadow, it seems to me, or the memory of a shadow. The outline looks like you, but will always be elusive, can’t ever be captured, questioned, no dialogue can be engaged with it, but the nostalgia for this lost version can’t ever be gotten over.

  The simurgh became a source of anxiety for Fingers, and handling it, making sure it was still there, was like a nervous tic. The object was rarely out of his sight, and he could be caught obsessively tracing its markings as he shifted the creature from hand to hand. Dark circles under his eyes turned into bags, and he grew more anxious with each hour, unable to concentrate on selling the violins, sets of encyclopedias, empty picture frames and various things we’d collected. We arrived early one morning to find him in an uncharacteristically jolly mood as he inventoried some glass animals ready to board an ark, itself carved from a discarded carousel horse, or so he said. The Kaliningrad ghosts had completed the job. The package Feigen received from his cousins contained every document we could have wished for.

  “If you wanted to go to America, this would have been beyond their skill,” Fingers assured us, “but for where you’ll be traveling, less precision is required. It’s fortunate that even from Berlin I still wrote to this cousin from time to time.”

  To my untrained eye all the papers spread before us looked completely authentic, and the Franco-Soviet Friendship Dig was inaugurated. Feigen whispered the Russian words aloud, a language I’d never heard him speak before.

  “The Russian archaeologists are to join you later.” He pronounced their names, these bogus characters, Gennady Pavlovich Antonov, and Ivan Sergeevich Bezymensky. “It’s a shame you and Bruno don’t speak Russian. Try repeating some of these lines after me.”

  “The Franco-Soviet Friendship Society was set up to promote mutual. . . .” He began, then stopped and looked up at me. “Come on, Sidonie, let me hear you say a few lines.”

  Bruno and I were careful never to speak Russian in front of Feigen. Had this happened, the former Berlin professor would have recognized our accents immediately.

  “The Franco-Soviet Friendship Society was set up to promote mutual. . . .” I tried to sound like a French person speaking Russian.

  “That’s very well done,” Feigen smiled. He was so drunk with the illusion he set up, he turned a deaf ear to what was actually fairly confident and competent Russian.

  “What’s the good of this act? This is no time to learn a new language.” Bruno entered the room carrying several violin cases under his arms. They were old and moldy, probably not worth much. Soon, I hoped, I would no longer have to be concerned with how much someone’s beloved cello or viola would fetch. Sidonie Nieumacher, a Berliner, was an identity that fit like a coat whose sleeves are too short and tight, so it clings, and is hard to take off, however Sidonie the archaeologist, sun-burned, shovel in hand, that was a daring and exciting image. Maybe from a flickering newsreel it really comes, but who cares? I threw the crumpled coat in a corner. You can plan for heat, dust, for scorpions in the desert, while here there are rumors of people who fire guns, and you don’t know in which corner they’re lurking.

  Bruno picked the papers off a table and looked over the signed and decorated letters authenticating our dummy organization. The red and black Soviet stamps with their angles and intertwined calligraphy were works of genius if you asked me, though no one did. Most important of all were entrance visas for Persia, issued in Paris. Feigen’s cousins were grand viziers of illusion, yet Bruno stood in the doorway, half in one room, half in the hall, still unconvinced.

  Feigen explained each document to him, translating from the Russian, slowly putting one sheet of paper on top of the next, in a very orderly fashion. Some were on onionskin, others on thicker paper, and the leaves floated one on top of the next as he argued the case for Suolucidir. Here was the charter establishing the Franco-Soviet Friendship Society, accompanied by letters from its Soviet and French board members stating its exploration agenda and goals to foster friendly scientific explorations that would in turn engender good will between nations and expand the horizons of all the peoples of the world, etc. etc. The Society was launching a dig in Sistan-va-Baluchistan, looking for Seulucid artifacts. Nothing was said about nearby Suolucidir and evidence of the Lost Tribes. Feigen didn’t want to raise any red flags as to our true project. As far as the Friendship Society was concerned we were looking for relics from an ancient city, nothing more. Here were our exit visas based on documents Feigen’s cousins had obtained at great risk on the black market in Vilna. They were based on a French visa, stolen from an Alsatienne Communist fleeing Stalin’s midnight knock on the door. She’d had her fling in Leningrad and was lucky to get out when she could, even if she’d lost this along the way. Apparently they’d made an exact replica, changing only the USSR to the Kingdom of Shah Reza Pahlavi. Poor Mademoiselle X. If she made it as far as Vilnius she could get into Finland or Poland and eventually travel back home to Strasbourg. The Soviet Union was full of French, German, and Italian communists who’d had to flee Hitler or Mussolini, but now had to go elsewhere, often traveling through the Baltic states. Perhaps Mademoiselle X didn’t exist and never had. The provenance of the visas could have been entirely invented by the slaphappy printers. I hoped not. Feigen was beaming as he shuffled the papers, replacing them in their box. With these forgeries the dreams of an itinerant lamed vovnik and the lost child version of Shuki Fingers Feigen would be realized.

  We left soon after, walking home in silence, stopping momentarily to light cigarettes, leaning against a door whose keystone gargoyle spat an arc of rainwater into a gutter. If we didn’t accept the passage and identities produced for us, I felt like these were the equivalent of our last cigarettes, the ones we’d smoke on the way to the gallows. Bruno scoffed and walked ahead of me. He didn’t see it that way at all.

  The concierge handed us our keys and tried to engage in small talk about the price of bread and the scarcity of eggs, yet I couldn’t bring myself to make conversation with her, however fleeting. She wanted to tell me something else, to prolong the conversation, but Bruno continued to walk on ahead, through the courtyard, and I hurried to catch up to him.

  “The papers look real to you, but what if we’re turned back at the docks?” He turned to me as he unlocked our door. “What if we’re not allowed to disembark at Bandar Abbas, and we’re left afloat without a country to return to? This is a letter of transit to a city that lives only in Feigen’s imagination.”

  “What makes you think customs officials can read Russian? French, maybe, but not thorny academic Russian.” I began to make dinner while Bruno walked up and down the length of the apartment.

  “People at borders aren’t idiots. They can certainly read the Persian. How do we know Feigen’s relatives didn’t make up their own Farsi documents and seals based on what they imagine they might look like? Oh, let’s draw an imperial winged lion here, yes, that seems about right. For all we know these are visas to Chelm, City of Fools. We have nothing to compare any of them to. The whole stack smelled of herring oil.”

  “Feigen said his cousins were professional, very good at what they do.”

  “He hasn’t seen them in over thirty years.” Bruno gave a you-know-nothing shrug. “These people could be working out of a stable with machiner
y powered by a lame horse made to trudge in circles, led round and round by a deaf mute.”

  “I thought they looked like they’d been issued on the Rue de Lille and signed by Molotov himself. It doesn’t matter if the signatures from French and Russian archaeologists who have joined together for mutual advancement of scholarship are forged. These people don’t exist. You can’t forge something that wasn’t real in the first place.” He plopped himself down on the bed, opened up an old copy of Arbeiter Illustrierten Zeitung, picked up who knows where, and thumbed through its satirical cartoons and photomontages. We knew these by heart. I found the AIZ magazines depressing and tried to hide them, but Bruno always sniffed them out.

  “This whole thing stinks, Sido. I have appointments set up for months from now, and there’ll be others following those. The Rothschilds are leaving for Switzerland, the Weils are leaving for Spain. They all have valuables to dispose of. No one, neither you nor Fingers, has explained to me why I should give all this up to look for evidence of an ancient utopia.”

  “We’ll be rich. You won’t need the Rothschilds’ cast-offs. You’ll get credit for discovering the lost city.” None of the families he mentioned would ever deal with him, a Nieumacher, a nobody, who lived in cheap rooms close to the port. Didn’t he think I knew that?

  He shrugged and went back to writing in a pocket calendar.

  “What if the door swings shut, and no one is allowed to leave? Immigration stops at the border. Even fake passports will have no more currency, and there will be no more sellers or buyers, what then?”

  “Traffic never comes to a complete standstill, whether human or material, molecules are always in motion.” He bent down to tie a shoelace. “I need to know the café around the corner where they know what I smoke and drink, and I’m on familiar terms with the topography of the zinc countertop. On the intersection of Avenue Zola and Rue Clemenceau there’s a kiosk that’s also a drop-off for a numbers game where a former sailor with one arm shortened by half, a Corsican milliner, and a man in a cassock with heavily pomaded hair who may or may not actually be a priest can be seen depositing little pieces of paper from time to time. I recognize which fishmonger rests his thumb on the scale just behind the head so you can’t see it unless you know what to watch for, and which one will give away the stuff he can’t sell just before closing time because he suffers anxiety, having recently witnessed a murder a few blocks away, and he wants to get home before dark. If you know all these things you have some idea of who you can trust when the wolf is at the door, and also who will hold the light for the wolf and, for two pfennigs finders’ fee, point out exactly where you live. In Sistan-va-Baluchistan you won’t know a camel’s ass from its eyeballs.”