by Susan Daitch
February 3, 1937
My suitcase was stolen in Baghdad, and with it went all my European clothing, so I traded the gold cross for long dresses and a headscarf. We boarded a ship due to sail down the Persian Gulf and eventually came within sight of Bandar Abbas, Persia, the final test of the Franco-Soviet Friendship Dig papers. Officials appeared, chests garlanded by heavy cartridge belts, feet encased in high tight yellow boots. Bruno told me not to say anything about any lost tribes — not to anyone in customs, not even when we got to the city of Zahedan.
Since leaving Baghdad we no longer had an English escort, and once again we were on our own. We took a bus to the town of Alibad, and from there joined a caravan of silk and olive merchants making their way to Zahedan. On the first day I thought our group was comprised of only Persians, Armenians, and Arabs, but on the second day two real Russians, Darya Vasilisa Ulanovskaya and Maksim Petakhov, introduced themselves to us in Farsi. They looked shocked when Bruno returned the introduction in their native language, though he pronounced words with a fake French accent. Darya Vasilisa Ulanovskaya, sturdily built, sandy hair, round lined face, squints through perfectly circular black glasses and speaks softly. Maksim Petakhov, a former Olympic soccer player, now retired, is more garrulous, speaking in cynical interrogatives as if they were declaratives, a way of speech I haven’t heard in a long time. They said they were surveyors, guests of the Shah’s Royal Ministry of Cartography, on a mission to survey Sistan-va-Baluchistan in order to create maps of a previously unsurveyed region whose boundaries are contentious and unclear. They carried German arms, Glocks and Mausers, and told a story of an ambush near the border with Afghanistan that killed seven of their party during their last trip to the region. It was Maksim who told this story, patting his camel on its twitching nose as he described the quiet of the mountains and how their guides disappeared when the first bullets cracked a rock a few centimeters from his head, yet he smiled as he described their escape through ravines and mountains. Now they no longer travel in distinct easily identifiable groups but go in pairs to cover the provinces. Ulanovskaya and Petakhov were pleased to meet members of the Franco-Soviet Friendship Dig. It was not a meeting they had expected, and it’s always a pleasure, they said, this kind of surprise. So we met two Russians while waiting for two others who will never appear.
“Antonov and Bezymensky, yes, we’ve heard of them, I knew a Bezymensky at university, an orientalist,” said Darya Vasilisa. “Perhaps this is the same man. It would not surprise me.”
“I hope they arrive while we’re still in the province. We have other territories to cover, but it’s always a pleasure to meet fellow Soviet travelers.” Maksim Petakhov tucked his thumbs into his belt that jangled with a slide rule and other instruments.
“Bezymensky lived for awhile in the mountains with some of the tribal groups, recording their music. They have an instrument similar to the oud; he described in it some detail.” Bruno played an oud made of the air. “He believed the sound of a group’s native language influences the rhythm of its music.”
Because I stood behind the Soviets I could slide my hand across my throat, silently telegraphing Bruno to shut up. Bezymensky is meant to be a digger, not an ethnomusicologist, enough already. Our comrades in the Soviet half of our enterprise are turning into an accordion that gets stretched to a ridiculous length, a giant slug of a thing. Who could be a master of all the trades he attributed to our Soviet Friends and still stand on two feet? Maksim asked me something about my studies in Moscow, and I wasn’t sure whether to try to speak French-accented Russian with the pair, in a feat of linguistic gymnastics, or just speak normally, which would give me away as a native speaker. Fortunately Bruno answered for me in a rush of explanation. By the end of the evening I tried to say as little as possible in their presence, and since they didn’t pay much attention to me, this wasn’t difficult.
February 21, 1937
We arrived in Zahedan, a remote mountain town that Darya Vasilisa and Maksim knew well; they had visited it before. They helped us find lodgings, and on our second day in the town, introduced us to an excellent guide, Ramin Kosari, who spoke not perfect but reasonably good Russian. Kosari, a Kurd, is more fair than most of the natives of this region. He has light eyes and a long nose, trim brown beard, and a habit of making short bows in the middle of sentences, as if to emphasize a cluster of words that must surely be true. Reason he is in this part of the country: unknown. Kosari, like many residents, knew about two Englishmen, one dressed like a Pashtun sheikh, maybe, who found a cave full of ancient objects, but they took everything they could get their hands on. When they finished with that cave you were lucky there were any stones or scorpions left in it.
On our third night in Zahedan we took Kosari up to our rooms and showed him Feigen’s map. So far we’d revealed it to no one, not the British sentries in Amman, not any of our fellow travelers, either. It had remained untouched, hidden between pieces of cardboard in Bruno’s rucksack. As he looked over the map, his eyes lit up. He knew this region, the exact area marked by the simurgh, the symbol Fingers assured us indicated the entrance to a hidden city. Yes, this would be easier than any of us thought. We’d come so far, through deserts and seas, and what we sought was waiting for us as if it were no more extraordinary than a stowaway in a barrel of kippered herring, unusual, but easy to find. Bruno expressed guarded excitement, scratched the back of his head, raked his dry hair, and smiled a little. Kosari would hire diggers. Things would proceed rapidly. We would find the city of the Lost Tribes, bring Feigen whatever he desired that would put him at peace, make some money, and return to Marseilles as if the events of Bruno’s last night in that city had never happened. That we can’t go back the way we came is something he seems to have forgotten.
The next day I insisted on going with Kosari and the others to look at camels we’ll need for the expedition. Kosari didn’t want me to go. Bruno handed me a veil that flattened my corkscrew hair into a dense Cleopatra-like wedge, and this seemed to appease Kosari a little. Snub-nosed Darya always covered her head with a Ukrainian scarf printed with red cabbage roses. The two Russians, who were not part of our expedition but wanted to accompany Kosari and Bruno to watch the bargaining, were already loitering on the corner, and if they could go, I saw no reason why I had to stay behind. So, to Kosari’s irritation, it was settled. I caught up with the others. How strange to hear Russian with its elaborate expletives and complicated diminutives spoken down dusty streets on the way to a market at the edge of Zahedan. Darya Vasilisa takes my arm and doesn’t just say “that’s a little house,” but “that hovel is a wretched, little house with its stuffing coming out of the windows.” Petakhov swears, probably under the impression that none of us understand him. But we all do, all the way to the camel market.
Darya has pale, unfocused eyes and when she asks me where I learned to speak such good Russian, a French woman who looked like a Pashtun, I inhale dust as deeply as possible, cough, and find it difficult to speak. What is Pashtun? I rasp out. She pointed somewhere to the east. Oh. Cough. Cough. My histrionic gagging cough probably fools no one, but what else could I do? The Pashtun, Darya Vasilisa said, are armed and militant, devout Muslims with Hebraic-sounding names, they light oil lamps on Friday nights and some claim they are descendants of the Lost Tribes. This time I really did cough, and the conversation ended.
We reached the camel market, which stank of animals standing around for hours with nothing to do but chew and shit, not so different from the Berlin Zoo, Bruno pointed out. I was thankful for the cloth that covered my nose. Do you remember the monkey house, he asked? Of all the animal houses, that one stank the worst, and even the monkeys seemed to know they were partially neglected by their cousins, who maybe felt uncomfortable with their resemblances, and so didn’t attend to them as often as they should have. We visited the zoo in the western part of the city shortly after we arrived in Berlin. It seemed like the most foreign thing we could do, the thing most unlike what you wou
ld do of an afternoon in the town where we came from, a place where there were no zoos, where the concept didn’t exist. A giant black U means, here you get on the U-Bahn. We got on at Alexanderplatz, though I lingered at the window of a photographer’s studio, looking at the pictures of the families and portraits of men in uniforms. It was the first time I’d traveled underground. It was chilly and drizzling rain in fits, but we went to the Zoologischer Gartens anyway. The squirrel monkeys had hair on their heads that grew in such a way that they looked like Americanischer Mohawks. A bouncy female paused long enough to groom one of the males, starting with his head and moving toward his leg, which she stretched out, carefully straightening the knee and foot joints in order to work on his delicate limb. He sat passively, if not regally, until another monkey (male or female?), screeching in anger and hysteria, interrupted the procedure, and they all screamed at one another, a fuming triangle. The blue-faced mandrill next door paced back and forth, as if thinking who were these idiots in the apartment next door who had all-night parties, orgies, screaming fests, who didn’t know how well off they were? No one groomed him. He sat alone in his shit-smeared cage. Bruno pulled me to another part of the primate house. Look at this one. The Hanuman monkey appeared like a wise old man, infinitely patient and sitting in forbearance of all the follies of all the silly fools who glanced his way, you would think, and you’d be wrong to read his impassivity that way. The sign on the side of his cage read that the Hanuman monkey kills his rival and his children, then takes his rival’s wife as his own mate, and in this way achieves leadership of the clan and maintains his primacy. Bruno didn’t remember the Hanuman monkey, but he recalled the lion had a deafening roar that brought visitors running, and a sign beside his cage warned that the lion shpritzed between the bars when he pissed, and he did, spraying a woman teetering on high heels very close to the cage, almost falling in. Someone said she was an opium addict, but no one stopped her or told her not to get so close — odd in itself for a city of laws like Berlin, but she did get sprayed by the lion. What did the lion think about the woman screaming at him, standing before his cage while other onlookers laughed? I don’t know, Bruno, why are you telling me this? I have no memory of a woman in a filmy dress being showered by a lion. Homesick now for a place that was never really home? Nostalgic for wild animals living in the middle of a city?
At the camel market Bruno wandered off, and Maksim followed him. I stuck with Kosari who was doing the real bargaining, sizing up legs and looking at teeth. I stood close by, just to annoy him. Suddenly, thwack, I fell to the ground. A moody camel, coat clotted with dirt, had kicked me hard just under the knee. It didn’t hurt all that much, but it was a shock, the knock coming out of nowhere. My veil slipped aside as I bent down to rub my shin. Kosari barked at the man trying to sell the animal. The man used the word Jahoudi looking in my direction, at least I think he did. Swift but short-lived arguing followed before we moved on.
March 10, 1937
A few days later all our equipment was loaded onto our three camels, who looked pained and bawled as they rose to their feet under the weight of shovels, coils of rope, buckets, baskets, containers of food and water. They reminded me of circus weightlifters who make a show of the effort they put into raising their dumbbells before suddenly and miraculously holding impossibly heavy iron bars aloft. We took turns with the binoculars, one of the few objects we still possessed that dated back to our years in Berlin. Its Zeiss lenses were remarkably sharp and clear, Feigen had said as he looked through them, the most precise lenses in the world. Formerly used for watching performances of Die Zauberflote or looking for scarlet tanagers in the Volkspark Friedrichshain, through them we now scanned desert and mountains, barren and deserted. How could a city have thrived in this landscape? When we stopped to rest, if I saw a single human being, a woman carrying a basket on her head or a child herding sheep or goats, I would sketch drawings of them, but this was rare. I developed a purple bruise in the shape of a camel hoof that didn’t go away.
Kosari, as the Russians promised, knew the mountains and valleys well. Nonetheless, for two days we failed to find the site or anything that remotely resembled a ruin of any kind. The landscape is desolate, here and there a group of sandstone formations. The camels stop to munch scrub or the drivers give them ajin, balls of dough that they gobble up. Their ears look like skin shells, and in the sun they’re translucent, like veined human ears. A fist would fit in one, and these are the kinds of absurd thoughts I had during the tedious journeys. Kosari explained that the distances may be greater than what was marked on the map, but he never questioned the reliability of the document, which any reasonable person might find to be more about a cartographer’s dreams than an accurate rendering of the relationship between drawing and geography. He never asked us how old the map was or what the language or symbols written on it might mean.
Darya Vasilisa and Maksim haunt us, much like Bruno’s version of our meeting with invented Soviets. Just as we dogged Bezymensky and Antonov, Darya seems to be just around every corner I turn. She’s very curious about what we’re doing in Iran, as if she knows everything I’m telling her leaves something out. She reveals very little about herself except that she has a daughter and grandson who were relocated somewhere farther east, and she doesn’t know when she’ll ever see them again. There is a point where even accurate cartographers must give up; space is so vast the phrase “to scale” loses its meaning. The last time she saw her grandson he wrote messages on paper airplanes and launched them out the window of their building when they all lived together. Do you think, she asked, children made paper airplanes before actual planes were invented? She asks me when did I become interested in digging up other people’s petrified trash? There is an edge of cynicism in her tone that takes me off guard.
On the third day, about forty kilometers north by northeast from town, Kosari led us into a narrow gorge perhaps a few meters wide. The further we traveled, the higher and narrower the chasm grew, and it was like walking through a cave whose roof had slid off. Finally the rocky canyon ramparts rose to one hundred meters high, maybe more. Even with the swaying motion of the camel, I could touch both sides of the canyon walls with my arms extended. In fact, I couldn’t straighten them if I wanted to. After an hour or so of riding, the rocks began to change. The cuts in the rock face started to look less like the natural cleaving of stone from cliff, but as if they’d been created by humans in an attempt to widen the channel. That was my impression; the marks were jagged and uneven. Maybe they weren’t chisel or axe marks, just sharp clefts made when Ice Age temperatures caused microscopic crystals to be severed from granite, but I was cautiously hopeful. Then the sky darkened. If there was a sudden cloudburst a deluge would flood the gorge, and all of us would drown in an instant. Should I tell everyone, let’s turn around? But what if I was wrong? Bruno and Kosari would say I was too nervous to travel, guilty of imagining horrors too extreme to be taken seriously. There was no space for the camels to turn around. The only possible direction was forward. Bruno looked up at the sky as if studying a flock of muddy storks and leaned forward to speak to Kosari, who shook his head. Was this an example of what Bruno was afraid of, the blindness and paralysis he predicted we’d experience when we were up to our knees in sand? He made a sign to stop all the camels, and Kosari rode ahead. None of us spoke. The storms dump water in a matter of minutes. There was no time to ride back. Bruno got down and leaned against a rock for a moment, then calmly pulled out one of Feigen’s books on the Seulucids, neighbors of Suolucidir. About thirty minutes later, Kosari returned on foot and motioned for us to follow him. .
We rode on single file but soon arrived at a clearing, a dead end like a small natural amphitheater caused by water or wind erosion. Rocks facing us did look slightly, ever so slightly, more cut than naturally fallen. We argued about whether it was worthwhile to try to move a few of them. Kosari insisted this was the exact spot identified by the simurgh symbol on the map. The entrance of the city
was not immediately apparent. Large rocks had to be moved, and some scattered boulders, on closer examination, may have been ashlars, posts, and lintels from some fallen structure, yes, they were definitely man-made blocks. Ropes were tied to animals and men who pulled and pushed away obstructions until a decent-size opening was created, about big enough for two men and a camel to get through. By now most of the chasm was in shadow, it would be night in about an hour. A rock shifted to the left, crashed, another followed and then a distinctly man-made shape came into view, a column whose capital was carved with grape vines, and a dirt floor gave way to tile. Kosari broke off a flinty piece of stone and put it in his pocket. Bruno looked wary but pleased. Whatever the site was, we were surely the first live humans to cross the threshold in perhaps thousands of years.
Outlines of lintels, doorways led into partially collapsed rooms, some inhabited by skeletal remains, most not. The city was underground, just as Feigen had said it would be, concealed by an earthquake, the metropolis of our ancestors permanently entombed. Porters were assigned to make measurements and move more rocks. While there was still some light I took photographs of the site with and without half-smiling Bruno and Kosari.
By nightfall, back in town, we learned that Maksim and Darya Vasilisa had disappeared on one of their treks. Bruno paused in front of Darya Vasilisa’s door, turned to me saying, should we take a look? Would we find a chronometer, a gizmo for running electric current through sandstone or Jurassic age crud, an astrolabe with Cyrillic markings? Or would Maksim’s room, as a stand-in for that of the imaginary Antonov, reveal a stash of Trotsky-era porn? Bruno was anxious. That evening we should have been celebrating, cabling Feigen, drinking Georgian wine smuggled into the city by Chechen bootleggers. Bruno paused in front of their doors as if he had unfinished business, but didn’t attempt to open them.