by Susan Daitch
But was this actually Suolucidir? I went every day to the site, though my presence caused some of the workers to become disgruntled. I couldn’t dig, or move heavy stones, but drew pictures of the place as they began to uncover walls, rooms, the remains of a fountain, pottery shards, and relics of weapons: knives and shields of some kind. Some skeletons still wore green stone necklaces, and loops of carnelian and agate around wrists and ankles, a sign no looters had ever found the site. The chambers were too dark for a camera to work properly, so my drawings were the only records. Maybe I got in the way, but that was my job. Kosari still didn’t want me to wander around underground. It was dangerous. I assumed he was talking about cave-ins and shrugged him off, but no, he really did believe I had no business on the dig and should stay behind in town. I shook my head. That wasn’t part of any deal. Berlin or Marseilles were, in their own way, also underground cities, and just as dangerous. We argued in Russian, and I completely abandoned the phony French accent.
“You’re boiling my head like a teapot, Ramin.” I used a language he’d never heard before, then translated my words into Russian.
“Your head was already a tea kettle.” He offered me a cigarette. I didn’t think he was supposed to do this, talk to me alone and make this kind of offer, but I accepted. Why not?
“Are you saying I’m steaming? Because what I mean is, you make me feel confused.”
“I’d like to know what you’re looking for here.”
“A lost city. You know this.”
“You have a map that looks like a very old joke put together by someone pretending not to know electricity has been harnessed and run though bits of wire and cord. Maybe it fell from the sky.”
I pointed out that he had been able to follow it, and he shrugged. He had no answer as to why an old joke of a map turned out to actually lead to the right place. Inhaling deeply, tapping ash against what may have been someone’s door, how could I answer this question? How could I explain the work of a visionary cartographer who probably also believed the world was flat? Kosari took out his knife and began scraping clay from the edge of a lintel, waiting for me to answer as he chipped closer to where my wrist dangled, cigarette in hand. He took it from me and put it out.
“All kinds of things find their way to Berlin. It’s a big city.”
He shrugged again and walked away. We never entirely understood one another, so when he got too frustrated he would cut off the discussion as soon as possible, leaving me to continue drawing or setting up a tripod, but then he would circle back and try to convince me I shouldn’t be anywhere near the ruined metropolis, like it was some kind of poisonous quicksand. It’s alright, I’d repeat in broken Farsi, I’ll grab onto your sleeve so you can pull me out when the skeletons start to suck me down. I reached out and pulled on his white sleeve in order to demonstrate its saving qualities, and though I expected he’d snap his arm away, he said, alright then see if it works. See if what works? We fail to understand each other, all our languages fall into the rocks and vaporize as if someone were telling me, ha, morons, you should never have left this desert place to begin with, because if you return you will never entirely, or with ease, reclaim it. Too many armies have ridden over the city and now what was once yours belongs to others, and it’s unrecognizable in daylight or at night. Why should it be?
April 4, 1937
For weeks neither Bruno nor I could identify any object or carving that could prove absolutely that the Lost Tribes had built and lived in the Suolucidir. The skeletons weren’t talking. Though I was convinced from the outset, Bruno was deeply skeptical. It was the early Berlin version of Bruno, the one intrigued by scientific method, by empiricism, before he was jettisoned from the club. He was being cautious, but we both wanted to believe the Lost Tribes had left evidence of themselves, a way of tapping us on the shoulder and beckoning us, yes you’ll be the ones to lead the way out of the desert that is the twentieth century for you people. I grabbed that idea with the enthusiasm and obsession of a deluded missionary who’s found a few huts in the middle of a jungle and is ready to start converting any lone souls who cross my path, I admit it. Bruno was more guarded.
Bruno’s methodical way of working, marking off blocks of space with rope to be examined one by one like cubes in an ice tray, without jumping to preconceived assumptions, seems needlessly slow. This may not be the lost city, and interesting though our find is, this ruin isn’t the one we’re after, and we should move on. Bruno was sure we’d find a simurgh carved into a stone or some more transparent evidence, a series of block script letters, a sign of some kind. He knew ancient cities didn’t announce their presence with obvious sentry gates, guard towers, refueling stations, immigration and customs, areas where your bags are searched and papers scrutinized, but he still wanted clear evidence: this was Suolucidir.
I was looking around a newly uncovered chamber near the entrance. Webs of dendrite crystals, delicate and fernlike, marked the surface of the rock face. Something caught my hair, and I swatted it away with the veil that had been bunched up in my bag. A small bat fell to the ground. I looked up to see a whole nest of them huddled into a corner. Water dripped overhead, a rivulet ran down the side of the room. I followed the trickle to the base of an ashlar like so many others I’d already come across. The layer of dirt that covered the top surface had accumulated in a pattern of depressions. I brushed off the fine grit and pebbles, and once dirt was swept from the sandstone ashlar, rough carvings were revealed: the eagle, the lion, the olive tree, and the goat, the symbols of Dan, Judah, Ariel, and Naphtali.
April 11, 1937
For the past week we’ve said nothing to the others about my discovery. Bruno asked me to explain the presence of the lion, symbol of Judah. Judah wasn’t one of the lost tribes. But you know everyone gets lost sometimes, I said. We were having our boots mended by a man sitting cross-legged in the market, who spoke no language either of us could understand. Our immediate surroundings receded. We forgot about the Englishmen in Amman. We thought and spoke only of the site we’d found.
We bought pomegranates and figs, eating them in bed, biting the seeds, sometimes swallowing them, sometimes spitting them out, sucking our fingers and staining the blankets. The owner of the rooms we rented would bring us tea late at night if we asked for it, but one night when we hadn’t asked, there was a knock on our door. I was half undressed and hurried to put on clothes. Bruno, sitting on the carpet looking at fragments of pottery, was startled, he swept them under a pillow, and gestured towards the door, it was up to me to answer it. The knock was repeated, and I opened the door mid rap. There was Petakhov with the usual big grin on his face. We thought he and Darya had disappeared into the mountains with their charts and surveying equipment, then suddenly here he was at our door unannounced. In Russia it’s considered bad luck to shake hands over a threshold. We both knew this, so I was at a loss. I didn’t want him to enter our rooms, but didn’t know how to cordially block the door. While I stood, hand on door jamb, Maksim walked right past me, glanced at my dusty clothing that lay in a heap on the floor, and sat on the floor beside Bruno. He removed a bottle from one of his jacket pockets, Bruno nodded at me to find glasses.
“Where’s Darya?” I asked, as if it mattered to me, as if the party wouldn’t be complete without his partner.
“Darya’s an early riser. She’s been asleep for hours.” Maksim took in our room. We’d left some other, earlier, pottery shards on a shelf near Feigen’s books. I wished we’d put them away. Petakhov noticed everything.
“You’ve been busy, I see. Nice. When are your colleagues arriving from Moscow? Not arrived yet? Is there a problem?” His ear-splitting grin shifted to a look of concern. Ushering in a smell of fried onions, sweat stains on his socks, unappealing, perhaps, but Petakhov took over a room as if he were royalty. Ironic, but true. “We are most anxious to meet fellow explorers, you know. Perhaps they are delayed. I could send a telegram, make inquiries to resolve difficulties. Please, my friends.
Is there anything I can do to help?”
Darya gave the appearance of being the kind of person who slept with her unfocused eyes open, but Maksim, so offhand and relaxed about everything, was actually more unpredictable and therefore more alarming.
“It would be no trouble for me to make inquiries, to cable parties I’m in contact with, offices in Grozny, the consulates in Tbilisi and Yerevan.” He took a notebook and pen from a pocket, licked his finger to open a page and prepared to write. “Tell me their entire names.” Raised eyebrows waiting to record full names of the dueling golems Bruno had created. He’d written emes, truth, on their foreheads and launched them from mud into the world to defend us, and now they were dissolving back into mud, just when we needed them.
“Please don’t trouble yourselves. We expect Bezymensky and Antonov to appear any day. Meanwhile we needed to begin, of course, and so we haven’t waited for them. They wouldn’t expect this of us.”
Maksim still held his pen, frozen. “Are you sure? There can be delays on the trans-Caucasus rails, especially traveling through Georgia as you approach Azerbaijan.” He took a square piece of paper from his pocket, drew a rough wide-channeled hourglass-shaped map of the Caucasus, a line representing rail tracks, and x’s marking spots of potential trouble, then folded the paper into a triangle. Not yet finished, he folded the triangle in half, and so on until he had a small nub of a triangle. “Okay, my friends, this is up to you.” He chuckled as he tossed the nugget of paper high into the air and caught it in his teeth like a circus performer, then spat it across the room. “Darya and I have been speaking, and we would enjoy going to your camp, maybe tomorrow is good and alright for you.”
How did he know about our camp? Who told him? Kosari, maybe?
“Doesn’t your surveying take you further east? Our camp is to the north.” I stood in front of Feigen’s books, leaning my back against their spines. Bruno scratched the bridge of his nose over and over as if leisurely trying to reach bone. What he was thinking, I don’t know. He saw no harm in conversing with the two Russians, in fact he enjoyed their company. For him they were charming and witty, joking about faraway Stalin and Bukharin, big deep laughs, very different from the secretive and desperate nature of life in Berlin and Marseilles. What did I see when I looked at them or heard their voices? Midnight arrests. Petakhov saying, fooled you with that joke about Lenin and a penguin walk into a bar. If you hadn’t laughed you wouldn’t be breathing your last now.
Petakhov nodded, yes, my Sido, that’s true. He stretched out on the carpet like a lazy cat. They were, indeed, working in a different quadrant, but insisted they could afford to take a day off, and expand the purview of their researches, it all needed to be mapped eventually. He’s curious about that area, north by northwest. He and Darya Vasilisa hadn’t looked around there much, and that area has never been mapped. He sat up and, leaned towards Bruno who slouched against a wall.
“My work has taken me many places.” Petakhov reached over and tapped Bruno’s arm. Even if I held up a sign warning him not to laugh at Maksim Petakhov’s penguin jokes he would wave me away. “Atlases give you instant histories with scarcely a printed word, imagine page after page indicating the shifting boundaries of our host country from the time of Darius to Reza Shah Pahlavi.” He made a hmm noise as he exhaled deeply, eyes shut, miming serious thoughts. “My favorite atlas: the borders of Russia in 1900, 1917, and 1937. Governments need maps. Sovereignty is cemented by graphic models, no?” It was not a question that required an answer. He flipped the pages of an air book. “Maps don’t only tell you where you are: 50 kilometers south of the source of the Nile or 10 kilometers from the center of Krakatoa, they also show you your past and possible future choices. An animated cartoon map would be best. Molten and evaporating lakes, mountain ranges folded up into escalating peaks, then wearing out into hillocks. One day you think your city is the center of the universe, and the next day it’s vanished off the face of the earth.”
Maksim pulled a small slide rule from a pocket and slid the bar up and down the scale while Bruno got up and poured more vodka. For a moment no one spoke.
“There are many precise depictions of the earth’s surface. You can align the rhumbs, the Mercator points of any number of highly accurate two-dimensional maps, and each will contradict the next, and each will be true. I’ve examined the dream maps of the tattooed Siberian Chukchi, the charts of 16th-century Conquistadores who believed they knew the location of a city of gold guarded by a plumed serpent, though they never would see it, and maps of the soul drawn by monks who never left their island monastery. Here are the Straits of Redemption, here lies the Archipelago of Temptation and so on.” He gestured into the air. “Or maybe it was the Straits of Temptation and the Archipelago of Redemption.” He shrugged. “My favorite map, perhaps the most accurate of all, is the one Stevenson drew of Treasure Island. Who’s to say any of them, even the fairy tales, are altogether wrong?”
“Where did you get a copy of Treasure Island?” Bruno asked.
“You find these things. It happens.” Petakhov raised and lowered his eyebrows, a kind of facial shrug, as if to say, this is no big deal, what do you care?
“In Russian, you read this book?” Bruno could barely contain his skepticism.
“No, in English.”
“What is Treasure Island?” I asked.
“A story about a voyage to the center of the earth,” Bruno replied.
“Stick to what you know,” Petakhov advised Bruno.
Bruno didn’t appreciate advice from anyone, especially someone who, as far as he could tell, traveled with little more than a measuring tape and a bag of stakes. Maksim ignored him, and shifted around on the carpet, so he was positioned closer to me. He wasn’t interested in humoring Bruno. I’ve often found myself on the receiving end of people’s monologues. Tonight would be no exception.
“What is my personal map? Imagine your history in terms of a cartographic legend: red lines for willing travel, blue for other reasons, coercion, maybe or some form of relocation, not your personal choice. Broken green line stands for rail travel, violet for walking or automobile, whatever you choose. Here’s mine: I, Maksim Petakhov, was born outside Moscow, served in the army near Turkey, played soccer in Berlin and all over Europe, before injury, went to university back in Moscow. Wait, let me tell you something interesting that will add to my map.” He outlined these travels on the carpet, turning central diamond shapes into continents and border arabesques into rivers. “In the army I was trained in orienteering, that is, traveling by foot without a map or compass through the steppes, marshes, parts of Siberia. See, the map expands.”
When did he learn English?
“Our maps, Sido’s and mine, are practically contiguous, and not very interesting.” Bruno leaned forward, elbows on the table. Bruno spun a tale of estates and dachas where none had existed before. I was the daughter of a circus performer taken in by his family. My mother was a trapeze artist who fell to her death, trail of feathers and sequins, a comet’s tail behind her. That was all we knew. Too painful for Sido to talk about, but her map led her all over the Soviet Union from Ossetia to Uzbekistan until outside Moscow her father gave her to Bruno’s family, wealthy porcelain makers. He wanted her to have a good education, so he left her, age nine, and here he exits the story. Bruno and Sido, therefore, met as children, fell in love, and so on. All this was news to me, though I nodded in agreement. Maksim leaned in close as if to examine the space behind my retinas with a tiny light. I panicked. Weren’t we still supposed to be from Alsace? Or had we managed to leave Moscow to study in France?
“Yes, I can imagine you came from people who flew in the sky. You muttered to Kosari in a language you know he won’t understand, a language one rarely hears in Moscow anymore. People who speak it disappear. Bruno, do you also speak this language?”
“She was speaking Esperanto, and no, I don’t know any illegal languages.”
“Esperanto isn’t illegal.”
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br /> “It is in some places,” I said. “Esperanto is the most logical of all languages. I was just trying it out. His Russian isn’t bad, but there are gaps in his understanding, you know. Nothing serious, but he needs to know what we’re asking of him.”
Maksim frowned and seemed to chew on this idea. He poured more vodka into the little glasses and said, “Let’s get lost.”
“Sure, Max, why not?” I said with false camaraderie, and I leaned closer into the chest of the former soccer player, closer but not touching. He closed his eyes for a moment as if again miming deep, hard to retrieve thoughts.
“My work already makes me lost. The more you find, the more you pin down, the less stable is the ground under your feet. The more likely someone is going to look at your work and say, go take a shit in the ocean, and you say what ocean?”
I’d heard that phrase in the language we weren’t supposed to speak since I could remember, and now Maksim was using it, and winking as if to say you two know exactly what I’m talking about. He poured more vodka into his own glass.
“Who’s to say the boundaries of Country X, the Disputed Territories of Discombobula, lie along this random crooked line, include this peninsula or that isthmus? Maybe the isthmus and the arbitrary line through the plains of Repetitia really all belong to the United Federation of Ironia and its far-flung colonies. What if we design countries based on languages rather than geography, whether posting our borders on man-made markings or those that occur naturally. Say, for example, if you speak Russian you reside in the Soviet state, but if a settlement of like-minded speakers resides in Berlin, maybe you lay claim to a bit of Soviet turf within a Rheinish protectorate, say. If you speak Russian, there you are. If you speak Chukchi, and there are no more Chukchi speakers, you are a nation of one until you die, and you take your language, songs, laws, holiday feast practices, everything about you goes down the hole along with your heap of interlocking bones.”