by Susan Daitch
Persia
Arriving in Duzdab on May 17, 1914, Hilliard took a villa with a garden bordered by mango and apricot trees. He plunged into the bazaar and came back loaded with kilims and hookahs of all sizes. Meanwhile Congreaves bargained over the price of camels, wheelbarrows, makeshift sieves, buckets, and rope. Ryder wrote that on warm nights people slept on carpets on their rooftops. He was enchanted by this scene, a patchwork of colored carpets spread out before him, but the vista only served to make his partner silent and depressed. In a photograph of Hilliard from this period, he temporarily abandoned his Egyptian costume and adopted the sartorial agenda of an upper-class Tehrani: a long collarless shirt, high narrow trousers held in place by a cashmere sash, a long V-neck coat slit at the sides.
They toured the Sassanid ruins in the Kahjeh mountains and had their picture taken sitting on the crumbling ridge of a wall. They studied topographic maps looking at likely spots close to sources of water. Congreaves interviewed local shepherds, hired guides and diggers, and began looking for clues in the area several kilometers due east of Duzdab. No one could tell him anything about the lost city. He began to have doubts, it was possible the whole thing was a hoax. Its kings, battles, and ingenious irrigation systems were no more concrete than a toll bridge in Atlantis. At the same time, he was anxious to get to work one way or another, arguing with Archer, kicking the rolls of carpets Hilliard had collected, but Ryder, too, had his distractions. He was often waylaid, intrigued by the ruckus of cockfights set up in dusty alleys or narrow courtyards.
One night, the fight hadn’t gone well for Ryder. He’d lost a little money, not much, but had to ask Hilliard for more, and this always made him feel humiliated and irritated. Dawn was at hand, it was time to leave, but as he elbowed his way to the edge of the crowd a man with a caprine face and a long split beard holding a dead rooster by its feet bumped into him. It’s unlikely this was really an accident. Word had spread around the city that two Englishmen were poking around looking for ancient sites. The man followed Ryder, talking about the fight, the different birds and their owners, trying to strike up a conversation. Swinging the rooster as he walked, he smiled and bobbed his head, not put off by Ryder’s coldness. Egyptians and other Africans had known to keep a physical distance from the Englishman. The man’s obliviousness to custom, his lack of respect would have ordinarily infuriated Ryder, but he was so distracted by his losses, he ignored the man until he described something he had seen while hunting a gazelle in the foothills. Congreaves stopped short and turned to listen more attentively, as the man holding the dead rooster knew he would. He described trailing the wounded animal to a cave he’d never seen before. The gazelle was an easy quarry, so once he got to the cave he looked around. Though dark he could make out the shapes of large urns and piles of pottery, some metal, too, glinted in the depths. Fearing the encroaching night, robbers, djinns, British or Russian mercenaries or who knows what, he finished off the gazelle, slung the animal over his shoulder and quickly returned home.
Telling the man to leave the dead rooster by the side of the road, Ryder led the way to Hilliard’s villa.
First Signs
Archer received them in the main room, lying on floor pillows, smoking, playing with the untucked tail of a sky blue turban. Taking stock of the expensive carpets from Tabriz and Esfahan and strings of camel bells used for decoration, the loss of his prize rooster earlier in the night was forgotten. Ryder had the hunter repeat his story, which he, translated for Hilliard. In the second narration the descriptions of what lay in the cave grew increasingly ornate. Archer looked surprisingly impassive, perhaps he had finally learned the art of bargaining. Gesturing with his hands to indicate the size of the urns and the shape of some of the pottery he had managed to see, the hunter raised his voice, feeling he was beginning to lose ground. Ryder, too, turned skeptical and feared that the man had smoked too much kif. Still, it was a tantalizing clue, and they had no others.
Finally the hunter showed signs of giving up. Arguing with the white man in a turban was going nowhere. He let Ryder know he had wasted too much time with them already when he had the lost investment of the rooster to deal with. The hunter turned to go, taking his leave like a supplicant with a secret axe to grind. As he began to make his way to the door, Hilliard stood up abruptly, but in doing so his whole turban fell apart and landed in a mass of cloth at his feet. Strips of longish red-brown hair fell around his ears, though he had very little on top. Ryder believed all was now lost. The ridiculous are not in a position to make deals to their own advantage. Headgear down around his ankles, Hilliard rasped at the native to wait. At first the hunter smiled like someone who, after an unforeseen struggle, suddenly lands a big fish.
Then his expression changed again. Examining the drying rooster blood on his sleeve, looking as if greatly pained, the man spoke.
“The route out beyond the edge of the city is deeply rutted and fraught with dangers: bandits, wild animals.” The hunter crossed his arms, appearing stern and concerned for their safety. “Perhaps it isn’t worth the trouble to take such risks. Maybe I’ve been too rash. Yes, I too, am decided against the venture. I can’t insure your safety, and I’ll lose a day’s work in the process.”
Hilliard doubled the amount they’d agreed to pay him. After stroking his beard in stagey contemplation, the Duzdabi relented. For that amount, plus the cost of food he himself would provide, he would show the Englishmen the cave of the wounded gazelle.
They engaged him, giving him a bag of krans, flattened balls of silver and alloy that passed as coinage, and the next morning the hunter appeared at Hilliard’s door. Hilliard noted the man was wrapped in a shawl, long white shirt, white trousers, a round hat made of grey sheep’s hair perched on his head, and he carried a gun.
As they made their way through the market on their way out of Duzdab, Ryder stopped to speak to a Bakhtiari woman in a long scarf with tiny mirrors and coins sewn into it. Her eyes were outlined with kajul, ornaments sewn into her headscarf dangled over her forehead and glinted in the sun. Neither their guide nor Hilliard were amused, and they walked ahead of the laggard. Over the course of the night, recovering from his humiliation and loss at the cockfight, Ryder had begun to have doubts about the hunter’s story, but they’d made an agreement. If they reneged there were ways a local could make life difficult for them. At least Ryder now realized this. No longer in a place where there were many other Europeans, Ryder packed a knife in his belt, as usual, but this time he was afraid that once in the desert the man with the dead rooster whose tale, by the light of the next day, seemed much less credible, could slit their throats and rob them. It is a marker of how much of a dead end Congreaves believed the hunter to be, that he stopped to flirt with a woman, endangering all of them, rather than get on with the exploration they’d traveled so far to undertake.
The hunter led them out of the city into the hills. They were nearly a day’s hike from Duzdab, and during the trek he took a few wrong turns, causing the small party to backtrack and lose valuable daylight hours. Ryder suspected they would have to set up camp in the mountains, unable to return to the city by nightfall, and this made him uneasy. The hunter spoke to their porters in a dialect Ryder didn’t fully understand, though he strained to hear every syllable. Finally in a small rock-strewn ravine the hunter led them to the entrance of the site where he had followed the wounded gazelle. Walking several kilometers into the dark cave they couldn’t see anything but veined rock face. Impatient and still far from convinced they had found anything but another dead-end they’d paid dearly for, Ryder went ahead of the others. Cursing and stumbling, deaf to the sound of water dripping somewhere ahead of him, he stopped when the passage forked, and then his torch lit on something he’d never seen before: a long notched blade leaning against a tall clay vessel, as if the warrior who guarded the thing had only stepped out for a moment’s cigarette break. The edge was still sharp. The blade was curved and serrated, designed to inflict maximum damage. He
held his torch higher. More objects lay in the crumbling channels further on, and he shouted for his companion as he’d never in his life shouted before.
They spent hours marveling over the cache of scrolls and other objects, then against their guide’s warnings, Ryder took a torch and walked further into the cave. The passage dipped and bent, the ceiling dropped so he had to stoop, but just as he was about to return, convinced they’d found all there was to unearth, his torch light glanced upon the bones of a female skeleton lying near a series of plates. Her shredded clothing was splattered with clay slip and flecks of paint. Her skull was some distance away, but there was no evidence looters had found the site. Apart from headlessness, the woman was so complete, other victims might be nearby, executed by the same sword. Though he moved rocks, dislodged clumps of wet clay from the cave bottom, no other skeletal remains were located, only a second notched blade with an inlaid handle stuck point down in the dirt near the skeleton’s foot, as if dropped in a hurry. He tried to measure the chamber, but he was so excited the tape kept getting caught on his rifle stock, though it was slung over his shoulder.
Hilliard and Congreaves had found, if not the city itself, then evidence of it hidden in and around the caves. The cuneiform and other markings were distinctly different from other Seulucid city-states that Rawlinson or anyone else had ever documented. They claimed the newly discovered relics could only have come from Suolucidir. Local people were quickly hired as diggers and porters, and the excavation process began. Each and every item Ryder and Archer inventoried, packed up, and dispatched.
Suolucidir, Found and Lost
The plates found near the skeleton were sent separately to London, and these found their way to the storage vaults of the British Museum. Perhaps Ryder and Archer considered these to be the least valuable, if the not the most curious, of the relics they plundered, and so made a token donation out of all their takings. Though Ryder wasn’t ordinarily a superstitious man, the plates’ proximity to the beheaded skeleton made him leery of keeping them in his possession. Hilliard and Congreaves ultimately took everything they could lay their hands on, leaving not so much as a bent coin or bronze tool behind. Thin-ankled camels staggered under the weight of the loot, their bells ringing plaintively as they carried the treasure from the hills of Duzdab to the Persian coast where the sum total of the surviving relics of Suolucidir were loaded on a ship bound for Deptford, England.
Their ship, HMS Dorchester, sank on the 14th of July 1915, torpedoed by a German sub in the Straits of Hormuz. Apart from the plates sent to the British Museum, whatever else that had been culled from their excavations, including valuable maps of the area locating the sites where they dug, all now lay at the bottom of the Gulf of Oman, along with the remains of Archer Hilliard and Ryder Congreaves.
Edna, What Remains
In England, from Oxford to London, many of those who had sneered at Ryder now filled trenches in France and Belgium. As they and others shipped out, bound for mustard gas and battlefields, jobs were left behind, waiting to be filled.
“You’re looking for a place? Well, I don’t know for certain, but it seems to me they’re a bit short-handed down the road. Tell them Jackie sent you.”
A casual conversation with a neighbor led Edna to a position behind the till at Wallingford’s, a greengrocer’s a short bus ride away. The Wallingford sons were fighting in Flanders, and Edna soon proved she was quick with sums. The sons never returned, and Edna found her calling: weighing pineapples, wrapping fruit in brown paper, chatting up, and making change. Edna had no other family and was very much on her own. The Crystal Palace job had been all about talking and conversing with other guides when the opportunity presented itself, but with no real companions at Wallingford’s, the loneliness of the long hours while her two children rolled oranges and cabbage heads around a back room, was often acute.
She saw so many return from the foreign adventure of the Great War missing not just limbs and bits of their sanity but parts of their faces: eyes, noses, chins. A young man in a metal mask would patronize Wallingford’s from time to time. Most of his face had been blown off in a trench, or more likely, as he emerged from one. One of his eyes was a blue marble, but the other one could see the piles of peaches and radishes and Edna herself licking her forefinger as she counted pound notes. Did he, too, want to ask her out for a coffee she didn’t drink? He noticed when Edna gave him too much change and corrected her with as much annoyance as if she’d shortchanged him. He didn’t want her charity, and so when he came in she drew on what reserves of small talk she could drum up. The weather? Off limits pretty much. You ought not, she felt, suggest a man in a metal mask should especially stay indoors in case of rain. As seasons slipped by quickly, strawberries and asparagus giving way to tomatoes and squash, then sliding to apples and root vegetables, Edna wasn’t sure she could comment, ah well, we’re all getting older, aren’t we, to a man whose face never aged. Though bus conductors looked into the distance, and his landlady stared at objects to the left of his face, Edna looked directly at him. She searched the surface of the mask the way someone would search any face, remembering the tilt of the eyes, the arch of the nose, a constellation of freckles, the kinds of things that become imprinted when one falls for someone, and can’t get their face with its ballet of reactions out of one’s head. The metal man’s face offered none of these signs or anchors and couldn’t reflect even a glimmer of affection. His desires couldn’t be telegraphed through the watchmakers’ screws, invisible hinges, joints, and rivets. They were dammed up behind it. Edna wondered how could she or anyone kiss him? If you bite into a peach, it’s a living thing, you taste the juice, and so on, but the man in the mask stumped Edna, and made her uncomfortable. She felt sorry for him, and he knew it. Eventually he stopped coming in to the shop. Edna resolved to always keep her children close to home.
In due course she became the shop’s manager, performing so well at the job and so efficiently, Wallingford’s was able to expand to the shopfront next door. She and the children were also able to move to a bigger flat closer to the store, and if Edna learned to be certain of her place in the world, at the same time she was never altogether happy with the limited horizons allotted to her. She wasn’t sure how and exactly when the boot heel came down. Perhaps conversation with a certain class of customer swerved toward the familiar, the personal. Yes, my husband, too, ran off with a woman from the embassy in Cairo, was not something you were supposed say to the red-eyed woman who asked for a pound of nectarines, assuming she, and not her cook was doing the shopping. Edna tried to make conversation from time to time, but Wallingford’s lay very close to an expensive neighborhood, and for these customers, the gap between grocers and residents was very wide. The door slammed shut in her face again.
The business thrived, hired more employees. Now, when Edna spoke of Ryder at all, she only used his name as a synonym for a slack-off. Telling shop girls who worked under her to stop rydering around, for example, or scolding a non-family-related child not to be a little ryder. They intuited the meaning without ever guessing the true root of the word.
Young Ryder grew up, but university was out of the question, and for Edna, that was one more black mark against his father, about whom by now neither she nor anyone else could remember much. Ryder II married a postman’s daughter who found unpacking crates of orange pippins and making sure the Estremoz plums from Portugal didn’t slip out of their tissue paper wrappers to be entirely beneath her.
Photographs of Edna from this period show a woman with a small mouth aswim in a large chin with a halo of tightly curled hair, like the kind you see on statues of Roman Empresses. But that tough customer look was deceiving. The former Crystal Palace guide who had lectured to crowds of visitors about the promises of the future, who had learned to make do, to survive, even to survive well, and not cause too much trouble to anyone, was seething inside. Television, when it came along, made Edna angry. The images on the screen said: here’s a taste of the world
. It reminded her of what might have been.
Tilda Congreaves-Sutcliffe
30 Regent’s Crescent
Hackney, London
April 1986
Dear Mr. Bokser,
It was a shock and a pleasure to get your letter, and I am sorry you went through so much trouble trying to find me. You were correct in your assumption. I’m the last of the Congreaves branch that migrated from what is now Zimbabwe to England. Ryder Dunleavey Congreaves, the archaeologist, was my great-grandfather. My grandmother was Alicia Congreaves-Sutcliffe, whose papers you have acquired. Alicia never really knew her father, but in 1959 she traveled to Cairo and Iran in order to learn what had happened to him, and to write of his explorations that had been forgotten by the rest of the world. It was her desire to learn something of the man her mother rarely spoke of, so her trip was of a personal nature, as well.
I do have letters from Ryder to Edna, pictures, some bits of ephemera (trunk labels, receipts for Channel crossing tickets, train to Marseilles, boat to Alexandria) and have enclosed photocopies because I’m using the originals in a huge installation piece under construction for one of my classes at Royal Art College. The project, I firmly believe, is the best use for this material that comments not only on my own family, but on Britain’s colonial ambitions and shortcomings in our post-colonial marketplace. It’s entitled: A Brief History of the Congreaves, a Double Self-Destructing Panorama. My installations are formed of all kinds of cultural detritus: a fan of postcards, bottles arranged on a fir-like bottle rack (borrowed from Duchamp), stuffed animals, old books, programs from plays, dolls, discarded toys of all kinds, a grill made of cigarettes, gum wrappers twisted into stamens of fruit wrapper flowers. I find material in anything biodegradable. My soon to be unveiled personal Congreaves Family Pyre is the least doctored, least transformed of all my works. I’ve pasted everything on a portable wall, then next Tuesday, in a week’s time, will light a flame while a friend films the whole disintegrating shooting match.