Читать книгу The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir - Susan Daitch - Страница 10

“I yama sad dictapator. Me sheeps ain’t got no sense. I yam king of 10,000 fatheads.”

E.C. Segar

Popeye August 21, 1935

JAHANSHAH ROSTAMI, SON OF THE mineralogist who gave my father the Nieumacher field notes, was very eager to help with the search. He had already collected old survey maps and interviewed tribal leaders and shepherds who traversed the area from the Burnt City in the north to Zahedan and farther south as well. On my way to his house I stopped to watch a man with an orange-hennaed beard sit on the floor of his shop hammering copper bowls into shallow lakes; other smaller vessels like jazvahs for making coffee were strung from the roof over his head. I walked on, the sound of hammer against copper following me down the lane. At a fruit stand a bare bulb swung above a pile of cherries and baskets full of branches of green dates. A pile of garnet-streaked pomegranates spilled into the road. Filling a bag with them, I bought some to bring to Rostami and his family. I knew they were well off and lived in a wealthier quarter of Zahedan. Like his father, Jahanshah worked for an oil company, determining the structure of oil fields hidden as deep below rocks and sand as a Suolucidir courtyard.

Expecting me to call on the very evening of my arrival in Zahedan, he opened the door almost before I knocked. Jahanshah remembered my father’s visits from when he was a child and claimed he could see the resemblance, but since he was only a few years older than I, more likely his memory was helped by a photograph of a group of geologists taken at a meeting in Tehran at which our fathers were both present. I had a copy of the same picture at home. Rostami had curly black hair receding in a V shape, ’70s-era sideburns and a moustache. Actually it was he and I who looked similar, though people who look alike rarely recognize the similarity themselves; others usually point it out.

I was not to spend much time in Rostami’s house, but in some ways it resembled the house I grew up in. Apart from turquoise tiles decorated with Kufic script, the Rostamis had the same feldspar bookends, probably from the same conference in Pikes Peak attended decades earlier, a relic, for both of us, of another age. Next to the bookends was a picture of Jahanshah’s brother, who had died in a car accident. Also on the shelf was a rocket-shaped mug from NASA and a statuette of Aladdin from Disneyworld as well as a small rubber Mickey Mouse. I was told that Rostami no longer studied rocks, now he taught math at a local school. Mrs. Rostami stood in an arched doorway tapping red fingernails against the jamb, waiting to be introduced. Her eyebrows met like a black tiara that had slipped down her crown, and she smiled in my direction, but also looked at me as if I were a large, new piece of furniture whose use was unclear, the kind of thing that would cause as many unforeseen problems as provide dubious entertainment, like a record player that arrives with no needles. Nice in theory but presenting complications before it can fulfill its promises.

Rostami had two very young sons, one who pushed himself in a sitting position from one stair to the next, making a thumping sound as his butt hit one step after the next, accompanied by a humming at the back of his throat, while the other one hid, reluctant to meet me at all. I presented them with a box of Batman figures, which they swooped down upon. I had opted for several varieties of Batman (Batman the color of blue Jell-O, Batman with armaments, Batman with a long voluminous cape) but forgot the batteries that would make the superheroes light up at knee and elbow joints. Near the bookcase, displayed on a pedestal was a silver hookah, the red snake wound around its engraved body, ending in a silver nozzle. One of the blue plastic Batmans quickly made it his lair, riding the snake like a fiend.

That first night we ate jeweled rice and chicken with pomegranate, and drank cardamom-scented tea. Rostami was gregarious. Holding the small glass of tea up to his eye he swirled the leaves and cardamom shells as if it was going to explain something to him. Finding Suolucidir would be like driving a stake into the ground, making a claim for a story that would be definitive and unalterable. His wife went to look for batteries for the Batmen. She didn’t like me very much; that was clear. It was as if she feared I was some kind of thief.

Like many Zahedanis, Rostami had visited the Burnt City site to the north, the way Americans would tour an Iroquois village, but he confessed he’d had an odd feeling at the site, as if he were looking at the severed half of a Siamese twin. In the 1970s Maurizzio Tosi, an Italian archaeologist working in the Burnt City, had found the oldest known dice, caraway seeds, a backgammon set made of turquoise and agate, skulls that exhibited signs of brain surgery, and an artificial eye made of gold and bitumen paste, the iris engraved with sun-like rays. Rostami felt the Burnt City couldn’t have been an isolated prodigy city-state. There had to be others. Something was missing.

“You must understand there have been major earthquakes in the region since the Nieumachers were here. Whole villages were flattened in one spasm like so many houses made of cards.” Jahanshah picked up the rubber Mickey Mouse and referred to him in English as the Hebraic mouse who pops everywhere. He was skeptical about the Nieumachers, I could tell. The shape-shifting Nieumachers were far more troublesome to him than the English who had come before them. The British had just wanted loot. It wasn’t clear to him what the Nieumachers, who had come to Persia under the auspices of something called the “Franco-Soviet Friendship Dig,” had wanted. They were protean, ambiguous, claiming land, maybe, more meddling and more dangerous, he thought, though in this he was mistaken, not recognizing the true fox that had had every intention of biting Persia on the ass.

He, too, knew about Hilliard and Congreaves, the pair of Englishmen who had come looking for Suolucidir maybe fifteen or twenty years before the Nieumachers arrived. Of the English not much was known, but he was acquainted with a man, Javad Eyvani, who claimed his father had worked for the Nieumachers, and he might have some clue as to the exact location of the site.

The next day we drove to a block of low, anonymous apartment flats that looked as though they had been built recently. A child peered at us from a doorway; a woman in black passed us on the stairway, her chador making a swishing sound against the tile. We made our way up a staircase that smelled of garlic fried by the fistful and the sourness of dried limes left too long on a windowsill.

Jahanshah knocked on door number nine, which was guarded by a blue glass orb intended to ward off the evil eye. He zipped and unzipped the pockets of his leather jacket as we waited. Somewhere in the building, or just outside it, dogs barked. After a few minutes an older man in billowing sherwal trousers, obviously annoyed at the sound, opened the door and yelled down the hall, but when he recognized Jahanshah he smiled in a ‘what do you want?’ sort of way, glad to see Rostami, but suspicious of the cause of the visit. Rostami introduced me to Javad, a retired oil rig worker he knew from years ago when they had both worked in the western part of the country in Khuzistan. When living on the gulf, both men had reminisced about Zahedan, the city of their childhood, and both had since returned to it, although for different reasons. Javad now lived with his daughter and her family who were rarely home, either out at work or school, so he spent much of his days alone in the apartment or at cafés. Javad wore a long white shirt like an Indian kurta, a brown coat, and had a piece of cloth wound around his head like Marat in the bath. He had very dark circles under his eyes and, though finally smiling when he showed us in, he didn’t really look very happy. Muttering something about the Sikhs down the hall he motioned us in with the wave of a cigarette. We walked through the kitchen to a small room lined with pillows and sat cross-legged on the floor while Javad poured tea. A news anchor was visible on the television, but the sound was turned down. Bollywood music played softly from a cassette on top of the television. Javad and Rostami asked about one another’s families, then got down to business.

“Do you remember the city you used to talk about when we were out in the oil fields in Khuzistan? Do you remember those stories? Was it your father or your grandfather who worked for those what were they, Russian? Long time ago.”

“It was my father,” Javad said, offering us a bowl of green pistachios.

“Do you think you know where the site was located? Did your father ever say?”

Javad laid his hands out palms up to indicate they were, by and large, empty, but there were possibilities. His father had taken him to the site once.

“A road lined with cypress, a grove of almond trees. It was over forty years ago, but perhaps not a great deal has changed since then.”

He grabbed a fistful of pistachios, cracked them open, then popped them into his mouth. If it were possible to do so, the city would be an interesting thing to find, he said, licking salt and green dust from his fingers. The search would get him out of the apartment building and away from the Sikhs who irritated him on a daily basis. He would make some money from us and a lot more if any Suolucidiri treasure remained to be unearthed. I found myself grinning and humming along with the music, tapping fingers on knees. This was turning out to be easier than I thought.

The next morning we picked up Javad and headed out of the city, driving south by southwest. It had been a wild desolate place where people hunted, Javad remembered. The almond grove and line of cypress trees perhaps marked a tamer part of the route closer to Zahedan, before you got to the real wilderness. Not as much hunting now, Javad, said, but then it was more common.

We looked for groves and tree-lined roads, backtracking, trying other ways out of the city. I turned the dial up and down on the car radio, but all we got was crackling buzz. Forget it, Javad said. I slumped down in the front seat. Was he giving up already? You’ll find no music was all he meant. Rostami nodded and switched the radio off.

In the forty years since Javad was a child, the trees could well have been cut down, if not for McDonalds, oil pipelines, poppy fields or interstate highways, then for something. We spent days driving around with the retired oil rig worker, but as we turned off a particularly bad road, he jumped up in his seat. We stopped the jeep and continued on foot as he instructed. An outcropping of red rocks shaped like a pod of whales looked familiar to him. Javad was sure the cave had been close by. The rocky cliffs, the stunted trees marked the entrance to a cave.

“This is where the camels were loaded. There were no roads, but they traveled east of Zahedan, then followed a trail up to these hills and this cave.”

“How do we know this is the one?” Jahanshah asked, but he was grinning slightly.

“I remember exactly,” Javad answered, squinting into the sun.

We spent days exploring the cave, looking for some remnant, some fragment the Nieumachers might have left behind. After about a quarter of a mile slowly sloping underground, passages branched in many directions, some with precipitous drops. The channels, Jahanshah had warned, were not safe, prone to pockets of toxic gas, cave-ins, and not well explored. In 1939 with equipment not as good as ours they had no chance of going far into the cave, even allowing for seismic activity that could have altered some passages and sealed others completely.

One afternoon I went a little ahead of Javad and Jahanshah and down a passage that inclined steeply while becoming so narrow I had to duck, nearly doubling over. A ledge containing what could have been fragments of pottery jutted into the space, but the pieces were so small I couldn’t positively identify them as anything. Pottery or crap? Bits of bone no bigger than a fingernail were scattered nearby. Even Le Plongeon had his glyphs and chacmools to misinterpret. Here was only dust. Though the three of us explored the area with high hopes, there was nothing more in the cave, and we never found any further evidence of human habitation. Leonardo Da Vinci designed a kind of lethal chariot, a plan that expanded on the Roman Scythian chariot. He added four large scythes which would rotate and cut down everything in their path, but the problem was that the horses themselves were vulnerable, too, and if they bolted, they could themselves be sliced. I felt as if, like this faulty vehicle, I was taking a few steps forward, but I ended up shooting myself in the foot and going nowhere. What once seemed like a brilliant plan turned out to be a dangerous waste of time. I paid Javad for his time out of the Zafar money, but finally all we had were dead ends.