Читать книгу The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir - Susan Daitch - Страница 14

Only the pen of a Macauley or the brush of a Vereschagin could adequately portray the rapidly shifting scenes attending the downfall of this ancient nation — scenes in which two powerful and presumably enlightened Christian countries played fast and loose with truth, honor, decency and law, one at least, hesitating not even the most barbarous cruelties to accomplish its political designs and to put Persia beyond hope of self-regeneration.

W. Morgan Shuster, The Strangling of Persia

Washington, D.C., April 30, 1912

ON NOVEMBER 4, 1979, HOSTAGES were taken in the American embassy in Tehran. They demanded that the Shah, who was in Egypt receiving treatment for cancer, be returned to Iran to stand trial. American flags and effigies of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi (though the exact physical template used by his Savile Row tailors remained untouched) were set on fire, and since the United States had supported the Shah, this shouldn’t have really come as a surprise to anyone. Why were my co-nationalists so shocked and so angry? Even children wrote anti-American messages on the embassy walls and elsewhere. By July 1980 diplomatic relations between Iran and the United States had deteriorated. The Ayatollah Khomeini, who returned from exile in Paris to take over once the Shah was deposed, turned out to be, in his own way, just as brutal as his predecessor. Even in my remote corner of the country, individuals weren’t invisible to the long arm of whoever was in power in the capital, and further excavation was becoming increasingly difficult, as people lived in fear of the army, the Revolutionary Guard, Khomeini’s Basiji, and others I couldn’t identify. Just as the door to Suolucidir creaked open after being locked and bolted for thousands of years, it was swinging shut again.

In Zahedan, where every market stall had had to post a picture of Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, suddenly all those portraits, big and small, were reduced to ashes and smoke. Late at night, during an insomniac’s ramble, I saw a lone orange fire, a solitary kebab man at the end of my street, enveloped by the smell of grilled lamb and advieh, a spice mixture of cumin, cardamom, ginger, and rose petals. A Kurd, perhaps, he wore a black-and-white-checkered jamdani around his head. Leaning against a high wall of sun-dried brick, a second man laid out branches of dates, oranges, and bundles of henna leaves, and beside him another merchant polished his array of samovars, fluted and pinch-waisted; elongated passersby were reflected many times over in the silver and brass surfaces. Another man set up a line of narghile, coppery, engraved, silver and glass-bowled. The kebabwala threw a scrap to a dog.

I was working deep in the Suolucidir site when I heard someone yelling for me to hurry back to the entrance. We had to leave quickly. Soldiers were coming. The yelling got louder, more frantic. No militia of any kind had visited the city before, or at least not for thousands of years, and it was safe to assume these men weren’t here for a friendly field trip. The shouting grew louder, I heard the sound of jeeps pulling up to the edge of the site, and running through the labyrinth as best I remembered it, I emerged to see soldiers herding some of the excavators into trucks while others were being questioned. I was the only American, but I no longer had my passport.

A soldier pointed his Kalashnikov at me and yelled I should stand in line with others on the edge of the pit. One by one each man was asked his name and to surrender his identity papers. I had thirty seconds to decide whether to say Ariel Bokser. Ariel Bokser, I’m American. I lost my passport, and no I haven’t yet reported it missing.

It just came out instinctively with no premeditation. Ariel Bokser was back in the United States explaining that his accent had been acquired during years spent in Jerusalem living in an apartment above a falafel stand named Shushan. Ramin Kosari’s papers had been lost or stolen. I groped my pockets like a cartoon character who’s just been pickpocketed. The last thing I heard was an explosion near my head, and I felt a searing pain as I fell backward.

I passed out for the second time in Suolucidir. It was as if something in the underground city could snatch your consciousness if you weren’t vigilant. When I came to, it was night. I’d been thrown over the side of the pit, landing on a mess of straw and sand. Around me were the bodies of six of my fellow diggers. They had been shot and then toppled over the edge.

A jumble of limbs lay under me. If I knelt to get up, my hands and knees pressed into someone’s spine and shoulder blades. Finally standing, I backed away, retreating into the site. The passages were dark, but I made my way to the arsenal, where I picked six weapons and wrapped them carefully. They were among the most valuable objects we’d found. In the early morning hours I made my way back to Zahedan and left the tridents, hammers, and notched shields at the doorsteps of the six men who had been shot.

Arriving in Tehran from Zahedan without a passport, and with the American embassy under siege, I was trapped. My hotel was full of journalists hoping to outlast the hostage crisis, enjoying martinis poolside, comparing the backgrounds of their drivers and their skills at navigating parts of Tehran where you could get into trouble. They listened to tapes of Duke Ellington, Mahler, Sting, and Abba. They had photographs of Khomeini’s family, of tortured corpses dumped in a street behind a half-burned-down movie theater, they had addresses of apartment towers where secret parties were held and where alcohol could be found and people danced like crazy until their drivers came for them early in the morning. I was in limbo, had the language to clink glasses with my compatriots as if I were in any random office celebration, but also stuck, unable to go forward or backward. The Zafar money was nearly depleted, and the person at the institute who was supposed to get back to me never did. I’d written about the killings at the site, but wasn’t sure whether my letter had yet reached them or whether it ever would. One night I heard a story about an American woman in Isfahan whose passport was stolen along with all her clothes. She borrowed a chador and made her way to the British Embassy in Tehran, even traveling part of the way on foot, but she was able to get her documents and finally depart. Waking at sunrise the next day, I tried the British Embassy and was able to secure emergency temporary papers from the skeletal staff still going to work. I could now leave. But did I want to go? No, I didn’t.

With just one day before my flight I called the university archive for the last time. Stating that my name was Kosari, I asked for Mr. Bastani as if I’d never had any conversations with the man before. I mentioned a payment that would accompany my access to the documents. He murmured a sound I interpreted to mean the sum I named could open certain doors.

“I’m afraid they aren’t available for public viewing. In any case they’re out on a temporary loan. Call back next week, and I’ll see what I can do.”

“But if they’re loaned out then somebody must be allowed access.” I asked him who’d borrowed the scroll, though I didn’t expect an answer.

“They’re being restored in a lab in another part of the city.”

Restorers, as opposed to conservators, were notorious for destroying as they attempted to preserve. Christian monks used scotch tape on the Dead Sea Scrolls, doing so much damage, it was commented the parchments had survived more successfully underground for thousands of years. I was worried.

“It can be a slow process, as I’m sure you’re aware, Mr. Kosari. Call back in a few weeks, just to be sure. I’m optimistic we can accommodate you sometime next month.”

At night I could hear the sound of gunfire, and soldiers patrolled the streets. Tehran was motionless, as if someone put a spell on the city at nightfall, and almost no one went out on the street at all. On television people held pictures of the missing, hoping for information about friends and family members who had disappeared. On their way home from school, children dipped notebook paper in blood found on the street. They waved these small flags as they went on their way to let others know a demonstration a few blocks away had turned violent.

The next day I got a cab to the airport, sharing the backseat of the rattling old Paykan with all kinds of interesting stuff: an electric mixer, a radio, a small TV, a shoebox of GI Joe dolls, objects found on the street after the Americans left.

“If you know where they lived you can find strange and astonishing things: photographs of Jimmy Carter, hair dryers, an Elvis lamp with a beard painted on, furniture of all kinds, a Madras porkpie hat, which you shouldn’t wear outside, since it will arouse the suspicion of those who watch the neighborhoods,” explained my driver, a lean man with a long moustache. Many of his fares, in the past, had been American, and so though he spoke in Farsi, he said porkpie hat in English. “I wouldn’t want to look like one of the fun-loving Shahi who ate gilded oysters filled with real pearls while Israeli soldiers fired on Iranian citizens.”

He talked non-stop about the Zionist Iraqis at the border, the use he might have put the Elvis lamp to, but he hadn’t, in the end, taken it. “What to do with such a thing?” We negotiated the price of the ride, and he threw in a couple of miles gratis, even if I was going back to my paymasters in Washington or Tel Aviv, he said. I hadn’t fooled him. I wished the driver well and faced the crowds and security checkpoints.

At the airport it looked as if all the hotel rooms in the city had emptied out. Reels of Super 8 film, video and tape cassettes lay in piles, confiscated. My photos taken at Suolucidir were confiscated. Perhaps for the customs agent I was the kind of American who was so spacy that, while intending to travel to Kathmandu or Dharamsala, I had wandered into Zahedan by mistake, and so I deserved to have my things taken from me. Or maybe the confiscation was executed on nothing more than a whim. I’m not sure what value or significance the pictures would have had, but for whatever reason all my photographs and negatives were seized. I felt no remorse or regret because I was certain I’d be back.

I boarded one of the last flights out of Tehran having had what seemed like only a glimpse of the treasures of Suolucidir.

Somehow I got through Customs. I won’t divulge here the manner in which the valuables taken from Suolucidir were hidden in my bags. Though nervous when I reached Kennedy Airport, it wasn’t for nothing that my previously mentioned college roommate had also been a small time drug dealer whose contacts were ingenious in smuggling and devising hiding places — useful knowledge he had freely passed on to me, but I’d no reason to draw on until now.