Читать книгу The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir - Susan Daitch - Страница 15

But for sorrow there is no remedy provided by nature; it is often occasioned by accidents irreparable, and dwells upon objects that have lost or changed their existence; it requires what it cannot hope, that the laws of the universe should be repealed; that the dead should return, or the past should be recalled.

Sorrow, Samuel Johnson

Tuesday, August 28, 1750

SONGBIRDS HAVE ACCENTS . THE SONG of a Montreal robin sounds slightly different from the song of a Nova Scotia robin. With each generation there are slight changes. A robin raised in isolation invents his own song, and it doesn’t sound very melodic, but over time, with each generation raised in isolation, slight improvements are made, and the song gradually begins to sound more pleasant to the human ear. Each bird knows how to imitate and improve. Experiments have also been done with the zebra finch and other birds. Finally each bird’s trill converges to a species standard. Where, in each DNA strand, is the code for this song?

I was back, but I wasn’t back.

Joe Lewis died in Las Vegas, subway workers threatened a strike, it was already freezing cold, and Ada Koppek kept calling, looking for Ruth, not remembering that she’d just rung and confusing me with her grandson, Adam, who was working as a pothead eighth-grade science teacher in Los Angeles. Ada complained that her vision was failing her. Ruth’s grandmother was my only caller, and that was only because she didn’t know who I was.

“Adam, Adam, why don’t you know where your sister is?”

“It’s Ariel, Mrs. Koppek.”

“Ariel? I don’t know any Ariel. What are you doing in my granddaughter’s apartment?”

I explained to her.

“I don’t remember Ruthie getting married. That I would have remembered. Why wasn’t I invited?”

“You were there, Ada, really you were. You must have photographs somewhere in your apartment.”

Ada was fantastically disorganized. Pictures were stashed in desk pigeonholes in between bills and receipts going back to the Nixon era. She used to know where everything was, but now it sounded like she was defeated by her own stacks of memories she didn’t have the strength to sort through, so all were equally reduced to irritating detritus she couldn’t get rid of.

“You danced with your cousin’s husband, whom you hadn’t seen in years. He spilled wine on your dress when someone knocked into him. It was an accident, but it really pissed you off.”

“No,” Ada said. “I’m a drowned rat.”

I was on my way out to see Marcello Pagliero’s Roma città librera at Bleecker Street Cinema, a 1946 movie about four characters wandering around Rome at night. For two dollars, you could sit in an air-conditioned room and see two movies, and wandering around an ancient city at night was an activity I was familiar with. Anxious to be on my way, while Ada spoke I punched my fingernails into the collection of Styrofoam cups collected on my desk. Crescents outlined eyes, nose, and mouth, teeth punched out. Kufic script written in fingernail impressions decorated another, random parabolas a third. On a fourth cup I’d engraved the Hebrew letters lamed, followed by vov, spelling lamed vovnik. The lightning-shaped lamed zigzagged down the side of the cup. Following the lamed I engraved a vov, the sixth letter of the alphabet, the Hebrew prefix that acts as a conjunction, the letter responsible for joining two halves of a sentence, sometimes linking two recalcitrant clauses that shudder when joined. At any given moment there are supposed to be 36 (twice 18, a number for miracles) lamed vovniks or holy men in the world. They may not know they’re lamed vovniks, and they could be almost anyone: an ambulance driver cursing at the traffic, a drunk who runs into a burning building to save a stranger he only half heard cry out, the woman who puts children on a train out of the country and remains behind to an uncertain fate. Personally, I like to think lamed vovniks aren’t perfect, each is flawed in some way. Andalusian Sephardim believed that if you found a rock shaped like a teardrop it was the petrified soul of a lamed vovnik who had suffered a great deal. So I sat punching lameds and vovs into a Styrofoam cup, as if doing so would will one to appear at my door. I missed the movie.

Hope dwindled for the fate of people I’d befriended in Tehran, Zahedan, and other parts of the country. In September 1980 Iraq began bombing Iran, and I followed the path of the explosions on the news and in the papers as best I could. Once again Suolucidir might have been saved by its isolation. Mines went off, chemical weapons full of nerve and mustard gas, agents whose formulas went back to the Battles of Ypres. The gas is heavy. It settles to the bottom of geographical depressions, poisoning low-lying towns, villages, train stations, cities only partially buried. The reporter described how you didn’t smell the gas immediately, then it did its corrosive work. By the time you smelled the vapor, a process that took a few minutes, the damage to your lungs had begun. The screen blinked to footage of people coughing violently, unable to speak. The camera backed off. Outside the hospital, palms were split or sheared off to half their former height. Buildings of stone, steel, and clay were equally reduced to clouds of smoke in an instant.

I put on white gloves and unrolled the smuggled parchment that could so easily crumble to nothing. I’d barely looked at it until I returned to the States. I’d been afraid to open the cylindrical case while still in Zahedan, afraid once exposed to the atmosphere it would completely disintegrate unless examined in a controlled environment. Now I was confronted by the problem that, because the thing was stolen, I couldn’t take it to the Metropolitan or any other institution that would ask questions about the object’s provenance. With the images of gassed, inert bodies lying in village streets came the gradual sense that there would be no going back; those people and things I had assumed were in some way retrievable, were no more. I unscrewed the lid of the black enameled cylinder, its top and bottom rims rusty and corroded, marking my hands with stains and red rings that remained for days. As Alfred Döblin said of photographer August Sander, he created an atlas of instruction, and this, with unreasonable optimism, is what I hoped to find in the Suolucidir scroll, at atlas of everything Suolucidiri.

The first inches were as Sidonie Nieumacher had described them in her notebook: intertwined hands made of Hebrew letters giving way to blocks of text. What surprised me was that beyond a few inches the text was written in a Hebrew I was able to read. Like many Judeo-Persian manuscripts it would jumpcut from medical advice to Talmudic commentary to interpretations of dreams to a form of local gossip in verse, all in a range of styles from formal literary to colloquial. I sat at my table with a view of the clock atop the Williamsburg Savings Bank and began to translate the document before me, which at first explained a social system organized around a strict set of laws.

Suolucidir, a lost world extinct several times over, seemed reasonable and orderly with its judges, scribes, legal system with no intentional death penalty. These laws tied language to act to punishment. Capital punishment, when it occurred, was accidental, almost comic. Unlike the images of the war flickering on the television screen, the concept of retribution, to the isolationist Suolucidiris was an embarrassment, something you didn’t talk about very much in public. If you ignore something long enough, their legal system seemed to say, it will depart.

According to their legal code, the Suolucidiris took literally the concept of eating your words, although their language didn’t include that idiomatic expression. Neither could a Suolucidiri talk about eating his hat, or crow, or swallowing his or her pride. A burglar had to eat a clay tablet bearing the words for thief as well as a description of his crime; a killer was compelled to consume the word for murder and a narration of the circumstances leading to the crime; an embezzler, and apparently the crime existed even then, had to chew the phraseology for cheat, and so on. Depending on the chemical composition of the clay and the length of the crime’s description, which could be extensive, the felon might be lucky enough to get off with just a stomach ache, but fatality was also a common outcome. Swallowing your words could kill you. Those falsely accused and convicted might protest, declaring the tablet before them represented neither their words nor deeds, but the luminaries who ruled Suolucidir enjoyed absolute power within the city, and their inedible words were final. There was one advantage to the Suolucidiri penal code. This wasn’t even the age of incunabula, and obviously since there were no presses or means to reproduce copies, each piece of parchment or tablet remained essentially unique. Once consumed the record of the crime disappeared as well, so if the perpetrator lived, he was more or less granted a clean slate. Forgiveness was an important moral concept in Suolucidiri life, but the scribe who made the words that were to be eaten was enormously powerful. Since few could read, he could write whatever he felt like.

Specific examples followed the legal code, and here I began to wonder if the scribes did, from time to time, make things up. For example, and I translate loosely, Citizen Q is accused of making unwanted overtures towards Citizen L. Q makes suggestions. They should meet in the alley around the corner from the baths. L states she finds Q repellent: his vanity, self-absorption, lack of control. (He exposes himself in the middle of a crowd, he deliberately makes loud sucking noises when women walk by.) On one occasion he suggested what he claimed was a primo location for trysts, promoting its virtues by saying: the noise of running water covers all sound, it’s a part of the city no one ever goes to, and so on. Q now says L is imagining things. He never uttered a remark more suggestive to her than have a nice day. Maybe a wink once in a while, but that’s it. No law against that as far as he knows. Although Q annoys her no end, the commentator reports L has the cynical composure of someone who’s sure she’s facing a liar who will only choke himself given enough time. L accuses Q of stalking her, of lying in wait outside her house to the point where she felt she was a prisoner in her own home. Liar! Prostitute! Q shouts. Why would I do such a thing? You’re not worth that kind of effort, that kind of desire and scrutiny — you’re not worth it by half. The city is full of women just like you. What makes you think I would give you a second glance? Q continues to deny the charge, shouting: You can’t make me eat words I never uttered. There were no witnesses who could say L was in the prostitution business. There were no witnesses to Q’s alleged stalking her, although he had often been seen in the vicinity of her house. L seems at Q’s mercy, overpowered by the accelerating rock slide of his accusations, but Scribe X notes that Q does seem obsessed with L. She isn’t just anyone. She has something Q covets, something he wants to possess. Scribe X chuckles behind his glass of wine. With the bat of an eye he can have white clay fed to both of them. He writes, don’t vomit on my feet and tell me it’s a divine sign. Scribe X, they may not realize, is a god, at least for the moment. I remember the clay tablets found in Suolucidir still smelled 3,000 years later. Eating them must have been a frightening and nauseating experience. Perhaps so few of the clay tablets survived because everyone was a criminal, and so everyone had to eat his or her words. Maybe that was the true apocalypse for a city in which every citizen was guilty of something.

Citizen Q declares it’s L who has a history of lying. Nobody takes her seriously. She, in effect, fucks everyone and anyone like crazy. Q is told enough already, you’ve made your point. This command could not have boded well for Q. L asks for it, he barges on. Look at her! Look at the way she dresses and stands. Q imitates L swishing down the street, his sandals flapping. He’s a complete clown. Unfairly, I imagine him acting like Mel Brooks’ very confident Thousand Year Old Man, and L’s laughter, like a sucker punch, stops Q in his tracks, baffled. L’s laughter at his mimicry disarms him, leaves his defense in ruins, makes him look like a liar or a fool, a role that doesn’t advance his case at all.

Fools were the first to be fed white clay, choking on their words, their comic routines reduced to bile. On the other hand, suppose the accused, framed and convicted, survives the ordeal, but someone needed the ingested text to be destroyed. The ancient murderer, who knew nothing of digestion or anatomy, could not be sure the body would do this work for him, and therefore would personally resort to the blade to finish the job.

Out my window I could see a plane skywriting a series of letters that finally spelled out: Luna Park. I turned back to reading the scroll in my narrow rooms, as if it were no more rare or unusual than Sunday morning funny papers. The apartment next door had been broken into twice in the middle of the day. I’d been home during one incident and hadn’t heard a thing. The safety of the scroll wasn’t a major concern; rare would be the thief who knew or cared what the hell this thing was. In case of fire the scroll was kept in the freezer, which was usually empty anyway. On one occasion, my neighbor who lives on the floor below me nearly burned the place down when one of her candles fell over and ignited a dishrag. There’s a fire house a couple of blocks away, and with little traffic in the middle of the night, they managed to get here instantly. My downstairs neighbor writes a syndicated astrology column, and even though she writes under a pseudonym and makes no bones (to me at any rate) about the fact that all her predictions are stabs in the dark, she’s not the kind of person who will ever give up candles scented like vanilla, gardenia, and a chemically produced lemon that smells like floor cleaner. We all ran out into the street. While others worried about clothes, photographs, valuables and jewelry left upstairs, and how lucky we all were to get out in time, all I could think about was the contents of my freezer. The astrologist babbled, in black pants and pink shoes ready to go clubbing, to go see Stiv Bators at Darinka or 8BC, high as a kite: Virgo this, Capricorn that. No wonder she hadn’t been able to predict the fire in advance. No flames licked the windows. The fire department contained the blaze to her place, and red-eyed, we all trooped back in. The phone rang. Ada Koppek, who else?

“Ada, we just had a fire here. I have a headache from the smoke. Call back another time.” The building smelled of burnt astrology books.

“Darling,” I could hear her playing with the silver links on her watch, “why don’t you just swallow a tablet? Adam, my one and only grandson, a headache isn’t the end of the world.”

The fire was too large and potentially catastrophic an event for her to assimilate. She would skip it altogether. I agreed with her, yes, most definitely I’d made a mistake. I’ll eat my words. The Williamsburg clock tower was shrouded in black netting, as it was being repaired, but I was aware of the time. I wanted to get back to work, to find out what would happen to Q and L.

“So do you know where your sister, Ruthie, is? I heard she’s getting married.”

“Yes, I know, I’m her husband. She’s already married.” I didn’t tell Ada we were in the process of getting divorced. There was no point. It was more information than she could handle.

“Not you. To someone else. A Choiman. Listen, a Choiman from France. I told you. His uncles read Gerta from Nancy to Drancy. Who was Gerta?”

Translation: someone read Goethe from Nancy to the transit camp at Drancy. Ada was baffled. No one told her anything. She sat in the dark. But maybe she was right, and in a moment of lucidity she realized that she wasn’t talking to her grandson, but to me, and Ruthie was, in fact, planning to marry Saltzman.

“Ada, I’m watching the news. Call me later.” I hung up knowing Ada would forget the conversation we just had and call me again within the week. More pictures flickered across the screen: desert explosions, oil refineries on fire, a glimmer of an interview with an Iraqi soldier who hoped the war with Iran would end soon.