reconstruct scenes from the ground up, but for a city like Suolucidir, this would be impossible, she knew it. It was even more forbidding than a city of chacmools. It was a heap of stones resistant to that kind of personal holography. Aerial photos of ancient rubble looked to her like teeming, interlocking bacteria seen under a microscope. Helter skelter, job lot of primitive life forms, impossible to extract any meaning.
Though Bruno and Sidonie Nieumacher disappeared sometime in 1939, fragments of Suolucidiri writing from pieces of the scrolls and parchments they discovered found their way to Tehran. While bombs began to fall on London, experts in Old Persian, Farsi, and Baluchi at Tehran University began the work of translating the fragments. It was a daunting task, and at first the lines of symbols appeared to the untrained eye to have no or little relationship to any known linguistic system. Two linguists, Farouk Rashidian and Ali bin Dost, spent years studying the shreds of parchment, and determined the writer or writers were not Suolucidiri, but citizens of a city established by a group related to the Seleucids whose Persian king was Seleucus, satrap of Babylonia. Though his reign was brief, he was one of the most powerful satraps to succeed Alexander the Great. However, there were differences between the writing in the Nieumacher scroll and the alphabet used by the Seleucids. One theory connected their language to Aramaic and ancient Farsi with some Urdu inflection, but so few written fragments of it have survived that its linguistic relatives in the region can only be the subject of conjecture. Rashidian and bin Dost declared the Zahedan Parchments were written in a combination of Elamite and Akkadian cuneiform.
There was a partial copy of the Rashidian bin Dost grammar and lexicon in Columbia’s Butler Library, which I was able to access. Though it wasn’t supposed to leave the rare book room, and couldn’t be photocopied, the grammar had already been vandalized. Despite missing bits and pieces, I needed it. Lessons in deviousness acquired years ago from a college roommate expert in shoplifting (among other things), those remembered conversations came in handy. Over a period of several days when alone in the library examining room I cut the pages of the book with the blade of an X-acto knife and replaced them with pieces of ordinary paper; in this way the theft might not be detected for years, perhaps never. No one was interested in the analysis of this long dead language by two linguists tortured by Reza Shah. Presto: the only section of the Rashidian bin Dost grammar and lexicon known in the United States found its way to Brooklyn. What I studied on my kitchen table wasn’t even the entire work. Others with an unknown agenda had desecrated the book, though why they would bother with something so arcane and, for most people so inconsequential, is unknown. Perhaps it was a lark while high, perhaps they were agents of Savak masquerading as Columbia students. I can only hope somewhere in the world the book remains intact. If Ruth didn’t want to go with me, I’d travel on my own.
Two days after the letter arrived announcing my small research grant from the Zafar Institute, Ruth was on her way to the airport back to the land of Quetzalcoatl, and I now think she had her ticket from the moment our conversation turned to shrews that had visited the taxidermist. In four thousand years the sun explodes, and we’re not here anymore anyway. There’s no human life remaining to dig up the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Camden or the Yuba City 7-11. Ruth left with Larry Saltzman, an anthropologist who called at all hours and whose speech was sprinkled with what he claimed were Mayan truisms like your festivals fill me with terror. Ruth thought he was hilarious. When she took his calls behind closed doors I could hear her laughing. Ruth, wedging the phone between her ear and her shoulder as she doodled chacmools dancing the fandango, playing drums, fucking their stone brains out, was the kind of person who never needed to say I’ll get back to you on that, she always had the answers at hand. You would be glad she was on your side of a debate until one day it turned out she wasn’t anymore.
Sometimes I did have the sense that every square meter of the earth and sea had been excavated, and there were no unknown clusters of people who’d built cities, created systems of government, mythologies, established rituals of birth, marriage, death, harvesting and eating, still to be found. All past human habitations have been mapped and inventoried. To go any deeper was to hit magma or deep ocean volcanoes inhabited by translucent shrimp and hairy white crabs. What remained? Had I hit a brick wall? I would find out.
I packed my topographical maps, compass, measuring tape, bundle of flag pins, trowels, short hoes, and camera and flew out to Tehran, stopping only to change planes in Istanbul. Ruth would be sorry. She might be lounging poolside in Cuernavaca with the king of Aztec one-liners, but I was confident that treasure lay under my feet if only I could find the right map. Once it was located and verified, she’d read, entirely by accident, about my triumph and would leap up, kicking sand in the king’s face. Why are you wasting time on that beach? I said to the chair next to me. She’d dash off a letter from the nearest hotel desk, begging to help me catalogue relics and translate the surviving scrolls and tablets of Suolucidir. It will take years, but I’ll agree, yes, she can return and act as my assistant, my Alice Le Plongeon, camera in hand, ready to chase Mayan queens to Cairo and beyond.
“History my foot, it’s money!”
Shirley Pemberton
Passport to Pimlico, 1949
A MAN ON A MOTORBIKE, rolls of carpeting stacked behind him, cut off another biker who toppled over, hitting the curb. Cylinders wrapped in brown paper spilled from the back of the bike rolling into traffic, some, tied with twine, came undone and streamed red, gray, and blue into the road. The injured cyclist managed to stand, and a fight ensued. I watched along with a group of men leaning against the glass window of a kebab joint, listening to them argue in Farsi with a smattering of Arabic words. Whose fault was it really? The carpet man has a knife. Look out. Was that other fellow in the proper lane? Perhaps he turned a bit to the right when he shouldn’t have. I could have been anywhere, maybe, but I had arrived in Tehran. Shouting insults, one of the two combatants, limping, managed to get back on his bike and drive off. The other sat on the curb and waited for help. Fight over, the men discussed a public hanging that was to take place later in the day. A convicted murderer would be suspended via crane. I listened to their conversation a bit longer, then made my way back to the hotel.
The university archive was on the outskirts, some distance from my hotel. Flattening the letter I’d received on archive stationery I memorized the number and made my first call in order to make an appointment to view the scroll the Nieumachers had found on the site on the outskirts of Zahedan, the document that, according to Sidonie’s field notes, was the remains of detailed records of daily life in the city of Suolucidir. I’d written to the director of the archive, and our correspondence was part of the basis on which I was able to obtain funding for the trip. In his letter Dr. Haronian assured me the Zahedan scroll was accessible and available for inspection.
I hoped my Farsi didn’t betray an American accent. It was something I’d worked very hard on, and though I was often told my accent was undetectable, you never know how you really sound with any consistency or when in a difficult situation. I practiced a few lines before I picked up the telephone, then dialed. It was with a great deal of anticipation I listened to the clicks of the Tehrani dial tone. Soon I would finally be able to see the only physical proof I knew of that confirmed the existence of Suolucidir. After many rings a man picked up, saying only hello, not stating the name of the archive as businesses usually do in the west. For an instant I wondered if I had the wrong number.
“I’d like to speak to Dr. Haronian.”
Some shuffling that sounded like boxes being moved came through the line, the scratching sound of cardboard pushed across a gritty, unswept floor. I looked out at the street while I waited, half expecting to see a person leaning against a wall looking up at me, but the street was empty except for a woman carrying a bag with branches of dates poking out the top of it. Across the narrow street I could make out a room filled with blue TV light. A man came to the window, looked up, noticed me, and pulled the curtains shut. Finally a man got on the line.
“This is Mr. Bastani, at your service.
