so I was surprised to hear he was no longer at the archive.
“I have letters from him.” I immediately regretted blurting this out. If Haronian was gone, there was nothing I could do about it, and so I tried to take a more conciliatory tone. “Are you his replacement?”
“No. I’m just answering the telephone in the interim.” Bastiani didn’t know where the former archivist had gone, so it was impossible for him to give me a forwarding address.
“Can I speak to Dr. Haronian’s replacement?”
“No one has yet been appointed.”
Pacing the carpet, one foot after the next, I tried to pull something out of my brain to prolong the interrogation before the line was cut off. One foot covered the border pattern of linked diamond shapes, the other was planted solidly in the middle of a quatrefoil design. I asked Bastani if he could help me, then, in viewing the Suolucidir Scroll. Dr. Haronian, with whom I’d been corresponding for nearly a year had assured me it would be possible to spend some time studying them, as much time as I wanted, in fact. This accessibility was critical to my funding from the Zafar Institute. Without access to the Suolucidir relics, I felt like a fraud.
“The Suolucidir Scroll? We have no such documents. I’m familiar with our entire collection.” He paused, and I heard the sounds of a match striking, then Bastani inhaling. He was smoking a cigarette. In an archive? The idea that I had misdialed again occurred to me. It was the wrong number, and some knucklehead was playing along as a kind of impromptu prank. I hung up and carefully redialed the number, but the same affectless voice of Mr. Bastani answered. I mumbled about a lost connection, sorry.
“The Zahedan Scroll. It could be archived under the name of the site where they were found.”
“Zahedan? There’s nothing here Zahedani. Zahedan is a city of dust.”
“They could be filed under the city’s former name, Duzdab.” Duzdab meant the Watering Place of Thieves. When Reza Shah came to power he changed the name to Zahedan, which means place of noble people.
“If you like, arrangements might be made for you to view some scrolls from Susa. This I could fix for you. Susa, the town where the Hammurabi Stele was kept until it was removed to Paris, as you know. These items are very old and can be viewed for only two hours on Monday afternoons.”
I explained that as interesting as these might be, they were of no use to me for my current project. The Nieumacher Parchments, I asked again. Could they be filed as the Nieumacher Parchments? I could hear Bastani laughing.
“Why would we call anything here by such a name? Our archive goes back to the time of Darius and beyond, but includes nothing Germanic. You haven’t told me why you want to see our archives. We aren’t a museum. We don’t ordinarily open to random passersby, even if they have a letter from the late Dr. Haronian.”
“He’s dead?”
“No, I meant the former Dr. Haronian is no longer working here, as I told you.”
I explained my research, what I was looking for, but Bastani then asked me if I had a girlfriend or sisters? This he would like to know about, and had they accompanied me to Tehran? Even if I had sisters, why would I bring them with me?
“You have girlfriends then?” He repeated. “Maybe several.” This was a statement, not a question.
“No.”
“That’s unfortunate.” He paused, inhaling and exhaling smoke. “You can’t just walk into the archives,” he said. “I don’t care who you think wrote to you saying this is possible.”
I mentioned a sum of money. It wasn’t much, but it was all I could offer him. For a moment neither of us spoke. I walked over to the window of my hotel room and twirled the cord around my index finger. Finally the man on the other end of the phone told me that until such time as Dr. Haronian’s successor was chosen, it would be impossible to view any of the archives. To do so, for whatever stated urgency, would be considered a grave security risk. People, even foreigners, have disappeared for less. When I asked when the next director would be at his desk, Bastani had no idea, nor would he tell me if he did.
The door to a shop across the street was locked. The shopkeeper vaguely looked up at the array of windows presented by my hotel, but he didn’t appear to be watching anyone in particular. I heard more shuffling noises from the phone receiver, then the line went dead. I dialed one more time. No one picked up.
That was to be my last conversation with Mr. Bastani. In the morning I packed my bags. I was anxious to press on to Zahedan and the site of Suolucidir itself, if I could find it, leaving the study of the scroll for my return trip, despite the knowledge that reversing the order of reading, then excavating would be far less useful. During the excavation of Esther’s Tomb in Hamadan in 1971, in the hurry to build a new temple that would attract visitors, all kinds of ancient significant objects were tossed out. On the one hand I understand at a certain point the bathtub is full and overflowing, you can’t hold on to and read everything; on the other hand the lost museum is something to be mourned, no? It was possible I’d never see the Nieumacher relics. There was nothing I could do about it.
“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
