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.
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