The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir
Praise for The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir
“Daitch’s fantastically fun novel has shades of Umberto Eco and Paul Auster and is brainy, escapist fiction at its best. Structured like a Russian nesting doll, the book conceals several overlapping tales centered on the search for the mythical lost city of Suolucidir. The novel begins with grad student Ariel Bokser’s present-day search for the city, located somewhere in modern day Iran. The book then shifts to the heart of its story, the so-called Nieumacher papers, an inheritance from Ariel’s father (a consulting mineralogist for a mining company) that relates the narrative of Sidonie and Bruno Nieumacher’s quest for Suolucidir, beginning in 1936. The Nieumachers are a husband and wife; he’s a rare book forger and she’s a law student, and they are fleeing the West as much as they are searching in the East for Suolucidir. Setting off under the guidance of Bruno’s former Berlin professor, now a black market profiteer, the duo brave adversity to find the lost city, dodging British agents and Russian spies. The book then shifts further back in time to the story of Hilliard and Congreaves, two mismatched British explorers who met at the Possum Club, an explorer society, and who set off in 1914 in search of fabled fortune and instead encounter their fate. Daitch has constructed an intricate, absorbing narrative. The novel is like a Scheherazade tale, never quite giving the reader time or reason to pause. What exactly is Suolucidir? Lost city of the Hebrew tribes? A stand-in for colonialism’s heart of darkness? Wisely, the MacGuffin remains elusive. As one character says, ‘Invisible cities sometimes leave no trace of themselves. Who knows what cities lay under our feet?’ Perhaps Suolucidir is real, and still out there, awaiting discovery.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Susan Daitch has written a literary barnburner of epic proportions. The question buried at the core of The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir is one of empirical—or is the imperial?—knowledge itself. Her labyrinthine tale of archeological derring-do calls to mind both 1984 and 2666, and does so by looking backward in time as well as forward. It is also utterly original, the work of a visionary writer with an artistic sensibility all her own.”—Andrew Ervin, author of Burning Down George Orwell’s House
“Susan Daitch’s The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir is a daring undertaking, the creation of an ancient land of fantastic proportions, its borders touching other countries we think we know while still remaining elusive and mysterious. This is a novel of archeology and history, of mythology and empire, powered by an undeniable call to adventure and a deep yearning for understanding, written by a novelist who manages to surprise on nearly every page.” —Matt Bell, author of Scrapper
“In The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir, history is revealed as ghost and prankster, archaeological remnant, information feed. This search for a vanished city takes in rare book rooms and obituaries, travel records, borders drawn and redrawn by war, boxes of records from a sanatorium where Kafka stayed, a statuette of Disney’s Aladdin, and quotes from Ignatz Mouse and Samuel Johnson. Where is the city? Where are we? We are lost, and will one day be someone else’s Suolucidir, at best. In the meantime, Daitch’s latest is a beguiling and virtuoso companion to our inevitable end: a novel that wrenches, sentence by fine sentence, some order from the chaos, while never shortchanging the chaos itself.”—Mark Doten, author of The Infernal
“Daitch’s novel is Indiana Jones for the introspective crowd—a continual, thrilling, and harrowing search for historical treasures.” —Foreword Magazine
Praise for Susan Daitch
“One of the most intelligent and attentive writers at work in the U.S. today.”—David Foster Wallace
“It’s always a delight to discover a voice as original as Susan Daitch’s.” —Salman Rushdie
THE LOST CIVILIZATION OF SUOLUCIDIR
Susan Daitch
City Lights Books | San Francisco
Copyright © 2016 Susan Daitch
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Daitch, Susan, author.
Title: The lost civilization of Suolucidir / Susan Daitch.
Description: San Francisco : City Lights Publishers, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015049535 (print) | LCCN 2016003408 (ebook) | ISBN 9780872867000 (softcover) | ISBN 9780872867017 ()
Subjects: LCSH: Archaeological expeditions—Fiction. | Extinct cities—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / Action & Adventure. | FICTION / Jewish. | GSAFD: Adventure fiction. | Satire.
Classification: LCC PS3554.A33 L67 2016 (print) | LCC PS3554.A33 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015049535
City Lights books are published at the City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133.
Visit our website: www.citylights.com
CONTENTS
First Collapse
Silent, Deserted, Fallen Cities
The Book of Smoke
Hilliard and Congreaves
Asoldier looked over the parapet and thought no army could even begin to crack open the towers that marked the corners of the city. A mason, though his spine ached from being torqued and twisted as he worked, wiped his nose on the back of his hand and was confident few foreigners could navigate the labyrinth he’d helped to construct. It ringed the metropolis like a moat, although no one in the city knew the word. Both the soldier with a view of the desert to the east and mountains to the west and the mason down below on the street felt safe; both looked out on landscape and urban geography from opposing perches, convinced there was no threat that would change the pattern of one day to the next. In the center of the city a cook watched her pots dance on hooks and knew that even if she ran out of her house, odds were good she wouldn’t make it out of the city before everything she took for granted would collapse around her ears.
Elsewhere in town at that moment:
A child was about to apologize for tormenting a cat. He twisted his hands behind his back, nervous, expecting blows, not sure what form punishment would take.
A woman was about to drink a glass of wine when she thought her overseer wasn’t looking. She leaned against a broken mosaic of a winged lion, tiles making a cool grid pattern on her back. She thought she was hidden by a column and intended to swallow the glass in one gulp.
A man was about to kiss his neighbor’s wife. He pulled her into an alley as she was leaving what passed as her house. The street was so busy, he thought, they both thought, no one was looking.
An executioner was about to cut off the head of a runaway slave. The slave shook, so the executioner was unsure what the blade would actually sever when it fell, though he didn’t care much either way. Whatever body part was lopped off was all in a day’s work.
A hungry traveler, having seen Hamoon Lake evaporate into a shiny crust that crumbled into sand underfoot was relieved to see the city rise before him like an oasis. He knew it was real, and it was also home. He quickly ran through the maze, reached his house, a square two-story building the color of melon rind. In his long absence he’d so often dreamed of its two rooms, one on top of the other. Ravenous, when food was placed in front of him, he scooped up sticky pieces of rice and lamb with his hands without stopping for any ritual washing. Before he could show his family the silk and spices in his bags, just as he was about to swallow a mouthful of lamb, a sandstorm swept over the city like a tidal wave so high even the square lookout towers were buried without a trace. If this wasn’t what reduced the city to a basin of sand, the catastrophe might have taken the form of an earthquake. In a few minutes all that poked out above the surface of the rubble was the jagged edge of a wall,
the blade of an axe, a human arm, maybe. And if the city survived the irritated shoulder shrug of tectonic plates there was Taftan, four thousand forty-two meters in height, a volcano that rose abruptly from the midst of the flat landscape. One big burst of lava and groves of olive, almond, and cherry trees would be reduced to cinders, the child offering milk to the cat, the lips about to touch, blade suspended mid-air, all frozen, turned to stone. For whatever reason, the city was destroyed.
The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language.
Karl Marx
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
BARELY HAD THE FEET OF the last Shah of Iran left the ground in Tehran when hundreds of miles away I was sitting on a ledge in the mountainous region of southeast Sistan-va-Baluchistan watching a herd of goats make their way though a wadi in search of grass or water. I’d been exploring the caves in the area, even though my visa was about to expire, and it was becoming clearer by the hour that I was as likely to find the object of my search as to find hidden shahi missiles or the demon Zahhak himself, snakes growing out of his shoulders. Evidence that hinted at earlier cultures hidden in the foothills of the Black Mountains was just out of reach. European digs in this province once yielded slight clues of an ancient civilization, but even with little to go on, archaeologists were able to speculate that a city-state that had resisted both Alexander and Mongol invaders may have flourished here. Others claimed it was all hoax. There had never been such a city, only the feverish dreams of Victorian adventurers who had become lost en route to Khandahar or Lahore. Speculations persisted, but the arguments surrounding this controversial lost city with its rumored splendor, mechanical inventiveness and imperial culture grew so contentious (threatening to reach a pitch not unlike the arguments of Darwinian evolutionist pitted against devout creationist) that the discussions died down to whispers and then finally nothing at all was audible in any language.
Nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century digging parties exploring this segment of what is now the beak-shaped area bordering Afghanistan, Iran, and West Pakistan generally came up empty-handed. During the Victorian era there were rumors about relics glimpsed by a few, and these tales fueled the dying embers of the debate. Prior to the Second World War a few parchment scrolls were alleged to have been found by a pair of Soviet émigrés, Sidonie and Bruno Nieumacher. Mishandled, as some of the Dead Sea Scrolls would be years later, most of these priceless records were said to have been reduced to lumps of glue, unredeemable, and therefore rendered utterly mute. Those fragments that did survive lay in an archive in Tehran, rarely visited.
Others may have been eager to follow in the footsteps of these earlier archaeologists, but intervening wars, earthquakes, sandstorms, and landslides made the area particularly inaccessible. Pahlavi had come to power in 1925, changing the name of Persia to Iran. The Pahlavi shahs and the theocratic regimes that followed discouraged excavations, and indeed, the translators of what were known as the Zahedan fragments were arrested and most likely executed in the prisons of Shah Reza Pahlavi during the era of Iran’s alliance with the Axis powers of World War II. After the war no one picked up the thread of the Nieumachers’ work. It was as if the couple had never existed, either one of them. Even today, when one arrives at the foothills of the Sistan-va-Baluchistan mountains, local legends are so rife with stories of djinn-haunted caves that it remains difficult to hire a guide who will take you into the area where the lost city is likely to be located.
I knew of the Nieumachers from my father, who traveled to Iran after the war as a consulting mineralogist. He worked for a mining company and made many trips abroad. Usually the gifts he brought home were in the rock department: agate ashtrays from lava beds around Lake Superior, feldspar bookends from Colorado, carnelian and turquoise from Tibet, sheets of mica which gave the room a kaleidoscopic appearance when held up to the eye, bits of fools’ gold I brought into a second grade class claiming the chunks were real, a jagged piece of smoky quartz that when tilted a certain way looked like Groucho Marx in profile, smoking a cigar. A trip to Iran in June 1967 yielded no souvenirs apart from Sidonie Nieumacher’s field notes, which he told none of us about. The Nieumacher documents had been given to him by an Iranian mineralogist who had found them during the course of renovating a house he’d bought in Zahedan. The pages were confusing because Sidonie Nieumacher’s identity documents tucked into an inside cover indicated she was a Christian, born in Alsace, but she wrote in Yiddish. Because of the Hebrew script my father’s Iranian colleague had not wanted her field notes in his house, fearing it would be incriminating should his home be searched for whatever random reason, as was often the case. People informed or misinformed, but the result was the same: those reported on disappeared. This was how my father acquired the Suolucidir papers. I’d never seen him so relieved to be home as when he returned from that trip.
He worked from a room in the attic, a mess full of papers, books and journals, some stalagmite-like piles weighted by a lump of jasper or a slice of blue slate sprinkled with the impressions of fingernail-size fossils. Here, at night, he translated the field notes, writing the English into a separate notebook, tapping a Chesterfield into the agate ashtray. Though Sidonie Nieumacher’s notes revealed that she had actually been born Eliana Katzir of Grodno Gibernia, she was not, as far as my father could tell, an agent of the Zionist state (as his Iranian host feared), which had not yet been officially declared at that time anyway. The two notebooks, Sidonie’s original and my father’s translation, were bound together by a thick rubber band that cracked and broke but stuck to the covers of the books long after it lost its elasticity. What my father thought of the contents I’ll never know. He returned to his work surveying volcanic outcroppings that dotted the western plains, compared the sediment of Jurassic and Mississippian layers of rock, sending back model airplane kits, fluorescent rocks, postcards of geysers, the kinds of things he thought I would like. I remember him holding a metamorphic piece of quartzite up to the light. The veins switchbacked on its surface like frozen billabongs. You could, as a very small child, think big was as big as stretching your arms wide as far as possible, but at the same time I knew that for my father big was measured by unimaginably vast units. The universe for him was the prelapsarian universe: billions of small or enormous planetary rocks hurtling around, sometimes under fantastic pressure and thereby transforming parts of themselves from magma to marble, from anthracite to diamonds. Animals and humans have yet to evolve, and when they do, their tantrums and triumphs appear too minuscule to bother with. It was just as well he lived, to a degree, so armored from human activity. Sidonie’s field notes are terrifying.
As I said, my father never mentioned the notebook to me, so I didn’t know what he thought about its contents. His second wife was cleaning out some drawers after his death, and it was only by chance that I stopped by her bungalow and rescued it from a Miami incinerator. That night, on the flight back to New York I avidly read his translation of Sidonie’s field notes as if they were a window into a hidden part of my father’s life as well.
Somewhere in the southeastern edge of the Pacific a shark is spawned who will, in a few years, eat a surfer, a boy still in middle school in a suburb of Sydney and, though a strong swimmer, not yet a surfer dude. The shark DNA and RNA are doing a dance of acceptance and elimination of various traits. The shark’s incisors are still years away from completion and, though the odds of the surfer and the encounter with the shark are, at this point, infinitesimally small, the two are hurtling toward each other. The papers Eliana Katzir wrote under the name Sidonie Nieuma
cher sparked the end of my marriage. Perhaps I’d been swimming with sharks for a while without paying much attention to the dorsal fins breaking the surface, circling ever closer. It’s a long way to Tipperary, but eventually you get there. Tipperary, in my case, was Iran.
Ethnology, n: The science of different human races, such as knaves, swindlers, imbeciles, clots, and ethnologists.
Ambrose Bierce
The Devil’s Dictionary
I MET RUTH KOPPEK IN Chichén Itzá, Mexico, on Ix, the day of the Jaguar. We’d climbed different sides of a Mayan calendar pyramid, one with four sets of stairs of ninety-one steps each, and ran into each other only when we’d arrived at the top. She got there before I did and had her back to me as she looked out over the trees and plain. She had a long stiff braid down her back. It was never undone. You could imagine it dipped in tar as pirates did who found this procedure easier than washing. She pointed to Eb, a figure with an angular face, a long hard jawline, associated with rainstorms. Nearby was Oc, thirteen, a lucky number, the dog who acted as a beacon, guiding the night sun through the underworld.
According to Mayan creation myth, Ruth said, the gods discovered yellow and white corn, the ideal essence from which men could be made. Four corn men were created, and they turned out better than expected, flawless creations with perfect vision and comprehension of the world. The gods felt uneasy about the corn people’s close resemblance to themselves, so in order to make men more fallible, their gifts were deliberately diminished. After their powers were adjusted, the corn men were given four corn women, one each.
Leaning against a huge limestone serpent with a human face staring out of its mouth she told me that she had once stolen something from a site. It was at a tomb in a border state few people visited. Looters had dug a tunnel into it and so had gone about their work undetected. Bones were strewn around, bits and pieces of pottery were scattered into random corners and heaps. Nearly everything had been taken from the site, but she found a nose ring which depicted a little man wearing an identical nose ring in a piece of a mise en abyme puzzle of which only a living human nose was absent. Pieces of frieze that had been chiseled off walls lay on the ground, and when she put the pieces together the result was images of men and women intertwined, ancient pornography, maybe. The images themselves, rendered in burnt limestone rubble and marl, might have been a joke planted by the looters who were hungry and wouldn’t have bothered with things that couldn’t be sold, but she also imagined the middlemen, the dealers with residences in New York, London, Tokyo who wanted to leave a message, as if to say: dusty digging knuckleheads with your brains full of clan relationships and calendars, it all comes down to this: screwing. She pocketed the nose ring and a little figure of a man with an enormous dick and then walked away from the site, never to return.