The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir by Susan Daitch

Author:Susan Daitch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: City Lights Publishers

January 23, 1937

The further east we traveled, the less we fooled anyone anymore.

Once Amman was long out of sight we entered a territory of which there are no definitive maps, and boundaries are unclear. Bruno says he can make Bezymensky into whomever he wants to, he can betray him with no qualms, no guilty conscience, send dispatches into the oblivion that the west will soon become. The English can chase shadows. Who will ever know?

Bruno writes long into the night, a labyrinth of field notes documenting the phantom Soviet half of the Friendship Dig, and in the morning he reads some of the pages to me before posting them to Amman:

We met Gennady Pavolich Antonov and Ivan Sergeevich Bezymensky in Baghdad as arranged, thus uniting the two arms of the Franco-Soviet Friendship Dig. Together we will travel to Tehran and from there to the eastern part of the country to search for Suolucidir.

When they removed their hats and tucked them under their arms, the Russians were considerably shorter in stature than they initially appeared, and both men look as if they’ve lived on burnt rice scraped from the bottom of the pot. Bezymensky, dark circles under his eyes like a raccoon, isn’t as old as we’d been led to believe, though I have some doubts about his physical ability to make the arduous trip to Sistan-va-Baluchistan. Sidonie suggested they may be more spry than they appear. It happens; some people who look like they’re held together by pins and rusty hinges turn out to have the ability to draw on invisible reserves of strength and swim the Sea of Azov. Carrying worn, leather suitcases that are never out of sight, they greeted us in a rush of tortured, well-intentioned French, then we all switched to Russian. Bezymensky, excited to the point of agitation, grabbed my arm and questioned me about Paris, a city I’ve never visited. He wanted to know about the descendants of the giraffe that was given as a gift to Napoleon by the Ottoman Viceroy of Egypt, the street where Balzac dreamed of the Countess de Hansa, the Polynesian collections in the Musée de l’Armée des Invalides. They had a difficult journey through the Caucasus, beleaguered by bandits brandishing curved scimitars whose chests were bound by crossed bandoliers studded by dull green bullets, as if they’d been cast during the last great war. Their supplies ran out, and they had to live on berries and ferns since neither of them could hunt so much as a squirrel or a starling. Both Bezymensky and Antonov are tremendously relieved to be in Baghdad where it is quiet and peaceful. Antonov, younger and taller, smells of stale tobacco and stirs his drinks with one of his fingers. He also eats the local food with his fingers, in the style of Punjabi. Why he does this I can’t say. It wasn’t Napoleon who was given the giraffe but Charles X.

Bezymensky claims to have a map of the region, but it’s a

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.