With just one day before my flight I called the university archive for the last time. Stating that my name was Kosari, I asked for Mr. Bastani as if I’d never had any conversations with the man before. I mentioned a payment that would accompany my access to the documents. He murmured a sound I interpreted to mean the sum I named could open certain doors.
“I’m afraid they aren’t available for public viewing. In any case they’re out on a temporary loan. Call back next week, and I’ll see what I can do.”
“But if they’re loaned out then somebody must be allowed access.” I asked him who’d borrowed the scroll, though I didn’t expect an answer.
“They’re being restored in a lab in another part of the city.”
Restorers, as opposed to conservators, were notorious for destroying as they attempted to preserve. Christian monks used scotch tape on the Dead Sea Scrolls, doing so much damage, it was commented the parchments had survived more successfully underground for thousands of years. I was worried.
“It can be a slow process, as I’m sure you’re aware, Mr. Kosari. Call back in a few weeks, just to be sure. I’m optimistic we can accommodate you sometime next month.”
At night I could hear the sound of gunfire, and soldiers patrolled the streets. Tehran was motionless, as if someone put a spell on the city at nightfall, and almost no one went out on the street at all. On television people held pictures of the missing, hoping for information about friends and family members who had disappeared. On their way home from school, children dipped notebook paper in blood found on the street. They waved these small flags as they went on their way to let others know a demonstration a few blocks away had turned violent.
The next day I got a cab to the airport, sharing the backseat of the rattling old Paykan with all kinds of interesting stuff: an electric mixer, a radio, a small TV, a shoebox of GI Joe dolls, objects found on the street after the Americans left.
“If you know where they lived you can find strange and astonishing things: photographs of Jimmy Carter, hair dryers, an Elvis lamp with a beard painted on, furniture of all kinds, a Madras porkpie hat, which you shouldn’t wear outside, since it will arouse the suspicion of those who watch the neighborhoods,” explained my driver, a lean man with a long moustache. Many of his fares, in the past, had been American, and so though he spoke in Farsi, he said porkpie hat in English. “I wouldn’t want to look like one of the fun-loving Shahi who ate gilded oysters filled with real pearls while Israeli soldiers fired on Iranian citizens.”
He talked non-stop about the Zionist Iraqis at the border, the use he might have put the Elvis lamp to, but he hadn’t, in the end, taken it. “What to do with such a thing?” We negotiated the price of the ride, and he threw in a couple of miles gratis, even if I was going back to my paymasters in Washington or Tel Aviv, he said. I hadn’t fooled him. I wished the driver well and faced the crowds and security checkpoints.
At the airport it looked as if all the hotel rooms in the city had emptied out. Reels of Super 8 film, video and tape cassettes lay in piles, confiscated. My photos taken at Suolucidir were confiscated. Perhaps for the customs agent I was the kind of American who was so spacy that, while intending to travel to Kathmandu or Dharamsala, I had wandered into Zahedan by mistake, and so I deserved to have my things taken from me. Or maybe the confiscation was executed on nothing more than a whim. I’m not sure what value or significance the pictures would have had, but for whatever reason all my photographs and negatives were seized. I felt no remorse or regret because I was certain I’d be back.
I boarded one of the last flights out of Tehran having had what seemed like only a glimpse of the treasures of Suolucidir.
Somehow I got through Customs. I won’t divulge here the manner in which the valuables taken from Suolucidir were hidden in my bags. Though nervous when I reached Kennedy Airport, it wasn’t for nothing that my previously mentioned college roommate had also been a small time drug dealer whose contacts were ingenious in smuggling and devising hiding places — useful knowledge he had freely passed on to me, but I’d no reason to draw on until now.
But for sorrow there is no remedy provided by nature; it is often occasioned by accidents irreparable, and dwells upon objects that have lost or changed their existence; it requires what it cannot hope, that the laws of the universe should be repealed; that the dead should return, or the past should be recalled.
Sorrow, Samuel Johnson
Tuesday, August 28, 1750
SONGBIRDS HAVE ACCENTS . THE SONG of a Montreal robin sounds slightly different from the song of a Nova Scotia robin. With each generation there are slight changes. A robin raised in isolation invents his own song, and it doesn’t sound very melodic, but over time, with each generation raised in isolation, slight improvements are made, and the song gradually begins to sound more pleasant to the human ear. Each bird knows how to imitate and improve. Experiments have also been done with the zebra finch and other birds. Finally each bird’s trill converges to a species standard. Where, in each DNA strand, is the code for this song?
I was back, but I wasn’t back.
Joe Lewis died in Las Vegas, subway workers threatened a strike, it was already freezing cold, and Ada Koppek kept calling, looking for Ruth, not remembering that she’d just rung and confusing me with her grandson, Adam, who was working as a pothead eighth-grade science teacher in Los Angeles. Ada complained that her vision was failing her. Ruth’s grandmother was my only caller, and that was only because she didn’t know who I was.
“Adam, Adam, why don’t you know where your sister is?”
“It’s Ariel, Mrs. Koppek.”
“Ariel? I don’t know any Ariel. What are you doing in my granddaughter’s apartment?”
I explained to her.
“I don’t remember Ruthie getting married. That I would have remembered. Why wasn’t I invited?”
“You were there, Ada, really you were. You must have photographs somewhere in your apartment.”
Ada was fantastically disorganized. Pictures were stashed in desk pigeonholes in between bills and receipts going back to the Nixon era. She used to know where everything was, but now it sounded like she was defeated by her own stacks of memories she didn’t have the strength to sort through, so all were equally reduced to irritating detritus she couldn’t get rid of.
“You danced with your cousin’s husband, whom you hadn’t seen in years. He spilled wine on your dress when someone knocked into him. It was an accident, but it really pissed you off.”
“No,” Ada said. “I’m a drowned rat.”
I was on my way out to see Marcello Pagliero’s Roma città librera at Bleecker Street Cinema, a 1946 movie about four characters wandering around Rome at night. For two dollars, you could sit in an air-conditioned room and see two movies, and wandering around an ancient city at night was an activity I was familiar with. Anxious to be on my way, while Ada spoke I punched my fingernails into the collection of Styrofoam cups collected on my desk. Crescents outlined eyes, nose, and mouth, teeth punched out. Kufic script written in fingernail impressions decorated another, random parabolas a third. On a fourth cup I’d engraved