Hope dwindled for the fate of people I’d befriended in Tehran, Zahedan, and other parts of the country. In September 1980 Iraq began bombing Iran, and I followed the path of the explosions on the news and in the papers as best I could. Once again Suolucidir might have been saved by its isolation. Mines went off, chemical weapons full of nerve and mustard gas, agents whose formulas went back to the Battles of Ypres. The gas is heavy. It settles to the bottom of geographical depressions, poisoning low-lying towns, villages, train stations, cities only partially buried. The reporter described how you didn’t smell the gas immediately, then it did its corrosive work. By the time you smelled the vapor, a process that took a few minutes, the damage to your lungs had begun. The screen blinked to footage of people coughing violently, unable to speak. The camera backed off. Outside the hospital, palms were split or sheared off to half their former height. Buildings of stone, steel, and clay were equally reduced to clouds of smoke in an instant.
I put on white gloves and unrolled the smuggled parchment that could so easily crumble to nothing. I’d barely looked at it until I returned to the States. I’d been afraid to open the cylindrical case while still in Zahedan, afraid once exposed to the atmosphere it would completely disintegrate unless examined in a controlled environment. Now I was confronted by the problem that, because the thing was stolen, I couldn’t take it to the Metropolitan or any other institution that would ask questions about the object’s provenance. With the images of gassed, inert bodies lying in village streets came the gradual sense that there would be no going back; those people and things I had assumed were in some way retrievable, were no more. I unscrewed the lid of the black enameled cylinder, its top and bottom rims rusty and corroded, marking my hands with stains and red rings that remained for days. As Alfred Döblin said of photographer August Sander, he created an atlas of instruction, and this, with unreasonable optimism, is what I hoped to find in the Suolucidir scroll, at atlas of everything Suolucidiri.
The first inches were as Sidonie Nieumacher had described them in her notebook: intertwined hands made of Hebrew letters giving way to blocks of text. What surprised me was that beyond a few inches the text was written in a Hebrew I was able to read. Like many Judeo-Persian manuscripts it would jumpcut from medical advice to Talmudic commentary to interpretations of dreams to a form of local gossip in verse, all in a range of styles from formal literary to colloquial. I sat at my table with a view of the clock atop the Williamsburg Savings Bank and began to translate the document before me, which at first explained a social system organized around a strict set of laws.
Suolucidir, a lost world extinct several times over, seemed reasonable and orderly with its judges, scribes, legal system with no intentional death penalty. These laws tied language to act to punishment. Capital punishment, when it occurred, was accidental, almost comic. Unlike the images of the war flickering on the television screen, the concept of retribution, to the isolationist Suolucidiris was an embarrassment, something you didn’t talk about very much in public. If you ignore something long enough, their legal system seemed to say, it will depart.
According to their legal code, the Suolucidiris took literally the concept of eating your words, although their language didn’t include that idiomatic expression. Neither could a Suolucidiri talk about eating his hat, or crow, or swallowing his or her pride. A burglar had to eat a clay tablet bearing the words for thief as well as a description of his crime; a killer was compelled to consume the word for murder and a narration of the circumstances leading to the crime; an embezzler, and apparently the crime existed even then, had to chew the phraseology for cheat, and so on. Depending on the chemical composition of the clay and the length of the crime’s description, which could be extensive, the felon might be lucky enough to get off with just a stomach ache, but fatality was also a common outcome. Swallowing your words could kill you. Those falsely accused and convicted might protest, declaring the tablet before them represented neither their words nor deeds, but the luminaries who ruled Suolucidir enjoyed absolute power within the city, and their inedible words were final. There was one advantage to the Suolucidiri penal code. This wasn’t even the age of incunabula, and obviously since there were no presses or means to reproduce copies, each piece of parchment or tablet remained essentially unique. Once consumed the record of the crime disappeared as well, so if the perpetrator lived, he was more or less granted a clean slate. Forgiveness was an important moral concept in Suolucidiri life, but the scribe who made the words that were to be eaten was enormously powerful. Since few could read, he could write whatever he felt like.
Specific examples followed the legal code, and here I began to wonder if the scribes did, from time to time, make things up. For example, and I translate loosely, Citizen Q is accused of making unwanted overtures towards Citizen L. Q makes suggestions. They should meet in the alley around the corner from the baths. L states she finds Q repellent: his vanity, self-absorption, lack of control. (He exposes himself in the middle of a crowd, he deliberately makes loud sucking noises when women walk by.) On one occasion he suggested what he claimed was a primo location for trysts, promoting its virtues by saying: the noise of running water covers all sound, it’s a part of the city no one ever goes to, and so on. Q now says L is imagining things. He never uttered a remark more suggestive to her than have a nice day. Maybe a wink once in a while, but that’s it. No law against that as far as he knows. Although Q annoys her no end, the commentator reports L has the cynical composure of someone who’s sure she’s facing a liar who will only choke himself given enough time. L accuses Q of stalking her, of lying in wait outside her house to the point where she felt she was a prisoner in her own home. Liar! Prostitute! Q shouts. Why would I do such a thing? You’re not worth that kind of effort, that kind of desire and scrutiny — you’re not worth it by half. The city is full of women just like you. What makes you think I would give you a second glance? Q continues to deny the charge, shouting: You can’t make me eat words I never uttered. There were no witnesses who could say L was in the prostitution business. There were no witnesses to Q’s alleged stalking her, although he had often been seen in the vicinity of her house. L seems at Q’s mercy, overpowered by the accelerating rock slide of his accusations, but Scribe X notes that Q does seem obsessed with L. She isn’t just anyone. She has something Q covets, something he wants to possess. Scribe X chuckles behind his glass of wine. With the bat of an eye he can have white clay fed to both of them. He writes, don’t vomit on my feet and tell me it’s a divine sign. Scribe X, they may not realize, is a god, at least for the moment. I remember the clay tablets found in Suolucidir still smelled 3,000 years later. Eating them must have been a frightening and nauseating experience. Perhaps so few of the clay tablets survived because everyone was a criminal, and so everyone had to eat his or her words. Maybe that was the true apocalypse for a city in which every citizen was guilty of something.
Citizen Q declares it’s L who has a history of lying. Nobody takes her seriously. She, in effect, fucks everyone and anyone like crazy. Q is told enough already, you’ve made your point. This command could not have boded well for Q. L asks for it, he barges on. Look at her! Look at the way she dresses and stands. Q imitates L swishing down the street, his sandals flapping. He’s a complete clown. Unfairly, I imagine him acting like Mel Brooks’ very confident Thousand Year Old Man, and L’s laughter, like a sucker punch, stops Q in his tracks, baffled. L’s laughter at his mimicry disarms him, leaves his defense in ruins, makes him look like a liar or a fool, a role that doesn’t advance his case