“Just keep walking,” Rostami said. A few cars still prowled the streets, and overhead lights glowed intermittently. We passed a large dress shop, windows empty except for decorative plastic columns, fluted with winged lions for capitals, intentionally broken to look like Sassanid ruins. Behind folding screens you could make out dresses and mannequins peeking out from purdah. They were posed for women customers only. Rostami told me he needed to leave the country. Dust had settled in the curved flutes of the plastic columns. In the depths of the shop a dummy winked, frozen, perched on high heels, mini-skirt a slash of red. Her wig was askew as if she, too, needed to depart in a hurry.
Leaning against a stone wall I took out my passport, opened it to the page with the photograph and ran my thumb around the edge of my picture as if to remove it.
“Put your picture here. Jahanshah Hossein Rostami becomes Ariel Bokser, born in Flatbush, educated at the University of Chicago, briefly married to Ruth Koppek, present whereabouts unknown. As soon as you’re safely in New York I’ll report my passport missing or stolen.”
Rostami shut his eyes and repeated the bare facts: address, phone number, date of birth, social security number. His English was actually very good, but the pronunciation couldn’t fool even the most stoned customs official at JFK.
“Say you lived in Jerusalem for years, that’s why you have an accent. They won’t know the difference. Look, you have the stamps on your passport to prove it.”
I flipped to the Israeli stamps. Rostami took the passport from my hand, snapped it shut, and put it in his pocket. He was vague about how and exactly when he would depart, but I assumed the urgency of his situation meant it would be as soon as possible.
“We’ll give Javad’s caves one more attempt,” he said. “One last try before I leave.”
We walked a few blocks together, reviewing the dead ends of our search. I was uneasy discussing the Nieumacher notebook with my Iranian host. It had exited his household ten years ago like a hot potato.
“Your father had the opportunity to destroy the notebook, why didn’t he?”
“My brother was much older than me. Just before your father’s visit he was already attending university, and he was interested in Sidonie’s papers. He’d found an old Persianist from Berlin who had sat out the war in Tehran and remained until the 1960s. This man was willing to translate the notebook.”
“What happened?”
“My brother was killed in a car accident, though his injuries didn’t resemble the kind you would receive in a head-on collision, or so I was told.”
The Persianist, too, disappeared, but it was rumored he landed in Tel Aviv, though this could be neither confirmed nor denied.
“I have here a dish of ‘mud’ which represents an oleaginous amplitudes of pellets.”
George Herriman’s Krazy Kat
Ignatz to Offissa Pup. March 3, 1940
I STOPPED BY HIS HOUSE the next morning as planned, intending to pack Rostami’s equipment into my rented car, then we would drive out to the foothills together. The house was dark, shutters drawn. His wife let me in, closed the door, but made it clear I was not to sit down or step far into the house. The children were watching television, what sounded like Tweetie Bird in Farsi, in another room. Somewhere between our parting on Fazl Street last night and this morning, he had vanished. Mrs. Rostami put on a headscarf though she wasn’t going anywhere, just opening the door enough, so she could be seen showing me out. She asked me to leave, not in an unkind way, but she was afraid my presence put them all at risk, and I should understand that. Fedeyroon Rostami dismissed Suolucidir as a phantom city, a hoax. She saw me as an American adventurer who had gotten her husband involved in something that should have been left alone. There was little I could do to persuade her otherwise. I had nothing to do with Jahanshah’s disappearance, but my voice sounded feeble and unconvincing, even to myself. She gently pushed me out the door, then slammed it shut.
I drove out to the foothills alone, as I had already done on numerous occasions since I’d arrived. It was blistering hot. Usually I brought adequate supplies with me, but that day, in my despair at certain failure, I’d only packed a small bottle. Jahanshah had had the maps and other equipment for caving in his car. Even after more than a month spent in Iran, no new proof that Suolucidir ever existed had been unearthed. I sat on a rock and stared at the horizon, swatting flies. Soon my water bottle was empty. Though sheep and goats dotted the landscape, no shepherds were visible, but I assumed someone must be watching in the vicinity of the flock. It was a habit of mine to converse with people I met in the region, always hoping, naïvely, that someone would know of a cave somewhere that held untold archaeological riches. I’d gotten to know a few of the inhabitants, since I had some knowledge of the local dialect. They were friendly and eager to talk, share meals, and they tolerated my presence with my jangling tool belt and backpack full of inscrutable objects, even if they secretly believed me to be a crackpot, referred to among themselves as Shovel Man.
One group of goats and sheep clustered around a clump of bushes. That wasn’t unusual in this kind of heat, but there was something desperate about this tight huddle. I went to take a closer look. The reason the animals wouldn’t budge soon became obvious, but the cause was like nothing I’d ever seen before. They were crowded near a crack in the ground from which cold air blew out as if someone had left an enormous underground air conditioner on high, facing straight up into the desert. It was like when you walk past an abandoned building and cold air blasts out onto the sidewalk. I went closer to the edge of the crevice, feeling the cool breeze on my face, when the ground suddenly gave way. I fell maybe fifteen feet, landing on a pile of sand.
How I survived the fall with no broken bones remains a mystery to me to this day. I’d fallen through what must have been the roof of some kind of structure, and just missed crashing into a dozen massive clay jars. There were instances in the past of archaeologists stumbling, falling into sites entirely by accident, like cartoon characters, legs bicycling in air, but instead of turning into a peelable pancake upon landing, they find treasures of Incans or Chaldeans and live to be photographed with their arms around totem and taboo. Standing with difficulty, I gasped as I looked around. Friezes like sandstone filmstrips and very life-like statuary ran the length of the room. Areas where the sand hadn’t drifted over revealed a checkerboard marble floor littered with bits and pieces: small oil lamps, silver coins, flint tools, pieces of colored glass. Had Romans been here? There were even a couple of glazed vessels. Did Crusaders make it this far?
I took a brush from my backpack and whisked millennia of dust from an oil flask. Because of erosion and recent earthquake activity the earth had, after keeping its secrets for thousands of years, kindly shifted, and in the hours that followed, I dusted layers of dirt and sand from a variety of objects, writing notes, quickly cataloging while the sun was high and light fell into the chamber. But eventually the shadows grew longer and a problem presented itself. It would soon be night, the temperature would drop, and I would be stuck on an underground island with no way out, destined to die of hypothermia in the desert. If I couldn’t get back to the twentieth century, the waters would close over my tracks, as if I’d never existed. My flashlight hadn’t been smashed in the fall. I flipped it on and turned its beam down one corridor selected at random. There were passages leading every which way. How was I to get out? No one would survive long in this hole. There were hazards associated with staying in one place and dangers of getting lost in what might be miles of underground corridors that had once been streets.
A phantom Ruth, eager to be photographed with me when news crews arrived on site, who stood by my side at awards dinners, vanished, laughing in a haze of Rambug and snake parts. No, my remains would lie in a heap beside an ashlar to be found, if I was lucky, before the earth collides with the sun. I decided to keep moving.
Down a short stairway, around a corner: mosaics of rams, red calves, fish with