The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir. Susan Daitch

or a combination: baggy dark pants and long jackets, buttoned-up shirts. Renting rooms a few blocks from the Rostamis, it was easy for us to meet without necessarily having conversations via telephone to make arrangements. Apart from one day when I did ask him about these shadows, we never acknowledged the peculiarities of the situations we avoided, commonplaces like using a phone or lowering our voices in a crowd. If I was by myself, no one dogged my steps that I was aware of, so it seemed the tails weren’t interested in me, the American, but there was no way of knowing this for certain. Jahanshah was evasive in his answers so I didn’t ask again. It was a time of transition in Iran. The men could have been agents of anyone or no one, freelancers of a sort. My father who traveled all over the world looking at rocks, appeared to know little about what he saw as the less permanent forces fighting it out above the topsoil, and somehow, for the most part, he always came home as if he’d only been taking a nap on a fishing boat on a peaceful river. The last time I saw him alive he’d just returned from Argentina where prisoners rounded up from their homes were dropped out of planes, and I argued with him, how can you not know? Unlike my father, I couldn’t concentrate on exploring caves to the exclusion of the men lurking in the shadows. Needing to know what they wanted, what they were looking at, was more than a continual distraction; it was a survival mechanism my father ignored.

      During my months in Zahedan, Jahanshah did disappear for periods of time without warning, and if I asked his wife where he was, she grew nervous, and only said she didn’t know where he was. She removed the photographs of the dead brother, the group of international rock hounds, the statuette of Aladdin, and Mickey Mouse. A crooked blue-black arm still stuck out of the coils of the hookah snake, Batman’s hiding place. Each time Rostami returned without warning, it was as if by magic. Mineralogists, like Rostami and his father before him, could read rocks like books and could be seen as gatekeepers or interpreters: what kind of oil might be found where, what rocks were signs of the presence of bauxite, gypsum, chromite, glass sand, iron ore, gold. What began as a child’s fascination with the crystals hidden within a geode or the phosphorescent rocks that glow in the dark turned into a useful profession and then into a job with risks. Rostami’s post had involved making detailed studies of field structures, overseeing drilling, maintaining a history of oil production, and most important, estimating the size of the oil reserves that remained. One day when we were on one of our hikes, looking for evidence — a cornice sticking out from the ground, a pottery shard etched with an unknown script, the tops of long-buried capitals, the gateway to a lost city, an old shoe, anything — he told me the story about his job and how he had lost it. We were looking for ancient footprints, but we talked about the present.

      “I’m not organized and left papers lying around, but in any case nothing was under lock and key. A few days later the file reappeared with my signature on it, but it wasn’t the same file. I remembered enough of the original findings to know that the replaced file exaggerated the size of untapped fields under my purview. The director of my division was a man who was rumored to have dined on gilt quail eggs and the most rare golden Caspian caviar with the Shah and Queen Farah, but it’s also possible he never in his life was anywhere near them. It’s possible he only glimpsed them inspecting an installation or new facility. In any case, I had stumbled across a dangerous piece of information that linked me to him. Had this man deliberately overestimated the size of the reserves? Maybe, maybe not, but by coming across these adjusted numbers, by being aware of them, I was the man who knew too much.”

      “So what did you do?”

      “The question was: did the adjuster of numbers know that I was aware of the altered figures? I think he did.”

      “How could he, whoever he was, have suspected?” I stopped, my shoes filled with sand.

      “At first I made no secret of the discrepancy. I talked about it, calculating that if I did talk about it, I couldn’t be blamed for a deliberate miscalculation I knew was wrong. Talking outright about the inconsistency, dumping the scorpion from my shoe so everyone could see it, seemed the safest thing to do. This was naive optimism on my part. I was told ink doesn’t change its position once laid on paper. The molecules don’t realign themselves overnight. How did my signature get on the file? It did look just like mine. I was set up to take the fall if the incongruity was discovered. The file had my signature, while the file with the accurate numbers was nowhere to be found. To save my life, I resigned and moved back here.”

      Being the supposed author of a doctored file wasn’t the only reason he was a sitting target. His work was seen by those who watched neighborhoods as a symbol of the west and its appetite for oil. No matter who he said he worked for, Rostami was considered to be leaning towards traitorous by nothing more complicated than blind association. Like his father before him he went into semi-retirement in Zahedan, but the remote province wasn’t a foolproof escape hatch.

      I often wondered what would happen if I was mistaken for him, and I was picked up off the street and questioned? Two men grab my arms as I’m about to pay for a spare set of batteries in an outdoor market. Coins, water bottles, sunglasses all go flying. No one says anything or appears to notice. I’m led out of the market and shoved into the back seat of the car. My passport is pulled from a pocket, and one of the men yells it’s a fake, and that I should shut up, even though I haven’t said a word. The taller of the two, maybe he’s wearing an eye patch, maybe he accepts I’m not Jahanshah Rostami, but he demands to know if I’m not Rostami then where’s the spy hiding? The other one, a man with a low, calm voice tells me he knows this Suolucidir business is a ruse to infiltrate, destabilize, steal reserves, sabotage pipelines. It was the same with the English, French, Russians, and Americans. I pretend not to understand their Farsi. Shrugging holding my palms out, they punch me again as the car careens down the Zahedan road. A hood is placed over my head. I don’t know where we are. One of the men hums a Bollywood film song. Finally the car comes to a halt, and I’m ordered out of the car, but I still pretend I don’t know what the man’s talking about. Out, he says in English. I obey because what choice do I have? My feet touch something soft: sand. It’s not easy to walk on but I’m told to walk, and I listen for the sound of a gun going off, the last thing I’ll hear. I imagined many such Spy vs. Spy scenarios: the beak-nosed spies pop up from beneath blocks of pavement that fan apart and hit the sidewalk with a resonant clunk, they emerge from panels in a ceiling, invisible joists sliding apart with loud creaking noises, they spring from spandrel-shaped doors and bungee cord from lofty arches to bop me from behind. Despite the loud noises, I’m oblivious, my head is in the clouds. In a year or so the spies will be sent west to Khorramshar when Iraq will invade with an eye on the oil fields of Khuzistan. Once, in the street, someone really did address me as Jahanshah Rostami.

      Not only that, but the unveiled women of Zahedan looked uncannily like Ruth, as if some branch of the Koppek family had wandered from Tehran to Baghdad to Lvov, retaining their black hair, mad dash of a single eyebrow, yet benefiting from a strain of aggressiveness, grabbing the last place on the last boat or caravan west, grabbing the last bag of rice or couple of potatoes, and so they survive. Ruth’s grandmother, Ada, would personally sew tumans into her headscarf and bribe her way over the border while humming Ladino songs she no longer remembered the words to.

      A few miles outside of the city I set up camp in an abandoned hut with an awning made of woven palm fronds that looked like it would blow away with the first strong breeze but never did. From here I made my day trips to outlying areas. I didn’t have an infinite amount of funding and consequently not much time. Also, since the revolution had ousted the Shah, there was growing anti-American sentiment in the country, though more so in the cities than in outlying areas. Every day brought word of more violence in the capital. The Shah’s people met with firing squads, and though many thought this day couldn’t have come too soon, at the same time there were protests and shootings; newspapers, radio stations, and movie theaters were closed. Even in isolated Zahedan of white stone buildings and nightingales, there was a sense of foreboding. It had become a major gateway for drug smugglers sending product in from Afghanistan and Pakistan. While pretending to look for oleaginous rocks, Jahanshah had told me, some apparent geographers were really posting couriers, so the dangers of poking around outside the city were many and unpredictable.

      Rostami returned for a few days. One night when I was back at my hotel he called uncharacteristically