THERE’S A SPECIAL KIND OF insanity that descends on a dig. Out in the middle of nowhere, when the only people who speak your language are the same seven people you see every day. When the afternoon is violently hot and at night you shiver with the cold and dysentery. When there isn’t enough food and you can’t trust the water, and when gin becomes a coveted reward for good behavior. When what you dig is based purely on the luck of what trench you’re assigned, but you’re judged on what you’re pulling up. When you’re covered in dust and you have to shower in the cast-off stream filled with camel dung, and you try to sleep despite the fear that those camels will step on your head, and you can’t because you learn very early that it’s a lie that roosters only crow at dawn. Tensions develop. Hatred develops. And yet, hungry for English, hungry for interaction, you have no choice but to turn to those same seven people.
Jane once wrote about the simmering explosiveness on digs: “Small-group situation tends to create downright psychotic atmosphere. i.e., it’s okay for me, I’m used to it, but wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”
At least this one had started off well.
In mid-June, the crew had arrived in Tehran. It was the final decade before the Iranian Revolution; the shah was still in power, and alcohol still flowed freely. The crew, in fact, had almost exactly traded places with Iran’s leader, who had been at Harvard that week, giving one of the graduation speeches and getting an honorary degree. (The other speaker that year was Coretta Scott King, who accepted the invitation in her late husband’s place.)
The crew had spent a few days at the British Institute of Persian Studies, which doubled as a plush hotel of sorts, run by David Stronach and Sir Max Mallowan, the archaeologist and husband of Agatha Christie. They whiled away the week picking up odds and ends they would need for the expedition—food from the US embassy commissary, pickaxes, and plastic bags—and waited for Karl to get the final permit for excavation from the government’s antiquities representative.
The crew spent the sultry afternoons cooling off poolside or wandering through the bazaar. Jane loved the bazaar itself but hated the crowds. Strangers used the congestion as an excuse to get too close to her. A few pinched her butt. And the traffic in Tehran in general made Jane swear she would never complain about the cars in Rome again—little orange taxis zoomed around, making U-turns and backing up in the middle of the street. But it was good to be back with Jim. Jane found herself catching the odd angle of light on his face and feeling the bottom drop out of her.
On their way to Iran, they had spent a few days together in London, and it was there that Jim had told Jane that he loved her for the first time. He left for Tehran slightly before her, and Jane found she couldn’t concentrate on anything in his absence. She went to the opera by herself but kept wanting to turn around to tell him something or to hold his hand before remembering that he wasn’t there. She had almost missed her flight to Iran because she couldn’t sleep, too consumed by the overwhelming desire to go out and chalk every sidewalk in London with their initials and a giant heart.
She wrote in a letter to him: “There is something different about your chemistry that brings me a great deal of peace, as opposed to the rampant unease I usually have.”
But the lack of privacy that awaited the couple in Tehran was getting to Jane. She and Jim didn’t want the others on the crew to know they were together, and they attracted too much attention in town—Jim because of how tall he was, and Jane clearly American in her round sunglasses. They spent the whole day waiting for the moment when even the late-hour talkers went to sleep and they could be alone, finally, over a gin and tonic. Otherwise, it was just a peck on the cheek after breakfast if they could find a quiet corner. Jim kept trying to make elaborate plans for them to find a time and place to sleep together for the first time, but the planning made Jane self-conscious. She wished he would just be brave enough to sneak down to her room in the middle of the night and longed for when they’d be peacefully settled in the desert.
The crew set off for Yahya in two separate cars, with Jim and Jane and the Persian antiquities representative in the Land Rover, named Bucephalus after Alexander the Great’s horse. When the car stalled ten miles into their drive the first day, they fixed the engine with masking tape and chewing gum. Jim and Jane sang dirty French songs and recited the poems of Robert W. Service, “the Bard of the Yukon,” while the antiquities man rode along, patiently. Jane felt more in love with Jim than ever.
* * *
By the time they arrived at Yahya, it was too late to properly see anything. She and Jim shared a tent, and they moved their cots outside where it was cooler, not realizing how dramatically the night stripped heat from the desert. They woke up freezing.
It was hard to exaggerate the remoteness of Tepe Yahya, and how much more rugged it was than what Karl had prepared them for. Baghin, the tiny village where they slept, was a few minutes’ walk from the majestic seventy-five-hundred-year-old mound. It had no running water, and there was no electricity in the whole of the valley. Some of the local workers, nomadic sheep and goat herders when the expedition wasn’t in session, camped in tents close by. The mail came in—when it came in—with a man on his bicycle. Drinking water was carried in from over a mile away by a driver on a donkey.
Jane had been used to her dig in France with Professor Movius, where she stayed in a little pension with a bidet in the bathroom. A gourmet restaurant could be found at the foot of the street. At Yahya, the latrines hadn’t even been dug yet, and there were so many “animalcules” in the drinking water that it wouldn’t have surprised Jane if she could suddenly start seeing them dance. And when Karl told workers where to dig the latrines, Jane complained that he hadn’t bothered checking which direction was downwind from camp.
The same lack of concern for detail was on display again that night when Phil Kohl, an undergrad from Columbia, arrived unceremoniously on the back of the truck that belonged to the local chromite miners. Phil, twenty-one years old, had hitchhiked his way to the site by himself because Karl had apparently forgotten––or hadn’t taken seriously––his promise to wait for Phil in Kerman.
Karl had warned the crew that he would be difficult to get along with in the field. As a first-time director of a full-scale dig—last year’s expedition was only a survey of the area—he was concerned about making a good impression on officials, on whom he felt the success of and continued access to Tepe Yahya depended. This anxiety about projecting the right image made Karl quick to injure and quick to anger, especially if his “no debate with the chief” policy was challenged. Being embarrassed in front of government representatives was a particular sore point. On the trip down to Tepe Yahya, Karl worried the Iranian government representative had misconstrued some laughter among the crew as being directed at the representative himself, and he volubly lectured Arthur and Andrea Bankoff on how to act in front of people who were their hosts.
Digging started on day two, and the work was hard. People came back from the mound looking like they had stuck their faces in flour. The food didn’t help matters. Hussein, the cook, did the best with what he had, but the local goats were stringy no matter how long or well you cooked them. The latrine, when it was finally built, was so vile that the crew ended up just using the bushes and ditches. It was no wonder many got very sick very quickly.
But at the beginning, the shared experience of the site’s challenges brought the crew closer together. Jane was even surprised by how much she liked Karl. She wasn’t attracted to him—she told Andrea “legs too short and has a droopy ass”—but he had a tendency to behave as if he were still at Dartmouth, which meant that he was fun, if a little immature.
She also grew to admire the valley where the mound was located. Though poor and remote, it was beautiful. Near the site was a sacred shrine, an immense gnarled cedar tree growing through a round stone wall. It was surrounded by an enclosure so narrow that a viewer could see nothing but skyward, which made the ancient tree even more majestic. It was said that the tree was where Zacharias, the father of Yahya––John the Baptist in Muslim tradition––was buried. The area was also crossed with a network of qanats, or water wells. Only children could fit in the slim passages, so maintenance and repair were handled by young boys lowered slowly into the qanats. The valley was often filled with the sound of their haunting voices rising up from the tunnel entrances.
But for Jane, the best parts of the summer were Jim and the night sky. Jim “has been spectacular,” she wrote to her high school roommate on one of those blue airmail sheets. “He’s the first person in a long time that takes care of me.” Sick with dysentery at dawn one morning, Jane had come back from her tenth trip to the bushes. She lay on her cot shivering, trying not to wake Jim up, when he moved his bed next to hers. He piled all their blankets on top of her and held her until she stopped shivering and fell asleep. All this when he had to get up at 5:30 a.m. to start excavating and was as exhausted as everyone else.
She and Jim slept together for the first time that summer. Still not wanting to flaunt their relationship, they had discreetly removed the bed railings from their cots and drew them together. One night she felt so full of love she had to get up in the middle of the night to write him a bad poem. She watched him sleep for a while before she drifted off. It felt like watching the stars.
Jim at Tepe Yahya.
When Jim sank into one of his depressive funks, Jane could talk him out of it. One morning when she noticed Jim was particularly withdrawn, Jane made sure that she walked alone with him to the site. “Hey, if you’re not doing anything next week, let’s have a kid?” she asked. It yanked him from his reverie. “What do you want to call it—Ali?” “No, I had more in mind something like Sherman,” she said. They were back in rhythm again.
Jane had a dream where she and Jim were married, but no one could find him. It wasn’t urgent, though. Even though she didn’t know where he was, there was a feeling that he was right there all the time.
* * *
Over the weeks, as sickness and the lack of sanitation lowered the threshold for irritation, even the smallest slights lost all sense of proportion. The pressure that everyone felt to perform well didn’t help matters any. Jim, as the oldest student on the dig, was the site supervisor, and he felt bad that Arthur Bankoff had been passed over despite a longer tenure in the department. Jim worked extra hard to live up to the appointment. Jane’s impression was that while Karl was busy “playing professional Central European barbarian-aristocrat,” walking around and criticizing other people’s trenches and archaeological conclusions, Jim ended up doing nine-tenths of the work. Jim was the one who ran the medical clinic on the site. It was meant for the workers, but locals got word of it, and Jim became the one who patiently and skillfully cared for local children burned by cooking fires and suffering from diarrhea and toothaches. Jane found herself wishing that she could tie him down and force him to rest. “I’ve never seen you stagger before, even from fatigue,” she wrote in her journal.
Jane felt a similar pressure because she knew that Karl had been unsure about her when he selected her for the dig. If she was going to complete her PhD, in addition to passing Generals, she needed field opportunities for dissertation research. After Movius’s departure, Karl had become Jane’s lifeline in the department. “She felt everything academically depended on her doing well and impressing Karl,” Andrea Bankoff later explained to police.
But, despite Jane’s best efforts, she was completely lost in her trench. While other crew members were pulling up interesting pottery sherds, all Jane was finding were bricks and rodent holes. She was terrified Karl knew she was making a mess of the excavation. More than once, Karl told Andrea Bankoff that he was pleased with everyone’s progress except one person. Andrea, who was concerned that Karl was referring to her husband, Arthur, didn’t dare ask him to specify.
In the afternoons, after he finished his work for the day, Jim would climb into Jane’s trench. Together, they’d try to make sense of it until the light grew too dim to see anything.
* * *
By late July, goodwill and patience were being gnawed away by the dust storms and the sand flies. Airmail stationery, their only connection to the outside world, was rationed, as was their food: A can of tuna was to be split among three people for lunch. A jar of peanut butter was supposed to last for two weeks. People hallucinated visions of gingerbread and whipped cream and Hershey bars and steaks and green vegetables. They longed for the cold. Jane had so many fly bites it looked like she had a rash. When she was stuck in bed, too sick to supervise her trench, a chicken walked into her tent, crapped, and walked out. Another time, a centipede crawled into her underwear.
Almost everyone––other than Karl and Richard Meadow (“bless his little antiseptic heart”)—was sick. Jane had been violently ill on and off since week one. Jim had pink eye and the runs and a case of hemorrhoids so severe that he couldn’t sit down. The rest had grumbling, dysenteric stomachs. “We are so frail, all of us, and without the faith or fatalism to meet this place on its own terms,” Jane wrote. Coping with it, she said, required either masochism or hyper-attention to duty, which, she suspected, only Jim was capable of. Eventually, even Richard got sick.
Sometimes Jane could no longer talk Jim out of his moods. She told him about the dream she had about their marriage—when she knew where he was even though she couldn’t find him—and the next night, he moved his cot away from hers without saying anything. His “I love you” in London changed to “Yes, I probably do.” Jane found herself thinking, It’s going to be just like the past, after all.
“I probably should have waited until I was sure before shooting off my mouth about Humph. I mean everything’s OK + all but I doubt me if there’s a future in it. In spite of his being a nice guy and all. Which he is. What the hell,” she wrote to her parents.
There was still more than a month left on the expedition, and she was already emptied out. Jane wrote to herself: “I think maybe I’d like to be dead so I wouldn’t have to see it end, wouldn’t have to keep reading between lines to maintain my precarious hold on what’s real.”