The Healer's Daughters

by Jay Amberg

  “Three more died during the night,” she says as she exhales. Her hand holding the coffee shakes. A heavy truck shifts gears as it rumbles by, but, given the hour, the road isn’t yet congested.

  He takes a slow, deep breath and then sips his coffee. When she turns her head toward him, he sees her bloodshot eyes. He has not slept either.

  “The two dead children are twin eight-year-old girls.”

  He nods. “Yes,” he says. “Both Sirma and Ferida told me that, too. How is Elif taking it?”

  “Hard. She’s very sad. Distraught.” She sighs. “Angry…”

  “Like the rest of us,” Ateş says.

  “But even worse. Taking it all so personally…like she has to…do something… ”

  “You mean, like her mother.”

  Boroğlu glares at him for a moment but does not contradict him. Then, shaking her head, she says, “Serkan hasn’t even called.”

  Ateş, knowing better than to pursue that topic, takes another sip of coffee. He is an exceptionally large man, even sitting down a full head taller than she is. An ex-basketballer good enough to play at university but not professionally, he has grown thick and heavy; his hair is short, gray at the temples and thin on top.

  “You’ve visited the site?” she asks.

  “Yes. Scorched earth. Crushed cable cars. Blood. It’s even more horrifying than the media is showing.” He sniffs his coffee. “The stench of the burnt…” He looks away at something she cannot see, then stares at the steam from his coffee. “I saw you on the acropolis…” He tries to force a smile but cannot. “Or at least the glow of your cigarette.” She has, for as long as he has known her, climbed in the evenings from her house to the site of the Altar of Zeus, where she can best think—and brood and scheme.

  “Any news on the killer?” she asks.

  “An outsider. Foreign. My age or older. A witness, a little girl from the neighborhood, saw him just before the explosion. Apparently said he was mean looking. Scary blue eyes. And a long black and white beard.”

  “And?” she asks. They have for years briefed each other on what is happening at the area’s archeological sites, in town, and at their respective, sometimes contentious, offices. But she is no longer connected to, much less the titular head of, her office. She has nothing to trade, but she needs the information. And nothing even remotely like this has ever occurred.

  He takes a deep breath. “And there are fingerprints, perhaps even DNA. The girl said he was wearing a cap. Investigators found a cap on the road near the grove. They’ll probably release a name by this afternoon.”

  “He couldn’t have acted alone.”

  Ateş doesn’t answer right away. He scratches his chin, the whiskers dark even after he has just shaved. “That’s true.”

  “Someone must’ve provided the truck…the bomb.” She drops her cigarette butt onto the cement and grinds it with the heel of her shoe. “But who would…?”

  “Somebody connected to Daesh. Nobody from town.”

  She sucks in her breath, gazes up at the pale morning sky, and exhales slowly. “Where does that leave us?”

  He leans out, his forearms on his thighs, like a coach looking over at his player. “It leaves you entirely out of it—and out of harm’s way.”

  She purses her lips. Like her daughter, she can’t leave any of this be. It’s too close to home, both her family’s and her work’s, too horrific, too evil. “And what about you?” she asks.

  “I don’t know. Wait, I guess. See if there’s anything I can help with.”

  She puts her cup on the cement next to the bench and then lights another cigarette. “But you know what this is about.”

  He looks into her bleary eyes. “Another terrorist attack on a Middle Eastern UNESCO World Heritage site.”

  “But why this site, Recep?”

  He shrugs and drinks his coffee. “Why not this site?”

  “You know what I mean.” Her tone is for the first time sharp. “We’re close. We’ve got to be.”

  “I know what you’re thinking.” He shakes his head. “But, Özlem, not everything has to be connected.”

  She stares at him, holding his gaze. “This is.”

  8

  GÖREME, TURKEY

  In late afternoon, three people sit around a table on the cave hotel’s veranda in the heart of Cappadocia. They look out at scores of the valley’s fairy chimneys, huge cone-shaped tufa pillars capped with basalt. Wind and water have eroded them for ages, and people have been hollowing out caves for homes and churches for longer than two millennia.

  “It has nothing to do with you,” Jack, the elderly Californian, says as he raises his Glenlivet on the rocks with a twist. “You’ve been terrific.” His skin is leathery, but the glint in his eyes is youthful, both, perhaps, the by-products of his having accumulated vast wealth in oil and natural gas. “Given the situation, we need to change our itinerary.”

  Serkan Boroğlu nods, but his mind is screaming. He has spent the last five days with this couple, providing them with an upscale, elite personal tour of Pergamon, Ephesus, and Cappadocia, topped off by this morning’s hot-air-balloon excursion. He is supposed to take them on his special private tour of Istanbul the next five days, but the Bergama bombing has spooked them.

  ”A couple of days earlier,” Clare says, “and we would’ve been on that cable car.”

  Serkan nods again. He knows all too well that she’s right. He would have been there with them. He has been a high-end Turkish tour guide for almost five years, and yesterday’s atrocity is a crippling blow to an already hobbled industry. And, personally, it’s a knife to his throat. He can’t put out of his head the fact that he grew up only a short walk from Bergama’s funicular that carries passengers up to ancient Pergamon’s acropolis. His mother and sister still live in Bergama. Neither would, each for her own reasons, ever ride the cable cars, but still. He has been meaning to call to check on them, but he’s been too busy.

  Clare reaches across the table and brushes her fingers across the back of Serkan’s hand. “And we will, of course, pay your full fee,” she says. Twenty-five years younger than her husband, she is not, as Serkan first thought, a trophy wife. She is tall and tan and thin, a bottle-blonde with large blue eyes, but she is even smarter than her husband and more driven, a successful attorney who is always checking messages and has long jargon-filled conversations every night with her office in Los Angeles. Her iPhone, never far from her, lies on the table next to her glass of French pinot noir.

  “Yes,” Serkan says, “thank you.” His lopsided smile and dark eyes often attract his foreign guests, especially the women. Glancing at his Heinekin, he does not reach for the bottle—he has already spent their full fee and more. Pigeons are cooing somehere nearby, and a flurry of small dark birds whirls in the light above the hotel’s fairy chimney.

  “We’ve booked a couple of nights in Crete and a couple in Rhodes before we head to the Holy Land,” Jack says.

  “But we’ll still meet you in Istanbul to pick up our order on the twenty-third before we fly home,” Clare adds.

  The Californian sips his scotch and leans toward Serkan. “Perhaps,” he says, “in the meantime, you can find something really nice for Clare. Another memento of our trip to Asia Minor.”

  Serkan’s mind spins. “That’s a nice idea,” he answers to buy himself time. He has already sold them half a dozen of his sister’s terra-cotta figurines. And the couple has also arranged to have his sister fashion a gold amulet for Clare—a unique design that she and Elif conceived together.

  “Something old, of real, lasting value,” Jack adds.

  “Yes,” Serkan says. “That’s a very nice idea. And something I’m sure I can arrange.” His part of the profit would help keep him financially afloat for another couple of months. As his mind c
lears, he turns to Clare. He prefers younger women, like the full-bodied Bavarian he is currently dating, but Clare is, he must admit, very attractive. “Yes,” he repeats, “I have exactly the right contacts.”

  “Gold, also?” she asks.

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “I’d like that, Serkan.” Holding his gaze, she traces her forefinger around the rim of her wineglass. “That would be lovely.”

  Sipping his scotch, Jack smiles.

  “Instead of my sister’s amulet?” Serkan asks.

  As Clare shrugs, her smile is coy. She gazes at her husband. “In addition to…”

  Serkan tries not to look surprised. He needs a sip of his beer but holds himself back. “That can be arranged,” he says.

  “I would like something ancient, Serkan,” she says, cocking her head and again holding his gaze.

  He looks over at the fairy chimneys, focusing on one with steps carved from the same volcanic ash as the cone itself. The window above the door frames a large green vase holding sunflowers.

  His smile widening, Jack says, “Clare tends to get what she wants.”

  Serkan tries not to show his excitement, but when he does finally drink his Heinekin, beer almost fizzes out his nose. He stifles a cough. Sweat runs down his spine. After the Istanbul terrorist attacks and the failed coup, his private, high-end tour business, like everyone’s, has gone into the toilet. Three years ago, he worked 297 days, last year 137, and this year only 29 in the first four months. To meet his ever-increasing costs of living, he has had to launch two new ventures—taking kinky clients to forbidden Istanbul locales and selling antiquities to wealthy foreigners. The former, which requires only au courant information and a bit of bribery, is far less complicated. In the latter, he is working on commission, a finder’s fee actually, for a powerful and influential family with strict protocols. This would be his fifth sale, and by far the most lucrative.

  “Whatever you like can be arranged.” His voice doesn’t crack, but he feels like he is outside himself looking in. “What do you have in mind?”

  “Another amulet. Something from the Roman period. Or Hellenistic. Egyptian might do.” Clare’s smile is soft as she swirls the wine in her glass. “Or perhaps even older. Something my jeweler might turn into a pendant.”

  “We can find something you’ll love, I’m sure.” The word “we” is used loosely. He is an honors economics graduate who felt that an academic life, like that which his father has lived, would be dull. He is a man fluent in German as well as English and Turkish. A man bright enough to have learned in less than five years everything he needs to know to entertain worldly foreigners at sites historic and esoteric. And this moment, maybe his last chance to make his business work, is exhilarating. Suddenly, he’s rising from the depths, ready to take wing among the fairy chimneys, to soar beyond the hot air balloons.

  Jack puts down his scotch, leans forward with his forearms on the table, and, fixing his gaze on Serkan, asks, “Should we be talking to somebody else?”

  His wife picks up her phone and begins tapping.

  “No,” Serkan says. “Absolutely not. My connections have a long history of trading in antiquities. Customers are always satisfied.” This conversation has been so abrupt. There hasn’t even been any mention of price. And, actually, the Hamits invite no outsiders, and certainly not him, into their inner workings. But their reputation is impeccable. If a sale ever went wrong, no one he knows has ever found out about it.

  Still leaning forward, Jack says, “And customs? Will there be guarantees in place?”

  “No problem,” Serkan says. “No problem.” He knows he needs to stop repeating himself. “All the paperwork is taken care of. Guaranteed.” At least, that was what was done on earlier, smaller deals.

  Clare sighs and places her phone on the table in front of him. “Something very much like this, Serkan,” she says, “would please me.”

  He stares at the golden image of a goddess similar to some of those his sister has made.

  “Or this,” she says, flicking the phone’s face.

  Staring back at him is a svelte, ornately dressed golden goddess with the head of a lion.

  9

  KAIKOS VALLEY, TURKEY

  Five kilometers northwest of Bergama, six women in their twenties and thirties file up a steep, narrow trail toward a rock escarpment. The first and last carry backpacks; the middle four hold hand drums. The air is dry, the breeze tangy. The gibbous moon is past its zenith, and stars blink in the hazy night. The women do not talk, but their footfalls on the stone and dirt have a distinct rhythm. Traffic hums in the distance, and cicadas buzz close by. Somewhere in the Kaikos Valley below, a dog is barking.

  When the women reach a niche cut into the rock formation, the leader, Elif Boroğlu, takes from her backpack a small figurine, an unpainted terra-cotta mother goddess with a headdress. As the women chant softly, she places the figurine reverently in the niche. After a minute, they start up the path again, but their low chanting continues. Their chant is, as always, spontaneous, and they pass the melody among themselves as they walk.

  High up the escarpment, when the trail cuts back, the procession stops near the narrow mouth of a cave. A spring whispers from the rocks to their right. Though they are far enough from Bergama that the town is mute, the sightline to ancient Pergamon’s acropolis is clear, the pale temple columns stark even at this distance. Still chanting, each woman takes off her clothes and piles them neatly on the rock next to the spring. In nakedness, they have learned, is honesty.

  Elif, the only one of the women without tattoos, takes three more figurines, human rather than mother goddesses, from her backpack. One is painted dull black, the second the pale blue of the sky just before sunrise, and the third a glossy yellow. She places them as an offering on a horizontal stone shelf cut next to the cave’s mouth. The women form a semicircle, and each begins to sway to her internal music.

  The drumming starts slowly, the rhythm clear but not yet relentless. One woman double steps into the semicircle, twirls, raises her drum first to the night sky and then to the cave. “Oh, Mother Goddess,” she calls out, “by every name you are known in every place, take the souls of those murdered in our ancient city! Take these innocents into your heart and purify them for their journey! Wash all of us of our impurities!” She lowers her head and beats her drum harder.

  A second woman steps forward, takes up the beat, spins, stomps hard, and spits into the dirt. “We mourn the passing of innocence!” she sings. “We mourn the loss of families, of mothers and fathers and dear children and grandparents!” Her voice rises. “And we curse the violence of men! Their destructiveness! Their evil! Their stupidity! Their arrogance! Their narcissism!” She squats, spits again, and leaps wailing at the moon. “Oh, we curse their arrogance!”

  A third, already weeping, calls, “Oh, Mother, help us understand what cannot be understood! We entreat you, help us comprehend incomprehensible evil!” She raises her arms and shakes her hands. “Give us the wisdom,” she cries, “of the ages that we now need so deeply! Send us a cure for the pain that wracks our souls!”

  The fourth woman shouts again for vengeance, and the fifth takes a list from a backpack and calls out the names of all of those killed on Bergama’s funicular. She repeats the names of the eight-year-old twins again and again until their names become a single incantation. The women are all sweating now, each swinging, each calling, each beating time. The moon turns, and the stars rotate.

  The women’s rituals are never scripted, their actions never preset. Their incantations are always new, and, though they sometimes utter the names of the old mother goddesses—Cybele and Meter and Isis and others—it is the current transgressions of humans that they bewail. And it is the sanctity of the earth, of the world now, that they honor, this moment in time. Often they step out of time, dance beyond
time, but they remain present to this escarpment, this cave, this spring, this night, this air, and the dust they stir in this moment.

  Finally, Elif takes up the black figurine and steps into the center of the tightening semicircle. The drumming around her is unrelenting, the passion still rising. “Hear our sadness, Mother!” she sings, her voice beautiful, high and haunting. “Hear our anger, oh, Mother! Feel our pain! Feel the ache in our hearts and in our town!” Her voice rises in pitch. “Lament with us the senseless horror that has been visited upon us!” She raises the figurine with both hands as she pirouettes. She then lowers her right hand that holds the figurine, turns, cocks her arm, and hurls it against the escarpment above the cave’s mouth. It shatters, showering the dancers with shards.

  “Give us hope, Mother!” Elif intones. “Give us strength! Give us the power to overcome! To carry on! To go forth! To make things right! To love!” Spinning, she can’t catch her breath. “To love! To love!” Her voice rises above words, beyond language.

  The others whirl with her but not in unison, each in her own universe. They are all sweating and panting, pale gleaming shadows hidden in the night from outsiders. Their voices rise with Elif’s, but none speaks words. Their incantations fly well beyond the discourse of any dogma, beyond the languages of cults or tribes or nationalities, beyond any dialects of man. In the valley, dogs bark.

  10

  BERGAMA