by Jay Amberg
“Soon.” The blaring sirens are a distraction, but he will not let them ruin this. Her stitched lower lip quivers, which makes her that much more enticing. His breathing becomes heavy, his mouth dry. She has to be feeling much of what he is. When his cell phone rings, he lets go of her niqab and mutes it. Nothing is going to interrupt this moment of conquest.
One of his attendants is shouting something through the locked door, but the rushing in his ears drowns the words. He lowers his hand to her right breast which, even through the coarse garments, is ripe to his touch. The holy book states that foreplay is proper so he squeezes the breast hard. Heat rises within him. Sweat runs from his temples into his beard.
She grips the hairpin, her fingers locking around the two spheres. She takes a long, deep breath.
His lower back arches as he twists the breast; his breath quickens. He can feel that her breathing is changing, too. He grabs onto something firm…her nipple?…and pulls. Both his attendants are shouting outside, but this moment’s siren song is all he can hear. He throws his head back and gapes at the cracks in the ceiling’s plaster, sure that there is a divine message there. Glass rattles when the first bomb strikes nearby.
The thick beard that scratches her wounded face smells of cigarette smoke. He is yanking at her burqa’s seam, rocking on his heels, mewing. She bites her lip. Tastes blood.
A second bomb, even closer, shakes the room’s bare furniture. He lets go of the burqa, runs his right hand down her side and hip, and then clutches the back of her thigh.
Their eyes meet for the first time. She sees lust and imperiousness and misogyny. He sees her submissiveness turn suddenly to contempt, a look so fierce and so filled with loathing that he is momentarily frozen by it.
As he lets go of her thigh so that he can cuff her to her knees, she slides the hairpin from her sleeve. Far more swiftly than he can react, she plunges the bright golden tip through her left eye deep into her brain. Blood spurts in his face. She is already convulsing as she lurches backward away from him.
53
BERGAMA
With his left hand, Serkan Boroğlu slides the empty bottle of Efes Pilsen onto the rooftop patio’s glass table. “No,” he mutters, “I don’t want to talk. Not to you…or anybody else.” In the two days since the attack on their mother, he has become increasingly guilt-ridden and sullen. He has finally changed his T-shirt, but he hasn’t showered or shaved. The soft cast on his right hand protects his two broken knuckles and fractured middle finger.
Elif, who sits across from him with the saucer of sliced apples she brought out for them to share, looks at the figurines on the shelf. She has just showered, and her damp hair gleams in the day’s last light. Her cat, Sekhmet, lies in her lap purring. In less than an hour she and Serkan will return to the hospital for their third visit of the day, though she believes that her mother does not even know they are there.
The doctors say the swelling has slowed, but there’s no evidence that her mother’s condition is improving—or that it ever will. And there isn’t much Elif can do for her mother except hold her hand and hope. Eventually, perhaps even tonight, she will get her grandmother to come home and rest from her constant vigil. But, here, now, there is something else she needs to do. She fixes Serkan with her eyes. “Look at me,” she says to him.
He doesn’t.
For two days, she has been trying to bolster him, telling him the attack was not his fault. Which it isn’t. It’s far more her fault, something she is acutely aware of and must herself do something about. But first she has to get him out of this swamp of self-pity into which he plunged after he smashed his hand into the hospital waiting room’s wall. She takes a slice of apple, bites it in half, and chews it. “I’ve been thinking,” she says, “that you’re right. It is all your fault.”
He glances at her, then looks away again. His Bergama basketball T-shirt, which has been in his drawer since high school, is much too tight.
She eats the other half of the apple slice. “If you hadn’t gotten involved with the Hamits, hadn’t gotten greedy, Mom would be fine!”
He glares at her as he wipes his mouth with the back of his left hand. But he still doesn’t answer.
She picks up another apple slice and points it at him. “You endangered me, too. If it weren’t for you, Mustafa Hamit would never have come to my studio.” She bites off a small piece of the apple without the skin and feeds it to Sekhmet. “So what are you going to do about it?”
He stares at the table.
“You keep crying into your beer—literally.” Her voice is even, feigning disdain.
He sniffles.
“If you really believe the Hamits sent the boy to kill our mother, you should be up in Istanbul hunting down Mustafa!”
He dabs at his eyes with his left hand, but he still says nothing.
“You know that, but you keep telling yourself that Mom needs you here. Why? She’s not responding to any of us. Not yet, anyway.”
He looks out at the dying light.
“You’re the man of the family. You should be wreaking vengeance!”
He doesn’t respond.
“That’s how it’s supposed to work. You take charge. You sharpen your sword! Gird your loins for battle!”
He looks down at his cast.
“But you’re not. You’re cowering here.” She strokes Sekhmet’s neck. “Are you afraid of Mustafa?”
He shakes his head.
“Why, then?”
Again, he doesn’t answer.
She leans forward and places her palms on the table. “Serkan, why?”
“They’ll kill me,” he murmurs.
“Who? Mustafa?”
“His Georgians! Steroidal maniacs.”
“And you can’t handle them?”
He wipes his eyes again. “Not those guys! Nobody can! They’ll gut me and then have soguk for lunch before I’ve even bled out.”
She nods. She thinks Mustafa will want to kill him—and maybe her—in any case, just to shut them up. But at least now, she’s finally breaking through to Serkan.
He starts to sob. “It won’t do you or Mom any good if I go off and get myself killed. Though it might be better.”
“Getting yourself killed helps no one!”
“I’ve fucked up everything!”
“Maybe,” she says, “but you need to be a man! We need you to.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry! What good does that do?”
He shakes his head. “I’m so sorry!”
“Stop it!”
He shakes his head more slowly. “I’ve messed everything up.”
She holds his eye contact. “You’ve said that. And maybe you have…but what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. I…”
“You what?” Elif asks after a moment.
He takes an apple slice from the saucer but doesn’t bite it. For the first time, he meets her gaze. “I want to do something, but I don’t know…”
Sekhmet mews, leaps from Elif’s lap, and darts for the stairs. The empty beer bottle begins to rattle on the tabletop. Elif’s figurines tremble, and the grape arbor above them creaks. Serkan stands, glances about wildly, and grabs the beer bottle as it begins to pitch off the table. An entire row of the figurines on the top shelf topples like bowling pins. The statue closest to the edge of the shelf—a svelte, naked, polychromatic terra-cotta goddess—plummets and shatters on the floor tiles. Elif leaps to her feet, snatches a black goddess before it, too, pitches off the shelf, then turns and spreads her arms to shield the other clattering figurines.
The second tremor causes the arbor to groan. Grapes rain on the table, bouncing and rolling. Serkan moves out from under the arbor, plants his feet, and raises his arms as though he’
s getting ready to rebound a basketball. Elif leans over the shelf as her goddesses bump and grind. Their grandmother’s pots shimmy on the floor, their herbs swaying. One of the neighbors is screaming.
When the third tremor is weaker, Elif straightens up and Serkan lowers his arms. They can barely feel the fourth, but their conversation has fragmented, their words splintered. Serkan’s eyes are wide, and his breath is ragged. Whatever thoughts were coalescing in his mind have disintegrated.
As Elif begins to stand her goddesses upright and arrange them again on the shelf, Serkan says, “Can I help?”
“Get a broom,” she says, her tone more curt than she intends.
54
BERGAMA
Elif Boroğlu pedals past the Aesklepion’s gate toward her studio. The hazy night feels heavy, but the gloom, she knows, is mostly in her heart. It is not late, not even midnight, but after the third of the day’s visits with her comatose mother she needed to ride her bicycle hard, well out into the hinterland. The ride did not, though, as it usually does, lift her spirits. She did not feel that potent sense of flying that she sometimes has when she’s on a long nocturnal ride in the hills beyond the valley. But at least she has gotten a full body sweat going.
When she slows at the corner, she sees a figure sitting in shadows near the entrance to her studio—a woman about her size. While she gets off her bike, Tuğçe Iskan stands and brushes off the seat of her jeans. She has nothing with her, no manila envelope, no Ministry materials, nothing. She must have been here quite a while because the neighborhood dogs aren’t barking. Somewhere down the street, someone is playing a guitar. And farther on, an overwrought sportcaster is ranting about some football match.
Elif wipes sweat from her face and nods but doesn’t say anything. She unclips her water bottle and drinks until it is empty. In the last five days, a couple dozen people from outside Bergama, police officials and reporters and politicians, have talked at her, offering condolences but really trying to get a sound bite or photo op. It’s not, Elif thinks, that they are cynical but rather that they are self-obsessed, honestly glad that her mother is surviving but also trying to use her family’s and Bergama’s tragedy to further their own ends, whatever they are. Iskan, on the other hand, vanished from public view after having provided so much aid.
“Was the ride…? Did it help?” Iskan asks.
“Not enough,” Elif says as she wheels her bicycle past her. She unlocks her studio door, opens it, and flips the light switch.
Iskan turns but does not follow her.
“Come in…” Elif steers her bike through the doorway. “Please.”
Once they are both inside, Elif leans the bike against the wall and then turns the new deadbolt. “Thank you,” she says, “for everything. I… We…”
Iskan nods.
Sekhmet stretches and leaps from her perch on the supply shelf. While Elif wipes her face, neck, and shoulders with a blue hand towel, Sekhmet rubs up against her bare, damp legs. Iskan surveys the figurines again before picking up the stout goddess holding the single-edged sword and the severed head.
“I’m still not sure what I’m going to do with that one,” Elif says as she refills her bottle at the cooler. She guzzles all of her water, refills the bottle, and gestures toward the stool by the workbench.
Iskan shakes her head once. ”I’d rather stand. I’ve been sitting most of the day.”
Elif picks up the studio’s one cup and offers it to Iskan.
“I’m good, thanks,” Iskan says. “Your mother, she is improving?”
“The doctors are satisfied with her progress. But…” Elif drinks again from the bottle. “But, as I’m sure you know, she’s still sedated, still in traction, still paralyzed, still unable…” Her smile is pained. The water has brought on a secondary sweat even though the studio is cool. “Or unwilling to speak. Her eyes open occasionally.” Elif shakes her head as she realizes how much she actually wants to talk with this woman. “Twice, I’ve seen her follow somebody’s movement with her eyes.” She raps her knuckles on the workbench. “The swelling is down some. No seizures.”
“That’s good,” Iskan says. Her tone suggests she’s not just trying to be polite.
“My grandmother, who has two broken ribs herself, refuses to leave the hospital even though visiting hours are limited.” Elif shakes her head again. “They’ve actually set up a cot for her down the hall.”
“And your brother?” Iskan asks. “I saw him at the memorial for Recep Ateş. He looked…upset…sad and angry at the same time…” She looks for a word that might not be offensive but can’t think of one. “He wouldn’t talk to anybody.”
“He goes to the hospital, but mostly he stays at home. Drinks beer until he falls asleep. Blames himself for what happened.”
“It’s not his fault,” Iskan says. “Both attacks were carefully planned, which takes a lot of time. Certainly more time than your brother has been working with Mustafa Hamit.”
“I’ve…we’ve told him that. But…” Elif puts down her water bottle, pulls the elastic bands from her ponytail, and begins to comb her fingers through her hair. “He wants revenge, wants to make up for what’s happened, but he’s too scared even to return to Istanbul.” She massages her scalp. “Are the Hamits done with him, with Serkan?”
Iskan doesn’t at first answer. Given her new position in a clandestine unit within the Ministry, she knows the answer but has to be careful about how much information she shares. Finally, she shrugs and says, “It’s unlikely.”
Elif leans down and strokes the cat’s neck. “So you think he’s still in danger?”
“I think you all are.”
“And that’s why you’re here? To warn me?”
Iskan nods. “Partly.”
“And there’s nothing the government can do? I mean, about the Hamits.”
“Nothing the government will do. The boy was Syrian, but he was never seen in Turkey. And the Irisher. Same thing. Somebody very good at smuggling both people and equipment had to be involved. But there’s no evidence in either case. Nothing. Whoever ran the logistics was very good at it. Has been doing this sort of thing for a long time.” Her own deep anger creeps into her voice. “Even if there was evidence, it would somehow get lost.”
Iskan clears her throat and then continues, “The first attack was ISIL terrorism. As they lose territory, they’re getting more desperate. Exporting terrorism. Trying to destroy other cultures, especially UNESCO sites.” She shifts the figurine, clenches it in her left hand. “But this attack on your mother and her friends, it’s different. It’s business. ISIL may have provided the boy, the bomber and the bomb, but this was planned by someone who was targeting your mother. ISIL doesn’t work that way. The amount of stolen treasure ISIL has traded for cash and weapons is monstrous. Crime organizations like the Hamits, they’ve been all too willing to partner up. Not just in Turkey.”
Elif pours water into her right hand and wipes her face. “So there’s no way to stop them, the Hamits?”
“I didn’t say that. Governmental agencies aren’t going to stop them. They’re too deeply infiltrated, too deeply indebted.” She pauses again, takes a breath, returns the figurine to the table, and gazes at Elif. “Even your mother’s friend, Recep Ateş, the hero of Bergama, had a hidden bank account, one he made significant deposits into, monthly, for four years. Through the end of last year.”
“Recep worked for the Hamits?”
“I didn’t say that. But someone was paying him off…for a long time.” She steps away from the drying racks and table, moves closer to Elif. “Look, no one will ever know about the bank account. Recep Ateş is a hero. We need heroes right now. But the point is that the Hamits are conspiring with ISIL, commiting treason, and killing Turkish people. They’ve used the system for too long, and the system goes on protecting them. Some
body’s got to stop them.”
Elif turns on her stool and leans back. “What does that mean?”
The women’s eyes lock. Iskan takes another step closer. “The Hamits are protected by a system they do not respect in any way. They never have, not in the entire history of our country. For that family, everything is transactional. Everything has a price. Everything is simply bought and sold. Even the law…it’s just another negotiable factor. People, the same thing. But as my friend says—” She stops herself, surprised she used that word. “Their strength, that everything can be bought and sold, is also their weakness, their Achilles’ heel.” She reaches over and again picks up the figurine holding the sword and severed head. As she lifts the statue and holds it before Elif, she adds, “In your world, in the world you sometimes enter, they’re weak. They don’t understand that the world is so much more than a series of financial transactions.” She hands the figurine to Elif. “There’s power in your work. I saw it, felt it, when I first visited your mother’s house.” She points at the goddess. “How did you design this?”
“I didn’t,” Elif answers. “It just comes to me. I sit here, and I find it.” Elif’s smile is for the first time in nearly a week neither painful nor ironic. “Or, it finds me.”
Iskan waves her hand at the table and the shelves filled with figurines. “These,” she says, “they come from inside you. The Hamits can’t possibly understand that. For them, everything is about winning. Always. They, the father and the son and the cousins and the nephews, believe your mother discovered the Galen cache. Gold artifacts. Bronze statues. All of it. And that she already sold an invaluable Sekhmet amulet to a rich American couple.”
Elif winces. “The Americans knew what it was. That it was modern. They provided the gold. Paid for the equipment.”
“The Hamits don’t know any of that.”
Frowning, Elif doesn’t say anything.
