The Healer's Daughters

by Jay Amberg

  As Iskan approaches Engin Suner, each wound, each burn and cut and bruise and break and dislocation, sears itself into her brain. At least, he is still breathing. Broken, mangled…but breathing. Carefully, delicately, she lifts Suner’s chin. His face is a quagmire of tissue and blood. His eyes are open but unfocused. She cups the side of his head with her right hand. “I’m sorry,” she says. “We came as fast…” She is unable to finish the sentence. A void, an emptiness, billows in the pit of her stomach. She doesn’t actually even know if they came as quickly as possible—and the team leader is already gone.

  When Suner hears her voice, his eyes clear, but only a bit. Choking up blood, he murmurs through his shattered teeth, “K…kill me.”

  She continues to cradle his head. “An ambulance is coming,” she says in the softest voice she can muster. “Will be here…soon.” This is her op, her mission, and this is what she has wrought. “Help is coming. Hold on…”

  Suner’s eyes focus on her face. His look is one she has never seen before. “Kill me,” he repeats.

  66

  BERGAMA

  As Elif Boroğlu closes the door to her mother’s private room in Bergama Hospital, Tuğçe Iskan is walking along the hospital’s corridor toward her. “Hello,” Iskan says. Her voice is low, almost a whisper. Her face is gaunt. Her khaki pants are loose on her hips. In the five weeks since the bombing at the Aesklepion, she has lost seven kilos.

  Elif nods to her, saying, “It’s not a good time…” Her voice is also quiet. Her hair is cut short, even shorter than Iskan’s. Her eyes are badly bloodshot, as though she no longer sleeps at all.

  “No time would be good for her to see me,” Iskan says. “I was just stopping by to check on her progress…”

  Elif shakes her head. “What progress?” she asks both Iskan and herself. “She won’t respond to anyone.”

  “She might respond to me.” Iskan’s voice is heavy with self-deprecating irony, something new in her life.

  As the two women head together past the nursing station, Elif says, “Her vitals are better, much better, but she isn’t. She can’t…or she refuses to communicate. Even with my grandmother and me.” Her tone is both sad and angry. “It’s killing Anneanne. I think Mom’s aware that she’s paralyzed from her neck down, but she won’t acknowledge it.” When they reach the elevator, Elif, her hand shaking, presses the button. “Why,” she asks, “are you really here?”

  “I need to talk with you.”

  “That’s why you came to Bergama?”

  “No,” Iskan says. “My new boss sent me to check on the renovation work at both the bombing sites. And some other stuff.”

  They ride to the ground floor and walk out the hospital’s main entrance without saying anything more. When they get outside into the morning’s heat, Iskan looks across the circular drive at the back of the statue of a seated man with his left arm resting on a stack of oversized books. To the statue’s right, the Turkish flag droops on a pole. “Can we talk,” she asks, “for a little while?”

  To their left an ambulance, lights flashing, is pulling up to the hospital’s emergency entrance. Elif points to the orange and white kantin sign to their right.

  An awning shades the kantin’s patio, but it is not air-conditioned. The air is still. Each of the dozen tables, the color of mud, is surrounded by four plastic chairs. A cheap tin ashtray lies on every table. One elderly couple sits smoking at a table near the kantin’s entrance, but no one else is on the patio. A tan, mangy dog sleeps on the patio’s brick floor. While Iskan goes inside to get Elif and herself a carton of ayran, Elif finds a table away from the stench of cigarette smoke. Just to her left, an orange, coin-operated phone charger stands on a pedestal. Fifteen different plugs hang on wires like tentacles.

  When Iskan returns with the ayran, Elif says, “You have a new boss?” In recent weeks she has become as bad as Iskan at small talk.

  Iskan opens her carton. “Yes. I was transferred to a special unit just before the Aesklepion bombing.” She does not provide any more information. She will not lie to Elif, but she can’t tell her everything.

  “And what does your new boss really want you to do here in Bergama?” Elif leaves her carton untouched.

  “Tie up loose ends.” Iskan takes a long pull on the straw. “Find out things.”

  “So this is an interview? An official visit?”

  “No. I have questions, but I—”

  “Ministry questions?”

  Iskan stares at Elif’s face. Much of the light has gone out of Elif’s bloodshot eyes. The rings beneath them are dark and puffy. Her clear skin has become pale and chafed, especially her cheeks, as though she has become more troglodyte than human. Her once-beautiful hair looks like Elif herself chopped it down. “No,” Iskan says. “Not a word either of us say will be in my report. Nothing.” She bends and crimps the top of the carton. “I need to talk with you. I don’t know who I trust anymore.”

  Elif’s laugh is sharp, almost mean. “You don’t!” A siren from a vehicle they cannot see is approaching the hospital fast.

  “I feel like my mentor, my friend, may have set me up to do things that I…that caused me to…” Iskan squeezes the top of the carton. “I’ve done what I’ve done. What happened was my doing, my operation, but I didn’t think it through…all the consequences.” She tries to muster a smile but can’t. “It was necessary, the op. And I ran it. But he…” She doesn’t think she can tell Elif much of what happened.

  “Is your mentor your new boss?”

  “No.” She has wondered, though, if Nihat Monoğlu is really running the entire operation to put the Hamits and their governmental cronies out of business. “My boss…he’s ex-special forces…I think…I don’t really know. The unit is cracking down on the illegal trafficking in artifacts. Not just the usual public-relations bullshit like what I was involved in before, but hitting them hard.”

  “You would be good at that.” Elif reaches for her carton of ayran but stops her hand before she touches it.

  Iskan can’t tell if Elif’s statement is a compliment. “I am. But I don’t know… I’ve already done things…”

  “Evil men have suffered?” Elif makes no reference to her own actions.

  “Not just evil men.” She pushes her carton aside, folds her hands on the table, and leans forward. Her blue eyes light as her voice becomes a whisper. “But evil men, yes. Definitely. A Russian oligarch, a really bad guy, burned to death when his yacht was blown up in the Aegean. Though the media reported the murder as typical Russian infighting among Putin’s perversely corrupt friends, it was Mustafa Hamit’s vengeance. Since his son, his only child, disappeared, Hamit has been out of his mind.” She looks into Elif’s bleary eyes, which don’t blink. “His favorite nephew disappeared, too, along with a number of his thugs.”

  Iskan gazes out at the Ambulance Bufe beyond the hospital’s circular drive. Scores of cases of water bottles are stacked next to the shed-like building. “Hamit thinks he’s been betrayed,” she continues, “and he’s hell-bent on getting even. A governmental minister, pretty high up, one of Hamit’s ex-cronies, died in a car crash on his way to Bodrum. That was in the news. Two other ministers, even higher up, have vanished. That wasn’t in the news.”

  Leaning forward as well, Elif says, “Yes, there’ve been disappearances around here, too.” Her face is stone, but a vein in her neck pulses.

  Iskan turns her carton 180 degrees and then turns it again. “How’s your brother?”

  “Fine,” Elif snarls, then checks herself. She drums the table with the fingers of her right hand. “I don’t have any idea where he is, if that’s what you’re supposed to find out.”

  “I’m not supposed to find out anything.” Irritation seeps into Iskan’s voice for the first time. She looks at Elif’s hand, which is rougher than it was when they
met before. The fingernails are all cut—or bitten—down. The right forefinger’s nail is cracked. “I was just wondering.”

  At first, Elif doesn’t say anything. She drops her hand into her lap and then looks into Iskan’s eyes. “Serkan’s a mess,” she says finally. “I really don’t know where he is or what he’s doing, but he sounds awful.” She glances at the phone charger. “We talk for less than two minutes once a week.” She lifts and waves her hand as if to dismiss the subject. “So you’re winning the war against the Hamits?” she asks.

  “Maybe.” Iskan nods but looks away. “It doesn’t feel like it.”

  “There’s no winning,” Elif says. She drums the table with both hands. “Are we safe, my family? Safe from the Hamits’ wrath?”

  Iskan holds her gaze. “Not Serkan. Not at all. If you are, which I believe you are, it’s only because he thinks you’re inconsequential. A woman artist.”

  The two women fall silent again. The two old people rise from their table and, still smoking, totter toward the the hospital’s main entrance. They follow the plastic yellow path set in the sidewalk’s stone. The mangy dog looks up briefly but then settles back.

  Elif presses the palms of her hands onto the table and asks, “Did Hamit kill Mehmet’s father?”

  “No.” Again, Iskan offers no more information.

  “My grandmother has seen Mehmet’s mother wandering around town muttering about her husband being murdered like her father and son.”

  “Engin Suner is alive.”

  “Nobody here has seen him.”

  Iskan stifles the urge to lie, then admits, “Mustafa Hamit tried to have him killed.” She wipes her left hand across her mouth. “Suner’s in Istanbul. Recovering in a…private…rehab facility.” “Recovering,” Iskan knows, isn’t the right word. Engin Suner will not be the man he was. The physical and emotional damage is too severe.

  “Has she been told that?” Elif asks, pressing Iskan.

  “Yes. But she doesn’t believe it. She’s not…in her right mind.”

  Elif leans farther forward so her face is close to Iskan’s. “Are any of us?” she asks.

  67

  BERGAMA

  Elif Boroğlu struggles to remove the rubble blocking her way through the tunnel. Dust motes swirl in the arc of her miner’s lamp. She is covered in grime—boots, jeans, work gloves, shower cap, and hoodie. Although it is not hot this far underground, her face sweats beneath her goggles and dust mask. She is not sure whether she is under the Aesklepion or the hillside pasture beyond the theater. She has been working her way through this tunnel for close to a month, having chosen it because it had once been wide enough to transport large objects. It is connected to one of the theater’s passageways—but not the one from which the Syrian boy emerged. The whole theater is still cordoned off, though no investigation continues.

  Elif has worked here every night from one o’clock to five o’clock. No one, she believes, has seen her come and go from her studio or noticed the secret entry, obscured by a fir tree’s branches, she has cut in the Aesklepion’s outer fence. The Aesklepion’s dogs, which she has known since she opened her studio six years ago, greet her quietly and sometimes escort her as she slinks through the curing center’s grounds.

  Elif’s days are still spent going to the hospital with her grandmother to visit her mother. She has told her anneanne that she is working in her studio at night, which, in a sense, she is—though she has not sculpted a single figurine since her mother was attacked. She washes herself and her clothes before dawn each morning at the studio and then sleeps there on her yoga mat for three or four hours—only to wake from nightmares of her decapitating rows of kneeling men in headscarves. She uses a single-edged sword that stays sharp despite all of the carnage she causes. The severed heads’ unblinking, sightless eyes stare up at her. She cannot scrub their blood from her hands.

  Elif loosens the largest stone and pulls it free. When she inserts her arm into the hole, she feels nothing. For a moment, she forgets to breathe. She can’t fit her face and her lamp into the void at the same time, but she catches a glimpse of what might be a vaulted ceiling. Forcing herself to slow down, she yanks at the next stone below the hole. She has made breakthroughs in tunnels before, but she has never been searching for something in particular. Her tunneling has always been an adventure—exploration. Here it is obsession. She starts to claw at the smaller stones, widening the hole. Her breath quickens, and sweat runs down her temples. If it weren’t for the gloves, her fingers would be bleeding.

  She stops herself, once again realizing how much she has been affected, is being infected, by her mother’s obsession. Slowly and deliberately, she leans back, takes off her right glove, and lowers her mask. She unclips her canteen from her belt and drinks deeply. Choking, she coughs up a mouthful of water. After taking another, smaller sip, she recaps the canteen and returns to work. As she enlarges the hole she can see that the chamber’s ceiling is, indeed, vaulted, though parts of it have collapsed. Clearing a path through the tunnel is similar to what she did growing up, but what she’s doing now feels fundamentally different. She is agitated, not excited.

  When she widens the hole still farther, she thinks she might be able to squirm through, but she stops herself yet again. Even at an angle, her hips won’t make it, so she returns to the task. Dust whirls and falls in the arc of her light. Finally, extending her arms ahead of herself, she wriggles into the gap, scraping her shoulders, breasts, and hips. And then she is sliding and skidding head first. She finds herself panting, facedown, on a slope of debris. She swings her legs around in front of her and plants her feet so that up is no longer down. Although she straightens her lamp, goggles, and mask, she can, at first, see nothing through the dust storm she has created.

  She tries not to move until the dust settles. Turning her head, she pans the light. There is something…shadows and contours…definitely something…ahead. When she finally can see recessed shelves cut into the rock, she rises slowly from the rubble, adjusts her goggles, and approaches as though she were on a precipice in a blizzard. There on the recessed stone shelves blanketed in dust are rolls of parchment—a lot of them. To her right, there are more shelves, some collapsed and some near the bottom buried. She reaches out but doesn’t touch anything.

  This is quite a find, whatever it is. The Aesklepion had its own library, but she is under the wrong part of the curing center’s grounds, if she is under the Aesklepion at all. Marc Antony supposedly gave Pergamon’s library to Cleopatra, but no one has ever been able to show that all—or, really, any—of the parchments were shipped to Alexandria. Pergamon’s leading citizens like Nicon, Galen’s father, had private libraries. Galen also sent books, his own and classic Greek works, back to Pergamon. Clasping her hands behind her back, she leans her face close to the shelves. Too many of the parchments are dust shrouded, but what little writing she can see looks to her like Attic Greek—but that may be wishful thinking.

  Coughing into her mask, she remembers the problems her gift of Galen’s letter caused her mother. It was really the source, the taproot, of much of the pain. She scans the shelves—there must be hundreds, thousands, of texts here, most intact. Already torn about what to do—or not do—she stares at the shelves. Her breathing is coming in gasps that draw the mask against her lips, but she is only now realizing it. She is shaking, unable to touch the parchments or turn away. And she is already past her deadline for leaving the tunnel undetected.

  68

  BERGAMA

  When Elif Boroğlu finally pulls her attention from the rolls of parchment and turns to her left, her miner’s light catches something bright in the dust near the floor. The far end of the chamber is completely covered with rubble, but the pile tapers toward the area where she is standing. She takes three steps closer and stares down at a bronze left foot shrouded in fine dust. As she kneels and
gently wipes away the grime, she begins to shake again. The perfectly wrought toes look alive, as though they belong to someone extant beneath the debris. The ankle bone shines in her light. The leg rises at an angle of about forty degrees. The calf muscle is that of an athlete, practically the size of a man living today. She recognizes the pose as that of one of antiquity’s most famous Hellenistic statues, long thought lost. Still kneeling, she uncovers the leg to the thigh. Although the bronze kneecap is dinged, it is intact.

  Elif sits back on her haunches and looks up. The ceiling a couple of meters behind the statue has collapsed, but the arch directly above has not. It may be that the rubble covering the statue is mostly dust that during an earthquake poured over it or accrued like sand spreading across the floor. She doesn’t know so she keeps clearing the grit away. Sweeping beneath the left knee, she finds the right foot and lower leg lying horizontally on their bronze base—a warrior’s shield.

  As far as she can tell, the right foot is perfect—the tendons, the veins, the arch, the toes, the space between the toes, each toenail. And the left thigh above the foot but not touching it is muscular, but not idealized, not exaggerated. She is choking up, not at the beauty of the statue, though it is the most beautiful she has ever seen, nor at its grandeur or even its authenticity, but at its sheer humanity.

  Unaware of time’s passing, she keeps exposing more of the statue. She has in Italy seen a marble copy of the statue, but this is wholly different. The marble copies have mass, gravitas—this has vitality, vibrance. The Dying Gladiator, the Europeans called the statue until they deduced from the torque, the warrior’s twisted metal neck ring, that he must represent a Galatian whom the Pergamene kings conquered in the third century BCE. The Dying Gaul that she is unearthing seems to be living on here in Bergama long after the empires, the conquerers as well as the conquered, have vanished.