by Jay Amberg
Her work becomes feverish. Like a dog, she uses both hands to scoop the earth back between her legs. Dust eddies. When she lays bare the scrotum and penis, she remembers that the Galatians fought against Hellenistic armor naked, which was courageous but essentially stupid. Sandy grit sifts down over the shoulder and arm. As she moves larger chunks of stone, she finds that the left shoulder is damaged, as is the back of the head. The statue’s hair is spiky; the torque around the neck has bulbous ends. The undamaged face is tilted down.
She sits back on her haunches again, her legs quivering, and gazes at the face. The Galatian’s brow is heavy, his cheekbones high, his nose prominent, his mustache trimmed. Pain shows, but his expression is impassive, unpenetrable. She leans forward, turns her head, and stares into his eyes, but they do not look back at her. In his moment, he is, as her grandmother was after Özlem was attacked, focusing on something beyond. He seems to see across the centuries what Elif cannot.
The Dying Gaul is mute, utterly silent. He does not, as some of her figurines have, speak to her. But they were her creations, and this man is not. His moment is beyond speech, and she is deeply moved, touched to her core by his silence. His life is ending, but here he is twenty-three hundred years later. His dignity in the face of death keeps him alive for her. Defeated, yes. Damaged and buried. Yet undestroyed. But for how much longer? In the brief time since Bergama’s funicular bombing, there have been two deadly earthquakes nearby, one on Lesbos and the other on Kos. And others will come, not just in geological time but in her own.
She glances over her shoulder. Hundreds of rolls of parchment lie in the dust she has stirred. There must be more. And what else is interred here in this cultural tumulus? What else does the rubble conceal in this room ruptured by earthquakes? Knowing this chamber exists could well save her mother, reinvigorate her. Or, more likely, kill her. Or get both Elif and her killed. Elif’s taking Galen’s letter from the tomb in the hinterland caused havoc. What chaos would a thousand rolls of parchment wreak? And this statue, in and of itself, with whatever else lies in this chamber—what strife would ensue? The Galatian belongs solely to his caretaker, Mother Earth.
Elif rises to her feet. She will take nothing from this cache and tell no one about it. But she also understands that she is incapable of just walking away. She is wholly taken by this statue, this Dying Gaul, Pergamon’s vanquished enemy that the sculptor filled with life, with humanity and dignity even in the face of death. She has made no attempt to render her enemy, and she feels no shame in the murder she committed. It was a necessity. She had to save her brother’s life and perhaps her grandmother’s and her own. Mustafa Hamit had little humanity and less dignity. His soul was lost long before she took his life. But she herself was also diminished by her action. In that tomb, she lost whatever purity her soul possessed.
Elif drops again to her knees. Dust still sifts over the shoulders and down across the torso. Her presence here will, sooner or later, draw others. Inevitably. She must go now. Must have been gone already. But she cannot turn away from the statue’s bowed head. She stares again at that face that remains inward, private, solitary. She is no longer shaking. She could stay here until her lamp’s battery dies. She could wall herself in and live out her life here, wasting away. She is, she thinks, every bit as alone, as isolated, as the Galatian. Utterly entranced by a twenty-three-hundred-year-old bronze statue, she is stuck here in her own time without whatever saving grace the ancient sculptor gave the Gaul.
69
BERGAMA’S HINTERLAND
Just after midnight, seven women file up the cliff-like ridge’s steep trail. When they reach a sharp cutback near the crest of the ridge, their leader veers away toward a sheer stone wall. Though none of the others has ever been to this place, they follow, clambering over boulders until they reach a narrow plateau just wide enough for the women to congregate. Water trickles from a cleft to the right of the waist-high mouth of a cave. The night, lit by a crescent moon and an expanse of stars, is clear, but the air is humid, a heaviness devoid of wind. The journey up here has been arduous, taking the women far away from the road, any road. They climbed quietly along sloping forest trails and across outcroppings for over an hour. As they undress, they begin to chant softly.
Tuğçe Iskan, the new member of the group, turns and gazes for a moment at the ancient stone columns of the Temple of Athena on Pergamon’s acropolis eight kilometers across the Kaikos Valley. She is breathing hard, her stamina reduced by her current anxiousness and by a recent, sudden weight loss, the byproduct of the constant stress in her new job. She chants along with the others but not in a language she knows. The sounds and the rhythms seem to her both ancient and modern, in and out of time. The moon has cycled three times since the bombing at Bergama’s funicular that for her seems a lifetime ago. Her left hand clasps little Mehmet Suner’s gold Hadrian Aureus coin that she retrieved from under the pithos in the Bergama Museum’s inner courtyard.
As the women form a semicircle facing the cave’s entrance, their voices lower to a murmur. Elif Boroğlu, their leader, her dark hair chopped short, steps into the middle of the group. Turning slowly, she raises aloft a figurine—a dark heavyset, robed goddess holding a single-edged sword in one hand and a bearded, severed head in the other. Three snakes emerge from the figurine’s thick hair. Elif raises her other arm, grasps the statue with both hands, and says, “Forgive us, Mother, our offenses against you and each other.” She stretches into the night sky. “We cannot reclaim our lost innocence, but we can try to restore the balance. We can hope that those broken by violence, by the meanness, the greed and arrogance, of men, may begin to heal. We cannot make any of us whole again, but we can accept the broken among us. And we can dedicate ourselves, each in her own way, to creating the balance that we so deeply need.”
But Elif knows, or rather, she is learning, that restoring balance and becoming whole again are not easy. Incantations may help, as does having like-minded friends, but she herself is not healing. Her soul is not what it was, and she has begun to question her own leadership. Her nightmares have not abated; she still cannot sculpt any figurines. The clay in her studio has dried up and cracked. Clare, the American, has commissioned her to make another gold amulet, but Elif has not yet finished even a single wax model.
Elif’s boyfriend has been home on leave, but even with him she has vacillated between listlessness and aggressive anger. His job is to defend their country, killing whenever it is necessary to do so, which is, she believes, exactly what she did, but she hasn’t been able to bring herself to tell him what happened in that grave in the Kaikos Valley or to ask him how he finds balance given what he has to do each day. And holding back from him, from her mother, from everyone, the news about what she has discovered beneath the Aesklepion is both eating away at her and, paradoxically, energizing her. She is the only person in the world who knows The Dying Gaul, speaks to the ancient bronze statue, waits for the statue to speak to her. Maybe, she thinks, she doesn’t really want to heal. Killing Mustafa Hamit was traumatic, not at all a thrill, but knowing then that she had to do it and now that she can get away with murder—that offers a certain power.
Elif lowers the icon and places it in a niche that she herself carved in the rock wall two days ago. She folds her hands, bows to the goddess, and steps back. She must appear to the others as though she is dedicating herself to this warrior, but she knows well that she has already done that. A battle has begun, a full-scale war is coming, a conflict between ideology and the freedom of people, between men in power and the nation’s citizens—and what’s at stake is no less than the values and precepts upon which Ataturk built the nation.
She has not told the others to commit themselves, not even suggested it, but she watches as the first of them, a kindergarten teacher with black hair piled and pinned on her head, steps forward, bows deeply, and says, ”I vow to use my skills on behalf of the Earth and the dear ch
ildren that Ataturk loved.”
Each of the other women comes forward and makes her own statement. The last is Tuğçe Iskan, the neophyte. She is sweating profusely, not enjoying this moment, not even understanding all of it, but feeling part of it. She has not often felt particularly good or bad in her life. She has rather measured herself in terms of utility, the amount of work she got done and the quality of that work. And in those terms, the operation she led has been a success. Her work since then has been worthwhile. But she has been waking in the darkness, feeling a suffocating heaviness about what has happened, especially to Mehmet’s parents. She has been feeling responsible for the pain of the mother who lost her father and her son, the woman whose husband still lies broken in a secret Istanbul intensive care unit. She understands that much of what has happened is not her fault, but she is to blame both for the damage to that man and the immeasurable pain of his wife, who is not even allowed to know where he is hidden.
Iskan knows, too, that feeling guilt is in some way a first step, an important and necessary initial foray, into the world of deep emotion that she has so seldom ventured. She has been angry, of course, sometimes terribly, and proud of her abilities, her accomplishments—but now she feels sorry, which may ultimately be healthy but for her is currently awful. When Elif invited her to attend the group’s meeting when the two of them talked again a week ago, she explained that there was no set ritual, no test to pass, no feat to perform. All Tuğçe had to do was commit herself wholeheartedly to the moment. To join the group, she must simply devote herself to the Earth—this sanctuary, the surrounding valley, the sea beyond, and the sky above.
But Elif also invited Iskan to speak with the others. And now, energy is pulsing through the crescent of women around the mouth of this cave. Their chanting rises and falls with an improvised rhythm not, as it has so often in the past, building to a crescendo. Their sweat glistens in the scant light. Elif waves, bidding Iskan to come into the center of the semicircle. She looks at each of the others who are again lowering their chants to a murmur that to her sounds like the turn of the planets and the wheel of the night.
Iskan is sweating even harder without knowing if it is the heat of the night or the anxiety of the moment—or both. Feeling her eyes welling, she bows her head and says, “I am sorry, Mother, for the wrong I have done in the name of right. For those I have hurt in my attempts to…” A tear runs down her left cheek. She has not wept openly since primary school when she hardened herself against those who did not understand her and would not try. She clears her throat and continues, “I will use my new position to right the wrongs being inflicted on our people.” She does not know what that will entail, but she is beginning to understand the depth of the commitment she is making. “I ask you, all of you,” she says to the others, “to accept me as I am….” There is more, much more, to say, but she is too choked up. She wants to tell them that she is different. That she has always been the bird without a flock, the wolf without a pack. That when she was a child, she was not allowed into the kitchen when her mother, her family, was cooking…and that she came to like that isolation. That at school, she won awards, but kept to herself, never joining any team. That in her work, she avoided cronyism and the corruption that went with it. That though she did her jobs well, she was shunned by and in turn avoided most of her colleagues. That it was not arrogance, as some of them would say, but rather a deep isolation. That she has always been the outsider who did not fit into any inner circle. There is so much more, but she does not now have the words. None at all.
Hyperventilating, Iskan turns toward the cave. Ducking, she enters the darkness that is both cramped and infinite. She drops to her knees, crawls forward seven meters, and begins feeling around on the rock with her right hand. She doesn’t know what she is looking for, but she knows she will find it here in the pitch dark. She switches the Hadrian Aureus to her right hand and brushes the wall with her left as she crawls forward. She crouches and then rises to standing, her head still bowed, careful not to hit it on the rock.
Iskan squeezes her eyes shut until she sees stars. Finally, she finds a cleft less than the width of her forefinger. She transfers the coin again. Tangible but not visible, the coin holds no sheen here, its value no more or less than the rest of the rock. As she jams it, edge first, deep into the fissure, the weeping comes. No one except Özlem and Nihat knows that she has the coin—and no one knows she brought it with her. It is time to give it back, to return it to the Earth as Mehmet and his grandfather have been, as Hafize and Engin Suner will be. As she herself will be. Tears stream, her shoulders heave, and her breath comes in gasps.
ORACLE
We accept another among us. Her auburn hair is tangled beneath her white scarf. Her eyes are downcast, her spirit quashed. She shuffles more slowly than the oldest of us. Her sadness sinks beyond despair. The woman has learned the actual cost, the deep cost, of your greed and your lust for power and your craving for violence which have been passed down from millennium to millennium to millennium back to Cybele’s time and before. We can offer the woman companionship but not hope.
We need each other. We need society, but our societies clash. And time is an arrow as much as a ring. Gods rise and fall, taking states and caliphates, nations and empires with them. Sultans, sovereigns, czars, shahs, caliphs, moguls, premiers, and presidents come and go—inevitably. And you persist in worshipping mere idols, specious icons, apocryphal avatars. Current potentates, having learned nothing, annihilate the wisdom of the ages—culture, civility, civilization itself. Ambition threatens yet again. Evil stalks once more. The Aesklepion, the curing center where death was officially banned, is itself the site of another massacre. It and the Acropolis are scarred, as are we all.
And yet our need for society endures. We go on speaking through time: The earth will quake again, destroying your shrines and altars, your monuments and memorials, once more. And yet the Aesklepion’s sacred fountain will still flow. The spring will pulse with light, despite the carnage. Worship no god. Breathe, instead, the flow of light, the sacred energy everywhere. Love the earth. Celebrate birth and rebirth. Respect life, yours and ours and others’. Listen to the springs, the wind, the valley, the hills, the sunlight and the darkness—the music that is within each of us and around all of us.
Stray, sacred dogs lie among us still. Even in the Aesklepion’s damaged theater, dogs congregate as though they are on watch. And, perhaps, they are—waiting for the ancient Mothers to return. Or for new goddesses to rise from the devastation, the ashes, the ruins, the chaos.
Jay Amberg is the author of twelve books. He has taught high school and college students since 1972. Contact him at jayamberg.com.
Books by Jay Amberg
The Healer’s Daughters
Bone Box
Cycle
America’s Fool
Whale Song
52 Poems for Men
AMIKA PRESS
Doubloon
Blackbird Singing
FORGE BOOKS
Deep Gold
WARNER BOOKS
School Smarts
The Study Skills Handbook
The Creative Writing Handbook
GOOD YEAR BOOKS
Verbal Review and Workbook for the SAT
HARCOURT BRACE JOVANOVICH
