Bone Box

by Jay Amberg

  He knows little about the everyday tasks of archeology, but even in his ignorance he can tell that there’s a chaotic order to the work. Unused scaffolding pipes and fittings are stacked separately from two-by-fours and timbers. Trenches and quadrants are numbered, and even the piles of dirt are marked.

  As Altay leads him down a wood plank ramp into the dig, she says, “We’ve been excavating the cistern this summer. I’ll spare you the jargon, but if you have questions about how I’m running the site, please ask.”

  Her dealings with her staff have already answered his more basic questions, and it isn’t time yet for the deeper ones—so he simply looks around. The cistern walls have regular stone and brick courses. Blue crates on the floor hold plastic bottles of chemical agents. Water jugs stand under the scaffolding, and tile fragments lie on a screen. Scanning the layout of the dig, he turns full circle. “This wasn’t built as a cistern,“ he says.

  Glancing at her watch, she answers, “No, it wasn’t.”

  “We’re standing in the apse.”

  Shaking her head again, she smiles. “Yes,” she says, “we’re in a Byzantine church. Much smaller than the cathedral down the hill—but probably also dedicated to Saint John. It’s one thing that Leopold and I agree on.”

  A loose tarp strung on poles shades them, but the air is hot and heavy beneath it. Still, his breathing is more labored than the climb up the hill should warrant. Sweat beads on his forehead, and his mind begins to race…. After his parents’ divorce, Travers, his mother, and his sister moved back East to Detroit where his mother had grown up. University of Detroit High was a good school, but greater Detroit was definitely not the Northern Arizona mountains. He did well in his classes, but, as the new kid from the small town out West, never quite fit in. His mother’s eldest brother, a Jesuit who ran University of Detroit Press, took Travers under his wing. After his sister went off to college, his mother fought her increasing loneliness by spending long nights with old boyfriends. Travers didn’t have the clear spiritual vocation that the Jesuits told him he had, but the seminary at Columberre seemed as though it might provide a community, a sense of belonging. It couldn’t, of course—he lasted less than a year, but certainly long enough for him to recognize the cruciform shape of a church even after it has been desecrated and roofed over with a barrel vault.

  The Jesuits did, though, take care of their own, and he arrived at Georgetown University the next fall without ever having applied. He bartended at The Tombs, as much for the camaraderie as the money, and he met, among others, Bill Glavine and Mary McDonald. Mary was attractive and artsy and wild-eyed enough to turn his head. Though he knew even then that she dwelled in a land of emotional peaks and valleys and he tramped in the foothills, he thought they could find common ground. And, in truth, he loved her. After graduation, he took a job with Sara Lee in Chicago. His college friends were getting married at a rate of one a month, and Mary was into decorating. Tom was born a year after the wedding, and Jason followed two years later. Travers felt useful, and, though he never loved it, he settled into corporate life.

  At the same time he was withdrawing from the foothills onto some vast emotional plain, Mary’s sojourns on the summits and in the gorges became more extreme. Medications helped her intermittently but did little for their marriage. He became adept at compartmentalizing his life. His career kept on track, but his home life derailed—and after fifteen years, he and Mary separated. And now, Jason, his relationship with Christine, his job, and his life in Chicago—all of them are gone…

  He drains the rest of his water, measures his breath, and glances again around the site. The air is stifling. Sweat runs down his neck and spine. Altay takes the empty bottle from him and drops it into a steel drum used for garbage. She tucks loose strands of hair back under her bandana. He needs to move so he steps away and looks at the tile fragments arranged on the screen. The colors are faded, but he can make out an old man’s bearded face encircled by a halo.

  She comes over and stands beside him. “Archeology is always a puzzle,” she says. “Sometimes the pieces fit together.” She stoops and shifts one of the shards slightly. “And once in a while you find something that changes the way you see the world.”

  He looks into her eyes, which are beginning to veil. “Here?”

  “Nothing here. You’re seeing what we’ve found here.”

  He goes over to look more closely at eight amphoras lined against the wall. Five have tapering necks, and two have unbroken handles. Altay joins him again, but neither of them says anything more.

  13

  When Altay and Travers leave the citadel, Kenan Sirhan is using a shovel to tamp the ground near the cairn on the knoll. He wears a sleeveless T-shirt, and, even at a distance, his sweating shoulders and bald head glisten. Fresh dirt is piled in the trenches, but there’s no equipment or other signs that the site is active.

  Altay and Travers head much of the way down Ayasuluk Hill in silence. The path they’re on winds down toward the area where the laborers are eating lunch. The building nestled among the pines at the edge of the worksite is connected by a courtyard to another house with stucco walls and an orange tiled roof. It stands atop the steep stone curtain wall that runs below the western end of the cathedral’s atrium. Together, the buildings look to him like a Spanish hacienda perched on the edge of a mesa in Arizona. Farther to the west, a thin haze hangs over the Aegean.

  “Seems like a good place to work,” he says.

  “It is,” she answers. “And to live. The smaller house, the one with the view, is mine…” Her smile is ironic. “…as long as I’m Saint John’s director.”

  “Have you worked in the area before?” he asks.

  “I was born in Istanbul, but I was educated in France and England.” She gazes over at Kenan for a moment. “I worked on sites in Cappadocia, but I had only been to the Aegean on family holidays.”

  The thin, young Turkish woman is serving steaming tea to the laborers who sit on beds of pine needles in the shade of the trees. The small clear cups look dainty in their hands.

  As Altay and Travers approach the restoration house, she says, “I have a good deal of office work this afternoon. You’d probably enjoy Ephesus and the House of the Virgin more than staying around here.”

  “More archeological tours?”

  “Yes,” she says, “but with a purpose. Those sites will put the work here in perspective.”

  He knows that hanging around Saint John’s might help his evaluation in some way, but what he really needs to do is to get Altay talking—and that isn’t going to happen in the afternoon. “How about dinner, then?” he asks.

  She hesitates before nodding. “I’m very busy, Joe,” she answers. “But, okay. Later. That would work.”

  “Do you have a favorite place in town?” he asks.

  “Yes,” she answers. “Here.”

  It’s his turn to hesitate.

  “I insist.”

  “May I…”

  “No.” She smiles. “You don’t need to bring anything. Visit Ephesus, get settled at your hotel, and come back after nineteen-thirty. Kenan will drive you. He’s at your service for the duration of your visit.”

  He looks back up the hill where Sirhan stands on the knoll, the shovel over his shoulder, staring to the west.

  14

  Altay kneads the dough. Her kitchen is as neat as her office, and everything has its place. When she’s finished with the dough, she’ll cut the vegetables and dice the meat for the güveç. She doesn’t really have the time to prepare dinner, but she realized early on that cooking would be less time consuming than going out to eat. She will also need Joe Travers to complete certain tasks for her. And in any case, cooking, like shoveling dirt, helps her think. The translation of the first scroll is going well. Even though some phrases, apparently dictated to a scribe,
are unfamiliar, she has a draft pretty much completed. If she works through the night, she’ll have a clean translation by dawn. The second document, written in a halting, less fluent hand, perhaps that of someone who learned to write later in life, is she believes, of less import. Still, she should, in another day, have that document completed as well. Thinking about the letters causes her skin to prickle, even now as she works. She can’t wait to see the originals.

  She’s had two emails from Abrahim, the first in the morning from Kayseri and the second mid-afternoon from Göreme. If what he says is true—that he overheard Kenan speaking heated German on the phone to someone less than an hour after they found the bone box and that Kenan kept repeating the words ossuary and euros—then the danger is even more imminent than she thought. Early this morning, she had the diggers fill in all of the trenches around the knoll and remove all of the equipment from the area, but that won’t likely throw Leopold off for long.

  She covers the dough and puts it in the refrigerator. She then scrubs her hands and picks up her kitchen knife. Working deftly, she slices the potatoes. Neither Kenan nor Abrahim has been completely honest with her. Abrahim will, she believes, go where she has instructed him to go and do what she has told him to do. After all, he left the flash drive for her and is taking care of the originals. But she can’t imagine that he’s carrying around the ossuary’s other contents. And in his emails he’ll only refer to the documents, nothing else. His possession of them is burning him alive. It is as though they are white hot, and he must hold them until the flames consume him.

  And, Kenan…he denies having a phone conversation with anyone. But she can see in his eyes that he is not telling her the truth—and that his lying to her is a blade that is already stuck deep in him and turning. He speaks German from his years as a laborer in Hamburg, but he insists he would tell no one, not even his own wife were she still alive, of their discovery of the ossuary. At least she is sure, given his pained and sullen silence, that he really doesn’t know what happened to the ossuary’s contents.

  As she dices the onions, she strikes the cutting board hard and fast. The calls she received early that afternoon from Istanbul were antagonistic, but, given what’s at stake, the threats are empty. Her job is history, her life here at Saint John’s over. Her task is simple: obtain all of the ossuary’s contents, protect them at any cost, and present them to the world. Joe Travers’ ignorance of the situation may, ironically, be his greatest strength—and her best asset. He will likely do as she says not because of who she is but because she has begun to understand that he is someone who needs to feel useful.

  15

  Just after five-thirty, Joseph Travers walks along the main road from the Hitit Hotel into Selçuk’s town center. The citadel looms on Ayasuluk Hill to his right. An open truck carries slouching field hands, men and boys, back toward town. A separate truck transports women and girls wearing scarves on their heads. When he reaches the first of the cafés with old men drinking tea and smoking, a tractor pulling a wagon laden with watermelons turns the corner. One melon rolls off the back and splatters on the pavement. Farther on, a man shoes a horse in a narrow courtyard.

  Earlier in the afternoon, Kenan Sirhan took Travers to Ephesus and the House of the Virgin Mary. At Ephesus, the Roman capital of Asia Minor and the best preserved of all ancient cities, the sun started to cook Arizona style. The second-story windows of the Library of Celsus held patches of cobalt sky, but sunburnt Germans vying for camera angles kept the facade’s statues of Knowledge, Virtue, Wisdom, and Destiny obscured. Then, Sirhan, scowling as always and smelling of earth and sweat even though he had changed his shirt, drove Travers up a winding mountain road through a pine forest that reminded him of Prescott National Forest and Granite Mountain. He thought about summers spent wandering around with buddies, following creeks, sliding down dry washes, and playing war games in which they died and lived again a thousand times. They roasted hot dogs over open fires and drank root beer from cans and crushed the empties with their heels. And they didn’t head home until the pines impaled the sun.

  When Sirhan dropped Travers in the parking lot of the House of the Virgin Mary, five tour buses were disgorging Spaniards. The scent of pine was in the air, but the throng of pilgrims was so large that he skirted the house and found a path that bent away from the Virgin’s shrine and spring. A couple of hundred yards later, he came to a clearing. Ephesus spread out below him, the tourists like ants. The bay beyond the ancient city shone darkly.

  Now, the first Roman-coin peddler hits on him the moment he turns onto the street leading up to Saint John’s. The boy is no more than fourteen, with large, dark eyes that give no hint that he knows the cobs he holds in his palm are neither old nor valuable. His pals up the road offer the same fare—at reduced rates. Saint John’s wooden gates are closed, but when Travers hammers on them, there’s a scraping along the ground behind them. The coinmongers sidle away as the old ticket-taker opens one of the gates. When Travers mentions Altay’s name to the man, he waves him in. He then closes the gate and pushes a brown stone, apparently the only lock, against it.

  Still almost an hour early for dinner, Travers strolls through the ruins of the cathedral. Saint John’s tomb, located at the intersection of the nave and the aisles, has four short columns rising at its corners. Patterned marble slabs cover the underground crypt, which isn’t open to the public. A sign nearby states that an inscription carved in the marble over the tomb read, “This is my resting place forever, here will I dwell.” But when archeologists first opened the tomb, it contained only a fine dust that quickly dissipated in the air.

  Near the cathedral’s atrium, another sign in Turkish, German, and English says, “The excavation and restoration of the Basilica of Saint John on the Ayasuluk Hill are sponsored by the Ministry of Culture of Turkey; The Aegean Association, Leopold Kirchburg, Director; and the Glavine Foundation, Dayton, Ohio.” Among the stories about how Ayasuluk Hill got its name is one that asserts that, through the centuries, Saint John’s tomb rose and fell as though he were still breathing inside. The locals, understandably mystified by these occurrences, coined the phrase, holy breath, and eventually associated it with the hill itself. Travers crosses to the curtain wall that drops vertically from the end of the atrium. It was added, long after the cathedral was built, to ward off marauding Arabs. The drop down to the rubble below is precipitous, but the view westward over paths and gardens and palm trees and the Asa Bey Mosque is spectacular.

  Travers makes his way back through the ruins to the work area adjacent to the restoration house. Not wanting to bother Altay yet, he sits in dappled shade on a section of column laid out in the grass. The workers have all gone for the day, and the tractor and wagon are parked off to the side of the main path leading up to the citadel. Light plays among the pines, shadows dancing on the beds of needles, the red earth, and the grass. The rows of pillar segments lined near him gleam. Brown birds flit about, darting and swooping for midges. Wind rushes through the pines and willows. In the distance, dogs bark and trucks rumble. He takes a series of deep breaths and watches the patterns of sunshine and shade shift across the ceramic shards on the screen next to the wheelbarrow and on the red and yellow flowers planted in beds near the restoration house. The call to prayer rises from the mosque in the valley.

  As he sits, the noise subsides. A flurry of birds, scores and scores of them, whirl and spin above him in the light. At one moment they are black, and at the next gold. Wind ebbs and flows. Time furls and then whisks away, black and gold as well. Energy swirls and spills, cascading around him. A coruscating surge rolls over him. And he feels a presence in the breeze and in the light. A presence that takes his breath, tosses time, and flicks light. There’s no vision, no apparition, but there’s something. He doesn’t understand what’s happening—everything, all of it, is at once in and out of time. He feels both full and empty, rooted and transcendent, himself and a witne
ss, absolutely present and infinitely everywhere. The silence disquiets him.

  Sound returns as the birds wheel away into the sun. Traffic and dogs and his own breathing amplify as he falls back into the stream of time, not at all sure what has happened. When he looks down, his hands are shaking. The nape of his neck tickles. He glances around, but no one else is there.

  16

  After a time, Travers becomes aware of Kenan Sir-han moving slowly near the cairn on the knoll. He trudges with his head down, as though he’s searching for something. Stooping, he examines clods of dirt. He then stands abruptly and hurls a chunk onto the ground. A puff of red dust rises like smoke from a small explosion. He shakes his head three times, hitches his pants farther up under his protruding belly, and starts down the narrow track. He’s only fifty yards away when he notices Travers seated on the column. Though he misses a step, he pulls in his gut and raises his head. Not acknowledging Travers at all, he takes a key chain from his pocket, opens the door to the restoration house, and goes in.

  Five minutes later, as Travers is trying unsuccessfully to comprehend that sense of presence he felt, Sophia Altay and the young woman who was earlier cleaning artifacts stroll around the side of the restoration house. Altay pats her on the forearm, waves as she walks down the path, and turns toward Travers. She wears a long denim skirt and a sleeveless blouse the color of cinnamon. Her hair is pulled back in a loose braid. “Joe,” she says, “you should have let me know you were here.”

  Wondering if, as in their two earlier meetings, they’ll have to work past her defensiveness, he says, “I was early. Didn’t want to bother you.”

  She leads him along the walkway under the pines between the restoration house and the cathedral ruins. The breeze riffles white sheets and a pillowcase on the clothesline strung across the courtyard between the restoration house and her residence. A large open amphora lies on its side amid cactus growing at the courtyard’s periphery. A smaller, more ornate amphora, cleaned but not yet restored, stands by the wall. Concentric rows of faded Jerusalem crosses decorate the jar.