by Jay Amberg
Tuğçe Iskan glances at the raspberry-colored steel door at street level before climbing the flight of concrete steps to the main entrance. The stone house—Greek, predating the 1923 Turkish–Greek population exchange—is the uppermost in the last line of private dwellings below the barbed-wire-topped, chain-link fence that encircles Pergamon’s ancient acropolis. Iskan raps on the steel double door, also raspberry, and steps back. One steel-framed window is to her right, and two are to her left. Steel bars, also painted raspberry, protect all three windows. The stonework and masonry are exceptional and probably, if she felt that way about buildings, beautiful.
The door opens a crack and then slams shut. Iskan takes a deep breath and turns. The front porch provides a panoramic view of Bergama’s red tile roofs and the Kaikos Valley beyond, where the morning haze is just beginning to burn off. Across the narrow cobblestone street, graffiti mars the windowless concrete back wall of the next property downhill of the acropolis. She knocks on the door again and waits.
Özlem Boroğlu opens the door, steps out onto the front porch, and says, “Good morning, Tuğçe.” Her eyes are not as bloodshot as they were yesterday morning, but the bags under them are darker. “You might have called before you came.”
“Good morning, Özlem Hanim,” Iskan answers, her voice deep. “I did call, but there was no answer.” Her blonde hair, though cut short, is not cropped. Her white shirt’s crew neck and long sleeves cover her tattoos. “How are you?”
“I’m upset about the tragedy in my neighborhood. And worried that terrorism has burst the Bergama bubble.”
“Yes, I understand. That’s why I’m in town.”
“Why is the Ministry of Culture involved in a terrorism investigation?”
“May we talk, Özlem?”
Boroğlu massages her temple with the fingers of her right hand. “Is this an official interview?”
“No, it is not.”
Boroğlu takes a pack of cigarettes and a red lighter from her pocket and then says, “Join me in our rooftop garden.”
The house’s cobblestone courtyard is large and swept clean. An olive tree stands alone in the sunshine below the high, stone back wall cut into the steep hillside. To the right, a covered terrace has an outdoor oven and a long wooden table with six chairs. In an alcove to the left, small brightly painted terra-cotta goddesses line the shelves and stand wherever space is available. The old woman sewing on a bench in the shade near the stone stairwell does not look up as Iskan climbs the stairs behind Boroğlu.
They are greeted on the patio by dozens more of the polychromatic terra-cotta goddesses set on shelves. Some are tall, some fat, some thin, and some in the fullness of pregnancy. Some are praying, others dancing. Some are naked and others ornately dressed; each is unique, and none looks like she is derived wholly from any specific culture—Anatolian, Indian, African, or European. Iskan doesn’t immediately discern the organizational scheme, but the pattern will, she knows, present itself to her later. Sixteen pots of herbs line the patio’s low ledge, providing the area with a pungent fragrance in the light breeze. The view out over the valley is spectacular. Above and behind the house, the promontory on which the Altar of Zeus once stood is visible on the acropolis.
“My daughter is the artist,” Boroğlu says as they sit at a round, glass-top table under a trellis covered by thick grapevine. “My mother is the herbalist.” She makes a point of not asking Iskan if she would like tea.
“Your daughter’s art is interesting,” Iskan says. “Impressive.” She is not merely making small talk; she has never been any good at it. The figurines really do speak to her.
Boroğlu lights a cigarette, takes a deep first drag, and blows the smoke over her shoulder at the grapevine. “Elif is talented,” she agrees, “but as her mother I would, of course, rather she had a job and a husband.”
“My mother, too.” Iskan shakes her head. “But that life doesn’t work for everyone.” Again, she is not at all making small talk. She is divorced from the man in a neighboring village to whom she was betrothed. He was twice her age, saw her as his property, and used her hard for two years until she refused. Then, he beat her. Her father and brother eventually rescued her, and her incredibly high scores on the national university admissions exam earned her a belated scholarship. She considers herself lucky that she was not saddled with a child.
Her own mother, Boroğlu realizes, would agree as well, but she doesn’t share that thought. She drags on her cigarette, holds in the smoke, and drums her fingers on the tabletop. As she exhales, she says, “So Tuğçe, why are you here? I thought the Ministry of Culture was finished with me. And you’re not the sort of person to drop by for a social visit.” Last year, a month after the coup attempt, Boroğlu came into possession of an eighteen-hundred-year-old letter written in Attic Greek on parchment. Although she is not perfectly fluent in Greek, she immediately understood the significance of the letter. She sent a copy to the Ministry of Culture, asking that she and her team be allowed to investigate both the letter’s provenance and its content. Only three days later, Iskan appeared in Boroğlu’s Bergama office bluntly informing her that their superiors at the Ministry in Ankara would like the original letter and would complete whatever investigation stemmed from its existence.
After nineteen years of leading the Allianoi and Bergama area excavations, Boroğlu knew better than to hand over anything of value to the Ankara bureaucrats without an extensive paper trail—and so she refused. Iskan appeared unofficially two weeks later saying that she, Iskan, had been removed from the case and that she, Boroğlu, was about to be summoned to Ankara to produce the original letter or her career was finished. Less than a month later, her position was eliminated, and one of the Ministry’s minions from Istanbul has since been the acting administrator of Bergama’s Department of Archeology and Antiquities. Only the fact that she had been the public face of Bergama’s ceremonious elevation to a UNESCO World Heritage site likely prevented more dire consequences.
Now, as Boroğlu stubs her cigarette in the ashtray, Iskan reaches into the left pocket of her black jeans, takes out a carefully folded muslin cloth, and places it on the table. Boroğlu stares at the muslin until Iskan says, “Open it, please.”
Boroğlu gasps when she first sees the gold coin and then stares at the profile of the Roman emperor Hadrian. The Hadrian Aureus is rare and quite valuable—in fact, too valuable to be carried in someone’s pocket. This one isn’t mint, but it certainly wasn’t in circulation for long.
“I have been relegated,” Iskan says, “to seemingly unimportant tasks in the Ministry as punishment for what the satraps say was abetting a rogue staffer—you.”
“Abetting me?” Boroğlu coughs.
“I was sent here yesterday,” Iskan continues, “to find out if there was anything about the attack that could embroil the Ministry in the investigation. No one expected anything.” She shrugs. “This is the sort of work I am now assigned.”
Boroğlu shakes another cigarette from her pack.
“I found this,” Iskan says, holding up the coin, “in the boy’s pocket.”
Boroğlu drops her lighter. “The b…? Mehmet? The ten-year-old in the coma?”
“Yes.”
“You found it?” Boroğlu points the tip of her unlit cigarette at Iskan. “How did you find it?”
“The boy’s pants were bagged at the hospital. The investigators are still focused on the acropolis…the crime scene.” Iskan leans forward and places her forearms on the table. “My Ministry special services ID got the attention of the hospital staff.” Her smile is unfriendly. “And I took the time.”
Staring at her cigarette, Boroğlu says, “Mehmet had an Aureus.” She looks up at Iskan. “No one checked his clothes at the hospital. But you did.”
Iskan stares across the table. “Of course.” There is neither conceit nor irony in her voi
ce. She carefully folds the cloth around the coin.
11
RAQQA, SYRIA
As the air-raid sirens wail, the veiled woman standing just inside the closed apartment door grits her teeth. Clenching her gloved fists, she bites at her lower lip until she tastes blood. Sweat runs down her spine beneath her black double burqa. Her emerald eyes flash, and her head thunders even before the first bomb explodes. She loathes the kuffars, especially the French and Americans who attack Raqqa, but her anger has begun to run deeper. She is not afraid to go out, not at all. In a way, she welcomes the destruction.
As the wife of a Foreign Martyr, she has privileges—this apartment, intermittent electricity, running water once a week, a steady ration of food, and all of her husband’s few remaining material possessions. But the caliphate forbids her to leave the apartment alone. Though she needs no protection, a state-assigned Guardian must watch over her every moment she is in public. She has no one else. The diabolical Assad regime murdered her father for speaking truth. One brother was banished, the other vanished. Her French-born husband made the ultimate sacrifice for the Islamic State, and the caliphate honored him by summoning her only son to the al Farouq training camp when he was eleven.
The floor shakes, and the boarded windows rattle. Pale plaster dust rains in the half-light. The coppery taste of blood in her mouth, she pulls off her thick black gloves and flings them against the locked door. The Guardian is always respectful, but he comes only twice each week to take her to markets that seldom have what she needs and never what she wants. And today, the Guardian will not come at all. He will cower in the bomb shelters like the other officials in the city. He would die for the caliph but never risk his life for her.
She crosses to her bed in which she is seldom able to sleep. Sitting, she stares at her quivering hands, which she has so often scrubbed. The ground shakes again, and the sirens blare. Fine dust swirls. Her fingernails are bitten to the quick, the skin around her cuticles inflamed, though not in this moment bleeding. She undoes the black niqab that covered all of her face except for her eyes. As she takes off her headscarves, she folds each of them on the bed beside her. Her hands still shivering, she begins to remove her hairpins. When she pricks her right thumb, she shakes her hand and sucks the blood.
She does not deliberately prick herself again, but the sting wakes her. Bees might be a good way to go. Her long hair, the color of chestnuts, falls around her shoulders as she takes out the rest of the pins. She lines the pins carefully on the scarves and then rubs her cheeks and temples. The pounding behind her eyes only gets worse.
Standing, she pulls the outer burqa over her head. The coarse material catches under her chin so she yanks hard, further entangling it around her neck. Gasping for air, she wrenches and twists until the burqa is free. She drops it on the floor at her feet and, panting, slumps back onto the bed. Her whole body quakes. She smells of sweat, an odor she once liked. Hanging is definitely not the way.
She yearns for her son whom she has not been allowed to see for more than a year. The caliphate forbids her to mourn her husband; she has been told repeatedly that he is better off in the hands of his Creator. There was never a body to wash, purify, and shroud. And no family to gather. No one except her son. Her Sunni faith runs deep, and white, she knows well, is the real color of mourning—but she is required by law to wear black only, even her inner burqa.
No graves can be marked, even for the Martyrs. As tears slip from her eyes, she swipes at them. Crying is also prohibited. No tears may be shed for the dead, but she will go on mourning the living, as she has every moment since the caliphate stole her son…every moment since the sheikh pulled the boy from her arms and rebuked her for her weakness.
She selects the longest of her hairpins, raises it in the floating dust, and gazes at this last vestige of her family, a wedding gift from her mother’s mother who herself received it when she was betrothed so many decades ago. The silver pin with two small, smooth orbs at the top is the last of the items she possesses from her childhood, the final remnant of a family now disbanded, disbursed, destroyed.
The sirens fade, and her shaking subsides. The motes slow their winding descent. Without flinching, she clasps the orbs and jams the pin through the black inner burqa into her right thigh. Although pain fires, she makes no sound.
12
BERGAMA
As Tuğçe Iskan strides up the walk toward the Bergama Ministry of Culture office, a mangy gray dog approaches her, its head cocked and its tail wagging. She stops and, leaning over, ruffles the dog behind its ears. The dog sniffles as though laughing, and its entire backside wags. “Ah, my dear,” she says, patting her pockets, “I’ve got nothing for you except a coin worth a fortune.” She stops herself, rubs the dog’s chest, glances at the Ministry office, and heads instead toward the Bergama Museum’s entrance. The dog follows but turns away at the door.
Once inside the museum, Iskan takes out her personal phone, the iPhone she uses only for private calls. No one from the Ministry office can see her in the museum’s front hall, but she still goes to the inner courtyard, a square, sun-splashed area that can’t be seen at all from outside the museum. A stone lion, seeming to leer, greets her. The head of its ruminant prey lies between the lion’s forepaws. Behind the lion at the center of the courtyard, an ancient fountain with a cracked basin spews no water. She heads to her left toward the larger than life, headless, armless, legless statue of a Roman emperor from Pergamon’s Temple of Trajan. A pithos, a large earthenware storage vessel, lies on either side of the truncated emperor. Standing by the museum’s pale-gray concrete wall in the scant midday shade, she taps the Ankara number.
The phone is answered, but no voice says hello.
She leans her right shoulder into the wall and says, “Hello, Nihat Bey.”
“Ah, it’s time for me to have a Yenice.” The voice is gruff, raspy from decades of smoking. The line goes dead.
Iskan smiles, gazes at the griffins facing each other on the emperor’s chest, and spins the iPhone in her left hand. It’s quiet in the courtyard, seemingly farther from Bergama’s bustling town center than it really is. The only sounds above the hum of a generator are cooing close by and birdsong higher in trees she cannot see. In exactly ninety seconds her phone rings. “You are in the doghouse?” she asks.
“Again!” Nihat Monoğlu answers. “Smoking is such a dirty habit.” He has been retired for a year now, and his wife does not let him smoke in their apartment. Last year, he blocked a scheme among some of his colleagues to transfer paintings from the Ankara Museum archives to private hands—and then he took early retirement before any reprisals could occur. He never made the scheme public because no real investigation would ensue in any case. And everyone, including those who would retaliate because they stood to have made millions of euros, knew that he lived by a code that they had broken, that he would hold onto the evidence against them but take it no further, and that if they came after him or his family he would fight them to the death.
“I need your advice,” Iskan says.
“It is always good to hear your voice. Are you back in town?”
“I’m at the Bergama Museum.”
“Bergama, Tuğçe? And?”
“I found a Roman coin, a Hadrian Aureus.” She hears the click of his old Zippo lighter, but he doesn’t comment, and so she continues. “In the boy’s pocket. The one in the hospital.” She knows what questions Nihat Bey will ask next. “The investigators recovered his phone, which was destroyed, but his shoes and pants were bagged in the hospital. And nobody took the time to check them.” She switches the phone to her right hand and reaches into her pocket to make sure the carefully wrapped coin is still there. Her current boss never likes her providing so much information, but Nihat Bey is different. “The boy—his name is Mehmet—has severe head trauma. Broken neck. He’s on a respirator. In a
coma. Ribs and arm broken. Punctured lung. Prognosis is not good. But he lived because someone, his grandfather or someone else, apparently cushioned him in the moment of impact. Everyone else in the cable car died. Four people. His grandfather and three Chinese nationals. Two males in their sixties and one female, forty, the tour guide.” She taps the larger pithos with the toe of her walking shoe and brushes her left forearm across her nose and mouth. “None of Mehmet’s other relatives was on the funicular. The grandfather is—was—on his mother’s side. But both families live outside the town. Farmers. Own land. The other investigators…” She stops herself because whatever the other investigators thought is conjecture—and irrelevant. She did not speak to any of them, only to the first responders at the scene and to the staff in the emergency room. “I’ve shown the Aureus only to Özlem Boroğlu. No one else.”
“Why Özlem?” His question is no more gruff than anything else he has said.
“Because she would make the connection.”
“And did she?”
“Yes.”
“What did she say?”
“Nothing.”
His deep-throated laughter is sudden. “No. She wouldn’t. Especially not to anyone from the Ministry.”
“She doesn’t like me.” Iskan’s voice is flat, the statement not at all self-pitying. Liking or disliking an investigator was never important to Nihat Bey, which makes her like him. “What should I do?”
“The fact that you are calling me suggests that you know what you should not do.”
“Yes.” She will tell no one at the Ministry of her discovery. But what she has not told even Nihat Bey is that when the copy of the ancient letter that Özlem Boroğlu sent crossed her desk, she read it. She did not, of course, know Attic Greek, but she recognized the name “Galenus.” And later, using an old dictionary from a forgotten shelf in the Ministry’s outmoded library, she made a painstaking interlinear translation from memory. She trusts Nihat Bey more than anyone else in Ankara, but it is difficult for her to trust anybody absolutely. “Yes,” she repeats. “That much I know.”