The Healer's Daughters

by Jay Amberg

  The guy does not look away. “All right,” he says. “You’ve made your point, Serkan. I’ll talk with my father. Perhaps, we’ll raise your fee.”

  Serkan holds his gaze. “Thank you,” he hears himself say, “but that’s not the point.” He has become every bit as polite as this condescending asshole.

  “Yes, Serkan, it is the point.” An edge cuts into the guy’s voice; his eyes brighten. “You have nothing without me and my family.” His smile is sharp. “And you’ll have nothing in the future. But if this deal goes well, we may have a long and mutually beneficial relationship.”

  Serkan should just take the deal, of course, but his mind races to other options. He wants to buy time. “I understand,” he says. And he does. This guy will use his family’s wealth and political connections to bully him. Serkan was smart and a good basketballer so he was never bullied in school—but he never liked guys who picked on others. In his business the last five years, he never tried to muscle others out. It worked better to cooperate—at least, a little.

  “It’s a big financial deal for you,” the guy goes on, “but for me, it’s pretty small. Almost trivial.” He waves his hand at the garden. “I can walk away…and never look back. How about you, Serkan?”

  18

  BERGAMA

  As the evening’s final call to prayer echoes through Bergama, Özlem Boroğlu and her mother climb the cement steps toward the acropolis funicular’s ticket office—and the impromptu memorial for the ISIL massacre victims. Although most of the glass panels were blown out, the massive facade of the funicular’s main platform prevents a clear view of the devastation on the hillside. Demolition teams have been working from dawn to dusk to remove the shattered stanchion and the ruptured cables, but the work and the noise subside each night by this time. Still, an acrid vestigial odor of burnt earth, metal, and plexiglass cannot be scrubbed from the area.

  At the top of the stairs, Boroğlu stubs out her cigarette. When four beige puppies sniff about the two women, Boroğlu’s mother, in her floral scarf and a long, dark dress despite the heat, stops to scratch each behind its ears. They begin to leap about, but neither Boroğlu nor her mother has any food to give them.

  Many mourners have begun to come to the memorial each day, but the only other person here in this moment is a stout, bald older man in a dark suit cupping his hands and whispering prayers in Arabic. A bed of red and white long-stemmed carnations lies at the base of the office wall. A dozen Turkish flags frame the photos of the victims taped to the office’s boarded-over windows. Handmade placards—”We Will Remember” and “Death to Terrorists”—are fastened to wooden dowels. At the center of the memorial, the photos of the twin girls and their parents are larger than those of the Chinese victims surrounding them. Folded personal notes are affixed to the photos of the girls. Boroğlu recognizes Elif’s terra-cotta rendering of the twins among the other gifts and tributes spread through the flower bed.

  When the man finishes his prayers and lowers his arms, Boroğlu’s mother steps forward, takes a small brown bag from her dress pocket, and sprinkles the memorial with a sacred combination of herbs. The man moves to one side and folds his thick arms across his chest. Boroğlu, standing near him, has no prayers and no tangible gift—and won’t, at least for a long time—but tears fill her eyes.

  As a blue sedan pulls off the road into the narrow dirt lot below the memorial, the stout man in the dark suit goes down the steps. A man in a gray T-shirt and sweatpants gets out the driver’s door, goes around the front of the car, and opens the passenger door. He is fit and in his late thirties; his black hair is cropped short and his dark beard trimmed. He helps from the sedan a woman with a white scarf and an ankle-length khaki dress. Together they head to the stairs. As they begin to climb, he puts his arm around her waist and steadies her. Both have their heads bowed when they reach the top. The puppies leap and bound.

  As the couple approaches the memorial, the woman sags for a moment against her husband. Wisps of auburn hair, having escaped from beneath her scarf, curl across her cheek. Her hand trembling, she leans forward and touches the photograph of Mehmet’s grandfather. “Father,” she murmurs. “Father…? Why…?” Her voice cracks. “Why has Allah…?” Her shoulders shake, and her hand slips from the photograph. Before her husband can bolster her, she collapses onto the bed of carnations. Her husband reaches for her, but he is himself so unsteady that he can’t lift her, and he slumps to his knees. She sobs uncontrollably. Both Boroğlu and her mother kneel by the couple. The woman pushes her husband away, clutches Boroğlu’s mother, buries her head in the older woman’s chest, and wails.

  Boroğlu stands as a silver Mercedes pulls up next to the blue sedan. An overweight, middle-aged man in blue jeans and a loose, blue work shirt pulls himself from the car and rumbles toward the steps, leaving the door open and the motor running. He has a thirty-five-millimeter camera and flash attachment slung on a strap around his neck.

  Boroğlu steps over to block the photographer’s way. Her anger and frustration boiling, she hisses, “Get out of here! Leave them alone!”

  “It’s public property, hon,” the photographer says in a low voice with a strong British accent.

  “Leave us alone!” the husband shouts.

  When the photographer raises his camera so that he can shoot over Boroğlu’s shoulder, she steps forward and knees him in the groin with all of her might. He goes down hard, his camera crashing to the cement beneath his weight. Moaning, he rolls to his side, curls his legs, and grabs his crotch. The husband stomps the camera repeatedly.

  “No,” Boroğlu says, her voice low. “That will only make it worse.” She goes down on one knee, grabs the camera, and, not quite choking the photographer with the strap, slides out the camera’s memory card. She drops the camera next to the photographer’s head and flings the memory card down the side of the hill into the brambles.

  Mehmet’s mother, oblivious to what has just happened, continues to bawl. The puppies yip, and the neighborhood dogs start to howl.

  Boroğlu leans over the photographer, who still can’t catch his breath, twists his ear, and whispers, “Leave them alone, you stupid kafir!” She yanks his ear. “If you’re not gone in two minutes, I’ll throw your car keys into hell.”

  19

  BERGAMA

  When Özlem Boroğlu and her mother enter their house’s courtyard, Serkan bounds down the stairs from the rooftop garden. He kisses his grandmother’s hand and presses his forehead to hers. Then, he hugs his mother, who at first only holds him tentatively. Finally, she begins to let go of some of the fierce anger she felt when she took down the kafir cameraman at the memorial an hour earlier. She clutches her only son until his grip around her shoulders grows limp. They each step back and look at one another. Tears run down her face again. “My Serkan,” she says.

  He cocks his head and gazes at his mother but says nothing.

  Özlem Boroğlu’s mother wrings her hands and says, “I will make çay.”

  “I will help, Anneanne.”

  “No.” She nods to the stairs as she says to him, “Talk with your mother. I will bring up the çay.” Her voice, though little more than a whisper, is firm.

  The night is still warm, but a light breeze on the roof rustles the grapevines. The garden smells of herbs, not scorched earth. Serkan brings a third wrought-iron chair to the glass table. Boroğlu lights a cigarette, takes a long drag on it, lifts a candle from the ledge, and lights it as well. She sets the candle on the table, exhales pale smoke, and asks, “To what do we owe the honor of your visit, Serkan?” She can’t help that ire seeps into her voice.

  “I just wanted to see you.” He snatches a bunch of underripe grapes from the vine and takes the middle chair, but he doesn’t look at his mother.

  She takes another drag and, exhaling slowly, says, “Tell that to your grandmother. Te
ll me why you’re really here. Do you need money again?”

  “No. No, I don’t need money.” As he gazes at a dozen of Elif’s terra-cotta statues perched on a shelf below the vines, a chubby black-and-white cat climbs along the trellis. The cat drops to the patio, sidles over to him, and rubs against his calf. “Hello, Sekhmet,” he says, leaning down to stroke its head. The cat purrs, crosses the patio, and laps water from a bowl.

  Özlem squeezes her lighter. “You didn’t come home after the attack!”

  “I was in Cappadocia. With clients. Working.”

  “You didn’t even call!”

  “I didn’t hear about it until…” He pulls two grapes from the bunch but doesn’t eat them.

  “The memorial service… You didn’t call me then either.”

  “I had a deal going. My biggest…”

  “You and your deals!”

  “Look, I’m sorry.”

  She scoffs.

  “I said I’m sorry.” He looks into his mother’s eyes for the first time. “How are you doing?”

  “I…I just kicked a kafir photographer in his jewels.” She coughs. “That’s how I am.”

  Pulling another grape from the bunch, he hides a smile. “Did he deserve it?”

  “That. And more.” She shakes her head, almost herself smiling. Although she has always found it hard to stay mad at her son, she can’t now let go of her fury. She has not felt this deeply angry since the government flooded the archeological site she ran at Allianoi. Or, perhaps, ever. “He was harrassing a woman who lost her father. Her son’s the boy who…the survivor. The one… But he’s…” She stares at the smoke serpenting into the breeze.

  Serkan nods. “How is Elif?”

  “At least you called her! Finally.” Her son’s eyes remind her too much of her ex-husband, the father of her children, her professor who took her to bed, the man who ten years later took another student to the same bed. “She’s not doing well. Everybody… We’re all taking it hard.”

  “It is hard.”

  “Harder than you know, Serkan.” She takes another drag on her cigarette.

  When he hears his grandmother, he leaps to his feet. Meeting her at the top of the stairs, he reaches for the tray holding the teapot, three cups, and a plate with six biscuits.

  “No, my dear,” she says. “Sit. You’re home.” Still wearing her scarf, she sets the tray on the table and begins to pour the çay.

  The three of them sit for a couple of minutes silently regarding the steam from their çay. Boroğlu stubs out her cigarette and then snaps a biscuit in half. Her mother gazes at Serkan as he stands and selects a small, thin, red-and-white goddess from the shelf. As he sits, he stares at the statue’s finely wrought face of a lion.

  “It’s good to be home,” he says.

  “A home wrecked by terrorists.”

  “Terrorists,” he mutters. “They’re killing my business… My clients left for Crete when—”

  “They’re killing people, Serkan! People in Bergama!”

  He squints at his mother. “I know that! And I know it’s tragic! I’m just saying it’s bigger. They’re killing tourism. The whole economy!”

  Özlem’s mother looks from her daughter to grandson. “They’re killing something inside us,” she says. “Something in all of us.”

  20

  ANKARA

  Tuğçe Iskan is alone in her Ankara office at a time, 22:17, that she likes. No other people. No distractions. She stares at the computer monitor, not her own, but a colleague’s, because the research she is doing in the Ministry’s system can’t be done on the clock—or on the record. She gleaned his password months ago to use in moments like this. Her half-liter bottle of Coke stands on a paper towel on the floor behind and to the left of her colleague’s desk chair.

  When she feels her personal iPhone vibrate, she slides it from her khakis’ pocket—but no one is on the line. She doesn’t get many calls, doesn’t have many friends, and none in the office, but this phone has been exceptionally useful in her work. She never uses it when others are around, in fact, has necesssarily kept its existence hidden from her office mates. The second time the phone vibrates, she answers, counts to twelve, and clicks her forefinger’s black-polished nail three times against the receiver. When she hears three more clicks, she smiles, counts to twelve again, and says, “Hello, Nihat Bey.”

  “You are safe, I trust, my dear Tuğçe.”

  For a split second she thinks she may have heard affection in his gruff voice. He has always shown respect, even in the beginning when others in the Ministry did not, and perhaps… She shakes her head. She has read inflections wrong before, failed to notice social cues any number of times. “I missed you, Nihat Bey,” she says. She does not mean that she longed for him. When she went to their arranged meeting at their kiosk in Genclick Park at 20:15, he was not there.

  “Old friends dropped by unexpectedly.”

  She knows he means that he was being followed. He has never missed a rendezvous except when he detected tails sent by his “old friends” in the Ministry whose plans to defraud the Turkish people of hundreds of millions of lira he blocked. Embittered in their fetid swamp of greed and power, some apparently believe he still intends to use the evidence against them. “It seems your friends are stopping by more often,” she says.

  “It does, doesn’t it?” She hears his lighter click and flare before he adds, “You are back in the office?”

  “I am.” Night is the best time to actually get work done here. She can roll up her sleeves and loosen her collar. She has reread all of the files about tumuli, particularly the robbing of the ancient graves in the State of İzmir dating from the present to a year before Özlem Boroğlu’s Galen letter surfaced. The Ministry has a wealth of information to sift through on its system—memos and site reports and project summaries—but nothing mentions gold coins from the second century of the Common Era. And there’s nothing, of course, about a letter from Ancient Rome’s most famous physician to the son of an old friend in Pergamon. She needs to discover how Boroğlu got her hands on the letter without Boroğlu figuring out that she has done so—no easy task. Iskan didn’t really expect to find anything in the Ministry’s electronic file system, but she had to do the research to be certain.

  She logs out and shuts down the computer. No one, she knows, can really multitask perfectly. Although she comes close, she’ll give her mentor her full attention, not least because she wants him to tell her something he will definitely not say. When she stands up, she makes sure that she has left everything exactly as she found it. She adjusts the mouse and pushes in the chair. As she picks up the Coke bottle and the paper towel, her phone pings.

  “And your friend, the emperor, is resting peacefully?” Nihat Bey asks.

  “Safe and sound.” She slips the paper towel onto her desk and sets the bottle on it.

  “Working on an old case? Or a new one?”

  She smiles, something she doesn’t do much except when she is talking with him. “Both really,” she says as she glances at the icon for the e-mail that just arrived.

  “Ah,” he says. “Sometimes those are the most interesting…and the most frustrating.”

  She nods, though she knows he can’t see her. “Nihat Bey,” she says, “I need to ask you something.”

  “Of course.”

  “You know the old case, the one I barely began before it was officially terminated? I’ve been receiving e-mails for almost four months from an anonymous source. I just received another a minute ago.” She tries to unscrew the Coke’s cap with her right hand but has to cup the phone and use her left to steady the bottle. “I wonder if you know who the source might be?”

  “What do they say, these e-mails?”

  “Nothing. They contain a lot of information. Records of tra
nsactions. Financials. Land deals, particularly.” She takes a quick sip of Coke. “And photos. Recent and not-so-recent. Focused on one business. One family. An established one. Well-connected. The dealings and the people involved are all, as you would say, interesting.”

  “But the e-mails, they don’t say anything? No messages?”

  “No. Nothing at all.”

  “Perhaps someone wants you to make connections. Find the patterns.”

  “Perhaps.” She smiles again. Thankful.

  “Perhaps you should take a look at what you just received. Maybe it will include a message.”

  “Maybe.” She taps her phone and then taps it again. As usual, the e-mail has no message, just an attachment. When she clicks on the icon, she finds a single photograph, another long shot of two men sitting on a stone bench in a park. But these two men are young and handsome. The one on the right is Mustafa Hamit’s Americanized playboy son, also named Mustafa. It takes her a moment to recognize the clean-shaven almost equally handsome one on the left. She sucks in her breath. That these two are meeting is almost as startling as the Russian spy meeting with the boy’s father. Her mind begins to race.

  “Tuğçe, my dear,” Nihat Bey asks, “Is there a message?”

  Not anything written, she thinks, but there is definitely a message.

  21

  BERGAMA