by Jay Amberg
Elif takes a deep breath.
“I’m not from the police or anything.” Technically, Iskan is telling the truth. She has come here entirely on her own. “I just need your mother to identify—”
Elif shakes her head.
“You don’t have to talk to me,” Iskan insists. “I would, though, sometime like to talk with you about your figurines.”
Elif seems to believe her, but still she says, “If this has to do with my mother’s work, I really can’t.”
The front door is flung open, and Boroğlu barges out onto the porch. “Leave her out of this!”
Iskan waves the envelope. “I just need—”
“Get the hell away from us!”
Iskan reaches into the envelope and pulls out a photograph.
Boroğlu rushes down the steps. As she’s about to tear the photograph from Iskan’s hand, Elif says, “That guy was in my studio yesterday. He came to the studio!”
Both of the other women freeze.
“Who is he, Mom?” Elif’s voice sounds stricken. “Who’s that guy with Serkan?”
The photograph is the one of Serkan Boroğlu and Mustafa Hamit on the stone bench in the park. Iskan has identified the setting as the area behind the Suleyman Mosque in Istanbul. “Yes, Özlem,” she says, “who is that with your son?” She hands the photograph to Boroğlu. “You know, don’t you?”
Boroğlu’s hand quakes as she glares first at the photograph and then at Iskan.
If eyes were daggers, Iskan thinks, I’d be dead on the cobblestones.
HOUSE IN BERGAMA
24
BERGAMA
Özlem Boroğlu’s mother sits in a small lobby outside the intensive care unit at Bergama’s hospital. A basket of food she has prepared rests on the floor next to her. Both of Mehmet Suner’s parents are inside the unit, but she doesn’t want to bother them. She could sit here waiting for hours, hands folded in her lap, but her daughter paces the corridor.
Boroğlu ignores the nurse at the station who stares at her. It’s warm, too warm; the air is unmoving, dead. The murmur of electronic machinery and the antiseptic odor irritate her. She doesn’t like feeling confined and detests doing nothing—and hospital waiting rooms entail both. They’re not as bad as classrooms or airplanes, but this is too much like being stuck in an office pushing paper after doing fieldwork for years. She badly needs a cigarette.
As she paces, Boroğlu spins her lighter as though it’s a short red baton. Finally, the ICU door opens, and Engin Suner, Mehmet’s father, steps into the small lobby. When he sees the two of them, he is startled for a moment. “You…,” he says, the word a mixture of a greeting, a question, and an accusation. In the hospital lights, the rings under his eyes are dark green. He is wearing a clean T-shirt but the same sweatpants and work boots that he had on at the memorial. He does not hug either woman.
“My mother has brought you food,” Boroğlu says.
He looks blankly at the basket, as though his mind can no longer process ordinary information. “Yes,” he says. “Thank you.”
Boroğlu’s mother stands and hands the basket to him, but he appears unable to figure out what to do with it.
“Thank you,” he repeats as he bows his head to Boroğlu’s mother. “Would you…”
“We don’t want to impose,” Boroğlu says.
He closes his eyes and squeezes the bridge of his nose. “It’s…” Dropping his hand, he takes a deep breath. “No…Hafize… She has no one… Her mother is dead… My mother left for the day…,” he pauses, seeming to have lost all sense of time, “an hour ago. Anyway, they don’t always get along….” Turning again to Boroğlu’s mother, he asks, “Would you like to visit?”
Boroğlu takes the basket from him.
“If it will help,” Boroğlu’s mother says.
“Yes,” he says. “It could…” He presses the buzzer that opens the unit’s door.
Boroğlu leaves the basket outside under the station nurse’s watchful eye. She and her mother and Mehmet’s father scrub their hands before entering Mehmet’s room. Mehmet lies on his back, his eyes closed, a frail form under the pale sheet. His shaved head is immobilized by a brace with three pins driven into his skull. His face is waxen, even the purple bruises on his right cheek and temple. His arms, lying at his sides outside the sheet, look to Boroğlu like pencils. An intravenous feeding tube is attached to his forearm. Drainage runs from under the sheet to a bag clamped to the bed. Most ominous, at least for Boroğlu, is the tube affixed to a shunt at the crown of his head. A ventilator cycles, and an EEG monitor shows a low level of brain function with no spikes.
Mehmet’s mother sits on the edge of his bed holding his right hand in both of hers. Her long auburn hair is pulled back in a tight braid. When she turns and sees Boroğlu’s mother, she bursts into tears. Her skin is gray and the bags beneath her eyes dark. Still holding Mehmet with one hand, she reaches for Boroğlu’s mother with the other. Boroğlu’s mother leans in close so that Mehmet’s mother can grasp her forearm and still hold her son. She strokes the younger woman’s hair as they both weep.
Holding back tears herself, Boroğlu stands by Mehmet’s father looking on for a few minutes until the women’s weeping subsides. Then, she whispers to him, “A cigarette?” He puts his hand on his wife’s shoulder and squeezes his son’s free hand for a moment before leaving the room.
Boroğlu and Suner take the basket out the hospital’s main entrance, turn to their right, and walk past the kantin. Around the building’s corner, they finally find a quiet spot with three connected wooden chairs lined against the hospital’s wall. A lone fir tree with a split trunk stands next to a ramp leading up to an unmarked emergency exit.
As Boroğlu and Suner sit down, small dark birds scatter from the fir’s branches. She hands him a cigarette and slips one from the pack for herself. He takes her lighter and lights first hers and then his. His hands are rough, those of a working man, and more steady than she expected. As he returns the lighter, he takes a quick puff and then a slow, deep drag on his cigarette. She savors that first long inhalation.
“Thank you,” he says, smoke escaping his nose and mouth. His brown eyes hold little light.
They sit silently for a moment until she takes from the basket two plastic bottles of water, a loaf of ekmek baked fresh, and a jar of her mother’s pickles. “How are you doing?” she asks.
“Okay.” He shrugs. “Okay…as long as my son lives.”
A skinny white puppy with a dark muzzle ambles toward them. It wags its tail, sits, stands again, and sits once more. Boroğlu tosses a piece of ekmek that the dog scarfs without chewing. She opens the jar and puts it on the bench. “And Hafize?” she asks.
He looks out toward the road, but she is sure he is looking at something closer—or farther—which she cannot see. “She’s strong,” he says. “But…”
The dog sniffs the basket and licks Boroğlu’s hand. She brushes it aside and then tears off a big enough hunk of the bread so that the dog slinks away with it. “It’s a lot for her…”
“Too much… Her father and her son. Mehmet is her whole life.” He stares at the open jar and then at the thin line of smoke swirling from his cigarette. “We just need to hold on until he comes around. Gets better.” He nods, more to assure himself than her. “He will.”
Although she is fairly certain that won’t happen, she smiles and says, “Yes.” When he gazes off into the distance again, she asks, “Was it a special day, their visit to the acropolis?”
“Yeah. Yes, it was. His birthday…Mehmet’s.” His voice trails off, like he’s having difficulty remembering something from the distant past. “Dede said it was a special surprise.” He takes another long drag on his cigarette and then drops the butt and grinds it out with the heel of his boot. He carefully picks up the crushed but
t and puts it into a white plastic container already more than half full of discarded cigarettes.
She leans forward. “What else did they do? I mean, did they go anywhere else?”
“No. I don’t think so.” Cocking his head like he himself is wondering, he takes a pickle and crunches it in half with his teeth. “I think Hafize walked him over to Dede’s village.” Chewing the pickle, he adds, “I don’t know.”
When the puppy comes begging again, Boroğlu pushes it away. It sits, cocks its head, and looks dolefully at her. “You’re not far from his grandfather’s?” she asks even though she already knows that the two villages are only three-and-a-half kilometers apart. The area between Bergama and Kozak, known for its rugged terrain, forests, granite quarries, small farms, pine-nut-processing plants, and now logging, has been populated for thousands of years.
Shaking his head, Suner raises the other half of the pickle but doesn’t eat it. His hand begins to shiver for the first time. “He, Dede, came for dinner every Sunday. Other days, too. Since Hafize’s mother passed… She was…is…an only child. Dede…they both needed…family.” He rushes his words as though once he started talking he can’t stop. “Dede still works his land. Gets around good. They…him and Mehmet walk the fields together. The hills. A lot. ‘Exploring,’ Mehmet calls it. ‘Going exploring with Dede!’ He’s had real good offers for the land, but he says it’s for Mehmet. I want Dede to sell… Wanted him to sell. He could live with us…my family.” His half-smile is painful. “Mehmet’s going to be an engineer. He’s good at maths. The best in his class.”
Boroğlu nods but doesn’t say anything.
As Suner sucks in his breath, his face darkens. “I’m going to get the people who did this to Mehmet! To Dede! To Hafize!” His voice trails off and then returns, even deeper and darker. “Mehmet’s blood, Dede’s blood will not be left on the ground!”
Boroğlu carefully says nothing. She understands the desire for vengeance, but she also knows that the father’s energy and focus have to be on the boy as long as he is alive. And afterward, Hafize cannot have her husband succumb to a lethal obsession after she has lost her father and her only child.
Suner clenches his fists and glares out across the parking lot at the Ambulans Bufe.
25
RAQQA
The sheikh leans forward in the only armchair in the woman’s apartment and says, “I alone can protect you.”
The woman’s emerald eyes flash for a moment. Her body goes rigid, and her hands, covered by her thick black gloves, clench in her lap. Her cheeks, hidden behind her niqab, flush. He is trying to sound paternal, but his nasal whine sounds nothing like her father’s voice; it lacks the timbre, the authority, and, clearly, the rectitude. “Thank you,” she says. “You have told me before.”
She sits on the edge of the plain, straight-backed chair, her head bowed and her eyes averted, not out of respect for the sheikh, as he would expect, but rather so that he may not see what’s there. He has visited her regularly since her husband drove the explosives-laden, Fiat delivery truck into one of Assad’s military command posts. On each visit the sheikh brings her gifts, fresh fruits and vegetables unavailable in Raqqa’s markets. But he is also the man who took her son from her and delivered the boy to the al Farouq training camp. She was expecting her Guardian when the hard knock on the door came, and, though she was fully dressed in her double burqa, she was still taken aback by the sheikh’s arrival.
The sheikh’s scalp itches under his black turban; beneath his black robes, sweat runs down his neck and chest and spine. The small apartment’s living area is stifling, and his heart is racing. His two heavily armed attendants wait as instructed in the hallway. “The Guardian I have assigned you,” he says, “informs me that you have stopped going to the market.”
She looks into the sheikh’s face. He has small, cold eyes. His eyebrows are thick and his nose wide. Scars pockmark his fleshy cheeks. Gray has crept into the stubble of his unkempt beard. “I have lost my appetite,” she says.
“But you will eat these.” He waves at the oranges in the net bag that lies on the small table next to her chair. The silver Rolex on his right wrist shines even in the room’s dimness.
“Allahu Akbar.” Her voice is flat. “I am grateful to Allah.”
“The Guardian,” the sheikh says, “he has not caused you any…difficulty…?”
“Never.” She shakes her head. “He is not the problem.”
The sheikh stands up and moves closer so that his robes are almost touching her bowed head. Speaking down to her, he says, “You need a husband.”
The smell of peppermint on his breath disgusts her. She presses her right hand against her thigh and claws at the unhealed puncture wounds so that, even though she wears heavy gloves, the pain in her torn fingers weds that in her infected leg. “As you say.”
He runs his right hand through his beard. “Soon!”
“I am still in mourning.”
“The iddah ended…,” he raises his voice, “more than a year ago!”
“And yet I mourn.” She stares at his robes bulging around his midriff. He may be a sheikh, may even be, as he has informed her, the fourth-most-powerful man in the caliphate, but he has grown soft during these hard times in Raqqa. As the city is destroyed by the unrelenting air attacks and the people suffer immeasurably, the sheikh and his cronies grow fat. Brutes enforce the caliphate’s stringent dictums, maiming or executing people over trifles, while the sheikhs themselves flout sacred Sunni customs and statutes.
“You are making a mistake!” His breath quickens as he takes a half step closer so that his robe touches her head covering.
“You know better than I.” She shuts her eyes.
“Yes, I do!” He takes her chin and raises her head so that the cloth covering her nose and mouth rubs against his robe. His hand shakes and his voice cracks as he whispers, “It’s either me…or everyone.”
Her eyes still closed, she gouges her thigh so that wedded pain fires through her. She takes a deep breath, grits her teeth, and yanks her head back so that he loses his grip.
His right hand grabs her neck. His thumb and forefinger press hard into the fold of her burqa. His voice high, he hisses, “You must not understand what’s good for your son!”
Her eyes pop open. She glares up into his face, her loathing clear as dawn breaking.
“You stupid cunt!” He shoves her head back, makes a fist, and shatters her nose.
The world falls into deep night except for the gleaming meteor shower of the Rolex as he pummels her face.
26
ISTANBUL
Walking along the stone path in Gülhane Park, Serkan Boroğlu smiles wryly at a circular flowerbed planted to resemble a nazar boncuğu, the blue and yellow and white talisman that protects believers from the evil eye. Though the park runs for a long way below Topkapı Palace’s outer fortification walls, he has never been here before. His clients always loved his tours of Topkapı Palace and nearby Hagia Sofia and the Blue Mosque, but none of them, nobody ever, asked to spend a serene hour or two strolling here among the tall trees and multihued gardens. And it never once occurred to him to suggest a sojourn here. His sister might like it—no, though it’s peaceful, it is managed and manicured, not natural and not nearly wild enough for her. And his mother would want to dig it all up just to find shards of lost civilizations.
His trek here today again involved stupid security precautions—his crossing through the Blue Mosque’s courtyard and circumnavigating Hagia Sofia’s grounds before entering the park. This time it was less disconcerting and exhausting but even more annoying. Mustafa Hamit sits on a brown wooden bench at the top of a hill. His back is to Topkapı’s high stone curtain wall. A vineless trellis runs above his head.
As Serkan scans the park, he sees only one of the bodyguards, the
older one, sitting twenty meters to the left on a similar bench, a newspaper folded in his lap. The other one, Serkan figures, must have been trailing him and will appear soon enough. When Serkan approaches, Mustafa neither stands nor shakes his hand. The “arrogant prick,” as Serkan has come to think of him, taps a message on his iPhone and, without looking up, pats the bench next to him twice. Children’s laughter rises from a playground below them.
Serkan has gleaned from the Internet that Mustafa is the scion of the Hamit family, for four generations one of Istanbul’s richest and most influential dealers of antique artifacts. Mustafa flaunts both his pedigree and education on his own dedicated website separate from the family’s business site. His Twitter account has almost three thousand followers, and his tweets, a dozen or so each day, are self–congratulatory—though, obviously, nothing akin to this meeting is ever mentioned. It’s all social, much of it photos of him with rich international friends and anorexic women.
Serkan shuts his phone off, sits, and stares at the wooden bench in front of them that’s shaped like a snake. One of the curved slats is broken, revealing rotting wood and rusted struts. Mustafa reaches his hand, palm up, toward Serkan who hands over his phone. Mustafa places both phones on the bench between them and says, “Good morning, Serkan.”
“Good morning,” he answers but does not say anything more.
Mustafa takes off his Ray-Ban aviators and gazes down through the trees as though he is surveying his estate. “My father and I are prepared to make you an offer,” he says, “that you will find more than agreeable.”
Wary, Serkan sits back. Mustafa’s face is a little pasty, a bit puffy around his eyes. Perhaps, Serkan thinks, after a long night he won’t be at the top of his game. In any case, if the offer isn’t agreeable, Serkan at least has Elif’s amulet for the Americans.
As Mustafa turns, his eyes narrow. “Twenty-five thousand American dollars,” he says. “In cash. And the promise of more deals. With one non-negotiable condition.”