The Healer's Daughters

by Jay Amberg

  When for a moment she becomes stuck, unable to move up or down in the darkness, she fights panic. The fingers of her left hand claw the rock; the toes of her shoes kick and grip. She snakes toward a ledge she knows is there but cannot see. Her hand finally finds purchase, and she pulls herself into a narrow tunnel. Breathing hard, she switches on her lamp and crawls deeper into the earth.

  Her headlamp sweeps the tomb, half the size of her studio with a stone ceiling so low that she has to stoop. It dates from the second century of the Common Era so there are no lavish displays of wealth—no bronze and gold armor or weaponry, no finely wrought gold chains, no precious stones, no gold death mask. But the skeleton lying on its back was once a wealthy aristocrat, a leading citizen of Pergamon. A bronze box lies on a low marble pedestal near the skeleton’s feet.

  Kneeling in front of the box, she begs for forgiveness. She then lifts the box’s lid, her headlamp shining on the rolls of parchment. When her hand shifts the parchment, the five gold amulets, each worth a fortune, gleam. She picks up the exquisite rendering of Athena. Each line, including the facial features and hands, is precise, close to perfect. Her own work, she fears, isn’t comparable. She squeezes her eyes shut and re-opens them. Still holding the goddess between her thumb and forefinger, she looks about the tomb at the human remains, the rock ceiling, the sealed entrance, the dusty floor.

  She has only once in all of her rambles in this territory removed an item from any tomb—this one. The document, she believed, had little monetary value but might be of historical importance. Her mother had sunk into a lethargic slough after decades of productive work both at Allianoi and in Bergama. When her mother then received the document anonymously, she was, in fact, reenergized—or, rather, her obsessions were reignited. But Elif failed to account for the depth of the darkness of the human spirit. She should have known better. At least, she has now learned enough to realize that this amulet, which would seemingly solve her brother’s immediate problem, would create still more grave risks for him and the rest of her family.

  29

  BERGAMA

  As Recep Ateş leaves the Ministry of Culture office building on the Bergama Museum grounds, he hears his name called. When he turns, he sees Tuğçe Iskan standing to his left on the garden path among large remnants of ancient pillars and friezes, architraves and sarcophagi. He stops on the bottom concrete step below the thick grapevine on the arbor overhanging the building’s porch. He has forgotten how striking she is—the short blonde hair, pale skin, high cheekbones, and bright eyes—but not how irritating she can also be. “Hello, Tuğçe,” he says. He does not ask how she is doing.

  “Can we talk for a minute?” she asks.

  He leaves the office promptly at five each afternoon, and, no doubt knowing this, she has trapped him. He has another meeting out near the Aesklepion in half an hour so he answers, “This isn’t something we could’ve talked about earlier in the office?” It’s pointedly not really a question.

  “It’s about an investigation.”

  “Yours or the Ministry’s?”

  “Both.”

  “What investigation?”

  “You know I can’t tell you.” She realizes that she should have brought coffee or some other peace offering.

  “And it can’t wait until tomorrow?”

  “Not really.” She waves at the bars and cafés directly across the street from the museum. “Can I buy you a beer?”

  Though an Efes would go down really well right about now, he says, “No.” Then, aware of how curt he’s being with a colleague from Ankara, he gestures toward the table and chairs in the garden to her right. “Will five minutes do?”

  “Yes,” she says. If he’s not too evasive, it will be more than enough time.

  They settle in two of the white wrought-iron chairs surrounding a round marble-top table in the shade of the garden. He has his back to the Ministry office; hers is to the street. This side of the building has large windows but no security cameras, which fits her purpose. She wants to be seen here but doesn’t want what she’s asking to be on video. Her mind is registering everything. The glare in his eyes. The frown. The spot on his right cheek he missed while shaving this morning. The thinning hair. His forehead and neck sweating, though it’s not all that hot this afternoon. His rumpled shirt. His bulk in the chair that makes him look like a circus bear on a stool. “I need to ask you a favor.”

  “I figured as much.”

  “I’d like to look at any files you have on grave robberies and rescues in the area over the last year.”

  “It all goes to Ankara. Everything.”

  “Yes, I know. But I also know that sometimes things fall through the cracks.”

  “Not likely. Esen, my administrative assistant—I think you’ve met her—is both capable and responsible.”

  “Just the same.” She forces a smile.

  He does not return it. “And this wasn’t something you could’ve requested in the office?”

  She gazes at a large cement oval, like a spoked wheel, set on a ledge against the building’s wall. The center is the sun’s face, and twelve rays shoot to the periphery. She can’t tell if the face is smiling, but the shape of the fiery rays holds her attention. “I thought,” she says, “it might be better for everybody if—”

  “So this visit…,” he practically spits the word, “is unauthorized.” He leans forward, shifting his weight so that he looms in front of her. “You’re poking your nose where you shouldn’t again.”

  “I’m not after you.”

  “No, you’re just causing my office more work and possibly embarrassing my staff.”

  “I’m not trying to cause anyone any embarrassment.”

  “No, but you will. And you’ll pester me for an eternity if I don’t do what you want.” He shakes his head. “Come back tomorrow if you must. We’ll see what we can do.” He places his large hands on the table and presses himself up so that he is standing over her.

  Unfazed, she asks, “Do you still have your weekly meetings with Özlem Boroğlu?”

  “Officially, no.”

  “Have you noticed anything strange about her?”

  “Özlem is strange!”

  “Any difference lately?”

  He leans closer, blocking out her view of the archeological pieces lined against the building’s wall. Off to her right, red roofing tiles are piled against the adjacent building’s wall.

  “Yes!” he shouts, sputtering. “She’s very upset about the bombing! We all are!” He glares at her. “But we’ll spend half a day tomorrow on your bureaucratic shit!”

  “Before that,” she says. “Before the bombing, any change?”

  He leans back and takes a breath. “Why do you ask?”

  “An investigation may lead—”

  He cuts her off, shouting, “She’s honest!” Sputtering again, he adds, “Too honest for her own good!”

  “I wasn’t suggesting—”

  “Leave her alone! Hasn’t the Ministry screwed her enough?”

  Iskan pauses. “Yes.” A motorcycle screams along the street. She gazes up at a tall pine bending into the sky. All of its branches have been cut except for those at the very top. “But that doesn’t mean she isn’t involved in something….”

  “She’s not!” His spittle strikes her arm. He wheels without another word and lumbers off toward the gate.

  She wipes away the saliva.

  30

  BERGAMA

  Elif Boroğlu tries to ignore the knocking on the studio door. She has been deep in her work, finally getting the wax model to exactly the point that she wants it. When the hammering continues, she looks to see if the deadbolt is set, which it isn’t, covers the mold with a white cloth, and takes out her earbuds. As she goes to the door, she shouts, “
Who is it?”

  “Tuğçe Iskan!” she hears. The voice, though a woman’s, is deep.

  Who? Elif thinks, unsure if she knows someone by that name. She opens the door to the young woman from the Ministry that her mother detests. Her mother, though, loathes a lot of people, and this woman was, in an awkward way, trying to help the family when she showed them the photograph.

  The two women stand silently, facing each other across the studio’s threshold. They are both tall and fit, but they are not at all mirror images of each other. Iskan wears black jeans and a short-sleeved, blue T-shirt that reveals the tattoos on her forearms. Because her studio is climate-controlled, Elif has on yoga pants and a lightweight, gray sweatshirt. She is thinner than Iskan. Her skin is darker, her features softer. Her brown eyes are warm, and her braided black hair falls down her back almost to her waist.

  After half a minute, Iskan says, “Hello, Elif. How are you?”

  Elif doesn’t answer, partly because it is complex and partly because she can feel her focus, having been interrupted, slipping away.

  “May I ask you a couple of questions?” Iskan says in a voice that is not at all a command.

  Elif takes a breath, nods, turns, and moves back to her stool. Iskan hesitates before following her. There is nowhere to sit so Iskan steps over to the table holding the figurines, finished and unfinished, and gazes at them. Elif remembers that when they first met, Iskan complimented her on her work. Sekhmet leaps down from atop the kiln and, purring, moves toward Iskan. The neighborhood dogs are barking, and the gypsy children up the side road are shouting and laughing as they play in the street. Their voices are high and lyrical.

  “Please shut the door,” Elif says. “I need to keep the place cool.”

  Iskan closes the door, returns to the table, and picks up the stout goddess with the single-edged sword and severed head.

  “Mustafa Hamit liked that one, too,” Elif says.

  The image of all the figurines at Özlem Boroğlu’s house wells in Iskan’s mind, and she is suddenly aware of the pattern or, rather, the lack of pattern, in the arrangements both in the house’s courtyard and on the rooftop garden. Here, all of the figurines are new, and all are Elif’s. There, mixed into the array were a few ancient goddesses that Elif or someone else must have had discovered. Not many, only four or maybe five, ancient Anatolian mother goddesses were hidden in plain sight among the modern figurines.

  “He offered me a lot of money—way too much money—for it,” Elif adds.

  Iskan nods. She has been building her case against the Hamits carefully. She has more than enough evidence of the family greatly adding to their fortune in recent years by delivering ISIL plunder to the wealthy of the world. She has pretty much concluded that Serkan Boroğlu is just another of the Hamits’ disposable pawns, a dupe serving some finite end. And though it’s not yet entirely clear, his mother’s involvement is probably adversarial.

  Using the only cup in the studio, Elif fetches water from the cooler. Sekhmet rubs up against Iskan’s calf and then saunters over to Elif, who stoops and lets her drink from the cup.

  “It was a bad idea for your brother to get mixed up with the Hamits,” Iskan says. She has never been any good at winding around toward the topic about which she wants to ask someone.

  “That’s not a question,” Elif says, but her tone is not negative.

  Iskan puts the figurine down, looks around the studio, and picks up another heavyset, robed goddess with snakes entwined around her staff. “Now that he has, it’s likely that he’s headed for some sort of fall.”

  “You think my brother’s in danger?”

  “The Hamits have been using people, chewing them up and spitting them out since the Ottoman Empire.”

  Elif sips water from the cup. “Is there something I can, should be, doing?”

  Iskan doesn’t at first answer. “Not now,” she says finally. “Not yet.” She draws her finger along the statue’s staff. “I’m more concerned about your mother.”

  “I told you before that I won’t talk about her work.” Elif licks her lips. “Anyway, I don’t really know anything.”

  “The Hamits. They think there’s a huge treasure near Bergama—the Galen cache. And they think your mother has found it. Or, she’s about to.”

  “She hasn’t.”

  Iskan eyes her. “We know that.”

  The cat comes back over to Iskan and rubs up against her leg again.

  “Wait. How do you know that?” And who is we? Elif wonders.

  “How do you know that?”

  Both suddenly guarded, the women stare at each other. Neither looks away. Finally, Iskan says, “Because we don’t think it exists anymore.”

  “But the letter my mother got? That’s authentic?”

  “The letter, it probably is. But nobody else has seen the original.” She leans down and strokes the cat’s neck. “But the destruction here over the centuries. Devastating earthquakes. Invading armies. Arabs sacking the town. Fires. Greeks. Far more than a thousand years, the city went without records. There may have been a cache, but…only stone remains.” She shrugs, then quickly refocuses on Elif. “How do you know your mother hasn’t found it?”

  “Because I’ve lived with her my whole life. And archeology is…has been her whole life.”

  “Archeology and her children?”

  “Archeology, and then her children.” There is no resentment in Elif’s voice. “If she’d found something big—even if she were trying to hide it from the world—she’d have been bubbling over at home. And, since she lost her job…really, since the government flooded Allianoi…she’s been unhappy. Angry. Except for the first few weeks after she got that letter… She’s been much worse since the attack on the funicular.” She starts to sip more water but stops herself.

  Iskan wants to ask how Boroğlu got the letter but holds herself back, and the two women become silent again. Surveying the studio once more, she asks, “What are you working on?”

  “Something for a client.”

  Iskan nods toward the new centrifuge and the vacuum table with the bell jar. “Precious metal?”

  “Why do you ask?” Elif’s voice is clipped.

  “Just wondering…” It’s as close to a lie as Iskan can muster.

  Elif stares at her and says nothing.

  “I’m interested in the lost wax method.” This is not a lie. “I have been for a long time.”

  “I did some metal casting after university, but it was too expensive.”

  “But you’re back at it now?” Aware that she is pushing too far, Iskan adds, “I’m sorry. I didn’t come here to pry.”

  With no point in pretending that the new equipment could be used for terra-cotta figurines, Elif stands and says, “I’ve got to get back to work. Thanks for stopping by.”

  31

  PERGAMON’S AESKLEPION; 168 CE

  As Galen takes his patient’s pulse, the aging, overweight man hyperventilates. He is as tall as Galen but bald and shaped like an egg. The two sit in a private underground chamber in the Aesklepion’s main treatment facility. Located outside Pergamon’s walls beyond the base of the citadel, the Aesklepion, named for Aesklepios, the god of medicine, is the world’s most famous healing center. More than four hundred years old, it has in this century returned to prominence because of Emperor Hadrian’s vast rebuilding program. It boasts this circular curing center with pools and fountains, a columned portal, two sacred springs, a library, three roofed colonnades, a theater that seats 3,500, and a temple modeled after Rome’s new Pantheon and dedicated to Zeus Aesklepios. Galen’s father, the project’s lead architect, designed the renovations but did not live to see all of them finished.

  The patient’s rapid pulse and breathing reinforce what Galen has already concluded—a serious illness of the p
syche. In his second year home after seven successful years in Rome, Galen has spent most of his time writing his epic study of Attic Greek, editing his medical treatises, and tending to business related to his father’s—and now his—estate. He is, however, being consulted in this case because the patient is wealthy and powerful, one of Pergamon’s leading citizens and an architect that was once his father’s protégé. The man’s three daughters are married, but he never had a son. His recurring nightmares have driven him to seek treatment in the Aesklepion and then to ask for Galen’s intervention. But there is no one moment, no single trauma, that has brought on his dread, this psychosis—and it has only worsened during his stay at the Aesklepion.

  “I tell you,” the man says, “Atlas can’t keep it up any longer!” He gnaws at his already torn left thumbnail. “It’s only a matter of days!” His tone is urgent, as though some power is forcing him to share a dark premonition of imminent destruction. “Hours!”

  Galen nods as the man’s pulse quickens even more. The diagnosis is easy; the cure will be difficult, if not impossible. These maladies of the soul are always the most difficult to treat. “Let’s go outside, take a walk in the courtyard,” he says. The chamber is peaceful, cool and fairly dark, lit by a single torch, but Galen has to find out immediately how deeply disturbed the man’s soul is.

  “No!” the man screams. “It’s not safe! The crash! It’s coming at any moment!”

  “Who told you this?”

  “Atlas!” The man repeatedly picks at the sleeve of his tunic. “Atlas himself!”