by Jay Amberg
Now, the boy’s left calf is cramping, but he can do nothing but grit his teeth, clench his left fist, and press the ball of his foot against the dusty stone. A woman’s amplified voice sounds nothing like his mother’s—the tone and the language both all wrong. His mother’s voice was soothing, especially when she spoke or sang him songs in his father’s French. His own French is gone after his many months at Al Farouq. Yet somehow at this moment, his mother is calling him for dinner, waving to him along a long dusty street. Her headscarf is green and red, and her long dress is blue, the color of her eyes. Though he waves curtly, he goes on kicking the Coke can against the crumbling stone wall. She apparently cannot see that he is training himself for a war she doesn’t comprehend. She continues to call him in French and Arabic and then in languages he doesn’t know.
With his heel, he stomps the can flat, turns toward her, takes three steps, and stops, stricken. Her headscarf writhes with scorpions, and her face is contorted in unspeakable pain. Her eyes flash purple and then crimson. Red ants swarm her dress and cover her twitching feet. Flames lick her raised hands, her neck, and her hair. She is screaming hysterically. Her face dissolves into that of the disfigured, dying Zahidi woman. And then the kneeling Kurd snaps his head back against the 9mm’s barrel. Blood splashes the boy’s face, streams down his neck, and drenches his hands.
Darkness strangles the boy. His head falls back, striking the stone wall. Screams reverberate. Stars burst. That voice…! His mother isn’t screaming. It’s the woman’s voice speaking, amplified—the target of his mission. And he has not been counting, has no idea if she has spoken two hundred words or two million. Was he the one who screamed? His fingers twitch on the trigger. He stinks of fear. The gloom, thick as shit, is drowning him. He pushes up from the wall and stumbles through the tunnel.
48
BERGAMA
Özlem Boroğlu takes a breath before delivering the conclusion of her speech. Standing behind the podium, she looks out from the stage at her audience in the Aesklepion’s ancient theater. The psychiatrists and psychologists gathered from all over Turkey and the Aegean islands have filled the stone seats rising toward the crest of the hill. Her friend Recep Ateş is seated in the front box with Bergama’s mayor, a tall, heavy man who still looks small next to Ateş. The early evening light paints the trees gold; the wind has fallen, and a thick heat is settling in the theater’s bowl.
“We are meeting here today on what people through the ages have believed is holy ground,” she says, her voice rising. She turns slightly to her right and waves her hand. “This spring has been providing healing water for more than twenty-five hundred years. Galen, the father of both pharmacology and psychiatry, practiced here. In fact, he grew up here. His father was the architect of the renovation and renewal of this Aesklepion in the second century of the Common Era. Galen no doubt accompanied his father often. He almost certainly played in this theater as a child, listened to lectures here as a medical student, and spoke here as a renowned physician.” She pauses, a moment of understanding welling as it sometimes did during her years at Allianoi. “Perhaps he even sat in the very seat where you now sit.”
As her epiphany deepens, a strange nervousness, part excitement and part anxiety, washes through her. “Galen believed in the soul, the human spirit, which he called ‘psyche.’ He understood, as you do, that there is really no absolute distinction between physical and mental illness. The Aesklepion was a healing center designed to last through the ages, and those practicing medicine here twenty-five centuries ago knew that health required both physical and mental balance.”
She scans the audience again. Her mother is there in the last row, her focus locked on her daughter. Tuğçe Iskan is there as well, standing behind the last row, her arms folded across her chest and her expression, as usual, void of affect. But she is, Boroğlu knows, committing every word to memory. Elif is not present, which is tremendously disappointing. They have spoken cordially, as mothers and daughters do, but since that morning at Kapıkaya, Elif has spent little time at home—as though she is now living in her studio. She said she would come to the Aesklepion for the speech, but she is not here.
“The soul, Galen believed, was part of the body,” Boroğlu continues. “One couldn’t be healed without also treating the other. In this sacred place, the analysis of dreams was as important as surgery. Exercise and massage and diet and even music and theater were critical to the healing process.” She waves her hand slowly over her audience. “What played out here where you are now seated mattered to the health of the patients.
“We have, of course, come a long way in twenty-five centuries.” She pauses again. “Or, have we?” Letting her question sink in, she looks out over her audience. “We have created any number of technological miracles. Great empires have risen and fallen. Political upheavals, wars, massacres—and through it all the Aesklepion’s spring still flows. The human spirit, the psyche, is still central to any deep understanding of our health, individually and as a society!”
She pauses a third time, shifting her notes on the podium, though she doesn’t need them at all for what she is about to say. “As an archeologist, I am, like you, concerned with—my mother and my daughter would say obsessed with—understanding the psyche, the human spirit. We archeologists, like you, search for meaning, for the spirit of an age. In my years of work at Allianoi that I have told you about, we discovered invaluable artifacts, but what was most important, what I was really after, was an understanding of that place and time.
“Yes, our site at Allianoi was drowned, flooded over by those in power in order to create a reservoir that served narrow economic ends. My work was seemingly nullified. But I studied and sweated and fought for all those years so that I might come to know something that would help me, help all of us, comprehend not just that age but also this age in which we live.
“Archeology, like psychiatry, helps us to discover who we are. And our age is frightening—an age of horrifying strife, of wanton violence, of the destruction of whole cultures, of the fragmentation and dissolution of nations that are our neighbors. Our town, as you know…,” she waves her hands more expansively in order to bring all of Bergama into the Aesklepion’s theater, “has recently suffered a deadly terrorist attack that has traumatized us as individuals and as a community. But we are by no means alone in our pain.” She fully understands that, in what she is about to say, she is moving beyond the purview of her speech. But she must. It’s necessary. Her arms gather the audience to her.
“Our amazing technology alone cannot protect us, cannot save us. We need more than ever the commitment of those like you who treat the human psyche, who heal our collective spirit. Together, we can use the wonders of our age not as ends in themselves but as tools that serve our skills as healers.
“Those of you who have, like Galen, dedicated your lives to providing the remedies for our individual and collective illnesses must recommit yourselves to the task. We must act now to discover meaning so that we can keep the darkness at our borders—and within each of us—from flooding our culture and drowning us. I call each of you to action, to an endeavor in which we use the wisdom of this Aesklepion to stand together against violence and terror.” She nods to her audience. “Thank you!”
The applause, at first uncertain, builds quickly. Boroğlu acknowledges the plaudits, nodding again and smiling, but her mind is already elsewhere. Not actually elsewhere, but here, in another time, two millennia ago. This theater and this healing center with its tunnels and baths is the still point, the nexus. Of course. Here all along. Of course! Why didn’t she recognize it earlier, months ago? Years ago?
Recep Ateş and the mayor and a well-dressed, wrinkled, elderly woman carrying a red bouquet are coming up on stage. Iskan is not among those clapping, and neither is Boroğlu’s mother. But her mother is pleased, Boroğlu thinks. She is smiling. Her arms are not folded across her chest, nor
are her hands clamped to her hips.
When the shriveled woman turns to present the bouquet to Boroğlu, there is a clattering off to Boroğlu’s left. Glancing over, she glimpses a skinny, young, dark-haired boy in a lumpy vest climbing the stone steps to the stage. He is rushing, his face contorted.
Abruptly, Ateş shoves the mayor into Boroğlu, knocking both of them and the podium off the front of the stage. As they sprawl into the theater’s front aisle away from the boy, Ateş is already wheeling his bulk toward him.
“Allah…!” she hears the boy shout.
Ateş lunges at him, knocking the boy backward off the stage. Their momentum carries the man and the boy into a stone recess next to the theater’s wall.
A galaxy of silver stars swirls around Boroğlu. Pain engulfs her. Pinned beneath the mayor’s weight, she cannot breathe. Her eyes squeeze shut as a brilliant light flashes an unfathomable white. Her world snaps into darkness.
THE AESKLEPION’S THEATER
49
BERGAMA
The hard knocking on the studio door does not stop. Elif, who has been completely immersed in molding a rotund, poly-breasted, terra-cotta mother goddess for her grandmother, stares at the locked door as her awareness of the world outside rushes back. She yanks the buds from her ears, stands, and takes a deep breath. Her neck is stiff so she rolls her shoulders as she goes to the door. She hears sirens as she lifts her hand to the knob. “Who is it?” she shouts.
“Tuğçe! Tuğçe Iskan, Elif!”
The voice holds far greater emotion than Elif has heard in it before. Elif rolls her shoulders once more and opens the door. Iskan’s blue eyes are huge. Sweat beads on her forehead and runs down her temples. She is sucking air as though she has just run five kilometers at speed. An ambulance is screaming by on the road from the army base and Aesklepion.
“Your mother!” Iskan gasps. “The Aesklepion! Another attack!”
“My…?” For a moment, Iskan’s words are runes. Then, Elif feels herself collapsing. She grabs the knob and slumps against the door.
Iskan takes Elif by her right shoulder and buttresses her. “She’s alive,” she says. “The paramedics, they’re working on her!”
Elif gulps air, holds herself upright. “What…? What?”
“Come!” Iskan says.
Nodding, Elif glances back into her studio. She then pats the pockets of her yoga pants, though she has no idea what she is looking for. When she takes a step, the world starts to spin.
Iskan throws her left arm around Elif’s shoulders and with her right hand pulls the studio door shut.
The evening light blinds Elif. Even soft, it’s far too sharp. She sees only a burst of colors. Noise—sirens, honking, shouting, barking, even the neighing of spooked horses and a buzzing like locusts—floods her mind. Both overheated and deathly cold, she slips her right arm around Iskan’s waist and tries to calm herself, which she cannot.
The two women hurry along the road crowded with people rushing to and from the Aesklepion two kilometers away. Waves of images of the acropolis bombing crash in Elif’s mind—the toppled stanchions, the mashed cable cars and tangled cables, and the scorched earth. There is no stench of burned plastic, but an acrid odor scratches her throat and nostrils. Her tears are streaming, and her breathing is erratic, quick and shallow and then long gasps and more huffing.
“Mom’s okay?” Elif asks.
“She’s alive.”
Half a kilometer from the Aesklepion, the road is blocked by a green military jeep and a covered troop transport. Only emergency vehicles are being allowed through the checkpoint. Heavily armed soldiers are turning everybody else away. Iskan steers Elif toward a barrel-chested, clean-shaven officer wearing fatigues but no helmet or cap. Elif teeters as Iskan pulls her Ministry ID from her jeans pocket. While showing it to the officer, she says, “The speaker’s daughter.”
The officer looks at the ID, glances first at Elif and then at Iskan, and waves them quickly through the cordon. Confusion reigns within the Aesklepion grounds. The flashing emergency vehicles’ lights snatch Elif’s thoughts before they fully form. None of the shouting makes any sense. She looks around feverishly but can’t keep anything in focus. No flames or smoke, but billowing dust. The scratching in her throat sharpens. “She’s alive, my mother?” she yells in Iskan’s ear.
“She was when I came for you.” Iskan is looking ahead at the menagerie of emergency vehicles.
Triage is set up near the ancient spring under the wide canopy of an old fir tree with horizontally spreading branches. As the two women begin to angle toward the theater, Iskan stops. With her free hand, she points to their left. Six people, four men and two women, sit in the tree’s shade. A single paramedic is walking among them giving out cups of water. Elif’s grandmother stands alone next to the group.
“Anneanne!” Elif shouts as she lets go of Iskan. She has been so overwhelmed by what’s happened to her mother that she completely forgot that her grandmother was planning to attend the speech.
With both her hands shaking, her grandmother is holding a paper cup to her lips. She does not actually drink, and she does not look Elif’s way.
“Anneanne!” Elif shouts again. The cacophony recedes. The flashing lights dim. Elif moves to hug her grandmother but stops abruptly. The old woman is standing so stiffly and so awkwardly that Elif doesn’t dare embrace her. Instead, she places her hand on her shoulder. Her grandmother does not respond at all. “Oh, Anneanne!” Elif says in a lower voice. Her tears flowing again, she brushes her fingertips along the older woman’s cheek.
The paramedic, a fit, strong-jawed man about her age, comes over to them.
“My anneanne,” Elif says through her tears.
He nods. “We’ll get her to the hospital when…,” he looks around at the bedlam, “when we can.”
“Thank you. I will…I can…” Elif realizes that there isn’t much she can do other than stay with her grandmother. “Anneanne!” she says more loudly. “It’s me, Elif!”
Her grandmother finally looks up but says nothing. Her face is vacant.
Elif takes the cup so that her grandmother can hold Elif’s other hand with both of hers. She seizes Elif’s hand and grips it hard but doesn’t otherwise move. Her eyes gaze at the ground. Elif gives the cup to the paramedic and looks around at the chaos. All of the clamor and the glare crash around her again—as though the sky itself is falling. Her breath coming in gasps, she roots herself with her grandmother under the tree’s canopy. She stands there for a minute or a century, not stepping beyond time but simply confused by its erratic passing. Finally, she notices Iskan hurrying back toward them from the area closer to the theater.
Iskan, again sweating and breathless, shouts, “She’s gone!” Then, apparently aware of how her words must sound, adds, “She’s been taken to the hospital! Emergency surgery!”
50
BERGAMA
As Serkan Boroğlu paces the small, private family waiting room at Bergama Hospital, he shakes his head and mutters, “I came as fast as I could…I didn’t have my phone!” He still wears the sandals, blue jeans, and Anadolu Efes basketball T-shirt he had on when he left his girlfriend’s Taksim Square apartment in the morning. He stops in front of his sister, who is sitting in an overstuffed blue chair with thick wooden arms, and says for the fourth time, “The bastard stole my phone!”
“You told us,” Elif answers.
Sitting stiffly in the adjacent chair, her grandmother holds Elif’s right hand in both of hers. She looks up at Serkan but does not say anything. Turning her head, she stares across the room at a roiling red and green blob on the wall. Since the carnage at the Aesklepion, she can’t form clear thoughts, much less articulate them. She is dizzy, and her ears ring. Light, even the softer light of this waiting room, hurts her eyes. She realizes at som
e level that, although her life is not in danger, she needs medical attention—but she will do nothing until they get word about Özlem.
“I came as fast…,” Serkan repeats. “I…”
“Serkan!” Elif is angry at herself, not at him. Although she knows she could have done nothing to stop the bombing, she feels guilty that she was not there. She chose to continue doing her work at her studio. And in some deep way, what happened to their mother is her fault. The Galen letter… The horror in Bergama began with Elif’s discovery of the letter… No, that’s not true either. It all began long ago, even before history… But her gift to her mother is the current catalyst for this senseless mayhem. And now, she is able to do exactly nothing. Except wait. Time is sticky here in this windowless room in this interminable night. She has altered time in her studio, flowed through it on her bicycle rides and hikes in the hinterlands, and, occasionally, stepped beyond it during solitary moments and, even more rarely, in meetings with her friends. But this…
“I drove as fast as I could! Made record time!” Serkan scratches the stubble on his cheek. “I did!” He makes a fist and slaps it into his left palm. “I tried to warn Mom that the Hamits…” His shoulders slump. “I didn’t know what… The Georgian bastard stole my phone. I tried…”
“Yes,” Elif says. “Yes, Serkan.” Serkan has just arrived, perhaps twenty minutes…or half an hour…ago, but she and her grandmother have been shut in this room for…for what? The duration of Özlem’s surgery… At the Aesklepion, Tuğçe Iskan somehow conscripted a car that took the three women to the hospital on the outskirts of the town. Once they were informed that Özlem was already in surgery, Iskan ushered Elif and her grandmother to this private waiting room—and then vanished.