The Cover That Drank

The body arrived in İzmit at the hour when the sun had already gone behind Yarımca but the sky had not yet admitted it, when the gulf is the colour of zinc and the air carries that particular Marmara damp which is not rain and not fog but the long exhalation of a sea that has been considering itself all day. Twelve degrees. The humidity, on a thermometer outside a kıraathane on Cumhuriyet Caddesi, was one hundred. There is no such thing as one hundred percent in any sense the body would prefer to recognise; it means the air is already at the limit of holding, and any cooler surface — a glass, a forearm, the hammered copper of a tea-pot — becomes a small site of condensation, a small theatre where the sea repeats itself in miniature.

I had walked up from the bay along streets that did not quite know which century they were in. The municipal palms had been recently pollarded; their cropped crowns held a few last cups of the day's wet. A bus rolled past with its windows fogged from the inside. A pharmacy sign blinked Eczane, Eczane, in the green that here means medicine and elsewhere has come to mean almost anything.

The news I had read was on a folded regional sheet left on the bench at the dolmuş stop, the kind of paper printed too thin for any climate but read by everyone here. In Arslanlı, a village strung along the slope of the tepe above Körfez, there is a çeşme — a fountain — built by the inhabitants in 1961, when the mains had not yet reached the high ground and water had to come from somewhere. The villagers, lacking quarry stone, did what the country had always done: they walked the fields and came back with what the fields offered. What the fields offered, that year, was the lid of a Roman sarcophagus.

The lid sits with the carved side outward. It bears — and has borne for sixty-five years — the head of Μέδουσα (Médousa), the Watcher, set there in the second century to keep the dead from being interfered with by anything that wished them ill. The sarcophagus-makers of Bithynia used her freely. The face was a guard at the gate. The serpents in her hair were drawn, on the better examples, with that particular patience which carves each scale as if the stone were the snake and the snake were merely waiting. There are also, according to the description in the paper, acroteria — the leaf-finials that ran along the upper edge — and an arrangement of vines that any inhabitant of Nicomedia in the Tetrarchic age would have recognised as the agreed grammar of expensive grief.

For sixty-five years, the children of Arslanlı have drunk water through her. The cement that the bricklayers used in 1961 has covered her chin and her left ear; moss has taken the rest. The villagers, when shown the article on a phone, are reported to have shrugged, or smiled, or said that it had always been a face and they had always known. The fountain works. The water is cold. The pipe, somewhere in the throat of the lid, has been replaced twice; once before the earthquake of '99, once after.

I sat with my tea in a small place on Hürriyet Caddesi and tried to think clearly about this, but the thinking would not stay in one shape. Medusa was apotropaic — ἀποτρόπαιος (apotrópaios), the one who turns away — and was set on tombs because the tomb had to be sealed against intrusion. The seal here is broken. The lid has been turned up to face the road. What she keeps away now is, presumably, whatever wishes ill to the water. The water passes through her teeth. The drinkers, bending, place their lips beneath her face and take into themselves whatever she does not turn away.

Ovid, in the fourth book of the Metamorphoses, has Perseus describe how the blood that ran from the severed neck of the Gorgon, falling onto the sands of Libya, gave rise to the serpents of that country; and how the head, packed in its bag, hardened by chance everything its averted gaze caught — a sprig of seaweed turning to coral on the shore, the eyelids of Atlas folding into stone. The face was a relic of conversion. Whatever met it became one thing and lost the other. In Arslanlı the conversion has run the other way. She has been the one converted — into spigot, into civic furniture, into the long indifference of country water. She watches no one. She is watched by no one. The cement covers her like a sleep.

I thought, then, of what Nicomedia had been. The capital Diocletian chose because Rome had grown too tired and Byzantium had not yet been imagined. The Tetrarchic palace whose painted reliefs the museum keeps under glass at Çukurbağ — the goddess Roma in red, the procession in their dyed cloaks — was built when this gulf was the centre of the known world. Within two centuries the stone of that palace was already being walked off, piece by piece, by the masons of the surrounding villages, who needed a sill, a step, a lintel. The countryside ate the city slowly, the way a body that survives the famine eats the body that did not.

The fountain at Arslanlı is the same act, late. It is not theft. It is not even reuse. It is the natural settling of imperial stone into peasant gravity. Nicomedia is in the gardens. Nicomedia is under the threshing floors. Nicomedia is the lintel above the door of the room where the children sleep. Once a year, perhaps, someone leans down to the lid, places a hand on the moss, and feels for an instant that the face is not a face but a question — and then straightens, and walks on, and the next bus comes.

Outside the kıraathane the sky finally admitted to having lost the sun. The minaret of the Pertev Paşa was a darker thing against the dark. A woman crossed the road carrying a bidon of water she had filled, she said, at a fountain in her village because the city water tasted of iron tonight. She did not say which village. I did not ask. The body knows when not to ask.

Claudius, la Malta