“Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.”
― Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides
The latest savior hails from Israel.
Liza wants to fly the baby to him tomorrow: a total stranger, a second-hand medical reference, a voice on the phone, a doctor whose first response to her plea for charity surgery is an estimate for his wondrous services: $77,400. (“Quoted prices are valid until 31/05/15.”) I want to murder this man. Liza does not: She is relieved. She is thankful. She clings to his absurd fee as to a talisman. It represents: an exit. It is a magical number that will save her infant son who lies, wasting from congenital defects of the heart and lung, in the intensive care unit.
There have been many such numbers. Liza does not know any of the doctors who email them. She refers to these wizards by their countries. America. Spain. France. It is as if entire nations were mobilizing to save Alex, her tiny black-eyed boy.
“What does Germany say today?” she asks. Or: “How much is Turkey asking?”
Liza and Eka are sisters. They share the spare room of my borrowed flat in Tbilisi, in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. I am walking across the world. And Eka is my new walking guide. Two weeks ago she called apologetically. Her baby nephew was in the Tbilisi hospital, she said. The Georgian doctors warn that the child will die without surgery abroad. It is a matter of urgency. And so, for the sisters: days of self-starvation and sleeplessness, fear and anxiety, despair and bewilderment, helpless anger and a kind of sorrow that is dense as blue granite.
How can Liza and Eka rescue their boy? Liza is a small town librarian. She earns 200 lari a month—$88. She will sell her apartment, she declares. She will auction her family’s derelict farm. But it will not be enough! Why? Because Alex’s condition is very serious—perhaps beyond medical remedy. What about calling aid organizations? What about calling the embassies? We go round and round like this, the sisters and I, through long nights. Tonight we plot well past one a.m. at the barren dinner table. We argue. We begin to shout. I go blind.
It happens like this: My eyes start to burn. They catch fire. They swell shut in pain. Have I detached my retinas? Is this even possible? I have been rubbing my eyes in frustration. All I know is that I am sightless. I cannot see. The suddenness of the symptoms—their utter mystery—terrifies me. I have never experienced anything like it before.
In the Greek legend of Jason and the Argonauts, the heroes encounter an old man, Phineus, exiled on the shores of Thrace. Zeus has stolen Phineus’ vision. Why? Because Phineus is a seer: He has committed the crime of revealing the future to humankind. Every single day, Zeus sends harpies to snatch the food away from the lips of poor, cursed, and blind Phineus.
I fall asleep with a wet cloth over my eyes. Tomorrow, Liza and Eka will take me to the emergency room. (More hours spent in a hospital!) But dawn comes. I open my eyelids. And I can see. My eyes function perfectly. It is as if nothing had happened at all!
Phineus: I have wondered often about his brutal punishment. But now I think I understand. Conjuring the future doesn’t enrage the gods. It is the death of hope it brings.
*
Liza and Eka come from Poti, a small and forgotten port on the Black Sea.
Poti doesn’t look like much. The town slumbers on the muzzy Eurasian coast. Its back streets are muddy and rutted and roamed by goats. Harbor cranes yank pallets from the bellies of rusty cargo ships from Bulgaria and Turkey. It is hard to believe that this is the land of the Golden Fleece, the fabled destination of Jason.
But so it is.
More than 3,000 years ago, the Colchis empire—a dazzling “kingdom of the sun”—flourished on the eastern shore of the Black Sea. To maritime Greeks who colonized the present-day region of Georgia, with its green folds and snowcapped peaks of the Caucasus, it was a Shangri La of unimaginable wealth: a land of shining cities, hoards of treasure, powerful sorcery. It was a Bronze Age El Dorado at the farthest rim of the Hellenistic world.
Archaeologists have pinned the historic source of the Golden Fleece legend to the beautiful mountains of Svaneti, in western Georgia. For millennia, local prospectors have used sheepskins to sift alluvial gold from swift creeks. Wool is a perfect filter for collecting grains of the heavy, sparkling metal. Word of this strange novelty drifted back to the Mediterranean. A quest was born.
Today, the story is told mostly as a boys’ adventure:
With his father’s throne usurped by an evil uncle, Jason of Thessaly must find the Golden Fleece of Colchis in order to reclaim his kingdom. It is the usual rite of passage. A test of testosterone. He sets sail in a ship called the Argo. He recruits a band of muscled worthies. (The argonauts.) The king of Colchis—his old capital is thought to be the archaeological site of Vani, near the Georgian city of Kutaisi—devises a series of impossible tasks to block the hero’s way: Jason must yoke fire-breathing oxen, he must fight supernatural warriors, he must hoodwink a dragon guarding the golden prize that hangs in a sacred oak grove. He prevails of course. He sails back to Greece triumphant, and not only with the fleece, but with Medea, his new bride, the daughter of the Colchian king.
What the Hollywood versions omit is the unhappy after story.
By one account, Jason and Medea are exiled forever from Jason’s homeland of Thessaly. (Medea kills the scheming uncle with magic; they are banished.) Another version has Jason committing suicide. The most pathetic coda: an aging Jason gets crushed to death by a beam from the Argo, which sits unused and rotting on the beach of Corinth. The tragic poets offer us many possible endings. Life, only one.
*
Liza is tall and thin and pale. Eka is short and thin and pale. You look at these two women and think: An asthmatic could flatten them with a sneeze. They appear frail, helpless, negligible, like humanity’s ultimate weaklings. They look like the meekest inheritors of the Earth. This perception is incorrect. Liza and Eka will not be knocked down. They can withstand typhoons, hurricanes, tornadoes. They have backbones of titanium.
The flat-faced security men at the hospital cannot stop Liza. She sweet-talks, hectors, bulldozes her way through them into ward where Alex lies panting in a crib. And poor, exhausted Dr. B! He sees her coming down the halls and throws up his arms in surrender. (She phones him at all hours.) Besides canvassing the entire planet for emergency care to save the baby, the sisters have door-stopped the Georgian Ministry of Health and a Georgian TV station. Liza has knocked on the door of the wife of the ex-president. She has appealed on her knees to St. Gabriel the miracle maker in the church at Mskheta.
Liza doesn’t cry much. She weeps in the way that demolition experts blow up buildings: The explosions are directed inward, muffled and brief, to avoid collateral damage. Eka never cries at all. She just stares at the floor. She reels in her chair. Stunned. Catatonic. She has been up all night translating medical reports for an army of polyglot doctors who respond like accountants.
“How do you translate tachypnea?” Eka asks.
It is from the ancient Greek. The word surgery, too, is derived from cheir and ergon, which mean “hand” and “action.” Trauma comes down to us from the verb diatetreno: to pierce through, to punch a hole into, to penetrate.
*
How cramped the rowers’ benches on the Argo must have been!
Apollonius of Rhodes, the Alexandrine poet, records a roll call of 50 argonauts: a ballast of superheroes.
There was the bard Orpheus, who could bewitch even the stones with his lyre. Euphemos was so swift he ran “over the swell of the grey sea” without wetting his feet. Herakles was the strongest man on Earth. Anaikos, expert in combat, boarded the Argo dressed in the pelt of Mainalian bear. (His grandfather tried to hide the warrior’s battle-axe, hoping to thwart him from shipping out.) Tiphys was the first weatherman: He predicted storms. The flying Boread brothers were the sons of the North Wind. Mopsos decoded the secret messages of birds. Etcetera.
Compared with his all-star crew, Jason comes off as a muddler. He is brave, it is true, but he is also a bit self-indulgent—a callow ladies’ man, handsome but passive: the world’s first male model. He seems an odd choice to headline a Greek epic. But his lack of character is exactly the point.
The story of the Golden Fleece predates classical Greek civilization. The same poem with slight modifications appears on Hittite tablets from the early Bronze Age. Conceivably, Jason’s journey may stretch back to the last glimmer of hunting and gathering, or to the cataclysmic settling down of humankind that came with agriculture. It carries a whiff of terrible longings familiar to any audience chained to the nine-to-five grind. It is not about freedom at all, or free will. It is about fate.
*
Breakfast in Tbilisi. Rain falls straight as ballbearings. Mtatsminda hill, the beacon of the city, is clotted with grey. Liza and Eka sit at the table.
Eka—an English teacher, our translator, our medium—announces that Liza has decided to let go of the baby. She wants to give Alex away to someone who will take him and cure him. Liza says through Eka that she accepts this sacrifice. She stares at me gravely. I suggest that finding a foreign hospital to treat the child for free is difficult enough; finding a rich couple willing to adopt a baby with congenital heart defects will be close to impossible.
Liza leans forward. She rests her forehead quietly on the edge of the table.
*
Jason could not acquire the Golden Fleece without Medea. Here pounds the ageless heart of the quest.
Medea the witch. The Caucasian enchantress. She works against her rich country, against her royal family, against her own soul to possess Jason’s love. She is besotted. In exchange for his marriage vow, she deploys her sorcerer’s herbs and unguents to protect the Greek outlander. She saves him from the flame-throwing oxen. She casts a spell on the scaly dragon. She thwarts her father’s wrath. Jason wins undying fame.
In exchange, Medea becomes a primordial arch-villainess.
First, she kills her brother for Jason. When Jason abandons her for another princess in Greece, she slays her own children by him. (Hence the suicidal Jason.) The Greeks paint Medea as the anti-mother. But Medea’s biggest sin is this: She acts like a man. She exacts a warrior’s revenge.
Liza too is alone. I do not ask about Alex’s absent father. There are, in fact, few men in the children’s ward in Tbilisi. There are many tired, hollow-eyed women and their sick babies. Alex shudders in his pajamas, strapped to a ventilator.
I am walking around the world.
The pathways of the ancients lead from Africa to Rustaveli Avenue. This downtown street is lined with magnificent plane trees that in early May popped open like green umbrellas. (Plane trees: symbols of revitalization in Greek mythology.) There were primeval forests here trod by early humans, and these vanished trails wind past the old hilltop fire temples of the Zoroastrians, past the medieval citadels, up beyond Aia, the old capital of Colchis, and into the glacial room where today the babies’ cribs are arrayed like small ships tacking in echelon, like miniature Argos.
The last time I see Dr. B, he looks weary as ever. In his rumpled scrubs. His hair in disarray. He waves his hands sadly over the boy’s clinical charts. The task is to save Alex from his own miswired little body. It is decided. Dr. B will do what he can. “Sometimes we must take a risk.” He sighs. He bends and rummages in a desk drawer. He produces a bottle of Georgian red wine. A fine saperavi. The good doctor holds it out, saying nothing. He smiles with infinite tenderness.
* Alex delighted his family and doctors by surviving his first life-saving surgery in Tbilisi on Friday, May 29. He remains on a ventilator in the hospital critical care unit. The medical team has informed the family that the baby faces multiple operations to correct anomalies on his right lung, heart, and thoracic blood vessels. While Georgia’s medical system is socialized, not all of these complex procedures are free. Readers wishing to contribute to Alex’s medical fund can donate to this site maintained by global friends of the family:
https://www.leetchi.com/c/solidarite-de-alex-3667040 Press the language icons at the bottom of the page to translate the site into English or other languages.
