The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (34 page)

After the waiter had memorized their elaborate order, her father added water to his
glass half-filled with raki and told her, Dot, I have some big news.

She marveled adolescently at the trick she had seen countless times, the liquor turned
cloudy by the water, and he chided her for not listening. She twizzled a straw in
her glass of Coke and to prove she had indeed been listening said, Well? Aren’t you
going to tell me?

Your mother’s not coming back, he said.

This isn’t another vacation, is it?

No, he said, it isn’t.

So, is this like a divorce or an annulment or something?

No, he said. Not at all. She wants to be in Virginia, now that your brother’s in college.

She can’t handle it anymore.

She wants to be there for Christopher.

I’m not surprised.

I didn’t think you would be.

What did you think?

I thought, Dottie is seventeen. She knows how to take care of herself.

That’s so true, she said, pleased.

The invasion of the meze began, the surface of the table disappearing beneath an advancing
army of small bowls and saucer-sized plates, three varieties of
ezme
—carrot, smoked aubergine, and chilies with tomatoes—
fasulye,
stuffed vine leaves, yogurt with grated cucumber and mint, cubes of grilled white
cheese rubbed in olive oil and oregano, paper-thin slices of smoked tuna called
lekerda,
a salad of charcoal-grilled octopus, humus topped with fat slabs of grilled red peppers
and pine nuts, mussels in beer batter—Dad! Enough! she said. No way you’ll eat all
that—spinach balls with yogurt, fresh anchovies—Ho ho! he said, just watch—a disgusting
lump of fried brain salad, an obscene fig dribbled with gunk—and she said, Stop already,
you are definitely crazy
—
his enthusiasm for food verging on the pathological and sometimes when she felt her
father’s appetite enclosing her she would remind herself of the pertinent family legend
deployed to justify his gluttony, that his parents were dirt poor and he had almost
starved to death as a kid in Pittsburgh during World War Two.

By the time the waiter brought her order—a cheese and tomato
pide
—there wasn’t space for it on the table. Oink, said her father, making room by wolfing
down two of the dishes, and she picked up her knife and fork and cut a tiny bite of
her pizza and stared at it hopelessly, not expecting her empty stomach to appreciate
the intrusion, and tried not to care about her father’s big news, telling herself,
Okay, it doesn’t matter, the season for her relationship with her mother had come
and gone and she could never trust her mother to keep her safe anyway.

Try some of this, said her father and she shook her head no in slow motion, remote,
distracted by her awareness that she wasn’t as sanguine or cavalier about any of this
as her tone suggested, in fact she was actually pretty good at denying herself permission
to think about these things at all—the folly of her parents—and she lifted the bite
of pizza to her closed lips, lost in thought, exploring the renewal of an old feeling,
that she had been born motherless.

After all, she told herself, would somebody please tell her what she was supposed
to do?

After all, she never wanted to be inadequate like her mother and as a teenager found
it increasingly impossible to conceal her disdain for her mother’s deficiencies. PMS,
migraines, panic attacks, paranoia, crying jags, selfishness so consuming it sometimes
seemed like a form of amnesia—
Whose children are these?
She had never stopped being afraid of the world, which made her anathema to her daughter,
who did not like women who rejected, however sensibly, a dangerous expansion of their
world. The way she hid herself behind walls she might as well have been a Muslim woman.
She took too many pills. She was anorexic before it became fashionable among the girls
of her daughter’s generation. She was freaked out by the topic of sex, welcoming her
daughter’s first period with a box of Kotex and silence, and totally insane about
cleanliness and hygiene, dirty countries, dirty food, dirty people
. . .
after all, her mother allowed her father to regularly administer purgatives to his
children, and even, Dottie suspected, to her mother herself, sudsy enemas that horrified
her with shame until the onset of puberty, when she became headstrong and learned
too late to refuse him.

Oh, man, this octopus! said her father, chewing rapturously. Try some?

It was like
. . .

. . .
no secret to her that women were an open field, a free market for her glamo father.
He could have had anybody, chosen anybody, but the woman he chose was her neurotic
mother and as she grew older and kept asking herself why, even knowing her parents
truly loved one another despite their obvious misalignment, the only good answer she
could come up with was that it all came down to the fact that in a time of crisis
he had rescued her, and the object lesson was self-evident: be careful who you rescue
because you’re likely to be stuck with them.

Oh, boy, said her father, holding out a nose-wrinkling anchovy like a flatworm speared
on his fork. These are fantastic. Here. But she jerked her head back, miming revulsion,
and quickly ate her forgotten bite of pizza to make him stop.

After all
. . .
she had watched it happen, her father attempting to be playful with her mother—a tickle,
a kiss, an impromptu dance in the kitchen, a pat on the rear end—and had noted her
resistance and later understood that her Catholic parents would not use birth control
and her mother was adamant about no more kids but then her mother became jealous of
her father’s affection for her until his physical displays of affection became clandestine
and she had to hide everything, which is what her father wanted.

Going, going, gone, said her father, popping the last of the meatballs into his mouth
and she pushed away her plate and its uneaten pizza, her own appetite waning as her
father’s multiplied beyond comprehension.

Groaning for the waiter’s benefit, he wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and looked
at his watch and said, Great, we have a few more minutes. She ordered another Coke
to settle her stomach, he a coffee and strawberries, and they chatted about her studies
and life at school and he asked, What about boys? She avoided the question with her
standard dismissal—Turkish guys are weird—knowing better than to open a window for
him into the topic of dating, and she shuddered seeing how instantaneously the wrong
topic could rip away his charm and make him scary. Hatred flashed through his eyes
when she asked about Chernobyl and she saw the hatred enlarge pleasurably with satisfaction—They’ve
done it this time, Dottie, it was the beginning of the end for those bastards—and
just what was radiation? she wanted to know, because she wouldn’t dare bring up the
incident with the Russian general, and any mention of the envelope on the floor, which
had come to rest against the legs of his own chair, would be a violation of the rules,
but he wasn’t paying attention.

Hey, he said, making an expression like a dumb cluck, How could I forget? and he reached
across the table, his hand asking for hers, to examine the ring on her finger, Dottie
sensing his desire before she recognized its proprietorial determination molding his
face.

Do you love it? he asked, and she did not always like to hear such eagerness in his
voice, the intense need to please her begging the question of her need to please him,
sometimes trapping her in appeasement and lies. But she did love the ring and told
him she loved it yet when he stretched forward, quickly and circumspectly, to brush
his lips across the pearl’s gold cage, she hissed, Daddy! and tried to pull her hand
away but for one long second he would not let go.

He sat back straight, smoothing his necktie, his guileless expression not to be trusted.
I know you wanted a Vespa for your birthday, he said, grimacing at his failure to
fulfill her wish. I’m sorry, he apologized, and as she rushed to assuage his guilt—Really,
Daddy, I adore the ring—she hesitated, her impulse to forgive him interrupted by the
leap of mischief into his eyes, the cunning sparkle that introduced the reentry of
the game, and she said smartly, Okay, Daddy, what’s going on?

Will this do instead? he said, disingenuous with uncertainty as he plucked the envelope
off the floor and unfastened its clasp and withdrew a photograph from its sleeve,
placed it upside down on the table between them, and, with a tentative, teasing index
finger inched it toward her. It’s not a Vespa, he cautioned, flipping the photograph
triumphantly like the card that wins the game.

She’s a beauty, don’t you think?

Daddy! she squealed, not quite sure of the meaning of the photograph she was looking
at—an unpainted wooden-hulled sailboat, varnished to a gleam, its upswept lines and
wind-filled sail frisky to the eye, skipping across the turquoise-colored water of
the Bosphorus.

She’s all yours.

Oh, my God!

Don’t I get a kiss, he said.

On the return trip to Uskudar, her imagination ran wild, susceptible to the enchantment
of unleashed possibility. In the middle of the Bosphorus she edited her farewell to
Europe to include a giddy good-bye to the ferry as well, her future already aboard
the boat that he had given her, sailing across the strait for an evening in Sultanahmet
or Karakoy, dropping anchor to picnic with friends on one of the islands or taking
Osman for a romantic cruise to the Black Sea, utopian expeditions that would make
each of their lives perfect and lovely and there she would be at the helm, in command
of all happiness. But as the ship approached the shores of Asia her mood lost its
elevation, her inspiration graying, her thoughts becoming clouded by reflection, and
she wondered what she had to complain about—that her father loved her? That his sin
was loving her? That he loved her too much? I have big plans for us, he told her,
and she thought, you always do.

And what do daughters truly know of fathers? Too little perhaps, perhaps too much?
What secrets do their mothers guard, what secrets have they simply missed, overlooked,
refused to acknowledge? The answers—given and taken away and returned as mysteries
or just as often as lies—were a perilous confusion: too much, too little, too late,
too soon.

And what do daughters truly learn from fathers? To understand, or misunderstand, love?

Forgive me Father for I have sinned, she said to herself, without hearing an inner
tone of the repentance she had thought would be there, when she searched her soul.

I confess, she said without remorse. I want his love too.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

In June, the
poyraz
, a gentle northeasterly wind, blew in from the Black Sea to cool the rising heat
of Istanbul. One Friday afternoon she and Osman took advantage of cherry season to
stage a photo shoot in an open-air
pazar
in Balat, the city’s old Jewish Quarter on the southern shore of the Golden Horn,
inspired by their common passion for the photography of Ara Güler. Osman, of course,
like any Turkish guy she knew even remotely, wanted to learn everything about her,
and the day was exalted with clear blue skies and marbled with heavenly light and
she felt like telling the history of her happiness in bits and pieces, which is how
happiness wandered in her memory, fractured and incomplete, uncertain of its destination.

In the perfect early days of family and childhood, she had loved throwing rice at
embassy weddings, touching the noses of camels on a trip to Egypt, sleeping stretched
out in a row of empty seats on airplanes hurtling through darkness to some unpronounceable
place, going to kindergarten with doll-like Chinese children, picnics on the beach
in a half-dozen countries and swimming in the waves, painting her toenails shocking
colors like Black Ice and granny-apple green, safaris and camping trips, gin rummy
with her brother on rainy holidays, baking sugar cookies with her mother at Christmas,
exploring strange cities, saying her prayers in each new language she acquired, doing
the polka with her father, and, rarely but euphorically, the jitterbug with her mother,
and dancing spasmodically with native kids on the ceremonial fringe, and disco alone
in her room. She wrote poetry about the animal kingdom, which her father Scotch-Taped
to the refrigerator, next to her brother’s drawings of robot men and gremlins from
outer space—
Crocodiles are mysterious/Because their tears aren’t very serious; The animals are
wild/They even ate a child
—and sent countless postcards to the playmates she was always leaving behind, outlandish
declarations of fidelity
. . . love you forever, best friends until the end of time.

Oyle mi?
Osman kept saying,
Really?
his eye squinched against the viewfinder of his Nikon and his left hand adjusting
her pose, Dottie in a tangerine-colored starburst-patterned sundress and black high-topped
sneakers standing in the
pazar
surrounded by dried slabs of rolled apricot stacked like amber tiles. When she frowned
about the artificiality of modeling Osman explained he was trying to create
the goddess effect
.
Whatever,
she smirked, knitting her hands in the air like a belly dancer, and he said,
That’s it!
making her suddenly self-conscious. He wanted to know everything, though she demurred
to his appetite for more intimate details about family and boyfriends and emotions
and then it was her turn and she led him down the path past the hefty, rosy-cheeked
women with their snow-white cotton head scarves and long-sleeved sweaters and baggy
salwar
pants to the
kiraz
stalls and stared at his lovely lips through the viewfinder of her own camera, the
dangle of Hellenistic curls at his jawline, zooming in as his teeth nipped at the
purple Napoleon cherries and the sweet juice stained the mesmerizing tip of his tongue.

Me? he scoffed, self-effacing, sampling the fruit at another stall. No, I can’t remember.
My childhood was boring.

No it wasn’t, she said, which made his lips tighten into a pained smile as he spit
out the seed of another cherry and she pressed the shutter and he began an intense
discourse to explain to her how it was for him, growing up in Istanbul.

The most important thing to know about his childhood, he told her in facile but heavily
accented English, was the jarring symmetry between noise and silence, the tyranny
of public space in a perpetual state of tension with the dubious concept of privacy.
Your family did not like it when you closed the door to your room, but neither did
the government; secrecy was a privilege reserved exclusively for authority. What he
remembered most about his childhood, he said, was his stubborn solipsism, the incuriosity
and righteous disregard he had for others, paired against its likely source, the claustrophobia
of overpopulation, his parents and grandparents and two older brothers and two younger
sisters sharing the upper floors of a four-story apartment building on the hill near
Istanbul University. His strict Kemalist father was a professor of economics and his
status-conscious mother an administrative assistant for the school of law. The residence
turned into a hostel for extended family flocking in from all over the map like homing
pigeons—Frankfurt, New York, Paris, Geneva; lemon farmers from the Aegean coast, head-scarved
aunties from Trabzon—the omnipresent huddle of relatives multiplied by his sibling’s
unruly friends, his father’s didactic colleagues and obsequious students, his socialite
mother’s stream of lacquered guests and distinguished visitors, the cook and her ignorant
children, the
kapici
and his family, and the neighbors stopping by for tea, the pandemonium within the
building a full dress rehearsal for the greater pandemonium erupting throughout the
ever-spreading metropolis, his fate inside and outside to be unnoticed, voiceless,
and overwhelmed.

You were just shy, I bet, she said, snapping frames that married Istanbul’s human
wealth of opposites, the eastern Mediterranean profile of his gorgeous face, nose
to nose with the merry-eyed Asian profile of the scarved, porcine vendor, a cigarette
jutting from the corner of her wrinkled mouth, as he paid for a kilo of cherries and
she lowered the camera, moved by the beautiful contrasts of the image—
classic,
she told herself—and they continued walking.

I think I was probably a snob, he laughed. My brothers enjoyed toy trucks and glue-together
airplanes and sports where you kneed each other in the balls, my sisters loved American
pop music and soap operas and I loved books, you see, and I was pretentious about
them. I would not tolerate being disturbed, and my brothers would not tolerate my
preference for solitude. And so, he said, with a tarp and old cushions he created
a refuge for himself on the roof, below the grove of Süleymaniye’s minarets, or in
bad weather or winter escaped to the library, feeling himself on more of an equal
footing with the chaos of life when he encountered it sealed in the no less lively
silence of books, a delicious potent silence that would occasionally seize the entire
city for days and weeks when the military felt compelled to remind everyone who’s
boss, curfews emptying the streets, martial law like a headmaster’s command to Istanbul
to pipe down, get back in your seats, put your nose in the book of secularism and
modern thinking.

Leaving the
pazar,
they returned to the leafy streets of Balat, photographing its collapsing wooden
houses, the visual romance of aging geometry—tilting roofs, cracked bow windows,
swaybacked balconies—pausing frequently to pop cherries into the other’s mouth, a
slow amble in the general direction of the water, where the new mayor, a post-imperial
sultan of urban renewal, was in hot pursuit of the city’s future, tearing down everything
in sight, stripping the landscape, razing thousands of buildings, peeling back the
grimy industrial crust of the old tin and concrete factories from the littoral, leveling
slums, obsessed with transforming the shorelines of the cesspool that was the Golden
Horn into a network of public gardens, parks, and playgrounds—camps, Osman foretold
derisively, for Gypsies and migrants.

Yes, Osman continued after she assumed he had finished describing his boyhood estrangement,
a tale with a resonance she found instantly familiar, reminding her of her own brother’s
self-involved state of withdrawal.

Oh, good, she said, leaning into him, looking up into his brown eyes with encouragement.
You’re going to tell me more.

Yes. When I was ten, one Saturday I packed my school bag with bread and cheese and
boiled eggs and, of course, a book—
The Ring Trilogy.

You read that when you were ten!

Of course. It’s a children’s book. I don’t know why because I didn’t think about what
I was doing but for some reason I became restless and walked down the hill to Eminonu
and I purchased a token for the next ferry, which was going to Uskudar. I had never
ridden the ferry by myself and I wasn’t sure where Uskudar was but these facts did
not concern me. I sat alone on a bench near the front of the boat and began to read
and when the ferry docked I got off and purchased a token for the next ferry. This
one was going to Be
ş
ikta
ş
. I read my book and was very happy with the hobbits and such. The next ferry took
me to Ortakoy, the next to Arnavutkoy. What were these places? I didn’t even look
at them. I didn’t notice the oil tankers and freighters, I wasn’t interested in the
dolphins jumping in front of the boat. I didn’t look at the magnificent palaces along
the shore or the
yalis
of the rich people or the passengers getting on or off at each stop. Finally, I was
almost to the Black Sea and had to turn around. By the time I arrived home it was
very late and I expected to be punished. My hands trembled as I removed my shoes at
the door and walked into our flat, dreading the scene to come. My mother was entertaining
a houseful of frightening ladies hidden beneath layers of jewelry and cosmetics and
silk and she made me introduce myself and said, Darling, where have you been so late?
I said the library and she beamed and announced to everyone I was going to be a doctor,
although I had never indicated any such desire, but one of the guests said skeptically,
How does the boy get such a sunburn in the library?
And then the truth came out. My mother became very dramatic, beside herself with anxiety
because I had journeyed all day long without an amulet to protect myself from the
evil eye.

Dottie didn’t interrupt but raised her left hand to display the bracelet he had given
her for her birthday. Yes, he nodded. Exactly.

The point of my story is this, Osman said. I became infatuated with Istanbul’s ferries,
not for any practical or aesthetic reason. Every Saturday I would ride them back and
forth, back and forth, from somewhere to somewhere to somewhere else, restored by
the constant stream of air and water, suspended in a sublime state, moving across
the water with everyone else but unlike everyone else, going nowhere, because I was
already where I wanted to be, which was turned inward and facing outward at the same
time. I was happiest in this place called Between. Between was not the space of separation
everyone imagined it to be. On the contrary, actually. Perhaps this perspective is
the difference between you and me. So, yes, I was talking about books. I read dozens
of books on the ferries. Hundreds. No, I’m not exaggerating.

So, he said, and her stomach fluttered as she let him take her hand. You might think
that my love of books transformed me into an excellent student, but that was not the
case.

Oh, crapola, she said, and he gave her a sad glance, his customary response when she
contradicted him. You passed the entrance exam to Robert College.

Okay, did I say I wasn’t intelligent? The problem was, the books had made me a dreamer,
an inhabitant of every world but my own, and because of this it is very clear to me
the day my childhood ended, six years ago, when I was fourteen, and I began to see
how I would have to adapt or perish.

But childhood should end at fourteen, don’t you think? she said.

Yes, he agreed. Perhaps even sooner. I was immature at fourteen. But at whatever age
childhood ends, it does not end naturally, it ends with a blow.

She thought about Osman’s theory as they crossed the boulevard toward the bulldozed
shoreline and agreed—childhood’s demise was truly painful—but did not say so. They
walked through an unsod plot of newly planted saplings, mangy stray dogs sniffing
the scraped soil.

Why do people call the dogs Arabs? she asked.

Ask your Mister Lawrence.

Sorry?

Mister T. E. Lawrence. And when she didn’t understand he laconically explained, We
don’t like the Arabs.

A horde of boys played soccer on the bare ground where not long ago had stood a dilapidated
row of warehouses. She felt Osman’s mood shift and asked, What’s wrong? and here was
that strange blend of his, passion and gloom, fueling a smoldering rant about the
popular mayor—the ringmaster for the ruling elite, he lamented, granter of wishes
for invisible people while the working people and artisans, who had lived along the
waterways for generations, were thrown out of their homes and displaced to the goat
pastures beyond the farthest suburbs, and she did not intend to argue when she said,
But, Osman, the pollution here was so gross.

Listen, Dottie, he lectured her, the real pollution is the way the government runs
this country, and she sighed, not wanting to ruin everything with politics.

Do you think the radiation from Chernobyl has come here?

Yes, he said ruefully. It’s obvious. We’re all fucked.

Far up the quay, a small white-hulled ferry had docked at the terminal below the iron
church and she said, Come on, let’s run for it! and took off trotting before he could
object. Osman caught up to her and then their brisk steps became a foot race, the
two of them leaping from the dock to the boat as it pulled away into trash-swirled
water, crumpling together onto a wide bench near the bow, breathless and laughing
and Dottie tortured by the looming possibility of love.

Fourteen, she said. You promised.

I never promised.

Beginning a story is like a promise that you’ll finish it. Otherwise, it’s not fair.