The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (38 page)

How would Elena and Jacqueline know what’s true or not true about my father? said
Dottie, infuriated with Elena for spreading a specious rumor and with Karim for his
unacceptable display of prejudice. Do diplomats in suits and ties go around shooting
people?

There was a missile, yes?

No.

I am sorry to have bothered you with the Jew’s lie.

She bucked in her chair and said, Stop saying that.

I was hoping this story was true. If such a story were true, I would take your father’s
hand to kiss and pray for God to protect him. Tell me, can your father help me to
reach Afghanistan?

You don’t listen. Say Jew one more time and I’m leaving.

Really? To go where? We are waiting for your boyfriend, yes?

Enraged by his smugness she said, Say it one more time and I swear—

Forgive me, he said, his smile this time patronizing and not beautiful. I did not
know this girl’s name. Elena.

Forget it, she said, but her mood had turned precarious. She forgave him and then
changed her mind and then changed it again, her emotions seesawing with exhaustion
and the telltale cramping low in her stomach. She wanted everything at once—to cry,
fight, sleep, scream, telephone Daddy, smoke hashish with the lycée boys, see Osman,
be held, be alone, be hateful and be in love and be mad at Karim or maybe make out
with him down by the water. Karim’s jealousy was shockingly transparent, the way his
lips had curled around
boyfriend,
the word she had blurted out to the gendarmes to try to get them to listen to her,
but perhaps Osman himself would no more accept or validate this word than the police.
Or, Jesus H Christ, her father, whom she had once overheard telling a colleague he
loved Turkey because it was impossible to kill one billion Muslims—whatever he meant
by that, other than his completely irrational loathing of Islamic people, another
reason she found it difficult to believe he had become a comrade-in-arms with Afghans,
despite the incriminating fact that her father was committed heart and soul to the
downfall of communism, that he carried the scars of that endless battle on his own
flesh. She could not calculate the slippery algebra of enemies (if the enemy of my
enemy is also my enemy, then
what
?) to predict her father’s actions and responses in the world, except as they applied
to her, and certainly, absolutely, to her use of
boyfriend,
that word she could not yet imagine a place for in the reality that was the two of
them, father and daughter, where even the word
mother
had a radioactive existence. The movie, already in her head, was,
Um, Daddy, I have a present for you, for those hang-ups of yours.
Muslim boy. We’re going steady. Check out this cool abaya he gave me to wear. Peekaboo,
Daddy-o.

They both turned their attention to the aproned kitchen boy returning from across
the street, coming to their table to deliver a note, which Karim unfolded and read.
What’s it say? she asked, and he showed it to her—
Go home
—and she said, What should we do? Perhaps we should go home, Karim said, but she wanted
to stay and he said, then, for a while longer he would stay as well. But it is pointless,
you should realize, he added.

She had a moment’s lucidity, a revelation that she and Karim were incompatible, irreversibly
and until the end of time incompatible, yet she did not like this feeling of permanent
volatility and, grasping for common ground, tried to switch the conversation back
around to his own family.

Your mother, she said, reaching across the table toward his hands, an unconscious
but sisterly gesture, a spontaneous coaxing touch, which she saw too late was unwelcome.
You haven’t told me anything about your mother.

She is a very pious woman, said Karim, his face darkening as he withdrew his hands
from the table to his lap. Not like my father, who salutes the
ezan
with a bottle of whiskey. And not like your friends. Why do you choose whores and
Jews for friends?

Excuse me, said Dottie. That’s so obnoxious.

Excuse me, please, he said. You are Christian, yes?

Catholic.

Ah, I mean to say, a Roman. And in the eyes of believers an infidel. He saw she dressed
with modesty and did not behave in a manner he found impious. Please, I respect you,
Karim said, although I do not live like you, nor do I want to live like you. But your
friends, they bring disgrace to your reputation. You should understand they make you
less than you are.

Why are you getting angry? she asked, angry herself, and she struggled to smother
the incendiary heat of her own temper, one of the pieces of her personality she did
not own, or refused to own, because these parts were not her, or not herself, or made
her feel like she wasn’t herself, and they did not exist until they did, rising to
the surface as her true self sank below, and afterward they were just gone, like a
dream, which is what she told herself they were. Selves that seemed real until you
woke up, or until, like a saint’s visitation, God began speaking.

Angry? No. I am giving advice. Because I respect you.

Okay, she said. Sometimes Yesho doesn’t make it easy to be her friend. But it’s really
none of your business who my friends are.

The impure behavior of women, he told her, was the business of all men.

You need to get over yourself, she said. What’s your problem? Are you some kind of
religious freaks, you and your friends?

You do not know my country or my faith well enough to say these things, said Karim.
The military and the elites are the ones in Turkey who are illiterate and backward,
not the religious people. The parliament—filled with idiots. They believe people are
not mature enough to make their own democracy. For the
devlet,
religious tolerance is a crime. Tolerance spreads the disease of democracy throughout
society. The
devlet
says we want to destroy democracy by asking for too much of it. Tell me, how can
you have too much democracy? The
devlet
insults my intelligence, and these girls you call your friends are the enemies of
God. These girls could not walk the streets of Erzurum as they walk the streets of
Ortakoy. The faithful would strike them with stones.

Tolerant! she said. Is that what you think you are?

God willing, I would throw the first stone.

I cannot figure out, she said, why you and Osman are friends. He’s not like you.

How do you know what Osman is? said Karim. You are a
yabanci
. How do you know what any Turkish man is? You are Christian.

Nice guys are the same, she said. It doesn’t matter what else they are. Remembering
Yesho’s inadvertent and unanswered disclosure, she asked Karim to tell her why Osman
had joined his group.

What group are you speaking of?

Your religious club or whatever it is.

Religious groups are forbidden by the
devlet,
he said. Maybe you did not know. There is no group. We are Mehmets who served together,
he said, but she did not understand what he meant.

Recruits. In Turkey we call them Mehmets. We are friends from the army.

What!

Could it be Turkish men do not find it necessary to tell the girlfriend everything?

I can’t believe it, she said. Osman, a soldier?

Every Turkish boy must give one year to the military. Three years ago, he told her,
they were conscripted and sent to Diyarbakir, to fight against Kurdish insurgents.
We killed no one—Osman, me—but I will confess, he said, we were often cruel. What
choice did we have? Osman, who had just returned from England, was unhappy in the
army, said Karim, but he himself discovered something he had not anticipated, that
he enjoyed a soldier’s life very much.

But you left, she said.

Because the Turkish army is no good, he said bitterly, building steam for a tirade,
stabbing his finger into the table. Because I cannot agree with their mission. Because
I admire the PKK.

I don’t know what that is, she said.

Of course not, he said, continuing. They are the Kemalist nightmare. Because the only
mission I agree with is jihad.

Lost me again, she said.

Because it is the duty of the faithful to recapture Jerusalem. Because I admire the
mujahideen. Because I admire Abdullah Öcalan. Hezbollah. The Algerians. George Washington
and Mister Lincoln. Abu Nidal. I admire Malcolm X. The PLO. The Malaysians and the
Vietnamese. I admire them all because they submit to no one.

I’m sorry, she said, finding his harangue tedious and fatiguing. Go to Afghanistan,
whatever. What the fuck’s stopping you?

Fuck! he sputtered, his eyes livid, bulging. You say this unclean word to me,
fuck
?

Yes, fuck, she mimicked him, wickedly. Fuck fuck fuck.

You wish to fuck? This is what you are saying?

He intercepted her wrist as she tried to slap him, tightening his grip, her hand frozen
in the air in front of his face, and she did not know how long the two of them remained
like this, frozen in an eruption of hatred, or how long Osman had stood outside on
the street looking in, his eyes frozen wide with alarm, watching their wretched little
skit of ugliness unfold until she began kicking at Karim under the table and Osman
rapped his knuckles on the glass and in unison they jerked their warring faces toward
the noise and there was Osman’s head framed in a windowpane, his lower lip split and
swollen, his own face thunderstruck with incomprehension, and how terrible, in the
first hours of her first love, to feel her heart so clouded.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

She had been expected to dominate the five-hundred-meter freestyle against a field
of more inexperienced swimmers, including a Turkish girl who swam spastically with
her head above water, but frazzled by the vicissitudes of the day before, feeling
puffy and sluggish, she finished an unprecedented fourth in the race and first in
humiliation, a poor loser who could not bear the stain of defeat, deaf to the consoling
efforts of her teammates, abandoned at poolside as she stormed off to the locker room
to shower alone and flee their pity. Then she returned to her room in the dormitory,
forgoing lunch to flop on her bed, half asleep and half on edge, until the house mother
knocked on her door to report that her father was trying to get in touch and her mother
had called again from the United States and someone else was waiting to speak to her
right now.

She went down the hall to the telephone cubicle to take Osman’s call, which began
with congratulations for a victory that had never happened, though she did not tell
him that, her thoughts still fixated on the shame she felt for being such a child,
running out of the teahouse blubbering past a bewildered Osman calling her name and
diving into the nearest taxi before he could reach her for an explanation—an opportunity
that must then have fallen to Karim, and God only knows what he had said.

About last night, she said, offering a meek apology, but when he took too long to
respond she thought,
Oh, God,
and asked, How’s your lip?

My lip? It’s nothing, he said. It’s not what you think.

They hit you.

Not at all.

We should file a complaint.

To complain about what? he asked, making light of his arrest. It was nothing serious.
The police are like mountain dogs that guard the sheep against the wolves. But it’s
not bad, like before, when they would bite anyone. These days they lift their heads
to growl and go back to sleep.

He had not yet thanked her for coming to his rescue and she held her breath waiting,
wondering if he understood he could depend on her whatever the circumstance and, hungry
for both his gratitude and forgiveness, she apologized again for her juvenile performance
at the teahouse, for quarreling with his friend, for running away without a word,
and she asked what Karim had to say and he laughed and told her Karim and the gendarmes
had said the same thing, Your girlfriend is a pain in the ass.

Very funny, she sniffed. Is that what you think, too?

I think you are this girl in the American comic book. Wonder Woman.

Wonder Woman has black hair.

Of course. I am thinking of Supergirl.

I’m not the kind of person who can just stand there.

Of course.

Not like your so-called friends.

Of course. But Dottie, you must promise. If you see the gendarmes take me, don’t interfere.

No, she said, hardheaded. Why?

Please. It’s very complicated. Very sensitive.

To appease him, she agreed, and again waited for his gratitude, until finally she
turned petulant and wanted to know why Osman had never told her he had served in the
army. He said of course he didn’t think it was important and she said, But that’s
why you and Karim are friends, right? and he was silent for a moment until he said,
Yes, that’s right, and she wanted him to tell her why he had joined the group.

Unlike Karim, he did not deny its existence but he paused before answering and his
voice became guarded. How do you know about the group? he asked and she told him Yesho
had mentioned it. Okay, he said, how does she know?

I have no idea, said Dottie. Is it supposed to be a secret?

Yes, he sighed, explaining a certain level of secrecy was necessary. He had accepted
Karim’s invitation to join because its members were his friends, bonded by the same
hardships from their days together in the army, and he thought they had an interesting
perspective on the nation, although he did not share many of their opinions.

Opinions on what? she asked, and he said, Life, but she had more questions. Religion?
and he answered, Sometimes. Afghanistan? Sometimes. Worried, she asked him, You don’t
want to go to fight in Afghanistan, do you? and he laughed and told her, Definitely
not. Never.

She could not understand why the government would outlaw guys with little else to
do but sit around bullshitting about life and he revealed that the
devlet
had invented an official description—illegal Koran school—for a group like Karim’s,
a revelation that she grappled with, but he anticipated her question before she could
form it and told her to stop fantasizing that he was an extremist or a militant or
any brand of fanatic.

Can I trust you? he said.

Yes! she answered, as if it pained her to be asked such a question.

Then you must trust me as well, he said. Believe what I tell you, not what you see.
Not what you think you see.

More than anything she wanted to say she had fallen in love with him but the sentence
came out haltingly:
I think. I might.

You think? he teased, feigning dismay. Dottie, he said. When I dream, I dream of you,
I dream only of our happiness.

The relief descended through her muscles like a blissful sedative and she returned
to her room to sleep soundly throughout the afternoon, waking slowly and lusciously
until her mind whipped back to the other thing she had forgotten to do after speaking
with Osman—
call Daddy.

Which was never easy. First, there were the chauvinistic Turkish operators to overcome,
their deliberate misunderstanding of her careful pronunciations. Secondly, now that
her mother had jumped ship and returned to the States, if she couldn’t get an answer
at her father’s villa in Ankara she had to call the embassy switchboard, which would
connect her to her father’s longtime secretary, Mary Beth, his selfless appendage.
She was a camp follower dragged around the world by Dottie’s father and who would
never put her through to him but instead ask for a call-back number and Dottie would
have to sit tight wherever she was waiting for the phone to ring, which meant don’t
call Daddy without a book to read. Dottie dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and walked
barefoot down the hall to the telephone cubicle and dialed his villa—no answer—and
then called the embassy switchboard and left a message and began to concentrate on
a chapter in her geometry textbook. Fifteen minutes later the telephone rang—
Hello, Kitten!
—and she said, Where are you, you sound far away? and he told her Belgrade, and she
said, That’s Yugoslavia, right? Correct, he said, and she asked, Is it pretty? and
he said, Not to my eyes.

When she asked what he was doing there, his answer was what she had come to expect
from him:
Oh, you know. This and that. Prepare a few things. Make new friends, visit old friends.
Drumroll, please.
Piss on the graves of our enemies.
There you have it, Karim, she thought, the previous night’s conversation still rattling
around in her head. What Daddy does.

It’s getting very interesting here, he said. There’s a new sheriff in town. That suggests
a certain rearrangement of the doable.

Daddy, she said in a tone she relied on to ignite his concern. Speaking of sheriffs.

What’s wrong? he asked. What happened?

Do you know someone in the Turkish government I can make a report to about police
brutality?

Whoa, back up. What’s going on?

She possessed the teenage knack of extemporaneous editing, trimming or tweaking a
story into a version more suitable for the ears of parents, omitting inconvenient
details, understating relationships, transforming the primary colors of questionable
behavior into blameless pastels. In this new and improved story, she arrived at the
café with her girlfriends, Osman was demoted to this guy she knew, her attitude toward
the police mellowed into ladylike behavior, Karim and his secret group banished from
the cast of characters, and Osman’s split lip just one consequence of a pummeling
that might very well have sent a lesser man to the hospital.

Okay, he said, neither sharing her indignation nor dismissing it, a quality in her
father she grudgingly respected, his habit of withholding comment or judgment until
he was satisfied he had gathered up the available facts—an investigation that occasionally
exposed a fault line in her own credibility—and he asked her to spell Osman’s surname,
promised her he would see what he could find out, and moved the conversation along
to his original reason for calling.

He was catching a late flight back to Istanbul and would send a car in the morning
to bring her to mass. After mass, whaddya say, he said, and his proposal had not lost
a scintilla of its capacity to thrill her. Let’s go sailing.

At the end of the month, school was out for the year and the dormitory echoed wistfully
with the absence of her classmates, the Turkish girls scattered back to their families,
leaving behind Dottie and a few remaining foreign students, excluding Jacqueline,
who a week ago had returned to France with her mother for the summer. Dottie had weighed
her father’s invitation to move into his newly leased penthouse in Ankara (the villa
had been shed when her mother left), but there were practical reasons (some actually
discussable) not to, given his erratic travel schedule, her lack of friends in the
capital (she’d be stuck with all the embassy snots glued to their parents, suffering
their condescension toward all things Turkish), and most of all there was the tension
she felt begin to ball in her stomach when she tried not to think about nights alone
with him in the apartment, his trespass submerged in the invisible depths of her childhood
underneath a sediment of her father’s private confessions, more adamant than guilt-ridden,
that
he loved her too much.
And yet he had his way still of easing into certain liberties she did not know how
to prevent, or even how to measure as right or wrong or neither. Most of all, her
unwillingness to be separated from Osman and the rapturous adventure of their secret
(perhaps not so secret, she suspected) romance.

The problem was, one evening at the beginning of the summer after the surprise of
her first solo sail, her father had minced his words, as though he had a plan, and
the plan this time seemed designed to bait her into her own intimate world of subterfuge
and deception—another one of his myriad games. He had distinctly not forbidden her
from seeing Osman; instead, he had warned her away from getting too close. Too close?
She would not ask whose privilege it was to define what might constitute the difference
between close and too close. Where was the divide, Daddy, the threshold, the line
not to be crossed?—somewhere he himself could not define. Too close to a boy meant
what—the same as being too close to your father? If it was meant to mean the other
thing, her emotions, the grafting of one heart to another, then her father’s injunction
against it had come too late.

After mass that Sunday morning, they had taxied north along the European coast, bypassing
the more fashionable yachting centers to the south, to Altinkum, a sleepy fishing
village with a public beach and a stupendously marvelous marina, now home port for
her beloved twenty-six-foot
tirhandil
she had christened
Sea Nymph,
anchored in the pristine cove among a fleet of traditional
gulets
twice as large, which Dottie thought of as the
Sea Nymph
’s harem of big sisters. They were identical to the
Nymph,
with the same smiling, sexy roundness of their classic lines and saucer-shaped hulls,
feminine curves in every direction, large wooden rudders, the emphasis on style rather
than cabin space, although her
tirhandil
was beak-nosed, double-ended, sloop-rigged, and sturdy as a dance floor, a luminous
work of art and eminently seaworthy. Now, of course, they all had motors in them,
the addiction of Turkish yachtsmen, who seemed to equate hoisting a sail with some
type of punishment or masochism, but originally the
gulets
were sailing cargo boats transporting goods throughout the eastern Mediterranean
since the Roman Empire, and the pedigree of the
tirhandils
was even more distinguished, descendants of the oldest style of vessel to ply the
Aegean Sea, and she felt herself an heiress to this history, given license to indulge
in endless role-playing fantasies—a female Argonaut pursued by Hercules, the Grand
Vizier’s most favored wife, handmaiden to a knight’s lady.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you
Dottie of Troy. Anybody but Io, poor girl, Zeus’s bitch, turned into a fat cow to
hide her from his wife Hera, more than a little vexed by Zeus’s philandering. Hera
sent a gadfly to torment the transformed Io, who plunged into the waterway that would
be forever named for her inglorious swim—Bosphorus, the ancient Greek word for
cow’s ford.

But no one in these waters had ever seen a girl or woman mariner, and so her ownership
and growing mastery of the
Sea Nymph
had made both Americans—the diplomat father and his captivating Turkish-speaking
blonde-haired teenage daughter—instant celebrities in Altinkum. The Poseidon-like
dockmaster himself insisted on rowing them out in his skiff to the
Sea Nymph
’s moorage, as he did that Sunday morning, and the moment she climbed aboard she felt
what she would always feel on a sailboat, a sublime sense of newness, defying the
physics of one’s life on land. Always on the boat there was an inner breeze of excitement,
a happy gratitude for the water and its strong promising scents, the
Nymph
’s proud sail set against the sliding panorama of facing continents and their ghostly
empires, crusted one atop the other like gobs of paint on a giant canvas.