The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (47 page)

What now? she said.

Tell me something, he said impishly, nothing bending his voice or manner except a
carbonated eagerness.

You mean, something dirty?

No, no, he protested, looking sadly offended by this misunderstanding. Tell me about
yourself. Whatever you like.

Can I ask questions?

Ah, of course, he said, his face lighting up. Curiosity is the difference between
the dead and the living. I have been waiting for your questions.

What was your relationship with my grandmother?

Relationship? he repeated, reacting with shrewd amusement, as if this word’s very
existence harbored a ploy, an ill-disguised snare one must learn to spot and step
around. I believe you ask if we were lovers, Marija and I.

I only meant, how did you know her?

We were not, he said, and we were. I had the joy of one kiss in the city of Buenos
Aires—one kiss to make last a lifetime. Is it enough? It must be. If not for that
thing that separates two people who are destined to be together but are not—I mean
duty, I mean love of homeland, for which no sacrifice is too great—in my heart I know—
I am sure
—we would have married. You, precious girl, you would have been my granddaughter.
Your father—yes, my son. Instead, he is my godson.

Why do I not know this? she said and he told her that because it was impossible to
know everything, the definition of grace was to be at peace with what you did not
know because you could not. This is a family secret, agreed? he said. Between us.
It would cause trouble for your father, for me, with the people we serve. She nodded
yes and asked, So who do you serve? and he paused, ironically reflective, before answering,
For now, the wrong people. She wanted to know when he had last seen her grandmother
and he told her not long before she died, in the city in America where her father
was born, Pittsburgh, a very nice place. Now I know what this term means, and in English
he said melting pot. But your grandmother, he said, she was not happy in this nice
place. She did not wish to melt.

What did she want?

What did she want? A free Croatia, an independent Croatia. To come home to such a
place. She never lost her devotion to this beautiful dream. Nor has your father. We
share this dream.

So you came to Pittsburgh to visit them?

I came to eliminate a traitor.

Davor. Why did you tell me that?

But my darling, why do you think?

I don’t know.

But perhaps you do.

Because my grandmother helped you, I think.

Yes, precisely. In her way. Up to a point.

And my father too? Do I come from a family of murderers?

A family of patriots. Your father was very young then, not much older than you. Perhaps
he would have joined us, but he was indisposed.

What does that mean?

In custody.

In jail?

Yes. Correct. Jail.

What did he do? Will you tell me?

Nothing so bad. As a boy your father was very angry. When young men have this anger,
they walk the streets always looking for a fight. In Pittsburgh, your father did not
have to look hard to find an old enemy. Serbs, Russians, Albanians, Czechs, Bosnians.
Not melting pot. Garbage bin. The trash Europe swept out after the war. Anybody who
did not respect him, he would fight. Look at him the wrong way, watch out. His mother
approved of this belligerence. She was proud of her son.

And what about my grandfather?

He was a weak man, a drunkard. He never understood your grandmother, he was not kind
to your father.

This is not the story I heard.

Very well.

These things
. . .
I had a different—I thought—and in English she said, You’re blowing my mind.

Enough for now, said Davor, his good hand patting a knee for emphasis before he stood
up. We have business, he said, turning on the spotlight. Are you ready? He stepped
behind the camera and then stepped out. You are thinking too much, he said. Stop thinking.

I’m trying.

Forget this trying. What is necessary is Carla. Bring Carla, please.

She angled herself into a sluttish pose but it felt too severe and her flesh seemed
to turn insensate and she let her body droop back into its neutral form, shaking her
head at the clumsy phoniness. The obstacle in her mind was all too apparent: she was
not voluptuous, she would never be voluptuous, she was something else, lithe and spontaneous,
something that did not present well when amplified, overstated, underlined, an organic
wholesomeness that could not be shopped out or made over or repackaged.

We are not thinking Dorothy, said Davor, gently. We are thinking Carla. It is very
simple for Carla to do this.

Honest, she said. I’m trying.

Do you have a boyfriend?

Yes.

Think of this boy. Look to the camera and think of this boy.

She could not say how it happened—Davor’s advice was irrelevant because Osman would
fall apart crying or maybe laughing if he saw her this way—but she felt the paradoxical
facade of Dottie dissolving, an out-of-body release, and there was Carla, no longer
an erotic parody, posing for her soft-core shoot, a breezy pinup girl who adorned
the walls of sexed-up boys. She propped a leg, canted her shoulders at a diagonal
and glanced back at the camera, sleepy-eyed, a modest girlish invitation, not too
coy, for the cocks to come out. She had only to smile and not look bored or cynical
or dissimulated—Carla’s smile on Dottie’s face.

Excellent, said Davor. One more. Finished.

You know what I want most? she said. Tenderness without bullshit. Is that possible
in the world? Can I have that? She amazed herself—who was this talking, Dottie or
the other girl?

In the bathroom she stood bent at the sink with the taps gushing and summoned the
courage to confront herself in the mirror, appalled by the lurid puppet who stared
back at her with garish eyes, how little girls make themselves vampy on Halloween.
What her father said—You don’t have to be Carla, Carla has to be you—she finally understood.
Buon giorno, Carla. Arrivederci, Dottie.
In Istanbul she would do a touch of lipstick, she would agree to kohl. Beyond that,
Carla and Dottie were of one mind.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Regarding carnal relations, said her father, agitating his daughter with the pretense
that they shared between them a proper ignorance on the subject. It was the only time
he ever spoke to her directly about sex—usually something just happened in a tense
space of pooling silence.

Once you had his undivided attention, there were many responses you could, as a woman,
anticipate from a man, her father told her, but only two that you could reliably expect—lust
and rage. These were subsets of the greater order of behavior, the biological imperative,
the battle for control. As for desire, her father said, there are no traps except
the ones we build for ourselves. I mean to say, you do not want to anger the
signori,
understand?

Wait, she said. I’m not having sex with this guy.

We’ve been clear on that from the beginning. But you have to make him believe, of
course. That shouldn’t be difficult.

He made her supremely uncomfortable talking this way, agitated with suppressed revulsion,
his sweaty little lectures on the science of seduction, clinically sterile chessboard
insights into a skill a young girl first practiced and honed in a years-long pantomime
with her father, the come-hither teasing, the nascent eroticism like a seedling sprouting
tendrils beneath the translucent surface of innocence, the drift of hugs and kisses
toward the edge of some mind-stopping power to be tested or rejected, the child herself
seduced by seduction,
What an exciting game!

Then one day Davor drove himself to the airport and the next day after lunch she and
her father left for Istanbul. The thrill of the escapade started with a seaplane,
which picked them up alongside the quay in Kusadasi and flew them north back across
the Sea of Marmara, Dottie glad to be returning home but frustrated about remaining
barred from her real life, forbidden to contact Osman or any of her friends or return
to school for a few more days. They landed at a private dock on the southern outskirts
of Istanbul, where Maranian waited for them with his spotless car, his manner once
again ironed by the formality of loyal service, masking the tension that remained
between them with solicitude.
Look,
she said to make her peace with Maranian, pulling his grandmother’s gold cross through
the neck of her T-shirt,
We saved it when the boat sank.
He bowed and called her Carla and took the dry bag from her to stow in the trunk of
the Mercedes.

Alone in the backseat riding into the city, she listened to the men up front and felt
excluded, the weeklong center of attention shifting away from her to other business
she was not privy to, something that had happened or would happen in Germany, imagining
they were talking in code until her father asked Maranian about Davor and Maranian
said, Yes, your man arrived this morning from Belgrade and Davor is with him now.
Then her father shifted around in his seat to examine her.

Tell me how you’re doing.

Fine.

Let me say it one more time. Walk away and that’s understandable. We’ll come at this
from another angle.

I’m fine.

You see, he assured Maranian. She’s fine.

Let me remind you, her father said, craning around again, his hands gripping the back
of the headrest as though he might climb over the seat on top of her. When you see
Davor again later tonight—

I know, she said with a trickle of annoyance. Who’s Davor?

Right. And remember, there’ll be another man with him.

Marko. Not our friend. Age, thirty-one. I know. If there’s something I don’t know
it’s because you didn’t tell me but you’ve told me everything fifty times.

That’s right. But now I’m thinking a couple of things. When we enter the apartment,
you must leave immediately. I mean in a flash. Get out of there and get back to the
hotel room and wait for Maranian.

You told me, she said.

It’s very important. Also, the
signori
sometimes likes to smoke opium during his liaisons. Let’s hope he does tonight, but
do not do this with him. Fix him a drink, fix yourself a weak one to play along, get
him relaxed, get him to take off his jacket, and that’s it.

I know.

You won’t see us but we’ll be right there.

I know.

If he tries anything funny, I want you to run like hell out of the room.

Okay. What kind of funny?

Anything at all. It won’t be a problem, he said. We’ll be right there.

Maranian pulled over to the curb in front of a drab pensione on a side street a dozen
blocks north and west of Taksim in a neighborhood she did not know. The Hilton, she
learned, was temporarily off-limits—
We drowned, remember,
her father said, promising her again he’d straighten that out in the next day or
two. She, Carla, had already been checked into a room. Maranian gave her the key and
told her she would find the lady waiting for her there and said in an oddly demanding
tone,
Good luck,
raising his hand to his forehead in a military salute.
She said it’s not like I’m a soldier or anything and he looked at her and replied,
You are.
Her father scrutinized her with an intensity so harsh she knew he was trying to frighten
her but her steel nerves were his own creation and she would not be frightened.
Okay,
he said finally, his face satisfied.
This is the right call. You’re ready. This will happen like clockwork and, swear to
God, the world will be better for it—
and he got out of the car with her, scooping her into his arms, his eyes uncustomarily
misty, and repeated his father mantra, that she could never imagine how much he loved
her, and she said,
I know,
not the same rueful, soul-weary acceptance of his unfathomable love in her voice but
instead a frosty acknowledgment, her face unaffirming, and she felt her body not pliant
as she meant it to be but stiffening against his.

And then she stepped away with a lewd wink and taunting smirk.
This is pretty weird,
she heard Dottie thinking from far away,
Carla finds Daddy’s love intolerable.

Carla in ascendance, mocking the game, disappearing through the glass door.

There was something darkly enchanted about coming into the cheap pensione and its
blunt custodial emptiness, inhaling its stale air, the dimly lit corridors and creaking
stairway a type of passage through a netherworld into another reality, like arriving
backstage and being tucked away in a dressing room to prepare for a performance, detaching
incrementally toward the ultimate absorption of character.
Cherries, she thought, that’s what I want. A white bowl of cherries. Champagne.

She keyed open the door to an interior darkness flickering with the grainy light of
a television set, the pumpkinlike silhouette of the Armenian lady planted on the foot
of a single bed, the lady unresponsive even as Dottie switched on the overhead bulb
and said hello and realized the lady’s shoulders convulsed with noiseless sobbing
and she said in a resentful tone,
What’s wrong?
and the lack of any answer at all summoned forth Carla once and for all. She crossed
the room and turned off the set, hearing enough of the broadcast to learn its significance,
the death of some great man, one of the Young Turks who had outlasted everybody, Ataturk’s
comrade, a former president of the Republic. Sorry, she reproached the woman on the
bed, do you mind? Let’s get this over with.

I hated him, the woman said, squashing away tears with the back of her plump hand.
I am crying with joy because this bastard is dead.

Oh, said Carla. Good riddance then.

Rising to her feet, the woman pushed past the surly girl into the bathroom where she
blew her nose with a snot-rattling honk and fixed the runny makeup around her frog
eyes, readying herself for a battle of wills with the teenager, Carla wrongly assumed,
but the recomposed Armenian instead acquiesced to Carla simply putting on lip gloss
and kohl and a careful spritz of hairspray. She poked at the
nazar
bracelet above the girl’s wrist—
I’m not taking it off—
but again, intent on her own defiance, she had misinterpreted the woman, who approved
of the bracelet and wanted to compliment it with a gift—evil-eye earrings, which Carla
accepted with a chagrined nod.

She obeyed a clipped mutter of instructions, stripped out of her T-shirt, jeans, and
underwear and put on what was handed to her, a new set of bra and panties, green silk,
a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar, a schoolgirl’s camel-brown skirt, shiny black
patent leather pumps, the studious illusion of fake eyeglasses. The taxi comes now,
the woman said, checking her wristwatch, and they went downstairs to the street, the
woman carrying a plastic tote bag containing the things Carla would need later in
the evening.

Passing through Taksim Square she stared out the window at the mass of humanity on
the move at day’s end, this victorious march of ordinary freedoms, her vision glazing
over, registering cameos of people going about their business—a man selling lottery
tickets, a boy setting down bathroom scales for a customer, a melon vendor—and felt
herself overcome by a feeling of calm, the streets a soothing blur of life as it should
be, the promise of twilight drawing her forward into the night that lay ahead, a night
inviting her induction into its greatest of secrets, understanding as never before
what her father had always understood—when the time is upon you, you are never too
young, or too insignificant, to choose sides, we are all born to choose sides, and
therein lay the true power of adulthood, the self shorn of frivolous alliance, immune
to decadence.

In a burst of pure clarity, she also understood her entire life—its plurality, the
challenge of its basic improvisations, the assortment of homes and places and friends,
the languages she readily acquired to mute her foreignness—had been designed to shape
her into a professional changeling, and she resolved that this was the way she was
destined to live, a type of actress in a theater without walls or boundaries or audience.
Like other precocious adolescents who became pop stars or sailed across oceans solo
or went off to college years ahead of everybody else, she was seventeen and self-possessed
and old enough now to know something so fundamental about herself.

She realized the Armenian lady was jabbing her knee and repeating her name like a
curse,
Carla! Carla!
and the taxi had stopped in front of the gates of the Italian consulate. Take this,
said the woman, giving her a small embroidered clutch containing her counterfeit passport.
I am waiting down there, she told Carla, pointing ahead to the corner of the block.

She presented her passport to a gendarme, who handed it back through the window of
the gatehouse to an Italian security agent who checked her name on the guest list
and she was allowed to enter the vibrant interior of the consulate, the staff directing
her down a high-ceilinged hall toward a
gilded ballroom churning with muffled conversation, the noise louder and flared with
laughter but no less intelligible as she entered the room and its hive of glamorous
people—
the shining class,
she called them—honey-skinned divas and military attachés and captains of industry,
a clattering
spangle of bracelets, gold jewelry and pearls, starbursts of diamonds.

She, Carla, glided toward a waiter carrying a tray of prosecco, stepping back against
a wall to sip from the flute and savor a pulsing lucidness like a drug making her
stoned with focus, something that made alertness and pleasure the same internal process,
aware that she had announced herself to the room by her light-footed youth and proud
erect body, a random pattern of heads swiveling to mark her arrival, which was exactly
why her father and Davor had argued about this moment, the risk of her exposure to
an assembly of people likely to contain at least several from the city’s resident
diplomatic corps who might recognize their American colleague’s daughter. But this
entrance was what the
signori
’s ego required, her public appearance allowing him the private knowledge that of
all the men in the room who would want her, he alone would have her.

(Stage direction: Reception at Italian consulate. Speak to no one. Establish contact
with Marko. Exit in two minutes.)

But her connection with her new identity seemed unassailable—anyone approaching her
as Dottie Chambers would turn away, she was sure, flummoxed and apologizing for his
mistake. She stared into and through the crowd, not seeing particular faces, always
looking beyond, watchful but abstracted and static, until she saw Davor and their
eyes met and she could feel the plaster of her expressionlessness, the satisfying
lack of receptivity in her face. She lowered her gaze as she drank her sweet bubbles
and when she lifted her head again she looked straight at the man Davor was speaking
with, the surprisingly diminutive
signori,
a frail gimlet-eyed gnome whose face sagged across the collapsed contours of his former
vitality. He cocked an eyebrow imperiously but Carla revealed nothing before she swept
her attention elsewhere and then to the man approaching her. The bodyguard, Marko.
Not weaselish as she had imagined from his photograph but sharklike and gladiatorial.
He was dressed like the
signori
in an expensive but more elegant business suit, his shaved head vaguely malevolent
above his dark eyes and long, triangular nose and weight-lifter’s body, the pursed
asshole of his mouth and weak chin strengthened by a condescending regard, which made
her feel bold and righteous, and she defeated his self-importance by handing him her
glass and turned to leave.

Hello, he said in grating English, you are Carla. She replied in a hush of Italian,
sticking to the script: Thirty minutes. Behind this building. The service entrance.