The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (33 page)

What?

The sex repression.

It’s true, said Jacqueline, lowering her voice. They won’t eat the woman, yes?

Stop, said Dottie. How would you know?

Yesho! Elena and Jacqueline said together.

And which one of you was in charge of inviting the guys? What happened to Karim? Why
wasn’t he here?

I don’t like this Karim, Elena said. This Karim has murder in his eyes.

Yizboot, Dottie said mockingly, you say that about—

Yes, but it’s true, protested Elena. I am a Jew. What do you expect me to say? Have
you noticed? Muslims are very happy to kill the Jew.

That’s just not true, Dottie said. You spend every minute of every day surrounded
by Muslims.

And what about the bombs? Elena said. Who is killing people with bombs? Oh, yes, I
forgot. It is the Eskimo.

And what the Jews are doing in Lebanon? countered Jacqueline, her English beginning
to fail with the wine.

I think you must be anti-Semite, said Elena. You are French and the French are this
way.

The Jews have all the money, pouted Jacqueline. Everyone know.

Jews know how to make money. They work, said Elena. Arabs know how to get money. They
steal.

You are a paranoid, Jacqueline said.

I am not speaking now, you bitch, said Elena, and turned in her chair away from their
familiar quarrel in time to see the long-awaited guests arrive, a hush spreading through
the haze of the room as they stood gruffly on the landing sending a grave regard down
toward the group assembled below, a civilian and a soldier, or rather a high-ranking
officer judging from his uniform, the red epaulettes and peaked cap and tunic adorned
with service ribbons and medals. Oh, shit, said Elena, Soviets. And of course she
would know, thought Dottie, since Elena’s family had emigrated from Leningrad four
years earlier, yet it seemed improbable that the bow-tie-wearing civilian of the pair,
who more resembled a florid-faced British schoolmaster than an iron-hearted Stalinist
apparatchik, could bear any responsibility for the crimes of the president’s evil
empire. As if to prove her point, Comrade Bow Tie’s somber expression dissolved into
warm collegiality as the two men descended the steps side by side, Bow Tie’s flat-footed
shambling bonhomie almost a parody of the military officer’s rigid movement, his arms
clenched out from his body as though there were tennis balls clasped in his armpits
while Bow Tie extended his hand to greet old friends and calm a fresh crop of adversaries.
Elena decided they had come to arrest her father.

Chairs were offered but declined. Bow Tie explained they were needed elsewhere in
their duties and regrettably could stay at most a few minutes, and the diplomats and
Turkish generals formed a half-circle in front of the Soviets and questions were asked
in English and French. Her father, unusually subdued, apologized for the American
ambassador’s absence and then deferred to the interlocutors. The military officer
remained silent as well, confrontation etched into the lines of his face, while his
civilian counterpart offered breezy answers basted in optimism that only increased
the chorus of questions from the diplomats.

The three girls sat quietly nearby, titillated, keen to hear every word of the dispute.
Chernobyl, Dottie finally whispered, where is that? The Ukraine, Elena whispered back,
you have been given nuclear meltdown for your birthday.

Someone said his country’s monitors were reporting radiation levels that were alarmingly
high. Each repetition of the accusation found itself paired with the same cavalier
denial. Offers of assistance—technical, humanitarian—were brushed away with an effusion
of insincere gratitude. The questions turned into admonishments. Catastrophic, said
a deputy from the German embassy, his voice disturbingly loud. Winds. Fallout. You
understand? Europe, humanity.

Mais oui,
said Jacqueline,
exactement,
nodding sagely when she heard her father’s emphatic interjection to own up to it.

Our business, said Bow Tie. No problem. Small problem. Routine. Under-control problem.
How is your wife? Under control. How are the children? Under control. Comrade Kill-You-In-Your-Sleep
sends his best. Comrade Slit-Your-Throat remembers you fondly.

Good, let’s go,
she thought, watching the grim-faced statesmen reaching for their coats and hats—who
gave these pinko a-holes license to interfere with her seventeenth birthday?—but the
other man, the military officer, suddenly came to life, barking in a language so aggressive
she felt it in her stomach and thought,
so that’s Russian,
an eruption that froze everyone in place, heads rotating slowly to search out the
one among them who seemed to be the object of the officer’s outrage.

Elena said as if to herself, Oh, my God, Dottie, this bastard is yelling to your father!

Bizarro! she managed to say, the room trying to float into separate planes and beginning
to pinwheel in front of her.

I don’t believe, said Elena, leaning into her friend conspiratorially. This lying
Communist says your father kill his son in the mountains of
. . .
some place. Ah, a place in Afghanistan. Sorry, I hope it’s true.

Look at their eyes, she said, and in them Dottie saw the searing hostility, the sadistic
refusal to allow forgiveness or entertain its possibility, the ferocious intolerance
for mistakes, their deadly honor, unshakable allegiances and loyalties, the blend
of mutual hatred liquefied in her whirling vision, sloshing back and forth.

Your father, Elena said haltingly, his Russian is not so good. There is a misunderstanding,
maybe.

Daddy’s never even been there, she said. Okay. He goes to Pakistan, she added, thinking,
that’s a little white lie,
because her father had been spending much of his time in Pakistan, and last year,
when she asked him why they didn’t just move to Islamabad she had been embarrassed
by the irascible outburst and unexpected bigotry of his answer. You and your mother
don’t deserve a place like Pakistan, he had told her. No woman does. These are disgusting
countries, barbaric. The worst. The Africans are better than these
Mujos
—a Slavic word he often used, which she more or less understood as something like
Muslim niggers
. Jesus, she had said to herself, backing away from him, confused.

Your father is agreeing, I don’t know what, Elena translated. Okay, I am not following.
To think in this language gives me headache. My family wiped off this language, like
snot from a pig. Ah, he is admitting that Americans give weapons to mujahideen, the
Russians give, gave, weapons to Vietnam people, this is war, be a big boy and accept
this, but the Soviet says I am speaking only of you—your father. Yes, but—your father
and mujahideen. The Soviet says you, you, you. You hold a weapon
. . .
missile. He is saying this missile hit some helicopter and everyone is dead, maybe,
and his son. And saying don’t be stupid to think an American who shoot a missile can
be secret. Your father is saying the Soviet come to make trouble and make lies and
maybe everyone forget this Chernobyl and the Soviet must give apology.

She remembered thinking,
That’s enough
and getting up from the table to defend her father, thinking,
Oh, they love this, don’t they,
and she remembered Jacqueline insisting Dottie, stop, don’t, and Elena’s attempt to
hold her back and she remembered chanting,
Bullshit,
but she didn’t think anyone heard because she thought she was only saying it to herself.
She could remember just those things, and then feeling sick and her father loading
her into a taxi, saying it’s very important you learn how to hold your liquor, Kitten,
and the last thing she remembered, when she woke up naked in her father’s suite on
the top floor of the Hilton, was the absolute importance of making herself not remember.

Daddy,
she made herself not remember asking,
did you really fire a missile? Bullshit, right?
she had slurred.
Crazy.

Right,
he said, undressing her, lying as he would always lie, as protocol, as policy, as
a matter of prudence, because not to lie placed lives in jeopardy, and to tell the
truth exposed a weakness in character. To not lie was an act of vanity.

Daddy, don’t
,
okay?
she would not remember saying, the sick confusion of her hands intercepting her father’s
hands at the waistband of her panties. With a spinning glance she saw his ring, Osman’s
bracelet—better not to know or even imagine what passed through her father’s mind
as he purchased a rare baroque pearl, pink as a girl’s innocence, to celebrate her
seventeenth birthday. What do daughters truly know of fathers? Their fingers paired,
then interlocked.

Okay?

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Always the opera buff, her father stood at the window humming
Carmen,
fresh from the shower, a white towel girdling his athletic hips, scanning the Hilton’s
famous view of the Bosphorus, a favorite pastime, monitoring the sea traffic, hoping
to spy a Soviet warship or the menace of a submarine’s conning tower, a black slice
of shark fin branded with hammer and sickle in the private pool of his relentless
obsession with Communists. Daddy’s Red Menace
. . .
but the very idea
. . .
coming to get us. They’re creeps, okay, but
. . .
really,
ugh.

Rise and shine, kiddo, he said, his ability to sense her watching him a skill she
had accustomed herself to early in life. His voice prodded her toward the shower with
a reminder, Let’s not be late for church.

Looking around the room strapped a headache across the general sense of anxiety she
had awoken into and inside her queasy stomach she felt a balloon of nausea inflating
and when she opened her mouth she couldn’t keep her voice from sounding pitiful.

Daddy, where are my things?

What things?

My clothes.

Being cleaned, he said, looking over his scarred shoulder with a sunny, complicitous
smile. You probably don’t remember.

Did I get sick? she asked, closing her eyes on the vile pain, not wanting to know
and he said, I’ll say.

She whimpered, But I can’t find my—

Your what? he said.

My underwear.

In the bathroom, he told her, with her overnight bag, and she pulled the sheet up
to her neck and swung her feet out of bed to the carpet and pleaded halfheartedly,
Don’t look,
the refrain of her pubescence. Silly kitten, he said, and she sprinted across the
room to the shower without a second to lose, retching into the drain as the water
belled over her pounding head. Toweling her hair she heard him announce the concierge
had returned and the door opened and he held out into the steam her skirt and blouse
and sweater, hangered and draped in crackling cellophane. Her elbows bracketed her
head and the towel like a hijab, framing her flushed face and he looked up and down
the length of her with an impossible love in a way she understood a father does not
look upon his daughter and she said a bit provocatively, What? and he said, You are
the most beautiful thing God ever put on earth and she exhaled chagrin and frowned
in protest and said, Daddy, come on, go away.

Gule, gule,
he said in Turkish—
smilingly, smilingly—
and she dropped the towel chastely across the top of her breasts. I need you so much,
he said, stepping back through the door, and his humility when he told her this always
weakened her and she softly admitted, I know.

Most often when he came to Istanbul it was all embassy business and they would meet
for dinner somewhere excellent in the city and after dessert he would check his wristwatch
and disappear—did he go to a mistress? she wondered possessively—but if he stayed
the weekend she would rendezvous with him at the Hilton Saturday evenings or Sunday
mornings and they would grab a taxi down through Taksim Square toward the Golden Horn.
They often bypassed nearby St. Anthony of Padua and its straw-colored steeple, as
they did this Sunday, Istanbul’s largest Roman Catholic cathedral—too modern, her
father complained, run by lefties—in favor of the smaller, more distant sanctuary,
the imposing medieval hulk of the Church of St. Peter and Paul. Built in the fifteenth
century by the Genoese, her father preferred its esteemed congregation, the local
Maltese community, heroic people, fighting men, descendants of the Knights Hospitallers—Knights
Templars, Knights of Rhodes, Knights of Malta, the last stand of the great crusaders.

The Angelus bells rang brightly. She bobby-pinned a white lace mantilla to her hair
and stored her sunglasses in her purse. They slipped, latecomers, into the dimness
of the vestibule, her father’s hand removed from the small of her back as they paused
to dip fingertips into the marble basin of holy water before slipping down the nave
into a half-empty pew and kneeling side by side. Her father’s daunting piety was a
perpetual fascination to his daughter. It had an intensity that, as a child, she tried
to emulate but now considered too eccentric and even backward, something of the Old
World she imagined had flowed into him from his Yugoslavian mother, his clasped hands
lashed together with the ivory-beaded strands of her grandmother’s rosary and nailed
onto the rail of the pew in front of them, his forehead dropped like a penitent’s
atop his hands, facedown and eyes closed with a degree of concentration that seemed
to hint of agony, his lips in constant motion with a passionate burble of Latin, regardless
of whatever language in which the mass was being celebrated. He would rise in a fervor
to knock his breast during the Kyrie, the first and the loudest to sing the congregant’s
response in the liturgy, the first to line up in the chancel with his tongue stuck
in the air to receive the consecrated host, the last to slide out from the pews in
the aftermath of the benediction, still on his knees and head bowed, remembering the
dead, the grandparents she had never known, relieving himself of his limitless surplus
of prayers. He was meant to be a priest, she sometimes thought growing up, and so
wasn’t surprised the day her mother confided to her, as if here was a fairy tale about
a prince mysteriously required to forfeit his kingdom for the call of duty elsewhere,
that as a young man her father almost had been, dropping out of the seminary—Jesuits?
Dominicans? she couldn’t remember—six months before he was to be ordained, to pursue
instead a secular career—grad school, a year of overseas work with the AFL-CIO, then
the government. The revelation immediately explained at least one of his disquieting
habits she recalled from childhood—her father’s nightly appearance in the doorways
to his children’s bedrooms, his last act of vigilance before he retired for the evening,
a faceless silhouette backlit by the hall light, wearing only jockey briefs glowing
ghostly white, his right arm slowly quartering the darkness with the sign of the cross
where his son and daughter lay with the covers pulled up to the slits of their eyes,
feigning sleep, his deep-voiced patriarchal Latin not the comforting voice they knew—
In nomini Patri, et Filii, et Spiriti Sancti—
the blessing entering her drowsiness as a somewhat frightening and supernatural visitation.
And how he sobbed at her Confirmation and First Communion and made her pose, immaculate,
for a thousand pictures.

The mass ascended, unlocking its miracle of transubstantiation,
My Body My Blood
—my goddamn head, she moaned to herself, her body tightening into her misery. The
thought that she had repressed throughout the ritual pushed through the loose weave
of daydream and rote prayer and memory that had occupied her during the service and
she told herself firmly,
I can’t,
at the same moment her father stepped into the aisle and stood, waiting for her to
join him in line to the altar—so handsome and debonair: who could not go to him?—the
puzzled expression on his face recalibrated to the bland curiosity of questioning
eyes when she failed to move and instead sat down, impassive, staring at her hands
folded in her lap and her new ring and the ring’s pearl in its gold-ribbed cage, suddenly
forlorn and forsaken, unsure of God’s judgment upon her, an insecurity that made her
aware of the impossibility of receiving Communion in any state where she had not calmed
her doubts with an appropriate penance. She couldn’t do it, she realized for the first
time in her life, just because she was supposed to do it, and this breach of loyalty,
like a splitting away not from God but from her father, seemed extraordinary and paralyzing
and she feared her father’s reaction. Then he was back, announced by the rustle of
his crisp suit, and she could smell him again, his aftershave and peppermint breath
and shoe polish, even before she felt his nudge, the side of his body warm against
hers. His hand crossed to her knee, which he patted reassuringly yet she knew once
he swallowed the melted wafer he would say something but then he didn’t and the hurtful
thought of his disappointment became unbearable to her and she kept her head lowered.

I’m sorry, Daddy, she whispered, unable to raise her eyes to him, her fingers worrying
the ring he had given her. He whispered back, asking what was wrong; she told him
she hadn’t been to confession. He pressed his left hand compassionately over hers
and bent his head to whisper into her ear something she did not readily understand,
that confession was contingent upon the commission of mortal sins, but otherwise an
unnecessary emotional indulgence. Not a problem, he counseled her, for those who are
blameless.

The priest at the altar issued a declaration of peace, the mass ended, and she considered
what her father said and thought,
That couldn’t be right, could it?
—wasn’t she to blame, too?

Between you and me and the Man above, he assured her. Not a problem.

If he wasn’t in a rush for the airport, after mass they would taxi back to the Pera
Palace in Beyo
ğ
lu and drink chai in the patisserie or eat a hamburger in the American Bar, her father
an encyclopedia of anecdotes about the Orient Express and the hotel’s roster of celebrity
guests, Agatha Christie and Mata Hari, Hemingway and Graham Greene, this king and
that dictator. Or, depending on the weather, they’d stroll as they did today from
Pera to Karakoy, down steep and narrow cobbled passageways flanked by cracked sidewalks
and busted steps, laundry fluttering overhead, banners of commonplace drudgery connecting
seedy apartment buildings filled by a rising tide of tenants swept in from the Anatolian
countryside. Their enterprise turned the formerly prosperous neighborhood into a junk-shop
sprawl of low-end vendors, spare parts, pirated tapes, and smutty lingerie everywhere
and urchins twisting through the crowds with their circular trays of tulip-shaped
tea glasses or a load of fresh-baked sesame
simits
balanced on their heads, a less grand bazaar than the one across the Golden Horn but
no less invigorating. Her hangover was eased by the walk and her dour mood uplifted
by the boisterous humanity massed in the Byzantine streets, a liberation she felt
as she emerged from the claustrophobic lanes below the Galata Tower to encounter the
glorious waterfront and its rioting seagulls, anglers with buckets and rods lining
its stone promenade and its spellbinding view of Old Istanbul, minarets rising from
its three central hills like rockets aimed at the sun.

Their destination, as always, was the iron footbridge spanning the banks of the Golden
Horn to Eminonu. It seemed all of Istanbul tramped across the Galata Bridge on Saturdays
and Sundays or gathered below its surface, and the dam of its unfortunate pontoons
made a smelly lake of inland water slopping back into the metropolis. But the dark
recesses beneath the bridge’s roadway housed a fragrant honeycomb of ramshackle restaurants,
smoky nargileh joints with bubbling water pipes, teahouses overrun by backgammon addicts,
and hideaway dens packed with burly unshaved men devoted to political argument and
the unIslamic pleasures of raki and Johnny Walker.

They wandered happily into the bustle and its singular exuberance, investigating the
gastronomic possibilities, until her father poked his head into a cramped
lokanta
they had overlooked on previous visits, saying, Oh, man, that’s the stuff! hooked
by the bountiful selection of meze displayed like a doll’s banquet on the wooden counter.
Let’s give it a try, he said, but five of its six tables were colonized by families
and in the back the sixth had been commandeered by a single patron, a swarthy man
whose coal-black hair had been pasted against his scalp with something oily. He wore
a blue tracksuit and warm-up jacket, the uniform of the city’s uneducated working
class, and sat like a guard dog over a plate of chicken bones picked clean, drinking
beer from a bottle with a look of loutish self-absorption and she thought,
Ugh, let’s not,
but her father went ahead, shining with affability, exclaiming,
Yemek, yemek!
—Food, food!—and she followed with a tolerant sigh, the good daughter.

Her father asked, Do you mind? The man at the table nodded without apparent objection
but remained indifferent to their presence and when they sat down her father winked
at her and said he was so hungry he could eat a camel, and she stifled a laugh and
the man took a final gulp from his beer, scraped his chair back from the table, and
stood up fishing into his pocket for lira to pay his bill.

Allow me, said her father and she thought,
How bloody rude,
watching the man accept this generosity without a word or gesture of thanks, flicking
his wrist to snap open a pair of wraparound sunglasses, slide them on his unpleasant
face, and leave.

Dad! Why did you pay for him?

Random act of kindness.

Then she noticed he had forgotten something, a large brown envelope the size of an
unfolded sheet of paper, on the floor next to his chair. Oh, hey, she began to say,
but her father caught her eye and she felt an inward thrill and clammed up, pretending
she had not witnessed what she understood amounted to a more sensitive level of her
father’s world of games, hidden in plain view.

He seemed kinda greasy, didn’t he? she said, playing along, excited about the drop,
an occurrence he rarely allowed her to observe, but more than anything relieved to
have her father again all to herself.

Yes, he did, agreed her father. What would you like to drink? How are you feeling?

Better. Thanks, she said shyly, her act of contrition.