The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (37 page)

We’ll see how great, she said, mostly to herself, and Karim, following behind, hissed
at the back of her head, You will not be blasphemous. Please.

Inside the public area of the station, a blaring television with snowy reception was
tuned to a soap opera. Ordinary people sat crowded together on a bench, watching along
with the gendarmes. This time the officer on night duty performed predictably, his
arrogance flaring, tersely explaining that the Ortakoy streets were beyond his station’s
jurisdiction and he could assure her that the license number she had copied down was
registered to the Ortakoy station.

Excuse me, sir, she said with stiff politeness. Someone is lying.

The accusation had the effect of shifting the policeman’s regard from Dottie to Karim,
who appeared jolted into servility by the gendarme’s scathing eyes. Who are you? he
barked. Why are you here with this disrespectful child?

Thank you, sir, Karim said, tugging at Dottie as he retreated. We are leaving, sir.
Thank you. May God protect you.

Go to bed, little girl, said the duty officer, satisfied.

They argued during the ride back to Ortakoy, Karim unable to convince her that her
persistence would doom them both to a night in jail or worse, but she thought such
an outcome ludicrous. She was a girl, had committed no crime, she was an American
coming to the aid of an innocent friend. He accused her of astonishing naïveté and
she called him frightened, a challenge that seemed to spur him out of his humiliation
directly into a show of crazed recklessness, as though he had willed his sanity into
the background in order to prove himself to her.

With Dottie hurrying to keep up, this time Karim was first inside the Ortakoy station,
shouting irrationally and demanding Osman’s return, slapping the counter for emphasis,
the police like twitching alley cats watching a wounded bird, their amazement progressively
more lethal.

It’s him,
Dottie cried out. There behind the desk smoking a cigarette with the older duty officer
was one of the gendarmes who had taken Osman into custody.
Why did you lie to me?
With an embarrassed smirk, the previously avuncular officer answered her question
by offering her his upraised hands, as if to show there was no blood on them, but
the younger gendarme smiled in disbelief at their impertinence. He ordered Karim to
show identification. Karim remained insolent; casting an I-told-you-so look at Dottie,
he plucked his ID from his wallet and tossed it on the counter at the gendarme, who
snatched up the card, glanced at it homicidally before ripping it in half and throwing
the pieces at Karim’s inflamed, unflinching face. At the same moment, Dottie had placed
her passport with its red diplomatic cover on the counter where it was shoved back
to her, unopened.

Just tell us, okay, she said, undeterred. Where is he? and with no answer forthcoming,
issued an illogical ultimatum. Okay, she said, fine. We’re not leaving until we see
him.

Suit yourself, said the duty officer, retiring into weary impassivity. Wait outside.

So he’s here, isn’t he? said Dottie, as though she had managed to hoodwink them into
a confession, but the order was merely repeated—Wait outside. When she said she would
not, the younger gendarme came around the counter forcefully, reaching for her, and
she shouted in English,
Keep your hands off me, you asshole,
and when Karim, burning through a final spasm of wildness, lurched forward to intervene
she realized her mistake and heard her voice go screechy,
Okay, stop, don’t, we’ll wait outside,
wrestling Karim with her toward the door before the gendarme could latch on to either
of them.

My God, she said, the two of them back out on the street, Dottie in a state of nervous
hilarity. Holy shit.

Air whistled harshly in and out of Karim’s flared nose and he looked at her severely
and said, I don’t understand you. He flicked his hand with a dismissive gesture. There
is a teahouse across the street, Karim said. We will wait there.

Oh, she said, regaining her composure with a quick look over at the shop, the bronzed
aura of sanctuary captured behind the glowing squares of paned windows, candles on
the tables, a scattering of friendly-looking adults. Subdued, she looked back at Karim
sheepishly, her instinct like a clock’s alarm, prodding her to reverse roles, but
when she tried to transfer over the leadership she had assumed earlier, he would not
have it.

How long should we wait? she asked, and when he answered, As long as you wish, she
had to admit the possibility that she had no idea what to do.

They sat opposite each other at a table next to the windows with a clear view across
the street to the gendarmerie, watching one another fidget, Karim’s legs as restless
as her fingers crab-walking from spoon to napkin, waiting for their tea, sipping the
bulb-shaped glasses self-consciously when it came, their exchange no more than an
awkward release of monosyllables until Karim, straightening his spine, cleared his
throat, confessing he was ashamed to have forgotten that a woman could be as strong,
or stronger, than a man. My own mother, he said, is like this, like you
. . .
but of course, I should say, nothing like you.

Really? said Dottie eagerly, wanting to relax into a bath of peaceful conversation,
be a boy and girl together, just talking, as this night was meant to be. Tell me about
her. Are you Moroccan? Someone told me that.

No, he said, his father was Moroccan, but Karim himself, by matrilineal tradition,
was considered, at least by the government, a Turk, a citizen. Dottie asked why his
father had come to Turkey and Karim, his closed body like a fist unclenching, now
seemed to appreciate her interest and was not averse to sharing his family’s story
of broken traditions and unrealistic expectation and the loss that invariably accompanies
change.

My father came from an old family, respected, but not very powerful, Karim began,
but immediately she interrupted.

What did they do?

They were tradespeople.

Of what?

Okay, he said. Cooking oil, cooking fuel
. . .
for many years charcoal; afterward, gas. I mean to say, bottled gas.

Where?

Where?

Where did he live? Like, a village? A city?

A neighborhood in Casablanca.

Oh, she said, her left hand splayed below her throat, as if she had received bad news.

What is wrong?

No, nothing’s wrong, she said quickly and her face expanded with a playful smile.
Pearls of candlelight swam in her eyes. I’ll tell you later. What year was this?

My father’s family has always lived in this place, said Karim, puzzled by Dottie’s
conspicuous reaction to his father’s birthplace. No one can remember when they did
not live there.

Okay, I’ll tell, she said. It’s possible that our fathers have met.

The world is not this small, said Karim, acting as if he would be horrified if indeed
it were, and when they compared dates, it seemed improbable that their fathers’ paths
had crossed.

It’s not like it would mean anything anyway, she said. Go on. I want to know more.

Throughout the centuries, the family was the family, each generation the same to the
one before and the one after, Karim continued in a didactic tone she associated with
the self-importance of university students. But the war, the Second World War, he
said, switching to Turkish when he was unsure how to express a word or idea in English,
had for the first time in the family’s memory made them prosperous, and so his father,
firstborn of the postwar generation, was viewed as an opportunity, a chance to lift
the family to a long-desired level of wealth and status. His life, in other words,
was theirs; the decisions, theirs. And then, of course, he rebelled. Perhaps it would
have been so anyway, said Karim, but the family saw his father only as a lottery ticket
for influence and
. . .
and (he paused, searching for the word) esteem. No longer would they be simple merchants;
they would slip through the back door of the elite class by sending their children
to the best private schools, then overseas to Europe or America to be educated—they
did not understand this, you see—in a manner that would cast their children out from
the family, far beyond their ability to be a living part of the family organism, to
be anything, I suppose you must say, than—she stopped him to look up the words in
her Turkish/English pocket dictionary and offered,
cherished phantoms?
and he continued, nodding uncertainly.

Yes, they would remit money home. Yes, they would visit on holidays. Yes, the family
could boast of their accomplishments, but the family would still be required to sell
its cooking oil and know its place in society and not imagine that its place was any
higher than where it was. So that is my father’s story, Karim said, and Dottie said,
Well, what happened?

What happened? said Karim. My father studied in America and made his PhD and became
an engineer. He came to work in Turkey. He met my mother.

Where? How? asked Dottie, anticipating a much different narrative than this, Karim’s
underfed provincial look suggesting a story more familiar with poverty than middle-class
affluence and professional careers.

I feel you are like the
devlet—
you want to know everything, Karim said. Why?

Why not? she chirped. Maybe I’m a spy. Or just nosy and superficial.

Maybe you are a superficial spy, he said, the first joke he had ever made in her presence.
She marveled at his smile, how disturbingly beautiful it was, perhaps because of its
rarity or its surge upward into his eyes, soaking through their hardness, and she
said, Oh, that’s so much better, you should smile more. But come on, she said, tell
me the rest, and Karim told her his father, when he finished his doctoral studies
in the United States, applied for jobs in many places in the world, none of them Morocco,
and eventually accepted a position in Turkey, because it was an Eastern country that
was modern and Islamic, but not too modern and not too Islamic for his taste, which
had been corrupted—Karim used the word
sickened
—by the West. This was many years ago, said Karim, that my father came to Erzurum,
to build roads and bridges throughout the countryside, and it was there I was born.
Do you know it? Erzurum?

No, she said, but she had a classmate from Erzurum, who told her that wolves came
out of the surrounding forest and wandered through the campus of the university, and
Karim confirmed that yes, this was true. Yes, many types of wolves, he added cryptically.

How long have we been here? she wondered out loud. Should we order more tea?

Summoning the waiter, Karim looked at his wristwatch and declared he had a plan. Let
me ask you, please, he said to her. Do you have money? I mean, dollars, and she gave
him the twenty she kept hidden in her wallet for emergencies, which he then gave to
the waiter, with instructions to take a tray of tea and the “gift” across the street
to the gendarmes. And tell them, he said, Osman’s friends are waiting.

I should have thought of this before, Karim said after the waiter left to conscript
one of the kitchen boys for the mission.

Yeah, of course, me too, said Dottie, impressed by Karim’s belated maneuver, right
out of her father’s playbook. I wasn’t thinking.

And you? he said, his eyes mirroring hers, lambent with flame, her uneasy attraction
to him like a radio’s poor reception, the signal wandering in and out through a soup
of static created by Osman. I thought you were an American but your passport is red.

Red, she explained, was the color for diplomats and their families. Then she sat back
as if to see him more completely, her head tilting with consternation when he asked
who’s daughter she was, the question spoken in English yet she had shuddered at his
use of the Arabic phrasing, wondering if it were possible that Karim too had been
enlisted somehow by her father.

Why are you asking me that? she said, attempting to sound nonchalant but frowning
with suspicion.

Because you are asking the same of me, he said, perturbed. Is it not allowed?

Sorry, Dottie said automatically, telling him her father was posted at the embassy
in Ankara. She was unable to rid herself of the nagging thought that some relationship
existed between her father and Karim, given her dad’s spidery habit of weaving webs.
I know this might sound weird, she said. You don’t work for my father, do you?

Is it possible to work for your father? said Karim, his interest sharpening. You mean,
as a driver? Or
. . .
what?

I don’t know, she said. Maybe.

With your permission. I wanted to ask about your father
. . .
I mean to say, before. At the café. What does your father do?

I don’t know really, she said, reluctant to pursue this line of inquiry and uncomfortable
with the intensity of Karim’s eyes upon her, inquisitive and mesmerizing. He’s a diplomat.
He talks to people.

Tonight, he said, before you and Osman came to the café, the Jew—

Don’t say the Jew, said Dottie, bristling. Her name’s Elena.

Yes, okay. That one.

What’s my name? she needled. I’ve never heard you say it.

Dodi.

Thank you, said Dottie.

That one was bragging about your father, to make us feel weak.

What did she say?

She said your father goes to Afghanistan to kill Communists. Could this be true?

Of course not, she said with a supercilious guffaw. That’s so incredibly insane.

Yes, I myself said to the Jew she is lying, but this other girl, the French
yabanci,
confirms the Jew is speaking the truth.

Her name is Elena. Stop saying the Jew.

But your father. It is true about him, yes? The Americans are in Afghanistan against
the Soviets. This is no secret.