The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (40 page)

She lowered the binoculars back toward the water, the dockmaster popping in and out
of the oval frame, and raised them back an inch to see him clearly, signaling her
to come ahead, and she steeled her nerves, turned the bow landward, relocated the
Sea Nymph
’s moorage, and headed in, side-slipping with the current, dashing to the bow to gaff
the float line but missing the first pass and reversing, missing the second pass as
well, crying in frustration as the third pass, too, went awry, and on the fourth pass,
with the engine in neutral, drifting in high toward the float, she jumped overboard
with the bow line, which she clipped to the float and then swam frantically back to
the
Nymph
,
clambered aboard, teased the engine into reverse, and set an anchor off the stern
to prevent the boat from swinging with the tide. She collapsed in the cockpit, gasping
with relief, then went below to change into dry clothes—jeans and a T-shirt and sneakers—and
the dockmaster rowed out to bring her ashore.

Well done,
kizim,
my daughter, he congratulated her in Turkish. I would have come sooner but I feared
you would sink me.

An hour passed but she hardly noticed the time, pampered by a staff with little else
to do, gathered at the small bar with the dockmaster, garçon, and bartender, who she
had conned into mixing her rum and Cokes, the anxious cook coming out of the kitchen
every few minutes with plates of meze,
the military officer in charge of security stepping over to flirt and practice English
after inspecting her bag for bombs or daggers or God knows what and trying to confiscate
her camera
.

Twilight deepened and the dockmaster switched on the fairy lights strung along the
outline of the open-air restaurant and throughout its arbor of sycamore trees. The
army officer’s walkie-talkie crackled and he put it to his ear and then back on his
belt and announced to the staff,
Ten minutes
. When she had asked the dockmaster earlier about the giant yacht he told her, exasperated
by the disruption of business, that this yacht was the pasha’s.
She asked which pasha,
as if she knew them all, and he said, the Big One, and she said airily, Oh, that one.
He was at my birthday party. But now she had a better idea of why her father had chosen
such an out-of-the-way home for the
Sea Nymph
, the last ferry stop on the European coast, directly below an off-limits Turkish
military base that stretched to the Black Sea.

She was chattering with the bartender about life in America, of which she knew very
little, when someone tapped her shoulder and she turned—
Mr. Kirlovsky!—
and threw herself impulsively into the plump and sweaty embrace of Elena’s father’s
arms. Then, as if by command, everyone at the marina stopped what they were doing
to observe the yacht’s arrival, its carving-knife silhouette sliding into view out
beyond the harbor, a police launch bringing its passengers to shore.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

She had been there on the landing to greet him, ignoring the soldiers’ halfhearted
order to stand back, but as soon as her father had come ashore that night, dressed
now in chinos and a blue oxford shirt (planning,
planning
—how many extra sets of clothes had he stored around the city?), she knew, despite
his ostensible bonhomie, that he was in an impervious mood she would not be able to
enter. Bravo, Admiral! he saluted her. How’d it go? but he had no time for her answer,
stepping aside for the thickset pasha, in baggy swim trunks and a khaki pullover,
to double-kiss her cheeks and anoint her with quick flattery. The other passengers—an
aloof pair of men in Bermuda shorts and golf shirts she took, given their blue-eyed
hauteur, to be Americans; a second pair, Middle-Easterners, one virtually a caricature
of an ostentatious high roller, his swarthiness adorned in thick strands of gold jewelry
and the other his opposite in every way, lean and severe with a malevolent smile slashed
through the circle of his closely trimmed beard and mustache, outfitted in black combat
boots and army greens with no insignia—expended nothing in their acknowledgment of
her existence. Their eyes simply registering with indifference her virginal fuckability
as her father tugged her away, whispering in her ear,
These other shitheads aren’t worth knowing,
and walked her back to the bar, distracted, apologizing mechanically for asking her
to stay put.

Triple-top-secret horseshit on a boomerang,
her father said later in the car, riding with her back across the bridge to Asia.
Sorry, Kitten. Better if you don’t know. Dirty business. I wouldn’t mind seeing those
bastards go to jail for it.

Jail?
she said.
Really? The pasha? Mr. Kirlovsky?

No no no.
The pasha
was a man of immeasurable qualities—a necessary and discreet host, a great ally, trusted
friend, fundamentally honest, commander of an army larger than any in Europe, a militant
anti-Communist and fellow admirer (with the White House) of Saddam Hussein’s strong-arm
secularism, a universalist and mullah-basher though, sorry to say, unbaptized (but
we’re not here saving souls). Exceeding folly to imagine he could be left out of the
loop. Our pal Kirlovsky was a businessman—
I don’t hold it against him,
said her father.
The man’s been helpful on some projects we have going out in the east.
Her father, it seemed, was the reluctant matchmaker valued for imperturbability, and
the Iranians—
Did I just say that? I didn’t say that. Never tell anybody I said that—
were customers, extortionists might be a more apt choice of words, and it was clear
her father would as soon stick a knife in their backs as sell them a shoelace.
No,
he said,
I’m talking about those fools from Washington, those fucking idiots and their neat
idea.
He had become pensive then, staring out the window, the lights of Uskudar down below
pressed against the Bosphorus, gleaming like an obsidian snake—or staring at the specter
of his own reflection in the glass.
Just because they’re our guys,
he added a moment later as they were descending into Asia,
just because they’re on our side, doesn’t mean they have brains. Never forget that.

She had risen at dawn to prepare for church and now the day’s splendid accumulation—the
fresh wind on her face, the joyous showering of the water, the unanticipated gift
of liberation, the illicit rum—seemed to suggest a nest, immediately available if
she slunk down into the leather seat and leaned against her father, who smelled tranquilizingly
like sunshine, and she closed her eyes, just beginning to doze off, when she heard
him refer to calls he had made, something about your friend Osman, and Osman’s name
pinched her erect, wide-eyed and fully conscious.

This boy,
her father continued, still gazing out the window into the sparkling night of the
city,
is a very interesting fellow. He associates with some very interesting people.

Uh-oh,
she thought.

Bad children, the government calls them. The newspapers call them the lost generation—the
kids who came of age under the military’s control. This bunch calls itself the Committee
of Democracy and Brotherhood.

But that’s beautiful,
she said, confused, expecting something apocalyptic
. It’s like . . . inspirational.

Yes,
he said wryly
. Inspiring
. He turned away from the window to meet her eyes but in the flickering darkness of
the car she could see only his cool detachment.
There’s a code at play here, Dottie. Democracy translates into Islam. Brotherhood
can be interpreted as a cadre of frat boys willing to go beyond the limit.

Daddy, he’s not a terrorist
.

How unbelievably dumb—that’s what she had said, guilt by association, just blurting
it out like a simpleton, but her father, agreeing, had mystified her by being amused
and omniscient.
I know, Dottie,
he had told her.
As a matter of fact, I’ve been led to believe he has redeeming virtues.

What’s that supposed to mean?

It means he has redeeming virtues,
he said, and closed the gate with his riddle about closeness,
Just promise me you won’t get too close to him. That could turn out badly, I’m afraid.

She had not wanted a confrontation but was quick to take offense.
It’s because he’s Muslim, isn’t it?

That might be something to consider,
her father said.
Do you think his family wants him marrying a Catholic girl?

Maybe they don’t care. What’s the big deal?

His answer, she felt, had been beside the point and although she heard his coldhearted
and uncharitable words their effect was deafening, only reminding her of Karim, and
she had not listened.
You know why I like Turkey?
he said.
Because it has a divided soul. These are the front lines out here, Dottie. You might
want to keep that in mind.

God, Daddy,
she whined,
I don’t get your problem. I really don’t,
and then the driver had pulled over in front of the academy’s gates and she said,
What about Osman? The police beat him up,
and her father said,
You should know by now, that’s what the police do.

Piqued by how the day was ending, her triumphant sail forgotten behind the screen
of her father’s preoccupations, she delivered a hasty kiss to his cheek, grabbed her
day bag, and opened the car door. He told her he was flying back to Ankara in the
morning and would call in a day or two and she asserted her claim on the
Sea Nymph,
pressing him for permission to take the boat out by herself, and he said,
Let me think about that,
and she had slammed the door much harder than she intended and stomped back to her
room.

Later in the week, he had telephoned with rules. I’ve already called the dockmaster
to fill him in on the program, he said. Stay between Altinkum and the bridge. Motor
only—no sails unless the engine breaks down. Watch the weather—winds over ten knots:
remain in port. Daylight hours only. No overnights. Can I take friends? she asked
and he told her not until she had more experience. How much more? she had wondered
but did not ask, smelling a loophole in this particular prohibition, which she soon
exploited, taking the
Nymph
out twice by herself before sneaking Osman aboard, picking him up at the dock in Ortakoy,
a pattern of subterfuge established not that day but the day her father had returned
to Ankara in late June and continued throughout the summer, the best of summers the
summer when she was seventeen, she and her boyfriend finessing a citywide game of
hide-and-seek with the men she imagined her father had assigned to keep watch on her,
accidental meetings (
hah!
) at museums and cinemas, clandestine rendezvous at the clubs and bars where she and
Osman danced throughout the night, anchoring the
Sea Nymph
in secluded coves to smoke hash and make out and begin to learn what her body had
never truly known beyond her father’s indecent tutorials in sensation—the anxious
passion, the slow, tense curriculum of love.

There were picnics at Yildiz with Yesho and her noisy magpie family or just the girls
themselves hanging out by the Blue Mosque or Taksim Square to absorb the kinetics
of the surging crowds or ridicule tourists or bargain with the hucksters or just sit
with Elena gossiping, consumed by laughter, fending off a queue of smitten boys and
creepy, badly dressed hairy men. Also the mind-clearing hours of swim practice in
the academy’s pool, the quiet mornings with her patient teachers, walking home through
the cobbled alleys of her neighborhood saluted by the smiles and nods of the old women
hijabis, the vendors on the streets selling spears of salt-sprinkled cucumbers, going
to sleep sticky-lipped or sore-lipped from her twin indulgences—wedges of watermelon,
the juice dribbling down her chin; the rash of wild kissing—the rapturous consumption
of meze and music and the ingrained fatalism and lusty overblown passions of the Istanbullus,
interrupted only by her father’s infrequent visits to Istanbul and their addition
of an old familiar rhythm to the shining new forms of her happiness.

One day in August when she went early in the morning to Altinkum for a day of sailing
the
tirhandil
was not there in the cove, a heart-stopping discovery until she found the dockmaster
and heard the explanation. At her father’s request he had sent the
Sea Nymph
down to the boatyard at Tarabya to have a cooking stove and toilet stall added to
its cabin.

When she telephoned him that night, her father announced his intention to take a much-deserved
vacation at the end of summer, just the two of them aboard the
Sea Nymph
—more than a vacation, something he had dwelled upon in prayers and dreams throughout
much of his life: a pilgrimage. He had traveled to Israel frequently, could wander
the streets of Jerusalem and Jericho, Nazareth and Bethlehem or the shore of Galilee
in his sleep, yet it was his conviction that the true birthplace of Christianity was
not its cradle but its nursery. That sacred honor fell not to Rome but to Turkey,
Asia Minor, and its first-century provinces, the ancient Anatolian coastline a trove
of New Testament sites, and, in the peripatetic footsteps of his favorite apostle,
Paul, the Jewish tent maker from Tarsus turned evangelical Christian, he planned to
visit as many of them as proved possible before her school returned to session the
third week in September. Such a trip, he promised, no matter what else happened in
the years ahead, would be a highlight of her life, and in the years ahead she would
think about this often, meditating on transfiguration, Christ risen from the dead,
though Dottie was not able to convince herself that resurrection could in any way
be described as one of life’s salient moments of ecstatic affirmation. What was the
point exactly, once you had come to the end of what is necessary? A second chance
to die again? How long could the resurrected Christ endure it? Not very.

Her reluctance to spend so much time apart from Osman was mitigated by her reluctance
to maintain the pace at which they seemed to be hurtling toward the moment that she
had so far resisted, irrationally but morally, pragmatically but neurotically, her
contradictory impulses a source of panting confusion for both of them, but she needed
more time to think about this—sleeping with Osman, giving (abandoning? submitting?)
herself to him, shedding (or magnifying) her impurity, restarting her sexuality in
a postpubescent body, inventing the permanence of her sexuality, splitting the difference
on domination, overcoming the danger of asserting herself physically, overcoming the
numbing terror of being
not there,
reduced to a one-dimensional flatness attached to a three-dimensional hole—although
what more time offered to someone poised on a cliff other than heaps of anxiety she
had no idea. It was all too much to actually think about in any deliberate and logical
way and her father’s plan to sail away presented Dottie with a respite from her ambivalence
and hormonal dementia and her lingering fears of the darkness in men. Some of them,
most of them?—she didn’t know.

Early in September it was her old friend Maranian who appeared at the academy gates
in Uskudar to chauffeur her to the boatyard in Tarabya, where she met her father overseeing
the
Sea Nymph
’s short journey from dry dock back to the water. He looked worn down, his face drawn,
his tan turned sallow, ungroomed and wrinkled and underweight, half-circle scoops
under his eyes, and he said, of course, that it was nothing, a bug he had picked up
on a trip out east. On top of it, he assured her. Got it beat.

Her first assignment was to go with the uncustomarily cheerless Maranian back to the
hotel room in the village where her father had spent the night and collect his gear
and the boxes of supplies he had purchased the day before, along with a plastic tub
of books that snagged her curiosity: several travel guides, a pocketbook Bible, three
volumes of poetry—Eliot, Brodsky, Rumi—and a small library of Christian theological
writing—separate editions of the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Pauline
Epistles, the Gnostic Gospels, and a thin leather-bound, heavily annotated text entitled
St. John’s Book of Revelation
(or, alternately, as the cover suggested, the
Book of Apocalypse
), St Augustine’s
Confessions,
and a text she could not categorize at a glance, the
Meditations
of Marcus Aurelius that had a quote handwritten neatly on its title page: I do my
duty. Other things do not trouble me.