The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (45 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

His quick sidelong glance her way warned of discretion and she watched him sign the
hotel receipt,
Lawrence Budd,
his copperplate penmanship a beautiful thing, an airy old-fashioned cursive—
Lawrence Budd
?
—
understanding the mission had been initiated prior to her own induction, a revelation
that made her feel and act capricious throughout their breakfast on the promenade.
Sitting at one of the café tables under a blue-and-white-striped umbrella, she was
jealous of the sea and its sailboats, her sunglasses obscuring only half of her morose
expression, grumpy monosyllables all she offered her father who, trying again for
an insight into her mood, solicited a lie. I’m getting my period, okay? she said,
unwilling to declare he should not always count on her to say yes to everything, and
after that he had the sense to ignore her as she crumbled a pastry into her untouched
tea. Then a white Mercedes-Benz sedan, a much older model than Mr. Maranian’s and
not well-kept, edged slowly up to the curb, and the driver lowered his window and
stuck his head out—
Excuse please . . . Mister Budd?
—and her father said, Time to go.
And like who the fuck am I?
she thought.
Rose Budd?
Very funny.

She had lost track of the days and did not realize it was Sunday morning until her
father told the driver to take them to a Catholic church—
No, no, this one’s Orthodox,
he said, and they eventually arrived at the cathedral of St. John the Evangelist
at the top of the city, the two of them dashing inside to the ringing of bells, joining
the shuffle of an oddly mixed congregation, elderly women, European bureaucrats, and
military personnel, toward the richly decorated altar. NATO, her father whispered.
I believe they have a headquarters here. With love flowing in his eyes, her father
pulled her to her feet as the mass ended and they walked arm in arm outside into the
Aegean sun and back to the car, his voice cracking with emotion, recalling that here
in this city, Homer’s birthplace and apostolic sanctuary, once stood the first of
the seven churches of Revelation. Without Turkey, her father reminded her, there would
be no Christianity. Not without Rome, not even without Jerusalem, but
without Turkey.
And then they were on the road south to Ephesus, the once-great city of Asia Minor,
where her father seemed to have a nervous breakdown.

Except for her father’s sole instruction to the driver—
Meryemana, House of Mary, my friend
—no one said anything for three hours, her father content again to fumble with his
mother’s rosary, his lips sipping the air with nine repetitions of the
Memorare
. Dottie stared out the window at the elysian countryside, her thoughts flitting around,
unable to settle into even a rudimentary coherence, feelings attached to a parsimonious
minimum of words—Osman, the
Sea Nymph,
prostitution, angels, shopping, evil, the storm, her lost Nikon, Jacqueline in France,
Karim’s malicious sensuality—the elliptical survey of her reverie interrupted by the
blink in her vision of a signpost announcing the archaeological preserve of Ephesus
and the sudden wrenching heaviness of her father’s breathing. When she looked at him,
his eyes and mouth were closed tight and twisted in a grimace and he had broken into
a crosshatching of sweat. Daddy? she asked, brushing his knee with no response. The
driver turned off the main road onto a narrow serpentine route looping up a pine-forested
mountain and she tilted her head toward her father’s quivering lips to determine that
he was asking her to tell the driver to stop.

In our hearts are the words, he said, scrambling out of the car, and she thought he
was going to be sick but something else was happening. He told her with a deeply pained
look that he would walk the rest of the way, to arrive at the house of the Mother
of God as a penitent on his knees. Join me, he said, and she asked the driver how
far it was and told her father her foot hurt too much to walk six kilometers up a
mountain and he simply knelt down on the side of the road to pray, a mortification
that made her stretch across the seat to shut his door. See you up there, she said,
the heat of the afternoon and her father’s overheated faith and the length of these
final miles intensifying her disapprobation. The chauffeur turned into the car park
at the summit and kept the engine running as he got out to open her door, then unlocked
the trunk to remove the dry bag and, without a word, got back in and left. She looked
around, figuring it would take her weird-ass father—
Saint Dementia,
she had dubbed this stranger—the remainder of the day to crawl the distance, and
what was she supposed to do in the meantime?

A busload of Muslim tourists disembarked, a preponderance of women in head scarves
and black raincoat dresses, whom she trailed down a walkway into the pines, the air
laden with golden motes. Her body began to respond, feathery shivers of electricity
absorbed in her chest, some ancient lingering energy flowing up and through the limbs
of her spirit, tendrils of holiness like climbing vines. Her heart felt gripped by
this modest stone cottage ahead in the trees, a hut really, a woodcutter’s shelter,
a place to hide from the world, where St. John had brought the Virgin away from the
unforgiving barbarity of Jerusalem. These mortared walls in this lovely forest where
Mary ate her bread and studied the dome of stars, wrestling with the miracle of her
child, and, finally, died from so much yearning. In everything she looked at she perceived
a mystical shimmer that could only be the mingling of auras, hers and Mary’s. Their
feet on the same ground, the baked fragrance of pine needles the same, century after
century; their ears buzzing with the same isolation, the Virgin’s parched throat cooled
from this sacred spring whose water Dottie now drank from the cup of her hands. How
could she have possibly foreseen what was being asked of her, what she had gotten
herself into? Had she been carefully chosen or had it been more like,
Okay, you,
one womb as good as the next to carry light into the world? And whatever miracle could
make that happen, Dottie thought, if a virgin has a baby, he better be the Son of
God.

Her father had told her this: God sent his Son to experience time, the Achilles heel
of creation, known only through the tribulations of mankind. The Virgin birth was
meant to establish the bridge back across the cosmic chasm—time’s correction. Understand?
The universe was not whole until Mary, the mother of our completion. Dottie was still
a child when her father told her this and she had failed to comprehend why God didn’t
just have the baby himself—why trouble poor Mary? And when she was older, and more
understanding, Dottie wondered skeptically,
Wait, did God rape Mary?
which is when she stopped going to confession, afraid to confess the mortal sinfulness
of such a thought.

But how crowded it was, she felt, entering the queue into the T-shaped building, peeking
around the horde of bodies into its austere vaulted bedroom and dank kitchen and kneeling
with so many others on the cobbley roughness of the floor, candles guttering in the
dim light, at the shrine dedicated by the Polish Pope himself,
her
Pope. She stood up in a daze of profundity and walked back out into the dappled shade
of the trees to find a place to sit down—a low stone wall to the side of Mary’s house,
the mountainside plunging behind her—and sat there without being aware of anything
much, her eyes blurred, staring at panels of an abstract fresco made from chicken
wire fencing, its mesh crammed with the petitions of the devout—colorful bits of rag,
scrawled notes, flower puffs, inscrutable totems: anything to make a wish—until the
tranquillity she had discovered was blown apart by her father’s arrival.

Wary-eyed pilgrims began to crane their attention toward a disturbance and when she
stood to see what caused them to nod and point there was the spectacle of her father
on the terrace, on his knees, shirtless, his torso slashed with angry stigmata, fists
clenched over his weeping eyes, his chin wobbly with lamentation. My God, she thought,
how did he become such a mess? She knew she should run to him but could not. And when
he rose to his feet she gasped—can someone so dignified and handsome possibly look
this wicked and unhinged?—tourists giving him a wide berth as he began to shout in
English at the blameless Mary-worshipping Muslims—
You fucking motherfucking
mujos,
you filthy wild beasts, you cockroaches
—until a nun came flying like a raven out of the shrine and seemed to swoop him up
in saintly wings and somehow pacify him.

Dottie held her breath, dreading the return of this crazy person to her side yet when
she saw him straggle out the low doorway at the rear of Mary’s house at least his
shirt was on and he no longer required a chaperone. His puffy eyes searched the terrace,
spotting her on the wall. He tried to smile but failed, his face disfigured by renewed
bawling, coming toward her with outstretched arms, streaming tears.

Daddy, just sit down, she said coldly, estranged by his psycho display of weakness,
and he did as he was told. Stuttering in a strangulated voice, he said that today
was his mother’s birthday, and Dottie pinned herself onto his tormented chest to console
him and he clung to her until he regained his composure, the tremble of his hands
receding, his jaw firm, eyes increasingly alert to here and now, the pathos draining
out of him. I thank God for the joy of this day, he announced, a king’s proclamation,
sealing his emotions back into the deep reaches of his darkness. I’ve waited all my
life for this, he said.
This what?
she wanted to ask but instead said nothing and watched him stand resolutely and walk
to the chicken wire panels and pluck out from its collage a black scroll of paper,
its tube containing keys and directions to a house in nearby Selcuk, and she followed
after him to search the car park for a green Toyota sedan and then they got in and
left.

Disorder was still an illusion—there was and always would be a plan. Sometimes she
forgot, but she had learned long ago to count on it.
Never
underrate Daddy
.

In the days ahead she would sometimes complain about being stashed away, sequestered
in the dreary bungalow—bare stuccoed walls, sagging beds, spattered taupe curtains
suggesting a house with a history she would rather not know, cracked linoleum floors,
smelly kerosene stove, cobwebs and spiders, mouse shit and the stink of rotting onions
everywhere. They could have easily rented something fabulous—a hip villa with a swimming
pool—in the bustling seaside town of Kusadasi, some twenty kilometers southwest, where
she was finally allowed her shopping spree and a trip to a bookstore (she picked out
a used copy of
Fear of Flying
based on a startling chapter title—“Arabs and Other Animals”). But her objections
were tempered by the return of her father’s happiness, his unflagging upbeat mood
and his love affair with the village, Ephesus a thirty-minute walk through the dust
and heat and fumes, their quiet neighborhood only a few blocks east of a hill crowned
by a Byzantine citadel, which she could see from her streaky bedroom window, and the
shorn ruins of the Basilica of St. John, containing the disciple’s grave—ground zero,
the Ur-church, her father never tired of saying, John wrote his gospel up there. Her
father’s newly acquired habit to awake and shower before dawn for a circuit of reverent
wandering around Ayasuluk Hill before breakfast, returning in time for coffee and
scrambled eggs with the man he called his uncle, her trainer or helper or whatever,
the person readying her for what she prosaically called the Pope Thing.

Her indoctrination began the evening they drove down the mountain from Meryemana into
Selcuk and found the house at the back of the village. The minute she walked through
the front door there was Mr. Maranian, her eyes gladdened by the sight of him, his
herringbone jacket and sweater vest (doesn’t he know it’s ninety degrees out), yellow
tie, rumpled trousers, steel-framed glasses, dignified posture—Maranian, her mirthless
surrogate grandfather. The dry bag fell from her hand and she skipped to kiss his
cheeks but he accepted her affection rigidly, eyes slitted and his palms out flat
at his waist to keep a tense distance between them.

This is a dirty business, he said by way of greeting, scowling over her head at her
father, a disaffected salute, but she refused to be chastened.
My boat sank!
she was finally able to blab but he already seemed to know, dismissing her excitement
with a grimness she would not heed. He stepped out of the way of an elderly man coming
from the kitchen, his beige linen suit protected by a flowery bib apron, the collar
of his black shirt open beneath the stringy wattles of his throat, a shoulder oddly
slanted, his face like chiseled stone with robin’s-egg-blue eyes sunk below a skull
squared by the brush-cut wheat stubble of his hair. He was good-looking, even at his
age, a raw handsomeness more virile than alluring. He frightened her a little even
as he met her with the warmest of disconcerting smiles, his lips parted across gold-capped
teeth, looking at her as if she were a beloved ghost he had spent a lifetime chasing.
Then he bowed at the waist like a clownish gallant and she gawked at the old man’s
mangled ear and he moved forward to embrace her father with one good arm. The two
exchanged a hug more brotherly than formal, conversing in a language she had learned
to recognize since her father’s trips to Belgrade, but his apparent fluency in Serbo-Croatian
surprised her.

Come, meet my daughter, her father said in English, taking the old man’s hand. Dottie,
he said, this is Davor, a friend of our family for many years.