The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (46 page)

The old man spoke to her and she looked from Davor to her father, who told him to
speak Italian, and then, her brain flipping switches and rewiring to Rome, she understood:
she was the
. . .
something—reincarnation?
. . .
of her grandmother.

You knew my grandmother? she asked, and then in English—Is that right?

He knew her very well, said her father, and she watched this man Davor wag his head
yes, yes, yes, with rueful sweetness.

Maranian, forgotten and abject, cleared his throat to excuse himself, saying, Steven,
documents I leave in the kitchen, good night.

Hey, no, her father protested. Stay for dinner, but Maranian withdrew with a morose
glance in Dottie’s direction, saying he would return in the morning with the lady.

Come, eh? said Davor to father and daughter, oblivious to the Armenian. Eat. A good
time.

His English is baby talk, said her father. Italian would be their lingua franca, and
in Italian she asked—a first sentence learned in any language—
Where is the toilet, please?

He had cooked a wonderful supper—veal parmigiana and fried artichokes and a tossed
vinaigrette salad of pine nuts,
finnochio,
endive, and mesclun greens and as they ate the old man could not take his eyes off
Dottie, his fixation quickly unnerving, drawing a shade over her curiosity and its
myriad questions.
Why don’t you just take a picture,
she thought, not knowing that was the plan for tomorrow. The meal was
so good,
a culinary echo of living in Trastevere, and she concentrated on that memory, walking
up the hill, ponytailed, with her uniformed schoolmates to the Janiculum, leaving
the two men to talk sparingly between mouthfuls in their private language, until the
old man winked at her father and reached across the Formica table to cuddle her hand,
a papery touch of paternal kindness, and declare in Italian his wish to rub honey
on her ____________ and lick it off.

Honey on my what? she asked in English, looking to her father, puzzled. I don’t know
that word.

Your nipples.

Oh. She frowned but did not take her hand away from the old man as she processed the
intent of this outlandish vulgarity. He’s joking, right?

He’s helping you, said her father. We’ve boarded the train. This is what we’re doing
now. Tell him anything you want. Tell him, Maybe later. Tell him to go fuck himself.

She locked her eyes on Davor’s but they had changed, darkened with sexual aggression
and she bunched her lips, staring back bravely at him as she lifted his speckled bony
fingers from her hand and said with a shallow tone of promise,
Maybe later, okay?
and the old man snatched her hand back, squeezing her fingers with increasing pressure,
saying,
Show me strength, girl,
and he was hurting her but she squeezed back stubbornly, between them now her resistance
and his sphinxlike silence, assaying her value, until his eyes relaxed and he jerked
his hand from hers to slap the table with a volley of applause.

In English, he told her he loved her very much. Not joking, he said, and she thought,
Fuck you.

He told her she was beautiful and added in Italian: Beautiful women get away with
murder.

Why is that? she said innocently.

The old man smiled, feigning his own innocence, and scraped his chair away from the
table, grabbing a bottle of Slivovitz off the counter. From Croatia, he said, the
best, but she did not want to stay up all night to drink with them and playact or
fatten her Italian vocabulary with anatomical parts and she kissed her father’s forehead
and went to bed.

In the morning after breakfast she was given a large brown envelope fastened with
a metal clasp, which contained her new identity—an Italian passport with the same
photograph used for her American one lost at sea, issued in the name of Carla Costa,
stamped with a student visa. Is it legal? she asked and her father said, You bet.
Now put Dottie out of your mind,
her father insisted,
Do not answer to Dottie.
You are Roman-born, the child of an expatriate American mother and Italian father.
Her make-believe mother: an art historian; her father a statistician for the Food
and Agricultural Organization near the Forum—it was all there in the documents in
the envelope, imperative that she memorize every last word, to live, breathe, dream
Carla
.

At first being someone else did not seem like much of a problem. Her assimilation
of Carla, her Carla feelings, felt real enough yet then what initially felt genuine
would end up feeling pretentious and fake—but her father, when he caught a whiff of
her misgivings, would tell her, Let Carla
be
you, you don’t have to be Carla, see the difference?

Not really, she said.

Try this, he said. Think self-replicating, self-affirming.

Okay, she said, dubious, but gradually she began to submit to the deeper temptation,
an acolyte in her father’s black zone of secrets. She would
be
the secret, penetrating the less overt layers of stealth only to find at the very
bottom of the game, through the game’s last unopened door, herself, the starlet of
enigma, the mystery made flesh.

Changing oneself, however, was a facile trick, a practice not unfamiliar to ordinary
teenage girls and their looking-glass wars. But Dottie glimpsed the real challenge
at the end of the masquerade—changing back was not so easy if your former self no
longer interlocked cleanly and separated effortlessly with the shape you had assumed,
and when you retraced your steps searching for your original self, maybe that wasn’t
enough, because self-possession would now mean
what?—
a sharing—or a refusal to share—between two selves. It was giving her a headache to
think this way.

Inside the packet as well were a from-the-shoulders-up photograph and a sketchy profile
of the target, her nemesis, the villain she would lure into the trap where, it was
carefully explained, he would be taken into custody, interrogated, and, after confessing
the names of fellow conspirators he had traveled to Turkey to recruit, deported. Why
not just grab him off the street? she asked and her father said, We’ve considered
that—too many things could go wrong. But the option remained on the table if she got
cold feet.

Despite his beribboned military uniform with its epaulette boards and oversized peaked
hat, the donnish appearance—an oval face, the wisdom creased at the corners of his
hooded eyes, the prominence of his Semitic nose and full, sensuous lips—of the target
did not resemble any image she had of bad guys, she thought, scrutinizing the photo
of a man somewhere between the age of her father and Davor. What’s his name? she asked
and her father said
Signori . . .
for you he has no other name.
Languages spoken,
she read:
Serbo-Croatian, Russian.
Do you know him? she asked. Davor said yes. Her father claimed a passing acquaintance.
Other languages
:
English, Italian, Turkish.
Fluency level: Poor.
She looked again at the photograph, the solemn undercurrent in his features that for
some reason she associated with a European academic, a teacher of philosophy, perhaps.
Yet of course he was despicable, a rabid Stalinist and puny anti-Christ, a colonel
in State Security, a thug plotting to murder the pontiff, a pedophile (if high school
girls counted
. . .
she wasn’t sure about that) and God knows what else. Certified by the devil. He would
want to fuck her—it would be so arranged—and she would encourage him to believe in
this absurd sicko fantasy and accompany him to a secret location and
then what
?

Not to worry, Carla, said her father. We’re going to rehearse the
then
and the
then what,
and once we’re finished, we’ll rehearse it all again. Step by step. Minute by minute.
You’ll have all the help you need.

She kept telling herself. I’m Carla. Carla, the schoolgirl who knows how to make ends
meet.

Maranian returned midmorning with the lady in tow, an officious middle-aged Armenian
woman with the short, burly body of a laundress-wrestler, her muscular legs protruding
from the black sheath of her skirt, plump feet wedged into leopard-spotted high heels
and tits like footballs jutting beneath her pink rayon blouse—an artless arrangement
of chic and frump. She carried a small vanity suitcase packed with lingerie and enough
gunk to paint the face of every whore in Istanbul. There is no good light in this
house, she declared, taking Dottie by the hand out the back door, ordering Maranian
to bring two kitchen chairs to the patio. Set them there, she instructed, gesturing
to an enclosed area shielded by a tall hedge of oleander. Now go away. You, she commanded
Dottie, sit down, please, and sat down herself, hitching her skirt up her thick pasty
thighs, her knees straddled around Dottie’s, who sat like a coiled spring while the
woman evaluated the structure and coloring of her face, opened the vanity case, and
went to work, chewing cloves to sweeten her breath. What’s this for? Dottie finally
bothered to ask. The woman took a small sponge and smeared her cheeks with foundation
and said irately, Please, no talking, and Dottie closed her eyes, not knowing where
to look, saving herself from having to look at the ludicrous grill work of wirelike
bangs on the woman’s low forehead. Her father came out once to check on their progress,
saying We’re just going to take a few pictures, honey, while the woman waved him away
like an interloper.

The application of cosmetics seemed both endless and invasive and Dottie whipped her
head violently out of reach when the woman made an attempt to pluck her eyebrows.
She was given a manicure, her broken nail repaired, talons glued onto each finger
and lacquered the color of geraniums, and then the woman began to fuss with Dottie’s
hair, teasing and spraying, Dottie visualizing the trampy style, hating it without
needing to see. When she had finished the woman said, Okay, inside, please, following
the girl back into the house, the emotionless expressions of the three men in the
kitchen—even Maranian—mesmerized by her sleazy transformation. Your bedroom, please,
said the woman, closing the door behind them, and then, Please, your clothes, remove
them. She stripped to her bra and panties only to be told, Sorry, everything, the
woman’s raised eyebrows clearly a reaction to Dottie’s shaved mons, turning her head
away with meaningless courtesy to hand Dottie a matching set of fire-engine red underthings,
lacy silk panties, and a sheer teddy. Put on, please
. . .
Okay, sit please, and Dottie plopped down on the edge of the bed blinking, suppressing
her humiliation, the funny weight of mascara on her eyelashes driving her nuts but
determined to maintain her equanimity. The makeup artist appraised her handiwork,
smoothing a few blonde strands of stray hair, snapped closed the vanity case, and
called out in her husky voice to the men that the job was done.

She was replaced by Maranian, carrying a camera fastened to a tripod and a spotlight
pole with extendable feet, her father and the old man close behind. When Maranian
rebuffed her with a censorious look, she could only think,
Why are you the one looking so put upon?,
watching him set up the camera, exclaiming out loud, Oh, my God, is that a Minox?
trying to be a good sport, a reliable member of the team with a positive attitude
and yet understanding Maranian’s impulse to protect her—but from what? She wished
he would just come out and say. From danger? But danger was
what
—your boat sinking? Men with vile intentions hitting on you? Having a run-in with
the police? Terrorist bombs going off in banks and restaurants? If he meant to exclude
her from danger, if he found her lacking because of her age or gender or inexperience
or some other unspoken belittlement, then who, she wanted to ask him, was misjudging
whom?

Maranian left the room to gather up the lady and leave the house, not to reappear
in her life, the two of them, until four nights later in Istanbul. She had no choice
then but to accommodate her father and Davor, her nonchalance withering when she stole
a glance at her father, slightly bug-eyed and lips clamped as if a bumblebee had flown
into his mouth. Her nerves tightened and she registered the charged air, prickly aware
of the impression she made, the crude taunt to any male in hot possession of a libido.
He wants to finish the job,
she thought, chasing the idea away as soon as it came to her, abiding by its ambiguity
so she did not have to acknowledge what she meant. She began to shrink from the motionless
assault of her father’s desire, crossing her legs in a vise, shielding her veiled
breasts with her arms, eyes downcast, and huddling, on the edge of being overwhelmed
by the moment’s unexpected hazard, the animal force uncontained even by fatherhood.
Then she heard the old man tell him to leave the room—
Naturally, you make her nervous—
and her chin was gently raised by Davor’s steady hand and he said, My dear child,
relax.

I will take a picture—two, three, nothing bad—to stimulate the
signori,
he told her, and then she could wash this nonsense off her face.

She was fixed in his crinkled gaze and its uncritical priestly solace, finding nothing
there to shame her and, in fact, she felt the truth of what he had told her the night
before, that he loved her without a price for his love. For some reason she was cherished
by this strange man, broken and old but also unbreakable and spirited in a way that
made any man seem young. When he seemed satisfied that she trusted him he moved back
from the bed, not to the camera but to the plain wooden chair where she had thrown
her clothes, folding them with care, placing them atop the cheap dresser with its
curling veneer, returning to the chair to sit, smiling at her with benign expectation.