The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (49 page)

In a daze she registered a stabbing at her anus, then a searing nova of incandescent
pain as the broomstick of his Soviet-made prosthesis ripped through the clenched ring
of muscle into her rectum, sawing back and forth, lubricated now by her blood. She
had stopped breathing and then when she started again her lungs expanded and emptied
like bellows and each time she tried to press up and away he sank deeper into her
and she felt a live coal stoked forward into her bowels.

She screamed once, suspended in agony, but did not call out for help, help itself
arriving anyway but not before she had regained some of the control she had forfeited,
as she had been duly warned. Her neck strained to lift her head to see better. Bending
her arms above her to claw at the
signori
’s hovering face, she raked bloody cat-whiskers across his cheeks, several of the
glued-on fingernails broken off and implanted in the furrows. For a moment he seemed
uninterested in protecting himself but then he snatched one of her hands as her other
found the full bottle of whiskey, her frenzied backhand, swatting hard at the dome
of his skull until the bottle connected with his forehead, the force not enough to
bust the glass but strong enough to stagger him back a few steps, off her and out
of her and against the looming tower of her father as she wrenched herself upright,
yanking her panties back in place before she turned into a pillar of stone. Someone
took her arm and began to pull her toward the door but she fended Maranian off without
truly seeing him or realizing what she was doing, her befuddled eyes fixed only on
her father and his prisoner.

The
signori
’s blood-smeared phallus bobbed in the air, a hellish divining wand, ghastly in its
prominence. Her father was certifiable, his madness a shimmering aura. His forearm
collared the little man’s throat and dragged him backward and his free arm swung in
a half-circle to bring the silenced barrel of the gun he held to balance at the base
of the
signori
’s everlasting erection. For a split second the eyes of both men focused on her as
if she might pronounce judgment but her thoughts were muddied and she had nothing
to say, the tremors in her thighs made it a struggle to just stay on her feet, and
then
phfft,
her father pulled the trigger. Except for the quick sharp spit like a cobra strike
the pistol was noiseless and the spray from the shot flecked her chest and face and
the ceiling and walls with crimson. Her eyes were wide and open and her remarkable
calmness lay blanketed over the hopeless truth that she felt nothing at all. She stared
with empty astonishment at the
signori
and the gory stub in the fly of his trousers and the lump of the blown-off part like
a garden slug in front of his bloody shoes. He did not appear to be in great pain,
maybe the nerves there dead long ago, maybe the opium, but she felt at sea with the
lack of stage directions. What to do next? What to say next? Stand where?

Her father gestured angrily with his head for Maranian to get her out and this time
his touch felt clarifying and she looked at Maranian and then at her father with fierce
complaint. But her father was too far fallen, unavailable, into some other universe
of reasoning to absorb her grievance or even its existence. She watched as he released
the
signori,
who crumpled down into one of the wingbacked chairs cupping his blasted groin and
tossed his head back to squint with pained wonder at her father and asked in chopped
English, Who are you?

Maranian pulled her to the door and she turned on him with blistering scorn and became
senselessly combative, pushing him away and slapping wildly, his failure as her guardian
as incomprehensible as her father howling a name she had never before heard as she
fled into the hallway.

I am Stjepan Kovacevic. That’s who I am,
mujo
. Kovacevic. What do you think of that?

On the opposite side of the hallway was a door identical to the one that closed behind
her and behind this door her father’s stakeout. She knocked twice tentatively with
quivering hands and listened for a moment, despairing because she had not known and
could never have guessed but she knew now, no one was there to call to except the
ghosts of her father’s past and he had been alone in the room. Daddy was the only
one there, a man with a camera, watching, eye to eye, filming his daughter’s violation,
her face separated from his by a looking glass, his heart on a five-second pause.

The heels were impossible on the steel mesh of the fire escape and she flung them
off down into the darkness of the back alley below where they thudded on the roof
of the waiting taxi. By the time she had descended to the street her entire body had
begun to tremble and her teeth were clicking and she ignored the taxi, whisking past
it and then stopping to pull out her earrings, thinking she had to give them back
and then she would be done with all this, but her fingers did not seem to want to
do this simple thing and the taxi started and eased up next to her. When the Armenian
lady saw her condition she hauled Dottie into the backseat and held her throughout
the delirium of sobs and convulsions, the lady petting the girl’s hair as the tears
stained her blouse and the girl’s racing breath moderated and she whimpered for a
while longer and then stopped.

Sit up now, she heard the Armenian woman tell her. Let me look at you.

I’m bleeding, Dottie said, staring blankly at the red blots she left behind on the
woman’s blouse.

Please, let me see, said the woman, taking Dottie’s chin and turning the girl’s head
out of the shadows to examine her face and neck. Here, you are cut here, she declared,
pointing to a small purple gash on the girl’s breastbone. It’s not so bad, I think,
and she took a handkerchief from her purse to dab at the wound. Here, she said. Without
asking she rehooked Dottie’s bra and then began to extract her arms from the sleeves
of the
carsaf
and when the girl began to resist this she said, What’s wrong?

I don’t want—I want the dress. Leave it on, please.

Yes, okay, said the woman, but let me see, and she continued carefully to pull her
arms free until the top half of the dress was down at her waist and the woman gave
her a once over until she was satisfied the girl had no other visible injuries.

Your legs?

My legs are okay.

She convinced Dottie to put on the blouse she had worn earlier in the evening at the
consulate and then the girl hunched her arms back into the sleeves of the
kara carsaf
and pulled its hood over the top of her head and the woman reached again into her
purse and dug around and removed a hair barrette and nail file and made a hole in
the buttonless seam of the bodice, inserting the clasp of the barrette through that
hole and a buttonhole in the opposite seam and fastened the two sides together and
said kindly, Okay? I think this is better.

I want to see Davor, said the girl.

The woman sighed heavily and spoke in Armenian to the supernaturally aloof driver
and they drove out of the alley and back to the front of the block and cruised the
street and Dottie asked, Where did they go?

I don’t know.

That man wasn’t going to hurt the Holy Father, was he?

Maybe. I don’t know.

They know each other, don’t they?

Who?

My father. The
signori
.

I cannot answer these questions. I don’t know.

He’s going to kill him, said the girl. I don’t care.

Here, put on your shoes.

Don’t you want to know what happened?

Do you want to tell me? said the woman but Dottie did not respond and the woman said,
No, what happened is not my business.

The woman quietly explained that it was her job to return Dottie to the pensione where
she could change back into her own clothes and be herself again and safe and when
her father came to get her maybe he would have the answers to her questions or maybe
not, maybe it was best to forget these questions and so the girl remained silent throughout
the ride, neither Carla nor Dottie but some other unknown and forsaken self. How easy
it now seemed to perceive the essence of men, their irreversible consummating need
not for sex but for the cruelty sex invited, vigorous but impersonal, the domesticated
savage rediscovering primal rapture reminding you, the female, of his fundamental
wildness and the impossibility of that wildness lying dormant forever. This lunacy
males contained—she was sure she was right about this, the absolute prevailing truth
of men, every one of them complicit in the infinite perversions of desire, a brute
or a secret brute.

No, she contradicted herself. That’s so wrong, and she repeated his name to herself,
the sound of it like an unwanted invitation for her heart to awaken: Osman, Osman.

The sting in her bottom would not abate and still it bothered her less to have been
sodomized by a depraved Yugoslavian freak than to have her thoughts skitter around
the inconceivable notion that her father was, in some way she could not yet put her
finger on, liable for her rape. Of course there was the inexpiable delay in sending
Maranian into the room and it was connected to that blunder but it was something more
than that, arguing to herself against what would be evident to any human being, even
the worst people on earth, Okay, he’s gone too far, this is too much. He fucking watched.
He sat there with his face inches from hers and would not stop. Could not. Five seconds
of unthinkable depravity before he pressed the button that unlocked the door for Maranian
to enter the room. Five seconds, five strokes. Did he sink the
Sea Nymph
too? Was that his doing? Why didn’t he just turn her into a cow to swim the Bosphorus?

When they dropped her back at the pensione she tried to return the
nazar
earrings but the Armenian lady stopped her hand and said with sad eyes I want to
give them to you, please. And wait, this too, she said as the girl opened the taxi
door and she gave her the other half of the torn one-hundred-dollar bill.

Whatever inside the pensione had seemed intriguing to her hours before now seemed
desolate and eerie and as she ran up the stairs to the room she became aware of a
rivulet of blood sliding down her thigh and in the bathroom she left the light off
and showered in darkness and dried herself and lay naked on the bed sucking her middle
fingers, her body curled and catatonically tucked into fetal limbo, waiting to be
born or born again, craving Dottie yet willing her to go away.

Every so often her muscles tightened and she felt a low moan vibrating in her throat,
an intermittent release of an injury greater than her body reckoned with. No one came
but it was hours before she understood that she did not want them to come. In the
predawn light graying the room’s window she jumped up suddenly and dressed in her
jeans and running shoes and T-shirt and replaced Maranian’s grandmother’s gold cross
around her neck, the tiny weight of the crucifix pecking at the cut in the center
of her sternum. Then she covered her clothes with the black shroud of the
kara carsaf
and wrapped the hood over her hair and grabbed the clutch with Carla’s passport and
crazy money and flapped out into the city like a damaged bird. Only her green silk
underwear with its shameful bloodstains remained on the bed, something for her father
to find.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

The muezzin sang from a nearby mosque—
Turkish roosters,
one of her father’s less noxious insults—and for a moment she yearned to slip off
her shoes and go inside and pray and find solace among the women, covered and segregated
in their balcony and shielded from the maniacs below, but the impulse, she realized,
recoiling from the entrance, was sinful and as a sinner she had outspent herself.
Aimless only briefly, separated from everything and existentially out of reach, she
advanced like a small pillar of black smoke through the brightening streets slowly
filled with Istanbullus at the start of their day, a specter in a billowing dress
descending through Taksim Square and Pera and down the hill to Karakoy and the Golden
Horn and the people clustering at the ferry docks, crowds of businessmen drinking
tea in the sharpening light of the new day, the night’s violation like a switch thrown
off in her soul. Of these things, the events, her history, the pain, the secrets of
her life, no one, she felt, would ever or could possibly know.

Then staring into glittering haze, watching seagulls dive into the water and understanding
her father’s mendacity, to which she was no stranger and often an accomplice but had
never once believed could be so perfidiously turned against her and her life held
hostage still, as some lives everlastingly are, by relentless love. Battered by a
love contaminated with all manner of immortal feuds. Her father’s claim—
I am Stjepan Kovacevic.
What did this mean? Another nom de guerre,
like Carla Costa? Knowing this: shackled to his obsessions, her father could not stop
no matter what, always betting on the consequences breaking his way—short term, certainly;
long term, if God so deemed. Repercussions? Not to worry, Kitten. He could separate
people and events and missions and affairs and yet, she would eventually understand,
he could not separate the bigger things in his life that sorely needed separation:
patriotism and hatred, love and violence, ideology and facts, judgment and passion,
intellect and emotion, duty and zealotry, hope and certainty, confidence and hubris,
power and fury, God and retribution, dreams of peace and fantasies of war, one’s devils
and one’s angels. The past and the future, upon which he asserted ownership. Righteousness
and a moral compass that had never been galvanized to true north.

But of course it wasn’t his fault, what had happened—How could it be? she argued to
herself. Surely there was an explanation for his inexplicable failure. And wasn’t
it true that Carla was asking for it, Carla had it coming? No matter what else was
true, wasn’t that true too? Imagining herself sealed inside a bubble of unswerving
guardianship, she had goaded the
signori,
whoever he was, the embodiment of some wickedness out of her father’s past. And what
would it take to unlearn Carla, relearn Dottie? Here she was in Dottie’s real life
again but not really because that Dottie did not exist anymore and the Dottie reemerging
could only be a pathetic fake
and how was it any longer reasonable to be either of them?

Crossing the bridge on foot because her lira and whatever else remained from the boat
were in the dry bag in the trunk of Maranian’s car and it was impossible to buy a
ferry ticket with a hundred-dollar bill and then hiking up the hill behind Eminonu
weaving through the busy streets, nothing in her mind but the cough of indecipherable
voices and the beep of horns and the clank and jangle of shops unshuttered. Not aware
of time or place or direction or anything at all until she found herself at the crest
of the hill across from the university, standing at the corner of the block she believed
was Osman’s, the block where he always asked to be dropped if they were sharing a
taxi, standing to wave as she was driven away. Strange for a Turkish boy to never
invite his girlfriend to meet his family, but not so strange perhaps if the girl was
a
yabanci
and the son and father would not reconcile with one another. She stood for some time
gazing trancelike at the row of squat turn-of-the-century apartment buildings and
then went up the block, door to door, asking the
kapici
s, the doormen,which one belonged to Osman.

Ah, yes, my daughter, said the third
kapici,
two doors farther on they live. At the fifth building on the block, she hesitated,
staring at the glass door until the
kapici
noticed her and came out.

Buyurun?
May I help you?

Evet.
Yes.

Then, before she could explain herself, Osman’s spindly little sister Saniye appeared
over the doorman’s shoulder, stepping onto the midway landing of the cement stairs
leading to the ground floor. A few times during the summer she and Osman had let Saniye
tag along with them to the cinema, the fourteen-year-old more interested in spying
on the lovers than watching the action on the screen. Now she wore her school uniform,
a backpack over her shoulders, a fat textbook cradled in one arm while her free hand
stifled a sleepy yawn. Then the book dropped and her mouth stayed open and her hands
pressed the sides of her face as she stared at the girl entering the foyer and exclaimed
her disbelief,
How could it be? How could it be?

In her excitement, Saniye ran down the steps to kiss the cheeks of the wet-eyed ghost
and pull her by the hand up the stairway in a cloud of Sweet Pea perfume, her breathless
squeaky babble rising with them all the way to the top floor and an open door flanked
with shoes and plastic slippers,
We saw you on television, my brother has been inconsolable, where have you been, you
look like a ninja, why didn’t you phone us,
why are you in this ugly dress, what happened on the sea, Osman now will die of happiness,
come in, come in, shhh, say nothing, he is in the kitchen, shhh, oh, my God, shh
.

Hand in hand they went at Saniye’s insistence stealthily to the threshold of an expansive
kitchen at the back of the apartment and peeked in upon Osman and an older man in
a business suit across the room preoccupied with their breakfast, sitting at a small
table in front of a bank of windows looking out over the city. Osman, she saw, was
growing a beard, or else, too distraught, hadn’t bothered shaving, and had hacked
off most of his beautiful curls. But the thrill was too much for Saniye, who began
to hop up and down, shrieking the news to her brother and—a shock in turn for Dottie—her
father.

Osman! Baba! She is alive! Look!

Jumping out of their chairs, the men turned toward the girls in the doorway, the father
wiping his mouth and mustache with a cloth napkin, his eyebrows in a quizzical arch,
and Osman’s grimace struggled through a series of contortions, arriving at befuddled
astonishment. The silence between them filled with paralyzing wonder and she saw his
ashen-faced countenance darkened by the bluish circles under his eyes as a measure
of grief and her eyes welled up and still no one moved or spoke until his father said,
Salaam alaikum. Otur,
sit, and held out a chair for her and she went to the table and sat down and Saniye
said,
Tell us what happened!
and her father clapped his hands affably and ordered her off to school.

Tea?

She nodded with a shiver of gratitude at the father, who stepped toward the stove,
and Osman found his voice. My God, he gasped, sitting down across from her with a
look of terrified confusion. I don’t understand this.

I know, she said meekly. I’m sorry.

What happened?

She told him about the boat and the storm, about how they had nearly drowned but didn’t
and then had just continued on in innocence with no idea they had been reported lost
at sea and only last night when they returned to the city did she find out everyone
thought they were dead and she couldn’t sleep waiting for the morning so she could
come here and tell him it wasn’t true, she wasn’t dead, and she was sorry sorry sorry.

Sorry? No! he said almost angrily. You have given back everything to me. I was dead
too, you see. You cannot be sorry that we are alive again.

In her heart she felt the reassurance of these words and yet something was wrong.
There was an awkwardness between them, and no lack of reasons for it, but the immediate
source, she guessed, was Baba, Osman’s supposedly estranged father who seemed unable
to glance at his son without revealing an unwavering paternal investment in pride.
He regarded Osman with masculine affection, gruff yet slightly worshipful, and he
was kind and courteous to his son’s oddly dressed, newly resurrected girlfriend, behaving
with the utmost circumspection, bringing her a glass of tea and then, to her relief,
bowing his apologies for running away to teach a morning class at the university.

But left to themselves, the awkwardness in the kitchen only intensified. She stared
at a hard-boiled egg abandoned on the father’s plate and couldn’t remember when she
had last eaten. Can I? she said, reaching for it, and Osman said, Please, take it,
and they both fell silent again while she peeled the shell, thinking she had made
a mistake maybe, coming here, her faith in Osman perhaps misplaced. She had been certain
he would know exactly how to respond to her with the sweetness of comfort, what she
most needed, but now she saw he did not know how to respond but instead was causing
her to feel primed for heartbreak. Somewhere deep in the apartment she could hear
his father preparing to leave and then a telephone was ringing and then Baba had stepped
halfway back into the kitchen to say the call was for her.

Are you sure? she asked with streaking panic, already sensing it was true.

Two doors down to the right, said Osman with a complicated, leery expression.

Shaking, she went down the hall to a small sitting room and sat in a brocaded armchair
next to the phone and stared blankly at the framed photographs of Osman’s family and
fez-wearing ancestors arranged on a credenza and then picked up the receiver and said
hello, her father’s voice swinging into her stomach like a fist of humiliation. He
said he wanted her out of there now.

Where are you? How did you get this number?

I want you to go down to the street and wait for Maranian to come get you if he’s
not there already. Do you understand?

No. Why did you lie to me?

About what?

About everything.

Let me speak to this kid Osman.

No. Why? Where are you?

Listen—

But before he could begin the sentence she hung up on him. When she stepped back into
the kitchen, Osman didn’t wait to get the issue of the
kara carsaf
off his chest, but she buried his question under another mystery. She had to leave
right now, she told him. Would he come with her?

Where? What’s wrong? Yes, of course. One minute, okay? I have to use the phone.

Too many questions that she promised to answer later. She walked him down the hall
to the sitting room and then she left him there and kept going to the front of the
apartment into a living room decorated with gilt-trimmed satiny white furniture that
overlooked the street and parted the lace curtains in time to observe a black Mercedes
coming up the block in a crawl of traffic. Leave me alone, she whispered to the window,
turning with an indescribable pang of loss back through the immaculate room. Down
the hall Osman spoke in a furtive voice that grew lower as her footsteps approached
and the receiver clacked into its cradle just as she reached the door. He spun around
with guilty eyes, withdrawing his attempt at a smile when he saw the prosecutorial
look on her face.

I need to know, she said. Do you have another girlfriend?

How could you think this of me?

You thought I was dead, she said.

No, no, he protested. Well, yes, but still I had hope. There was reason to hope, he
said and finally held out his arms to her and she pounced into them and fought back
an incipient rack of sobs threatening to undo her, resting her face on his shoulder,
her nose burrowing into the earthy affirmation of his smell, ploughing her fingers
through the curls remaining at the back of his head, saying I love you so much, saying
it over and over again until he repeated the words to her, which made her brave enough
to ask about the phone. It was just Karim, he told her, they had planned to meet later
in the day. She was placated though not pleased by this answer and reluctantly ended
their embrace.

We can’t go out the front, she said. My father sent someone to get me.

Tell me—

I’ve told you before, she said. He hates Muslims. He doesn’t want me seeing you.

But—

Please, please. Let’s just go.

Tabi, tabi
. Of course.

They tried to do what could not be done, to resume their familiar summer game, giving
the slip to Daddy’s spies, only this time there was no lightheartedness between them
and no honesty and nothing to laugh about, this time was not an adolescent lark, and
Osman, enigmatic and clearly paranoid, seemed to her somehow preconnected to this
overtly dire shift in circumstances.

She shadowed him up a narrow staircase at the back of the kitchen to a hatch that
creaked open onto the storied roof of his boyhood, no evidence in sight of its former
role as sanctuary, and she allowed herself the luxury of turning in a circle, imagining
him there as a child, huddled with his books, and she thought she glimpsed the shine
of melancholy ebbing into Osman’s eyes and the truth she had long dismissed became
visceral—she would leave Istanbul because she never stayed anywhere and he would stay
because that was what he was meant to do.

Now what? she asked anxiously and he explained they needed to cross the rows of low
walls dividing each apartment’s property from the next to reach the end of the block,
where the afterthought of a single fire escape had been added onto the building after
the Second World War. The stucco walls were belly-high and easily climbed and when
they had come to the end of the complex she peered over the edge at the metal ladder,
reminiscent of a swimming pool’s, bolted to the exterior of the last apartment, straight
down to the alley four stories below.