The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (50 page)

You must take off this dress, I think, said Osman with a nervous step backward. But
why are you wearing religious clothes? It shocks me, this dress.

It’s a disguise, she said, hoping such an obvious answer would mollify him, and she
removed the
kara carsaf
and pitched it over the side and tucked her clutch into the waistband of her jeans
and then, grabbing the curved handholds at the top of the ladder, maneuvered her body
to face the building and stepped one foot at a time onto the rungs. This is a little
hairy, she said. Shit. The blood drained from Osman’s face and he admitted he had
never dared to use the ladder, although when they were kids his brothers monkeyed
up and down it all the time. It’s not really so bad, she said, her encouragement halfhearted.
Come on, she said, and continued down, focused and methodical, feeling her way with
her feet, not looking up to check his progress until she found herself on the street,
in a small group of spectators who had stopped to watch such a curious show.

Osman was on the ladder but near the top, petrified. She called and waited but when
he didn’t move she climbed up again and grabbed a quaking ankle to calm him down,
feeling the fear in him like a reverberation of thunder through his flesh. Come on,
she wanted to say, you can do this, but thought of her brother, how wise her father
was to push his competitive daughter and lay off his son, and she remembered what
she already knew about Osman, that he was not physically bold, how she would tease
him when they would anchor the
Sea Nymph
to swim on a hot day, Osman a good enough swimmer but in dread of venturing into
water over his head. She said now what she said then—It’s okay, you’re doing great—and
when that didn’t work she understood he had completely lost his nerve and told him
to climb back up to the roof and go to his apartment and put on a hat or something
to conceal himself and she would meet him at the Spice Bazaar as soon as he could
get there undetected.

It’s okay, she said, go back. There’s a guy in a black Mercedes. Don’t let him follow
you.

If you fall, she said to herself, we fall together, a romantically morbid thought,
the residue of girlhood that appealed to her expiring belief in perfect endings.

She waited until he was on the roof before she descended again to the street, retrieved
the black dress off the pavement, and began her march through the labyrinth of hillside
alleys that twisted and turned back down toward the Golden Horn, looking over her
shoulder at each intersection before deciding left or right or straight, her choices
deliberately random, her pace brisk but not brisk enough to stand out in the flow
of pedestrians.

At the entrance to the Spice Bazaar she ducked into a public toilet and covered her
blatant westernness again in the
kara carsaf
and then
blended into the ever-present sea of jostling humanity that occupied the dim interior
of the market. She wandered in a state of jittery exhaustion, her head down and heedless,
bumped and bumping back in the stream of people until somehow she found herself circulating
in an eddy of modest tea stalls, single-vendor enterprises recessed into a wall of
stony earth, like dens in a catacomb, each occupied by a kettle steaming atop a brazier
and two or three rustic footstools and every kettle attended by an almost identical
old crone with a head scarf knotted under her doughy chin, stoic and shabby, roosting
on one of her stools. She heard a croak of Turkish directed, she slowly realized,
at her, a sympathetic beckoning—
Come, come, daughter. Come, sit. You are lost. I can see. Come drink my tea and rest—
and fell gratefully under the crone’s spell, folding herself onto the low stool in
the gouged-out hole that contained the austere world of this white-haired woman.

Yet when the old woman handed her a glass of apple tea, her clouded eyes stared inhospitably
at Dottie’s face.

Yabanci?

Evet.

Are you a believer, my child?

Yes, she answered without hesitation, recalling Peter in the courtyard of Jerusalem’s
High Priest; Peter, the apostle who proved you could lie your head off about Jesus
and get away with it. But he was a coward, she told herself, and I’m not. This was
different. The crone spoke to her in Arabic and she answered appropriately.

There is no God but God.

Her brief sanctuary among the believers ended roughly, though, someone’s fingers sinking
into the flesh of her upper arm and hauling her to her feet and there was Osman, just
as she had last seen him, nothing incognito about him, his face burning with disapproval.
Quick! he snapped and tugged her, stumbling, back into the crowds, and refused to
say a word or release his angry grip until they were back on the street, squinting
at each other in the sunlight. She asked if they were being followed and he said he
could not be sure and he demanded to know everything. Why was she behaving this way?
Why was she pretending to be a Muslim? Why was she being strange? and she asked him
Please don’t be mad at me.

Her lower lip jutted out and she studied his gaunt unhappy face and helpless eyes,
wary of offering even the smallest detail of her tribulations to pacify him, the train
of deceptions she shared with her father, hers coerced or impulsive, his either compulsive
or calculated in cold blood. Could Osman ever understand Carla? But then, yes, why
not, what was so difficult to understand about a whore? Islamic men took it for granted
this was a woman’s indelible nature. His intractable rejection of her would be the
inevitable result of the truth, added to the compounding of her own self-hatred, which
she had no appetite to indulge, nor time. It too would have to wait. Still, she began
to whimper, and when she saw his own eyes reflect her pain she blurted out a perilous
confession, telling him she had been attacked by a man.

He was struck dumb, his body tightening with outrage. Say something, she pleaded and
began to hiccup and Osman sputtered more questions. Attacked? Who did this? Was it
him? The man in the car?

Yes, she hiccupped.

We will go to the police.

No!

Yes, they are my friends.

What does that mean? What are you saying?

What did he do to you? I myself, then, will kill this man.

We have to go, she said. You have to protect me.

He brought her into his arms then and kissed her face and wiped away her tears with
his thumb and promised. She wasn’t asking much, she told him. Take me back to the
academy in Uskudar, where she could feel safe again in her own room. They would talk
and she would answer his questions and then they would make a plan. A plan for what?
he asked and she told him, A plan for being together.

Tabi, tabi,
he assured her, yet the set of his lips seemed indecisive, and he said he’d need
to place another call to Karim.

She was cheered to see the ferry station at Eminonu still jammed at this late hour
of the morning and they lurked inside one of the souvenir shops on the perimeter of
the square, keeping an eye out for Maranian’s black Mercedes, and then made a dash
for the Uskudar ferry, sliding into the push of last-minute passengers. The Eminonu-Uskudar
route was Istanbul’s most traveled, requiring the fleet’s largest ship to carry thousands
of commuters daily between Europe and Asia, and it took them several minutes to press
through the passageway to the bow and squeeze in alongside other passengers on one
of the open-air benches on the forward deck. They cuddled together, Osman’s arm around
her shoulder, pulling her into him with tender mercy, as the ferry churned away from
the Golden Horn into the once-magical waters of the Bosphorus.

I’m really, really sad, said Dottie.

Then I am sad as well.

I miss my sailboat, she said.

Yes, Osman echoed her. I miss it as well.

There was this thing troubling him and she thought she knew what it was and she thought
if she mentioned it it would go away. Your father seemed nice, she said, feeling Osman’s
body tense as he automatically agreed with her, like a recorded message on a machine.
She held still and waited for him to explain but as the silence became uncomfortable
she allowed herself to wonder if the estrangement between Osman and his father had
been a lie, a dramatic fabrication, a better story than the real story. He had been
reading her thoughts, it seemed, because he turned from watching the approaching shoreline
of Asia and met her eyes with a look of surrender and said what he had told her about
the situation with his father was true until about six months ago.

You mean, before you met me?

Yes, he nodded.

What happened six months ago?

I took a position with the state, said Osman. This pleased my father, and he welcomed
me back into his home. My home.

What does that mean—a position with the state? Have you dropped out of school?

No, no. It’s nothing. But it made my father happy.

But why did you not tell me? she said and, plaintively sincere, he told her that the
story of his estrangement with his father had never felt like a lie but felt more
true than the reality that had replaced it, the years of bitter rejection and self-recrimination
more vivid and alive than the past few months of eating breakfast each morning with
his father, the two of them acting like those years were in the past, or had never
happened. He asked her to understand and she said she did and she loved him and then
the ferry was tying up to the dock and Osman went inside the terminal to telephone
Karim.

Is everything all right? she asked when he came outside again and they began to walk
up the slope to the academy.

Yes, fine, he said. It’s nothing. He and Karim had arranged to meet today. Perhaps
later, I told him, and he said okay.

Classes were still in recess for summer break, the new semester a week away, and the
campus seemed unnaturally abandoned. Her keys lay in the mud somewhere on the bottom
of the Sea of Marmara and she had to buzz the resident attendant to come unlock the
door of her dormitory. The RA came down, not the one Dottie expected or liked, a gormless
dull-faced stork too lazy to change out of her pajamas. Through the half-opened door
she gawked stupidly at Dottie and told her it had been kind of weird having to think
of her as drowned and then, like, not-drowned, and if Dottie needed something she
should go to administration, the RA said, because she wasn’t authorized to let her
into the building.

Osman’s face reflected her own dismay. She knew you were alive, he marveled as he
trotted after her toward the academy’s main building. How was that possible?

I don’t fucking know, Dottie snarled and then stopped in her tracks, turning with
a cringe of apology for her tone but then she was screeching that her father was sick,
not sick like ill, sick like insane, and Osman finally managed to settle her down
sufficiently to enter the central suite of offices for a visit, unannounced but apparently
anticipated, with the headmistress, a Canadian educator with a gray bob and pale,
worried eyes who decades ago had fallen in love with a Turkish man and decided to
make her home in Istanbul despite getting what the students called The Big Heave-ho.
She came out from behind her desk and swept Dottie into a consoling matronly embrace
and piped, What an adventure you’ve had, eh? adding with dry amusement, You haven’t
converted, have you, my dear? her eyelids fluttering at Dottie’s torn outer-dress.
They sat in adjoining upholstered chairs opposite one another and the headmistress
rested her chin in her hand pensively and examined the confusion in Dottie’s inchoate
eyes and said, I’m positively delighted you found the time to come say good-bye but
I’m beginning to suspect that wasn’t your intention.

Dottie forced her voice to be steady and asked, Have you spoken to my father?

Indeed, I have. He didn’t say, but he seemed to be calling from the airport. What
he did say was that he thought you might be stopping in this morning for one last
look around and if I saw you to tell you to call your mother in the United States.
Would you care to use the phone?

What she wanted, and wanted desperately, was to go to her old room and lie down and
yank the bedcovers over her head but the headmistress received this request with a
wide-eyed expression of pity. You poor thing, she said. That bastard. He didn’t have
the balls to tell you, did he?

The headmistress said she had been terribly relieved to get a call from Dottie’s father
the day after the newspapers had reported the two of them lost at sea, and then quickly
disappointed to hear him say that his daughter would be attending her final year of
secondary school back in America, a consequence of Dottie’s decision to live with
her mother.

No, said Dottie, stunned. That’s not true. It’s not right, it’s not true.

True or not, said the headmistress, at your father’s instruction, your room has been
emptied and your things shipped to your mother’s address in the States. I’m sorry,
Dorothy. Would you like to make that phone call now?

She nodded through tears and without being asked, the headmistress stepped discreetly
out of the office for a few minutes while Dottie placed her call, not to her mother
in Virginia but to her father’s secretary, Mary Beth, in Ankara, who responded to
Dottie’s histrionic demands with mechanical calm, explaining that her father was traveling
and could not be reached and that she had a reservation at the Hilton under the name
of Carla Costa and in the morning she should wait in the lobby for Mr. Maranian, who
would drive her to the airport to catch a midday flight to Dulles. That’s all I know,
honey, said Mary Beth, and Dottie lost control, shouting through her tears, You’re
not telling me! Where’s my father? What about that man, the
signori
? The one who was supposed to kill the Pope! Tell me about him!