The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (52 page)

I want you so much, he said with such heart-tugging sincerity that to be fair, a translation
from Turkish to English would have to flip a coin between
want
and
love.

She did not doubt the nature of his desire or his determination to have what he had
truly earned or arguably deserved, but she was appalled to find his touch unbearable.
Now she was turning the person she cared most about in the world into a beggar as
his fingers advanced without any consideration toward the stumpy forest of new growth
atop her pubis.

Stop, she said. Osman, please stop. Tomorrow or the day after, she promised, he could
spend the night and do what he wanted, have all of her, claim her, take her virginity.
Or what was left of it, if anything, she said to herself.

She awoke in the late afternoon to an empty room and a full bladder and dashed down
the hall to use the toilet and when she returned Osman was back, his smile open and
sweet with gratitude but his eyes betrayed a twinge of guilt and she noticed her embroidered
clutch on the dressing table had grown plump in her absence. The lira, he said, gesturing.
I put them in your purse, and she searched his face for any indication that he had
unearthed her alter ego, disconcerted by the sheepishness that crept into his self-involved
expression, not the reaction she might expect if he had spied at her phony passport.

I have to go, he said, taking her in his arms. I’ll come back later tonight.

But where are you going? she cried. I’ll go too.

It frightened her that he did not immediately consent to her company, weighing her
potential for being in the way. She understood better after his explanation—he was
taking the ferry to Karakoy to see Karim for a meeting he could no longer delay. He’d
be back in two hours, he said, and they would have dinner and would come back to this
room and he would spend the night—
Like brother and sister, I swear
—and at that moment she wanted to confess everything to him and start again from there
but instead she found herself clinging, pleading to come along, she absolutely had
to see Yesho and Elena, she’d call them from the ferry terminal and they could get
together and grab something to eat in Ortakoy. The boys were up to something, that
much was clear, but so what? and she promised she wouldn’t start anything with Karim.

Osman looked into her eyes, making a decision, she could tell, against his better
judgment, and kissed her and said, It’s crazy, okay? Something is definitely wrong
with me. You should wait here, but always with you, why is it I forget this very good
word? This very good word,
no.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

They got to the terminal early and she had time to find a telephone to call Yesho,
holding her breath while she listened to the rings, rehearsing the miraculous story
of Dottie risen from the dead. Instead, Yesho’s mother answered, and Dottie’s nerves
failed and without identifying herself she left a message for Yesho to join her friends
later in the evening. She fed more coins into the slot and dialed Elena, who picked
up and, immediately recognizing Dottie’s voice, began shrieking,
Yes, but, you fucking bitch, why you didn’t call sooner, I love you, you make me so
sick, how is America?
Another consequence of her father’s tomfoolery came to light—the day after the news
reports that her best friend had been lost at sea, a sobbing Elena had gone to the
academy to speak with the headmistress about organizing a memorial service for her
classmate.
Guess how pissed I become,
Elena bellowed into the phone.
Gone to America! But it’s the same thing as dead! I’m crying to her. What is the fucking
shit I am hearing? Our Dottie is gone!

She had to interrupt Elena’s cascade of lamentation and reproach, saying, You’re never
going to believe it, this is just insane, I’m calling you from Uskudar, and the squeal
coming through the line so high-pitched she held the phone away from her ear. Outside
the windows of the terminal she could see the ferry about to dock and they made a
joyous plan to meet at Gizgi in a couple of hours and Dottie said,
I have to go now
.

She went out on the quay and slipped to the front of the queue next to Osman and they
boarded with ample time to have their choice of seats in the bow and she picked the
bench all the way in the front to be able to watch the sun go down with an unobstructed
view. While the ferry loaded up, Osman flirted, pretending she was a stranger,
Excuse me, have we met? What is your name? You are the most beautiful girl I have
ever seen. What country are you from? May I please kiss you?
and she teased him back about the tenacity of horny Turkish boys and their annoying
belief in love at first sight. Then the boat was filled with people and the engines
throttled forward out into the rejuvenating Bosphorus and they leaned into one another
and committed the small scandal of making out in public. They spent the crossing being
what they were—young lovers, indefatigable and silent in each other’s arms beneath
the sunset, in motion and one and the same in their gratitude. She couldn’t remember
what else they might have said to one another until they were near the entrance to
the Golden Horn and Osman told her he’d be right back, he was going aft to use the
bathroom and grab a cup of tea at the snack bar. Did she want anything to drink? Sure,
she said. Cherry juice.

Did she see Maranian then, when she turned to watch Osman go? Which silver-haired
man was he in the crowd packed into the glass-enclosed sitting area behind the benches?
Did she even see a silver-haired man? Did she see a dozen of them? If she saw him
she could not possibly have really looked at him without panicking, so it never made
sense that she saw him, even if maybe she did. But of course he was there, somewhere,
tracking them, unable to save them or anybody.

The ferry cut ahead into the Golden Horn toward Karakoy and she waited for Osman to
return and then the ferry was docking and he had not come back and a patrol launch
with its siren howling sent a wonderful rooster-tail of water into the gloaming air
as it sped away from shore.

She did not ask herself where Osman was because the lines at the snack bar and toilets
were often notoriously long and nothing was unusual about finding yourself separated
from someone on the jam-packed ferries, especially at this time of the day. The ropes
were tied to their stanchions and the gangplanks attached and she became part of the
disembarking herd shuffling toward the exits, not bothering to look for Osman because
if they didn’t bump into each other haphazardly getting off the boat she knew he would
be there waiting for her, or she for him, on the quay.

Watching both gangplanks, her heart sank when she spotted Maranian in the crowd on
the second one, near the stern, frantic now to find Osman and get out of there and
disappear, and then in a panic, silently pleading for Osman to come and the last passengers
left the boat and where was Osman? She whirled away, spinning in circles, looking
for him in the throng of humanity on the landing, not seeing him but the sweep of
her eyes catching a man with a camera—she specifically remembered the camera and its
telephoto lens—talking to several police.

Maranian was calling her name—
Dorothy! Dorothy!
he must have known she had gone to Uskudar—and she saw him shoving through the crowd,
red-faced and apoplectic, shoving and pushing and coming to get her and she pinballed
around person after person across the square, still desperate to find Osman before
she herself vanished into the refuge of the city. Then, near the car park someone
else was calling her and it was,
thank God,
Karim. She ran toward him hollering Osman’s name.

We are waiting for him, Karim said. I thought he was with you. What happened to him?
asked Karim in a voice both defensive and accusatory and she said, Please help me,
there’s a man, please. I think he did something to Osman. What man? asked Karim, his
mouth seized with a crooked smile and his eyes shifty and craven. She saw another
man standing there but did not realize he and Karim were together until the two of
them began to speak too rapidly in Arabic for her to understand what they were saying.
Then Karim looked at her queerly to ask why she thought this man had done something
to Osman and she cried, her voice ranging toward hysteria, I don’t know, where’s Osman?
Where is he?

Karim’s eyes went suddenly cold and shifted over her shoulder and she knew someone
was behind her and she knew when someone grabbed her arm to drag her away that it
was Maranian. He was winded and trying to catch his breath, never saying anything
but looking crestfallen as she gyrated and fought and kicked at his legs, shouting
for him to let go
and then the person with Karim, whom she had never seen before, forced himself between
her and Maranian and then Maranian had toppled to the ground and she was in the backseat
of a car staring out the window at Maranian as if he had plummeted from the sky wearing
a rosebud of blood on his shirt and she said, dumbstruck,
What did you do?
as Karim started the engine and they drove away, tires squealing like bank robbers.

The two men talked nonstop, she remembered, but again she could not fathom what they
were saying in Arabic, the words had a pressurized velocity like spray from a fire
hose, arguing—
she, she, she—
until it finally dawned on her that
she
was her. Please, she interrupted them, Karim, take me with you! but neither of them
responded and she rode along limp and mute with shock, deep into the treeless hills
of the western slums where she had never been before and Karim, yelling at her, slammed
on the brakes and stopped with the engine running. Get out, he said, but she didn’t
move. Benumbed, she was hardly cognizant of being spoken to, and he repeated his command,
this time furiously, Dottie, get out of the car!
But why?
she whimpered and then the other man had turned in his seat and leaned back to land
a punch on her jaw and kept slapping her face until she had sense enough to find the
door handle and she tumbled out into the street wailing and the car sped away.

The first night on the streets she had walked past a police station and a minute later
wheeled around and went back and went in and the duty officer asked what she wanted
and she trembled trying to find the words and the words themselves quivered when she
finally said a friend of hers had told her about a friend of theirs who had had an
accident on the Uskudar ferry, did the officer know anything about that. No, not personally,
the officer said and pointed behind him to the ubiquitous television broadcasting
soap operas. There had been a news bulletin, he said, earlier in the evening. A student
had fallen overboard off the Uskudar ferry. They found him, didn’t they, she said.
He’s all right, isn’t he? and the gendarme gave his head a sympathetic tilt and said,
Sorry, I must tell you, this person drowned.

Because of her own experience on the Sea of Marmara at first she refused to believe
that Osman had actually drowned, assuming, instead, that he had managed to swim ashore
or had been rescued and they were hiding him for some reason but as the night went
on she began to believe it was true. Osman could not swim well enough to survive plunging
off the ferry and who pushed him and why was certainly no mystery to her. The farther
she walked the more she began to feel herself enclosed in a fog that threatened to
suffocate her if she stopped moving and she began to obsess on the thought that she
was having a strange mystical experience, like she was tripping or in some drug-induced
trance and floating, an ashy, scorched rag of a spirit, and for the next day or two
or three she was unable to extricate herself from the incapacitating stupor that accompanied
her weightlessness, a pervasive numbness that left her ambulant but without a sense
of free will, and when she tried to make her mind operate lucidly it would function
in no other way except through the simple logic of hatred, a searing, linear, easy-to-connect
design that created an isosceles triangle from which her father reigned at the flaming
apex, and she and Osman thrashed underfoot, and off to the side of this pyramid lay
the stick-figure body of Maranian, a cast-off extension of her father’s power, and
the antidote to this power and its unspeakable effect was a secret beyond her knowledge
but what she instinctively knew was a daughter’s formula to mete out punishment for
his control over her, her mind and body welded into a perfect communion and her unholy
peregrinations through the city guided by her quest for revenge. A perfect communion,
until her lust for vengeance expired, defiling what should, by right and by love,
have been Osman’s, and would have been, but became instead, by default, the property
of hatred.

What happened next? the man across the table asked. He was dressed in an army officer’s
uniform but had removed his hat and jacket and rolled up his sleeves as if he were
trying his best to suppress a natural inclination to intimidate the people brought
to him. She looked down again at the black-and-white photographs he had spread in
front of her an hour ago and then up again into the artificial kindness of his eyes,
the perfunctory gestures of compassion,
Would you like a tissue? Tea?
Not what she expected from a colonel in the Turkish military and in stark contrast
to the ugly treatment she had received from the gendarmes when they had taken her
into custody the night before in her room at F. Nightengale’s. They had delivered
her here from Uskudar in the morning in a windowless van but she had soon guessed
where they were, across the Bosphorus on the army base north of the marina where her
cherished
Sea Nymph
had once been moored.

What happened next?

She remembered most vividly the apricot spears of light breaking through the clouds,
lanced into the Bosphorus off the bow of the ferry, but what happened next she was
unclear about and lay crisscrossed and tangled in her memory, or, astonishingly, nowhere
to be found. It sickened her, this inability to remember clearly, the fear that she
had blotted out crucial moments, because what happened next, after she had been told
and shown days later what happened next, had been seared precisely into another part
of her brain separate from her memory, her version. The problem being, as she saw
it, that the two versions combined should make an inevitable whole yet they did not,
each instead conspiring to sow doubt into the other.

Their version: Maranian was on the ferry that day from Uskudar to Karakoy. Karim and
the Palestinian were also on the ferry.

Her version: Maybe she saw Maranian on the ferry. She was 99 percent certain she saw
him getting off in Karakoy. She never saw Karim on the ferry, or the man they said
was with him. She saw them, though, when the ferry docked in Karakoy.

Their version: The Palestinian shoved Osman overboard.

Her version: Daddy. How could it not be? Who else was so medieval that he would remedy
his daughter’s refusal to cease dating a Muslim by drowning the boy? Her father had
become a sword attached to the hand of an avenging God, striking down the guilty and
the innocent alike. But this version had caused her to do foolhardy, degrading things
to herself that she never wanted to remember as long as she lived.

Who was right and who was wrong and did it matter? After much deliberation she arrived
at an answer that provided the self under construction with its most vital component.
If it was true that the dead lived on, or carried on, in the living, then another
more consequential truth had to be accepted. The dead mattered, the dead cared, as
long as life mattered, and the living cared. The heart, one learns, whenever one learns
it, early or late, is a depository for the dead, a private necropolis. There is no
other, really. Where are they? Here, or nowhere. That was what the heart shared with
history. The holding, the preservation, the remembering—an eternal present.

What happened next?

August twenty-fourth was
. . .
? Or was the twenty-fourth actually the twenty-fifth?

She would stare at September first and see absolutely nothing there. The day before
and the day after were interchangeable in their fickle, wretched vacancy. September
fourth was the police station and questions questions questions and the morning of
September fifth still more questions after they had transferred her to this place
and then the terrible humiliating shock of learning how wrong she had been. Stupid,
stupid girl.