The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover

by Bob Shacochis

  She’s eleven years old, for God’s sake! There are people and things she needs to be afraid of. And if she gets any more independent, why not plant a flag on the kid and declare her a sovereign nation.

  Later that evening when he was in his study she had asked her father about a sensation she had felt at times during the game, when she had stopped at a crossroads and looked around, trying to get her bearings—was someone following her?—and he said, yes, now next time I want you to see if you can lose him, and he bet her a dollar that she couldn’t. She lost four before winning four, and then that part of the game seemed finished.

  In Africa her father encouraged her in the rich extravagance of her freedoms. At that age she experienced the vague feeling that it must be difficult for a person like her mother to have a child as willful and unaccepting of boundaries as her daughter had proved to be, but for as long as she could remember, she had neither her mother’s attention nor yielding affection. She was, of course, daddy’s girl, but then so was her mother.

  In the Mercedes with the chauffeur she remembered that when she was younger she’d loved hearing the story about how her father, the young consulate in Morocco on his first foreign service assignment, had rescued her mother, a twenty-two-year-old Peace Corps volunteer raised in Fulton, Missouri, from imminent injury and perhaps a thousand deaths at the hands of tribal heathens massing outside the mud-walled house where she lived. She was staying with a family of eight in a backroom without windows and ventilation and just a squat hole in the yard for a toilet and was served her breakfast of bread and cheese and yogurt and her dinner of couscous and cauliflower by a silent wife watched over by an ever-changing number of teenage boys who, when the mother wasn’t looking, rubbed their groins when she made eye contact with them. This disgusting tableau was garnished with a soundtrack of cackles emitted from an ancient grandmother covered head to toe in blue robes, planted on her cushions in the corner of the kerosene-smelly kitchen. In truth, these heathens were no more of a threat than can be posed by a well-behaved room of doe-eyed Berber schoolchildren who mechanically repeated every syllable of English that left her mouth six days a week, including, after just two months in the country, the declaration, I think I’m losing it.

  It was well-known throughout the expatriate community in Morocco that her father exercised an open-door, open-phone policy at his villa for any volunteer in from the countryside for R & R or medical treatment, plus use of his chlorine-saturated swimming pool and the twenty-four-hour attention of his three domestics who came with the lease (there was no getting rid of them). On the day he returned home from the consulate to the panting sobs of an attractive young midwestern girl in the throes of a nervous breakdown, he ordered his housemaid to soothe her with an almond oil massage and his houseboy to supply food, drink, and, should she want it, a pipe of hashish (she wanted it, but being stoned only magnified her distress), then walked down to the city center and had his supper irrigated with several rounds of gin and tonics. He walked back up the cobbled streets to the villa to find the volunteer on the phone in his study, hyperventilating transatlantically to her parents in Missouri, and he took the phone from her grip and spoke calming, reassuring words to her family and replaced the receiver in its cradle and asked, What can we do to make you feel better? She said she wanted to go to church, and he said do you want to wash up first and she nodded tearfully and it took the rest of the night for her to scrub herself free of the germs of hysteria and disorientation. By Sunday dawn they were side by side in a pew at St. Eusti’s, celebrating first mass, the immediate bond of their devout Roman Catholicism overshadowing the differences that would make them an unlikely couple. By noon they had changed into bathing suits to retire poolside for a service of tea and fruit. By twilight her father-to-be had discovered what her mother-to-be most needed, which was to be held in the tender unquestioning arms of the familiar.

  That was how the story of her mother began, she thought, noticing that the driver had begun to circle past Hagia Sophia a second time, and only God could say how the story would end, though the ending already seemed to have taken place some time ago. You could not conceivably pack more irony into a life than had been stuffed into her mother’s, a woman who desperately wanted to escape the exoticism of faraway worlds, yet she had guaranteed her exile from her own by falling in love with the one person who would keep her from returning home. And how could her mother ever live in the States again, her daughter thought unkindly, without her legion of servants, without the accumulated privileges that only came from living overseas, the viceroy’s wife.

  They had married, one had to think too hastily, in Casablanca, her father undoubtedly expecting her to be the virgin that she was, her mother having never given procreation a thought. Then he surprised her on their honeymoon in Paris by leaving her there in a walk-up apartment on the Left Bank, a war bride and freshly pregnant, and flying away to his new assignment in Saigon. She liked Paris but despaired of being alone, found the student riots thrilling but almost everyone she tried to talk to was an insufferable snob (she had only to mention she had a husband in Vietnam to be held personally responsible for the war), and often she forgot that she was pregnant and imagined instead that she had contracted some awful African disease. After her son was born, her husband visited his new family like clockwork for ten days every other month, for a year, then three months in, one month out, and then she reclaimed him full-time, starting with his recovery from a bullet he had taken to his left shoulder during the Tet offensive. Then eleven months back in the States in the suburbs of Washington, DC (where her father purchased one of the new town houses mushrooming through the cow pastures of Vienna, Virginia), followed by two years in New Delhi, where their daughter was born and her mother stuck her with the name she would come to abhor, Dorothy—Tell Daddy there’s no place like home, baby—as if to punish them both for not being somewhere else where they belonged. Soon afterward she sunk into a postpartum depression, withdrawing to a room she took as her own at one end of the sprawling humid house where she lived in bed all day, listening to American folk music and smoking vast quantities of pot out of a chillum. When she finally emerged she had, in her husband’s words, gone hindu, wearing saris, visiting gurus, making a pilgrimage to the Ganges and returning to an infant and a small boy who seemed, perplexingly, as much a part of the house as the servants and rented furniture and peacocks in the yard and just as removed from her sense of responsibility. Her brother remembered the ammas and nannies—even the ambassador’s teenage daughter, Maura—and sometimes their father changing diapers and dressing them but never their mother.

  Cairo, her mother was fond of saying vindictively in the years ahead, made her come to her senses—she might pretend to go hindu but she’d never go muslim—and for the first and only time she fled all the way back to her parents’ cozy redbrick bungalow on a quiet maple-lined street in Fulton, arriving thoroughly exhausted, international travel with two small children clearly a message from God that God hates you. Her alcoholic but good-natured father an agricultural extension officer for the university in Columbia and her book-loving but narrow-minded mother tenured in the poli-sci department at Westminster College offered their tsking admonitions and unplacating concerns—But honey, this is the life you’ve made; I would think an annulment is not something the Vatican makes easy. What is it you want? First it’s save the world, now it’s ruin yourself. She answered always with two minds, self-doubt the only common trait between the pair—But you don’t know the things he does, she’d say direly, unable or unwilling to explain, and then in the next breath, He’s the most altruistic, dedicated man I’ve ever known, and then she’d wedge in a half-formed unconvincing diatribe on American imperialism that would cause her parents to shake their heads at the naïvéte that had driven her overseas in the first place.

  Think of the children, her mother would tell her quietly as they stood at the kitchen sink, washing up after meals. But
that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, she’d say back in a rebuke to her own mother. These places we have to live, they’re no place to raise children. It’s their attitude about things. Poverty doesn’t have to be so dirty, does it? And the way the men treat women—don’t get me started.

  Well fine, said her mother. There was no lack of decent folks here in Calloway County who would appreciate a helping hand. But she had felt called as a freshman at Washington University, watching television when JFK, campaigning in Michigan, had said if he were president he would create an agency for young people just like her, bursting with unshaped idealism but ready to help, bit by bit, to make the world better, and now here she was, knowing the call had been a mistake, crossed wires, and she felt her life had been misassigned and she was doomed to be forever remorseful that she had not succeeded in her callow passion to make a better world, or make even one life easier. Instead, she had made her own worse.

  Dottie knew what she was meant to know about the story, knew her mother’s point of view, her father’s, her grandparents’. Her brother’s, who could only remember that mom cried often and that their grandfather had taken them fishing in the Ozarks and that their grandmother had pulled from the oven tray upon tray of oatmeal raisin cookies, which she distributed parsimoniously. She herself only recalled the golden image of their father showing up at the door, come to retrieve them from what came to be known in the family as the Vacation. Although he had phoned his wife frequently during their separation, he assiduously avoided probing her thoughts and did not ask the questions she was not ready to answer, and so had left her alone for three months, three months being the limit, he liked to say, on losing touch with your old life and creating something new. Three months was long enough to have thought about everything and discuss it with her parents and decide what she wanted. Now that he was here she saw her error, not in leaving him but coming to Fulton, realizing her parents were going to see him as God’s gift to mankind, not solely because of his princely good looks or unstoppable charm or provenance in the world but because walking into church together to attend mass as a family they were, in everybody’s eyes but especially her parents’, the ideal family, a blessed family, and any failure to appreciate this condition surely meant that you were yourself a dismal failure, without virtue or hope. They had raised her to be grateful for her blessings, and honey, what in the world did you think a blessing was, if not this husband, these children?

  But he had come with a secret, a real secret, one that it was against the law to share, he explained, as he initiated them into the government’s intrigue. The president was going to China. Part two, you can tell anybody, he said: So are we. Not the mainland, naturally. Hong Kong. Her mother, this once but never again, enjoyed the posting—the overlay of British culture, urban amenities, rational people, Filipino domestics, clean beaches, the flocks of snow-white cockatiels in the air, excellent shopping.

  And the rest, as her family liked to say with the tacit understanding that they had been swept away into its current, is history.

  She loved her mother but her mother was not lovable; if that paradox didn’t exactly make sense, she did not want to think about it anymore tonight, definitely not tonight. The driver was trying to edge around a stalled dolmuş and force back into traffic past the Topkapi Gate, apparently to skirt Hagia Sophia for a third time. Dorothy knew to be patient and trust the game and not second-guess her father even if his behavior sometimes puzzled her girlfriends Elena, Yesho, and Jacqueline (whose name she envied), who understood most everything about her. Finally, she couldn’t keep herself from saying, with a slight tone of annoyance, Excuse me, and the driver’s glass-covered eyes jumped to meet hers in the rearview mirror.

  How many times are we going to go around the cami?

  Not jammy, he said, correcting her pronunciation of the Turkish word for mosque. Jahmy. And it hasn’t been a mosque for fifty years. Please, you can speak English, he said to her, and already she was interested in his schooled British accent.

  But Muslims go there to pray.

  And Christians go there to pray, but it is a museum.

  Shouldn’t we just go to the Kumkapi? she asked.

  He took his right hand off the wheel to pull back the cuff of his woolen jacket and tap his ostentatious wristwatch. Faulex, she thought immediately. It’s fake.

  There’s a problem, he said. No, not a problem, sorry. There is a delay.

  We have to kill time.

  Is that how you say it?

  It’s a funny expression, isn’t it?

  It makes good sense, he said. Killing is wasting. He twisted around to look at her and offered a cryptic modification of his axiom—but when it is necessary to remove waste, this is different—and then asked if she wanted to park and go inside and she said no thank you and he nodded and turned back to his driving.

  Have you ever been inside? he asked.

  Yes, she said. Several times.

  He was silent for a while, maneuvering through the swarm of cars and pedestrians and pushcart vendors, and her mind drifted inside the elephantine dome, through the ancient majestic spaces of the cathedral that soared above Istanbul like a stony rose-colored knob of mountaintop, goose bumps rising on her arms as they did when she first saw the Pantheon in Rome, the other place where she truly began to comprehend the words sublime and mystical, the basilica a mysterious world of its own floating between earth and heaven. Standing within the Hagia’s echoing mysteries, she had to admit, made her want to pray, but it also spooked her, its magical sweating column and holy hole and, worst of all, the column with the power to reveal whether or not you were a virgin—she wouldn’t go anywhere near it.

  Your father will not pass through the gates of Hagia Sophia, the driver said, interrupting her thoughts.

  Really? she said. You’ve come here with him then?

  Yes.

  And he won’t go in?

  No, he won’t go.

  Do you know why?

  I don’t blame him.

  She said light-heartedly, Sir, you’re being very mysterious, her thoughts drifting toward some of her friends, Turkish and foreigners, fun, hip, brilliant but smirking pseudointellectuals when the mood suited them, who wouldn’t bother to visit Hagia Sophia or the Blue Mosque or Topkapi Palace or any of the other fabulous sights of the city, all clichés, they said, manifestations of Scheherazade fantasies for Western tourists although, of course, they loved the Grand Bazaar, the biggest freaking shopping mall in the universe, refusing to see these grand edifices as she saw them. When a particular boy that she liked despite his arrogance had condescended to join her on a visit to the Blue Mosque, she had huffed and said in amazement, Cliché? How stupid! You might as well call the breasts on a woman clichés. And why not the moon as well? And the boy, mocking her, said he wanted to sell her a rug.

  My name is Maranian, said the driver. The intimacy of revealing his name seemed to open a door between them and now he wouldn’t stop talking. In Greek, he said, Sophia means divine wisdom, and the church, the centerpiece of the first Christian capital in the world, sat at the epicenter of three great empires, enduring the rise and fall of these empires, the obliteration of their wealth, the decline of their power, the sufferings of their peoples.

  But tell me, Mr. Maranian, why my father won’t go inside.

  Because he is a very religious man, he said.

  He is, she said. But Hagia Sophia is a holy place, isn’t it?

  Your father will not pray inside a church that has been defiled by the Turks.

  Oh, she said, but you’re a Turk, aren’t you?

  I am an Armenian, he said.

  I thought you were all dead, she said thoughtlessly.

  And so we are, he said with a sigh. And so we are.

  Oh, God, I’m sorry, she said, mortified by h
er insensitivity.

  Your father says he will return to the Sophia to pray after the next Crusade.

  I think he should just go inside and say a Hail Mary, she said, and not worry about it.

  I want to show you something, said Maranian, and sped off in the opposite direction from Kumkapi, across the Ataturk Bridge and up along the Bosphorus toward Beşiktaş, slowing when they came to a tree-lined avenue passing through a neighborhood that did not hold much interest for her. It was one of the first to modernize—which meant scramble to westernize—when the city began to reawaken from the stupor that had overwhelmed its citizens as the century turned and the Istanbullus realized that, once again, they had been crushed by history, shame and its lethargy imbuing in the population a trait known as huzun, a collective sadness and painful sense of loss, which she had heard her father liken to the saudade of the Portuguese. He even accused the city of stealing its angst from Europe: the black passions of the French, she had heard him say, then sharing the phrase with her girlfriends, who adopted it as one of their favorite jokes, laughing hysterically whenever they found cause to use it. She herself had felt the city’s melancholy but resisted it, except sometimes on a ferry or walking the cobblestoned alleys when she would be overtaken by a piercing sense of déjà vu, the feeling that she had already lived her life a thousand years ago and that she was now a phantom spirit—an angel, perhaps, or a reincarnate—who existed for the sole reason of bestowing eternal compassion upon her past selves.

  But this neighborhood Maranian had brought her to with its depressive hues did not lend itself to romanticizing the past. Winter would sit with a terrible gloom on these streets, yet this time of year the light flowed up from the Bosphorus in the late afternoon like warm syrup through the channels of the tidy street-level shops tucked into the uniformly high six-story buildings, row upon row, each one as anonymous as its companion to the left and its neighbor to the right, with the same glass entrances and minimalist facades plated with glass or polished granite and the same late-twentieth-century bourgeois respectability that—she clearly saw the cause and effect—suffocated personality and devalued culture. These buildings told her with a dry murmur that she was being invited to be an ordinary person in somnambulant possession of an ordinary life, a nowhereness of cloned identity that you could insert here or anywhere, what’s the difference, Paris or Berlin or London or the District of Columbia or Rome or a modestly affluent district in Istanbul. Inauthentic, she thought, which for her was a synonym for not worth preserving, not worth the trouble one might take to care. Not for her, at any rate.