The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover

by Bob Shacochis

  But you left, she said.

  Because the Turkish army is no good, he said bitterly, building steam for a tirade, stabbing his finger into the table. Because I cannot agree with their mission. Because I admire the PKK.

  I don’t know what that is, she said.

  Of course not, he said, continuing. They are the Kemalist nightmare. Because the only mission I agree with is jihad.

  Lost me again, she said.

  Because it is the duty of the faithful to recapture Jerusalem. Because I admire the mujahideen. Because I admire Abdullah Öcalan. Hezbollah. The Algerians. George Washington and Mister Lincoln. Abu Nidal. I admire Malcolm X. The PLO. The Malaysians and the Vietnamese. I admire them all because they submit to no one.

  I’m sorry, she said, finding his harangue tedious and fatiguing. Go to Afghanistan, whatever. What the fuck’s stopping you?

  Fuck! he sputtered, his eyes livid, bulging. You say this unclean word to me, fuck?

  Yes, fuck, she mimicked him, wickedly. Fuck fuck fuck.

  You wish to fuck? This is what you are saying?

  He intercepted her wrist as she tried to slap him, tightening his grip, her hand frozen in the air in front of his face, and she did not know how long the two of them remained like this, frozen in an eruption of hatred, or how long Osman had stood outside on the street looking in, his eyes frozen wide with alarm, watching their wretched little skit of ugliness unfold until she began kicking at Karim under the table and Osman rapped his knuckles on the glass and in unison they jerked their warring faces toward the noise and there was Osman’s head framed in a windowpane, his lower lip split and swollen, his own face thunderstruck with incomprehension, and how terrible, in the first hours of her first love, to feel her heart so clouded.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  She had been expected to dominate the five-hundred-meter freestyle against a field of more inexperienced swimmers, including a Turkish girl who swam spastically with her head above water, but frazzled by the vicissitudes of the day before, feeling puffy and sluggish, she finished an unprecedented fourth in the race and first in humiliation, a poor loser who could not bear the stain of defeat, deaf to the consoling efforts of her teammates, abandoned at poolside as she stormed off to the locker room to shower alone and flee their pity. Then she returned to her room in the dormitory, forgoing lunch to flop on her bed, half asleep and half on edge, until the house mother knocked on her door to report that her father was trying to get in touch and her mother had called again from the United States and someone else was waiting to speak to her right now.

  She went down the hall to the telephone cubicle to take Osman’s call, which began with congratulations for a victory that had never happened, though she did not tell him that, her thoughts still fixated on the shame she felt for being such a child, running out of the teahouse blubbering past a bewildered Osman calling her name and diving into the nearest taxi before he could reach her for an explanation—an opportunity that must then have fallen to Karim, and God only knows what he had said.

  About last night, she said, offering a meek apology, but when he took too long to respond she thought, Oh, God, and asked, How’s your lip?

  My lip? It’s nothing, he said. It’s not what you think.

  They hit you.

  Not at all.

  We should file a complaint.

  To complain about what? he asked, making light of his arrest. It was nothing serious. The police are like mountain dogs that guard the sheep against the wolves. But it’s not bad, like before, when they would bite anyone. These days they lift their heads to growl and go back to sleep.

  He had not yet thanked her for coming to his rescue and she held her breath waiting, wondering if he understood he could depend on her whatever the circumstance and, hungry for both his gratitude and forgiveness, she apologized again for her juvenile performance at the teahouse, for quarreling with his friend, for running away without a word, and she asked what Karim had to say and he laughed and told her Karim and the gendarmes had said the same thing, Your girlfriend is a pain in the ass.

  Very funny, she sniffed. Is that what you think, too?

  I think you are this girl in the American comic book. Wonder Woman.

  Wonder Woman has black hair.

  Of course. I am thinking of Supergirl.

  I’m not the kind of person who can just stand there.

  Of course.

  Not like your so-called friends.

  Of course. But Dottie, you must promise. If you see the gendarmes take me, don’t interfere.

  No, she said, hardheaded. Why?

  Please. It’s very complicated. Very sensitive.

  To appease him, she agreed, and again waited for his gratitude, until finally she turned petulant and wanted to know why Osman had never told her he had served in the army. He said of course he didn’t think it was important and she said, But that’s why you and Karim are friends, right? and he was silent for a moment until he said, Yes, that’s right, and she wanted him to tell her why he had joined the group.

  Unlike Karim, he did not deny its existence but he paused before answering and his voice became guarded. How do you know about the group? he asked and she told him Yesho had mentioned it. Okay, he said, how does she know?

  I have no idea, said Dottie. Is it supposed to be a secret?

  Yes, he sighed, explaining a certain level of secrecy was necessary. He had accepted Karim’s invitation to join because its members were his friends, bonded by the same hardships from their days together in the army, and he thought they had an interesting perspective on the nation, although he did not share many of their opinions.

  Opinions on what? she asked, and he said, Life, but she had more questions. Religion? and he answered, Sometimes. Afghanistan? Sometimes. Worried, she asked him, You don’t want to go to fight in Afghanistan, do you? and he laughed and told her, Definitely not. Never.

  She could not understand why the government would outlaw guys with little else to do but sit around bullshitting about life and he revealed that the devlet had invented an official description—illegal Koran school—for a group like Karim’s, a revelation that she grappled with, but he anticipated her question before she could form it and told her to stop fantasizing that he was an extremist or a militant or any brand of fanatic.

  Can I trust you? he said.

  Yes! she answered, as if it pained her to be asked such a question.

  Then you must trust me as well, he said. Believe what I tell you, not what you see. Not what you think you see.

  More than anything she wanted to say she had fallen in love with him but the sentence came out haltingly: I think. I might.

  You think? he teased, feigning dismay. Dottie, he said. When I dream, I dream of you, I dream only of our happiness.

  The relief descended through her muscles like a blissful sedative and she returned to her room to sleep soundly throughout the afternoon, waking slowly and lusciously until her mind whipped back to the other thing she had forgotten to do after speaking with Osman—call Daddy.

  Which was never easy. First, there were the chauvinistic Turkish operators to overcome, their deliberate misunderstanding of her careful pronunciations. Secondly, now that her mother had jumped ship and returned to the States, if she couldn’t get an answer at her father’s villa in Ankara she had to call the embassy switchboard, which would connect her to her father’s longtime secretary, Mary Beth, his selfless appendage. She was a camp follower dragged around the world by Dottie’s father and who would never put her through to him but instead ask for a call-back number and Dottie would have to sit tight wherever she was waiting for the phone to ring, which meant don’t call Daddy without a book to read. Dottie dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and walked barefoot down the hall to the telephone cubi
cle and dialed his villa—no answer—and then called the embassy switchboard and left a message and began to concentrate on a chapter in her geometry textbook. Fifteen minutes later the telephone rang—Hello, Kitten!—and she said, Where are you, you sound far away? and he told her Belgrade, and she said, That’s Yugoslavia, right? Correct, he said, and she asked, Is it pretty? and he said, Not to my eyes.

  When she asked what he was doing there, his answer was what she had come to expect from him: Oh, you know. This and that. Prepare a few things. Make new friends, visit old friends. Drumroll, please. Piss on the graves of our enemies. There you have it, Karim, she thought, the previous night’s conversation still rattling around in her head. What Daddy does.

  It’s getting very interesting here, he said. There’s a new sheriff in town. That suggests a certain rearrangement of the doable.

  Daddy, she said in a tone she relied on to ignite his concern. Speaking of sheriffs.

  What’s wrong? he asked. What happened?

  Do you know someone in the Turkish government I can make a report to about police brutality?

  Whoa, back up. What’s going on?

  She possessed the teenage knack of extemporaneous editing, trimming or tweaking a story into a version more suitable for the ears of parents, omitting inconvenient details, understating relationships, transforming the primary colors of questionable behavior into blameless pastels. In this new and improved story, she arrived at the café with her girlfriends, Osman was demoted to this guy she knew, her attitude toward the police mellowed into ladylike behavior, Karim and his secret group banished from the cast of characters, and Osman’s split lip just one consequence of a pummeling that might very well have sent a lesser man to the hospital.

  Okay, he said, neither sharing her indignation nor dismissing it, a quality in her father she grudgingly respected, his habit of withholding comment or judgment until he was satisfied he had gathered up the available facts—an investigation that occasionally exposed a fault line in her own credibility—and he asked her to spell Osman’s surname, promised her he would see what he could find out, and moved the conversation along to his original reason for calling.

  He was catching a late flight back to Istanbul and would send a car in the morning to bring her to mass. After mass, whaddya say, he said, and his proposal had not lost a scintilla of its capacity to thrill her. Let’s go sailing.

  At the end of the month, school was out for the year and the dormitory echoed wistfully with the absence of her classmates, the Turkish girls scattered back to their families, leaving behind Dottie and a few remaining foreign students, excluding Jacqueline, who a week ago had returned to France with her mother for the summer. Dottie had weighed her father’s invitation to move into his newly leased penthouse in Ankara (the villa had been shed when her mother left), but there were practical reasons (some actually discussable) not to, given his erratic travel schedule, her lack of friends in the capital (she’d be stuck with all the embassy snots glued to their parents, suffering their condescension toward all things Turkish), and most of all there was the tension she felt begin to ball in her stomach when she tried not to think about nights alone with him in the apartment, his trespass submerged in the invisible depths of her childhood underneath a sediment of her father’s private confessions, more adamant than guilt-ridden, that he loved her too much. And yet he had his way still of easing into certain liberties she did not know how to prevent, or even how to measure as right or wrong or neither. Most of all, her unwillingness to be separated from Osman and the rapturous adventure of their secret (perhaps not so secret, she suspected) romance.

  The problem was, one evening at the beginning of the summer after the surprise of her first solo sail, her father had minced his words, as though he had a plan, and the plan this time seemed designed to bait her into her own intimate world of subterfuge and deception—another one of his myriad games. He had distinctly not forbidden her from seeing Osman; instead, he had warned her away from getting too close. Too close? She would not ask whose privilege it was to define what might constitute the difference between close and too close. Where was the divide, Daddy, the threshold, the line not to be crossed?—somewhere he himself could not define. Too close to a boy meant what—the same as being too close to your father? If it was meant to mean the other thing, her emotions, the grafting of one heart to another, then her father’s injunction against it had come too late.

  After mass that Sunday morning, they had taxied north along the European coast, bypassing the more fashionable yachting centers to the south, to Altinkum, a sleepy fishing village with a public beach and a stupendously marvelous marina, now home port for her beloved twenty-six-foot tirhandil she had christened Sea Nymph, anchored in the pristine cove among a fleet of traditional gulets twice as large, which Dottie thought of as the Sea Nymph’s harem of big sisters. They were identical to the Nymph, with the same smiling, sexy roundness of their classic lines and saucer-shaped hulls, feminine curves in every direction, large wooden rudders, the emphasis on style rather than cabin space, although her tirhandil was beak-nosed, double-ended, sloop-rigged, and sturdy as a dance floor, a luminous work of art and eminently seaworthy. Now, of course, they all had motors in them, the addiction of Turkish yachtsmen, who seemed to equate hoisting a sail with some type of punishment or masochism, but originally the gulets were sailing cargo boats transporting goods throughout the eastern Mediterranean since the Roman Empire, and the pedigree of the tirhandils was even more distinguished, descendants of the oldest style of vessel to ply the Aegean Sea, and she felt herself an heiress to this history, given license to indulge in endless role-playing fantasies—a female Argonaut pursued by Hercules, the Grand Vizier’s most favored wife, handmaiden to a knight’s lady. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Dottie of Troy. Anybody but Io, poor girl, Zeus’s bitch, turned into a fat cow to hide her from his wife Hera, more than a little vexed by Zeus’s philandering. Hera sent a gadfly to torment the transformed Io, who plunged into the waterway that would be forever named for her inglorious swim—Bosphorus, the ancient Greek word for cow’s ford.

  But no one in these waters had ever seen a girl or woman mariner, and so her ownership and growing mastery of the Sea Nymph had made both Americans—the diplomat father and his captivating Turkish-speaking blonde-haired teenage daughter—instant celebrities in Altinkum. The Poseidon-like dockmaster himself insisted on rowing them out in his skiff to the Sea Nymph’s moorage, as he did that Sunday morning, and the moment she climbed aboard she felt what she would always feel on a sailboat, a sublime sense of newness, defying the physics of one’s life on land. Always on the boat there was an inner breeze of excitement, a happy gratitude for the water and its strong promising scents, the Nymph’s proud sail set against the sliding panorama of facing continents and their ghostly empires, crusted one atop the other like gobs of paint on a giant canvas.

  She was a quick study and impressed to learn how accomplished a sailor her father proved to be, his nautical skills acquired while growing up in Pennsylvania, a boy capsizing racing dinghies at a summer camp on Lake Erie, and later in college a member of the sailing club at Yale. Their initial weekend outings on the Sea Nymph were cautious, his lessons methodical. They quickly began to gain a feel for the boat, though, and increasingly comfortable with the clutter and pace of the sea traffic in the busy, busy Bosphorus, developing a sense for its shift of winds, teaching themselves how to read the riffles and eddies of the trickster currents. On their first sail together, they wobbled out of the harbor into the sweeping channel and then, with the wind on their stern, trimmed the sail—only the mainsheet, that first time—and galloped on the crystal blue racetrack south toward the surreal span of Bosphorus Bridge. Coming about in its cool shadow they threw themselves into the high-alert exercise of tacking back to Altinkum through an oncoming flotilla of tankers and cruise ships and warships, ferries and hovercraft, water taxis, fishing vesse
ls, paddleboats, and the occasional psychotic windsurfer.

  Each time he came to Istanbul to take her sailing they swooped a little farther south down the straits, below wooded hillsides violet with flowering jacarandas, past the yacht basin and the well-to-do crowds of Tarabya, perhaps docking in Kanlica on the Asian shore for a bowl of its famous yogurt, past the towered ruins and crenellated walls of the magical twin castles, Anadoluhisar and Rumelihisar—one each for Asia and Europe— the gates to the Black Sea, built by the conqueror Sultan Mehmet during his final siege of Constantinople in 1453. Then drifting past Arnavutkoy to admire its surviving wooden mansions, fire-spared relics of Ottoman aristocracy, perhaps stopping for a lunch of grilled lufer, back in season for the summer, at a waterfront meyhane in Bebek or Ortakoy, where on one sail they had arranged to pick up Elena, Jacqueline, and Yesho for the afternoon.

  This turned out to be not the best idea: Elena, her colorless skin turning a greenish hue, was immediately seasick; Yesho, who had spent her lifetime plying the straits on the public ferries, was terrified by the petite Sea Nymph, afraid to move off her perch atop the cabin hatch; and Jacqueline pouted like a brat after Yesho, noticing Jacqueline pretzel her arms around behind her back to unclasp the top of her bikini, squawked that this wasn’t St. Tropez, she’d start a riot, she’d get them all arrested, the police would rape them, what was she thinking? Jacqueline, her hands holding up the cups of her unfastened top, turned to play the wounded coquette with her father, batting her eyes for permission and Dottie could see, in his sunny expression of regret that poorly masked what he truly wanted, that he would die for a good long look at Jacqueline’s pointy breasts, but thank God even Yesho, the Queen of the Vile, had enough sense to stop it.

  That Sunday morning in June, the poyraz, like an old family servant, met them at the cove’s entrance, its freshening kiss of wind a bolt of cool velvet drawn across her bare shoulders and the backs of her legs. She stood braced in the cockpit, commanding the wheel, while her father cut the motor—a tiny inboard diesel with a toyland chug—and raised the mainsail. The Sea Nymph took the wind abeam until they were midchannel, the Byzantine battlements of the castle Yoros straight off the bow. Her father told her to fall off and inched the boom out over the azure water and they went flying ahead in a sizzle of foam, south toward Istanbul, her father in the bow hoisting the jib, letting it billow out portside, wing and wing with the main, the Nymph in the prettiest of downwind canters.