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 kapicis, 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.
The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover Page 48