The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover

by Bob Shacochis

  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, So
rry, 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.

  Try to remember, said the colonel. Take your time.

  I don’t know, she said. I mean, nothing happened. I was lost. I didn’t know where I was.

  Who did you contact?

  What do you mean?

  Someone to help you, perhaps?

  No, no one. I wandered around. Walking felt like something I needed to do.

  And all those days, where did you go?

  Nowhere, really. I would just keep walking until I got tired. Then I would sleep wherever I ended up, in a church or a doorway or the backseat of a car or somewhere.

  I find this puzzling, the colonel sighed. You asked no one for help. Why not? You have friends in Istanbul, I think.

  I don’t know, she said. I didn’t know what was happening. I was afraid, she said, nodding dull-eyed at the photograph the colonel had placed in front of her of Osman and Karim having a furtive discussion at the railing near the ferry’s stern, the Palestinian lurking nearby.

  What were you afraid of? The terrorists?

  Yes. I don’t know. I was confused. Which terrorist?

  And why was this man we know to be an Armenian terrorist chasing you? asked the colonel, tapping the photograph she could not bear to look at, Maranian lying spread-eagled on the tarmac of the car park.

  I wish I could tell you, she said anxiously, her voice weak and despairing. Honest. I have no idea.

  And you called no one? Is this correct?

  I phoned Osman’s apartment. I told you that already, didn’t I?

  No.

  His mother answered the phone and said there had been an accident with Osman on the ferry and she said I had to hang up because she was waiting for the police to call. But how did the authorities know, it seemed instantaneously, that it was Osman, fallen off the ferry?

  Dorothy, why did you cut your hair that day and change its color?

  Really, I don’t know. It’s just a coincidence. I thought it would be fun.

  Dorothy, I want you to tell me the truth, okay? I want you to believe me—the situation we have been discussing is very serious. Why did you disobey your father?

  Because I loved him, she said.

  You loved?

  Osman. Osman.

  Before they could be stained by her onrush of tears, the colonel reached across the table to gather up the photographs for safekeeping, evidence of crimes committed and yet to be committed. He replaced the first set of photographs in his briefcase and brought out a second set, which he arranged before her like a fortune-teller’s cards.

  You were watching me, she sa
id, unnerved by the proof of her flagrancy and carelessness.

  Yes.

  How long?

  Not long, said the colonel, pointing to a photograph. Can you tell me, who is this man you are speaking to?

  I don’t know, she said, embarrassed. Maybe I was asking him directions.

  And the man in this photograph?

  I don’t know his name. Someone I met in a café, I think.

  And this man?

  That man. He sells fish. I forget his name.

  His name is Mohammed, said the colonel wearily. I believe you spent a night on his boat.

  Yes. He’s not in trouble because of me, is he?

  Only with God.

  But what was I supposed to do? she said. She had succumbed to a juvenile whim, returning to the fish market to tell Mohammed that the queen at the bottom of the sea had, in her inconsolable jealousy, demanded she give back the treasure of her pink pearl. Whoever stole my passport, she told the colonel, stole all my money too. I had to sleep somewhere.

  If you were my daughter, said the colonel, pausing while he retrieved the photographs and stood up with his briefcase and tunic in hand. If you were mine, he continued, I would lock you in a room.

  There was much she had not told the colonel, much she could not tell him, but nothing she might have told him that would have made any difference. The chance to save everybody, she was about to find out, had been lost with Osman.

  Can I get you anything? the colonel asked as he prepared to leave.

  Pistachio sorbet? she said, the request of an unreasonable child and slightly naughty, her coyness like an encoded beacon signaling from inside the shell of her wreckage.

  The colonel smiled, momentarily beguiled, and she observed him closely, registering the change in his eyes as he measured her as a potential object of desire, the gleaming surge, the ebb and flow of heat that temptation caused in a man. This man too, she understood, would fuck her if he could, and probably every man in the building, the trade for sorbet.