We don’t have that here, he said, his voice a gentle reprimand punctuated by the closing door. A few minutes later the door opened again and there was Mary Beth, the can-do saint of her father’s underworld, her decency exceeded only by her discretion and competence, holding Dottie’s new American passport and a ticket to an alien place called home. Dottie dashed from the table into Mary Beth’s arms, a spontaneous act of surrender and an end to fear, the way tormented children run helpless to their mothers.
Grudgingly, during the course of his interrogation the colonel had remarked that she was an exceptionally lucky girl, and grudgingly in return she had replied that she supposed she was, congratulating herself on the single piece of good fortune that she could accurately gauge, packaged in the irony of misfortune—the theft of her clutch, resulting in the depressing loss of her money but the altogether propitious separation of herself from the passport of Carla Costa, a document that would have proven instantly self-indicting, catastrophic evidence of her participation in unknown conspiracies, an advertisement for her manifold guilt, when she was picked up after she eventually circled back to her rented room at F. Nightengale’s. It was there, thanks to the perfidious disloyalty of Zubedye and Dena, that the police were patiently waiting for their suspect to finish her rounds with the males of Istanbul, her lascivious manhunt a parallel universe to the one being conducted by the authorities for Karim and his homicidal cohorts. She’s a fucking liar, she screamed and screamed at the police, disavowing the giantess’s insistence that the girl carried a fake passport. I made up a name and she took all my money and wrote it down.
But naturally the colonel could not have been thinking of the fortunate disappearance of Carla’s passport when he judged her luck. Nor, from what she could discern from his manner, was the colonel overly impressed by her vulnerability as a teenage yabanci tramp prowling the streets of his city, a danger she herself did not acknowledge, operating in a zone of magical thinking, the disheveled and unwashed reflection she glimpsed in shop windows of no more concern or connection to her than the scuzzy hippies who liked to hang out at the Pudding Shop en route to nowhere and its banal enlightenments.
The colonel’s true assessment of her luck was made apparent through a pair of revelations that rendered her air-brained and queasy and, for a short time, bawling, her tears interrupted by awful intervals of psychotic chortling that circulated through the austere room like the sound of a demented bird and elicited a period of dismayed but tender solicitude from the colonel, who displayed great sensitivity to the portion of her emotional pyrotechnics that was the outcome of her introduction to a second Osman, a shadow Osman stepping forward into an all too familiar cone of light already shining on her father. How strange to see him there in the sizzle, an Osman to be both adored and detested. How weird, how crazy, how clichéd and scary that on her first foray into the realm of love outside the palace gates of her father’s kingdom she had in oblique but indisputable ways fallen in love once again with her father, Daddy’s unlikely double, the rookie Turkish version, and of her own generation, a patriotic college boy working undercover to save the world or at least his own piece of it, one of many patriotic students selected by the state as members of a secret unit, infiltrating the clandestine Muslim brotherhoods germinating in the universities, stepping right into shit.
I believe you know this group of radicals your boyfriend was investigating, yes?
I don’t, she said. I saw them once in a café. Osman was there. Karim was there. Can I ask you something? Osman was arrested that night.
Correct, said the colonel, anticipating her question. The arrest was a ruse.
I just had that feeling, she said.
The colonel had showed her the pictures taken by another undercover agent assigned that day to tail and photograph Osman as he met with Karim and a foreigner subsequently identified as a Palestinian terrorist, the suspected mastermind of a forthcoming but unspecified atrocity. The Palestinian had flown from Syria to Turkey to locate and collaborate with a group of like-minded fundamentalists, Jew haters who would provide logistical support—reconnaissance, safe houses, transportation, weapons, explosives—for his bloody mission. Whatever that mission was, Osman, as an agent of the state, was attempting to determine but had failed. She looked at the photos, weeping.
Dorothy, you can help us, yes? asked the colonel.
She shook her head wildly, voiceless, unable to speak in any language to describe what she saw or felt, devastated by the ghastly expression on Osman’s face in the photo, a blur of horror, of total betrayal and total surprise, a mouth gulping with the instinct for self-preservation, his eyes enlarged not with fear but the promise of a repudiating, obliterating violence as he tottered backward into the sea. What she read in Osman’s eyes convinced her that the colonel was telling the truth, and she began to perceive the hidden message contained by the truth, that no matter what seemed to an ordinary person to be the odds against such mythical human symmetry, people who are meant to be together find each other, enemies no less than lovers, throughout space and time and the sea of eternity.
Help me understand, said the colonel. Why did these terrorists let you out of the car? I think you are very, very lucky.
I don’t know, she said, but she knew that the answer was Karim.
In their room in the Hilton that night Mary Beth gave her a note from her father that she unsealed from its envelope and read, a single handwritten page in her father’s immaculate script, and then refolded and returned to its envelope and gave back to Mary Beth to be disposed of properly—following the instruction in the note’s postscript. I believe there is an Argentinian saying, the note began, that the past is a predator. Without apology, he asked for forgiveness. For what, he did not bother to say, only adding this cryptic explanation—There was a malfunction. I was the malfunction, a non sequitur followed by a brief lesson in family history that left her mystified: Her grandparents and her father, she read with astonishment, had lived in Croatia during World War Two. Near the end of the war, Communist soldiers had killed her father’s father and raped her father’s mother. Three of these partisan soldiers did not survive the war and the carnage of its aftermath. One of the remaining three had been executed during a purge by the Tito government. Of the surviving two, one was lured to Pittsburgh where he met his just fate at the hands of Davor and your grandmother. The last living member of the six criminals responsible for these sins against our family was the signori. The note concluded with her father’s profuse expression of gratitude to his daughter for fulfilling her sacred duty.
What duty? she asked herself.
One day I believe you will agree that the obligation and the grace to serve are in your blood, he wrote. There was no mention of Osman or Maranian or the lethal consequence of their own commitment to this all-consuming, ever-hungry monster named duty.
See you in Virginia at Christmas, Kitten, her father ended. God bless you.
The hotel room was crammed with Mary Beth’s luggage and Dottie sat humped over on the bed, watching her father’s assistant open a suitcase and explore its neatly folded contents and slowly abandon the armor of her taciturnity. What size are you? said Mary Beth. We need to find you something to wear. Why don’t you hop in the shower while I pull out some things.
Why did you bring all this stuff? Dottie asked. Are you going somewhere?
On her knees bent over a pile of skirts and rayon blouses, Mary Beth straightened up and sat back in a thoughtful pose, ass atop heels, and tucked her light brown hair behind her ears and cocked her head at Dottie with a vaudevillian shrug. Would you believe it? she said, her voice mocking a perky version of herself. I actually am going somewhere.
Where? Like a vacation?
Well, yes, I guess you could say that. I’ll visit my family in Ohio for a while and then, who knows?
What’s wrong?
She made a stern face, peering at Dottie judgmentally, but again she appeared to be mocking herself. Off the record, okay, she said.
I can do that.
I’ll bet you can, honey, said Mary Beth, not unkindly. You are Steven’s daughter one million percent. Here’s what I know. I believe your father is out of the office indefinitely. He has, apparently, gone off the reservation—I suspect you know more about that than I do, and I don’t want to know anything more than I know. So, okay, bad boy, naughty naughty, but it seems his friends in high places are both understanding and forgiving. That said, I seem to be the one left out in the cold. At least for the moment.
Where is he?
Stirring it up in Belgrade, with occasional excursions to pursue his hobby in Peshawar. Now, you understand what I just said, don’t you, because I’m not going to say a word more.
Yeah.
How about this? chirped Mary Beth, holding up a very unlike–Mary Beth paisley minidress. It never fit me anyway, she said. I’m afraid the hemline will cover your knees. It’ll probably hang on you like a bag but we can belt the waist. Whaddya think, honey? Your mother will kill me if I put you on a plane in those filthy clothes. And by the way, I shouldn’t say anything, but whoever did your hair—
I know, said Dottie, it’s gross.
She wanted more than anything to apologize to Mary Beth for being such a brat on the telephone, all those many days ago when her life with Osman was the only thing she had imagined she could believe in. After, I’m sorry, her voice cracked and Mary Beth held out her arms and said, Baby, come here, and she got off the bed onto her knees and crawled to this woman who knew her and held her and told her that her own heart was bleeding with the knowledge of a young girl’s juggernaut of loss. Mary Beth let her cry for a while and then eased Dottie’s head from her shoulder, telling her to go jump into the shower and she would order from room service and they would eat and then lights out for the big day tomorrow.
Outside came a boom, far away but strong enough to rattle the windows. What the hell was that? asked Mary Beth.
That’s just the cannon in Taksim Square, said Dottie, drying her eyes. You know, they shoot it off every day at sundown.
Of course, said Mary Beth. The cannon. It must be time to pray.
Her dreams that last night in Istanbul were waking dreams where she watched herself watching a conveyor belt of images—Maranian with a hand line fishing along the quay, her father genuflecting before the Pope, Karim riding a miniature donkey, Osman eating the pages of a book (the Koran?), Elena giving a blowjob to an Arabic man wearing a suicide bomber’s belt—crazy things, and everything unreachable except through unwavering sorrow.
What happened? Even stuck in the middle of things, you don’t always know.
Sometime during the night there was a phone call that awakened her. Is that my father? she had mumbled into the darkness. Mary Beth said yes, go back to sleep, which must have happened because she had no memory of any conversation after that. Then, in the taxi on the way to the airport, she suddenly remembered. Did my father call last night? Mary Beth said yes, he had phoned to warn them to be careful. Why? she asked and Mary Beth said because yesterday a Pan Am flight in Karachi had been hijacked. Sixteen passengers were dead.
For days she would keep trying to refasten herself to the old calendar and its shattered trajectories. August twenty-fourth? August twenty-fifth? The calendar was not telling her what she needed to know. Sixth, seventh, eighth? September sixth!
September sixth was the Istanbul airport, soldiers with machine guns posted everywhere as she queued up to enter the international terminal.
September sixth she didn’t know about until Mary Beth escorted her to the airport for their midmorning flight. September seventh was early morning in the airport in Frankfurt, saying good-bye to Mary Beth and waiting alone for her connection to Dulles and a headline in the Herald Tribune about the assassination of a Turkish diplomat in Bonn, an alleged retaliation for the assassination by police in Istanbul of one Raffi Maranian, identified as a leader of an underground organization of terrorists, the Commandos of the Armenian Genocide. Without buying the paper, she scanned the lead paragraphs of the story at a kiosk and then stopped reading because what it said happened in Istanbul was not what had happened and apparently journalists too were licensed to lie like anybody else.
Oh, God. Saturday September sixth was the Istanbul airport swarming with soldiers brandishing automatic weapons because the morning of September sixth was a pair of Palestinian terrorists who locked themselves inside the synagogue in Karakoy during Sabbath services and slaughtered everybody and blew them up with hand grenades and burned them with gasoline and in the terminal she began shrieking, The Kirlovskys! My God! because the Neve Shalom synagogue near the Galata Tower was their synagogue and she ran to a telephone cubicle and called Elena and kept calling until her flight was announced and then she called again from Frankfurt and whoever answered said Mr. Kirlovsky was dead and after the funeral and shiva the family would be emigrating to Israel.
September seventh was late afternoon in humid Virginia and the ugly satisfaction of the look of repressed revulsion on her mother’s face when her emaciated listless daughter emerged from Customs wearing an ill-fitting paisley smock, Dottie’s cheeks and forehead an angry hatch of acne and old bruises, and her golden hair chopped short and badly hennaed. Her mother’s bright blundering, neurotically insistent—I know you’ll just love your senior year at Madeira, you’ll just love your new room. Gosh, wouldn’t you love to stop for a good old American cheeseburger—on the drive down the access road back to Vienna and the ivy-skirted white-brick faux-colonial town house that served as the command post of her mother’s dubious liberation. She was a disaffected ex-liberal who, like her newly adopted guru, a neocon pundit acquired at a Georgetown dinner party, had been mugged by reality. And Dottie was unyielding in her hostility, refusing to acknowledge the irony or shorten the distance. What she wanted didn’t even make sense—to go home, but where was that? To be healed by her mother—but who was that? She had learned at an early age that she could get along very well without a mother.
August twenty-fourth.
August twenty-fourth was the cruelest joke anyone might ever imagine and in her memory she would sidestep away from its indistinct serpentlike manifestation with a startled jerk, stumbling in horror, her torment expanding until she was crying so hard she would wake up hours later, her face buried in a pillow still wet and cold with slobber.
The girl who drowned really didn’t but the boy who drowned really did—this was the joke of August twenty-fourth and it kept returning her to Istanbul and exiling her to America and pitching her right back again into the lovesick clutch of Osman. And then she would find herself curled into an icy glob of space where she accepted she would remain forever, rocking in his lifeless arms and then not rocking at all but frozen by the immensity of loss and the immensity of the world’s malevolence and its dim reverberation in her blood.
Day after day after day, a refugee in Virginia and ostensibly an invalid and certainly disabled by the savage loop of time playing in her head, as the season shrank toward winter, she did little else but stay in bed and count the calendar, those days from the end of August to the day in September when she was delivered back to the West, trying to unscramble the bloodcurdled lump of time that seemed like a perpetual infernal day in hell and a single permanent night at the frozen edge of the universe, the sun rising and setting simultaneously out of Asia and into Europe or maybe she had that backward like everything else and all that was the world as she knew it had vanished and was condemned and ripped away, her mind blank from rage and incomprehension and the abysmal indigo depths of shredding grief. It was as if somebody had smashed her head with a crowbar.
In mid-September, looking around her room in her mother’s town house, she slowly realized why
her father had shipped her off to Virginia. Dottie was being offered back to her, like a coat she had left at a party the year before and wasn’t sure she wanted to wear anymore, even if it still fit, which it did not. But losing Dottie was his mistake, not hers.
Whoever she was now about to become, that self would be a solitary creation, patented and inviolable, cobbled together and pounded into shape from its kaleidoscopic shamble of bits and pieces. Henceforth as her mother’s ward she would practice the art of hibernation, subservient to her studies, passive in a social life that amounted to singing in the choir at St. Luke’s, waiting for the light and growth of a new season and her happiness in finding herself alive again. She had wandered in the wilderness and mingled with its natives but she would come back, she kept telling herself. I will come back.
September seventh was that first terrible night in her mother’s town house which stank of chemicals, geriatric potpourri and pukey air freshener and toilet bowl cleaner, her mother standing in the kitchen in a coral-colored linen suit and stockings and heels and her brunette hair permed into motionless waves, opening a bottle of white wine for herself and offering Dottie a ginger ale. Let’s go sit in the living room, her mother said, grabbing the bottle and a wineglass and Dottie drifted behind her like a wraith into a purgatory of inanities. The living room seemed to be a midwestern celebration of chintz and the walls were churchy with evenly spaced icons and crucifixes with strands of dried palm leaf tucked behind Christ’s sagging head and her mother plunked down on the sofa and kicked off her shoes and straightened her skirt over her shiny knees and slurped her wine and wouldn’t shut up, reborn with the freedom to express herself uncontested, striving again for her emotions to embody substance, to suddenly contain genuine political meaning or stir involvement, trying to attach this resurgence of powerful feelings to an intellect she did not possess.
The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover Page 52