The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (39 page)

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 vessels, 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.

She called forward in her happiest voice,
Where are we going?
And he answered,
To the sea, my captain. To the sea!
They plunged through the cresting wake of a naval cruiser like children on a rocking
horse as the implacable elephantine mass of the other vessel flashed by, a Union Jack
snapping in the wind off its stern.
Ah, our esteemed allies,
said her father.
Hail, Britannia.
Then he added what sounded like a curse in a language she had never heard and she
asked what he was speaking.
Serbo-Croatian,
he told her and she said,
Oh, like Yugoslavian?
naturally assuming he had picked up a few phrases on his trip to Belgrade.
What did you say?

I said,
Shit on your dog-faced queen,
and she feigned disapproval, saying,
Dad!
and into their banter he slipped a teaser—
This Balkans project. I may need you to give me a hand
—and how could she have known what he was suggesting.

They sailed past the ivory jewel box of the Ortakoy mosque and its twin minarets,
the Bosphorus rolled out like a turquoise carpet between rival continents, bottomless
only in its histories. Dottie could not conceive of a world more enchanted or generous
in its offerings, and she never tired of being on the glorious water, in love with
its ever-changing moods and peacock colors, and would not mind if she never touched
ground again.

Soon the coastlines of Asia and Europe began to widen and swell outward, the minarets
of Suleymaniye and the city’s five hundred mosques shrinking into matchsticks off
the
Sea Nymph
’s stern and here they were, finally, at the top of Marmara Denizi, the cerulean Sea
of Marmara, and over the horizon at its other end the Dardanelles emptying into the
womb of the timeless Aegean. She fell off the wind just enough to create a slight
lull and flutter in the sails and said,
Daddy?
And he answered, up in the bow facing out toward the daunting openness and its haze
of infinity,
What are you waiting for—Let’s go!

The waves were bigger, the winds cuffing, and it scared her at first to not be bottled
up safely by the land, but the receding shores gave her an adult sense of daring she
had never quite experienced, and with less traffic and a boundless stage her father
hauled the jib to leeward to match the main and they practiced jibing, zigzagging
like a water beetle, coming about into the wind and swinging off, accelerating into
a beam reach, spray fountaining over the bowsprit, her acrobatic responses gaining
more precision on each tack and her happiness ascending toward some sort of trigger
point, an exhilaration that seemed to be the culmination of yearning, purely alive
and complete and confident, as if that day she stopped becoming and started, for all
her life ahead, the impetuous, immutable act of being.

Eventually, bearing down on the Princes’ Islands, they turned upwind and stayed there,
beating back against the current. Her father relieved her at the wheel while she went
down below into the stuffy cabin to pee into a bucket, fetch drinks from the cooler,
and grab her camera. When she climbed back on deck her father had stripped to his
Speedo bathing suit, his boating shorts and Hawaiian shirt folded neatly on the chart
shelf, and was singing snatches of opera at the top of his lungs, his gold—wristwatch,
chain, and crucifix—bouncing glints of light back at the westward sun. He threw her
a kiss and she snapped his picture.

Given a reprieve from duty, for the next hour she sat quietly in the bow, taking photographs,
sipping from a container of cherry juice, and watching Istanbul rise again from the
sea, her thoughts wandering to her studies—half-day sessions with tutors (Arabic
and chemistry, the extra credits allowing her to advance to her senior year)—and then,
with a throb of lust, achingly to Osman, who she would see the next day, and with
another more maddening throb to Karim—she told herself she didn’t care if she ever
saw him again—and with melancholy toward the missing half of her family, her brother—but
he would not love sailing, drenched with spray, at nature’s mercy—and to her mother,
who had unlearned how to appreciate the pleasures available out on the edge of convention,
tossed against the unexpected and the unknown.

Her father was suddenly behind her, lowering the jib, which he left her to fold and
stow as he scampered back to the wheel and they funneled into the strait and beat
upwind in a northeasterly tack toward the tower of Kiz Kulesi. Up in the bow, she
watched a sleek motor yacht swing out from behind the tower, headed south, and, a
minute later, worried that the boat was on a collision course with the
Sea Nymph,
she called out her concern.

I see it, honey, said her father. Come back here and take the wheel.

Where should I steer? she asked sensibly. We have the right of way, don’t we?

Glancing at his wristwatch, he told her to stay the present course and went below.
In a minute, the diesel puttered to life, and she wondered what was going on. The
motor yacht, as big as a city bus, was closing at a reckless speed and she could see,
below the crescent and star emblazoned on its red flag, its captain on the flying
bridge dressed in whites and the smoked-black windows of its salon. Then her father
was back in the cockpit, his cigarettes in a plastic baggie, which he stowed in the
compartment below the compass before leaning over to release the mainsheet, the boom
swinging over their heads, the transmission in neutral, the
Sea Nymph
in a slow-motion glide toward the oncoming yacht as her father dropped the sail.

Daddy! They’re going to hit us! she said, just as the yacht, sounding its horn, throttled
back and cut its engines, its fearsome bow sitting down in the water. The yacht’s
captain hove to, swinging his vessel parallel to the
Nymph
, a hundred feet off their starboard side, and now she could see the soldiers on its
stern, a pair of Turkish commandos, armed with compact submachine pistols, Israeli-made
Uzis. She knew the name because her father had once taken her to a shooting range
outside Ankara and she had fired one. Where did you get it? she had asked him, digging
out her yellow earplugs, and he told her, Well, it’s mine.

Okay, she said, turning to her father but not returning his impish smile. Will you
tell me what the heck’s going on?

I have a meeting to go to.

Now? On the yacht? Really?

You have three options, said her father. She could wait for him, drifting and circling
alongside for the next hour or two while he attended to the business at hand; he could
send over a crew member from the yacht to help her get the
Sea Nymph
back to Altinkum; or, if she felt up to the task—and he would not suggest such a
thing, he emphasized, without his supreme faith in her ability to handle the boat—she
could stay at the helm and motor up the Bosphorus by herself.

Are you serious? she said. Can I put the sail back up?

Better not. Think you can do it? and she told him, Sure I can do it. You afraid? he
asked, and she said, Of what?

That’s my girl.

He grabbed his baggie and stepped up on the starboard rail, pausing to bless himself
with the sign of the cross. Bon voyage, he told her, I’ll see you back at the marina
for dinner, and then he swan-dived over the side, breast-stroking with the bag in
his mouth toward the ladder attached to the motor yacht’s transom. She waited until
he was safe, clinging to the first rung, waving back at her with his free hand, to
engage the transmission and tap the brass bar of the throttle forward, steering for
midstream to claim a lane of her own, her legs trembling not from fear but from a
staggering pleasure.

That’s like so double-oh-seven! she shouted into the breeze, her voice ending in a
squeak.

In the throes of independence, she became all-seeing, her senses tethered to the boat
but her soul transcendent, soaring in light, and she prayed, not as supplicant but
as seraph, ecstatically:
Dear Lord, the sea is so large and my boat so small, please protect me on my journey.
Her confidence unwavering, even as the sky blackened horribly, north of the bridge,
and a tiny squall dropped like a bomb on top of her, a direct hit, shredding her visibility
for a disorienting minute before it blew past, its stinging glitter of rain pellets
leaving her chilled and shivering but also invigorated. The strait scoured by white
caps, she motored ahead toward a sunbeam like a celestial column prying open gilded
clouds.

She moved on through the coppery splatter of waning sunlight, threading the Bosphorus
to the entrance of Altinkum’s tiny harbor, where she throttled back the engine and
scrutinized the crowded moorage and thought,
Shit.
Earlier in her education, she and her father had spent an entire morning in the confines
of the cove, dropping anchor, raising anchor, docking and casting off, but what seemed
a routine pas de deux impressed her now as a challenge easily failed by a single novice
sailor.

But she had not been paying attention to where she was going and, in a mild panic,
had to swing about before crashing the
Nymph
onto the wave-slapped mossy rocks of the harbor’s northern headland. Drifting back
for a more central approach, she had an eerie feeling that something was wrong, and
however hard she squinted, trying to identify the source of her uneasiness, she could
not see it until she grabbed the binoculars and scanned the shoreline. At first she
thought the beach and marina had been abandoned, which made no sense on a Sunday evening
when people usually crowded into its dockside restaurant, and then the soldiers came
into focus, a loose ring of armed sentries forming a perimeter from the sand up to
the highway, where she could now see in the distance the strobe of blue lights, and
she knew immediately, being her father’s daughter, the basic scenario and thought,
What’s Daddy up to now?