The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (44 page)

She watched him with waning impudence from the top of the vault’s steps, analyzing
the transformation that had occurred, his nose in the ruins like an archaeologist
at his first dig. When he turned and saw her, she was hailed with a barrage of manic
exclamations.
Fantastic! Tremendous! Look at this place!
He laid his hands reverently on an intact slab of cornice to examine its pattern of
ovoid carvings.
What about that fucking storm! Never seen anything like it!
He stooped to pick up a pottery shard, rubbing off the grime with his thumb.
Hercules! Hadrian! Marcus Aurelius! They were here!
He spun around, marveling at the surpassing novelty of their good fortune.
How’s this for an adventure!

Daddy, she said. What about my poor
Sea Nymph
?

The boat was fun, wasn’t it? he said. Done, finished—every epitaph a non sequitur.

But I’ll miss her, Dottie whimpered, a mawkish invitation to be consoled, an abject
useless desire immediately discarded when he began to clap his hands provocatively,
like her swim coach, challenging her to fly into high gear.

All right! Big day! Let’s go!

Without any affectation of modesty, she unbuttoned and dropped her blue jeans to her
ankles and peed. As she pulled up her pants she chided him for forgetting to pack
toilet tissue and then voiced her most serious grievance—her purse and camera were
missing. He lavished her not with apology but offhanded rationale; he had grabbed
whatever he could find to stuff into the bag and here they were, two very lucky castaways,
alive and well and in God’s care. Nothing had been lost, Kitten, that could not be
easily replaced. My address book, she whined, my passport. We’ll replace them, he
repeated cheerfully. Don’t worry.

She was, after all, a teenager and willing, when properly seduced or inspired, to
exchange one attitude for another, without a mature dislike of contradiction or the
need for introspection.
What a perfect little bitch,
she reproached herself, shamefully aware that she had awakened prepared to hold her
father accountable for all things beyond his control—the squall, the badly installed
toilet and its catastrophic leak, his diseased intestines, his untimely slump into
grief, the poisonous jellies, his almost dying, and the unsettling hallucinatory cameo
of his resurrection. On the verge of genuine tears, she ran to hug him, clinging to
his waist with gratitude, and when they separated she asked what was the plan and
he looked at her with tender-eyed derangement, his neck a rashy swelter of stings,
and answered,
Ephesus.

Oh, she said uncertainly, I thought that was something I dreamed, and his right eye
twitched—or was that a wink?—adding ambiguity to his constricted smile.

A muddy goat trail flanked by nodding sunflowers led them away from the ruins into
a ravine where they wandered into the ancient city’s amphitheater, scaling its broken
rows of seats to the top of a windswept hill from which they could see the arched
remnants of an aqueduct leading past a nearby village ringed with poplars, its dirt
track connecting to a narrow road winding back toward the mainland. The lonely, primitive
cluster of whitewashed cottages seemed abandoned until a large mastiff sent out an
alarm of rabid barking at their approach and a gaunt churlish man with pants held
up by suspenders opened his door to stare at them. She asked if they could stop for
water but her father said I don’t like the looks of that dog and they went on. Following
the path to the track, and the track to the scabrous paved road, they found an elderly
peasant woman sitting with her linen-covered market baskets on a simple wooden bench,
who pointed to where the next bus to Edincik would arrive. She wore a faded blue dress
cut like a grocer’s smock, her white hair frizzing out from beneath a yellowed head
scarf, and seemed to accept their company as an unremarkable event.

The bus was unexpectedly sleek and modern, an air-conditioned first-class coach with
high windows and tall reclining seats that allowed for privacy among its unlikely
manifest of shabby peasants. She and her father passed down the aisle to the empty
seats at the back of the bus and slid into a row, Dottie taking the window.

Tourists? someone asked, but when she started to answer her father jumped in, telling
unctuous little lies, alternate but plausible identities and circumstance fabricated
out of habit, she supposed, and she began to feel cheated, realizing his intent to
leave their incredible adventure a private affair, a decision she did not understand
even as she remembered her father saying more than once that fame was a curse he could
ill afford. That’s you, she argued silently.

She was relieved to be off her injured foot but immediately vulnerable to more mundane
discomforts—she craved water, her toothbrush, a shower; she wanted a tomato and onion
omelet and a telephone, aching to spellbind Osman and her girlfriends with tales of
personal disaster and, increasingly, with each passing minute stuck next to him in
their upholstered booth, she wanted to retch from the suffocating vileness of her
father’s breath. The next thing she knew he was shaking her bad foot and she woke
up ugly and snarling, saying, You’re hurting me.

They had backtracked to Bandirma, Dottie asleep during the brief stop at the Edincik
market. Their bus had been chartered by a travel agency for an excursion to a nearby
national park, her father said, they had to get off with everybody else and find another
bus going south. He paid the driver with lira from the dry bag and they stood in the
sunlight of the insipid provincial depot, looking for a kiosk or vendor, anyone selling
anything she could drink or eat, even a pack of mints would be heavenly, until she
spotted a police station across the car park and said, pointing, Shouldn’t we go there
and report? and her father gave her a look that made her feel dense. Report what?
he said. I think by now you would have learned your lesson about Turkish gendarmes.
He was right, of course, but she felt disappointed again, her role in their survival
negated, the act of telling someone, anyone, essential to her need to be rewarded
somehow for her mettle, for not being a helpless baby, a reward not forthcoming from
her father, who ambled off to make inquiries about schedules and destinations.

She sighed heavily and wandered around dragging the dry bag until she saw a kid lugging
a jerrican sloshing water from its uncapped spout and he directed her to a public
standpipe. Grateful at least for this, she removed her sunglasses, washed her hands
clean and tossed water in her face, ignoring the vulgar catcalls of several pimply
adolescent boys lounging against a nearby wall. Bent over the spigot to rinse her
mouth, she listened to the taunts rise in volume and specificity—
Stick it in!
She’s waiting, she wants it!—
and sensing someone behind her she wheeled around to confront a handsome boy holding
at his groin a priapic loaf of bread, previously aimed at her ass. They seemed for
a moment disarmed by one another, her contemptuous smirk softening with sly and interrogating
curiosity, sweet chagrin replacing the loutish arrogance in his sea-green eyes, before
her gaze shifted over his shoulder and her expression became deadly serious and she
said with fair warning,
Get out of here, my father is coming.

Throughout her life, her father’s outbursts had been rare but devastating, meant to
destroy, his victims never his own family, thank God, but house servants who had stolen,
cabdrivers who had cheated, rude strangers who pushed things too far. Never pardon
or forget an insult, he once told her on a street corner in Rome, standing over a
man he had just knocked down for groping her mother’s breast on the crowded sidewalk.
The boy turned, the self-deprecating grin that a moment before she had thought cute
erased by her father’s right hand with the speed of a guillotine, his fingers clawed
into the throat of the boy, the boy gurgling for air. She stepped back, petrified,
then lunged after them, her father strong-arming the boy across the oil-stained macadam
to slam him against the side of a bus, Dottie crying for him to stop, inhaling her
father’s shit-breath seeping from the ice-cold hiss of his English:
I saw you, mujo. I saw you.

But it went no further than that. He raised and cocked his left hand as if he meant
to strike the boy yet his murderous focus turned sensible, businesslike, he was only
checking the time on his wristwatch and the almost comic reversal of his personality
left her giddy and dumbfounded, the boy released and forgotten, her father grabbing
her hand, her other hand snatching the bag.
Wait! The bread!
she blurted, her emotions thrown aside by her unfailing instinct for self-preservation.
Her father snatched up the baguette from where the boy had dropped it and the two
of them were off and running like muggers to a bus beginning to roll, its doors closing
behind them as they clambered aboard, breathless and, in Dottie’s case, silly with
laughter.

They sat near the back, her father at the window because she didn’t want to be barricaded
in by him again. She knew it was out of the question to object to his behavior. The
boys in Istanbul are a lot worse, she could tell him, but he would find the comparison
meaningless.

Where are we going? she asked and he told her Izmir and she said she wanted the bread,
which she ate, relaxing into a lazy acquiescence, well-suited for daylong bus rides,
toward everything strange and extraordinary that had happened, or might yet happen,
on their journey. Her father, for the most part, occupied himself with his mother’s
ivory rosary, interrupting his prayers frequently to scratch, abstracted, at his welts.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

They arrived in Izmir at dusk and she was thrilled to smell the sea again after a
day spent motoring through the interior, fertile countryside rising steadily into
a range of savage mountains that formed the backdrop to the city and its steep hills
and the terminus of the Aegean waterfront where they now walked along the Kordon among
a stream of pedestrians and cyclists, the cafés alive with noise and gaiety. The first
two pensions they scouted were grungy and inhospitable, but the third, above a fish
restaurant, seemed good enough, its rooms plain but comfortable. She went directly
to the shower while her father registered and paid, leaving it to him to bullshit
the proprietor, if the man cared at all, about her lack of identification.

Because she had not heard him return to the room, she shrieked when the bathroom door
swung open, his intrusion a predictable surprise, saying, Don’t use up all the hot
water, kiddo, but he withdrew before she had to tell him to get out. She wrapped herself
in scratchy towels and attached
her narcissistic scrutiny to the mirror above the sink, admiring the sun-cooked tone
of her complexion until he glided behind her into the stall, and she slipped away
to the temporary privacy of the room.

Bracketed to the wall was an old television and she turned it on while she dried her
hair, plopping down on the edge of the twin bed she had claimed as hers, her attention
divided between the toweling and inspecting the wounds of her journey, hoping for
at least one scar to brandish as a badge of honor, half-listening to both her father’s
bubbly croon of pleasure and the transmission from an Istanbul station, a snowy static-smeared
installment of a game show.

When she heard the shower stop, she jumped away from her towels and dressed hurriedly
in her only clothes, worn throughout the night and now all day
and sat back down, her fingers combing out her tangles, waiting for her father, wishing
he would hurry. The show ended and the evening news began in garbled, urgent Turkish
and the bathroom door slammed open and there was her father, nude and frowning and
riveted on the broadcast.

Fuck, he said, who gave them that picture?

She turned in time to see a cutaway from her father’s face to a Turkish coast guard
helicopter lifting off from its base and then a map of the Dardanelles, an X north
of the entrance to the straits, the commentator describing the unsuccessful search
for the American diplomat and his daughter, lost at sea.

Oh, my God, that’s us!

Son of a bitch, said her father.

They think we drowned. But they’re looking in the wrong place, aren’t they? said Dottie,
bewildered but no less fascinated to be the subject of the news. She looked at her
father for confirmation, startled with pity to see his flagellated body up close and
in its entirety, the scarlet crisscross of whiplike markings on his shoulders, stomach,
and thighs, but all she got from him was a guileless smile.

Let’s get something to eat, he said, blithely lighting a cigarette before tugging
his pants on over wet legs. It looks like we have a lot to talk about.

She wanted to sit outside at a sidewalk table but he chose a less crowded area in
the rear of the restaurant. He sat not opposite but next to her and they ordered a
bottle of red wine, her father leaning on his forearms, speaking in an earnest but
confidential voice, falling silent each time the waiter arrived with a new round of
meze.

It seemed reasonable and likely, he speculated, taking occasional small bites while
she ripped through everything on the table, that whoever had answered their Mayday
call had copied down the wrong coordinates. She swallowed what was in her mouth to
say, But now they think we’re dead.

Ah, he said, exactly, and there’s the opportunity.

She did not understand his thinking and it seemed wrong and hurtful to everyone who
cared about them, to pretend they had drowned when they had not. Not clever and romantic—irresponsible.
It was, she realized, taking the game too far, and he said, First thing, you have
to imagine that everyone’s pretending everything except us. We’re the ones only pretending
to pretend.

Why would we pretend we’re dead?

To be just you and me, he said, completely and absolutely free, the last two unencumbered
people on earth. You see what I’m saying, don’t you? No obligations, no responsibilities,
no concerns. To be anybody you like, to be anybody you desire. It’s a wonderful opportunity,
don’t you think? We answer to nobody and nothing except ourselves, like it was on
the boat. Just until we return to Istanbul in ten days, where everything will be the
same, except we’ll be resurrected, won’t we, returned from the sea. It’s an experiment
I’ve always wanted to try, and now, as I said, here’s the opportunity, heaven-sent.

She remained unconvinced, unable to perceive how their freedom was enhanced or their
liberties multiplied by playing dead. Tell you what, he said with the aplomb that
always tempted her with provisional assurance. He raised his wine to toast, pausing
until she did the same, and clinked her glass as if she had already consented to his
plan. We’ll try it for a day or two and if you feel it’s not working out I’ll call
the authorities and say, Hey, you dopes, here we are, quite thoroughly alive. What
do you say, Kitten? The possibilities are damn intriguing.

She felt the impulse to maneuver around her allegiance to their solidarity, careful
not to fracture it with an excess of doubt or haggling but trading what she could
afford to lose. Okay, she said, but on one condition, she wanted to make a phone call
first. He wanted to know to whom, she told him Osman and Elena, it was only fair to
let them know, she could make them swear to keep their mouths shut, and he said, Let’s
compromise. I’ll call Mary Beth to let her in on the scheme and I’ll have her call
your mother and Christopher and your two friends and let them know what we’re up to
and that, I think, he said, standing up with his palms flat on the table to whisper
in her ear, solves our problem, sweetheart. And then he was off to requisition a telephone.

She poured herself another glass of wine, emptying the bottle, and drank half before
stopping to consider what her father was proposing and why, another game but this
one improvised toward a purpose that seemed superfluous and a bit zany. Together they
had never been anything but free—perhaps too free, she thought, trying not to dwell
on what she meant, the implication of her submissiveness. And yet the thing about
playing with Daddy was she always felt more herself, unshackled and granted immunity
from the deepest part of her interior. All the blind alleys of self-discovery were,
or had been so far, most securely investigated in the company of her father. Was that
normal? she wondered, knowing she did not care to answer her own question, and then
he was back at the table, making no effort to mask his consternation, and she said,
What’s wrong? Something’s wrong, right?

He said, Should we order another bottle of wine? and when she said if you want he
summoned the waiter and they chose identical entrées—grilled sea bass—for their dinner,
Dottie abandoning her craving for a hamburger. When he lit a cigarette she asked for
one too, waiting impatiently for the wine to be opened and poured, glancing at his
new and unshaped beard, which had begun to look wolfish, she thought, a definite change
from his physical trademark, the well-groomed presentation of reliability, and then
free of the waiter she said, Okay, I know that look—are you going to tell me?

Perhaps our plan is being outpaced by events, he said cryptically, stabbing out his
cigarette and lighting another. Or, he said brightening, one can finally see God’s
hand in the plot.

Earth to Dad, she said.

Right, he said, smiling apologetically. Mary Beth was distressed, as you might imagine,
to be falsely informed of our fate by the Turks, and damn happy to hear otherwise.
Then she was right back to business, something in the works for months, and now, apparently,
we are looking at a green light, all systems go as they say in Houston, except for
the lack of one, most crucial player.

So, can you tell me, asked Dottie, or is this one of those hush-hush things?

I think we can say this is very much one of those hush-hush things, he said, pausing
for the waiter to deliver their plates of grilled fish before adding, Can I tell you?
Actually, I’ve already told you.

Oh, you mean—

Believe me, I’ve thought long and hard about this, the risk involved, et
cetera—I’ll ask once more and I promise never again: Would you consider helping us
out?

You mean the Pope thing
. . .
somebody trying to hurt the Pope. That thing?

He picked up his tableware, methodically deboning his fish and then switching plates
to debone hers, and thus began his rant, sotto voce, deliberate, unbreachable except
by a forkful of sea bass, the obsessive unscrolling of his universe, the politics
and theology of its underpinning, which she barely listened to as she ate, not bored
but restless, her attention not quite synchronized with what he was telling her. She
had been overly inducted into his sophistry, its sideline audience for so many years,
his beliefs invading and occupying her metabolism until they had become, without the
virulence, her own.

With that with which you cannot compromise, she heard him say, it is impossible to
be too aggressive, and her attention sprang back at the shift in his tone, the serene
marshaling of details, as he finally resolved to lead her through the gates of his
conspiracy. Of course she did not need to be reminded of the man who shot Pope John
Paul II—Mehmet Ali A
ğ
ca; a Turk. Her Turkish friends, when they learned she was Roman Catholic, were embarrassed
to say his name. Did she know why this man attempted to assassinate the Holy Father?
I guess so, she told her father, whose heavy-lidded eyes seemed to smolder with impersonal
anger as he corrected her: No, the crime was not religious except ostensibly; here
was a case of a contract gunman recruited by government security agents. My God, said
Dottie, what government would want to kill the Pope?

And he told her: the Soviets, the Soviets, the Soviets. The Soviets, who will stop
at nothing to eliminate the Almighty’s presence on this earth; the Soviets, who instructed
their surrogates in Bulgaria to orchestrate this diabolical crime; the Soviets, who,
having failed, are prepared to try again, this time with a more effective cast of
puppets, the blood-sucking Yugoslavs, some of whom I know very well, he said, and
you must never breathe a word of this, what I’m telling you
. . .
and the fish would be better with raki, I think. Would you like something else? he
asked and she said, Just water.

Her mind was empty as blue sky. She picked absently at the last spice-laden morsels
of crispy skin on her plate while they waited for the waiter to leave. You have questions,
her father declared, but she did not, not yet. The magnitude of what he had asked
her seemed beyond the scope of her direct involvement, although it amazed her to think
of her father as the one person in the world employed to stop this terrible thing
from happening.

What am I asking you to do? her father rushed ahead. The man the Yugoslavs are sending
to Istanbul to organize this atrocity has a well-observed weakness, and I need the
assistance of someone like you, I need
your
assistance, to exploit that weakness. Why you, you ask, rather than someone like
you? Here is the answer: to keep it in the family, so to speak, makes everything easier
to contain.

Someone like me?

I will say it straight out, keeping nothing from you, said her father. The weakness
they would exploit—he started to explain but succumbed to a quote.
He liked green fruit, imported from the west.
Who wrote that?

I have no idea.

That’s our man Conrad, one of the Asian novels. It means this Serbian bastard I’m
referring to has a taste for young women, young Western women, most notably blondes.
I hope to God I’m not offending you, he said.

She scoffed at his presumption. At times her father was shock incarnate.

Now is the time to say you’d rather not get involved. There are alternatives.

But you have to tell me, she said, what the operation is, and when he finished describing
the plan she said, Oh, you want me to pretend to be a prostitute.

Pretend, he assured her, was the operative word. Honey to trap the bear. The man only
has to believe he can have his way. I would kill him before I would ever let him lay
a hand on you.

No kidding, she said facetiously.

I’ve never been more serious, Kitten.

God, she said, I know.

He took the napkin from his lap to wipe his lips. I’m having a coffee and cognac,
he said. Would you like some dessert? Without any hesitation she said yes, a chocolate
fudge sundae, and when it was put before her she held her spoon in the air, turning
her wrist with alluring dips and batting her eyelashes in a parody of a coquette.

So Daddy, she said, feigning radiant breathlessness, how would a prostitute eat her
ice cream? and her father smiled enigmatically and said, Good question, assessing
her with incipient prurience before he seemed to remember himself. You’re a natural,
kiddo, he told her, but I think you might be overplaying it.

In her bed an hour later she lay on her back with her eyes closed, wondering who the
woman was, the winner of his nocturnal competition, as she listened to the sounds
of her father’s surreptitious jerking off, the barely audible piston-like rhythm,
the familiar soft methodical pump of friction climaxing in a sharp suck of air as
if he had inhaled a hot ember and she thought, sarcastically,
Glad that’s over with,
and turned on her side away from him, tense and agitated, her left hand sandwiched
idly between her thighs, a finger rolling the tiny hard pearl, thinking, Who’s behind
the door—prostitute or daughter?
Well, not Mom, that’s for sure.