The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover

by Bob Shacochis

  That building, there, said Maranian, slowing to point out a particularly unremarkable piece of white-collar architecture, its ground floor housing a bank. I am the man who made that building.

  It’s very nice, she felt obliged to say. You’re a builder?

  I was an architect. 1962. My first and last.

  Oh, like Sinan, she said. Why did you stop?

  Here’s something you do not know, he said. The famous Sinan was a Christian. Did you know that? An apostate.

  No, I didn’t, she said. What’s an apostate?

  Listening to Maranian, she understood that he had brought her across the Golden Horn not to see the building but to hear his story about the bright young student on scholarship at Istanbul Technical University who, upon graduation, discovers that his design and engineering skills mean less and less in a city yearning for amnesia, its reinvention inspired, like a schoolgirl’s, from pictures and ideas borrowed from foreign magazines, learning to despise its former diversity and embrace its rising nationalism, hail the Turks and to hell with the Greeks and the Jews and the Gypsies and anyone else who imagined here was where they belonged. The westernized rich were not comfortable with an Armenian and his smoldering grievances in their employ, and the soon-to-be-rich Turks from the Anatolian provinces coming to rebuild the city practiced a robust mix of incompetence and corruption that pushed decent men into bankruptcy. These commissions were like eating dung, said Maranian. So the star-student-turned-young-professional returned to the Technical University to join the faculty as a junior member, yet by the 1970s the Armenians who remained in Turkey after the century’s wars were being made to disappear again through a different type of cleansing. But an Armenian always knows who he is, said Maranian, and without regret he left the university to teach at a private boys’ school for fifteen years and then, because of his passion for the city, retired to enjoy himself as one of the city’s many freelance guides, a guild famous for its arcane obsessions.

  And now you work for my father? she asked.

  Now I work for the future, said Mr. Maranian, turning the car around in the direction of the Flower Passage, and she said to herself, Well, if working for the future means driving me in circles on my seventeenth birthday, then tally ho. She sat back against the seat, liking the grandfatherly Mr. Maranian, who did not treat her like a helpless child, and liked his answer. The future was every person’s business, everybody’s occupation. Well, it should be, certainly, she amended herself.

  So how’s the future looking these days, she said cheerily.

  Much like the past, he said. New forms for old misery.

  Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, she said in a rush, recognizing the quote from her father’s repertoire of le Carréisms, and maybe that’s where Maranian had picked it up as well—Cultural attaché—Balls! another of her father’s favorites—he has military written all over him. Her memory for languages and names and whatever she read or heard was the thing that made people think she was smart, not realizing her skill (and her brother’s) for recall was something their father had drilled into them with games at the dinner table, car games, campfire games, waiting-in-line games—Name That Song, Weird Discoveries, So and So is the Author of What, Who Said Blah Blah, or the game they played at embassy receptions, Who’s the Spy.

  That’s John le Carré, isn’t it, she said. Daddy had him over for dinner. When we lived in Rome.

  Maranian took his eyes off the road to give her an appraising look. Have you read Stamboul Train? he asked.

  No! she said with a purity of élan for which she was often adored by adults. Tell me.

  He double-parked at the intersection at the top of Kumkapi, saying he would wait for her, and as she walked down the lively street webbed with festive lights and lined with crowded bistros, smiling at the touts in front of each establishment trying to coax her in, the sea air made even more delicious by the aroma of garlic cooked in olive oil, she realized she had not asked Maranian if he meant he’d wait for a few minutes while she collected her next clue, or wait until she had finished dinner with her father, whom she eagerly imagined just up ahead, sitting at a linen-covered table in front of their favorite seafood restaurant, sipping a glass of red wine and savoring a bowl of fried mussels. He better be, she began to whine to herself, because he must know that by now she would be ravenous, anxious for the conclusion of the game, today’s version uncustomarily anemic, almost haphazard, last-minute, and she was mildly disappointed, yet no sooner had her mood darkened than it brightened again—here was the restaurant with its big red umbrellas and here was the violinist, a large mustachioed man wearing a tuxedo, his instrument like a toy in his hand.

  Good evening, she said respectfully. Can you help me? I am looking for my father.

  Barbie speaks Turkish, he said beaming, exaggerating his delight, and she sighed, having heard this everywhere she went in the world from men this man’s age, fathers coerced by their daughters into buying blonde-haired American dolls. The violinist snapped his fingers and a trio of aproned waiters escorted her to a seat at a candlelit table, brought her a flute of French champagne and a single white rose, then warm bread, a bowl of the famous fried mussels, a smaller bowl of bright green olives. As the waiters stepped back the musician stepped forward, tucking his violin beneath his chin, his head tilted and his eyes pinched shut, the violin now his heavenly pillow, the bow angled atop the D string without a squeak, the violinist inhaling loudly through his nose, all very dramatic but not without grace, she thought, and then his eyes opened wide and he dipped his broad shoulders and played for her.

  Oh, she gasped, having recognized the piece after the first four exquisitely sad notes he pulled from the violin. Her father’s eyes often brimmed with tears when he heard it, because it was his most beloved piece of classical music, how could it not be hers as well, Pachelbel’s Canon in D Minor, and her heart swelled, how achingly beautiful sorrow sounded, and she relished this, being drawn to the very limit of her capacity for sentimentality, her feelings so overpowering at times, this place inside you that would allow life everything, and thus risk everything.

  She gulped her champagne to keep from crying and picked up the long-stemmed rose to smell the memory of those other landmark days in her life, Confirmation and First Communion, when her father had also given her one white rose, and then she looked at the violinist and laughed as he held and then contorted the last note of the Canon and made it squeak like a mouse while he grimaced and his eyes became clownishly wild and she wanted to jump up and dance as he segued to a mazurka, an insanely exuberant, reeling version of Happy Birthday, all the waiters, the diners, people passing by, clapping their hands to the fiery rhythm. Then the song finished, the violinist bowed, and she did jump up, unable to contain her pleasure.

  That was awesome! she said in English.

  Awzume, he echoed in his gravelly voice, and then reverted to Turkish to tell her she must go now to the fish market on the Bosphorus and perhaps there she would find her father.

  Oh, man, she said, reverting to girlish frustration. When was this going to end?

  Maranian shrugged when she told him to take her to the fish market and with darkness falling and the muezzins calling the faithful to evening prayers they drove a short distance to the shore and she got out and marveled at the scene, the smell pungent but not unpleasant, the fishmongers lighting scores of candles and small clay oil lamps to illuminate their stalls, mackerel and bluefish piled high like loaves of bread in enormous baskets, the light a shimmering flow like water across the fish, and behind the market out into the strait the ships passing like broken-off pieces of the city sliding away toward open water, unperturbed. Her light-headedness felt like the warmth of spring and how true love might feel but also slightly champagne loopy, the waiter refilling her flute once or maybe twice, and she walked with a bounce from stall to stall, the men calling to her
as they would any customer or any pretty girl, until midway through the market she heard someone address her in Arabic and stopped.

  Inti bint meen, welaadee?

  She peered into the shadows behind the baskets and could detect a face but not its features, seeing only the oracular shape of the smoker, who sat cross-legged atop a crude wooden table, presiding over the flaring red eye of a water pipe. Then a ball of fragrant smoke, smelling of hot apples, and the voice asked again, Inti bint meen, welaadee? Whose daughter are you, my child?

  She almost snapped, Excuse me, I am not a child, but collected herself and composed the sentence in her head and answered properly. Ana bint Abu Theeb. I am the daughter of Abu Theeb.

  Abu Theeb, eh? the voice said, sarcastic, switching to English but carrying the same tone. Daughter of the son of the wolf. Who knew that Americans could have such names?

  His face loomed forward into the egg of candlelight, his mouth stretched expansively into a grin that revealed the gleam of his teeth, and she saw that he was only a few years older than she and, she thought giddily, gorgeous in the way Arab boys could be—smooth-faced with a full-lipped sensuality and eyelashes like a woman—when they weren’t shouting their idiot heads off and complaining about the most piddling thing and trying to be despicable little thieves.

  I am Mohammed, he said.

  Of course you are, she said, tossing her hair. Who isn’t?

  Don’t be blasphemous, welaadee.

  Stop calling me your child.

  You must choose a fish, he said, getting down to business, and she pointed to one in the basket and he said no, choose another, and she pointed to a second one and he said no and she stamped her foot and demanded he choose a fish himself.

  This one, he said, lifting a mackerel that seemed to her the same as all the others. This is a number one fish.

  I can’t tell the difference, she said.

  Ah, he said, you will never know the difference until you look in its mouth.

  Her reluctance came not from squeamishness but from the thought of having her fingers stink of mackerel. You do it, she said. You open it and I’ll look.

  Oh welaadee, he said, prying the jaws. If we could only see what this fish has seen. This fish has swum through the sunken ruins of a lost city, fabled Tanpinar. This fish swam through the portal of the emperor’s palace, past the great hall containing the mosaics of paradise, swim swim, and into the queen’s chamber, where it swallowed a treasure.

  Yeah, sure, she said, looking into the mackerel’s mouth. There’s nothing in there.

  Really? said Mohammed, aghast, raising the fish to examine its mouth himself, becoming more alarmed, shaking the fish, tail up, as if it were a Christmas stocking with one last chocolate inside the toe, saying one moment, please, one moment, while her face began to hurt as she tried to keep from laughing and then couldn’t stop herself.

  Maranian was out of the Mercedes, pacing, and when he saw her returning from the fishmonger he glanced at his wristwatch and opened the rear door for her and even though he did not smile when she declared they were friends now which meant she should ride up front, his face turned kind and he allowed her what she wished. Look, she said, excited, fluttering her right hand in front of his nose, and he switched on the overhead light to admire the gold-banded ring, mounted with an unusual pink pearl like a lozenge set in a cage of braided gold wire. Isn’t it fabulous!

  They call this pearl baroque, he said. Very rare. He turned off the light and said now they must go, her father was waiting. Super, she said, not having eaten the mussels or olives to avoid being disrespectful to the violinist. I’m starving. She chattered as they sped back toward Sultanahmet, saying that boy was so funny, he had stuck the ring inside a fish but couldn’t remember which fish until he grabbed the right one and out came this lovely ring but dripping slime, ugh, and he popped it into his mouth to wash it and she thought she would gag. Then he put it on her finger and said now we are married, welaadee, and she said in chiming tones, Don’t think so, and he told her she must always buy her fish from him and she told the boy but didn’t tell Mr. Maranian that perhaps one day she would buy his fish and cook it for him à la français. Agreed, he said. From this minute on, I wait for you, welaadee.

  Never marry a Saracen, said Maranian. The Muslim man will make you his slave.

  That’s harsh, she said, but there was no time to discuss Mr. Maranian’s backward point of view because the ride, and today’s game, had come to an end. What’s going on here? she asked, frowning at the flashing lights of police vans, the line of Turkish soldiers, a row of limousines. What happened? What is this place?

  Your father is inside, said Maranian.

  Is he all right? she asked, her heartbeat rising in her chest.

  He is very well, I think, said Maranian.

  Are you coming? she asked, hoping he was, because what was happening outside on the street seemed terribly ominous, so many awful things kicking you in the gut these days: Libyans arrested in Ankara last weekend outside the American Officers Club before they could blow it up with their bombs, the embassy urging Americans in Turkey not to leave their homes except for necessary business, the bombing three weeks ago of the discotheque in West Berlin, the assassination at the embassy in Khartoum, the bombings and kidnappings in Beirut, the hijacked TWA flight in Greece, which ended with the execution of an American sailor, the massacre last year at the airport in Rome two days after her father had been reassigned to Turkey, and, just a few days ago, the bomb outside the bank here in Istanbul, enough to give anyone what her mother called a major case of the nerves, not to mention the government’s nasty attitude toward students, planting MIT agents and undercover finks throughout the universities and cafés. She certainly didn’t like the looks of the men in black leather jackets milling around, smoking their cigarettes with unsavory expressions, plainclothes whoever, secret whatever, nothing more obvious than their brutish instincts.

  No, said Maranian. I am not coming. I am invisible again.

  But what’s the military doing here? That’s not good, is it?

  He is waiting for you, said Maranian. Go. You will be happy, I promise you.

  The army was the source and protector of secularism in Turkey, but to go among these uniformed men it helped, she knew, that she had dressed conservatively, changing after her afternoon swim team practice into an ankle-length skirt and bulky sweater that concealed her breasts. The Turkish girls at school, obsessed with Western fashion, lived for the weekend hours when they could shuck their gray skirts and white blouses and squeeze themselves into jeans and short skirts and busty tank tops, but the Muslims in the neighborhoods of Uskadar were old-fashioned and disapproving, the women in their head scarves hissing at any girl they thought immodest, and the men were worse, unable to decide what they wanted from females—celestial virgin or gutter whore—and the infuriating impossible answer seemed to be both.

  She walked as her father had taught her, as a free person fully in her rights to do what she was doing. Behind the cordon on the sidewalk were two policemen and one asked her name and then relayed it to the other one who held a clipboard and crossed out her name on a list and she thought, How stupid. The first policeman said please wait and descended a set of stone steps to a large wooden door and went in and she asked the policeman with the clipboard what was happening, why such heavy security, and he said he did not know, and she said respectfully, why won’t you tell me? I think you should. The first policeman returned and said please follow me and they went down the stone steps and through the old wooden door and down another set of shadowy steps to another old door within a stone wall, the policeman’s voice echoing slightly in the musty, cavelike air. Please go ahead, he told her and she put her hand on the door pull but turned around uncertainly and said please tell me where we are.

  A Byzantine cistern
, he said. Rented for occasions. You will see, and he nodded for her to open the door and she did, stepping out onto a landing that resembled an interior balcony suspended beneath the vaulted brick ceilings of a magnificent cavern, torches in sconces making an undersea light that danced over the long communal dinner tables attended by tuxedoed waiters balancing trays of drinks and across the cheering, whistling faces of the crowd below, these wonderful people, dear God, applauding, her father and a large group of men in dark suits on one side of the room underneath a blue cloud of cigar smoke, her best friends from school and it looked like her entire class on the other, her favorite teachers, even some of the entel boys (the self-styled entellectuals) from the lycée and cafés, surprise, surprise. Oh, my God! she said under her breath, a rosy heat spreading on her cheeks. Her eyes, now misty, returned to the commanding presence of her father, his hands stuffed into his trouser pockets, and met his sparkling eyes and she knew that look better than she knew herself, the boyish radiant smile under lifted eyebrows that said, Look where we’ve found ourselves this time, Kitten! and he winked at her and she flew skipping down the last set of stone steps and into his arms.