The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover

by Bob Shacochis

  Bizarro! she managed to say, the room trying to float into separate planes and beginning to pinwheel in front of her.

  I don’t believe, said Elena, leaning into her friend conspiratorially. This lying Communist says your father kill his son in the mountains of . . . some place. Ah, a place in Afghanistan. Sorry, I hope it’s true.

  Look at their eyes, she said, and in them Dottie saw the searing hostility, the sadistic refusal to allow forgiveness or entertain its possibility, the ferocious intolerance for mistakes, their deadly honor, unshakable allegiances and loyalties, the blend of mutual hatred liquefied in her whirling vision, sloshing back and forth.

  Your father, Elena said haltingly, his Russian is not so good. There is a misunderstanding, maybe.

  Daddy’s never even been there, she said. Okay. He goes to Pakistan, she added, thinking, that’s a little white lie, because her father had been spending much of his time in Pakistan, and last year, when she asked him why they didn’t just move to Islamabad she had been embarrassed by the irascible outburst and unexpected bigotry of his answer. You and your mother don’t deserve a place like Pakistan, he had told her. No woman does. These are disgusting countries, barbaric. The worst. The Africans are better than these Mujos—a Slavic word he often used, which she more or less understood as something like Muslim niggers. Jesus, she had said to herself, backing away from him, confused.

  Your father is agreeing, I don’t know what, Elena translated. Okay, I am not following. To think in this language gives me headache. My family wiped off this language, like snot from a pig. Ah, he is admitting that Americans give weapons to mujahideen, the Russians give, gave, weapons to Vietnam people, this is war, be a big boy and accept this, but the Soviet says I am speaking only of you—your father. Yes, but—your father and mujahideen. The Soviet says you, you, you. You hold a weapon . . . missile. He is saying this missile hit some helicopter and everyone is dead, maybe, and his son. And saying don’t be stupid to think an American who shoot a missile can be secret. Your father is saying the Soviet come to make trouble and make lies and maybe everyone forget this Chernobyl and the Soviet must give apology.

  She remembered thinking, That’s enough and getting up from the table to defend her father, thinking, Oh, they love this, don’t they, and she remembered Jacqueline insisting Dottie, stop, don’t, and Elena’s attempt to hold her back and she remembered chanting, Bullshit, but she didn’t think anyone heard because she thought she was only saying it to herself. She could remember just those things, and then feeling sick and her father loading her into a taxi, saying it’s very important you learn how to hold your liquor, Kitten, and the last thing she remembered, when she woke up naked in her father’s suite on the top floor of the Hilton, was the absolute importance of making herself not remember.

  Daddy, she made herself not remember asking, did you really fire a missile? Bullshit, right? she had slurred. Crazy.

  Right, he said, undressing her, lying as he would always lie, as protocol, as policy, as a matter of prudence, because not to lie placed lives in jeopardy, and to tell the truth exposed a weakness in character. To not lie was an act of vanity.

  Daddy, don’t, okay? she would not remember saying, the sick confusion of her hands intercepting her father’s hands at the waistband of her panties. With a spinning glance she saw his ring, Osman’s bracelet—better not to know or even imagine what passed through her father’s mind as he purchased a rare baroque pearl, pink as a girl’s innocence, to celebrate her seventeenth birthday. What do daughters truly know of fathers? Their fingers paired, then interlocked.

  Okay?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Always the opera buff, her father stood at the window humming Carmen, fresh from the shower, a white towel girdling his athletic hips, scanning the Hilton’s famous view of the Bosphorus, a favorite pastime, monitoring the sea traffic, hoping to spy a Soviet warship or the menace of a submarine’s conning tower, a black slice of shark fin branded with hammer and sickle in the private pool of his relentless obsession with Communists. Daddy’s Red Menace . . . but the very idea . . . coming to get us. They’re creeps, okay, but . . . really, ugh.

  Rise and shine, kiddo, he said, his ability to sense her watching him a skill she had accustomed herself to early in life. His voice prodded her toward the shower with a reminder, Let’s not be late for church.

  Looking around the room strapped a headache across the general sense of anxiety she had awoken into and inside her queasy stomach she felt a balloon of nausea inflating and when she opened her mouth she couldn’t keep her voice from sounding pitiful.

  Daddy, where are my things?

  What things?

  My clothes.

  Being cleaned, he said, looking over his scarred shoulder with a sunny, complicitous smile. You probably don’t remember.

  Did I get sick? she asked, closing her eyes on the vile pain, not wanting to know and he said, I’ll say.

  She whimpered, But I can’t find my—

  Your what? he said.

  My underwear.

  In the bathroom, he told her, with her overnight bag, and she pulled the sheet up to her neck and swung her feet out of bed to the carpet and pleaded halfheartedly, Don’t look, the refrain of her pubescence. Silly kitten, he said, and she sprinted across the room to the shower without a second to lose, retching into the drain as the water belled over her pounding head. Toweling her hair she heard him announce the concierge had returned and the door opened and he held out into the steam her skirt and blouse and sweater, hangered and draped in crackling cellophane. Her elbows bracketed her head and the towel like a hijab, framing her flushed face and he looked up and down the length of her with an impossible love in a way she understood a father does not look upon his daughter and she said a bit provocatively, What? and he said, You are the most beautiful thing God ever put on earth and she exhaled chagrin and frowned in protest and said, Daddy, come on, go away.

  Gule, gule, he said in Turkish—smilingly, smilingly—and she dropped the towel chastely across the top of her breasts. I need you so much, he said, stepping back through the door, and his humility when he told her this always weakened her and she softly admitted, I know.

  Most often when he came to Istanbul it was all embassy business and they would meet for dinner somewhere excellent in the city and after dessert he would check his wristwatch and disappear—did he go to a mistress? she wondered possessively—but if he stayed the weekend she would rendezvous with him at the Hilton Saturday evenings or Sunday mornings and they would grab a taxi down through Taksim Square toward the Golden Horn. They often bypassed nearby St. Anthony of Padua and its straw-colored steeple, as they did this Sunday, Istanbul’s largest Roman Catholic cathedral—too modern, her father complained, run by lefties—in favor of the smaller, more distant sanctuary, the imposing medieval hulk of the Church of St. Peter and Paul. Built in the fifteenth century by the Genoese, her father preferred its esteemed congregation, the local Maltese community, heroic people, fighting men, descendants of the Knights Hospitallers—Knights Templars, Knights of Rhodes, Knights of Malta, the last stand of the great crusaders.

  The Angelus bells rang brightly. She bobby-pinned a white lace mantilla to her hair and stored her sunglasses in her purse. They slipped, latecomers, into the dimness of the vestibule, her father’s hand removed from the small of her back as they paused to dip fingertips into the marble basin of holy water before slipping down the nave into a half-empty pew and kneeling side by side. Her father’s daunting piety was a perpetual fascination to his daughter. It had an intensity that, as a child, she tried to emulate but now considered too eccentric and even backward, something of the Old World she imagined had flowed into him from his Yugoslavian mother, his clasped hands lashed together with the ivory-beaded strands of her grandmother’s rosary and nailed onto the rail of the pew in front o
f them, his forehead dropped like a penitent’s atop his hands, facedown and eyes closed with a degree of concentration that seemed to hint of agony, his lips in constant motion with a passionate burble of Latin, regardless of whatever language in which the mass was being celebrated. He would rise in a fervor to knock his breast during the Kyrie, the first and the loudest to sing the congregant’s response in the liturgy, the first to line up in the chancel with his tongue stuck in the air to receive the consecrated host, the last to slide out from the pews in the aftermath of the benediction, still on his knees and head bowed, remembering the dead, the grandparents she had never known, relieving himself of his limitless surplus of prayers. He was meant to be a priest, she sometimes thought growing up, and so wasn’t surprised the day her mother confided to her, as if here was a fairy tale about a prince mysteriously required to forfeit his kingdom for the call of duty elsewhere, that as a young man her father almost had been, dropping out of the seminary—Jesuits? Dominicans? she couldn’t remember—six months before he was to be ordained, to pursue instead a secular career—grad school, a year of overseas work with the AFL-CIO, then the government. The revelation immediately explained at least one of his disquieting habits she recalled from childhood—her father’s nightly appearance in the doorways to his children’s bedrooms, his last act of vigilance before he retired for the evening, a faceless silhouette backlit by the hall light, wearing only jockey briefs glowing ghostly white, his right arm slowly quartering the darkness with the sign of the cross where his son and daughter lay with the covers pulled up to the slits of their eyes, feigning sleep, his deep-voiced patriarchal Latin not the comforting voice they knew—In nomini Patri, et Filii, et Spiriti Sancti—the blessing entering her drowsiness as a somewhat frightening and supernatural visitation. And how he sobbed at her Confirmation and First Communion and made her pose, immaculate, for a thousand pictures.

  The mass ascended, unlocking its miracle of transubstantiation, My Body My Blood—my goddamn head, she moaned to herself, her body tightening into her misery. The thought that she had repressed throughout the ritual pushed through the loose weave of daydream and rote prayer and memory that had occupied her during the service and she told herself firmly, I can’t, at the same moment her father stepped into the aisle and stood, waiting for her to join him in line to the altar—so handsome and debonair: who could not go to him?—the puzzled expression on his face recalibrated to the bland curiosity of questioning eyes when she failed to move and instead sat down, impassive, staring at her hands folded in her lap and her new ring and the ring’s pearl in its gold-ribbed cage, suddenly forlorn and forsaken, unsure of God’s judgment upon her, an insecurity that made her aware of the impossibility of receiving Communion in any state where she had not calmed her doubts with an appropriate penance. She couldn’t do it, she realized for the first time in her life, just because she was supposed to do it, and this breach of loyalty, like a splitting away not from God but from her father, seemed extraordinary and paralyzing and she feared her father’s reaction. Then he was back, announced by the rustle of his crisp suit, and she could smell him again, his aftershave and peppermint breath and shoe polish, even before she felt his nudge, the side of his body warm against hers. His hand crossed to her knee, which he patted reassuringly yet she knew once he swallowed the melted wafer he would say something but then he didn’t and the hurtful thought of his disappointment became unbearable to her and she kept her head lowered.

  I’m sorry, Daddy, she whispered, unable to raise her eyes to him, her fingers worrying the ring he had given her. He whispered back, asking what was wrong; she told him she hadn’t been to confession. He pressed his left hand compassionately over hers and bent his head to whisper into her ear something she did not readily understand, that confession was contingent upon the commission of mortal sins, but otherwise an unnecessary emotional indulgence. Not a problem, he counseled her, for those who are blameless.

  The priest at the altar issued a declaration of peace, the mass ended, and she considered what her father said and thought, That couldn’t be right, could it?—wasn’t she to blame, too?

  Between you and me and the Man above, he assured her. Not a problem.

  If he wasn’t in a rush for the airport, after mass they would taxi back to the Pera Palace in Beyoğlu and drink chai in the patisserie or eat a hamburger in the American Bar, her father an encyclopedia of anecdotes about the Orient Express and the hotel’s roster of celebrity guests, Agatha Christie and Mata Hari, Hemingway and Graham Greene, this king and that dictator. Or, depending on the weather, they’d stroll as they did today from Pera to Karakoy, down steep and narrow cobbled passageways flanked by cracked sidewalks and busted steps, laundry fluttering overhead, banners of commonplace drudgery connecting seedy apartment buildings filled by a rising tide of tenants swept in from the Anatolian countryside. Their enterprise turned the formerly prosperous neighborhood into a junk-shop sprawl of low-end vendors, spare parts, pirated tapes, and smutty lingerie everywhere and urchins twisting through the crowds with their circular trays of tulip-shaped tea glasses or a load of fresh-baked sesame simits balanced on their heads, a less grand bazaar than the one across the Golden Horn but no less invigorating. Her hangover was eased by the walk and her dour mood uplifted by the boisterous humanity massed in the Byzantine streets, a liberation she felt as she emerged from the claustrophobic lanes below the Galata Tower to encounter the glorious waterfront and its rioting seagulls, anglers with buckets and rods lining its stone promenade and its spellbinding view of Old Istanbul, minarets rising from its three central hills like rockets aimed at the sun.

  Their destination, as always, was the iron footbridge spanning the banks of the Golden Horn to Eminonu. It seemed all of Istanbul tramped across the Galata Bridge on Saturdays and Sundays or gathered below its surface, and the dam of its unfortunate pontoons made a smelly lake of inland water slopping back into the metropolis. But the dark recesses beneath the bridge’s roadway housed a fragrant honeycomb of ramshackle restaurants, smoky nargileh joints with bubbling water pipes, teahouses overrun by backgammon addicts, and hideaway dens packed with burly unshaved men devoted to political argument and the unIslamic pleasures of raki and Johnny Walker.

  They wandered happily into the bustle and its singular exuberance, investigating the gastronomic possibilities, until her father poked his head into a cramped lokanta they had overlooked on previous visits, saying, Oh, man, that’s the stuff! hooked by the bountiful selection of meze displayed like a doll’s banquet on the wooden counter. Let’s give it a try, he said, but five of its six tables were colonized by families and in the back the sixth had been commandeered by a single patron, a swarthy man whose coal-black hair had been pasted against his scalp with something oily. He wore a blue tracksuit and warm-up jacket, the uniform of the city’s uneducated working class, and sat like a guard dog over a plate of chicken bones picked clean, drinking beer from a bottle with a look of loutish self-absorption and she thought, Ugh, let’s not, but her father went ahead, shining with affability, exclaiming, Yemek, yemek!—Food, food!—and she followed with a tolerant sigh, the good daughter.

  Her father asked, Do you mind? The man at the table nodded without apparent objection but remained indifferent to their presence and when they sat down her father winked at her and said he was so hungry he could eat a camel, and she stifled a laugh and the man took a final gulp from his beer, scraped his chair back from the table, and stood up fishing into his pocket for lira to pay his bill.

  Allow me, said her father and she thought, How bloody rude, watching the man accept this generosity without a word or gesture of thanks, flicking his wrist to snap open a pair of wraparound sunglasses, slide them on his unpleasant face, and leave.

  Dad! Why did you pay for him?

  Random act of kindness.

  Then she noticed he had forgotten something, a large brown envelope the size of an unfolded sheet of paper, on t
he floor next to his chair. Oh, hey, she began to say, but her father caught her eye and she felt an inward thrill and clammed up, pretending she had not witnessed what she understood amounted to a more sensitive level of her father’s world of games, hidden in plain view.

  He seemed kinda greasy, didn’t he? she said, playing along, excited about the drop, an occurrence he rarely allowed her to observe, but more than anything relieved to have her father again all to herself.

  Yes, he did, agreed her father. What would you like to drink? How are you feeling?

  Better. Thanks, she said shyly, her act of contrition.

  After the waiter had memorized their elaborate order, her father added water to his glass half-filled with raki and told her, Dot, I have some big news.

  She marveled adolescently at the trick she had seen countless times, the liquor turned cloudy by the water, and he chided her for not listening. She twizzled a straw in her glass of Coke and to prove she had indeed been listening said, Well? Aren’t you going to tell me?

  Your mother’s not coming back, he said.

  This isn’t another vacation, is it?

  No, he said, it isn’t.

  So, is this like a divorce or an annulment or something?

  No, he said. Not at all. She wants to be in Virginia, now that your brother’s in college.

  She can’t handle it anymore.

  She wants to be there for Christopher.

  I’m not surprised.

  I didn’t think you would be.

  What did you think?

  I thought, Dottie is seventeen. She knows how to take care of herself.

  That’s so true, she said, pleased.

  The invasion of the meze began, the surface of the table disappearing beneath an advancing army of small bowls and saucer-sized plates, three varieties of ezme—carrot, smoked aubergine, and chilies with tomatoes—fasulye, stuffed vine leaves, yogurt with grated cucumber and mint, cubes of grilled white cheese rubbed in olive oil and oregano, paper-thin slices of smoked tuna called lekerda, a salad of charcoal-grilled octopus, humus topped with fat slabs of grilled red peppers and pine nuts, mussels in beer batter—Dad! Enough! she said. No way you’ll eat all that—spinach balls with yogurt, fresh anchovies—Ho ho! he said, just watch—a disgusting lump of fried brain salad, an obscene fig dribbled with gunk—and she said, Stop already, you are definitely crazy—his enthusiasm for food verging on the pathological and sometimes when she felt her father’s appetite enclosing her she would remind herself of the pertinent family legend deployed to justify his gluttony, that his parents were dirt poor and he had almost starved to death as a kid in Pittsburgh during World War Two.