The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover

by Bob Shacochis

  By the time the waiter brought her order—a cheese and tomato pide—there wasn’t space for it on the table. Oink, said her father, making room by wolfing down two of the dishes, and she picked up her knife and fork and cut a tiny bite of her pizza and stared at it hopelessly, not expecting her empty stomach to appreciate the intrusion, and tried not to care about her father’s big news, telling herself, Okay, it doesn’t matter, the season for her relationship with her mother had come and gone and she could never trust her mother to keep her safe anyway.

  Try some of this, said her father and she shook her head no in slow motion, remote, distracted by her awareness that she wasn’t as sanguine or cavalier about any of this as her tone suggested, in fact she was actually pretty good at denying herself permission to think about these things at all—the folly of her parents—and she lifted the bite of pizza to her closed lips, lost in thought, exploring the renewal of an old feeling, that she had been born motherless.

  After all, she told herself, would somebody please tell her what she was supposed to do?

  After all, she never wanted to be inadequate like her mother and as a teenager found it increasingly impossible to conceal her disdain for her mother’s deficiencies. PMS, migraines, panic attacks, paranoia, crying jags, selfishness so consuming it sometimes seemed like a form of amnesia—Whose children are these? She had never stopped being afraid of the world, which made her anathema to her daughter, who did not like women who rejected, however sensibly, a dangerous expansion of their world. The way she hid herself behind walls she might as well have been a Muslim woman. She took too many pills. She was anorexic before it became fashionable among the girls of her daughter’s generation. She was freaked out by the topic of sex, welcoming her daughter’s first period with a box of Kotex and silence, and totally insane about cleanliness and hygiene, dirty countries, dirty food, dirty people . . . after all, her mother allowed her father to regularly administer purgatives to his children, and even, Dottie suspected, to her mother herself, sudsy enemas that horrified her with shame until the onset of puberty, when she became headstrong and learned too late to refuse him.

  Oh, man, this octopus! said her father, chewing rapturously. Try some?

  It was like . . .

  . . . no secret to her that women were an open field, a free market for her glamo father. He could have had anybody, chosen anybody, but the woman he chose was her neurotic mother and as she grew older and kept asking herself why, even knowing her parents truly loved one another despite their obvious misalignment, the only good answer she could come up with was that it all came down to the fact that in a time of crisis he had rescued her, and the object lesson was self-evident: be careful who you rescue because you’re likely to be stuck with them.

  Oh, boy, said her father, holding out a nose-wrinkling anchovy like a flatworm speared on his fork. These are fantastic. Here. But she jerked her head back, miming revulsion, and quickly ate her forgotten bite of pizza to make him stop.

  After all . . . she had watched it happen, her father attempting to be playful with her mother—a tickle, a kiss, an impromptu dance in the kitchen, a pat on the rear end—and had noted her resistance and later understood that her Catholic parents would not use birth control and her mother was adamant about no more kids but then her mother became jealous of her father’s affection for her until his physical displays of affection became clandestine and she had to hide everything, which is what her father wanted.

  Going, going, gone, said her father, popping the last of the meatballs into his mouth and she pushed away her plate and its uneaten pizza, her own appetite waning as her father’s multiplied beyond comprehension.

  Groaning for the waiter’s benefit, he wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and looked at his watch and said, Great, we have a few more minutes. She ordered another Coke to settle her stomach, he a coffee and strawberries, and they chatted about her studies and life at school and he asked, What about boys? She avoided the question with her standard dismissal—Turkish guys are weird—knowing better than to open a window for him into the topic of dating, and she shuddered seeing how instantaneously the wrong topic could rip away his charm and make him scary. Hatred flashed through his eyes when she asked about Chernobyl and she saw the hatred enlarge pleasurably with satisfaction—They’ve done it this time, Dottie, it was the beginning of the end for those bastards—and just what was radiation? she wanted to know, because she wouldn’t dare bring up the incident with the Russian general, and any mention of the envelope on the floor, which had come to rest against the legs of his own chair, would be a violation of the rules, but he wasn’t paying attention.

  Hey, he said, making an expression like a dumb cluck, How could I forget? and he reached across the table, his hand asking for hers, to examine the ring on her finger, Dottie sensing his desire before she recognized its proprietorial determination molding his face.

  Do you love it? he asked, and she did not always like to hear such eagerness in his voice, the intense need to please her begging the question of her need to please him, sometimes trapping her in appeasement and lies. But she did love the ring and told him she loved it yet when he stretched forward, quickly and circumspectly, to brush his lips across the pearl’s gold cage, she hissed, Daddy! and tried to pull her hand away but for one long second he would not let go.

  He sat back straight, smoothing his necktie, his guileless expression not to be trusted. I know you wanted a Vespa for your birthday, he said, grimacing at his failure to fulfill her wish. I’m sorry, he apologized, and as she rushed to assuage his guilt—Really, Daddy, I adore the ring—she hesitated, her impulse to forgive him interrupted by the leap of mischief into his eyes, the cunning sparkle that introduced the reentry of the game, and she said smartly, Okay, Daddy, what’s going on?

  Will this do instead? he said, disingenuous with uncertainty as he plucked the envelope off the floor and unfastened its clasp and withdrew a photograph from its sleeve, placed it upside down on the table between them, and, with a tentative, teasing index finger inched it toward her. It’s not a Vespa, he cautioned, flipping the photograph triumphantly like the card that wins the game.

  She’s a beauty, don’t you think?

  Daddy! she squealed, not quite sure of the meaning of the photograph she was looking at—an unpainted wooden-hulled sailboat, varnished to a gleam, its upswept lines and wind-filled sail frisky to the eye, skipping across the turquoise-colored water of the Bosphorus.

  She’s all yours.

  Oh, my God!

  Don’t I get a kiss, he said.

  On the return trip to Uskudar, her imagination ran wild, susceptible to the enchantment of unleashed possibility. In the middle of the Bosphorus she edited her farewell to Europe to include a giddy good-bye to the ferry as well, her future already aboard the boat that he had given her, sailing across the strait for an evening in Sultanahmet or Karakoy, dropping anchor to picnic with friends on one of the islands or taking Osman for a romantic cruise to the Black Sea, utopian expeditions that would make each of their lives perfect and lovely and there she would be at the helm, in command of all happiness. But as the ship approached the shores of Asia her mood lost its elevation, her inspiration graying, her thoughts becoming clouded by reflection, and she wondered what she had to complain about—that her father loved her? That his sin was loving her? That he loved her too much? I have big plans for us, he told her, and she thought, you always do.

  And what do daughters truly know of fathers? Too little perhaps, perhaps too much? What secrets do their mothers guard, what secrets have they simply missed, overlooked, refused to acknowledge? The answers—given and taken away and returned as mysteries or just as often as lies—were a perilous confusion: too much, too little, too late, too soon.

  And what do daughters truly learn from fathers? To understand, or misunderstand, love?

  Forgive me F
ather for I have sinned, she said to herself, without hearing an inner tone of the repentance she had thought would be there, when she searched her soul.

  I confess, she said without remorse. I want his love too.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  In June, the poyraz, a gentle northeasterly wind, blew in from the Black Sea to cool the rising heat of Istanbul. One Friday afternoon she and Osman took advantage of cherry season to stage a photo shoot in an open-air pazar in Balat, the city’s old Jewish Quarter on the southern shore of the Golden Horn, inspired by their common passion for the photography of Ara Güler. Osman, of course, like any Turkish guy she knew even remotely, wanted to learn everything about her, and the day was exalted with clear blue skies and marbled with heavenly light and she felt like telling the history of her happiness in bits and pieces, which is how happiness wandered in her memory, fractured and incomplete, uncertain of its destination.

  In the perfect early days of family and childhood, she had loved throwing rice at embassy weddings, touching the noses of camels on a trip to Egypt, sleeping stretched out in a row of empty seats on airplanes hurtling through darkness to some unpronounceable place, going to kindergarten with doll-like Chinese children, picnics on the beach in a half-dozen countries and swimming in the waves, painting her toenails shocking colors like Black Ice and granny-apple green, safaris and camping trips, gin rummy with her brother on rainy holidays, baking sugar cookies with her mother at Christmas, exploring strange cities, saying her prayers in each new language she acquired, doing the polka with her father, and, rarely but euphorically, the jitterbug with her mother, and dancing spasmodically with native kids on the ceremonial fringe, and disco alone in her room. She wrote poetry about the animal kingdom, which her father Scotch-Taped to the refrigerator, next to her brother’s drawings of robot men and gremlins from outer space—Crocodiles are mysterious/Because their tears aren’t very serious; The animals are wild/They even ate a child—and sent countless postcards to the playmates she was always leaving behind, outlandish declarations of fidelity . . . love you forever, best friends until the end of time.

  Oyle mi? Osman kept saying, Really? his eye squinched against the viewfinder of his Nikon and his left hand adjusting her pose, Dottie in a tangerine-colored starburst-patterned sundress and black high-topped sneakers standing in the pazar surrounded by dried slabs of rolled apricot stacked like amber tiles. When she frowned about the artificiality of modeling Osman explained he was trying to create the goddess effect. Whatever, she smirked, knitting her hands in the air like a belly dancer, and he said, That’s it! making her suddenly self-conscious. He wanted to know everything, though she demurred to his appetite for more intimate details about family and boyfriends and emotions and then it was her turn and she led him down the path past the hefty, rosy-cheeked women with their snow-white cotton head scarves and long-sleeved sweaters and baggy salwar pants to the kiraz stalls and stared at his lovely lips through the viewfinder of her own camera, the dangle of Hellenistic curls at his jawline, zooming in as his teeth nipped at the purple Napoleon cherries and the sweet juice stained the mesmerizing tip of his tongue.

  Me? he scoffed, self-effacing, sampling the fruit at another stall. No, I can’t remember. My childhood was boring.

  No it wasn’t, she said, which made his lips tighten into a pained smile as he spit out the seed of another cherry and she pressed the shutter and he began an intense discourse to explain to her how it was for him, growing up in Istanbul.

  The most important thing to know about his childhood, he told her in facile but heavily accented English, was the jarring symmetry between noise and silence, the tyranny of public space in a perpetual state of tension with the dubious concept of privacy. Your family did not like it when you closed the door to your room, but neither did the government; secrecy was a privilege reserved exclusively for authority. What he remembered most about his childhood, he said, was his stubborn solipsism, the incuriosity and righteous disregard he had for others, paired against its likely source, the claustrophobia of overpopulation, his parents and grandparents and two older brothers and two younger sisters sharing the upper floors of a four-story apartment building on the hill near Istanbul University. His strict Kemalist father was a professor of economics and his status-conscious mother an administrative assistant for the school of law. The residence turned into a hostel for extended family flocking in from all over the map like homing pigeons—Frankfurt, New York, Paris, Geneva; lemon farmers from the Aegean coast, head-scarved aunties from Trabzon—the omnipresent huddle of relatives multiplied by his sibling’s unruly friends, his father’s didactic colleagues and obsequious students, his socialite mother’s stream of lacquered guests and distinguished visitors, the cook and her ignorant children, the kapici and his family, and the neighbors stopping by for tea, the pandemonium within the building a full dress rehearsal for the greater pandemonium erupting throughout the ever-spreading metropolis, his fate inside and outside to be unnoticed, voiceless, and overwhelmed.

  You were just shy, I bet, she said, snapping frames that married Istanbul’s human wealth of opposites, the eastern Mediterranean profile of his gorgeous face, nose to nose with the merry-eyed Asian profile of the scarved, porcine vendor, a cigarette jutting from the corner of her wrinkled mouth, as he paid for a kilo of cherries and she lowered the camera, moved by the beautiful contrasts of the image—classic, she told herself—and they continued walking.

  I think I was probably a snob, he laughed. My brothers enjoyed toy trucks and glue-together airplanes and sports where you kneed each other in the balls, my sisters loved American pop music and soap operas and I loved books, you see, and I was pretentious about them. I would not tolerate being disturbed, and my brothers would not tolerate my preference for solitude. And so, he said, with a tarp and old cushions he created a refuge for himself on the roof, below the grove of Süleymaniye’s minarets, or in bad weather or winter escaped to the library, feeling himself on more of an equal footing with the chaos of life when he encountered it sealed in the no less lively silence of books, a delicious potent silence that would occasionally seize the entire city for days and weeks when the military felt compelled to remind everyone who’s boss, curfews emptying the streets, martial law like a headmaster’s command to Istanbul to pipe down, get back in your seats, put your nose in the book of secularism and modern thinking.

  Leaving the pazar, they returned to the leafy streets of Balat, photographing its collapsing wooden houses, the visual romance of aging geometry—tilting roofs, cracked bow windows, swaybacked balconies—pausing frequently to pop cherries into the other’s mouth, a slow amble in the general direction of the water, where the new mayor, a post-imperial sultan of urban renewal, was in hot pursuit of the city’s future, tearing down everything in sight, stripping the landscape, razing thousands of buildings, peeling back the grimy industrial crust of the old tin and concrete factories from the littoral, leveling slums, obsessed with transforming the shorelines of the cesspool that was the Golden Horn into a network of public gardens, parks, and playgrounds—camps, Osman foretold derisively, for Gypsies and migrants.

  Yes, Osman continued after she assumed he had finished describing his boyhood estrangement, a tale with a resonance she found instantly familiar, reminding her of her own brother’s self-involved state of withdrawal.

  Oh, good, she said, leaning into him, looking up into his brown eyes with encouragement. You’re going to tell me more.

  Yes. When I was ten, one Saturday I packed my school bag with bread and cheese and boiled eggs and, of course, a book—The Ring Trilogy.

  You read that when you were ten!

  Of course. It’s a children’s book. I don’t know why because I didn’t think about what I was doing but for some reason I became restless and walked down the hill to Eminonu and I purchased a token for the next ferry, which was going to Uskudar. I had never ridden the ferry by my
self and I wasn’t sure where Uskudar was but these facts did not concern me. I sat alone on a bench near the front of the boat and began to read and when the ferry docked I got off and purchased a token for the next ferry. This one was going to Beşiktaş. I read my book and was very happy with the hobbits and such. The next ferry took me to Ortakoy, the next to Arnavutkoy. What were these places? I didn’t even look at them. I didn’t notice the oil tankers and freighters, I wasn’t interested in the dolphins jumping in front of the boat. I didn’t look at the magnificent palaces along the shore or the yalis of the rich people or the passengers getting on or off at each stop. Finally, I was almost to the Black Sea and had to turn around. By the time I arrived home it was very late and I expected to be punished. My hands trembled as I removed my shoes at the door and walked into our flat, dreading the scene to come. My mother was entertaining a houseful of frightening ladies hidden beneath layers of jewelry and cosmetics and silk and she made me introduce myself and said, Darling, where have you been so late? I said the library and she beamed and announced to everyone I was going to be a doctor, although I had never indicated any such desire, but one of the guests said skeptically, How does the boy get such a sunburn in the library? And then the truth came out. My mother became very dramatic, beside herself with anxiety because I had journeyed all day long without an amulet to protect myself from the evil eye.