The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover

by Bob Shacochis

  Despite his daring behavior the night of her birthday party, Osman’s boldness had receded to something more gentle and patient. They dated in a mannerly, cerebral fashion, chaste and sweet, with guarded hearts and cautious optimism, for less than two months, tacitly avoiding their respective friends, not secretively but perhaps selfishly, and she had never done these things before—taken his hand into hers and held it, thrown her arm around his neck to kiss him fully, with a fevered eagerness that seemed to blot out her mind. With their lips pressed together, in the back of his throat he began to laugh, a tender chuckling that seemed to express to her another type of fondness, as if he were offering a caress not just to the fact of her, but to the reality of them.

  What? she whispered, releasing just enough pressure to let him speak without separating her mouth from his. You should kiss me again, she said, encouraged by the approach of twilight, and they embraced until the ferry docked in Besiktas, the hillsides rising above the coast snowy with pink-flowering Judas trees.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  She let him know that in the morning she had a swim meet with her school team and shouldn’t stay out late and when he said he would come to cheer her on she told him, Sorry, no men allowed.

  They walked along the shoreline of the silvery Bosphorus, its surface quilted with spangles, and she fancied each gleam off the water a knowing complicitous wink in her direction, an affirmation of the newfound fullness in her heart. Following the promenade below the gardens of Yildiz Park, they turned eventually back into the city to Ortakoy, to the cafés where everyone they knew could be found on a Friday night, wedged like electrons around the sticky nuclei of little tables, playing chess or backgammon, strumming acoustic guitars, sipping tea, floating in the heat of laughter and conversation, arguments and prophecy delivered with outlandish gravity.

  Sometimes she and Osman would meet up in Ortakoy on weekends but would never arrive together as they did tonight. They climbed the stairs above a gift shop to a café named Gizgi, a preferred hangout, a tiny place with only ten tables, all low to the ground. Two of the tables were pulled together nearby a third occupied by Yesho and Jacqueline, hosting an invasion of older boys whom the girls seemed to be snubbing—or vice versa. They were Osman’s friends, she saw, Karim among them, and Osman greeted them warmly and wedged into their circle. Most were university students she didn’t recognize, not the usual pack of lycée puppies taunted by her brazen girlfriends, who yanked her down between them with a theatrical sense of urgency.

  Uh-oh, said Yesho, murmuring but sounding dire, waggling her head side to side with misgiving—perhaps teasing, perhaps not. The minute you walk in with this guy, I see it in your eyes.

  Jacqueline leaned forward and tilted her head away from the boys, looking past Dottie to Yesho, nodding agreement if not approval. She is in love, yes? she said, speaking behind her cupped hand. Oh my God. Terrible.

  Yes, Yesho concurred. Terrible.

  Dottie laughed without admitting anything and tried to accustom herself to Yesho’s new look, her haystack thatch of yam-colored hair dyed back to its original raven black and cut à la Cleopatra, her forehead a full chop of bangs, helmetlike swoops on each side of her chin, the effect pushed to its extreme with kohl-lined eyes, fake eyelashes, and butterfly blue shadow, glossed lips, a half-buttoned gauze blouse over a red sports bra, gold harem pants—a performance that had earned Yesho a new sobriquet from Elena—Queen of the Vile. (And where was Elena? Dottie wondered. Still with family at synagogue?) As for Jacqueline, she seemed to be firing back at Yesho with a Parisian dominatrix fantasy, mostly done in leather—miniskirt, thigh-high boots, elbow-length gloves, studded biker’s jacket over a black camisole, black lipstick and nails, a beret atop her lengthening Goldilocks curls. To Dottie, tonight they both seemed trapped in the flamboyance of their provocations, since the boys weren’t paying the slightest attention to either of them. Even Osman seemed to have defected to the island of male indifference, and she felt a twinge of peevishness at the sudden push of distance between them, realizing that in all likelihood he had arranged to meet his friends here tonight.

  For a moment she looked around, until her eyes met Karim’s, mercurial and sunken with permanent suspicion yet pooled deep with a desire she could not fail to notice, and she averted her gaze from his before he misunderstood her curiosity as encouragement—she had chosen Osman, hadn’t she?—and lowered her head, intrigued but uneasy. Except for Karim, she knew not one of them by name, and none appeared to be card-carrying members of the entel crowd, the chums she would expect Osman to rendezvous with on a Friday night to discuss books and art and music. A few of them had grown the thin ear-to-ear beards of the imams—strange but okay, Turkish men had a fetish for facial hair—but the bumpkin clothes, chosen without any deference to style, and crude haircuts like you get when you’re a child, and just the mood, there was something about the mood she found bothersome.

  Where’s Elena? she asked, and Yesho sat up straight and said loudly that Elena had left because Karim and his friends had insulted her.

  Seriously? said Dottie, and Yesho told her, Don’t play so innocent, exchanging smirks with a boy who looked over at her. Yes, seriously. Because she is a Jew.

  Jacqueline, still whispering, interjected to declare it was Elena’s own fault, unable to hold her tongue when the boys, immersed in politics, found themselves suddenly being made fun of. Hey, ayatollah, Elena had badgered them. Ayatollah, hey—when you are going to Afghanistan? So they say dirty kike, Zionist bitch, explained Jacqueline, and she leave.

  You know very well why this is disaster, said Yesho, dropping her voice again so the boys would not overhear. Osman, he is a Muslim.

  But this objection made no sense to Dottie; almost everyone in Turkey was a Muslim, devout or not, yet the only religion she had ever known Osman to practice was as an Atatürkçu, a follower of Kemalism, which made him a rather ordinary Istanbullus. He was committed to progress (or so she thought, until his rant about the mayor) and secularism and the enlightened modernizing ideals of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the man she had heard her father describe as the greatest revolutionary of the twentieth century. The Turks spoke of Atatürk as a god, though you could say whatever you wanted about God. Osman a Muslim? Hardly . . . at least not with any apparent level of allegiance. Osman liked his beer and raki and cognac, and she had never seen him enter a mosque, or prostrate himself toward Mecca when the muezzins called out ezan from their minarets five times each day, and his regard for females was nothing, she could report firsthand, if not healthy, liberated from the absurd sanctions of Islam.

  What are you saying, said Dottie. You’re a Muslim yourself!

  Yes, of course, said Yesho, technically we are all Muslims, but not like these Anatolian shepherds, who want to dominate the woman and keep everybody ignorant and throw us backward. You have been in my country long enough to understand.

  You can’t possibly be talking about Osman, she said, but Yesho snorted and rolled her eyes and shrugged as if to say, Wait and see.

  Coup, coup, coup, said Jacqueline like a shrieking bird. She was not born to suffer the disaffection of men. I am bored with this coup. Six years and they can’t shut up about the coup, and she lit a cigarette and stood up, exhaling a beam of smoke at the university students, who leered back at her audacity, eyes violent with lust, and went to the other end of the room to flirt with a German hippie, one of the regulars at Gizgi, playing a guitar.

  They are stupid, these boys, said Yesho, obviously too impassioned to care that Jacqueline was abandoning them. They don’t want to be Turks. Turks like Israel. Why not? The Arabs are no good for either of us. These boys dream to be Saudi or Afghani or something uncivilized. They want to hate. And don’t tell me nonsense about head scarves. This is a trick to make all the women live under a black sheet. I can’t believe, you know, that Osman join this stupid gro
up. What group? interrupted Dottie, but her friend was not listening. Temper rising, Yesho spoke directly to the student who kept staring at her with undisguised contempt. Hey, you stupid boy, she said, parroting the opinion of her father, a colonel in the army. Who are the humans whose rights we are abusing? We don’t abuse true humans, only animals.

  Yesho, my God! Dottie protested.

  The discussion among the university students stopped and they glowered like stage villains at the girls’ table until, a moment later, Karim smiled, his hollow-cheeked expression black with ridicule, looked back at his friends, and said in his high-pitched voice, Excuse me, did someone hear a whore speaking? and so the feud escalated, Yesho and Karim trading slander and imprecations in English and Turkish, several of the other boys enjoining the battle while Osman, who would not look over at Dottie, appeared moribund, seemingly dazed by the cannon bursts of hostility, lost between factions.

  And then like falling dominoes the chirr of conversations throughout the café went silent with the spreading awareness of a pair of newcomers looming a step inside the doorway. Two brawny gendarmes exuding a cocky sense of authority began working their way down the line of tables to check IDs, their boots resounding on the wooden floor, their hands outstretched like mendicants demanding alms, a harassment of the city’s youth that routinely meant you were sent home if you were unable to prove who you were.

  Which everyone in the club was able to do except, for some inexplicable reason, Osman, who riffled through his shoulder bag and dug through his pockets but could not find his government registration card. Dottie, waving her American passport at the police, tried in vain to vouch for him, then insisted she would go along too when it became clear that the police, each with a hand clawed on Osman’s shoulders, seemed intent on arresting him. He turned once to look at her, signaling with a jerk of his head no, his eyes warning her not to get involved, but she had not been raised to accede to a position of helplessness in the world.

  This isn’t right, she said to Yesho. Is this what you were defending?

  Calm down, said Yesho, unchastened. It’s normal. It’s no problem. It’s his own fault, yes?

  What has he done? she demanded, bounding to her feet, her eyes briefly pleading with the two tables of hapless students until she understood how cowed and useless they were and she turned away with a grimace of disappointment, shadowing the police to the door, the agglutinated Turkish words tumbling awkwardly into her mouth from the top of her throat. Where are you taking him? He’s my boyfriend. He did nothing wrong. He lives near Sultanahmet. I will take him home.

  Osman stopped, his expression desolate with resignation, and looked slowly around, over her head, back into the café, to tell Karim to please accompany her back to Uskudar but by now her defiance was full-spirited and she could not hear this request as anything but an empty patriarchal mannerism—I can take care of myself, she seethed, spinning around to reject Karim’s assistance—and followed the police as they nudged Osman ahead onto the stairs and down to the street. They marched to their patrol car and she skipped in front of them to ask their names and ranks, her hand fishing in her camera bag for a pen and scrap of paper. Osman turned on his heels and rasped, Dottie, go home, please, I will telephone you. Please, and she said, This is such bullshit. He saw her begin to pull her camera out and commanded her to put it away. I’m going to call my father, she said. The police opened the rear door and Osman, as he ducked into the backseat, met her eyes fiercely and said, Dottie, no. Dottie? Listen, promise me you will not do that, and then the car was splitting the flow of pedestrians as she scribbled the number of the license plate on the inside of a matchbook and a hand was pulling her arm and she wheeled around infuriated to confront whoever it was and there was Karim.

  Come, he said. I will take you back to Uskudar.

  She ran into the street, flagging taxis until one stopped, and Karim, nonplussed, scurried in beside her. She told the driver to follow the police, but the patrol car had disappeared up the avenue, and she said she wanted to be taken to the nearest gendarmerie. Karim, finding his voice, asked her sardonically what she planned to do, and Dottie said, I’m going to get him back.

  Please, said Karim, you cannot understand. These police, they are like criminals. The regime imprisons and tortures thousands of people. They do what they please.

  No, she said, you don’t understand.

  The taxi dropped them at the Ortakoy police station, where Karim pulled her aside and tried to persuade her that her attitude was dangerous, asking to get them all in more trouble than she could guess, that the best thing to do until morning was what Osman had asked them to do, and she stared back at him wordlessly and then shook free from his grasp and went inside.

  Behind the front desk the duty officer, an older, jowly man with benevolent eyes and a droopy salt-and-pepper mustache, greeted her as if her presence before him was an unthinkable pleasure, and she said, Please, can you help me, and explained her situation. My dear, he said graciously, I can tell you for certain, your friend is not here. She produced the matchbook on which she had written the number of the patrol car and he studied it for a moment and handed it back. Not our boys, he said. This must be a Besiktas registration.

  She thanked him effusively for his kindness and left, whisking past Karim-No-Balls, Karim-the-Pigeon-Hearted, son of Abu Jellyfish, as she stepped, waving, back into the street, yet hesitating before she closed the taxi’s door, her voice cold as she asked Karim if he was coming. He came but sat pressed against the door like a bony mannequin, more high-strung than virile, this guy, not venturing to speak, his eyes straight ahead and she offered him nothing. At the Besiktas station she paid the driver and dashed for the entrance but Karim outpaced her, blocking the way, and they looked into each other’s angry eyes until she, haughtily, said, Well?

  Do you know what you are doing?

  Do you? she challenged.

  Okay, so, he said, tentative, then summoning enough nerve or pride to open the glass door. Allahu akbar.

  We’ll see how great, she said, mostly to herself, and Karim, following behind, hissed at the back of her head, You will not be blasphemous. Please.

  Inside the public area of the station, a blaring television with snowy reception was tuned to a soap opera. Ordinary people sat crowded together on a bench, watching along with the gendarmes. This time the officer on night duty performed predictably, his arrogance flaring, tersely explaining that the Ortakoy streets were beyond his station’s jurisdiction and he could assure her that the license number she had copied down was registered to the Ortakoy station.

  Excuse me, sir, she said with stiff politeness. Someone is lying.

  The accusation had the effect of shifting the policeman’s regard from Dottie to Karim, who appeared jolted into servility by the gendarme’s scathing eyes. Who are you? he barked. Why are you here with this disrespectful child?

  Thank you, sir, Karim said, tugging at Dottie as he retreated. We are leaving, sir. Thank you. May God protect you.

  Go to bed, little girl, said the duty officer, satisfied.

  They argued during the ride back to Ortakoy, Karim unable to convince her that her persistence would doom them both to a night in jail or worse, but she thought such an outcome ludicrous. She was a girl, had committed no crime, she was an American coming to the aid of an innocent friend. He accused her of astonishing naïveté and she called him frightened, a challenge that seemed to spur him out of his humiliation directly into a show of crazed recklessness, as though he had willed his sanity into the background in order to prove himself to her.

  With Dottie hurrying to keep up, this time Karim was first inside the Ortakoy station, shouting irrationally and demanding Osman’s return, slapping the counter for emphasis, the police like twitching alley cats watching a wounded bird, their amazement progressively more lethal.

 
It’s him, Dottie cried out. There behind the desk smoking a cigarette with the older duty officer was one of the gendarmes who had taken Osman into custody. Why did you lie to me? With an embarrassed smirk, the previously avuncular officer answered her question by offering her his upraised hands, as if to show there was no blood on them, but the younger gendarme smiled in disbelief at their impertinence. He ordered Karim to show identification. Karim remained insolent; casting an I-told-you-so look at Dottie, he plucked his ID from his wallet and tossed it on the counter at the gendarme, who snatched up the card, glanced at it homicidally before ripping it in half and throwing the pieces at Karim’s inflamed, unflinching face. At the same moment, Dottie had placed her passport with its red diplomatic cover on the counter where it was shoved back to her, unopened.

  Just tell us, okay, she said, undeterred. Where is he? and with no answer forthcoming, issued an illogical ultimatum. Okay, she said, fine. We’re not leaving until we see him.

  Suit yourself, said the duty officer, retiring into weary impassivity. Wait outside.

  So he’s here, isn’t he? said Dottie, as though she had managed to hoodwink them into a confession, but the order was merely repeated—Wait outside. When she said she would not, the younger gendarme came around the counter forcefully, reaching for her, and she shouted in English, Keep your hands off me, you asshole, and when Karim, burning through a final spasm of wildness, lurched forward to intervene she realized her mistake and heard her voice go screechy, Okay, stop, don’t, we’ll wait outside, wrestling Karim with her toward the door before the gendarme could latch on to either of them.