The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover

by Bob Shacochis

  She called forward in her happiest voice, Where are we going? And he answered, To the sea, my captain. To the sea! They plunged through the cresting wake of a naval cruiser like children on a rocking horse as the implacable elephantine mass of the other vessel flashed by, a Union Jack snapping in the wind off its stern. Ah, our esteemed allies, said her father. Hail, Britannia. Then he added what sounded like a curse in a language she had never heard and she asked what he was speaking. Serbo-Croatian, he told her and she said, Oh, like Yugoslavian? naturally assuming he had picked up a few phrases on his trip to Belgrade. What did you say?

  I said, Shit on your dog-faced queen, and she feigned disapproval, saying, Dad! and into their banter he slipped a teaser—This Balkans project. I may need you to give me a hand—and how could she have known what he was suggesting.

  They sailed past the ivory jewel box of the Ortakoy mosque and its twin minarets, the Bosphorus rolled out like a turquoise carpet between rival continents, bottomless only in its histories. Dottie could not conceive of a world more enchanted or generous in its offerings, and she never tired of being on the glorious water, in love with its ever-changing moods and peacock colors, and would not mind if she never touched ground again.

  Soon the coastlines of Asia and Europe began to widen and swell outward, the minarets of Suleymaniye and the city’s five hundred mosques shrinking into matchsticks off the Sea Nymph’s stern and here they were, finally, at the top of Marmara Denizi, the cerulean Sea of Marmara, and over the horizon at its other end the Dardanelles emptying into the womb of the timeless Aegean. She fell off the wind just enough to create a slight lull and flutter in the sails and said, Daddy? And he answered, up in the bow facing out toward the daunting openness and its haze of infinity, What are you waiting for—Let’s go!

  The waves were bigger, the winds cuffing, and it scared her at first to not be bottled up safely by the land, but the receding shores gave her an adult sense of daring she had never quite experienced, and with less traffic and a boundless stage her father hauled the jib to leeward to match the main and they practiced jibing, zigzagging like a water beetle, coming about into the wind and swinging off, accelerating into a beam reach, spray fountaining over the bowsprit, her acrobatic responses gaining more precision on each tack and her happiness ascending toward some sort of trigger point, an exhilaration that seemed to be the culmination of yearning, purely alive and complete and confident, as if that day she stopped becoming and started, for all her life ahead, the impetuous, immutable act of being.

  Eventually, bearing down on the Princes’ Islands, they turned upwind and stayed there, beating back against the current. Her father relieved her at the wheel while she went down below into the stuffy cabin to pee into a bucket, fetch drinks from the cooler, and grab her camera. When she climbed back on deck her father had stripped to his Speedo bathing suit, his boating shorts and Hawaiian shirt folded neatly on the chart shelf, and was singing snatches of opera at the top of his lungs, his gold—wristwatch, chain, and crucifix—bouncing glints of light back at the westward sun. He threw her a kiss and she snapped his picture.

  Given a reprieve from duty, for the next hour she sat quietly in the bow, taking photographs, sipping from a container of cherry juice, and watching Istanbul rise again from the sea, her thoughts wandering to her studies—half-day sessions with tutors (Arabic and chemistry, the extra credits allowing her to advance to her senior year)—and then, with a throb of lust, achingly to Osman, who she would see the next day, and with another more maddening throb to Karim—she told herself she didn’t care if she ever saw him again—and with melancholy toward the missing half of her family, her brother—but he would not love sailing, drenched with spray, at nature’s mercy—and to her mother, who had unlearned how to appreciate the pleasures available out on the edge of convention, tossed against the unexpected and the unknown.

  Her father was suddenly behind her, lowering the jib, which he left her to fold and stow as he scampered back to the wheel and they funneled into the strait and beat upwind in a northeasterly tack toward the tower of Kiz Kulesi. Up in the bow, she watched a sleek motor yacht swing out from behind the tower, headed south, and, a minute later, worried that the boat was on a collision course with the Sea Nymph, she called out her concern.

  I see it, honey, said her father. Come back here and take the wheel.

  Where should I steer? she asked sensibly. We have the right of way, don’t we?

  Glancing at his wristwatch, he told her to stay the present course and went below. In a minute, the diesel puttered to life, and she wondered what was going on. The motor yacht, as big as a city bus, was closing at a reckless speed and she could see, below the crescent and star emblazoned on its red flag, its captain on the flying bridge dressed in whites and the smoked-black windows of its salon. Then her father was back in the cockpit, his cigarettes in a plastic baggie, which he stowed in the compartment below the compass before leaning over to release the mainsheet, the boom swinging over their heads, the transmission in neutral, the Sea Nymph in a slow-motion glide toward the oncoming yacht as her father dropped the sail.

  Daddy! They’re going to hit us! she said, just as the yacht, sounding its horn, throttled back and cut its engines, its fearsome bow sitting down in the water. The yacht’s captain hove to, swinging his vessel parallel to the Nymph, a hundred feet off their starboard side, and now she could see the soldiers on its stern, a pair of Turkish commandos, armed with compact submachine pistols, Israeli-made Uzis. She knew the name because her father had once taken her to a shooting range outside Ankara and she had fired one. Where did you get it? she had asked him, digging out her yellow earplugs, and he told her, Well, it’s mine.

  Okay, she said, turning to her father but not returning his impish smile. Will you tell me what the heck’s going on?

  I have a meeting to go to.

  Now? On the yacht? Really?

  You have three options, said her father. She could wait for him, drifting and circling alongside for the next hour or two while he attended to the business at hand; he could send over a crew member from the yacht to help her get the Sea Nymph back to Altinkum; or, if she felt up to the task—and he would not suggest such a thing, he emphasized, without his supreme faith in her ability to handle the boat—she could stay at the helm and motor up the Bosphorus by herself.

  Are you serious? she said. Can I put the sail back up?

  Better not. Think you can do it? and she told him, Sure I can do it. You afraid? he asked, and she said, Of what?

  That’s my girl.

  He grabbed his baggie and stepped up on the starboard rail, pausing to bless himself with the sign of the cross. Bon voyage, he told her, I’ll see you back at the marina for dinner, and then he swan-dived over the side, breast-stroking with the bag in his mouth toward the ladder attached to the motor yacht’s transom. She waited until he was safe, clinging to the first rung, waving back at her with his free hand, to engage the transmission and tap the brass bar of the throttle forward, steering for midstream to claim a lane of her own, her legs trembling not from fear but from a staggering pleasure.

  That’s like so double-oh-seven! she shouted into the breeze, her voice ending in a squeak.

  In the throes of independence, she became all-seeing, her senses tethered to the boat but her soul transcendent, soaring in light, and she prayed, not as supplicant but as seraph, ecstatically: Dear Lord, the sea is so large and my boat so small, please protect me on my journey. Her confidence unwavering, even as the sky blackened horribly, north of the bridge, and a tiny squall dropped like a bomb on top of her, a direct hit, shredding her visibility for a disorienting minute before it blew past, its stinging glitter of rain pellets leaving her chilled and shivering but also invigorated. The strait scoured by white caps, she motored ahead toward a sunbeam like a celestial column prying open gilded clouds.

  Sh
e moved on through the coppery splatter of waning sunlight, threading the Bosphorus to the entrance of Altinkum’s tiny harbor, where she throttled back the engine and scrutinized the crowded moorage and thought, Shit. Earlier in her education, she and her father had spent an entire morning in the confines of the cove, dropping anchor, raising anchor, docking and casting off, but what seemed a routine pas de deux impressed her now as a challenge easily failed by a single novice sailor.

  But she had not been paying attention to where she was going and, in a mild panic, had to swing about before crashing the Nymph onto the wave-slapped mossy rocks of the harbor’s northern headland. Drifting back for a more central approach, she had an eerie feeling that something was wrong, and however hard she squinted, trying to identify the source of her uneasiness, she could not see it until she grabbed the binoculars and scanned the shoreline. At first she thought the beach and marina had been abandoned, which made no sense on a Sunday evening when people usually crowded into its dockside restaurant, and then the soldiers came into focus, a loose ring of armed sentries forming a perimeter from the sand up to the highway, where she could now see in the distance the strobe of blue lights, and she knew immediately, being her father’s daughter, the basic scenario and thought, What’s Daddy up to now?

  She lowered the binoculars back toward the water, the dockmaster popping in and out of the oval frame, and raised them back an inch to see him clearly, signaling her to come ahead, and she steeled her nerves, turned the bow landward, relocated the Sea Nymph’s moorage, and headed in, side-slipping with the current, dashing to the bow to gaff the float line but missing the first pass and reversing, missing the second pass as well, crying in frustration as the third pass, too, went awry, and on the fourth pass, with the engine in neutral, drifting in high toward the float, she jumped overboard with the bow line, which she clipped to the float and then swam frantically back to the Nymph, clambered aboard, teased the engine into reverse, and set an anchor off the stern to prevent the boat from swinging with the tide. She collapsed in the cockpit, gasping with relief, then went below to change into dry clothes—jeans and a T-shirt and sneakers—and the dockmaster rowed out to bring her ashore.

  Well done, kizim, my daughter, he congratulated her in Turkish. I would have come sooner but I feared you would sink me.

  An hour passed but she hardly noticed the time, pampered by a staff with little else to do, gathered at the small bar with the dockmaster, garçon, and bartender, who she had conned into mixing her rum and Cokes, the anxious cook coming out of the kitchen every few minutes with plates of meze, the military officer in charge of security stepping over to flirt and practice English after inspecting her bag for bombs or daggers or God knows what and trying to confiscate her camera.

  Twilight deepened and the dockmaster switched on the fairy lights strung along the outline of the open-air restaurant and throughout its arbor of sycamore trees. The army officer’s walkie-talkie crackled and he put it to his ear and then back on his belt and announced to the staff, Ten minutes. When she had asked the dockmaster earlier about the giant yacht he told her, exasperated by the disruption of business, that this yacht was the pasha’s. She asked which pasha, as if she knew them all, and he said, the Big One, and she said airily, Oh, that one. He was at my birthday party. But now she had a better idea of why her father had chosen such an out-of-the-way home for the Sea Nymph, the last ferry stop on the European coast, directly below an off-limits Turkish military base that stretched to the Black Sea.

  She was chattering with the bartender about life in America, of which she knew very little, when someone tapped her shoulder and she turned—Mr. Kirlovsky!—and threw herself impulsively into the plump and sweaty embrace of Elena’s father’s arms. Then, as if by command, everyone at the marina stopped what they were doing to observe the yacht’s arrival, its carving-knife silhouette sliding into view out beyond the harbor, a police launch bringing its passengers to shore.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  She had been there on the landing to greet him, ignoring the soldiers’ halfhearted order to stand back, but as soon as her father had come ashore that night, dressed now in chinos and a blue oxford shirt (planning, planning—how many extra sets of clothes had he stored around the city?), she knew, despite his ostensible bonhomie, that he was in an impervious mood she would not be able to enter. Bravo, Admiral! he saluted her. How’d it go? but he had no time for her answer, stepping aside for the thickset pasha, in baggy swim trunks and a khaki pullover, to double-kiss her cheeks and anoint her with quick flattery. The other passengers—an aloof pair of men in Bermuda shorts and golf shirts she took, given their blue-eyed hauteur, to be Americans; a second pair, Middle-Easterners, one virtually a caricature of an ostentatious high roller, his swarthiness adorned in thick strands of gold jewelry and the other his opposite in every way, lean and severe with a malevolent smile slashed through the circle of his closely trimmed beard and mustache, outfitted in black combat boots and army greens with no insignia—expended nothing in their acknowledgment of her existence. Their eyes simply registering with indifference her virginal fuckability as her father tugged her away, whispering in her ear, These other shitheads aren’t worth knowing, and walked her back to the bar, distracted, apologizing mechanically for asking her to stay put.

  Triple-top-secret horseshit on a boomerang, her father said later in the car, riding with her back across the bridge to Asia. Sorry, Kitten. Better if you don’t know. Dirty business. I wouldn’t mind seeing those bastards go to jail for it.

  Jail? she said. Really? The pasha? Mr. Kirlovsky?

  No no no. The pasha was a man of immeasurable qualities—a necessary and discreet host, a great ally, trusted friend, fundamentally honest, commander of an army larger than any in Europe, a militant anti-Communist and fellow admirer (with the White House) of Saddam Hussein’s strong-arm secularism, a universalist and mullah-basher though, sorry to say, unbaptized (but we’re not here saving souls). Exceeding folly to imagine he could be left out of the loop. Our pal Kirlovsky was a businessman—I don’t hold it against him, said her father. The man’s been helpful on some projects we have going out in the east. Her father, it seemed, was the reluctant matchmaker valued for imperturbability, and the Iranians—Did I just say that? I didn’t say that. Never tell anybody I said that—were customers, extortionists might be a more apt choice of words, and it was clear her father would as soon stick a knife in their backs as sell them a shoelace. No, he said, I’m talking about those fools from Washington, those fucking idiots and their neat idea. He had become pensive then, staring out the window, the lights of Uskudar down below pressed against the Bosphorus, gleaming like an obsidian snake—or staring at the specter of his own reflection in the glass. Just because they’re our guys, he added a moment later as they were descending into Asia, just because they’re on our side, doesn’t mean they have brains. Never forget that.

  She had risen at dawn to prepare for church and now the day’s splendid accumulation—the fresh wind on her face, the joyous showering of the water, the unanticipated gift of liberation, the illicit rum—seemed to suggest a nest, immediately available if she slunk down into the leather seat and leaned against her father, who smelled tranquilizingly like sunshine, and she closed her eyes, just beginning to doze off, when she heard him refer to calls he had made, something about your friend Osman, and Osman’s name pinched her erect, wide-eyed and fully conscious.

  This boy, her father continued, still gazing out the window into the sparkling night of the city, is a very interesting fellow. He associates with some very interesting people.

  Uh-oh, she thought.

  Bad children, the government calls them. The newspapers call them the lost generation—the kids who came of age under the military’s control. This bunch calls itself the Committee of Democracy and Brotherhood.

  But that’s beautiful, she said, confused, expecting something
apocalyptic. It’s like . . . inspirational.

  Yes, he said wryly. Inspiring. He turned away from the window to meet her eyes but in the flickering darkness of the car she could see only his cool detachment. There’s a code at play here, Dottie. Democracy translates into Islam. Brotherhood can be interpreted as a cadre of frat boys willing to go beyond the limit.

  Daddy, he’s not a terrorist.

  How unbelievably dumb—that’s what she had said, guilt by association, just blurting it out like a simpleton, but her father, agreeing, had mystified her by being amused and omniscient. I know, Dottie, he had told her. As a matter of fact, I’ve been led to believe he has redeeming virtues.

  What’s that supposed to mean?

  It means he has redeeming virtues, he said, and closed the gate with his riddle about closeness, Just promise me you won’t get too close to him. That could turn out badly, I’m afraid.

  She had not wanted a confrontation but was quick to take offense. It’s because he’s Muslim, isn’t it?

  That might be something to consider, her father said. Do you think his family wants him marrying a Catholic girl?

  Maybe they don’t care. What’s the big deal?

  His answer, she felt, had been beside the point and although she heard his coldhearted and uncharitable words their effect was deafening, only reminding her of Karim, and she had not listened. You know why I like Turkey? he said. Because it has a divided soul. These are the front lines out here, Dottie. You might want to keep that in mind.