The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover

by Bob Shacochis

  God, Daddy, she whined, I don’t get your problem. I really don’t, and then the driver had pulled over in front of the academy’s gates and she said, What about Osman? The police beat him up, and her father said, You should know by now, that’s what the police do.

  Piqued by how the day was ending, her triumphant sail forgotten behind the screen of her father’s preoccupations, she delivered a hasty kiss to his cheek, grabbed her day bag, and opened the car door. He told her he was flying back to Ankara in the morning and would call in a day or two and she asserted her claim on the Sea Nymph, pressing him for permission to take the boat out by herself, and he said, Let me think about that, and she had slammed the door much harder than she intended and stomped back to her room.

  Later in the week, he had telephoned with rules. I’ve already called the dockmaster to fill him in on the program, he said. Stay between Altinkum and the bridge. Motor only—no sails unless the engine breaks down. Watch the weather—winds over ten knots: remain in port. Daylight hours only. No overnights. Can I take friends? she asked and he told her not until she had more experience. How much more? she had wondered but did not ask, smelling a loophole in this particular prohibition, which she soon exploited, taking the Nymph out twice by herself before sneaking Osman aboard, picking him up at the dock in Ortakoy, a pattern of subterfuge established not that day but the day her father had returned to Ankara in late June and continued throughout the summer, the best of summers the summer when she was seventeen, she and her boyfriend finessing a citywide game of hide-and-seek with the men she imagined her father had assigned to keep watch on her, accidental meetings (hah!) at museums and cinemas, clandestine rendezvous at the clubs and bars where she and Osman danced throughout the night, anchoring the Sea Nymph in secluded coves to smoke hash and make out and begin to learn what her body had never truly known beyond her father’s indecent tutorials in sensation—the anxious passion, the slow, tense curriculum of love.

  There were picnics at Yildiz with Yesho and her noisy magpie family or just the girls themselves hanging out by the Blue Mosque or Taksim Square to absorb the kinetics of the surging crowds or ridicule tourists or bargain with the hucksters or just sit with Elena gossiping, consumed by laughter, fending off a queue of smitten boys and creepy, badly dressed hairy men. Also the mind-clearing hours of swim practice in the academy’s pool, the quiet mornings with her patient teachers, walking home through the cobbled alleys of her neighborhood saluted by the smiles and nods of the old women hijabis, the vendors on the streets selling spears of salt-sprinkled cucumbers, going to sleep sticky-lipped or sore-lipped from her twin indulgences—wedges of watermelon, the juice dribbling down her chin; the rash of wild kissing—the rapturous consumption of meze and music and the ingrained fatalism and lusty overblown passions of the Istanbullus, interrupted only by her father’s infrequent visits to Istanbul and their addition of an old familiar rhythm to the shining new forms of her happiness.

  One day in August when she went early in the morning to Altinkum for a day of sailing the tirhandil was not there in the cove, a heart-stopping discovery until she found the dockmaster and heard the explanation. At her father’s request he had sent the Sea Nymph down to the boatyard at Tarabya to have a cooking stove and toilet stall added to its cabin.

  When she telephoned him that night, her father announced his intention to take a much-deserved vacation at the end of summer, just the two of them aboard the Sea Nymph—more than a vacation, something he had dwelled upon in prayers and dreams throughout much of his life: a pilgrimage. He had traveled to Israel frequently, could wander the streets of Jerusalem and Jericho, Nazareth and Bethlehem or the shore of Galilee in his sleep, yet it was his conviction that the true birthplace of Christianity was not its cradle but its nursery. That sacred honor fell not to Rome but to Turkey, Asia Minor, and its first-century provinces, the ancient Anatolian coastline a trove of New Testament sites, and, in the peripatetic footsteps of his favorite apostle, Paul, the Jewish tent maker from Tarsus turned evangelical Christian, he planned to visit as many of them as proved possible before her school returned to session the third week in September. Such a trip, he promised, no matter what else happened in the years ahead, would be a highlight of her life, and in the years ahead she would think about this often, meditating on transfiguration, Christ risen from the dead, though Dottie was not able to convince herself that resurrection could in any way be described as one of life’s salient moments of ecstatic affirmation. What was the point exactly, once you had come to the end of what is necessary? A second chance to die again? How long could the resurrected Christ endure it? Not very.

  Her reluctance to spend so much time apart from Osman was mitigated by her reluctance to maintain the pace at which they seemed to be hurtling toward the moment that she had so far resisted, irrationally but morally, pragmatically but neurotically, her contradictory impulses a source of panting confusion for both of them, but she needed more time to think about this—sleeping with Osman, giving (abandoning? submitting?) herself to him, shedding (or magnifying) her impurity, restarting her sexuality in a postpubescent body, inventing the permanence of her sexuality, splitting the difference on domination, overcoming the danger of asserting herself physically, overcoming the numbing terror of being not there, reduced to a one-dimensional flatness attached to a three-dimensional hole—although what more time offered to someone poised on a cliff other than heaps of anxiety she had no idea. It was all too much to actually think about in any deliberate and logical way and her father’s plan to sail away presented Dottie with a respite from her ambivalence and hormonal dementia and her lingering fears of the darkness in men. Some of them, most of them?—she didn’t know.

  Early in September it was her old friend Maranian who appeared at the academy gates in Uskudar to chauffeur her to the boatyard in Tarabya, where she met her father overseeing the Sea Nymph’s short journey from dry dock back to the water. He looked worn down, his face drawn, his tan turned sallow, ungroomed and wrinkled and underweight, half-circle scoops under his eyes, and he said, of course, that it was nothing, a bug he had picked up on a trip out east. On top of it, he assured her. Got it beat.

  Her first assignment was to go with the uncustomarily cheerless Maranian back to the hotel room in the village where her father had spent the night and collect his gear and the boxes of supplies he had purchased the day before, along with a plastic tub of books that snagged her curiosity: several travel guides, a pocketbook Bible, three volumes of poetry—Eliot, Brodsky, Rumi—and a small library of Christian theological writing—separate editions of the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Pauline Epistles, the Gnostic Gospels, and a thin leather-bound, heavily annotated text entitled St. John’s Book of Revelation (or, alternately, as the cover suggested, the Book of Apocalypse), St Augustine’s Confessions, and a text she could not categorize at a glance, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius that had a quote handwritten neatly on its title page: I do my duty. Other things do not trouble me.

  Penny for your thoughts, she prompted Mr. Maranian as they loaded the Mercedes, yet he was no more receptive than he had been on the drive over from Uskudar, his responses clipped and his mood unsocial. Dottie persisted, asking about his family, only to be chastened to learn that he was alone, his parents dead, his two siblings dead, his wife likewise dead, his only son a teacher halfway around the world in California. That’s so sad, she said, but he grunted in an ironic manner that seemed to pander to her sentiment. They finished packing the car and he stood by the driver’s door, hands jiggling coins in the pockets of his summer trousers, looking at her with a lugubrious expression of farewell, as if he might not ever see her again. She met his eyes with an inquisitive look and said, What? and he seemed to bring himself back with a weak smile and said, I have something to give you.

  He removed his left hand from his pocket and extended his arm toward her. It’s so beautiful, she exclaimed, taking the t
iny gold coptic crucifix and its chain from his palm to examine its Byzantine workmanship. Very old, he said. Antique. Armenian. Wear it, please—taking it back from her to noose the chain over her head, kissing the cross before he dropped it through the neck of her T-shirt. For protection, he said, tapping the blue beads of Osman’s evil eye bracelet on her wrist. Better than a superstition. I love it, she said, and he responded brusquely, Please, get in the car.

  The boat was in the harbor, tied off to the wharf, by the time they returned, its tanks being serviced with diesel fuel and fresh water and the coolers with blocks of ice. Her father sent her with cash to the marina’s store to purchase foul-weather gear and candy bars and anything else she might have forgotten to pack. Before she finished shopping, however, the car was out front honking and she quickly paid and found herself driving with the men to a stone chapel in the village, where they went inside and lit votive candles below icons of Our Lady of the Sea and Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors and she knelt between Maranian and her father in front of the altar to pray for a safe voyage. Then her father offered to take everybody to lunch but Maranian said moody good-byes and drove away. Dottie said, Is Mr. Maranian all right? and her father told her that Maranian had a lot on his mind.

  He’s sweet, she said, pulling the gold cross out from her T-shirt. Look what he gave me.

  Take good care of this, her father said, fingering the pendant. It was his babaanne’s, his paternal grandmother’s.

  Oh, my gosh, he didn’t tell me that!

  He’s like an old mother hen, said her father. He worries about our trip. But he’s not a sailor, is he?

  When they sat down in a café for lunch her concern for his health returned. While she ate a Niçoise salad he drank two beers, claiming he had no appetite, and waved off her suggestion that they postpone the trip for a day or two. I’m fine, he insisted, as trickles of perspiration began to pour off his forehead in the steamy heat of the season. He took a pen from the pocket of his shirt and said, Here’s the plan and began to sketch it out on a paper napkin, a route that would take them through the Dardanelles—he preferred Hellespont—and into the Aegean to Smyrna, Ephesus, and, ultimately, the island of Patmos, where the Lord unveiled the end of the world to the apostle John. They walked back to the quay and went aboard the Sea Nymph and minutes later were out in the shipping lanes, Dottie at the helm, wearing a violet-colored billcap and her black one-piece, the engine cut and the silence a seductive whisper. Her father raised the mainsail into moderate winds, heading south on their grand adventure, but as they slipped beneath the span of the Bosphorus Bridge he said, I’m going below for a little nap. That was the last she saw of him until late in the afternoon, when he appeared bleary-eyed in the hatch opening, bare-chested and glistening with sweat, his scarred shoulder a garish pink crab of molten tissue, a cigarette dangling from his lips.

  We there yet? he said, grinning sleepily.

  Almost.

  The wind had fallen off and they were a mile or more from Kinaliada, the first of the Princes’ Islands, and he told her to steer farther west toward the green hills of Buyukada, the largest island in the group, where they would anchor for the night and be ready for the morning’s fresh start for their longest sail of the expedition, westward across the Sea of Marmara.

  Let me know when we’re ten minutes out, he said, flicking the stub of his cigarette overboard and withdrawing to his bunk.

  It was a lazy sail through heat-drenched haze, the sky above an orange-tinted screen, that last hour until she was close enough to Buyukada’s northern headlands to see the gingerbread villas climbing its slopes. When she called her father to come on deck he popped up transformed, face washed, hair combed, eyes lucid and teasing, all jolly, one hand rattling an ice-filled silver canister and the other holding two tea glasses, each containing an olive, surveying their position for a moment, saying to himself, Well done, until he turned to admire her at the wheel and announced cocktail hour. I think it’s time you learned to drink martinis, Kitten, he said, prying the lid off of the shaker and pouring and then relieving her at the wheel.

  But by her second awful sip—Yech! This is straight vodka!—she could feel her senses swirl and she rescued and ate the olive and offered the rest of the martini to her father. I think I’ll start with cherry juice, she said, and went below to change out of her bathing suit into cotton shorts and a tank top, used the toilet and figured out its saltwater flushing system, rubbed lotion on her sun-tendered skin, and tied back her hair in a ponytail, noticing her father had fallen asleep with St. Augustine. She returned topside in time to help drop the sail and fire up the engine as they approached the channel toward the harbor and ferry terminal, lining up with the island’s unmistakable landmark, the bulbous cupolas of the Splendid Otel.

  Let’s reconsider, her father said, back at the helm, frowning at the boat-jammed harbor. He tapped the throttle into neutral and they bounced in the wake of a passing ferry. It looks like a frigging regatta in there.

  Whatever is fine, she said, though he must have sensed her disappointment, assuring her there would be an abundance of places to explore in the days ahead, but tonight he hoped for solitude and quiet in preparation for their dawn-to-dusk sail across open water, the two of them together beneath the stars, undistracted. Getting—he said with emotion—to know each other better.

  Like, how much better, Daddy? she wanted to say.

  He pointed the Sea Nymph south and they motored down along the hilly coast over mottled shallows, teal and greenish brown, Dottie a statuesque Aphrodite in the bow keeping a lookout for shoals, a blushing sun lowering toward the European mainland. That looks fabulous! he sang out as the headland they rounded fell away to reveal a perfect cove, its privacy walled by cliffs dropping to a pebble beach. She shouted out the depth and they anchored fifty yards from shore. Then a splash startled her until she realized her father had jumped overboard, the bobbing humps of his naked ass and shoulders visible as he butterflied toward the island, pausing once to somersault around, dog paddling while he called back to her—What are you waiting for? Jellyfish report: zero—and she said she had just changed out of her swimsuit and he said, You don’t need a bathing suit in paradise, baby, and she told him maybe later, itchy with the embarrassment of her newly shaved crotch, her pubic hair dispatched by a disposable razor with the guidance of Yesho, who had finally coaxed her into a hammam, where such a thing was de rigueur. Fistik gibi—like a nut, said Yesho; the other Turkish women in the bath nodded approval. In wide-eyed disbelief she watched several of them—thick-waisted, saggy breasts, shockingly bare pussies—scoop up the floss of her curls and pass them, marveling at their fineness, from hand to hand. Like a little girl, she thought uncomfortably, now imagining beneath every conservative Muslim female’s head-to-toe carsaf loomed the private contradiction of exposed genitalia. Not for Daddy’s eyes! Afterward, she and Yesho leaning into each other, bent with uncontrollable laughter, waiting outside the hammam for a dolmuş, joking in English—The clam has lost its beard. Poor clam! Cold clam! Scratchy clam!—the queue glaring as if they were retarded, these girls.

  But as she watched him swim to the beach and strut around like Adam, the audacious freedom of the sight spurred her envy and she changed her mind, stripped, and dove in, knifing through the underworld, relishing the taut glide of her flesh, seeing how long she could hold her breath, going farther than she thought she might, eyes wide open in wonderment, a deb mermaid, boundless.

  Well what do you know, said her father as they climbed back aboard the sailboat and she quickly wrapped herself in a towel. By the looks of it I’d say you’ve been to a hammam. His droll tone caused her to stiffen and snap—Don’t say anything else. Just don’t—a rare rebuke of her irrepressible father for a minor offense that, minutes later, she had not so much forgiven but pushed away and forgotten before she admitted what she sometimes felt, the obvious answer to
the question, Who’s to blame?

  Twilight arrived with the land-scent of rosemary seeping onto the water and an exquisite coolness exhaled from the sea and encouraged her to join her father in the cockpit, on his second round of martinis, with a rum and Coke in her hand, dressed to feel not quite dressed, braless under a scoop-necked sleeveless aqua-colored shift. Here’s to us, he said, saluting her with his glass, a toast she echoed back to him. Dear God, we are blessed, he said, this is certainly the life, isn’t it, and she stood up in the well and bent over to hug him, her nose pressed against his neck, breathing deeply the smell of him, which she knew so well but could never describe, saying how much she loved him as his hand rose and fell soothingly along her spine.

  There’s a baguette, he said. Olives, cheese, tomato, some prosciutto. Marinated eggplant. How’s that sound?

  While he went below to throw together dinner, she watched a raucous flock of seagulls pinwheel through the glassed surface for fish, a luminescent halo crowning Europe, the sea traffic light up on the Sea of Marmara, like flickering clumps of drifting villages, her consciousness soaked in a divine silence the absence of which she now realized had been a mistake in her life, one of the last missing pieces of the puzzle of complete existence. She reflected upon love, how she was in love with love, its presence crazy and sweet, the center of all yearning. Wasn’t it true that when you fell in love you had done the one thing that no one could explain to any satisfaction? If she were to have Osman here right this second by her side, they would swim ashore like electric eels in the inky phosphorescent water and without a doubt and absolutely she would give herself to him body and soul, her readiness for love, all of love, never more apparent in her life than at this moment, and yet the back of her mind muttered Yesho’s folkloric admonitions, Loving too much invites envy, bad luck, nazar—the evil eye. When things go well in your life, remember danger walks behind you. Protect yourself. Eat onions. Wear the bracelet.