The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover

by Bob Shacochis

  This is a dirty business, he said by way of greeting, scowling over her head at her father, a disaffected salute, but she refused to be chastened. My boat sank! she was finally able to blab but he already seemed to know, dismissing her excitement with a grimness she would not heed. He stepped out of the way of an elderly man coming from the kitchen, his beige linen suit protected by a flowery bib apron, the collar of his black shirt open beneath the stringy wattles of his throat, a shoulder oddly slanted, his face like chiseled stone with robin’s-egg-blue eyes sunk below a skull squared by the brush-cut wheat stubble of his hair. He was good-looking, even at his age, a raw handsomeness more virile than alluring. He frightened her a little even as he met her with the warmest of disconcerting smiles, his lips parted across gold-capped teeth, looking at her as if she were a beloved ghost he had spent a lifetime chasing. Then he bowed at the waist like a clownish gallant and she gawked at the old man’s mangled ear and he moved forward to embrace her father with one good arm. The two exchanged a hug more brotherly than formal, conversing in a language she had learned to recognize since her father’s trips to Belgrade, but his apparent fluency in Serbo-Croatian surprised her.

  Come, meet my daughter, her father said in English, taking the old man’s hand. Dottie, he said, this is Davor, a friend of our family for many years.

  The old man spoke to her and she looked from Davor to her father, who told him to speak Italian, and then, her brain flipping switches and rewiring to Rome, she understood: she was the . . . something—reincarnation? . . . of her grandmother.

  You knew my grandmother? she asked, and then in English—Is that right?

  He knew her very well, said her father, and she watched this man Davor wag his head yes, yes, yes, with rueful sweetness.

  Maranian, forgotten and abject, cleared his throat to excuse himself, saying, Steven, documents I leave in the kitchen, good night.

  Hey, no, her father protested. Stay for dinner, but Maranian withdrew with a morose glance in Dottie’s direction, saying he would return in the morning with the lady.

  Come, eh? said Davor to father and daughter, oblivious to the Armenian. Eat. A good time.

  His English is baby talk, said her father. Italian would be their lingua franca, and in Italian she asked—a first sentence learned in any language—Where is the toilet, please?

  He had cooked a wonderful supper—veal parmigiana and fried artichokes and a tossed vinaigrette salad of pine nuts, finnochio, endive, and mesclun greens and as they ate the old man could not take his eyes off Dottie, his fixation quickly unnerving, drawing a shade over her curiosity and its myriad questions. Why don’t you just take a picture, she thought, not knowing that was the plan for tomorrow. The meal was so good, a culinary echo of living in Trastevere, and she concentrated on that memory, walking up the hill, ponytailed, with her uniformed schoolmates to the Janiculum, leaving the two men to talk sparingly between mouthfuls in their private language, until the old man winked at her father and reached across the Formica table to cuddle her hand, a papery touch of paternal kindness, and declare in Italian his wish to rub honey on her ____________ and lick it off.

  Honey on my what? she asked in English, looking to her father, puzzled. I don’t know that word.

  Your nipples.

  Oh. She frowned but did not take her hand away from the old man as she processed the intent of this outlandish vulgarity. He’s joking, right?

  He’s helping you, said her father. We’ve boarded the train. This is what we’re doing now. Tell him anything you want. Tell him, Maybe later. Tell him to go fuck himself.

  She locked her eyes on Davor’s but they had changed, darkened with sexual aggression and she bunched her lips, staring back bravely at him as she lifted his speckled bony fingers from her hand and said with a shallow tone of promise, Maybe later, okay? and the old man snatched her hand back, squeezing her fingers with increasing pressure, saying, Show me strength, girl, and he was hurting her but she squeezed back stubbornly, between them now her resistance and his sphinxlike silence, assaying her value, until his eyes relaxed and he jerked his hand from hers to slap the table with a volley of applause.

  In English, he told her he loved her very much. Not joking, he said, and she thought, Fuck you.

  He told her she was beautiful and added in Italian: Beautiful women get away with murder.

  Why is that? she said innocently.

  The old man smiled, feigning his own innocence, and scraped his chair away from the table, grabbing a bottle of Slivovitz off the counter. From Croatia, he said, the best, but she did not want to stay up all night to drink with them and playact or fatten her Italian vocabulary with anatomical parts and she kissed her father’s forehead and went to bed.

  In the morning after breakfast she was given a large brown envelope fastened with a metal clasp, which contained her new identity—an Italian passport with the same photograph used for her American one lost at sea, issued in the name of Carla Costa, stamped with a student visa. Is it legal? she asked and her father said, You bet. Now put Dottie out of your mind, her father insisted, Do not answer to Dottie. You are Roman-born, the child of an expatriate American mother and Italian father. Her make-believe mother: an art historian; her father a statistician for the Food and Agricultural Organization near the Forum—it was all there in the documents in the envelope, imperative that she memorize every last word, to live, breathe, dream Carla.

  At first being someone else did not seem like much of a problem. Her assimilation of Carla, her Carla feelings, felt real enough yet then what initially felt genuine would end up feeling pretentious and fake—but her father, when he caught a whiff of her misgivings, would tell her, Let Carla be you, you don’t have to be Carla, see the difference?

  Not really, she said.

  Try this, he said. Think self-replicating, self-affirming.

  Okay, she said, dubious, but gradually she began to submit to the deeper temptation, an acolyte in her father’s black zone of secrets. She would be the secret, penetrating the less overt layers of stealth only to find at the very bottom of the game, through the game’s last unopened door, herself, the starlet of enigma, the mystery made flesh.

  Changing oneself, however, was a facile trick, a practice not unfamiliar to ordinary teenage girls and their looking-glass wars. But Dottie glimpsed the real challenge at the end of the masquerade—changing back was not so easy if your former self no longer interlocked cleanly and separated effortlessly with the shape you had assumed, and when you retraced your steps searching for your original self, maybe that wasn’t enough, because self-possession would now mean what?—a sharing—or a refusal to share—between two selves. It was giving her a headache to think this way.

  Inside the packet as well were a from-the-shoulders-up photograph and a sketchy profile of the target, her nemesis, the villain she would lure into the trap where, it was carefully explained, he would be taken into custody, interrogated, and, after confessing the names of fellow conspirators he had traveled to Turkey to recruit, deported. Why not just grab him off the street? she asked and her father said, We’ve considered that—too many things could go wrong. But the option remained on the table if she got cold feet.

  Despite his beribboned military uniform with its epaulette boards and oversized peaked hat, the donnish appearance—an oval face, the wisdom creased at the corners of his hooded eyes, the prominence of his Semitic nose and full, sensuous lips—of the target did not resemble any image she had of bad guys, she thought, scrutinizing the photo of a man somewhere between the age of her father and Davor. What’s his name? she asked and her father said Signori . . . for you he has no other name. Languages spoken, she read: Serbo-Croatian, Russian. Do you know him? she asked. Davor said yes. Her father claimed a passing acquaintance. Other languages: English, Italian, Turkish. Fluency level: Poor. She looked again at the photograph, the
solemn undercurrent in his features that for some reason she associated with a European academic, a teacher of philosophy, perhaps. Yet of course he was despicable, a rabid Stalinist and puny anti-Christ, a colonel in State Security, a thug plotting to murder the pontiff, a pedophile (if high school girls counted . . . she wasn’t sure about that) and God knows what else. Certified by the devil. He would want to fuck her—it would be so arranged—and she would encourage him to believe in this absurd sicko fantasy and accompany him to a secret location and then what?

  Not to worry, Carla, said her father. We’re going to rehearse the then and the then what, and once we’re finished, we’ll rehearse it all again. Step by step. Minute by minute. You’ll have all the help you need.

  She kept telling herself. I’m Carla. Carla, the schoolgirl who knows how to make ends meet.

  Maranian returned midmorning with the lady in tow, an officious middle-aged Armenian woman with the short, burly body of a laundress-wrestler, her muscular legs protruding from the black sheath of her skirt, plump feet wedged into leopard-spotted high heels and tits like footballs jutting beneath her pink rayon blouse—an artless arrangement of chic and frump. She carried a small vanity suitcase packed with lingerie and enough gunk to paint the face of every whore in Istanbul. There is no good light in this house, she declared, taking Dottie by the hand out the back door, ordering Maranian to bring two kitchen chairs to the patio. Set them there, she instructed, gesturing to an enclosed area shielded by a tall hedge of oleander. Now go away. You, she commanded Dottie, sit down, please, and sat down herself, hitching her skirt up her thick pasty thighs, her knees straddled around Dottie’s, who sat like a coiled spring while the woman evaluated the structure and coloring of her face, opened the vanity case, and went to work, chewing cloves to sweeten her breath. What’s this for? Dottie finally bothered to ask. The woman took a small sponge and smeared her cheeks with foundation and said irately, Please, no talking, and Dottie closed her eyes, not knowing where to look, saving herself from having to look at the ludicrous grill work of wirelike bangs on the woman’s low forehead. Her father came out once to check on their progress, saying We’re just going to take a few pictures, honey, while the woman waved him away like an interloper.

  The application of cosmetics seemed both endless and invasive and Dottie whipped her head violently out of reach when the woman made an attempt to pluck her eyebrows. She was given a manicure, her broken nail repaired, talons glued onto each finger and lacquered the color of geraniums, and then the woman began to fuss with Dottie’s hair, teasing and spraying, Dottie visualizing the trampy style, hating it without needing to see. When she had finished the woman said, Okay, inside, please, following the girl back into the house, the emotionless expressions of the three men in the kitchen—even Maranian—mesmerized by her sleazy transformation. Your bedroom, please, said the woman, closing the door behind them, and then, Please, your clothes, remove them. She stripped to her bra and panties only to be told, Sorry, everything, the woman’s raised eyebrows clearly a reaction to Dottie’s shaved mons, turning her head away with meaningless courtesy to hand Dottie a matching set of fire-engine red underthings, lacy silk panties, and a sheer teddy. Put on, please . . . Okay, sit please, and Dottie plopped down on the edge of the bed blinking, suppressing her humiliation, the funny weight of mascara on her eyelashes driving her nuts but determined to maintain her equanimity. The makeup artist appraised her handiwork, smoothing a few blonde strands of stray hair, snapped closed the vanity case, and called out in her husky voice to the men that the job was done.

  She was replaced by Maranian, carrying a camera fastened to a tripod and a spotlight pole with extendable feet, her father and the old man close behind. When Maranian rebuffed her with a censorious look, she could only think, Why are you the one looking so put upon?, watching him set up the camera, exclaiming out loud, Oh, my God, is that a Minox? trying to be a good sport, a reliable member of the team with a positive attitude and yet understanding Maranian’s impulse to protect her—but from what? She wished he would just come out and say. From danger? But danger was what—your boat sinking? Men with vile intentions hitting on you? Having a run-in with the police? Terrorist bombs going off in banks and restaurants? If he meant to exclude her from danger, if he found her lacking because of her age or gender or inexperience or some other unspoken belittlement, then who, she wanted to ask him, was misjudging whom?

  Maranian left the room to gather up the lady and leave the house, not to reappear in her life, the two of them, until four nights later in Istanbul. She had no choice then but to accommodate her father and Davor, her nonchalance withering when she stole a glance at her father, slightly bug-eyed and lips clamped as if a bumblebee had flown into his mouth. Her nerves tightened and she registered the charged air, prickly aware of the impression she made, the crude taunt to any male in hot possession of a libido. He wants to finish the job, she thought, chasing the idea away as soon as it came to her, abiding by its ambiguity so she did not have to acknowledge what she meant. She began to shrink from the motionless assault of her father’s desire, crossing her legs in a vise, shielding her veiled breasts with her arms, eyes downcast, and huddling, on the edge of being overwhelmed by the moment’s unexpected hazard, the animal force uncontained even by fatherhood. Then she heard the old man tell him to leave the room—Naturally, you make her nervous—and her chin was gently raised by Davor’s steady hand and he said, My dear child, relax.

  I will take a picture—two, three, nothing bad—to stimulate the signori, he told her, and then she could wash this nonsense off her face.

  She was fixed in his crinkled gaze and its uncritical priestly solace, finding nothing there to shame her and, in fact, she felt the truth of what he had told her the night before, that he loved her without a price for his love. For some reason she was cherished by this strange man, broken and old but also unbreakable and spirited in a way that made any man seem young. When he seemed satisfied that she trusted him he moved back from the bed, not to the camera but to the plain wooden chair where she had thrown her clothes, folding them with care, placing them atop the cheap dresser with its curling veneer, returning to the chair to sit, smiling at her with benign expectation.

  What now? she said.

  Tell me something, he said impishly, nothing bending his voice or manner except a carbonated eagerness.

  You mean, something dirty?

  No, no, he protested, looking sadly offended by this misunderstanding. Tell me about yourself. Whatever you like.

  Can I ask questions?

  Ah, of course, he said, his face lighting up. Curiosity is the difference between the dead and the living. I have been waiting for your questions.

  What was your relationship with my grandmother?

  Relationship? he repeated, reacting with shrewd amusement, as if this word’s very existence harbored a ploy, an ill-disguised snare one must learn to spot and step around. I believe you ask if we were lovers, Marija and I.

  I only meant, how did you know her?

  We were not, he said, and we were. I had the joy of one kiss in the city of Buenos Aires—one kiss to make last a lifetime. Is it enough? It must be. If not for that thing that separates two people who are destined to be together but are not—I mean duty, I mean love of homeland, for which no sacrifice is too great—in my heart I know—I am sure—we would have married. You, precious girl, you would have been my granddaughter. Your father—yes, my son. Instead, he is my godson.

  Why do I not know this? she said and he told her that because it was impossible to know everything, the definition of grace was to be at peace with what you did not know because you could not. This is a family secret, agreed? he said. Between us. It would cause trouble for your father, for me, with the people we serve. She nodded yes and asked, So who do you serve? and he paused, ironically reflective, before answering, For now, the wrong people. She wanted to
know when he had last seen her grandmother and he told her not long before she died, in the city in America where her father was born, Pittsburgh, a very nice place. Now I know what this term means, and in English he said melting pot. But your grandmother, he said, she was not happy in this nice place. She did not wish to melt.

  What did she want?

  What did she want? A free Croatia, an independent Croatia. To come home to such a place. She never lost her devotion to this beautiful dream. Nor has your father. We share this dream.

  So you came to Pittsburgh to visit them?

  I came to eliminate a traitor.

  Davor. Why did you tell me that?

  But my darling, why do you think?

  I don’t know.

  But perhaps you do.

  Because my grandmother helped you, I think.

  Yes, precisely. In her way. Up to a point.

  And my father too? Do I come from a family of murderers?

  A family of patriots. Your father was very young then, not much older than you. Perhaps he would have joined us, but he was indisposed.

  What does that mean?

  In custody.

  In jail?

  Yes. Correct. Jail.

  What did he do? Will you tell me?

  Nothing so bad. As a boy your father was very angry. When young men have this anger, they walk the streets always looking for a fight. In Pittsburgh, your father did not have to look hard to find an old enemy. Serbs, Russians, Albanians, Czechs, Bosnians. Not melting pot. Garbage bin. The trash Europe swept out after the war. Anybody who did not respect him, he would fight. Look at him the wrong way, watch out. His mother approved of this belligerence. She was proud of her son.

  And what about my grandfather?

  He was a weak man, a drunkard. He never understood your grandmother, he was not kind to your father.