This is not the story I heard.
Very well.
These things . . . I had a different—I thought—and in English she said, You’re blowing my mind.
Enough for now, said Davor, his good hand patting a knee for emphasis before he stood up. We have business, he said, turning on the spotlight. Are you ready? He stepped behind the camera and then stepped out. You are thinking too much, he said. Stop thinking.
I’m trying.
Forget this trying. What is necessary is Carla. Bring Carla, please.
She angled herself into a sluttish pose but it felt too severe and her flesh seemed to turn insensate and she let her body droop back into its neutral form, shaking her head at the clumsy phoniness. The obstacle in her mind was all too apparent: she was not voluptuous, she would never be voluptuous, she was something else, lithe and spontaneous, something that did not present well when amplified, overstated, underlined, an organic wholesomeness that could not be shopped out or made over or repackaged.
We are not thinking Dorothy, said Davor, gently. We are thinking Carla. It is very simple for Carla to do this.
Honest, she said. I’m trying.
Do you have a boyfriend?
Yes.
Think of this boy. Look to the camera and think of this boy.
She could not say how it happened—Davor’s advice was irrelevant because Osman would fall apart crying or maybe laughing if he saw her this way—but she felt the paradoxical facade of Dottie dissolving, an out-of-body release, and there was Carla, no longer an erotic parody, posing for her soft-core shoot, a breezy pinup girl who adorned the walls of sexed-up boys. She propped a leg, canted her shoulders at a diagonal and glanced back at the camera, sleepy-eyed, a modest girlish invitation, not too coy, for the cocks to come out. She had only to smile and not look bored or cynical or dissimulated—Carla’s smile on Dottie’s face.
Excellent, said Davor. One more. Finished.
You know what I want most? she said. Tenderness without bullshit. Is that possible in the world? Can I have that? She amazed herself—who was this talking, Dottie or the other girl?
In the bathroom she stood bent at the sink with the taps gushing and summoned the courage to confront herself in the mirror, appalled by the lurid puppet who stared back at her with garish eyes, how little girls make themselves vampy on Halloween. What her father said—You don’t have to be Carla, Carla has to be you—she finally understood. Buon giorno, Carla. Arrivederci, Dottie. In Istanbul she would do a touch of lipstick, she would agree to kohl. Beyond that, Carla and Dottie were of one mind.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Regarding carnal relations, said her father, agitating his daughter with the pretense that they shared between them a proper ignorance on the subject. It was the only time he ever spoke to her directly about sex—usually something just happened in a tense space of pooling silence.
Once you had his undivided attention, there were many responses you could, as a woman, anticipate from a man, her father told her, but only two that you could reliably expect—lust and rage. These were subsets of the greater order of behavior, the biological imperative, the battle for control. As for desire, her father said, there are no traps except the ones we build for ourselves. I mean to say, you do not want to anger the signori, understand?
Wait, she said. I’m not having sex with this guy.
We’ve been clear on that from the beginning. But you have to make him believe, of course. That shouldn’t be difficult.
He made her supremely uncomfortable talking this way, agitated with suppressed revulsion, his sweaty little lectures on the science of seduction, clinically sterile chessboard insights into a skill a young girl first practiced and honed in a years-long pantomime with her father, the come-hither teasing, the nascent eroticism like a seedling sprouting tendrils beneath the translucent surface of innocence, the drift of hugs and kisses toward the edge of some mind-stopping power to be tested or rejected, the child herself seduced by seduction, What an exciting game!
Then one day Davor drove himself to the airport and the next day after lunch she and her father left for Istanbul. The thrill of the escapade started with a seaplane, which picked them up alongside the quay in Kusadasi and flew them north back across the Sea of Marmara, Dottie glad to be returning home but frustrated about remaining barred from her real life, forbidden to contact Osman or any of her friends or return to school for a few more days. They landed at a private dock on the southern outskirts of Istanbul, where Maranian waited for them with his spotless car, his manner once again ironed by the formality of loyal service, masking the tension that remained between them with solicitude. Look, she said to make her peace with Maranian, pulling his grandmother’s gold cross through the neck of her T-shirt, We saved it when the boat sank. He bowed and called her Carla and took the dry bag from her to stow in the trunk of the Mercedes.
Alone in the backseat riding into the city, she listened to the men up front and felt excluded, the weeklong center of attention shifting away from her to other business she was not privy to, something that had happened or would happen in Germany, imagining they were talking in code until her father asked Maranian about Davor and Maranian said, Yes, your man arrived this morning from Belgrade and Davor is with him now. Then her father shifted around in his seat to examine her.
Tell me how you’re doing.
Fine.
Let me say it one more time. Walk away and that’s understandable. We’ll come at this from another angle.
I’m fine.
You see, he assured Maranian. She’s fine.
Let me remind you, her father said, craning around again, his hands gripping the back of the headrest as though he might climb over the seat on top of her. When you see Davor again later tonight—
I know, she said with a trickle of annoyance. Who’s Davor?
Right. And remember, there’ll be another man with him.
Marko. Not our friend. Age, thirty-one. I know. If there’s something I don’t know it’s because you didn’t tell me but you’ve told me everything fifty times.
That’s right. But now I’m thinking a couple of things. When we enter the apartment, you must leave immediately. I mean in a flash. Get out of there and get back to the hotel room and wait for Maranian.
You told me, she said.
It’s very important. Also, the signori sometimes likes to smoke opium during his liaisons. Let’s hope he does tonight, but do not do this with him. Fix him a drink, fix yourself a weak one to play along, get him relaxed, get him to take off his jacket, and that’s it.
I know.
You won’t see us but we’ll be right there.
I know.
If he tries anything funny, I want you to run like hell out of the room.
Okay. What kind of funny?
Anything at all. It won’t be a problem, he said. We’ll be right there.
Maranian pulled over to the curb in front of a drab pensione on a side street a dozen blocks north and west of Taksim in a neighborhood she did not know. The Hilton, she learned, was temporarily off-limits—We drowned, remember, her father said, promising her again he’d straighten that out in the next day or two. She, Carla, had already been checked into a room. Maranian gave her the key and told her she would find the lady waiting for her there and said in an oddly demanding tone, Good luck, raising his hand to his forehead in a military salute. She said it’s not like I’m a soldier or anything and he looked at her and replied, You are. Her father scrutinized her with an intensity so harsh she knew he was trying to frighten her but her steel nerves were his own creation and she would not be frightened. Okay, he said finally, his face satisfied. This is the right call. You’re ready. This will happen like clockwork and, swear to God, the world will be better for it—and he got
out of the car with her, scooping her into his arms, his eyes uncustomarily misty, and repeated his father mantra, that she could never imagine how much he loved her, and she said, I know, not the same rueful, soul-weary acceptance of his unfathomable love in her voice but instead a frosty acknowledgment, her face unaffirming, and she felt her body not pliant as she meant it to be but stiffening against his.
And then she stepped away with a lewd wink and taunting smirk. This is pretty weird, she heard Dottie thinking from far away, Carla finds Daddy’s love intolerable.
Carla in ascendance, mocking the game, disappearing through the glass door.
There was something darkly enchanted about coming into the cheap pensione and its blunt custodial emptiness, inhaling its stale air, the dimly lit corridors and creaking stairway a type of passage through a netherworld into another reality, like arriving backstage and being tucked away in a dressing room to prepare for a performance, detaching incrementally toward the ultimate absorption of character. Cherries, she thought, that’s what I want. A white bowl of cherries. Champagne.
She keyed open the door to an interior darkness flickering with the grainy light of a television set, the pumpkinlike silhouette of the Armenian lady planted on the foot of a single bed, the lady unresponsive even as Dottie switched on the overhead bulb and said hello and realized the lady’s shoulders convulsed with noiseless sobbing and she said in a resentful tone, What’s wrong? and the lack of any answer at all summoned forth Carla once and for all. She crossed the room and turned off the set, hearing enough of the broadcast to learn its significance, the death of some great man, one of the Young Turks who had outlasted everybody, Ataturk’s comrade, a former president of the Republic. Sorry, she reproached the woman on the bed, do you mind? Let’s get this over with.
I hated him, the woman said, squashing away tears with the back of her plump hand. I am crying with joy because this bastard is dead.
Oh, said Carla. Good riddance then.
Rising to her feet, the woman pushed past the surly girl into the bathroom where she blew her nose with a snot-rattling honk and fixed the runny makeup around her frog eyes, readying herself for a battle of wills with the teenager, Carla wrongly assumed, but the recomposed Armenian instead acquiesced to Carla simply putting on lip gloss and kohl and a careful spritz of hairspray. She poked at the nazar bracelet above the girl’s wrist—I’m not taking it off—but again, intent on her own defiance, she had misinterpreted the woman, who approved of the bracelet and wanted to compliment it with a gift—evil-eye earrings, which Carla accepted with a chagrined nod.
She obeyed a clipped mutter of instructions, stripped out of her T-shirt, jeans, and underwear and put on what was handed to her, a new set of bra and panties, green silk, a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar, a schoolgirl’s camel-brown skirt, shiny black patent leather pumps, the studious illusion of fake eyeglasses. The taxi comes now, the woman said, checking her wristwatch, and they went downstairs to the street, the woman carrying a plastic tote bag containing the things Carla would need later in the evening.
Passing through Taksim Square she stared out the window at the mass of humanity on the move at day’s end, this victorious march of ordinary freedoms, her vision glazing over, registering cameos of people going about their business—a man selling lottery tickets, a boy setting down bathroom scales for a customer, a melon vendor—and felt herself overcome by a feeling of calm, the streets a soothing blur of life as it should be, the promise of twilight drawing her forward into the night that lay ahead, a night inviting her induction into its greatest of secrets, understanding as never before what her father had always understood—when the time is upon you, you are never too young, or too insignificant, to choose sides, we are all born to choose sides, and therein lay the true power of adulthood, the self shorn of frivolous alliance, immune to decadence.
In a burst of pure clarity, she also understood her entire life—its plurality, the challenge of its basic improvisations, the assortment of homes and places and friends, the languages she readily acquired to mute her foreignness—had been designed to shape her into a professional changeling, and she resolved that this was the way she was destined to live, a type of actress in a theater without walls or boundaries or audience. Like other precocious adolescents who became pop stars or sailed across oceans solo or went off to college years ahead of everybody else, she was seventeen and self-possessed and old enough now to know something so fundamental about herself.
She realized the Armenian lady was jabbing her knee and repeating her name like a curse, Carla! Carla! and the taxi had stopped in front of the gates of the Italian consulate. Take this, said the woman, giving her a small embroidered clutch containing her counterfeit passport. I am waiting down there, she told Carla, pointing ahead to the corner of the block.
She presented her passport to a gendarme, who handed it back through the window of the gatehouse to an Italian security agent who checked her name on the guest list and she was allowed to enter the vibrant interior of the consulate, the staff directing her down a high-ceilinged hall toward a gilded ballroom churning with muffled conversation, the noise louder and flared with laughter but no less intelligible as she entered the room and its hive of glamorous people—the shining class, she called them—honey-skinned divas and military attachés and captains of industry, a clattering spangle of bracelets, gold jewelry and pearls, starbursts of diamonds.
She, Carla, glided toward a waiter carrying a tray of prosecco, stepping back against a wall to sip from the flute and savor a pulsing lucidness like a drug making her stoned with focus, something that made alertness and pleasure the same internal process, aware that she had announced herself to the room by her light-footed youth and proud erect body, a random pattern of heads swiveling to mark her arrival, which was exactly why her father and Davor had argued about this moment, the risk of her exposure to an assembly of people likely to contain at least several from the city’s resident diplomatic corps who might recognize their American colleague’s daughter. But this entrance was what the signori’s ego required, her public appearance allowing him the private knowledge that of all the men in the room who would want her, he alone would have her.
(Stage direction: Reception at Italian consulate. Speak to no one. Establish contact with Marko. Exit in two minutes.)
But her connection with her new identity seemed unassailable—anyone approaching her as Dottie Chambers would turn away, she was sure, flummoxed and apologizing for his mistake. She stared into and through the crowd, not seeing particular faces, always looking beyond, watchful but abstracted and static, until she saw Davor and their eyes met and she could feel the plaster of her expressionlessness, the satisfying lack of receptivity in her face. She lowered her gaze as she drank her sweet bubbles and when she lifted her head again she looked straight at the man Davor was speaking with, the surprisingly diminutive signori, a frail gimlet-eyed gnome whose face sagged across the collapsed contours of his former vitality. He cocked an eyebrow imperiously but Carla revealed nothing before she swept her attention elsewhere and then to the man approaching her. The bodyguard, Marko. Not weaselish as she had imagined from his photograph but sharklike and gladiatorial. He was dressed like the signori in an expensive but more elegant business suit, his shaved head vaguely malevolent above his dark eyes and long, triangular nose and weight-lifter’s body, the pursed asshole of his mouth and weak chin strengthened by a condescending regard, which made her feel bold and righteous, and she defeated his self-importance by handing him her glass and turned to leave.
Hello, he said in grating English, you are Carla. She replied in a hush of Italian, sticking to the script: Thirty minutes. Behind this building. The service entrance.
Then she was walking away and he said, Wait, one moment, but it was easy to guess from his tone that he had nothing he needed to say, he was grasping for a thread of intimacy to have as his own, perhaps a
type of investment to cash out in whatever ridiculous future he imagined for the two of them, Carla on call for men like him and their aging masters, bureaucrats of primitive treacheries, and in English she answered, I don’t think so, still walking away, and he made no effort to stop her.
Back on the street, night had freshened the late summer air and she walked to the end of the block and turned the corner and got back into the taxi with the driver and the Armenian lady, both of them staring raptly at the dashboard radio, listening to its gobble of seditious demands. Here, said the lady, thrusting the tote bag onto Carla’s lap. Here? said Carla indignantly, thrusting it back. No, not here, and she asked the driver to pull farther up the alley out of the crude amber light of the streetlamp.
This was what the signori, a Bosnian Muslim, was willing to spend lavishly for and risk entrapment, costuming nearly-naked fair-haired Christian girls in Islamic dress, draping them in a shroud of piety to both emphasize and mock their forbiddenness, then peeling off the fraud of their modesty and chasteness to expose them for what they were, corrupted vessels of wanton infidelity, leaving him no choice but to further defile their pollution, their heretical debasement of the feminine. Then redressing them in Western haute couture and escorting them to the nearest three-star restaurant for a late-night dinner and the finest bottle of wine on the menu while the sticky coolness of his semen dried between their legs.
She removed the eyeglasses and toed off her pumps and tugged her skirt over her hip bones, kicking it away toward the lady’s side of the car, then stopped, distracted by her own mood of insouciance, and asked the driver for a cigarette but he had none and she told him go to the kiosk back on the corner and buy her a pack. The woman hissed that there was no time to waste on unnecessary errands and Carla, bristling, snapped that the signori would certainly wait. The driver left to do her bidding and she unbuttoned her blouse and slipped it off her arms and said to the woman, Okay, give it to me, and the rustling black fabric rose from the tote bag like the skin of a phantom widow. She opened the door and the woman squealed in alarm trying to prevent her from disgracing herself in the street, Carla leaping agilely out into the dark in bra and panties to cloak herself head to ankle in the kara carsaf, fastening its endless row of buttons, which began at her throat, her fingers made clumsy by her luridly exaggerated nails. Come back inside, ordered the woman, and Dottie covered her head and ducked back onto her seat.
The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover Page 46
