The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover

by Bob Shacochis

  Sorry? No! he said almost angrily. You have given back everything to me. I was dead too, you see. You cannot be sorry that we are alive again.

  In her heart she felt the reassurance of these words and yet something was wrong. There was an awkwardness between them, and no lack of reasons for it, but the immediate source, she guessed, was Baba, Osman’s supposedly estranged father who seemed unable to glance at his son without revealing an unwavering paternal investment in pride. He regarded Osman with masculine affection, gruff yet slightly worshipful, and he was kind and courteous to his son’s oddly dressed, newly resurrected girlfriend, behaving with the utmost circumspection, bringing her a glass of tea and then, to her relief, bowing his apologies for running away to teach a morning class at the university.

  But left to themselves, the awkwardness in the kitchen only intensified. She stared at a hard-boiled egg abandoned on the father’s plate and couldn’t remember when she had last eaten. Can I? she said, reaching for it, and Osman said, Please, take it, and they both fell silent again while she peeled the shell, thinking she had made a mistake maybe, coming here, her faith in Osman perhaps misplaced. She had been certain he would know exactly how to respond to her with the sweetness of comfort, what she most needed, but now she saw he did not know how to respond but instead was causing her to feel primed for heartbreak. Somewhere deep in the apartment she could hear his father preparing to leave and then a telephone was ringing and then Baba had stepped halfway back into the kitchen to say the call was for her.

  Are you sure? she asked with streaking panic, already sensing it was true.

  Two doors down to the right, said Osman with a complicated, leery expression.

  Shaking, she went down the hall to a small sitting room and sat in a brocaded armchair next to the phone and stared blankly at the framed photographs of Osman’s family and fez-wearing ancestors arranged on a credenza and then picked up the receiver and said hello, her father’s voice swinging into her stomach like a fist of humiliation. He said he wanted her out of there now.

  Where are you? How did you get this number?

  I want you to go down to the street and wait for Maranian to come get you if he’s not there already. Do you understand?

  No. Why did you lie to me?

  About what?

  About everything.

  Let me speak to this kid Osman.

  No. Why? Where are you?

  Listen—

  But before he could begin the sentence she hung up on him. When she stepped back into the kitchen, Osman didn’t wait to get the issue of the kara carsaf off his chest, but she buried his question under another mystery. She had to leave right now, she told him. Would he come with her?

  Where? What’s wrong? Yes, of course. One minute, okay? I have to use the phone.

  Too many questions that she promised to answer later. She walked him down the hall to the sitting room and then she left him there and kept going to the front of the apartment into a living room decorated with gilt-trimmed satiny white furniture that overlooked the street and parted the lace curtains in time to observe a black Mercedes coming up the block in a crawl of traffic. Leave me alone, she whispered to the window, turning with an indescribable pang of loss back through the immaculate room. Down the hall Osman spoke in a furtive voice that grew lower as her footsteps approached and the receiver clacked into its cradle just as she reached the door. He spun around with guilty eyes, withdrawing his attempt at a smile when he saw the prosecutorial look on her face.

  I need to know, she said. Do you have another girlfriend?

  How could you think this of me?

  You thought I was dead, she said.

  No, no, he protested. Well, yes, but still I had hope. There was reason to hope, he said and finally held out his arms to her and she pounced into them and fought back an incipient rack of sobs threatening to undo her, resting her face on his shoulder, her nose burrowing into the earthy affirmation of his smell, ploughing her fingers through the curls remaining at the back of his head, saying I love you so much, saying it over and over again until he repeated the words to her, which made her brave enough to ask about the phone. It was just Karim, he told her, they had planned to meet later in the day. She was placated though not pleased by this answer and reluctantly ended their embrace.

  We can’t go out the front, she said. My father sent someone to get me.

  Tell me—

  I’ve told you before, she said. He hates Muslims. He doesn’t want me seeing you.

  But—

  Please, please. Let’s just go.

  Tabi, tabi. Of course.

  They tried to do what could not be done, to resume their familiar summer game, giving the slip to Daddy’s spies, only this time there was no lightheartedness between them and no honesty and nothing to laugh about, this time was not an adolescent lark, and Osman, enigmatic and clearly paranoid, seemed to her somehow preconnected to this overtly dire shift in circumstances.

  She shadowed him up a narrow staircase at the back of the kitchen to a hatch that creaked open onto the storied roof of his boyhood, no evidence in sight of its former role as sanctuary, and she allowed herself the luxury of turning in a circle, imagining him there as a child, huddled with his books, and she thought she glimpsed the shine of melancholy ebbing into Osman’s eyes and the truth she had long dismissed became visceral—she would leave Istanbul because she never stayed anywhere and he would stay because that was what he was meant to do.

  Now what? she asked anxiously and he explained they needed to cross the rows of low walls dividing each apartment’s property from the next to reach the end of the block, where the afterthought of a single fire escape had been added onto the building after the Second World War. The stucco walls were belly-high and easily climbed and when they had come to the end of the complex she peered over the edge at the metal ladder, reminiscent of a swimming pool’s, bolted to the exterior of the last apartment, straight down to the alley four stories below.

  You must take off this dress, I think, said Osman with a nervous step backward. But why are you wearing religious clothes? It shocks me, this dress.

  It’s a disguise, she said, hoping such an obvious answer would mollify him, and she removed the kara carsaf and pitched it over the side and tucked her clutch into the waistband of her jeans and then, grabbing the curved handholds at the top of the ladder, maneuvered her body to face the building and stepped one foot at a time onto the rungs. This is a little hairy, she said. Shit. The blood drained from Osman’s face and he admitted he had never dared to use the ladder, although when they were kids his brothers monkeyed up and down it all the time. It’s not really so bad, she said, her encouragement halfhearted. Come on, she said, and continued down, focused and methodical, feeling her way with her feet, not looking up to check his progress until she found herself on the street, in a small group of spectators who had stopped to watch such a curious show.

  Osman was on the ladder but near the top, petrified. She called and waited but when he didn’t move she climbed up again and grabbed a quaking ankle to calm him down, feeling the fear in him like a reverberation of thunder through his flesh. Come on, she wanted to say, you can do this, but thought of her brother, how wise her father was to push his competitive daughter and lay off his son, and she remembered what she already knew about Osman, that he was not physically bold, how she would tease him when they would anchor the Sea Nymph to swim on a hot day, Osman a good enough swimmer but in dread of venturing into water over his head. She said now what she said then—It’s okay, you’re doing great—and when that didn’t work she understood he had completely lost his nerve and told him to climb back up to the roof and go to his apartment and put on a hat or something to conceal himself and she would meet him at the Spice Bazaar as soon as he could get there undetected.

  It’s ok
ay, she said, go back. There’s a guy in a black Mercedes. Don’t let him follow you.

  If you fall, she said to herself, we fall together, a romantically morbid thought, the residue of girlhood that appealed to her expiring belief in perfect endings.

  She waited until he was on the roof before she descended again to the street, retrieved the black dress off the pavement, and began her march through the labyrinth of hillside alleys that twisted and turned back down toward the Golden Horn, looking over her shoulder at each intersection before deciding left or right or straight, her choices deliberately random, her pace brisk but not brisk enough to stand out in the flow of pedestrians.

  At the entrance to the Spice Bazaar she ducked into a public toilet and covered her blatant westernness again in the kara carsaf and then blended into the ever-present sea of jostling humanity that occupied the dim interior of the market. She wandered in a state of jittery exhaustion, her head down and heedless, bumped and bumping back in the stream of people until somehow she found herself circulating in an eddy of modest tea stalls, single-vendor enterprises recessed into a wall of stony earth, like dens in a catacomb, each occupied by a kettle steaming atop a brazier and two or three rustic footstools and every kettle attended by an almost identical old crone with a head scarf knotted under her doughy chin, stoic and shabby, roosting on one of her stools. She heard a croak of Turkish directed, she slowly realized, at her, a sympathetic beckoning—Come, come, daughter. Come, sit. You are lost. I can see. Come drink my tea and rest—and fell gratefully under the crone’s spell, folding herself onto the low stool in the gouged-out hole that contained the austere world of this white-haired woman.

  Yet when the old woman handed her a glass of apple tea, her clouded eyes stared inhospitably at Dottie’s face.

  Yabanci?

  Evet.

  Are you a believer, my child?

  Yes, she answered without hesitation, recalling Peter in the courtyard of Jerusalem’s High Priest; Peter, the apostle who proved you could lie your head off about Jesus and get away with it. But he was a coward, she told herself, and I’m not. This was different. The crone spoke to her in Arabic and she answered appropriately.

  There is no God but God.

  Her brief sanctuary among the believers ended roughly, though, someone’s fingers sinking into the flesh of her upper arm and hauling her to her feet and there was Osman, just as she had last seen him, nothing incognito about him, his face burning with disapproval. Quick! he snapped and tugged her, stumbling, back into the crowds, and refused to say a word or release his angry grip until they were back on the street, squinting at each other in the sunlight. She asked if they were being followed and he said he could not be sure and he demanded to know everything. Why was she behaving this way? Why was she pretending to be a Muslim? Why was she being strange? and she asked him Please don’t be mad at me.

  Her lower lip jutted out and she studied his gaunt unhappy face and helpless eyes, wary of offering even the smallest detail of her tribulations to pacify him, the train of deceptions she shared with her father, hers coerced or impulsive, his either compulsive or calculated in cold blood. Could Osman ever understand Carla? But then, yes, why not, what was so difficult to understand about a whore? Islamic men took it for granted this was a woman’s indelible nature. His intractable rejection of her would be the inevitable result of the truth, added to the compounding of her own self-hatred, which she had no appetite to indulge, nor time. It too would have to wait. Still, she began to whimper, and when she saw his own eyes reflect her pain she blurted out a perilous confession, telling him she had been attacked by a man.

  He was struck dumb, his body tightening with outrage. Say something, she pleaded and began to hiccup and Osman sputtered more questions. Attacked? Who did this? Was it him? The man in the car?

  Yes, she hiccupped.

  We will go to the police.

  No!

  Yes, they are my friends.

  What does that mean? What are you saying?

  What did he do to you? I myself, then, will kill this man.

  We have to go, she said. You have to protect me.

  He brought her into his arms then and kissed her face and wiped away her tears with his thumb and promised. She wasn’t asking much, she told him. Take me back to the academy in Uskudar, where she could feel safe again in her own room. They would talk and she would answer his questions and then they would make a plan. A plan for what? he asked and she told him, A plan for being together.

  Tabi, tabi, he assured her, yet the set of his lips seemed indecisive, and he said he’d need to place another call to Karim.

  She was cheered to see the ferry station at Eminonu still jammed at this late hour of the morning and they lurked inside one of the souvenir shops on the perimeter of the square, keeping an eye out for Maranian’s black Mercedes, and then made a dash for the Uskudar ferry, sliding into the push of last-minute passengers. The Eminonu-Uskudar route was Istanbul’s most traveled, requiring the fleet’s largest ship to carry thousands of commuters daily between Europe and Asia, and it took them several minutes to press through the passageway to the bow and squeeze in alongside other passengers on one of the open-air benches on the forward deck. They cuddled together, Osman’s arm around her shoulder, pulling her into him with tender mercy, as the ferry churned away from the Golden Horn into the once-magical waters of the Bosphorus.

  I’m really, really sad, said Dottie.

  Then I am sad as well.

  I miss my sailboat, she said.

  Yes, Osman echoed her. I miss it as well.

  There was this thing troubling him and she thought she knew what it was and she thought if she mentioned it it would go away. Your father seemed nice, she said, feeling Osman’s body tense as he automatically agreed with her, like a recorded message on a machine. She held still and waited for him to explain but as the silence became uncomfortable she allowed herself to wonder if the estrangement between Osman and his father had been a lie, a dramatic fabrication, a better story than the real story. He had been reading her thoughts, it seemed, because he turned from watching the approaching shoreline of Asia and met her eyes with a look of surrender and said what he had told her about the situation with his father was true until about six months ago.

  You mean, before you met me?

  Yes, he nodded.

  What happened six months ago?

  I took a position with the state, said Osman. This pleased my father, and he welcomed me back into his home. My home.

  What does that mean—a position with the state? Have you dropped out of school?

  No, no. It’s nothing. But it made my father happy.

  But why did you not tell me? she said and, plaintively sincere, he told her that the story of his estrangement with his father had never felt like a lie but felt more true than the reality that had replaced it, the years of bitter rejection and self-recrimination more vivid and alive than the past few months of eating breakfast each morning with his father, the two of them acting like those years were in the past, or had never happened. He asked her to understand and she said she did and she loved him and then the ferry was tying up to the dock and Osman went inside the terminal to telephone Karim.

  Is everything all right? she asked when he came outside again and they began to walk up the slope to the academy.

  Yes, fine, he said. It’s nothing. He and Karim had arranged to meet today. Perhaps later, I told him, and he said okay.

  Classes were still in recess for summer break, the new semester a week away, and the campus seemed unnaturally abandoned. Her keys lay in the mud somewhere on the bottom of the Sea of Marmara and she had to buzz the resident attendant to come unlock the door of her dormitory. The RA came down, not the one Dottie expected or liked, a gormless dull-faced stork too lazy to change out of her pajam
as. Through the half-opened door she gawked stupidly at Dottie and told her it had been kind of weird having to think of her as drowned and then, like, not-drowned, and if Dottie needed something she should go to administration, the RA said, because she wasn’t authorized to let her into the building.

  Osman’s face reflected her own dismay. She knew you were alive, he marveled as he trotted after her toward the academy’s main building. How was that possible?

  I don’t fucking know, Dottie snarled and then stopped in her tracks, turning with a cringe of apology for her tone but then she was screeching that her father was sick, not sick like ill, sick like insane, and Osman finally managed to settle her down sufficiently to enter the central suite of offices for a visit, unannounced but apparently anticipated, with the headmistress, a Canadian educator with a gray bob and pale, worried eyes who decades ago had fallen in love with a Turkish man and decided to make her home in Istanbul despite getting what the students called The Big Heave-ho. She came out from behind her desk and swept Dottie into a consoling matronly embrace and piped, What an adventure you’ve had, eh? adding with dry amusement, You haven’t converted, have you, my dear? her eyelids fluttering at Dottie’s torn outer-dress. They sat in adjoining upholstered chairs opposite one another and the headmistress rested her chin in her hand pensively and examined the confusion in Dottie’s inchoate eyes and said, I’m positively delighted you found the time to come say good-bye but I’m beginning to suspect that wasn’t your intention.

  Dottie forced her voice to be steady and asked, Have you spoken to my father?

  Indeed, I have. He didn’t say, but he seemed to be calling from the airport. What he did say was that he thought you might be stopping in this morning for one last look around and if I saw you to tell you to call your mother in the United States. Would you care to use the phone?