What she wanted, and wanted desperately, was to go to her old room and lie down and yank the bedcovers over her head but the headmistress received this request with a wide-eyed expression of pity. You poor thing, she said. That bastard. He didn’t have the balls to tell you, did he?
The headmistress said she had been terribly relieved to get a call from Dottie’s father the day after the newspapers had reported the two of them lost at sea, and then quickly disappointed to hear him say that his daughter would be attending her final year of secondary school back in America, a consequence of Dottie’s decision to live with her mother.
No, said Dottie, stunned. That’s not true. It’s not right, it’s not true.
True or not, said the headmistress, at your father’s instruction, your room has been emptied and your things shipped to your mother’s address in the States. I’m sorry, Dorothy. Would you like to make that phone call now?
She nodded through tears and without being asked, the headmistress stepped discreetly out of the office for a few minutes while Dottie placed her call, not to her mother in Virginia but to her father’s secretary, Mary Beth, in Ankara, who responded to Dottie’s histrionic demands with mechanical calm, explaining that her father was traveling and could not be reached and that she had a reservation at the Hilton under the name of Carla Costa and in the morning she should wait in the lobby for Mr. Maranian, who would drive her to the airport to catch a midday flight to Dulles. That’s all I know, honey, said Mary Beth, and Dottie lost control, shouting through her tears, You’re not telling me! Where’s my father? What about that man, the signori? The one who was supposed to kill the Pope! Tell me about him!
Mary Beth said her father had never mentioned such a man and she was sorry to hear Dottie so distressed and Dottie told Mary Beth to tell her father that she would never forgive him. You tell him, Dottie sobbed and stammered. Tell him never. Be sure to tell him that. You fucking tell him.
All right, said Mary Beth, her voice infuriatingly neutral. There’s one more thing you need to do. Call your mother, please.
You call her, said Dottie. Tell her I’m staying here. Tell my parents to go to hell.
Okay, said Mary Beth. Will do.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
She had slammed down the phone and stamped out of the building and found Osman waiting for her on the marble steps, forlorn and smoking a cigarette with manic puffs, his face as bloodless as it had been throughout the morning and he would not say what was troubling him. Perhaps it was only a particularly bad case of huzun yet by now she knew she had arrived back into his life as a complication. She took a ragged deep breath to calm herself before she explained the calamity of her situation and told him what she wanted to do, although it wasn’t much of a plan, as plans go, and waited for his reply. Yet her fate was not what she had in mind at the moment—she only wanted an answer. Osman, seeming to understand the power she had assigned to him, looked stricken.
I don’t understand what is happening, he said. It’s simple, she told him. I’m choosing you and I’m choosing Istanbul.
It will be very difficult to do this, he said but his eyes gradually warmed and he took each of her hands in his and gripped them and that was it—that was their pact. They would be together, coauthors of a fairy tale about a boy and a girl and a brilliant place called Istanbul and happiness and love and defiance.
They walked across the campus of the academy and through its gate back into the city, farther inland up its slopes and into Asia until she began to feel light-headed with hunger and they bought fish kebobs and bread rings and cherry juice from a kiosk on the edge of a children’s park and sat on a bench in a grove of pines and ate in silence while they watched the mothers scamper after their laughing toddlers through the sunny playground. It would never have been the same anyway, she said as they stood up to leave and he said, What wouldn’t be the same? I just mean school, she said carefully, mentioning that the headmistress told her Jacqueline would not be returning from Paris for her final year, either. But if you don’t go to school, what will you do? Osman asked and she shrugged and heard herself laugh in a way that was too giddy and unbalanced and told him she didn’t want to think about that today.
They turned back down toward the center of the old city and its scribble of alleys, looking for a small hotel or pensione where she could rent a room for a few days but there were immediate obstacles she had not considered: the nature of her relationship with this young man by her side, the suspicious absence of luggage, her sudden absolute fear of exposing the counterfeit passport to Osman. She began to make Osman wait outside while she inquired at the desk, but her inability to pay in lira or with a card and the very fact that she was a teenage yabanci dressed in a strange manner made even the most open-minded proprietor leery of taking her in. The streets were filled with women shrouded in black, though, and wearing the kara carsaf seemed like the right tactic in this ongoing game, staying as low as possible under her father’s radar, and she refused to take it off no matter how much Osman despised the garment and what it symbolized.
I need to change some money, she told him, and the search for a bank or black-market hustler took them closer to the train station and its squalid neighborhoods. Osman objected when she slowed in front of a decrepit hulk of weather-beaten clapboard taking up most of a block, a shabby Edwardian mansion grafted onto a structure resembling a warehouse that had been converted, according to a sign above a ridiculously pretentious entrance with curving balustrades and a grandiose portico, into a nightclub. F. Nightengale’s, surely a joke on the nurse who became famous in an Uskudar hospital during the Crimean War. Another, less ostentatious, sign advertised rooms for rent.
Osman said no, this was not a place for reputable women.
She could not tell if he was being prudish or merely condescending. I have to sleep somewhere, she said, her voice stripping away the frustration she felt because he had not offered her a room or a couch or anything in his family’s building and, too proud or just too unwilling to trap him into excuses, she would not stoop to ask to be taken in, she did not want to become anybody’s responsibility. Here, she said preemptively, removing a hundred-dollar bill from her purse. Lira, okay? Before he could say anything else, she moved up the warped steps and disappeared through the establishment’s massive oak door, its panels graying and blistered with old varnish, her mood lightened by the stuffy, cigar-smelling, old-fashioned atmospheric campiness of the salon in which she found herself.
A beautiful Ottoman-era rug covered most of the floor, muffling the tread of her steps. Period furniture: leather armchairs and divans upholstered in melon-green velvet, tea tables and ashtray stands, water pipes on brass trays, everything arranged in cozy groups along walls that had been papered a deeper green with flocked patterning. An impressive cut-glass chandelier hung from the high tin ceiling, a banistered, foot-worn stairway ascended to a second story. The mahogany reception desk, a grand survivor of more opulent times, was unattended, the convenience of a small brass temple bell left on its countertop. She picked it up and rang for help and waited, admiring the freakish voluptuousness of a row of framed divas, their photographs hung on the wall in front of her, a gallery of belly dancers, sinewy feline flesh and man-smothering tassled tits and prized sequined buttocks and grotesque gobs of circus makeup and swooping Roman coiffures circa the 1960s.
A woman’s unfriendly voice asked what she wanted and when she turned to answer she found herself confronted by a big-boned giantess nearly twice her size, thanks in part to the woman’s outlandish hair, corn-colored with platinum highlights, stacked and lacquered into a Babylonian ziggurat of seashell whorls towering straight up off the top of her skull. She wore an equally outlandish caftan, broad-striped purple and orange, pink ballet slippers on her large feet, her very long fingers ringed with clusters of jewels, a hardware store of bangles above each knobby wrist, her po
uched dark eyes outlined with flaring tails of kohl and her face, glistening and heart-shaped, had been denied its natural beauty by an outsized Levantine nose hooked over the hypersensual protrusion of her lips, camel-like and scowling. She barked at Dottie as if she were an intruder, her presence an affront to a virtuous person’s sensibilities.
You. What is your business here?
Unlike her mother, Dottie was capable of planting herself, undaunted, in the face of unexpected hostility. And indeed the woman’s rudeness seemed arrested by what she saw as she peered more closely at the girl, the severity of her countenance cracking open with wonder and then tightening with acquisitive interest. I am Zubedye, she declared without further prejudice, and then the questions flowed in a more amiable tone.
Are you a religious person? No. Are you lost? No. Dancer? No. My dear, don’t take offense—are you a prostitute? No, said Dottie, but I need a room where my boyfriend can visit me.
Ah, I see, said the giantess Zubedye, her rubbery lips stretching into a prurient smile. And for how long would you like this room?
Dottie took a hundred-dollar bill from her clutch and asked how many days it would buy and the woman, used to the cowering pliable obsequiousness of girls who came to her from the poverty of the countryside, eyed her shrewdly and snatched the bill from her fingers and said five. It was also necessary to show proof of identity to register lawfully but as Dottie began to hand over her passport she hesitated and sighed. There’s a small problem, she said. It’s a long story, but my boyfriend doesn’t know my real name.
The woman reached out and took the passport and opened it. Italian?
Yes.
Carla Costa?
It’s better for me if you call me Dottie.
I will call you Dottie, the woman agreed and then frowned and corrected her. Not a small problem, she said. You are only sixteen.
Seventeen.
Where are your parents?
Rome. They come here all the time. To work.
And what am I to think about this? You have run away from home?
She almost said if anyone had run away it was her parents but the story she told was close enough to the truth—she was a student, enrolled in the girl’s academy on the other side of town, determined to enjoy a week’s liberty with her boyfriend until the new term began and she was locked up like a nun in the dormitory. Mmmm, purred Zubedye indulgently. Okay, I understand. You are a very clever girl.
But still there was a problem. The proprietress of F. Nightengale’s enjoyed a good relationship with the police, a relationship, for obvious reasons, essential to preserve. Dottie was not of legal age, too young, in fact, to sit in the nightclub and drink alcohol. My business has many hidden costs, said Zubedye, rubbing the tips of her fingers together.
Osman inconveniently reappeared, casting a look of extreme disapproval in Dottie’s direction as he shouldered open the heavy oak door and stopped, gaping at the spectacle of the flamboyant Zubedye and then moped, a hangdog droop to his face, his authority somehow unmanned, when both women glanced his way and then quickly ignored him. Without protesting Zubedye’s extortion, Dottie slipped her passport back inside the clutch next to all that now remained of the perverted signori’s money. There was yet one last problem, the giantess told her. You must remove this garbage you are wearing. People who come here to my club don’t like to see this on women. Osman returned to life, agreeing vigorously and self-importantly, his judgment finally honored. Dottie tried to explain—it wouldn’t do to have a schoolmate or teacher or a friend of her parents recognize her on the streets—but Zubedye remained adamant. Okay, I have a solution, she said, now we go upstairs and I will show you your room and I will introduce you to Dena and Dena will help you. You come, too, she commanded Osman, who plodded upstairs after the females with glowering reluctance.
Then they were in a nondescript book-lined room with a wardrobe and dressing table, not much different than her drab dormitory room except for the double bed and the darkly attractive, wispy-voiced Dena sitting on its edge in jeans and a football jersey, painting her toenails, her coal-black hair tied back with a white ribbon, sloe-eyed and sleek and unremittingly cheerful. If she had a tail, Dottie thought, she’d never stop wagging.
Osman, though, was not the least receptive to Dena’s effusive friendliness. Smirking, he scanned the titles nearest him and said, Excuse me, picking up a copy of a textbook on Marxism from a stack on the floor. I am confused—You are a prostitute?
Dottie whipped her head around and seethed in English, Why are you being so uptight?
Dena gave him an inquisitive look, not unlike an adoring pet ready to please its master if it only understood what its master wanted. I am a university student, Dena said with a flicker of self-consciousness. Second year, okay?
Also a hair cutter, said Zubedye. To pay her education, she added with her jaw thrust accusingly at Osman, pronouncing each word with an inflection reserved for someone unusually dense. She snapped her fingers to order Dottie out of her torn black dress and gathered it into a ball as though it were the hide of some repugnant animal and stepped back through the door to leave the three of them alone. Dena began spreading newspaper on the floor and centered her desk chair on the paper and arranged the tools of her trade on the cosmetic-laden dressing table, talking all the while, playing an adolescent version of a game called Dreams Come True, a fantasyscape of accumulation—cars, villas, travel, clothes, shoes, jewelry—Dottie politely approving all the elusive luxuries that inspired a girl from the slums of Bursa to flee to the metropolis. I like this very much, chirped Dena, tracing her index finger along the cheap nazar bracelet on Dottie’s wrist. Osman gave it to me, said Dottie, and Dena beamed at Osman, hapless and brooding on the edge of the bed, as though he were the most exemplary of providers. Dottie dumped herself into the chair on the paper and the banter continued and finally Osman had had enough of it.
Be serious, he said. What university do you attend? What are you studying? and Dena responded to his skepticism with answers that required Osman himself to abandon his ridiculous sense of superiority. The scissors snicked away while Dottie half-listened to the two of them engage in a spirited discussion about the transformative miracles of secularism and modernism, not exactly what she was accustomed to hearing from Osman. On they chattered like flag-waving cousins elected to parliament, Dena deftly lifting Dottie’s chin as her head nodded forward, woozy with a fatigue that crept up on her from every direction in her life.
After a while she felt the wetness of the henna dribble down the back of her bared neck and the exquisite toweling and brushing and then the nuisance of blow-drying and from far off she heard Dena say, Finished! What do you think? and Osman’s answer, amazed, It’s like another person—do I know this gorgeous girl? Dena shook her shoulder gently and she opened her eyes to a hand mirror held in front of her face and saw Carla incarnate and Dena was asking in an opportunistically timid voice if it was okay if she kept the hair on the paper. You know, said Dena, to sell. For my education.
Yes, take it, sell it, said Dottie, blocking a sarcastic impulse to say, for your education.
She stared into the mirror and thought, I am the invention of other people.
They went across the hall to her own room and flopped on the bed and Osman was suddenly afire with erotic zeal, flinging his hips against hers, madly kissing her face and kneading her breasts and she wanted to lie in bed with him but not for sex, she did not want to have to think about sex for a while or feel sexual or let her body be itself. When he slipped his fingers halfway under the waistband of her jeans she stiffened and gripped his wrist instinctively and was stunned to feel the insistence of his hand, pushing down beneath her panties.
I want you so much, he said with such heart-tugging sincerity that to be fair, a translation from Turkish to English would have to flip a coin between
want and love.
She did not doubt the nature of his desire or his determination to have what he had truly earned or arguably deserved, but she was appalled to find his touch unbearable. Now she was turning the person she cared most about in the world into a beggar as his fingers advanced without any consideration toward the stumpy forest of new growth atop her pubis.
Stop, she said. Osman, please stop. Tomorrow or the day after, she promised, he could spend the night and do what he wanted, have all of her, claim her, take her virginity. Or what was left of it, if anything, she said to herself.
She awoke in the late afternoon to an empty room and a full bladder and dashed down the hall to use the toilet and when she returned Osman was back, his smile open and sweet with gratitude but his eyes betrayed a twinge of guilt and she noticed her embroidered clutch on the dressing table had grown plump in her absence. The lira, he said, gesturing. I put them in your purse, and she searched his face for any indication that he had unearthed her alter ego, disconcerted by the sheepishness that crept into his self-involved expression, not the reaction she might expect if he had spied at her phony passport.
I have to go, he said, taking her in his arms. I’ll come back later tonight.
But where are you going? she cried. I’ll go too.
It frightened her that he did not immediately consent to her company, weighing her potential for being in the way. She understood better after his explanation—he was taking the ferry to Karakoy to see Karim for a meeting he could no longer delay. He’d be back in two hours, he said, and they would have dinner and would come back to this room and he would spend the night—Like brother and sister, I swear—and at that moment she wanted to confess everything to him and start again from there but instead she found herself clinging, pleading to come along, she absolutely had to see Yesho and Elena, she’d call them from the ferry terminal and they could get together and grab something to eat in Ortakoy. The boys were up to something, that much was clear, but so what? and she promised she wouldn’t start anything with Karim.
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