The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (31 page)

Yes.

And he won’t go in?

No, he won’t go.

Do you know why?

I don’t blame him.

She said light-heartedly, Sir, you’re being very mysterious, her thoughts drifting
toward some of her friends, Turkish and foreigners, fun, hip, brilliant but smirking
pseudointellectuals when the mood suited them, who wouldn’t bother to visit Hagia
Sophia or the Blue Mosque or Topkapi Palace or any of the other fabulous sights of
the city, all clichés, they said, manifestations of Scheherazade fantasies for Western
tourists although, of course, they loved the Grand Bazaar, the biggest freaking shopping
mall in the universe, refusing to see these grand edifices as she saw them. When a
particular boy that she liked despite his arrogance had condescended to join her on
a visit to the Blue Mosque, she had huffed and said in amazement,
Cliché? How stupid! You might as well call the breasts on a woman
clichés.
And why not the moon as well?
And the boy, mocking her, said he wanted to sell her a rug.

My name is Maranian, said the driver. The intimacy of revealing his name seemed to
open a door between them and now he wouldn’t stop talking. In Greek, he said, Sophia
means divine wisdom, and the church, the centerpiece of the first Christian capital
in the world, sat at the epicenter of three great empires, enduring the rise and fall
of these empires, the obliteration of their wealth, the decline of their power, the
sufferings of their peoples.

But tell me, Mr. Maranian, why my father won’t go inside.

Because he is a very religious man, he said.

He is, she said. But Hagia Sophia is a holy place, isn’t it?

Your father will not pray inside a church that has been defiled by the Turks.

Oh, she said, but you’re a Turk, aren’t you?

I am an Armenian, he said.

I thought you were all dead, she said thoughtlessly.

And so we are, he said with a sigh. And so we are.

Oh, God, I’m sorry, she said, mortified by her insensitivity.

Your father says he will return to the Sophia to pray after the next Crusade.

I think he should just go inside and say a Hail Mary, she said, and not worry about
it.

I want to show you something, said Maranian, and sped off in the opposite direction
from Kumkapi, across the Ataturk Bridge and up along the Bosphorus toward Be
ş
ikta
ş
, slowing when they came to a tree-lined avenue passing through a neighborhood that
did not hold much interest for her. It was one of the first to modernize—which meant
scramble to westernize—when the city began to reawaken from the stupor that had overwhelmed
its citizens as the century turned and the Istanbullus realized that, once again,
they had been crushed by history, shame and its lethargy imbuing in the population
a trait known as
huzun,
a collective sadness and painful sense of loss, which she had heard her father liken
to the
saudade
of the Portuguese. He even accused the city of stealing its angst from Europe:
the black passions of the French,
she had heard him say, then sharing the phrase with her girlfriends, who adopted
it as one of their favorite jokes, laughing hysterically whenever they found cause
to use it. She herself had felt the city’s melancholy but resisted it, except sometimes
on a ferry or walking the cobblestoned alleys when she would be overtaken by a piercing
sense of déjà vu, the feeling that she had already lived her life a thousand years
ago and that she was now a phantom spirit—an angel, perhaps, or a reincarnate—who
existed for the sole reason of bestowing eternal compassion upon her past selves.

But this neighborhood Maranian had brought her to with its depressive hues did not
lend itself to romanticizing the past. Winter would sit with a terrible gloom on these
streets, yet this time of year the light flowed up from the Bosphorus in the late
afternoon like warm syrup through the channels of the tidy street-level shops tucked
into the uniformly high six-story buildings, row upon row, each one as anonymous as
its companion to the left and its neighbor to the right, with the same glass entrances
and minimalist facades plated with glass or polished granite and the same late-twentieth-century
bourgeois respectability that—she clearly saw the cause and effect—suffocated personality
and devalued culture. These buildings told her with a dry murmur that she was being
invited to be an ordinary person in somnambulant possession of an ordinary life, a
nowhereness of cloned identity that you could insert here or anywhere, what’s the
difference, Paris or Berlin or London or the District of Columbia or Rome or a modestly
affluent district in Istanbul.
Inauthentic,
she thought, which for her was a synonym for not worth preserving, not worth the
trouble one might take to care. Not for her, at any rate.

That building, there, said Maranian, slowing to point out a particularly unremarkable
piece of white-collar architecture, its ground floor housing a bank. I am the man
who made that building.

It’s very nice, she felt obliged to say. You’re a builder?

I was an architect. 1962. My first and last.

Oh, like Sinan, she said. Why did you stop?

Here’s something you do not know, he said. The famous Sinan was a Christian. Did you
know that? An apostate.

No, I didn’t, she said. What’s an apostate?

Listening to Maranian, she understood that he had brought her across the Golden Horn
not to see the building but to hear his story about the bright young student on scholarship
at Istanbul Technical University who, upon graduation, discovers that his design and
engineering skills mean less and less in a city yearning for amnesia, its reinvention
inspired, like a schoolgirl’s, from pictures and ideas borrowed from foreign magazines,
learning to despise its former diversity and embrace its rising nationalism, hail
the Turks and to hell with the Greeks and the Jews and the Gypsies and anyone else
who imagined here was where they belonged. The westernized rich were not comfortable
with an Armenian and his smoldering grievances in their employ, and the soon-to-be-rich
Turks from the Anatolian provinces coming to rebuild the city practiced a robust mix
of incompetence and corruption that pushed decent men into bankruptcy. These commissions
were like eating dung, said Maranian. So the star-student-turned-young-professional
returned to the Technical University to join the faculty as a junior member, yet by
the 1970s the Armenians who remained in Turkey after the century’s wars were being
made to disappear again through a different type of cleansing. But an Armenian always
knows who he is, said Maranian, and without regret he left the university to teach
at a private boys’ school for fifteen years and then, because of his passion for the
city, retired to enjoy himself as one of the city’s many freelance guides, a guild
famous for its arcane obsessions.

And now you work for my father? she asked.

Now I work for the future, said Mr. Maranian, turning the car around in the direction
of the Flower Passage, and she said to herself, Well, if working for the future means
driving me in circles on my seventeenth birthday, then tally ho. She sat back against
the seat, liking the grandfatherly Mr. Maranian, who did not treat her like a helpless
child, and liked his answer. The future was every person’s business, everybody’s occupation.
Well, it should be, certainly, she amended herself.

So how’s the future looking these days, she said cheerily.

Much like the past, he said. New forms for old misery.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,
she said in a rush, recognizing the quote from her father’s repertoire of le Carréisms,
and maybe that’s where Maranian had picked it up as well—
Cultural attaché—Balls!
another of her father’s favorites—
he has military written all over him.
Her memory for languages and names and whatever she read or heard was the thing that
made people think she was smart, not realizing her skill (and her brother’s) for recall
was something their father had drilled into them with games at the dinner table, car
games, campfire games, waiting-in-line games—Name That Song, Weird Discoveries, So
and So is the Author of What, Who Said Blah Blah, or the game they played at embassy
receptions, Who’s the Spy.

That’s John le Carré, isn’t it, she said. Daddy had him over for dinner. When we lived
in Rome.

Maranian took his eyes off the road to give her an appraising look. Have you read
Stamboul Train
? he asked.

No! she said with a purity of élan for which she was often adored by adults. Tell
me.

He double-parked at the intersection at the top of Kumkapi, saying he would wait for
her, and as she walked down the lively street webbed with festive lights and lined
with crowded bistros, smiling at the touts in front of each establishment trying to
coax her in, the sea air made even more delicious by the aroma of garlic cooked in
olive oil, she realized she had not asked Maranian if he meant he’d wait for a few
minutes while she collected her next clue, or wait until she had finished dinner with
her father, whom she eagerly imagined just up ahead, sitting at a linen-covered table
in front of their favorite seafood restaurant, sipping a glass of red wine and savoring
a bowl of fried mussels. He better be, she began to whine to herself, because he must
know that by now she would be ravenous, anxious for the conclusion of the game, today’s
version uncustomarily anemic, almost haphazard, last-minute, and she was mildly disappointed,
yet no sooner had her mood darkened than it brightened again—here was the restaurant
with its big red umbrellas and here was the violinist, a large mustachioed man wearing
a tuxedo, his instrument like a toy in his hand.

Good evening, she said respectfully. Can you help me? I am looking for my father.

Barbie speaks Turkish, he said beaming, exaggerating his delight, and she sighed,
having heard this everywhere she went in the world from men this man’s age, fathers
coerced by their daughters into buying blonde-haired American dolls. The violinist
snapped his fingers and a trio of aproned waiters escorted her to a seat at a candlelit
table, brought her a flute of French champagne and a single white rose, then warm
bread, a bowl of the famous fried mussels, a smaller bowl of bright green olives.
As the waiters stepped back the musician stepped forward, tucking his violin beneath
his chin, his head tilted and his eyes pinched shut, the violin now his heavenly pillow,
the bow angled atop the D string without a squeak, the violinist inhaling loudly through
his nose, all very dramatic but not without grace, she thought, and then his eyes
opened wide and he dipped his broad shoulders and played for her.

Oh, she gasped, having recognized the piece after the first four exquisitely sad notes
he pulled from the violin. Her father’s eyes often brimmed with tears when he heard
it, because it was his most beloved piece of classical music, how could it not be
hers as well, Pachelbel’s Canon in D Minor, and her heart swelled, how achingly beautiful
sorrow sounded, and she relished this, being drawn to the very limit of her capacity
for sentimentality, her feelings so overpowering at times, this place inside you that
would allow life everything, and thus risk everything.

She gulped her champagne to keep from crying and picked up the long-stemmed rose to
smell the memory of those other landmark days in her life, Confirmation and First
Communion, when her father had also given her one white rose, and then she looked
at the violinist and laughed as he held and then contorted the last note of the Canon
and made it squeak like a mouse while he grimaced and his eyes became clownishly wild
and she wanted to jump up and dance as he segued to a mazurka, an insanely exuberant,
reeling version of Happy Birthday, all the waiters, the diners, people passing by,
clapping their hands to the fiery rhythm. Then the song finished, the violinist bowed,
and she did jump up, unable to contain her pleasure.

That was awesome! she said in English.

Awzume, he echoed in his gravelly voice, and then reverted to Turkish to tell her
she must go now to the fish market on the Bosphorus and perhaps there she would find
her father.

Oh, man, she said, reverting to girlish frustration. When was this going to end?

Maranian shrugged when she told him to take her to the fish market and with darkness
falling and the muezzins calling the faithful to evening prayers they drove a short
distance to the shore and she got out and marveled at the scene, the smell pungent
but not unpleasant, the fishmongers lighting scores of candles and small clay oil
lamps to illuminate their stalls, mackerel and bluefish piled high like loaves of
bread in enormous baskets, the light a shimmering flow like water across the fish,
and behind the market out into the strait the ships passing like broken-off pieces
of the city sliding away toward open water, unperturbed. Her light-headedness felt
like the warmth of spring and how true love might feel but also slightly champagne
loopy, the waiter refilling her flute once or maybe twice, and she walked with a bounce
from stall to stall, the men calling to her as they would any customer or any pretty
girl, until midway through the market she heard someone address her in Arabic and
stopped.

Inti bint meen, welaadee?

She peered into the shadows behind the baskets and could detect a face but not its
features, seeing only the oracular shape of the smoker, who sat cross-legged atop
a crude wooden table, presiding over the flaring red eye of a water pipe. Then a ball
of fragrant smoke, smelling of hot apples, and the voice asked again,
Inti bint meen, welaadee?
Whose daughter are you, my child?

She almost snapped, Excuse me, I am not a child, but collected herself and composed
the sentence in her head and answered properly.
Ana bint Abu Theeb.
I am the daughter of Abu Theeb.