The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (53 page)

Try to remember, said the colonel. Take your time.

I don’t know, she said. I mean, nothing happened. I was lost. I didn’t know where
I was.

Who did you contact?

What do you mean?

Someone to help you, perhaps?

No, no one. I wandered around. Walking felt like something I needed to do.

And all those days, where did you go?

Nowhere, really. I would just keep walking until I got tired. Then I would sleep wherever
I ended up, in a church or a doorway or the backseat of a car or somewhere.

I find this puzzling, the colonel sighed. You asked no one for help. Why not? You
have friends in Istanbul, I think.

I don’t know, she said. I didn’t know what was happening. I was afraid, she said,
nodding dull-eyed at the photograph the colonel had placed in front of her of Osman
and Karim having a furtive discussion at the railing near the ferry’s stern, the Palestinian
lurking nearby.

What were you afraid of? The terrorists?

Yes. I don’t know. I was confused. Which terrorist?

And why was this man we know to be an Armenian terrorist chasing you? asked the colonel,
tapping the photograph she could not bear to look at, Maranian lying spread-eagled
on the tarmac of the car park.

I wish I could tell you, she said anxiously, her voice weak and despairing. Honest.
I have no idea.

And you called no one? Is this correct?

I phoned Osman’s apartment. I told you that already, didn’t I?

No.

His mother answered the phone and said there had been an accident with Osman on the
ferry and she said I had to hang up because she was waiting for the police to call.
But how did the authorities know, it seemed instantaneously, that it was Osman, fallen
off the ferry?

Dorothy, why did you cut your hair that day and change its color?

Really, I don’t know. It’s just a coincidence. I thought it would be fun.

Dorothy, I want you to tell me the truth, okay? I want you to believe me—the situation
we have been discussing is very serious. Why did you disobey your father?

Because I loved him, she said.

You loved?

Osman.
Osman.

Before they could be stained by her onrush of tears, the colonel reached across the
table to gather up the photographs for safekeeping, evidence of crimes committed and
yet to be committed. He replaced the first set of photographs in his briefcase and
brought out a second set, which he arranged before her like a fortune-teller’s cards.

You were watching me, she said, unnerved by the proof of her flagrancy and carelessness.

Yes.

How long?

Not long, said the colonel, pointing to a photograph. Can you tell me, who is this
man you are speaking to?

I don’t know, she said, embarrassed. Maybe I was asking him directions.

And the man in this photograph?

I don’t know his name. Someone I met in a café, I think.

And this man?

That man. He sells fish. I forget his name.

His name is Mohammed, said the colonel wearily. I believe you spent a night on his
boat.

Yes. He’s not in trouble because of me, is he?

Only with God.

But what was I supposed to do? she said. She had succumbed to a juvenile whim, returning
to the fish market to tell Mohammed that the queen at the bottom of the sea had, in
her inconsolable jealousy, demanded she give back the treasure of her pink pearl.
Whoever stole my passport, she told the colonel, stole all my money too. I had to
sleep somewhere.

If you were my daughter, said the colonel, pausing while he retrieved the photographs
and stood up with his briefcase and tunic in hand. If you were mine, he continued,
I would lock you in a room.

There was much she had not told the colonel, much she could not tell him, but nothing
she might have told him that would have made any difference. The chance to save everybody,
she was about to find out, had been lost with Osman.

Can I get you anything? the colonel asked as he prepared to leave.

Pistachio sorbet? she said, the request of an unreasonable child and slightly naughty,
her coyness like an encoded beacon signaling from inside the shell of her wreckage.

The colonel smiled, momentarily beguiled, and she observed him closely, registering
the change in his eyes as he measured her as a potential object of desire, the gleaming
surge, the ebb and flow of heat that temptation caused in a man. This man too, she
understood, would fuck her if he could, and probably every man in the building, the
trade for sorbet.

We don’t have that here, he said, his voice a gentle reprimand punctuated by the closing
door. A few minutes later the door opened again and there was Mary Beth, the can-do
saint of her father’s underworld, her decency exceeded only by her discretion and
competence, holding Dottie’s new American passport and a ticket to an alien place
called home. Dottie dashed from the table into Mary Beth’s arms, a spontaneous act
of surrender and an end to fear, the way tormented children run helpless to their
mothers.

Grudgingly, during the course of his interrogation the colonel had remarked that she
was an exceptionally lucky girl, and grudgingly in return she had replied that she
supposed she was, congratulating herself on the single piece of good fortune that
she could accurately gauge, packaged in the irony of misfortune—the theft of her clutch,
resulting in the depressing loss of her money but the altogether propitious separation
of herself from the passport of Carla Costa, a document that would have proven instantly
self-indicting, catastrophic evidence of her participation in unknown conspiracies,
an advertisement for her manifold guilt, when she was picked up after she eventually
circled back to her rented room at F. Nightengale’s
.
It was there, thanks to the perfidious disloyalty of Zubedye and Dena, that the police
were patiently waiting for their suspect to finish her rounds with the males of Istanbul,
her lascivious manhunt a parallel universe to the one being conducted by the authorities
for Karim and his homicidal cohorts.
She’s a fucking liar,
she screamed and screamed at the police, disavowing the giantess’s insistence that
the girl carried a fake passport.
I made up a name and she took all my money and wrote it down.

But naturally the colonel could not have been thinking of the fortunate disappearance
of Carla’s passport when he judged her luck. Nor, from what she could discern from
his manner, was the colonel overly impressed by her vulnerability as a teenage
yabanci
tramp prowling the streets of his city, a danger she herself did not acknowledge,
operating in a zone of magical thinking, the disheveled and unwashed reflection she
glimpsed in shop windows of no more concern or connection to her than the scuzzy hippies
who liked to hang out at the Pudding Shop en route to nowhere and its banal enlightenments.

The colonel’s true assessment of her luck was made apparent through a pair of revelations
that rendered her air-brained and queasy and, for a short time, bawling, her tears
interrupted by awful intervals of psychotic chortling that circulated through the
austere room like the sound of a demented bird and elicited a period of dismayed but
tender solicitude from the colonel, who displayed great sensitivity to the portion
of her emotional pyrotechnics that was the outcome of her introduction to a second
Osman, a shadow Osman stepping forward into an all too familiar cone of light already
shining on her father. How strange to see him there in the sizzle, an Osman to be
both adored and detested. How weird, how crazy, how clichéd and scary that on her
first foray into the realm of love outside the palace gates of her father’s kingdom
she had in oblique but indisputable ways fallen in love once again with her father,
Daddy’s unlikely double, the rookie Turkish version, and of her own generation, a
patriotic college boy working undercover to save the world or at least his own piece
of it, one of many patriotic students selected by the state as members of a secret
unit, infiltrating the clandestine Muslim brotherhoods germinating in the universities,
stepping right into shit.

I believe you know this group of radicals your boyfriend was investigating, yes?

I don’t, she said. I saw them once in a café. Osman was there. Karim was there. Can
I ask you something? Osman was arrested that night.

Correct, said the colonel, anticipating her question. The arrest was a ruse.

I just had that feeling, she said.

The colonel had showed her the pictures taken by another undercover agent assigned
that day to tail and photograph Osman as he met with Karim and a foreigner subsequently
identified as a Palestinian terrorist, the suspected mastermind of a forthcoming but
unspecified atrocity. The Palestinian had flown from Syria to Turkey to locate and
collaborate with a group of like-minded fundamentalists, Jew haters who would provide
logistical support—reconnaissance, safe houses, transportation, weapons, explosives—for
his bloody mission. Whatever that mission was, Osman, as an agent of the state, was
attempting to determine but had failed. She looked at the photos, weeping.

Dorothy, you can help us, yes? asked the colonel.

She shook her head wildly, voiceless, unable to speak in any language to describe
what she saw or felt, devastated by the ghastly expression on Osman’s face in the
photo, a blur of horror, of total betrayal and total surprise, a mouth gulping with
the instinct for self-preservation, his eyes enlarged not with fear but the promise
of a repudiating, obliterating violence as he tottered backward into the sea. What
she read in Osman’s eyes convinced her that the colonel was telling the truth, and
she began to perceive the hidden message contained by the truth, that no matter what
seemed to an ordinary person to be the odds against such mythical human symmetry,
people who are meant to be together find each other, enemies no less than lovers,
throughout space and time and the sea of eternity.

Help me understand, said the colonel. Why did these terrorists let you out of the
car? I think you are very, very lucky.

I don’t know, she said, but she knew that the answer was Karim.

In their room in the Hilton that night Mary Beth gave her a note from her father that
she unsealed from its envelope and read, a single handwritten page in her father’s
immaculate script, and then refolded and returned to its envelope and gave back to
Mary Beth to be disposed of properly—following the instruction in the note’s postscript.
I believe there is an Argentinian saying
, the note began,
that the past is a predator
. Without apology, he asked for forgiveness. For what, he did not bother to say, only
adding this cryptic explanation—
There was a malfunction. I was the malfunction,
a non sequitur followed by a brief lesson in family history that left her mystified:
Her grandparents and her father, she read with astonishment, had lived in Croatia
during World War Two. Near the end of the war, Communist soldiers had killed her father’s
father and raped her father’s mother. Three of these partisan soldiers did not survive
the war and the carnage of its aftermath. One of the remaining three had been executed
during a purge by the Tito government. Of the surviving two, one was lured to Pittsburgh
where he met his just fate at the hands of Davor and your grandmother. The last living
member of the six criminals responsible for these sins against our family was the
signori
. The note concluded with her father’s profuse expression of gratitude to his daughter
for fulfilling
her sacred duty
.

What duty?
she asked herself.

One day I believe you will agree that the obligation and the grace to serve are in
your blood, he wrote
.
There was no mention of Osman or Maranian or the lethal consequence of their own commitment
to this all-consuming, ever-hungry monster named
duty
.

See you in Virginia at Christmas, Kitten,
her father ended.
God bless you.

The hotel room was crammed with Mary Beth’s luggage and Dottie sat humped over on
the bed, watching her father’s assistant open a suitcase and explore its neatly folded
contents and slowly abandon the armor of her taciturnity. What size are you? said
Mary Beth. We need to find you something to wear. Why don’t you hop in the shower
while I pull out some things.

Why did you bring all this stuff? Dottie asked. Are you going somewhere?

On her knees bent over a pile of skirts and rayon blouses, Mary Beth straightened
up and sat back in a thoughtful pose, ass atop heels, and tucked her light brown hair
behind her ears and cocked her head at Dottie with a vaudevillian shrug. Would you
believe it? she said, her voice mocking a perky version of herself. I actually
am
going somewhere.

Where? Like a vacation?

Well, yes, I guess you could say that. I’ll visit my family in Ohio for a while and
then, who knows?

What’s wrong?

She made a stern face, peering at Dottie judgmentally, but again she appeared to be
mocking herself. Off the record, okay, she said.

I can do that.

I’ll bet you can, honey, said Mary Beth, not unkindly. You are Steven’s daughter one
million percent. Here’s what I know. I believe your father is out of the office indefinitely.
He has, apparently, gone off the reservation—I suspect you know more about that than
I do, and I don’t want to know anything more than I know. So, okay, bad boy, naughty
naughty, but it seems his friends in high places are both understanding and forgiving.
That said, I seem to be the one left out in the cold. At least for the moment.

Where is he?

Stirring it up in Belgrade, with occasional excursions to pursue his hobby in Peshawar.
Now, you understand what I just said, don’t you, because I’m not going to say a word
more.