Seven Houses

by Alev Lytle Croutier

  This happens every night. Well, almost . . .

  In the morning, Gonca, finding her mistress like this, covers her with the silk blanket woven of millions of cocoons, her brother Iskender’s gift—the finest silkmaker in Bursa, they say. The one who will arrive that day and will change their lives.

  Gonca can smell man in the room. She knows. Like me, she knows but will not talk. She knows, if others were to know, they might stone her mistress. Or cause other unspeakable torments. Esma could be defaced, and the man, exiled. She can’t forget the image of the woman she once saw in the desert, buried up to her neck in the sand and her accomplice up to his waist, left to the vultures of kismet.

  As the night predators flee the sun, a new cast of characters, the yogurt-man, the rag-seller, the bundle-ladies pass by, staring at me. I could sense they are imagining a procession of ghostly images, as if a veil has been drawn over this timeless face. House of dreams, they whisper to each other.

  In daylight, legitimate this time, Süleyman arrives again rowing his cayique. Şükrü, the running boy, greets him at the dock and leads him to the Learning Room—piled with old maps, peculiar medical instruments that once belonged to the boys’ father—a great scholar, everyone says—the serried, dusty volumes, almost murmurous with accumulated meaning, arranged meticulously along the high walls.

  But the most compelling object for the boys is a skeleton for their anatomy lessons. It’s of a very short person they have endearingly named “Yusuf.” They tell stories of him before he became a skeleton.

  Dressed in their black suits, they approach Süleyman and kiss his hand. He pulls their ears affectionately; then, all of them sink down at a low table with intense male seriousness. Süleyman knows how to draw them to himself.

  The boys wait silently as their teacher slowly stirs his tea. Clink, clink, clink. Slurp. Cadri always dreamy, Aladdin restless twirling his pencil.

  They recite verbatim the previous day’s history lesson. The conquest of Constantinople. How their Great Sultan, Mehmed the Conqueror, stretched oiled sleds across the Galata and slid his ships into the Golden Horn, vanquishing the ancient city of the Byzantine Empire.

  “And when did this occur?” Süleyman asks.

  “1453,” Cadri effortlessly replies before the question mark. “When the crescent broke the cross.”

  “Does anything make that date special?”

  “Yes, that was the event that ended the Middle Ages. The Islamic people overpowered the Christians. They turned the churches into mosques.”

  Or they recite how their great admiral Barbarossa was losing his fleet in the Mediterranean until a crescent and a bright star, Venus really, formed in the sky, a divine omen that changed the course of history. It takes a heavenly incident like this to change fate. Any fate. Anywhere.

  Or the story of the croissant. How the Turkish invaders were advancing toward the gates of Vienna with their crescent and star banners and how the bakers of the city concocted crescent-shaped rolls to warn their people to mobilize. Odd, how this common breakfast pastry once saved Europe from the sons of Allah. If the Turks had succeeded in passing through those gates, imagine what could have happened to the Western civilization!

  Süleyman makes them repeat: Calligraphy is a spiritual geometry manifested by a physical instrument or device, strengthened by constant practice and weakened by neglect.

  Cadri copies the words slowly in ornate calligraphy—from the back of his notebook, to the front—and from right to left, the way his mind moves, from right to left. The way it would be the rest of his life even when everything changes. From right to left.

  But Aladdin’s eyes, they wander far, counting every ship leaving the harbor. Forty-seven. Forty-eight. Forty-nine. Words don’t interest the boy. The magic of numbers forming and reforming themselves. He is already far into his calculus. Eyes drifting across continents, across constellations.

  “Where do your eyes wander, my son?” Süleyman asks.

  “What is beyond the Aegean?”

  “The Mediterranean.”

  “And beyond that?”

  “The Atlantic Ocean.”

  “And beyond that?”

  “America. The unknown continent Cristophe Colombe discovered.”

  “What about the Red Skins?”

  “They were already there.”

  “So, how could he discover a place if people were already living in it? It would be theirs.”

  “You see the truth, my boy.”

  A pandemonium outside. Veiled women arrive in their cayiques paddled by their eunuchs or in phaeton carriages. They can hear the voices from the learning room.

  “Yo-ho.”

  “Yo-ho, yo-ho, Esma. Are you home?

  The girls take the guests’ bundles up to the hamam and the food they brought to the kitchen. The women remove their veils. Esma kisses each on both cheeks and, sitting at the edge of her seat, serves them freshly ground Turkish coffee in thimble-sized cups.

  “How are you?”

  “Fine. And yourself?”

  “Maallah. No complaint.”

  “And the boys?”

  “They, too. Just fine. And your household?”

  “Not so fine. That spoiled new wife throws jealous tantrums.”

  “Pray tell.”

  “Oh, she’s a young blossom, you know. Not keen on men’s nocturnal wanderings. She will soon compromise.”

  An older woman weeps. “My sons joined the army.”

  “Vah, vah!”

  “But the war is over.”

  “They say there will be another one.”

  And so on. And so on.

  They scurry up the stairs into the tepidarium, remove their clothes—everything—put on high wooden clogs, wrap themselves in soft Bursa towels before entering the vaporous sanctuary. There, they stay all day, camouflaged in the silver mist, all breasts and hips, ladling water out of marble basins, rivulets of henna running through the small gutters, scent of lilac and muguet mingling with the foul odor of muddy depilatories, their hollow voices bouncing off the walls muffled by the steam to the skylight as pink as Turkish delight. They wash, they scrub each other, buffing the skin with pumice and loofah, extracting noodles of dirt that swim in the rainbow-colored water, running under their feet like freshly hatched tadpoles.

  In a private corner, the old women pour blue powder into copper pots and rinse their white hair with indigo to achieve a fluorescent sheen. Afterward, they wash their underwear with small cakes of the same in marble sinks.

  They watch each other. The older women watch the bodies of the young girls; it gives them pleasure. Yet, they are jealous of the luminescent skin, the unnursed breasts, the unspoiled vaginas. The young girls wear evil-eye charms on their ankles or wrists to protect themselves from bad spells. Transfixed on clusters of cellulite, the infinite forms of breasts, the w-shapes where the legs meet, the children gape at everyone.

  These women, chefs of depilatory, masters of lemon paste, slap patches on their pubis, arms, legs, even the crevices inside nostrils, inside ears. Yank out all hair, whimpering in pain. God created woman without hair. Only after the great sin her hair grew like other animals. It’s the memory of her shame. Any sign of it must be obliterated.

  So, this is the daily life here, more or less, day after day, but today things are slightly different because Iskender is visiting from Bursa. He has come to persuade his sister to take her boys and come back to the silk plantation in Bursa where he is convinced they would be safer since there are rumors that the allied forces intend to occupy Smyrna.

  Meanwhile, he is doing a bit of business. Ferret, an associate who comes to call on him, steals into the washroom on his way up the stairs, peeks into the hamam through a hole on the wall that he himself has pried. His arteries burst as if filled with noxious gas. Watching the women’s private nudity, his breath grows leaden, his hands slide into his trousers—shaking with grotesque contortions.

  For months, he’s been pursuing Esma�
��s scent through the corridors, inhaling the rooms she had recently walked through, licking the walls, fondling the drapes. A man of such lickerous and unsavory intentions.

  Around noon, steaming bodies sprawled out on the cool tiles. The beautiful male voice of the muezzin resonates outside—way outside, in a world unkind to them. It rises into the heaven as if he is drinking the song of its deity. In unison, the women raise their palms, standing in a circle, mumbling mysterious prayers.

  Meanwhile, in the enormous cellar, the girls work, their hands deep in flour and eggs. They roll huge circles of dough, paper thin, stack the circles on big trays, layering with eggplant, pistachio, figs. The running boy, Şükrü, rushing to the brick furnace down the street, a tray in each hand held above his head like some Corinthian caryatid, his perfect balance, his golden sinewy arms, his blond mustache making the girls giggle and blush.

  Gonca flushes at the sight of him but he’s got the hots for her curvaceous sister Ayşe. He sneaks through the watchman’s path and comes to Ayşe’s window each dawn, on his way to the bakery. Bars separate them but only at arm’s length. She bares her breasts for him, one at a time. Sometimes he brings her grape molasses and she lets him touch her nipples and tweak them. Sometimes tahini. They coo and gurgle unimaginable ecstasies that awaken the roosting doves.

  Iskender has invited the Ferret for mezes and raki—the transparent liquid that the dervishes call “white writing,” or invisible ink. The Ferret, squishing the seeds out of a plateful of olives with his fat fingers, watches out the window, the boys waving at Süleyman’s disappearing cayique.

  “The boys need a better education,” the Ferret tells Iskender. “Why don’t you send them to the Sultaniye school?”

  “My sister prefers a private tutor. Süleyman is a clever lad. Educated. Inventive. The boys like him.”

  “But an empty pocket,” Ferret says. “With holes in it. Hair down to his shoulders, clothes like those degenerate Frenchmen. Libertine ideas admittedly borrowed from the Young Turks. Bad example for the boys whom I myself hope someday to parent.”

  “Ah!” Iskender takes a long sip of his raki, avoids the insinuation. He won’t disclose to this impudent his plans of taking his sister back. “Süleyman is a fine lad. Sincere. Honest. Well mannered. Nice.”

  “Only if one is blind to vice.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Well, there’s talk . . .” A wry smile. The Ferret whispers something in Iskender’s ear.

  Iskender’s eyebrows meet in a frown. He asks the Ferret to leave.

  That night, Iskender reclined in front of a blazing brazier, smoking his secret affliction while he watched a ghostly procession parade endlessly across an invisible screen. His pain stopped, all edges dissolving into a continuous flow. Whispers throughout the city stretched like taffy. Strains of music in distant rooms, runaway phrases. Deep bass of the fog horns. The lamenting woman’s lullaby as she rocked her golden cradle. Invisible hands reached out of the walls and caressed him. Everything he touched became an extension of his own extremities.

  All night long, as he swam through a corridor of silk, as the children and the servant girls slept. Süleyman arrived at the usual hour at Esma’s room. They sat across from each other whispering because they knew of Iskender’s sentience, that he could sense things in other rooms.

  Iskender indeed heard them although he could not make out the words. Their poetry sounded to him like the seventeen-year locust falling from the sky he had heard in the Far East. He had journeyed to Isphahan from where he joined camel caravans to the distant reaches of the Silk Road, Samarkand, Tashkent, and Bohara, carrying The Travels of Marco Polo under his arm, searching for clues on the origins of the Turkish civilizations. He had even dared cross the Takla Makan, the desert of irrevocable death dreaded by all travelers, journeying to Uygur—thanks to his camels, possessing a secret knowledge of springs, who led him to mysterious sources of life-giving waters and eventually to the great wall of China. There he had been stricken by an ailment that made him delirious and he was treated with strange needles they stuck into his body, as well as opium, an affliction that accompanied him through the rest of his life.

  At dawn, still awake, Iskender rose absently to the sound of prayer and looked out the window. Against the cool darkness of the obsidian, he saw the silhouette of a man gingerly ascending the invisible steps. So much poetry in that vision, but as a patriarch he had obligations. He could not allow the family to lose face.

  Esma was kneeling down in prayer when she heard the firing—three shots. She ran to the balcony. The smell was familiar to her, the smell of burning gunpowder seasoning the night. The smell of her father’s factories. The smell of her childhood. Saltpeter and sulfur.

  Who? Who? Who? She heard the golden owl. Her beloved’s totem. A rifled silhouette barely discernible stood above the obsidian. No, dear God, no! Then, she saw Iskender descending. Pain filled her chest. All the doors to the outside closed. All expressions locked inside her. She passed out.

  As the new day began, everything seemed normal on the surface. The peddlers barking, the girls waking up, the running boy Şükrü shoving coal into the furnace, Iskender at breakfast, feta and olives. A cayique arriving. But instead of Süleyman, as it had been until that morning, Iskender ushered the young Doctor Eliksir into Esma’s room. Somber.

  A sheet was stretched across her bed to prevent the doctor from seeing her face. Through a hole in the sheet, he examined, his scythe-like fingers groping for her privates. A pelvic exploration by feel. Gonca’s hand guiding to lessen the pain, he slid inside Esma, digging for evidence.

  Esma wept and Gonca did, too, on the other side of the curtain.

  The doctor shook his head. “You’re misinformed,” he told Iskender as he walked out the door. “There is no evidence of any misdeed. Your sister is a virtuous woman. Always has been.”

  The boys wanted to know why their teacher did not come. And why their mother remained in her room and why they would not be allowed to see her. Although Esma silenced her tears in her pillows in order to protect her sons, they could sense something pitiful.

  Gonca fed them copious amounts of Turkish delight to lessen their loneliness. She cut their hair. Showed them how to fold paper boats, float them in the water, then set them on fire. Aladdin drew maps. Cadri wrote poems in careful calligraphy. Each sank into his own desert.

  Iskender retreated to his room, closed off the curtains to sunlight, fed the coals until the embers whispered through an iridescent glow. Esma had buried her face in the pillows when he had tried to apologize. He knew she would refuse to come with him. He might never see her again. He squeezed into his amber pipe a black paste smelling like manure. He swallowed the smoke, sank deep into the velvet oblivion. In his hand, he clutched the handkerchief that Süleyman had dropped. Inside was an egg-shaped piece of amber. He held it to candlelight and saw a moth escaping its cocoon. The eye of the insect was still open, although the wings were folded back inside. How incredible to see something that existed so long ago arrested in the midst of metamorphosis!

  Soon, he drifted off into a dream that even the quiet sobbing of his sister, directly above, could not disturb. It sounded like another siren’s song, Esma’s cries and whimpers. As if the imbat wind was filtering the voices of the lamenting Trojan women from the Dardanelles. The women who had lost their men. No song more beautiful than grief.

  At dawn, Iskender left. He’d never smile again until a very old man.

  Esma wept in her room for months. She wanted to die but could not endure the thought of abandoning her sons. Every soul must confront the lament of loss. This life is but the curse of our desires.

  Gonca read spiderwebs; she read pebbles and coffee grains. “So much darkness in your heart,” she told Esma, peering deep into her cup. “Azrael, the angel of death, is perched on your left shoulder like a vulture. You’re trying to reach someone on the other side but it’s not possible because that someone has not yet crossed to the ot
her side. I see him walking on a bridge. I see an unexpected reunion. But I see worse things before that. Dark clouds over a burning sky. Oh, mistress, pray for the winds to stop. Pray.”

  The Ottoman Empire and Germany were defeated at the end of the Great War and with the signing of the Moudros armistice in 1918, the Allied forces began the occupation of Anatolia. They parceled off the glorious Empire—the great lands stretching from the Caucasus to the Persian Gulf, from the Danube to the Nile. They invaded Istanbul. The British occupied Urfa and Antep and the East. The French claimed the province of Adana and the South. Italian units quartered the interior province of Konya and all the way down to Antalia. All that was left was an interior terrain.

  On a gloomy day in May of 1919, Greece invaded Smyrna. A cyclone appeared in the sky, twisting the city’s fate.

  At this juncture, as the Ottoman parliament dissolved and the Sultan yielded to the wishes of the Allied forces, a voice resonated all across the nation, campaigning along the Black Sea, shouting, “Independence or Death,” a phrase which became an infectious slogan on everyone’s lips. The people put all their hope in their new hero, the commander of the Lightning Army, the hero of Gallipoli. His name was Mustafa Kemal.

  So came the Independence war. Everyone took to arms, even children and grandmothers. People who had lived together for hundreds of years, who had mingled so many seeds that it was impossible to tell them apart, suddenly turned mean. Turks, Armenians, Greeks, Albanians, Kurds, Jews, Rums. Foreseeing the future, many old and wealthy Levantine families left, taking their wealth. Whole armies were maddened by contaminated grain. Families were broken; brothers killed brothers (how could it be!); friends betrayed one another while Greek soldiers cruised the streets, deafened by the wailing of spirit voices.

  The men were gone from Smyrna. Even the running boy Şükrü was no longer around to watch over the family. One day, shaving his head, he slung a sack across his broad shoulders, stopped for good-byes before going off to the front. Gonca and Ayşe each wept privately. One for love, the other for lust.