Seven Houses

by Alev Lytle Croutier

  With no one watching over them now, the women boarded me up from the inside. The girls kept vigil behind tightly closed lattices for bread and yogurt from black marketers, as the opportunists gnawed their way around town like hungry rodents, taking advantage of misfortune.

  When a neighbor’s maid was shot while hanging the laundry, Esma prohibited the boys from going on the roof terrace. They sneaked up anyway, to watch the ships with different flags in the harbor—how could a boy resist such? A great orgy of colors splashed across the sky, crimson and black, like Gonca’s paper ships they used to set aflame. Smell of gunpowder suffused the air, lingering, potent like the smell of skunk. Cannon shots in the distance. Shrapnel. Dead horses. Screams.

  On one occasion, lowering a basket from the third-floor window to receive some provisions from a street peddler, Gonca was astonished to pull in a stewing chicken. She excitedly presented this rare commodity to her mistress.

  They did not know who had sent it but since it was the boys’ seventh birthday, Esma decided to make Circassian chicken to celebrate. They still had the last season’s walnuts in the deep cellar. As she reached inside the thin carcass to pull out the entrails, her hands felt something hard and metallic. It was a key. How absurd. Why would someone put a key inside an emaciated chicken?

  She washed the key and polished it. It was a well-crafted key.

  “What will you do with it, Mistress?” Ayşe asked Esma.

  “I don’t know.” Yet a strange instinct made Esma keep the key though she did not know why. She put it in a mother-of-pearl box where she kept her hairpins on her dressing table.

  The children were restless. They had now taken to playing underground where subterranean arteries, from the times the Greeks pirated the Aegean, meandered across the entire city. This humid darkness now belonged to the children of Smyrna. They hid inside the enormous cisterns, where once sacrifices had occurred, that had doubled as sewers since the Roman days. Rumors of hidden treasures enticed them immensely. But rumors of slimy prehistoric animals that lived in those oily waters kept them from wandering too far into those forbidden passages.

  It was dark and damp and scary down there but secret and they could pull their pants down, show their “organs” to one another and sometimes even be daring enough to touch because it felt good to touch things in the dark.

  They waited for the streetcars that made the walls shake as if suffering a seismic tremor and the sounds of the tracks groaned like a trapped Minotaur. Convinced that a giant beast was pursuing them, the children managed to work up hysteria, and with rampant adrenaline, plunged upstairs to find refuge under their mother’s satin arms.

  Two men arrived carrying a lovely walnut wardrobe that had miraculously survived the danger outside.

  “But who has sent me this wardrobe?”

  They told Esma that it was from her brother Iskender. They said he had found it in the city of Saffron where craftsmen excelled. Esma refused to believe them at first; it seemed incongruous that at such time of war and famine her brother would bother sending her a gift like this, even if it was to ask her forgiveness. People did not even have enough bread or coal.

  But Gonca read their coffee grains and persuaded Esma to accept the enigmatic wardrobe. One should never turn down a gift. From the way they labored up the steps, it was obviously heavy. Esma asked them to open it but they said it was locked.

  “What good is a locked wardrobe?” Ayşe complained. “We can use it for firewood, I guess.”

  “We can’t even find a locksmith at a time such as this.”

  But that became unnecessary. That night, as Esma kneeled on her rug praying for her dead lover, only one thought invaded her mind. She felt him so close that it was as though he was in the room, near her. She felt his presence. She could almost hear him whispering her name.

  “Esma, Esma.”

  It was something between thrill and fear. The euphoria of incertitude.

  “Esma, Esma,” the voice repeated, erasing any doubt in her mind as to the identity of its owner. She had never seen a ghost but her mind was open.

  “Süleyman!”

  At first, it seemed to be coming from inside the walls or from the rustling of leaves outside but as her ears became attuned, she heard the tapping inside the wardrobe.

  “The key,” the voice whispered. “Please, hurry!”

  “The key!” Trembling, Esma searched for the box. The key. There.

  The key fit perfectly into the lock. She opened the wardrobe.

  Instead of a transparent ectoplasm, Süleyman stepped out flesh and blood, dressed in a khaki uniform with brass buttons that glistened in the dark. He gasped for air.

  “I’ve been in there for days, it seems, but I’ve lost all track of time. My senses are dulled.”

  Despite the fatigue that painted dark circles under his eyes, despite the gauntness from undernourishment, despite arthritic joints from the dampness of war, he exuded an unworldly radiance. Something had hardened his jaw, saddened his features, bridled his tongue but he was no ghost. He reached out and touched Esma’s face.

  “I thought my brother . . .”

  “Only to warn me he would, if I showed my face to you again.”

  “I’d given you up to the holy martyrs,” she began to cry. “Thank heaven you’ve appeared to me like one of the seven sleepers of Ephesus.”

  He removed his high-collared tunic, his astrakhan hat. His hair shaved like a Mehmetcik, a Johnny Turk, a soldier of the armed forces, bitter fate for a pacifist. For anyone, really. Especially for Süleyman.

  “I’ll sacrifice the fattest sheep in Anatolia,” she told him. “I’ll protect you.”

  “No fat sheep left in Anatolia,” he laughed ironically. “You don’t know what a miracle it was to find even a chicken. But, please, give me something to eat, dear heart. My soul is about to leave my mouth.”

  The cellar smelled of warm milk and cinnamon. Gonca was stirring salep, a warm pudding made from the Orchis mascula root. When she saw Esma breeze into the kitchen, she sensed that something unusual ailed her mistress but kept quiet, fearing the words might spoil the spell. She watched Esma hastily gather things on a tray and run upstairs.

  Süleyman voraciously gulped down the fermented root, devoured the dark bread. Later, she poured water from the copper pitcher for his ablutions. Starting from the right, working to the left, she washed his hands, his feet. He wiped her tears.

  Blessed heaven. Oh, yes. That night, Süleyman was emanating a fervor as in the paintings of the Divine; flames poured out of his body, invigorating everything around him. The tingling in the air, the song of silence was even more alluring than the singing of the sirens. Contagious, it washed her all over. He reached out to Esma, consumed her with his gaze.

  Esma and Süleyman forced themselves to sit down on the Louis Quinze couch like the old times, with distance between them. They were not to touch. They stared at the sky to calm themselves. This privileged them to witness a miracle. They saw something that night no one else had ever seen. They saw, instead of one, double moons in the sky. So it seemed. Saw them approach each other weaving through the fast moving clouds. Closer and closer they came, like the moons, their radiance increasing as they were enraptured in a constellation of unconsummated passions.

  In her room, Gonca also saw the double moons. She knew it was an eclipse—for her, an ominous sign. She smudged the boys’ bedroom with juniper branches. To protect them from the evil eye, she lit a candle to Aesculapius, the heathen healing god, and let it burn till it expired.

  Down on earth, Esma unrolled her prayer rug, though it was past the prayer time; she peeled off her clothes just like in the hamam and concealed her nakedness with a piano shawl before lying down on the rug and opening her legs away from the obsidian rock.

  Süleyman bent his knees and touched his forehead to hers. Mutable like ever-changing colors of the sky, the patterns and colors of the shawl, the rug, the floor tiles inextricably blended, free of cont
ours. They began moving at the speed of dark.

  For hours and hours.

  Never a greater blessing.

  Never a more ardent prayer.

  Knowing it was the last.

  Before sunrise, Süleyman vanished.

  From that day on, Esma surrendered herself to prayer. It was like she’d gone mad. Like other women who go crazy over war. All day long, bending her frail body up and down so much that she shrank into a skeleton, then began swelling like a starving child. In the mornings, she threw up. At night, out of exhaustion, she collapsed.

  At dusk, when Gonca came to cover her, she felt her mistress’s forehead for fever, counted her pulse, and thought to herself. “Oh, great Goddess. What shall we do?” She knew Esma was with child. She was certain, having midwifed the Imam’s daughter and other girls before. And, I knew as well, maintaining all pretense of peace while the war ravaged my skin. I tried to spare the ones inside me. I was well built, resilient.

  Nightly, the Ferret, that old creep who had brought so much misery to Esma, prowled outside, milky eyes protruding from his fecent face like a predator circling his prey. He strained to hear the murmurs inside, contracted his nostrils, his eyes leaped out of their sockets into private interiors. He was like a disease, chrome yellow and mephitic. One time, he urinated on the outer walls, marking his territory. If I had tears, I’d cry. If I had a voice, I’d swear. If I had hands, I’d slay. As providence would have it though, the nightman caught him in the act and kicked him away from the wall with his staff. Beat him to the ground. Tap, tap. Slap, whap.

  “Son of a whore. Shove off. Go piss on your mother, will you?”

  It must have been around the same time when a soldier delivered a letter through the kissing window, a small opening for the delivery of messages. Scribbled on tar paper. “Promise, you won’t utter a word to anyone, the apple of my eye,” she told Cadri as she handed him the letter. “Read this to me. Read”

  The boy read with easy fluency:

  In the mountains, I carry orders. The earth, my bed. My roof the sky. You and the boys, my stars. Why must we? I ask each time I take a breath. Why must we? But when I return and we transcend all this, I know, and I know we’ll find some bliss. My thoughts, my dreams are always with you, my love. You are my soul.”

  No signature. No need for one. The boy recognized the writing. “Why must we?” he asked, comprehending the gravity but unprepared for its consequences. “What happened to the egg with the cocoon inside?”

  Cadri saw, for the first time, the tear-shaped diamonds falling off his mother’s eyes and gathering into a pile on her lap, the diamonds that would save the family from being destitute, in the next few years when things became much worse.

  But with all the devastation around her and the stirring in her belly, Esma knew she had to find a place of silence where the rumors of this damaged city could not harm her. Where she could be near her sister Mihriban. Where her sons and the girls could find some calm. Where she could give birth in the solitude of silk.

  So, one day, they abandoned me.

  What lonely moments followed! Abandoned. Boarded up to prevent pillage, to listen to the silent moaning of the burnt houses surrounding me. Yes, houses hurt, too, with each fire, flood, and frost. Grateful to be spared. Darkness outside, no life inside. I slept a great deal, letting myself disengage from the influence of the elements.

  We each desire a lovely setting. Good design. Solid construction. Harmony with our surroundings. Kind inhabitants. Constant maintenance. Long life. Tender love and care. All this, all this gives us life. And, in turn, we do the same. Determine the inner landscape of those who occupy us.

  I must have slept for months, uncertain of my fate, gathering dust, uncertain whether I’d be left forever to he throes of kismet or someone else’s whims, especially someone whose only purpose was to profit. How I began falling part! I abandoned my will.

  Just as I’d forsaken the thought of ever seeing them again, they returned one day. Esma with an empty womb but no infant in her arms. Her eyes sadder. Her lips tighter. The boys taller. The girls older and gnarlier. Ripened fruit now.

  But things got worse. On a dark September day, the Turkish armies entered Smyrna forcing the Greeks to leave, forcing their fleet to sail back, taking with them a shipful of immigrants. A terrible anger, stifled in black smoke, splashed across the sky. When the imbat wind began to sway, the tongues of flames spread rapidly while the sirens whined ominously to warn the people of the city. The fire quickly moved from the Armenian quarters to Alsancak to Konak, meandering its way toward the neighborhoods of Karantina and Güzel Yali.

  As the hordes rampaged through the city looting everything in sight, the rage, the hatred trailed in their wake, spreading like a contagious disease. Little fires broke out in houses and shops between St. Stephan’s church and the fruit bazaar. The flames took the palm trees. Took the intricately latticed mansions that gave the sections their names. Took the great gardens of paradise. Temples, marble statues of great deities, gymnasiums, dream centers. Domes, cupolas, minarets. In a day, four thousand years of human expression was wiped out. Just like that. Who can forgive such madness! The firemen clamped around on horses, unboarding houses, drilling cisterns in search of water sources. Water pumps broke down. Hoses caught on fire. Men rushed around filling buckets of salt water from the Bay. Esma and the boys watched the flames swallow their landscape out of existence, their noses pressed against the window, as if staring at the other side of reality from which there is no return. They watched until the window shattered from the heat, their faces subdivided in each piece of broken glass, their hearts irreparably broken.

  The wind seemed to be dying down at first but suddenly, unexpectedly changed direction, heading toward us. The shutters were already bolted. The servants scurried down to the garden, frantically pumping from the well, filling pots and pans, setting them along the boundaries.

  Out of the sea of flames, the Ferret materialized; crimson and horned, “Leave with me,” he begged Esma.

  “How could you imagine that I’d ever abandon my house at a time like this?” she told him, holding the edges of her scarf across her mouth. “If its kismet is to burn, so is mine. So be it.”

  She prayed for ice not knowing what else.

  The flames were now devouring the little shops farther down the street, the creamery, the butcher, the grocery. Globes of flames billowed, bursting apart and fading into a whirling smoke. Terrified of looters, some neighbors hid inside their houses, letting themselves be devoured by flames instead. Some leaped out of windows to their death. Others ran the streets carrying pieces of furniture, lithographs, candelabras, anything they could salvage. Cinders, ashes rained on everyone like the spitting of a volcano while a muffled mass of figures approached the waterfront and threw themselves into the sea. Others walked in hypnotic ecstasy into the fire, imagining themselves indestructible like salamanders.

  The beauty of flames carried contempt in them. Stationary, immobile, helplessly delicate against the intensity of heat I stood my predicament. No choice but to suffer the voraciousness of burning death. At that moment, I realized that I, too, had a soul. My body may be consumed by flames but something else would live on. That we do not exist only in space but in the silence of time.

  Esma watched the Adonis tree go up in flames. She felt the end was approaching. Cuddling her boys to her bosom, she kept praying. She raised her hands, she wept her tears to the great male God.

  Occasionally, the Ferret’s face kept appearing over the brazier like Satan. The girls refused to flee, out of loyalty, or maybe lack of choice. Where else could they go? Who would care for them?

  Gonca made a magical charm to protect them from enemies, devils, thieves, lizards, scorpions, magic, and fear. She ran down to the cellar; sacrificed their last rooster to Yadaji, the rain goddess. She carefully removed the bezoar stone from inside the bird, rubbed it over her face, and prayed for water.

  “Yadaji, send us rain
. Let the heavens pour their great tears. Let the thighs of the Goddess giggle with joy. Send us heavenly waters to wash away this infernal curse, Yadaji. Bring on the rain. Bring on the rain. Bring on the rain.”

  Cadri, curled in a ball, cried silently. Peed in his pants. Aladdin continued staring at the flames. Mesmerized.

  “Why does the heat make the glass shatter?” he asked, watching the explosions across the way. The neighbors’ houses, on the right and on the left, now blazing up while the paint blistered; windows shattered to particles of crystal.

  “Because he is angry,” Esma replied, holding the boy on her lap. Not the answer Aladdin was looking for but he put his arms around his mother’s neck and kissed her cheek.

  “Are we going to die?” he asked. “Are we?”

  Then, it happened. A great thunder overwhelmed the crackling of the fire. An aggressive outpouring of tiny shards of hail countered. Ice curses fell from the sky with deliberate fierceness, sharp and determined, melting like a salve over our burning flesh. Spitting into the fire, sizzling into steam, sizzling until the embers weakened and lost their determinate glow.

  Within an hour, the fire had subsided, leaving us, the inhabitants of Smyrna shrouded in black mud and mourning. The white city buried in a shroud of black mist. Like its women. The whole city weeping for human stupidity. As the world wept for the city.

  Esma thought it was her prayers that brought on the miracle, that made ice pour from the sky. She felt optimism about the future. Yes. She was convinced her lover would return now before long. He would marry her and they would become a family. Yes, she would finally consent. To insure this, she offered a sacrifice.

  Gonca, on the other hand, attributed the ice magic to the power of the bezoar stone. She saw Yadaji’s dark, luminous eyes in the sky. She saw her tears. She saw her enigmatic smile.

  The next morning, although the whole city still suffered the chaos, Iskender broke through the crowds.