Seven Houses

by Alev Lytle Croutier

  “You are leaving this wasteland and coming up to the plantation with me,” he pleaded. Esma did not respond. She still was not on talking terms with her brother. How could she since that horrible night—even though her lover was still alive! Iskender had defiled her, taken the amber egg.

  So, she refused to follow him.

  On a gentle day in early spring, the cannons exploded announcing the end of Liberation War. Overnight, Smyrna became Izmir, a statement of the Turkish victory and claim. Some men returned home. But some did not.

  The treaty of Lausanne settled oppositions with a population exchange. The Rums, the Turkish Greeks, as well as other Christians, were deported to Greece, a land foreign to them, among people who were strangers. In exchange, the Greeks expelled their Turks from Lesbos and Crete to the mainland Turkey, these people who had known no other land.

  As the Rums left, they offered their homes for a few piastres to their friends—a few friendships still survived the war—with the uncertainty of ever coming back. Arriving in a hostile new land with a few coins would be infinitely preferable to arriving with empty hands.

  Just before their departure, they frantically buried treasures in their gardens, inside rafters, everywhere, in hopes of returning someday to reclaim their past. (Some did manage to find their way back years later after the peace was made, only to discover that their precious and exaggerated treasures had become worthless—except for gold, of course.)

  It was a time of need and of greed. Everything went on ration. Outside, treasure hunters projecting Y-shaped doodlebugs—dingus, doohickeys, thingamabobs—dowsing interminably for metal. They sauntered like blind people, or ones risen from graves, floating in the mists of the flame-lit mysterious world outside.

  Others dug graves. The locals called the diggers “crows” because they resembled the quick-billed scavengers searching recently plowed soil for worms. After each rain, carrying pickax and shovel, they traveled to abandoned excavations, poking for undiscovered treasures. Not just a passing fancy. Nor for the love of art. These ignorant locals had cultivated better knowledge of appraising antiquities than the experts. Some had the nerve to establish a network of connections stretching from Istanbul to Frankfurt, the British Museum to the Metropolitan. The world was growing fast.

  Finally, Esma decided it was safe to unboard me but I had suffered so many scars.

  “This poor house,” Esma said. “We must again infuse it with life.”

  “Where to begin?”

  “Touch the walls. Touch the walls, children. Give them your breath. Bring the spirits back.”

  They opened all the doors and the windows, airing out the aftermath of fire and war. Gonca stole from room to room, burning juniper, and chanting pagan prayers. “Hosh! Hosh! Hosh! Hosh! Hosh!” For forty days and forty nights. The center of interest. The object of desire. Washed and scrubbed. Sang and smudged. New curtains. New kilims. New paint. New hope.

  In the days that followed, Esma watched the street day and night, her heart agitated at the sight of each passing uniform until they turned around. None was the face she had hoped to see. She listened to every whisper in the air, trying to identify the voices, rushing to the balcony at the slightest provocation, the faintest hiss of the wind, only to be repeatedly disillusioned.

  For the boys, too, a new teacher came. They called him Agop the Four Fingers because the man’s thumbs were missing.

  “What happened to your thumbs?” Aladdin asked.

  “The war took them.”

  “How?” the child wondered. The image of war as a raging maniac chopping people’s fingers.

  “They were amputated.”

  “How come?”

  What interested the boys were the nuts and bolts and body parts, not the ethics of disaster. Nor the ethos.

  Holding a pen between his toes, Agop the Four Fingers taught them to write from left to right. And front to back. In Latin roman alphabet. The new way. Unlike the Arabic letters they had learned. Things were changing rapidly. Europe was taking revenge by imposing its own image. The country was now leaning to the West.

  Moving the centers of his brain, a struggle for Cadri at first. But Aladdin adjusted instantly, impressing Agop the Four Fingers with the way he conceived symbols and abstractions. But he was testy with the boy who craved the challenge.

  “Aladdin should be sent away to a school in the West,” Agop the Four Fingers told Iskender as they sat in a seaside tavern nearby, a liaison Esma was unaware of. Over mussels and calamari, they sipped the municipal brew. “The numbers here are not big enough for the boy’s mind. Maybe Germany. Maybe even America. He’ll someday be someone. Mark my words.”

  Cadri heard them, eavesdropping outside the door to the men’s quarters. Cadri heard everything. He had sensitive ears. Ears that would make him a poet in the years to come.

  Above the picture of her deceased husband Esma put the picture of another, a dashing blond man with an iron face, a strong jaw, and penetrating blue eyes—eyes capable of the greatest hatred and of the greatest love. Who was he? A new prospect? Would there be a new master? What had happened to Süleyman?

  Süleyman’s picture remained in Esma’s precious wardrobe, inside a medallion. Everyday, she put it to her lips. Forty days and forty nights had long come and gone. There was not a sign of him. Not even a letter.

  For days, parades floated down the streets; young girls with laurel and white flowers crowning their freshly cropped hair, displaying larger-than-life pictures of the blue-eyed man. The same as the one on Esma’s dresser. Men paraded in borsalinos instead of the fez; the Great Leader himself had appeared in Kastamonu wearing one. Women burned their veils, revealed their faces, at long last allowed in male company, allowed a social life. Slogans read, “Can one half of the population rise to the skies while the other is chained to the ground?” promoting women’s rights. And, “Turkey can no longer be the stage of religious fundamentalism and sharia schemes.” People hung from the balconies around the quay chanting and cheering:

  Where shall we find the skies and seas?

  And where are the rocky mountaintops?

  Where are the singing birds and trees?

  Comrades, come, march along with me.

  The convertible Daimler passed in front of the mansions near Alsancak, penetrated the hearts with his eyes. His name printed in Roman script appeared everywhere, his picture larger than the city: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The ancestor of the Turks. (Ata meant ancestor.) The savior from the tyranny of the Sultans, the greed of the Allies. The hero of Gallipoli. The new God. The blond savior. The man of great reforms. Atatürk. Amen.

  She had become mindless with her sons and although she held them close to her, they sensed her absence. Nothing seemed to console her, not until the day a letter arrived from her sister, Mihriban. Esma read the letter and folded up her sleeves.

  For forty days and forty nights the girls slaved, rolling a thousand and one sheets of filo, pickling bushels of eggplant, churning tahini with grape molasses for halvah. Esma herself resurrected precious fabrics out of her old dowry trunk. She cut them into a little girl’s clothes—aprons and pinafores and frilly, lacy, ribbony, embroidered, gauzy delightful gowns. Who were they for? What child stirred her so?

  On the last day of Ramadan, at an ungodly hour, the mysterious guests arrived—Mim Pasha and his wife Mihriban, Esma’s sister, their three daughters and two maids. Mihriban had the same paisley eyes as Esma but lacked the ethereal delicacy of her sister’s features. She had her feet on the ground and her head in the soup. But from a distance, they looked almost identical. The Pasha, a dark man born in India, solid as granite. The two older daughters, Papatya and Sibel, had his eggplant skin, curly hair, and full lips but the youngest girl’s blond ringlets and paisley eyes set her apart from the rest. Her name was Aida. The lady of the Moon.

  Aida was the most beautiful child in the world, with a celadon glow, translucent and radiant. Gazing at her face, it made one cry and smile at the sam
e time, always wrought in some sort of deep revelation.

  When Esma saw the child she began to weep and disappeared into her room. Aida instinctively followed her, wobbling her plump little body like a penguin. Esma embraced the child in her arms, rocked her to the sound of the waves, yielding to the trance of the old lullaby. Dandini, dandini, danali bebek.

  Aida followed Esma everywhere, sneaking into her bed in the night, following her precise gestures in prayer, sitting across the loom, and imitating Esma’s expressions. She wanted Esma to bathe her in the hamam. To scratch her back. She wanted Esma to curl her hair. She wanted to dress in her clothes. She wanted Esma’s stories. She wanted to eat out of Esma’s mouth.

  “What should we do?” Mihriban asked the Pasha, as she washed his feet in the hamam.

  “She is ours now,” Pasha responded. “That’s all there is to it. The child shouldn’t be confused about who to call mother. You should not encourage her either.”

  “But she is such a comfort to my poor sister. They belong together. I feel as if we should . . .”

  “Your poor sister should have thought twice before having a child out of wedlock. She should be grateful we were able to shield her from dishonor. From all of us losing face. Besides, with two boys to bring up, she shouldn’t be afflicted with another burden. This way, she can have the best of all worlds. So could Aida.”

  It was to Esma’s arms that the child ran, the night of that intense snowstorm, even on the night that a fateful incident changed the course of Esma’s life when Lady Luck became cross. What occurred on that evening deflated her dreams, took away her sweetness.

  It happened that Ferret came to call on Mim Pasha, bringing a bucket of warm boza for the family. On that chilly evening, the taste of warm fermented millet with a sprinkling of cinnamon would be welcome in any household. As his hand groped for the knocker, a dark figure appeared out of the shadows.

  “Selam Aleyküm,” he greeted.

  The Ferret shrank as if he had seen a jinn, then gathered his wits. A parody of himself.

  “Süleyman! We had given you up for dead!”

  Süleyman nodded. “I was.” His skin leathery from the elements. His eyes dim. He looked anxious. He limped and shuffled one leg as he walked.

  The two men stood across from each other, rubbing their hands to keep warm. The blizzard slapped their faces, urging for combat.

  “I’m bringing boza for them,” Ferret explained, pointing at me. “The boys needed a father. A young woman cannot live alone forever, you know?”

  Süleyman had seen the like of this happen to other men who went to war, men whose women could not endure loneliness. Uncertainty was part of survival, but Esma? The love of his life. The fire of his groins. She would never. Unless, unless her conniving brother Iskender urged her into an undesirable and forced union.

  “I don’t believe it,” he said. “I don’t believe a word you say.”

  “See for yourself,” the Ferret gestured the way. “Come, then.”

  Through, an opening in the curtain, Süleyman looked inside. There was Esma, the love of his life, so thin and gaunt. Then, a little girl ran into her arms and her face lightened up and she covered the child with kisses. That moment would never leave him.

  “You can’t let her see you like this, like a cripple,” Ferret told him.

  A murderous impulse was rising in Süleyman’s veins faster than mercury. But he only raised his hand and slapped his opponent, slapped him hard, so hard that the Ferret lost his balance, tumbled down. Then without a word, Süleyman walked away. His walk turned into a trot. He galloped to the end of the street without stopping, his arms lifted up to the sky. Once, he looked back. He saw the Ferret knock on the door. He saw a woman open the door and let him in. He heard a child’s cry. He saw the door close.

  He limped his way to the obsidian, sat on a step, strange sounds escaping from his throat, sounds that exploded into a sad gazel, a ballad in the minor key. But it was so cold that long before reaching the air, the notes turned into snowflakes.

  It snowed that night in Izmir for the first time in its history, the white blessing burying wounds while preserving the color of blood. Flakes piled, entombing Süleyman. He became a snowman. Had the night watchman not stumbled on him, thawed him with his stick, he would have been frozen to death. Slap, slap, slap, slap.

  “Wake up, poor slob! Here, drink down some raki. Come on.”

  He blew his whistle, to which a retinue of other night watchmen responded within seconds. They bundled Süleyman in their coats, carried him into an araba, and drove away from Karatash.

  Oblivious to all this, Mim Pasha and the Ferret warmed themselves around the stove, drinking boza in stern silence. Ferret was restless. Every few minutes, he went to the window and looked out as if he were anticipating something.

  “Are you expecting someone?” Mim Pasha questioned him.

  “Just checking how deep the snow . . .”

  The children slept, the girls in one room, the boys in the other. Gonca, Ayşe, and their two sisters, huddled around the boiling kettle in the kitchen. In the old harem, Esma and her sister sat across from each other now over the loom that had once belonged to their mother, and that Mihriban had transported from the plantation to distract her sister.

  “Don’t worry,” Mihriban told Esma, as they collaborated weaving an old pattern. “I know Süleyman will soon return. He’s an honorable man.” But inside, she feared the opposite.

  Despite the multiplying tension caused by their complicity, Mim Pasha’s family remained for the full cycle of the moon. The children protected themselves by playing together; Papatya, Sibel, and Aida bonded with the boys. From then on, they were brothers and sisters.

  Süleyman did not return. Everyone assumed he had been a war casualty. But the night watchman, who made love to Ayşe across the bars, told her about the night he had discovered the man under a mound of snow and how he and the other watchmen had revived the poor devil. The next day, Süleyman had wandered off to the docks, without a possession, looking for a ship to sail on.

  Ayşe was afraid to tell this to her mistress, not wanting to incriminate her source of information. Besides, Süleyman was gone now anyway. She did not wish for Esma to stop hoping for his return. Her mistress had nothing else left to hope for.

  But something inside Esma told her he was still alive. Every morning as soon as she woke up, she would tap the wardrobe, as if sending someone a Morse signal. She then closed her eyes and fell into a trance, her last hours with Süleyman repeating themselves in her mind’s eye. She talked to him endlessly and answered questions that no one else could hear. She told him stories, recited poetry. She told him about their little Aida. Like that, she carried on a dialogue by herself. Even in her dreams, she kept him captive in a continuous narrative, as though they had contacted each other on some other dimension of existence that was only theirs.

  She had retreated into a netherworld no one else could fathom. Her eyes no longer looked outward, her hands perpetually occupied with trifles to conceal her resignation. She was running out of precious stones and she had stopped crying diamond tears. Too proud to ask her family for sustenance, she faced the challenge of feeding her own children. Prayers had gone feeble during the war.

  Suddenly it came to her. She sat on her knees, her hands plucking the strings of her loom, as if playing the harp and then casting a fly in the air. She made music of colors, plant juices that tinted the wool in rich autumnal hues. Her prayer rugs, the same design as the one she had learned from her mother in Macedonia, who had learned from hers, an inheritance from their nomadic ancestry. Wild intoxication of shapes and colors, animated, hypnotic trances opened doorways into imaginary worlds, just as in fairy tales.

  They were so whimsical that everyone wanted one. So, she was occupied. When people bought Esma’s magic carpets, they dreamed sweet dreams, escaping into realms free of hate or pain.

  Esma slowly reached an inner peace never granted her before.
Like Penelope, she focused on weaving her patterns to perfection. She knew them so intimately that she could compose with closed eyes, her attention elsewhere. Her weft and warp, her plucking and pulling made melodies for sensitive ears. So much so that Jinns and peris crawled out of their crevices to dance.

  Cadri, transported by his mother’s weaving music, the mystery of symbols—chevrons, diamonds, trees of life, birth-giving goddesses—sat on the other side of the loom, watching Esma through the crossing threads of yarn, as if through the lattices of a harem window.

  My mother weaves her pain

  entangling the threads,

  so they will not break

  their tension.

  My mother weaves her sacred self.

  The days passed. The boys grew. Cadri lost in books and Aladdin in the stars. Cadri turned an empty room into his pensatorio, his thinking room, to retreat for contemplation. Or to pin his butterflies and spell their Latin names. Or to practice calligraphy and read archaic texts, while Aladdin constructed telescopes, and made model airplanes.

  But Cadri’s temple was elsewhere. Ever since Iskender had taken him to his first Nickelodeon in the alley across from the Clock Tower, the boy had fallen into a trance. He cut school—out of character—he spent his pennies in the arcades; he swore to himself he’d see everything that lived in that shadowbox during his lifetime. He fashioned an altar with the photographs of his love goddesses. He managed to teach himself enough English to write rudimentary fan letters to his favorites. All identical. In return, he received their glamour photos signed to “Dear Cadri, best wishes, Theda Bara.” “To Cadri, yours always, Billie Dove.” “To Cadri, affectionately, Marion Davies.” Lillian and Dorothy Gish. Louise Brooks. Gloria Swanson. The silent ones. The vamps, the ingenues, the “It” girl, Clara Bow. The flappers. Then, the talking ones. And last but not least, the queen of queens herself, Dolores. Dolores Del Rio.

  The boys’ imagination was so rich and peopled that neither felt the urge to seek other company. An invisible umbilicus still united them, sealing their sufficiency. Even when their sexual urges came, they just went inside Ayşe in the cellar or the broom closet. Ayşe willing, of course; in fact she’d lure her lovely boys into the dank corners of the cellar, seeking their lips, guiding their hands to her full breasts and other succulent crevices. The boys could never be certain to whom the breasts belonged but no matter. Because the cellar was so dark, Cadri and Aladdin had the fortune of being initiated into lovemaking by touch rather than visual stimulation. Their sensualness increased, making them good lovers of other women in years to come.