Seven Houses

by Alev Lytle Croutier

  Ayşe did not mind at all the touch of young sinew, fleshy palpitations, the steam of warm breath. Ah, Heaven! Drowned out every prayer time by the muezzin’s song, she made sounds of such pleasure that the blue wisteria clung itself deep into the outside walls and produced a profusion of dangling blossoms that chimed like tiny bells. Although she was getting on in years, her body never changed, which everyone attributed to her insatiable carnal appetite.

  Aida came to visit frequently, enslaving the family with her blossoming beauty. Esma indulged herself playing with Aida’s hair—braiding, curling, crimping, weaving. For a while, she forgot her pain.

  “What do you want to be when you grow up?” she asked Aida, who at the age of eleven was already deliciously pubescent.

  “I’d like to be a beauty queen.”

  Esma smiled, having herself known impossible dreams of little girls.

  When the boys turned eighteen and graduated from the Lycée, the inevitable happened. Aladdin received a scholarship to a faraway place called Boston. Esma wanted to keep him, sensing the loss would not simply be a temporary one.

  “The boy’s eyes always wandered away from home, almost since he was born,” Mihriban reminded her. “You gave him wings to fly. You cannot clip them now.”

  Esma wept as Aladdin’s ship left the harbor, waving at the disappearing face, sensing it might be the last vision of him, her hands digging into Cadri’s and grafting themselves.

  Aladdin sent her postcards from the world’s most famous edifices—the Eiffel Tower, the London Bridge, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate. To Cadri only, he sent more provocative ones, of bare-breasted women, extolling their smells and erotic nights in strange houses, in strange cities. Mysterious lust. Unfamiliar tongues. Unspeakable delights.

  Cadri stayed home, faithful and devoted to his mother whom he attended with deified reverence, swearing always to kiss her feet. An anemic young man from having been weaned in a library and drawn to artificially lit rooms, Cadri perceived the world through thick glasses that made his face appear cyclopean and he concentrated intensely when he looked at things. The sun disturbed him, freckling his prematurely balding pate, protected only by a crescent patch of hair below his ears. He was always seen wearing a hat (fedora in the winter and Panama in the summer) to conceal his baldness, which he said made his head vulnerable to the attack of the mind predators. Even in his sleep, he wore a night cap.

  Cadri had become the center of the three women’s affection, the master of his harem, the perpetual boy. All the women were convinced that this was how it would always be, to compensate for the loss of Aladdin, silently claiming their special place in his heart.

  Gonca sank deeper into her world of the intangibles. Cadri sometimes noticed how things moved of their own accord and levitated when she was around: He would move through the rooms feeling a sense of something breathing that often startled him. Struggling with his thoughts, he’d try to understand just what Gonca was seeing and clean his lenses to improve his own vision.

  Ayşe, at long last, realizing that the night watchman had no intention of ever leaving his wives and his many children, not to mention his adventurous night life, one day stopped baring her breasts. With this withholding, a certain kind of moisture left her, she became fat, and her sister Gonca was no longer compelled to lock her up at night.

  When the muezzin sang at midnight, Cadri stole out for his nocturnal stroll, waiting for the moon to taste the licorice night air while the rest of the town slumbered. The women would call out after him or stand at the threshold until he disappeared into darkness through an avenue of gaslight, like a somnambulist, seeking worlds beyond physical reach.

  One such night, the cicadas came. The hell chatter lasted all night, driving to madness the inhabitants of the city who could not sleep. In the morning Esma’s garden was ravaged, the Adonis tree, which had come back to life with even a greater vengeance than before, stripped of all its bark. The wisteria, jasmine—everything lay in a chaotic heap of limp brownness.

  “Bad omen,” Gonca told Esma. “Something else will have to replace the vines—which may not be so bad but will change the balance of things.”

  Esma fell into a deep state of drowsiness. She slept for seven days and seven nights. And Cadri, worried about his mother’s condition, went to fetch Doctor Eliksir. On the way, he stopped to buy flowers for Esma. That was the day that kismet knocked at their door again in the form of Camilla. Another gain. Another loss.

  Camilla. What can I say about Camilla? From the day she arrived, as stubborn as an Angora goat yet unblemished as an unfolding gardenia. The spitting image of the woman adorning Cadri’s walls: Dolores Del Rio—as if she’d dropped from her nose. A hint of Loretta Young, maybe, in the cheeks. Pistachio-skinned and succulent, apple face, chestnut eyes, intense and calculating, and never, never without reason, without assessment. Not even in bed.

  The morning after the madness of the cicadas, Cadri stopped at a flower shop near the ferry landing. It was the sweetest scent that had lured him, the scent of orange blossoms. A young woman greeted him. Pearl teeth. Opium eyes. He confessed to her his plight, of his mother’s ailment and the Adonis tree. Camilla arranged a bouquet of black tulips and forget-me-nots. She also gave him a bouquet of valerian.

  “Make tea out of this. It will make your mother feel better. I promise you. As for the Adonis tree, don’t worry. It will sprout again just as it always has. It’s an immortal. Don’t fret.”

  When Cadri returned with the doctor, Esma was sitting up in bed, having her afternoon tea. The minute she laid eyes on the bouquet, she broke into uncontrollable shivers as if someone had given her a shock.

  “Burn them, burn these wretched flowers so that no other soul can inhale the stink,” she wailed. “These flowers are evil.”

  “I don’t smell anything, mother,” Cadri told her, “least of all evil. I bought them from a very nice young lady.”

  He coaxed his mother to drink the valerian tea, covering her under mounds of colorful satin quilts while singing praises of Camilla. She’d spent her childhood in an ancient region of the Aegean where archaeologists and treasure hunters persistently stalk in search of lost cities, of gold, and missing parts of goddesses. Blood memories of primeval dreams, of human sacrifice, fertility rites. “But all that’s just below the surface. In truth, she seems to have an iron will.”

  He said she was different, different from them, weaned on a peculiar diet, which also included consumption of flowers—honeysuckle, gardenia, nasturtium, lavender, calendula. Perhaps, there’s a point to it. Perhaps, they themselves should reconsider their diet. Perhaps.

  “You’ve certainly discovered a great deal in such a short time,” Esma told him. “Did you find out about her family?”

  “Her family has been in deep straits, her father very ill. Her mother grows the flowers she sells to support the family.”

  Sensing the inevitable threat of a prospective rival, Esma prayed to her God, “Spare me the pain of losing my second son, my favorite, to a nectar-sucking witch. Make him blind to her charms.” The girl had charms, no doubt about that, clearly with connections to the plant kingdom and all that. The well had been poisoned already.

  But, alas, God paid no attention to Esma’s prayers. Nor did the devil mind her spiky-tongued curses. Resignation and loneliness took hold of her as Aladdin’s letters became less and less frequent and Cadri ceased kissing her feet. A few weeks later, a priceless fire opal with diamonds graced Camilla’s finger. And shortly after that, Camilla herself graced us.

  From the beginning, Esma’s Macedonian temperament, passive and prone to pining, caused a tug-of-war between the matriarch and the daughter-in-law. Fighting for her status, Esma abandoned her precious weaving, distracted now by the necessity of casting mean spells at Camilla and lying in wait for their repercussions.

  Camilla had no suspicion that her terrible mooncycles and frequent falls down the stairs were symptoms of curses. She was resilient
and feisty; reflected the evil eye right back at her mother-in-law. The two women mirrored the darkness in each other. Glassy silence erupted with a pandemonium of dubious spirits prancing around night and day.

  Loneliness occupied the rooms, especially in the evenings, each of them sitting in separate rooms like solitary inmates of a prison. Persistent, frozen images affixed like perfume, invisible but lasting. Esma slowly combed her wavy white hair now reaching down to her knees. Her hands, gnarly like pruned sycamores, sorting out worry beads. Her back a question mark, still praying. Praying for all the lost ones, their only connection now through pictures—all except Süleyman’s. His image as a young man was fixed as was hers in her own mind, with certain relief that he could not see her as she is now and only knew her youthful beauty.

  Camilla sat on a window seat, looking across the Bay toward Cordelio, singing an old Rum song:

  Farewell, my dearest father, farewell

  Farewell, my darling mother.

  I’m moving to a stranger’s house

  To serve my husband’s mother.

  Seeking her way to her mother-in-law’s heart, she cooked pots and pots of pilaf, burning it each time, stinking the space with a lasting odor that repelled Esma even more. She planted a variety of flowers in the garden that withered before they bloomed. Her green touch, her divine connection to growing things had vanished. She conceived many babies but all were unborn.

  Each time she was expecting, a recurrent dream visited her in which an invisible hand reached from an imaginary sky, zipped her open, and removed the baby. After her seventh miscarriage, Gonca, unable to endure burying another embryo, told Camilla about the Red Woman, the ogress that attacked the pregnant, but concealed Esma’s role in the curse. First loyalty first.

  Unable to detach herself from her disembodied mother-in-law pacing above her room, Camilla escaped into books about tormented heroines. Gone with the Wind. Rebecca. Forever Amber. Anna Karenina. Madame Bovary. Disenchanted. She devoured the words until she could no longer sustain them, until she could no longer keep her eyes open, trapped in the realm of fiction.

  Cadri’s response to the ancient harem feud—the one between mother and daughters-in-law—was to retreat even deeper. He withdrew once again in his pensatorio, composing esoteric verses that he kept locked up in an étagère along with his archives, rosettes, and lepidores. In this sanctuary of collectibles, he constructed a city of the mind, neglecting the desolate emotions that floated like burnt paper in every room. He stayed up, drinking endless cups of coffee that kept mysteriously appearing on his desk, served by invisible hands, while concocting words that inexplicably burst into life. His vastly populated verbal universe shaped itself into volumes. At last, he had become a true poet.

  When the streets stopped humming, he pursued the night, leaving Camilla alone in bed, shivering. Sometimes she wanted to go with him but he refused, possessive of his nocturnal peregrinations.

  “Do you have another woman?” she asked.

  He laughed. And she knew he didn’t because when he returned, he didn’t smell of one. He was ardent, waking her up with his need. Dark and impersonal, yet slow and sensual. For her, it was just another part of the dream she was in the midst of.

  On such a night, Iskender encountered Cadri drifting aimlessly along the Cordone. He appeared to be wandering in a trance. Iskender realized that the silent war between the women must have brought on his nephew’s sleep disorders. As a rescue remedy from this magnetic domain, he offered Cadri a job inspecting the family’s silk interests in the rural countryside—the beginning of Cadri’s political awakening. Another turning point.

  So, it all came down on Cadri, early mornings and bright days, exposure to a disturbing solar intrusion. At dawn, Camilla shook him out of sleep; they whispered in the breakfast room trying not to disturb the others. In his impeccable suit carrying a leather suitcase full of papers and shoe trees, his fetish, he kissed his wife as if for the very last time, before jumping into the rattling old Citroën TA (traction avant)—“the Dachshund,” as they lovingly called it—to drive off to the provinces while Camilla went back to bed for another hour or two before entering her own day.

  Cadri traveled as far as the Citroën could endure, then on mule or on foot, to small worlds of hidden desire. Each time, he sent his women photographs of himself taken in ever-changing landscapes. Always wearing a hat, always the same winning, confident grin, even when caught off guard, the one he reserved for the camera.

  In his absence, the two women spoke to each other only through the girls, or sometimes other women guests.

  “Gonca, will you tell my daughter-in-law that we don’t put pistachios in grape dolmas.”

  “Gonca, will you tell your mistress that there is more than one way to skin a cat.”

  Sometimes, Cadri was gone for months, leaving the women in suspense of his whereabouts, except from letters both received on the same day in separate envelopes:

  December 5, 1945

  My Camilla,

  I arrived in Salihli on muleback at 13:00 yesterday in cloudy weather and checked into the Sun Hotel near the train station. In the afternoon, I strolled the streets under the rain you love so much, stopping at the Town Club to visit the mayor whom I had previously met in Soma. He was pleased to see me again and promised his help contacting local employers.

  They had just begun rationing bread in Salihli and I obtained a weekly card. I will save it until my return so that you and mother could get more flour and wheat. In the meantime, the delicious boereks mother had baked for me fulfilled my hunger. Tomorrow is market day and if the cherries are not full of worms after the rains, I will bring home a nice basket.

  At night, the generator in the hotel was not working; so, no heat or electricity. I was freezing all night and I had difficulty falling asleep. Luckily, I had a flashlight so that I could read. Finally, I must have dozed off thinking of you, for you appeared in my dream. (Hope it is a good omen.) We were in an enchanted place together with lots of other young people. We were feeding each other fruits and cakes, and laughing. Since I’m no psychic oracle I don’t have a clue how to interpret this dream but I must confess it made me ecstatic to have you in my bed in Salihli.

  I woke up at dawn; and at 9:00 I raided a textile factory and finished my inspection late afternoon. The conditions are much worse than anyone can imagine. The exploitation of the workers is beyond comprehension. I never knew such injustice was possible.

  I found this town incredibly unattractive. Even though it’s on the main Smyrna line, it’s extremely neglected. Blizzard, mud, frost, and desolate as the heart of the ignorant. Dilapidated buildings—not a pleasant sight but it’s my duty, my obligation to seek solutions.

  How is your cough? Are you getting along better with my mother? You know how important this is to me. Is she still upset about my brother Aladdin’s marriage to that Irish-American girl? You must try to console her. Be her friend. You have no one but each other when I’m away.

  Tomorrow, another factory. But now, my gastronomical needs beckon. I kiss your beautiful eyes and . . . (I’ll tell you the rest on my return.) I love you more when I’m away from you.

  So, like this . . .

  Your husband,

  Cadri Ipekci

  When Cadri returned home, he was so preoccupied sorting out his thoughts about his trips and writing reports that he no longer occupied his pensatorio. The green door remained locked; everything inside gathered dust, buried in an interminable slumber. Smelling the decaying paper and neglect, the mice made camp, devouring his precious books, fringes of his invaluable rugs, and the gold dust of his prized butterflies and moths. Finally, they devoured his poems.

  When he came home, he was exhausted. Cadri and Camilla retired to their bedroom, so as not to stir Esma; made love for hours in total silence. Esma knew anyway, no matter how they concealed their desire. Not difficult to smell those things.

  Once again, Doctor Eliksir told Camilla that she was expec
ting. She already knew from the way her body had become ravenous as if a parasite starved inside her. Gonca found her one night, sitting alone in the kitchen and gorging on a plateful of raw lamb chops. She offered to cook them. Camilla consented. She had become a carnivore.

  This time, Doctor Eliksir told her, no more chances. “I’m confining you to bed for the full term. You will not allow yourself to slip this one. You must be still.”

  Camilla lay mummified in a white bed overlooking the Izmir Bay, reading gothic novels while watching the passing of the ships, the gathering of storms, the setting of the sun and of the moon. She counted flocks of migrating pelicans. She continued dreaming, dreaming of deformed babies with missing parts, Siamese twins, elephant babies, horned babies with webbed feet, furry babies with tails, harelips, dwarves, imbeciles, idiots, and ones with the pink disease. She felt the swimming of life inside her without sex or sin.

  “I will keep my baby this time at any cost. It will not leave my body prematurely this time,” she repeated like a mantra, oblivious that the baby was full grown, ready to burst out in the seventh month but had not yet found a soul. They were already contesting wills.

  The dream returned. The hand came down, reached inside her bandages, but they were tied with the devil’s knot that no one, not even the Red Woman, could unravel. Realizing she had been tricked, the Red Woman attacked. In a flash, Camilla realized she was dreaming and, therefore, could stop the dream if she wanted to. She entered her dream, pushed the Red Woman’s hand forcefully away from her body, before waking herself up into a starless night all alone in bed, soaked in sweat.