Seven Houses

by Alev Lytle Croutier

  The dream visited again the following night but before the hand could touch her, Camilla let out a savage scream, sending chills to everyone in the neighborhood. But they forgave her trespasses, knowing she was from the opposite shore where many were still the descendants of the Rums, spoke an ancient tongue, and others kept the faith of old slave women out of the Anatolian darkness.

  “Go away where you came from, the face of darkness, and never, never never never come back. Go back into the dark distant star, home of your own kin. Go back. Go back.”

  Startled by such a display of courage and recognizing her own defeat, Esma pilgrimaged to the temple of Su Baba, the great water saint, and prayed for a grandson, a little boy to fill the place in her heart that Aladdin had left empty. Prayed for her daughter-in-law’s madness to stop. Prayed for the Red Woman to leave her alone. She promised to love Camilla as her own flesh and blood if her wishes were granted. She promised to sacrifice her soul in return.

  After Camilla’s waters broke and she transited into labor, the Red Woman pursued again. This time not in her dream but in the same room, hovering over her birth chair.

  “Get her out of this room,” Camilla begged Gonca.

  “There is no one in the room, mistress. Just us.”

  “She’s leaning on the counterpane. Get her out!”

  Gonca sought Esma. “Mistress Camilla has puerperal fever,” she cried. “The Red Woman’s consumed her. I need help. Or we’ll lose the baby.”

  Esma prayed, “Great God. Take my life instead. Let my grandson live. Take my soul. Take what you want from me.”

  Camilla’s body refused to open up and let the infant leave as if she were determined to keep it inside forever. But her pain was so unbearable that it turned on itself, carrying both her and the baby into a jagged twilight. She would have been lost there had Gonca not interfered and slit her belly—just like in the dream—to take the baby out.

  The child did not cry when she broke out of Camilla’s womb, covered with a silver web of mucus. She was silent. She didn’t scream like other babies. She didn’t tense her hands and feet. She seemed lifeless but her eyes were wide open.

  Esma picked up the tiny little girl in her fragile arms and looked into her eyes—void as if she belonged to the soulless ones. She cut the chord. She licked the vernix. She breathed on the child’s face. Within seconds, the baby’s eyes became alert and inquisitive like a sea mammal. She stirred like the baby dolphins seen gamboling along the Aegean. Paisley eyes like hers, like Mihriban, like Aida. Esma perceived in her granddaughter the reflection of her own spirit. The tiny creature looked as though she was smiling and then winking. Esma winked back as if she thought they shared a great secret but felt herself swiftly expiring.

  Camilla lay quietly as Gonca delivered the afterbirth, watching her mother-in-law claim her baby. Tears were streaming quietly down Esma’s cheeks but at the same time, a peaceful smile formed on her face.

  “What will we call her?”

  “Her name is Amber,” Camilla announced.

  The baby’s skin had a translucent amber glow but it was Camilla’s perverse infatuation with Forever Amber—the book she had been devouring—that had inspired the name. She had learned to view the world through an amber-colored filter ever since she had come here in order to survive.

  Camilla soon returned to her twilight, rid of the Red Woman once and for all but also rid of her womb. Her face a pale glow. A mother now.

  “Your name is Süleyman,” Esma whispered to the baby. Then, stuck a piece of Turkish delight wrapped in a handkerchief between her lips, so that “She will have a sweet life.”

  When she returned to her room that night, Esma looked at the picture of Aladdin with his Irish-American wife dressed in winter coats with fur collars, standing in front of a white colonial house somewhere in a snowy New England landscape. Picture of Cadri and Aladdin as boys, in gilded white satin hats during their circumcision ceremony. Her stern old husband—the same old picture. Aida as a beauty queen. And inside the wardrobe, Süleyman wearing a dark fez and pelerin.

  Too weak to stand up, she lay down to pray. She told God her life had been fulfilled. She no longer feared the breath of Azrael. Death was not the end of life, she knew. Multiple souls went on living eternally. She told everyone in her prayers not to fear for her. Her body may leave, but her soul would always return.

  That night, in her sleep, she separated from her body. At dawn, Gonca came running upstairs. The sight of her mistress curled up on her prayer rug like a fava bean as in the old days of her passion. Brought tears to her eyes. She covered Esma. Then, she knew.

  A blue spirit floated over Esma’s lifeless body; formless at first, it began to change like the clouds until a piece of it broke off and became a nightingale. The bird flew out the window, perched on the Adonis tree. The muezzin chanted the dawn prayer. The nightingale sang. And the baby began to cry.

  The Silk Plantation

  (1930–1958)

  Still round and round the ghosts of beauty glide.

  And haunt the places where their honour died.

  ALEXANDER POPE

  THE BEAUTY QUEEN

  Esma’s sister Mihriban first came to live here in Bursa pushing her husband’s wheelchair, his dark face distorted from the stroke—one lip facing the sky, the other the earth. Their three pubescent daughters followed, glued at the hips like vocalists in some singing group: Papatya, Sibel, and Aida. The two older girls took after their father, Mim Pasha, a kind man, people said in his time before he was struck, though somewhat ornery. But Aida, the youngest, was fair with almond eyes, cherry lips, and irresistible radiance as if spawned by a houri.

  The family sent Sibel and Papatya to get educated—it was fashionable now for girls since Atatürk’s reforms, but Aida they groomed only in matters of beauty. Beauty, they believed, held the reins of power. And Aida was born to be a queen.

  They took great pride in cultivating this beauty that God had clearly sent them as a gift planted by him in Esma’s belly. They spent a fortune on Aida’s wardrobe, which contained Mandarin gowns, saris and sarongs, charshafs and chadors, caftans, kimonos, and kebayas, pallium, peplum, peplos. Not to mention the accessories to accentuate: tiaras, shawls, stoles, capotes and capes, bloomers and boleros, petticoats and pinafores, knickers and fans, yashmaks and mantillas, hats, and gambados and gloves.

  Her sisters stole books from the library containing illustrations of costumes from different regions of the world and Sibel, an accomplished artist in her own right, made sketches to conform to her sister’s mermaid proportions.

  The women residents, skilled with their hands, dexterous in the art of lacemaking, embroidery, crewel, needlepoint, crochet, shadow stitch, and appliqué, sat around, making impeccable garments for Aida. And their servants, proficient in silkmaking, cultivated silk oak trees and raised silkworms. The men built enormous looms and before long, the family was producing so much fabric, such amazing textiles that Iskender Bey, the family patriarch, was driven to travel to the distant provinces of the Silk Road to market their goods and search the secrets for higher-quality silk.

  Years later, when Iskender Bey returned, he brought back not only musk, fine fabrics, diamonds, rubies, perfume, rhubarb, and other assorted objects of desire but the Bombyx mori, the most coveted silk moth, a secret that the Chinese had guarded viciously for many centuries, its theft considered the greatest taboo, punishable by violent death.

  But Iskender took his chance and smuggled the worm’s eggs and mulberry seeds in his simply crafted ivory cane. No mean trick this. A turning point in trade history. Just a few insect eggs and a couple of seeds!

  In no time, the mulberry trees replaced the great oaks, which had until now produced the silk and the silkworm Bombyx mori, and replaced the oakworm Antherea harti, whose silk was infinitely inferior.

  So, I became a vast plantation above Bursa, in the foothills of Mount Olympus bubbling with sulfur springs—mulberry thrived on thermal soil�
�quickly becoming populated with mulberry trees. Iskender Bey, then, officially changed the family name from Barutçu, which meant the “gunpowder makers,” to İpekçi, the “silkmakers.” He’d never felt an affinity to manufacturing the war products that had made the family rich anyway. Iskender Bey was at last following his poetic bliss.

  When Aida turned thirteen, she was as lovely as the pale moon—her name meant the lady of the moon—because the family kept her in the shade. Even on the rare occasions when she was exposed to the sun, they made her wear enormous hats with veils or carry parasols so that her skin would retain the priceless ivory color she was born with. Her lustrous chestnut hair, which had never been cut, cascaded all the way down to the ground, folded over and tucked under so she would not step on it and trip. Every day, she brushed it a thousand times with the special boar bristles that Iskender Bey had brought back from Asia.

  Aida, of course, was never allowed in any other part of the estate where work occurred, since no one could endure the thought of risking her hands, so smooth, so fine, like the marble hand that Iskender Bey had purchased from a grave digger near Knidos, convinced beyond any doubt that it had belonged to the Aphrodite of Praxiteles, the most beautiful statue ever cast and one of the Seven Wonders of the World. (Mind you, the country possessed four: the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, and the renowned Aphrodite.) Iskender Bey had an extraordinary knack for acquiring objects of high resonance.

  Aida glowed from the endless hours spent soaking in the mineral baths, scrubbed, exfoliated, anointed, detoxified by the sulfurous steam. Her muscles were pliant and languid, owing to the massages she received daily. Of course, like the rest of the women, she shied away from any form of physical exertion because, well, Eastern gentlemen like women with flesh (after all what’s a body for?), not like those toothpick foreign hussies. So what choice did women have but to aspire to look plump like the figs growing by an emerald sea? (This would not be significant until much later in life when their legs and thighs looked as though they’d been injected with tapioca pudding but even then, they took it as a sign of their kismet, or perhaps the evil eye, most likely an inevitable curse of their heredity, since they had witnessed the same happen to their own mothers and grandmothers on the wheel of fortune.)

  But Aida, being only thirteen, was still endowed with God’s gifts before He withdrew them, while blessing women with more children and longer life. If anything, she appeared undernourished. So, the family tried fattening her with enormous portions of sugar and lard—boereks, tatlis, baklavas, ladyfingers, beauty’s navels, Imam fainted, slashed bellies, dolmas, tripe soup, and fatty mutton stews—the cuisine of their native Balkan regions that the Ottoman Turks had once annexed. In those days, nobody knew that kind of food was bad for health so they all lavished Aida with sinful delectables, which she continued burning off effortlessly. Alas, nothing, nothing seemed to work.

  Out of desperation, poor Mihriban took her to an evliya, a seer, named Kum Baba, the sand master, who possessed a reputation for having the power to cure every imaginable affliction.

  The evliya breezed her with prayers and blew on her face, washed her mouth with a sacred spring water, looked into her eyes. “My beauty, I have never seen anyone like you,” he told her. “The whole world is right at your fingertips but your vanity, your vanity is your curse. Someday, it might cost you your happiness, even your life. I know because of what I see in your eyes—the smut, the impurities reveal themselves in those brown specks (Aida had paisley eyes like Esma—green with brown specks.) “You have to purify them, dissolve those dirty spots so that your eyes can turn blue—the way they are meant to be, the color of your soul.”

  He gave her special herbs to brew and Aida promised she would, but in no time became so absorbed with herself that she completely forgot the herbs. Gradually, however, a slight change came over her as a layer of softness padded her bones and a fine cushion of baby fat pampered her fairy tale fineness. Still, she was as slender as a willow but the family had good reason to be ecstatic because she secreted a liquid that smelled like the attar of roses. They celebrated by sacrificing a whole flock of sheep, whose meat they distributed among the poorest of the poor along with five thousand bowls of bulgur.

  Alas, at last, their Aida had become a woman. Now she had the power.

  Aida’s scent wafted from street to street all through the city and lo, the görücü, those abominable matchmakers, those harpies in never-ending droves trailed to our threshold every hour, every day of the week to negotiate on behalf of their sons and nephews and uncles. But Aida showed not a trace of interest in any of the proposals. She found them so revolting that she decided to revolt herself.

  Being the youngest she knew that her sisters had to be married off first before her own turn came. Dressed up in one of her fabulous outfits, curving her hips right and left, she would prance into the living room, carrying a coffee tray, flash a seductive smile as she served the görücüs but left the room immediately afterward, refusing to sit in a corner like a closed-up morning glory. Refusing to sit her head bent, eyes downcast, and hands folded on her lap—as the etiquette demanded—retaining this pose for interminable hours while the görücü went through their lists of criticisms, appraisals, offering points of negotiation, day after day.

  I must say that Aida made it clear to everyone that she was doing this only because she did not wish to embarrass the family, but she was a modern girl, a living emblem of Atatürk’s ideal of youth. She’d never, ever allow the görücü to dictate her marriage partner.

  This was a relief for the household since they themselves had been obligated to spend too much time being hospitable to those leeches, so they put a sign on the gate which read: “Görücüs not accepted,” a sign that eventually discouraged the suitors—unfortunately including the ones who came for Papatya and Sibel. Those girls required greater effort.

  But Aida was still restless. A small passion had wedged itself into her heart of hearts, a passion greater than a wedding ring. But not a word did she whisper even to her sisters, who did not have an inkling of her secret desire. She confided only in her aunt Esma, who never came here but whom Aida visited occasionally. She felt a special affinity with her aunt that chagrined her parents at times, despite their generous, good hearts.

  But one day, Iskender Bey found Aida weeping under the lilac gazebo. “What is it that ails you, my child?” he asked. He had great fondness for the girl who clearly had the mana, the female power. That’s why he had given her the amber egg with the moth, which had once belonged to the girl’s real mother, who had never forgiven him. “You can have anything you wish, you know?”

  Unable to endure it any longer, Aida announced her dream, “I want to be the queen, dear Uncle.”

  “I’m sure you can if you wish. I’m sure there must be royalty who would be delighted to have your hand.”

  “I want to be a beauty queen.”

  On the one hand, they’d groomed Aida to compete with the most beautiful women in the Empire to become the Sultana. Now challenged to compete with others who lacked her breeding and looks, and rise above all as the beauty queen. This, of course, would bring the family into the public eye who thus far had simply been prospering in vast wealth and fortune, but managed to maintain an illusion of privacy.

  Iskender Bey believed that such things as beauty contests were for common people and by participating, Aida would tarnish the family honor, but the women in the family vehemently disagreed with him. Wasn’t Aida their collective creation who’d live out the dreams they themselves were not fortunate enough to manifest? In their hearts, all of them secretly desired the same, the triumph of their beauty. And finally, Iskender Bey, being a sensitive man who appreciated the wisdom of women, acquiesced without much issue.

  But there was one problem. The contestants had to have short hair in order to set an example and support the modernization. Iskender Bey asked for exemptions and exceptions,
even trying bribery and other unsavory methods of persuasion but the rule was unbendable. He asked Aida to change her mind, he offered her and her sisters a trip to Paris but Aida was so persistent, so determined that nothing, nothing would stand in her way even sacrificing her precious hair kissing the floor, which had taken her an entire lifetime to grow.

  Since no public hairdressers were here in those days, her sisters, aunts, and great-aunts accompanied Aida to the barber shop on a humid midsummer’s day. She was wearing a white straw hat with an enormously wide rim to protect her skin as she left.

  I only know what happened from hearsay. This is what I’ve been able to conjecture, putting all the bits and pieces together:

  They said when Aida sat in the barber’s chair and took her hat off, the poor man was so moved with such celestial hair that he refused to cut it at first but she begged him.

  “Are you certain you won’t regret this?” he asked Aida pitifully.

  “Absolutely,” Aida replied.

  So, the barber uttered a short prayer as he reluctantly grabbed his scissors and slashed her hair in one great strike—so as not to prolong the pain—right below her ears.

  Then, it happened. Although he had shut the shades and put a “closed” sign to provide the women with full privacy, the door flew open and a young man in a military uniform, decorated with golden tassels and epaulets, walked in. The women gasped.

  The barber was standing in the middle of the floor, holding the long beautiful mane in his hand with tears in his eyes. When the young lieutenant noticed the beauty unlike any other he had ever seen sitting in the barber chair, who now looked as vulnerable as the paintings of women martyrs, with an uncontrollable impulse, he got on his knees in front of her, took her hand, and kissed her on the wrist. Then, apologetically, he slipped outside as the barber shouted after him, threatening to yank out his ear and asked the forgiveness of the lady visitors, above all to Aida, for his son’s impetuous behavior.