Seven Houses

by Alev Lytle Croutier

  His son? A barber’s son? The beginning of the end of it all. Such is fate.

  Aida sat there, still feeling the young man’s breath on the Y-shaped vein of her wrist, the same sensation she had witnessed being fondled by Azrael, the angel of death, who had stalked her since birth.

  “Azrael likes beauty,” Mihriban had told her once, “and when he isn’t busy inhaling the last breath from old people, he visits pretty young girls and flirts with them, giving them a mysterious shiver all over their body, but especially their nipples and between their legs. If the beauty yields, Azrael keeps his embrace until she becomes weak in the knees, collapses, and begins suffering from consumption. Then, he abandons her, returning a few months later, to claim the beauty as one of his wives.”

  But later a wise old woman who worked at the silk house had told her that if you felt Azrael fondling you, pushed him away, and told him, “Go away now, and come back in the winter of my life,” then swallowed three pomegranate seeds, he’d leave you well alone.

  “But I thought pomegranate seeds caused Eve to be expelled from Paradise,” Aida had exclaimed.

  “Which do you prefer, the apple of my eye, death, or expulsion from paradise?”

  So when Aida felt the breath of Azrael from the young man’s kiss, she shouted, “Go away now, and come back in the winter of my life.” With that, she grabbed the bowl of fruit next to the entrance, pinched three pomegranate seeds, and swallowed them immediately.

  The young man returned for a moment and said, “I cannot wait that long. I’m the angel of life,” and stormed out, leaving all the women in gasping suspense. He was a handsome youth, the spitting image of Robert Taylor in Camille, maybe even more dashing in his lieutenant’s uniform. Son of a barber, yes, but fighting for his country and among the young elite. He belonged to the future.

  The barber tied Aida’s mane with a silk ribbon and gave it to her. “Save this,” he said. “It’s priceless. If you like, I can make you a hairpiece.” Then, with a smaller pair of shears, he shaped Aida’s short hair, starting just where her cervical vertebrae ended in the back, tapering it longer in front, leveling just under her chin. Combing all the hair forward, over her face, he selected a handful and mowed it down, giving her some neatly tapering bangs. Then, he danced, letting the hair sift through his fingers like tiny feathers and catching the wisps in the air with his beak-like scissors. It was done.

  “There,” he said, and gave Aida a hand mirror so that she could see the back of her head. A perfect bob like Clara Bow’s. The perfect “It” girl, but the rest of the women were wiping their tears, sensing something irrevocably lost.

  Convinced that Aida was standing at the threshold of change, Mihriban took her to Kum Baba’s shrine once again. “You must restrain your vanity,” he told her as he read the coffee grains. “Or it’s bound to be your doom.” Aida laughed at the absurdity of the old man’s prediction. She did not then believe in doom or gloom.

  Besides losing her hair, two other important things happened to Aida in the following weeks. She lost her innocence and she became the queen.

  The spinsters pulled out of the hope chest the finest crepe d’amour Esma had sent her for the occasion—spared all these years for an epiphany—and busied themselves day and night, imitating a ball gown for Aida they had seen in the movies. It was the loveliest dress in the world, yet the simplest.

  The moment of her crowning lingers in everyone’s memory, stretching like a flexible piece of gum passed from mouth to mouth. Wearing butter-colored swimming trunks that came to the middle of her thighs, on her shoulders an atlas cape in midnight blue trimmed with ermine, Aida paraded on the municipal stage along with the other beauties, all flashing pearl teeth and ample bosoms.

  Just as the jury was getting ready to cast its vote, the door opened, and in he came, dressed in tails, a top hat, and a white pelerin. The great magician. They say he took one look at Aida and became oblivious to everything else around him the rest of the night. She kneeled in front of the Great Atatürk and he placed the golden coronet on her head.

  “Like your family, I’m from the Balkans where I have seen many beautiful women,” he told her. “Macedonian, Serbian, Wallachian, Romanian women, Bulgarian, Thessalonian, Thracian, Albanian, Slovenian women, Croatian, Transylvanian, Montenegrin, Besarabian, Moldavian, Bosnian women. But none, none of them can hold a candle to you. Never have I encountered a face more angelic, a spirit more radiant. You carry a piece of every one of those women! You carry their voices, their stories, yet unlike them, you’re not of the past. You’re the symbol of a modern world, a model for all its women. What I’ve been searching for all these years. The vision of a new nation! As such, I crown thee Miss Turkey.”

  His eyes rested on the tiny crescent-and-star birthmark on Aida’s cleavage, the emblem of the flag. “And I see that I’m confirmed with every sign,” as he kissed her hand.

  Aida flashed her perfect pearl teeth and blinked coyly under her finely trimmed bangs and suddenly burst into tears. People gasped. Atatürk pulled his neatly folded monogrammed handkerchief and gave it to her. An unforgettable moment.

  After the contest all the guests were invited here for an outdoor feast. Once the contestants and the public arrived, men and women separated like oil and water; they were not used to any other way.

  An al’a Turca quintet consisting of an ud, a ney, a tambour, a saz, and a davul stirred in their seats. An aide of Atatürk’s, a Rum of Italian descent, accompanied with an accordion. Cymbals clashed. The ney blew a melancholy breath, the musicians fumbled with their instruments as they slid into “La Cumparsita,” the tango of all tangos, in the minor key.

  The beat was sluggish at first, like a record playing at the wrong speed, but the momentum gained swiftly, as the music took baroque turns sounding like a circus overture.

  Atatürk walked over to the women’s side, bowed in front of Aida.

  Although an accomplished belly dancer, Aida had never been exposed to the waltz or the tango. But she was the queen and the king himself was inviting her to the dance arena. She flashed her radiant smile and allowed him to put his arm around her waist—ah, the touch of crepe d’amour—and lead her to the middle of the floor as if in a trance.

  They glided across the parquet like a pair of swans while everyone else watched, holding their breath. He held such dictatorship over this nubile beauty prone to having her way! She yielded to him with no resistance. No one could have guessed it was their first dance. As the accordion quivered, so did Aida, undulating her curvaceous hips, her supple shoulders and Atatürk, wearing an impeccably starched white grosgrain vest and a white papillon, his sun-bleached hair neatly slicked back, led with fluid steps despite his age, fashioning intricate poses and attitude, now bending Aida from the waist, now whirling her around the freshly polished parquet. To all eyes, they had become Fred and Ginger.

  Atatürk, mind you, unlike other scruffy politicians and dictators, was a man of extraordinary elegance, extraordinary grace—a narcissist, an exhibitionist of the first degree. They say, as a young man in Paris, he’d made it his business to learn the tango from the famous Argentine Carlos Gardel himself, anticipating the right moment to dazzle his subjects.

  The other male guests, trained to mimic their leader, walked one by one to the women’s side and steered their wives, sisters, daughters to the dance floor. Ah, what an evening! Tango on a pentatonic scale but soon drowned in the rapture of the dance itself, the bodies were rippling with their own compulsive rhythm to the voluptuous beat. The dancers contorted their bellies and snapped their fingers as if dancing the zeybek, a rhythmic pattern of nine beats, rather than a tango of four. But it was so inspired.

  The musicians, deciphering from the sheet music of the accordion player, freshly promoted to the position of band leader, expanded their fledgling repertoire to “La Violetera, Vida Mia, El Esquinazo,” and “Jalousie,” as the older ladies with babushkas watched the dancing couples, not knowing whether to smile or
scorn, whispering prayers and rolling their worry beads.

  At the end of the night, Atatürk handed Aida over to his first lieutenant, lo and behold none other than the barber’s handsome son, which he never should have done but, then again, no one can interfere with the hand of kismet. It’s written on one’s forehead at birth, they say. Atatürk’s kismet was never to make a family—perhaps why, in years to come, he would adopt nineteen children. His skills in patience and strategy, attack and retreat, had made him the finest of military leaders but he had miscalculated the power of youth. What a defeat!

  After that night, it was as though Aida had fallen under a mystical spell that suddenly gave her the power to attain anything. But still living within her world of carnal limitations, she was oblivious to this endowment. Even though her boundaries were vast, she was trapped in her flesh, bursting with the visceral urge of eros and confronted with the impossibility of going against one’s destiny.

  What happened that night after the contest? No one knew for sure but most presumed that the lieutenant simply drove Aida to the Palace and delivered her to the Leader. He sat in the silver Daimler the rest of the night, waiting.

  Some imagine, however, that he drove silently in Atatürk’s silver Daimler until they reached the top of Camlica, the highest hill overlooking the Bosphorus with the most splendid panorama. He stopped the car, raised Aida’s crepe d’amour skirt, and put it to his lips.

  This is one of those secrets we’ll never know for sure—except for Aida, Atatürk, and the young lieutenant.

  No one bothered washing out the rose stain on Aida’s dress, accepting it as a badge of honor. Not for a second did they doubt that it belonged to the great man and had to be preserved. They folded it carefully, and kept it in a trunk as though it were a holy relic. (Her niece Amber would inherit it later on.)

  The lieutenant now came here every day in Atatürk’s Daimler to collect Aida and brought her back at the hour of the wolf. Everyone in the family wishfully assumed, of course, that she was being delivered to the Leader, and although they were dying to know where the “couple” went, what they did, what he said to her, how she responded, no one asked questions and Aida’s own lips were sealed.

  She began to sleep till noon and in the afternoons stayed in her room, surrounded by exotic plants and birds, eating boxes of chocolate bonbons, maron glacées, Turkish delight, and colored marzipan in the shape of animals and fruit that her suitor had sent her.

  Before long, her body began to fill, and the family cheered, because although most efforts had been futile in getting her plump, obviously the great man’s sweetmeats were doing the magic—or so they thought but the women noticed the vacant gaze, the aloofness surrounding Aida since the beauty contest. She no longer seemed enthusiastic about her fittings, or priceless fabrics or designs from Iskender Bey’s travels.

  Everyone in the city knew that the Number One Daimler came to the İpekçi house every evening and left with the beauty queen. Droves of distant relatives, forgotten acquaintances appeared at my doorstep, trying to get a glimpse of the goddess—strangers dangling like evil-eye talismans from the tall stone wall surrounding the house. In response, Aida flaunted her own charms, modeling her legendary wardrobe, but in her own eyes she was absent, having dissociated from the needs of others. While she continued her secret outings, her body was also ripening. How women repeat their mothers’ sins!

  It happened at the end of Ramadan just like this: The family had woken up to a predawn feast. They came to the dining room in their sleeping clothes, huddled together sleepy-eyed around the copper brazier, but none would miss a delicious middle-of-the-night iftar feast for the sake of empty dreams.

  The servants brought tray after tray of delectables, forty different kinds of olives, boereks and dolmas stuffed with every possible nut and grain, green, red, purple vegetables and fruits, goat cheeses, Circassian chickens, giant baked mussels, numerous eggplant dishes, marrow and tripe soup with yogurt and peppermint, pita breads, baklavas, ashures, puddings, and helvahs. Fingers were into everything.

  Aida was out as usual. Papatya and Sibel, not really fasting but pretending to in order to feast with the rest of the family—that’s why those girls were always so plump.

  In the middle of their feast, they heard the engine of the familiar car and soon Aida came in, her hair tussled, her dress creased in her midriff—she was bursting in the middle. In her hand, she held a bowl of cocoons. She sat down next to her uncle Iskender and proceeded to crack the shells and devour the pupa as if eating pistachios.

  Everyone was speechless. Had their beauty gone loony?

  “Görücü will be visiting in the afternoon,” she announced casually. “Please, remove the sign from the gate.”

  Sighs, and squeals of delight rose from the women’s sweet throats.

  Iskender Bey told Aida he was proud, he knew she’d be a perfect wife for an important man, give him the best of children. She’d be a real queen. “May you and your husband grow old on the same pillow,” he blessed her, a father to the young woman since the Pasha’s passing.

  In her room, Aida cried all night. Normal, they thought for a bride-to-be.

  Great preparations took place the next day, the ladies eager to meet the Leader’s emissaries. But, alas, it was the barber’s wife who arrived with the görücü, asking Aida’s hand in marriage to her handsome lieutenant son.

  That’s when Iskender went to Aida’s room and took away the amber egg with the frozen cocoon inside.

  Fate has mysterious ways. Soon after the modest wedding, the lieutenant was sent to Germany as the military attaché and his wife accompanied him.

  “Aida,” they’d say later, “had the power to change family history but instead she chose an ordinary life and married a barber’s son.” Even though he’d become a great general later on, in their eyes he remained a flea. Blame it on beauty.

  After Aida left, Iskender Bey did not smile for years. Ending his travels in pursuit of the finest threads, he retired here with his consorts, irrevocably lost in a vacuous world of silk dreams.

  Spinster, n, 1. a woman who spins, whose occupation is to spin thread.

  ISKENDER AND AMBER

  The first time Iskender saw Amber was the end of silk harvest, a sultry June day—the end of Ramadan. Ever since Esma’s death, he had not returned to Izmir. In fact, he hadn’t gone anywhere for ages, cocooning himself with his silkworms and what little was left of the extended family.

  I remember how, meandering through the disarrayed trails of Mount Olympus, the araba labored up the unpaved road. I traced it along the foothills where peach orchards webbed out with fruit so large that branches lay about broken from the weight. In the valley below, the fog was hanging like a giant umbrella over the dung-brick farms and Pillars of dung smoke rose from the plateau where flocks of sheep grazed, blissfully oblivious to their imminent destiny.

  The araba rattled higher up the holy mountain road where bubbling hot springs oozed out of the sulfurous earth near the precinct called Grasshopper. The snowy peaks widened there, thawing into a landscape of silk plantations, where wild lavender and pink hyacinths scented the air, thinner and more damp at this higher altitude, prime for mulberry—and silk, of course. The best of its kind.

  Ambling through the avenue of white oleander hedges, the araba finally turned into the courtyard, lurched to one side, and came to a jolting stop. Cadri got off, took in the mountain air, and once again observed the complex of pavilions with colossal arches and columns shaded by cedars of Lebanon, surrounded with reflection ponds, small cascades, and fountains.

  I could sense the eyes darting behind the lattices. Shuffling of light feet along the corridors. Whispers. The doors opened as if by magic and a bevy of women—wrinkled old ladies with irrepressible babushkas, golden-teethed buxoms with gold bracelets jingling up to their elbows, the matriarchs with elephant legs—wobbled in through the great wooden doors.

  Cadri helped a young woman still in city clot
hes climb down the araba, followed by a maid holding the hand of a little girl.

  The women took a quick peek at the wife—rumors flying around. And, of course, later ogled the little girl, their latest progeny, passing her from arm to arm and lap to lap, pinching and kissing and squeezing until the child rebelled, burying herself under her mother’s armpits. Who could blame her uncertainty?

  Camilla would describe Mihriban later as a woman “with dehydrated skin so taut you can stretch a drum.” Mihriban’s eyes watered, seeing the child. She extended her bejeweled hand and baptized her with a flask of attar of roses.

  “The resemblance is uncanny. . . .”

  “Enough, enough,” the child shrieked as she rubbed her scratchy eyes; burnt with alcohol. But promised sour cherry sherbet made from the mountain snow, oh, she smiled, exposing two missing front teeth—uninhibited by the huge gap, seeing herself through the other’s eyes full of inexplicable adoration. She indeed was adorable.

  “So, what’s new?”

  “Oh, the General is just back from Korea. Missing an eye,” Mihriban explained.

  “Yes, yes, we heard. How awful that is.”

  “Aida went off with him to visit his mother. They should be back tomorrow for the Feast of Sacrifice.”

  “And their boy?”

  “No good,” Mihriban whispered to Cadri. “Like he’s swallowed a bad seed or something. Aida can’t tame Osman. But maybe now that the general is back, who knows?”

  Cadri and Camilla exchanged meaningful glances as if they shared a secret.

  Mihriban kept staring at the child. “Maallah. May the evil eye stay away from her angel face. How old are you now, Amber?”