Seven Houses

by Alev Lytle Croutier

  “Six and ten months.”

  “May the angels protect her, Cadri. Such a smart little girl. Is she doing well in school?”

  “Chok. Already reads and writes and knows the numbers. Prefers books over dolls. Reads all the time. Likes to draw pictures. She has curiosity for sure.”

  “Maallah. A thousand blessings on your mother, Cadri. If she could only see us all like this!” Then, more tears and the sound of rolling worry beads.

  “I think she can,” Amber cut in unexpectedly.

  Heads turned around with sudden alarm. The child obviously crossed to the invisibles like the others but she should be made to forget them. She should be distracted. Or else she’ll grow pixilated. Like Esma.

  A sudden telepathic force swarmed above them, like the kind that begins and ends frogs’ songs or a flying goose taking the lead of a flock. Whispers faded into a gradual hush. The old man had entered the room, wearing a full-length bearskin—Iskender’s thermostat was reversed—cold in the summer, hot in the snow. Leaning on his walking stick, shifting his weight, pushing off with the silky smooth movements of an eagle gliding. Remote and elegant, he passed his hand around the room with an air of indifference until the little girl kissed it at her turn, touched it to her forehead, and caught his eye as she lifted her head.

  “What is your name, child?” His voice cracking slightly, obviously touched by the resemblance.

  The girl took his hand and wrote the letters with her index finger inside his palm.

  “A-M-B-E-R,” he spelled. “Amber. The divine liquid of great purity. It becomes you.” Then, he turned to her and smiled a smile worth a thousand smiles.

  No one had thought he’d ever smile again. Iskender had not cut a smile for so long. How many years? One forgets. Since Aida’s beauty contest maybe. Or before, when he and Esma were estranged. How touching that was.

  “You have crooked teeth,” the child told the old man and he looked very sad for a moment, then leaning on his cane left the room for another distraction. Or maybe to find some solace in his confused heart.

  “You shouldn’t have said that! You should never say such things to your elders,” Camilla scolded Amber. “You made him leave.”

  “But he does. It’s the truth.” Darkness came over the child’s face, a deep sadness children are immune to.

  “She’s tired. She needs a siesta,” Camilla apologized. “I’ll take her away.”

  The young family lingered on a verandah the rest of the afternoon, enclosed in steaming glass like orchids. They were meditative and languid, stretched out on the sagging wicker chairs with loose joints, listening to the sounds of the fountain playing through the French doors. Gonca fanned the child while Cadri wrote in his little black diary and Camilla crocheted a bonnet for some relative’s baby until she was unable to move her limbs or lips.

  Amber tried to ignore the flies, burying herself in a new coloring book, The Great Women in History, line drawings, identified as Cleopatra, Queen of Sheba, Florence Nightingale—all glamorous like movie stars. But it was Joan of Arc that she was transfixed on, hands tied, face anguished, peeled by flames—or so it seemed. Amber wondered what it would feel like to burn so much, like a lamb turned on the spit. How it would sizzle and fizzle, the way it did the time she stuck her hand on the brazier and touched the embers breathing with such beauty. An early lesson. When you play with fire, you get scars.

  As the setting sun smudged the sky before vanishing behind the mountain, the pounding of the distant kettledrums reverberated through the valley. A hundred times, announcing the end of Ramadan. They immediately broke their fast with a ritual olive, wrinkled and greasy, mumbled blessings, gulped down the rosewater with roasted pinions. So ended the thirty days of fasting, what awaited them now was a great feast.

  Aida’s son Osman arrived late from quail hunting with the caretaker. He was a slight lad, beginning to get fuzz on his face, and his voice dropped to a pebbly baritone. When he sat down, a heavy silence surrounded the table as if their unity was disturbed, as if they feared to agitate him, as if to avoid his tantrums.

  “Tripe again!” he groaned, making a farting sound. “Never anything decent to eat around here. Either tripe or trout.”

  “What’s tripe?” Amber asked.

  Osman looked at her with a chilling hunger, as I witnessed the culmination of my fears.

  “Where their shit travels before coming out,” he carried on, something obscene about his mouth, his lips like the inside of a snail.

  “Don’t listen to him,” Cadri interfered. “He’s shameless. Tripe is the stomach, not what he says it is.”

  “I’m not eating,” Amber whined.

  Camilla crossed her worry lines together. “A guest must eat what she’s offered.”

  Amber shook her head again. Camilla dove with her spoon into her daughter’s soup, stuck it in the girl’s mouth. Amber pushed her hand away, splattering the soup on the freshly starched tablecloth. Camilla’s hand hit her cheek.

  “She doesn’t have to eat it,” Mihriban told Camilla. “It’s all right. Children don’t have much taste for tripe anyway. It’s all right, you see?”

  “But the tablecloth.”

  “Don’t worry. It will come out in the wash.”

  As the family dispersed after dinner, Osman talked Amber into going with him to the library. Something inside her told her not to but she went anyway. She was testing the boundaries of her fear. He showed her a children’s illustrated version of a Koran with pictures of different prophets and saints. Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed.

  Osman pointed at a white-bearded man wearing a dress like a burnoose, looking at a sheep hanging down from the sky.

  “This is Abraham. God asked him to sacrifice his son, a boy named Ishmael, to prove his devotion. Abraham loved God so much—much better than his sons, better even than his own life—so he agreed. He took the little boy—who was about your age—on top of a mountain just like this Mount Olympus here and was about to cut his throat,” he made a slashing gesture.

  “But how could he do it to his own son?”

  “Parents are evil.”

  Amber wanted to get away, to disappear but the hallway was long and dark. He would follow her and catch her. He was so much bigger. Then, they heard some footsteps.

  “But Allah lowered a sheep from the sky. So, Abraham sacrificed it instead, winning God’s love,” Mihriban interfered. “That’s why we sacrifice sheep every Bayram, to give our thanks for saving the little boy’s life. Come with me now, sweet child. Let’s go to the hamam. We’ll do some henna and I’ll tell you more stories.”

  Maybe she also possessed a sixth sense.

  The hamam is decorated entirely with tiles—tiles of birds, of flowers, and an enormous tree of life—all fired in Kutahya, the slim Byzantine columns supporting the stained glass dome, remnants of the legendary Theodora’s basilica. Underneath, the natural sulfur springs are still bubbling. Around the edges of the pool, a rust color had formed from the persistent steam.

  “Smells like rotten eggs,” Amber complained when she came in, pinching her nose.

  She watched through a curtain of mist, the women wrapped in peshtemals, undressing in the tepidarium. Stubby legs, fat hips waddled around sideways. Fat so unkind to flesh in age.

  Mihriban pumiced Amber’s back. Lots of tension in the little body.

  “Did you know Cleopatra and the Queen of Sheba bathed in this pool?”

  “They did?”

  “Oh, every thermal town in Asia Minor claims the same,” Camilla interfered.

  “They sure did,” Mihriban continued ignoring her. “This water is so precious that once upon a time, long before even Cleopatra and the Queen of Sheba, a vicious dragon with seven heads guarded it, not allowing a soul near its source.”

  “Every spring the people had to sacrifice a maiden so that the dragon would spare them some water. Without water there’s no life. You know that, don’t you? Without water everything dies. So, they had n
o choice but to sacrifice their daughters to the dragon until the women stopped rearing children, terrified of giving birth to girl babies.

  “Hearing this tragic and unjust story, a young lad traveled far from another land beyond the Aegean. He arrived at the fountain just at the moment the last maiden was tied to a rock, about to be sacrificed. This daring young man confronted the dragon, unsheathed his sword, and with one strike, slush, slash, he decapitated the monster, rescuing the terrified maiden.”

  Mihriban had told the story so many times that she had come to believe that it actually had happened.

  Amber opened her eyes, “And then?”

  A girl was passing around a pot of the greenish mud-like stuff—all except Camilla were dipping their hands and feet in the pots and sliding into mitts. Amber too held out her hands.

  “You’ll have bright-orange hands like peasant girls,” Camilla said.

  “I don’t care. I want to be hennaed.”

  “Your friends will make fun of you when we go back.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Go ahead then. Have your hands done, see if I care, but not your feet because I don’t want you to slip and fall when you get up in the middle of the night to pee. You’ll break your neck with those mummy bandages on.”

  Amber turned to Mihriban again, “And then what happened?”

  “Then, the townspeople were so happy that they made the youth their Sultan. He married the young maiden and they lived happily ever after and people never worried about water again. The spring flowed freely, bringing healing to people. So ends the story. Three apples have fallen from a tree—one belongs to you, one to me, and the last to the storyteller.”

  The hypnotic rhythm of the water, the hollow sounds of wet wooden clogs, the soothing hands gliding over her fine skin lulled Amber into a hypnotic slumber as the stories went once again late into the night, turning into women’s gossip.

  Amber tossed and turned all night in the bed she was not accustomed to—everything of eiderdown. All night long, the eerie bleating of the sheep wove in and out of silence. The chill of her damp hands, the feculent smell of henna, and outside, the sheep’s anticipatory cries wove into peculiar dreams until Gonca shook her out of sleep around sundown so that she could see them “do it.”

  “Children should be accustomed to things like this. It’s all part of becoming a grown-up,” her father had told Amber. “It won’t hurt so much when you see it again. Pain loses its strength with repetition.”

  Gonca removed the bandages. The child squealed with delight at her bright-orange hands. Rinsing off the henna.

  “But how could he do that to his son?”

  “Who?”

  “Abraham.”

  “They believe no love is greater than the love of the Divine.”

  When Amber and Gonca walked down to the meadow, a group had gathered around a black-and-white sheep with a red ribbon around its horns, already blindfolded, its legs tied to a stump. Osman stood next to a man with octopus eyes and menacing black mustache, who was sharpening his knife against a whetstone as the others stood in silence. Amber caught the man’s dark gaze. She looked away.

  “That man, I saw him in a dream,” she told Gonca.

  “Murat? He’s just the caretaker.”

  “He was going around with a scimitar, slashing a field of watermelons, which turned into heads of people, separated from their bodies. Let’s go away, Nanny. I don’t want to watch.”

  “Be patient,”

  Although some plantation hands held down the beast, tensing with all its might, it began bleating as if sensing this holy menace.

  “Can’t you see, it’s crying for help,” Amber told Gonca, squeezing her hand. “Please, do something. Please.”

  “Hang on, child, it’s almost over. We must make ourselves stay to the end. Your parents wanted you to watch, you know?” She pulled the hair off Amber’s eyes so that the child could see better. Amber covered her face with her hands but peeked between her fingers—an irresistible impulse.

  In a flash, the knife hit the jugular; an enormous fountain of blood squirted out of the sheep’s throat as it convulsed and shook, convulsed and shook. The blindfold slipped; its eyes became fixed on an invisible spot somewhere in the distance, at the last moment opening its mouth to make a sound but squirting a flood of red flourish instead.

  No one remembers what happened at that moment but suddenly Amber was kneeling next to the sheep. She put her hand on the animal’s throat where a stream of blood was gushing. Although Gonca caught up and steered her away from the dead animal, a bloody imprint of the tiny hand remained on the stump for some time, which they were unable to remove.

  Murat had already removed the skin and slashed the belly; the entrails spilled out, delicate membranes of transparent pinkish tubes, vessels, great soft sculptural shapes of kidneys and liver and heart and eyes and sweetbreads and brain. Within minutes, the sheep was chopped into its components, ready to be distributed among the poor who were already gathering outside the gates.

  Amber cast a last furtive glance. First time seeing the death of a substantial being. She began throwing up. Gonca rushed her to her room and gave her some chamomile tea. She washed the child, painted her toes with blood-red nail polish, then, dressed her in her new Bayram dress with purple pansies, a giant bow in her hair of the same fabric. When Amber saw her image in the mirror, she began to cry.

  “I don’t know why,” Gonca said. “Please, don’t cry. I won’t tell your parents what happened. And no one, no one else will know. I promise. Run along now. Kiss everyone’s hands and collect your loot. But you’re not supposed to count it till you’re alone.”

  In the lemonier, jewelry discreetly chimed, the women were basking in musky perfumes as they fanned themselves. Amber went around the room kissing hands and collecting a handkerchief from each containing coins while they fussed about her new Bayram dress. “Çok güzel, çok yakişmiş. Maşallah.”

  After it was all over, she slipped out onto the verandah where she could be alone to count her booty. She did not notice that she wasn’t alone.

  It was mostly brass coins with a hole in the center. Thirty-two liras in all. Quite a score! She dreamed of the chocolate gaufrettes she could get that came with trading cards of movie stars—Esther, Liz, Marilyn, Gina, Elaine Stewart, Patricia Medina. She dreamed of a Faber watercolor set with forty-eight different colors. And lots of paper to draw houses.

  Suddenly, she became aware of the other presence. Iskender was watching her. “How much have you collected?” he asked.

  “About fifty,” Amber lied, startled somewhat.

  “You could do better. Maybe more hands to kiss?”

  Amber took the wrinkled hand with the beautiful blue veins, touched it to her lips, then her forehead.

  Iskender squeezed her nose. “Close your eyes.” He slipped something in her palm. “Now open your eyes. Hold it to light.”

  A yellow transparent stone, the size of a plum. Inside, a perfectly preserved moth, the facets of its eyes, veins in its wings, even the combs of its antenna as vivid as life, climbing out of its cocoon.

  “It’s beautiful. What is it?”

  “Amber. Like your name.”

  “Where did it come from?”

  “No one knows.”

  He explained to her that amber originally was ambergris but afterward, through some confusion, came to mean this translucent fossil resin that entombs insects. “In French amber gris is gray amber; amber jaune, yellow amber. The Greeks called it elektron—where the word “electricity” comes from—or “substance of the sun.”

  “When you hold a piece of amber to the sun, it attracts the sunshine to itself and explodes with celestial brilliance. The first people made fire by rubbing two pieces of amber together. Zip-zap. Without amber there would be no fire. And without fire, no civilization.”

  “But where does it really come from?”

  “Well, a long, long time ago, there was nothing but
trees. Great broadleaf conifers interspersed with hardwoods formed vast forests on the earth. When it rained endlessly, lakes, rivers, oceans formed. These trees felt the fate of the world (by fate he meant kismet, of course) and wept resins. After the ice melted, the entire surface of the earth was covered with amber. Yellow fossil glazed the surface, the rocks, even the tops of old trees. Can you imagine what it must have looked like?”

  “Lemon candy?”

  “Liquid gold. Anyway, many, many years later, the waves eroded the coastal sediments, revealing amber-rich layers of earth. You see, amber is so light that it floats in saltwater. So, millions of pieces of amber, trapped in seaweed, washed up to the beaches, especially after tumultuous storms—hurricanes, monsoons, tempests, typhoons, siroccos, tsunamis.”

  Amber peered again in deep fascination at the tiny moth emerging from the fluffy white cocoon, all happening so fast that the moth had not been able to escape before the resin had hardened.

  “Is it the silk moth? The Bombyx?”

  Iskender slouched forward, leaning on his cane with both hands, and laughed. “How did you know about the Bombyx?”

  “Everyone knows.”

  “No, not exactly. But since you asked, it’s an ancestor, I’m sure. Millions of years old. Here, take it. It’s yours now but promise not to show it to anyone and not to betray your fate. Promise?”

  “Why?”

  “Because it has great fields of attraction and ultimately can be taken away from you. Adults don’t like children possessing such powerful things.”

  “Why?”

  They heard Camilla calling Amber. She came out to the verandah, seeing the child and patriarch in such intimacy.

  “Amber, what are you doing here? Iskender Bey, I hope she’s not intruding.”

  “Not in the least. We’re already old friends.”

  The mother snatched the girl away. As Amber waved good-bye, something in the casual way she dangled her wrist threw Iskender back in time. He saw fragments of his life flash before him. Everything condensed into a second and everything in motion.