Visitors poured in and out all morning, saying little while the İpekçi women scurried around with plates of pistachio marzipan, Turkish delight, and served homemade fruit liquors, which even the children were allowed during the Bayram. With each guest Amber toasted a shot of banana liquor, which she savored.
At lunchtime, they served the lamb roast on a bed of mint. Amber felt sick.
It must be all the banana liquor, Camilla thought. Gonca suspected the memory of sacrifice.
“It’s not the animal you saw,” she told Amber. “People never eat their own sacrifice. This is a gift from another plantation. It’s a sacrament to eat it.”
The child was noticeably distraught. Maybe she had affinities with animals, animist tendencies like herself. Finally she carried Amber to the room they shared, adjoining Cadri and Camilla’s suite, the one called “Solitude,” and put her down for a nap.
The walls always remained cool and humid from the stone and stucco. The room was furnished like a monastery, white piquet covers on the simple beds and nothing else except a vase of hyacinths. Out of the window, it overlooked a tranquil view of the mountain. Then, the infinite rows of mulberry trees.
Instantly, Amber was asleep.
She woke up midafternoon, an oppressive humidity filling the room, which even the laboring overhead fan could not subdue. Through the crack between the shutters, she could see the small herd of Angora goats tracking up the mountain, hear the music of their bells. As she lay on the bed observing the moth inside her amber rock, she suddenly sensed her aloneness. Camilla and the other women still had not returned from visiting relatives. Gonca was helping in the kitchen. And Cadri? Time when he would retire to his room to write poetry, a luxury he hadn’t had for a long time.
Amber jumped out of bed, ran across the corridor into the selam, the men’s quarters, shouting, “Baba, baba, where are you?”
A strange music drifted out of one of the rooms and the smoke of olibanum rose through the corridor. The door a crack open. She peeked into a jungle of velvet drapes, Buddha heads, carnivorous plants, golden braziers, ancient tombstones, assorted smoking-pipes, maps, musical instruments, peculiar ephemera. An ancient map of Asia Minor was titled “Map of Turquoise.” Clumps of brown photographs pinned on the walls. One showed two men dressed in Bedouin clothes smoking nargilehs in front of a coffee shop somewhere on the Silk Road, a backgammon board between them. Another showed Iskender on camelback dressed like a sheik.
In a corner of the room, Iskender sat cross-legged on the floor, in awesome concentration, writing on a lacy tobacco leaf with gilded ink. Without lifting his eyes from his work, he told her to come in. Amber walked over to his table, peered at what he was writing.
“What brings you to the men’s quarters?” he asked in a sonorous voice.
“When I woke from my nap, no one was around. I came looking for my baba.”
“Things have a way of disappearing when we sleep, don’t they? That’s why I stopped sleeping.”
“You don’t sleep?”
“We sleep only to dream. But if you can learn to dream while awake, sleep becomes unnecessary.”
“But how do you learn?”
“Sometimes we might stumble upon a passageway into dreams.”
She looked intently at his face. His right eye much brighter than his left. She had not noticed it before. In fact, one eye was blue, the other yellow.
“Just like the Angora cat at my grandparents Taşpinar’s house,” she told him.
“What is?
“Your eyes.”
Iskender smiled. He cranked up, raising himself with grace unusual for a man his age, faced the little girl.
“Your father’s gone walking to the silk hatcheries. But I’m here. You have nothing to fear,” he reassured, shaking her hand like an equal. Instantly, the difference in age melted between them. “Now, look at my hands,” he went on. “What do you see? They’re empty. Right?” In the air, he painted strange movements, then flashed a transparent scarf in violet. Indigo and blue followed. Green, yellow, orange, and red. Seven colors of the rainbow, seven veils. “Here, feel them. Just feel them. Touch them against your cheek, feel the warm supple beauty of their fiber. My finest silk spun by worms I’ve been crossing for decades to produce the most luminescent spit. Feel it, Amber.”
Amber stood across rubbing her cheeks against the silk with the tentativeness of stroking a fledgling dropped out of its nest.
“You’ll never feel anything finer, Amber,” he continued. “Our silk is better than the Chinese, which is the best in the world. Not many get a chance to touch the royal silk, you know, the spin of the queen moth. But a lucky star is following you all your life. Good thing, too, you’ll need it to balance your difficult kismet. But you better go now. I have a map to draw, hours to contemplate. Tomorrow I’ll show you how silk is made. All right? Go, now. Go, look into your amber stone. Maybe it will help you to learn to dream while you’re awake. Tell me later what you discover.”
Amber caught a glimpse of Iskender as she labored to close the heavy door. The old man readjusted his body, settled into a recline on a divan. From a small box, he pinched a piece of black paste, rolled it into a pea-sized ball, and stuck it into his strange-looking pipe. Then seared it with a hot poker from the brazier, inhaling the smoke.
“What is it?” Amber asked before shutting the door.
“Oh, the white poppy. Tastes like dung.”
“Then, why are you smoking it?”
“I close my eyes and watch images pass like an endless procession of caravans. So many worlds besides this one, Amber. Just a matter of finding your passageway. And some ways are better than others.”
Iskender propped himself up against dozens of pillows, keeping his gaze on a fern plant. He seemed transfixed. Looking at it, Amber saw at that moment what he saw. The sense of time had slowed down to such a degree that Iskender could actually see the young leaves uncurl into spiky fans. He could see plants grow like time lapse photography. Through his eyes, she saw the same.
It rained that night as it always did after the sacrifice, washing away the blood of the beasts. The rain concealed the slightest hint of the morning’s ritual—even the little handprint that had threatened the caretaker had been washed away by the incessant movement of water.
In the morning, while the women gossiped over breakfast, Amber slipped away, bouncing from pavilion to pavilion, from room to room, in pursuit of secret passageways—an escape hatch, a closet, a mirror. She opened door after door, seeking hidden worlds behind.
She entered a room, a woman’s room, atlas blue with painted stars. Garments of silk, colors of the moon. An ornately carved three-leaf vanity, inlaid with gems, reputed to have belonged to Aimée de Rivery, the great French Sultana.
Aida found the child in front of the mirror—smeared with rouge, kohled eyebrows, resembling the rambunctious shadow puppet, Karagöz, the Black Eyes. The vanity, the floors, Amber’s Bayram dress were all covered in pink dust. The blue perfume bottles were tipped open and an overpowering scent of lilac and violet filled the air. Amber was about to pass out from the scent when Aida walked in. Amber recognized her aunt immediately. She’d seen Aida’s pictures everywhere. In bathing suits and ball gowns, even one dancing with the great Atatürk. Amber pouted, cast down her eyes, expecting a reprimand. But Aida smiled, sat next to her, their image reflected in the mirror side by side.
This was the first moment Amber recognized her own vanity.
“Your scent, my little passion. You should never give it away. If anyone steals your scent, they can steal your soul, you know?” Aida explained.
She took a bottle, rubbed the little crevice between the child’s nose and lips. “Smell this, Amber, she said, you know what makes it so potent? Ambergris. Like your name. You know where it comes from? From the intestines of the sperm whale—a big, clumsy leviathan exuding this sensuous substance. Imagine! They kill big giant mammal-fish just to get this precious substance? What tragedy! But take a whiff
. Isn’t it to die for?”
Amber still pouted, peeking at her beautiful aunt, filtered under her baby long lashes, noticing Aida’s peach skin, the low-cut dress, exposing the half domes of her faintly freckled breasts. The left one had a birthmark, a crescent and a five-pointed star. She touched it unself-consciously and made tiny circles with her fingers.
“How did you get this?”
“A gift, Aida said, from the great genie. Remember, always put the lid on a perfume bottle immediately after using one! You know why? Because genies live in perfume bottles. When you open the bottle, the genie’s breath slowly escapes. That’s what we smell. Genie’s breath. But if you leave it open for too long, he loses his breath and has to escape to find another bottle. Once a genie leaves, he can never come back.”
Aida, put her arm around Amber, wiped her cheeks gently with a handkerchief until the harshness of red rouge began to fade. Two faint circles appeared, one on each cheek.
“There,” Aida said. “Not too much, nor too little. Beauty should never appear artificial.” She spat into her handkerchief, wiped off the kohl smudged all over Amber’s forehead, tried again. The blackness finally faded. “See how lovely you look now? My little sultana. And just a little lipstick now. Wouldn’t you like that?”
“Yes.”
“Of course, you would. But you shouldn’t purse your lips like wrinkled figs. Give us a smile now. Smile.”
Amber grinned to stretch her lips while Aida filled them with brilliant red, holding the tiny chin, lifting the child’s face up to the morning light, straying through the empty spaces of the lace curtain.
When Amber looked at the mirror, she grinned a toothless grin, pleased with herself. Her first vanity lesson. From her aunt, the former beauty queen.
Aida then led Amber to the reflection pond where she told her the story of Narcissus. How sooo beautiful the lad was, how he had fallen in love with his own image reflected in crystal clear water. “But when he wanted to possess this image of himself, he fell into the stream and drowned. You should never allow yourself to peer so deeply into anything that it could drown you, promise me, sugar peach?”
“All right.”
The following morning, Amber was initiated into the mysteries of sericulture. Iskender showed her everything—harvesting the cocoons, removing the chrysalis, setting free the moths so they could make more eggs.
“With patience, mulberry leaves become the finest fabric,” he explained. “Silkworms dislike eating wet leaves; therefore, you should never feed them when the leaves have dew but also be careful not to when the sun begins to warm the earth because they dislike eating hot leaves as well. When the silkworms have just been born you should keep them far from the kitchen, in a place where smells cannot intrude because they dislike having fish or meat nearby. They dislike grains being pounded. They dislike resonant objects like drums being struck. They are not happy when a woman who has recently given birth becomes their keeper; they are jealous of the baby and they can smell the milk in her breasts. They dislike it when a man making wine gives them mulberry leaves to eat; they dislike smoke and the smell of coffee. They dislike the smell of raki and of the seven sour herbs. They dislike rancid smells, the smell of musk, the smell of sex. They dislike it when dirty people come into the breeding house. They dislike it when, in the daytime, a window is opened to the wind. They dislike the light of the setting sun. When it is hot, they dislike a violent wind or a sharp cold. When it is cold, they dislike a sudden and excessive heat. They like silence.”
As the old man and the girl strolled through the mulberry groves, she asked why there wasn’t any fruit on the trees. “The one in our garden makes sweet purple berries,” she told him. “When they ripen, we lay sheets underneath, shake the tree, shake it until the berries rain from the branches. I love the taste of mulberries.”
He explained that his trees were of a different sort—the white mulberry, Morus alba, which bears neither flower nor fruit. Once upon a time it did, but this took so much vitality from making leaves that they had to be sterilized. Now, the essence of the tree is concentrated in its leaves instead. Look how thick and broad the leaves are. Tastes different, too. See? He put the leaf in his mouth, slowly chewed and swallowed it. He gave Amber a leaf as well but she made a face and shook her head. Then, they both burst into giggles.
Iskender told the story of every tree and stone, reinventing everything on the spur of the moment, spinning stories until they became completely ludicrous but still credible. He watched Amber’s face, roared with laughter at her gaping wonder.
He told her stories of the Silk Road, of places where people were yellow, where they ate monkeys. Of giant ants guarded by griffins digging up the earth for gold, of pearl divers who found treasures buried beneath the sea in dark and sinister caves, of skinny naked men who sat on beds of nails, of people who lived hundreds of years because they drank out of a special spring, of others who reclined in the shade cast by an enormous foot, of giants and unicorns, lions and tigers, jewels scattered everywhere like dust, the cobras that guarded them, and of perfumes and silk that grew on trees.
He led her to the egghouse. “Too small for you to see but look through this magnifying glass.” Clusters of silk eggs, pearly blue and translucent like their moths, resembling bunches of minuscule grapes. “We must keep the seeds—that’s what we call the eggs—cool and dormant to prevent hatching too early,” he explained. “Otherwise, we lose the silk.”
Next door, flatbeds stretched for the eggs getting ready to hatch. Everywhere, small white worms were creeping and crawling under blankets of straw while vigorously chomping the fine leaves with their massive jaws.
“They must eat freshly cut leaves day and night,” he explained. “The little buggers must always eat. They eat leaves twenty times their size. You know how many times they molt in their lifetime? Four times, discarding their outside skin but a new one grows underneath, giving them more, allowing new growth. You know how long it takes a caterpillar to make a cocoon? Three whole days! It’s a lot of work.”
Some of the worms were larger and they were beginning to spin cocoons for themselves, releasing twin gossamer threads out of their mouths. A gummy substance, sericin, bound the filaments together as well as forming the walls of the cocoon. By moving their heads from side to side, the silkworms lay the filaments in a series of figure eight, gradually building from wall to wall.
“The sericin sets hard and the cocoon develops into a peanut shape with the chrysalis inside. In a couple of weeks the chrysalis will break through the cocoon and emerge as a moth—and this we must avoid.”
In the cocooning room, large-breasted women, dressed in colorful cottons soaked from the steam that revealed their voluptuous curves, plunging cocoons into boiling water. Venus of Willendorf’s descendants.
“Why are they boiling the cocoons?”
“They have to. To dissolve the serecin,” he explained.
“What’s serecin?”
“The stuff that binds the silk thread—of course, this kills the chrysalis inside—so that they’re unable to disturb the cocoons in their struggle to hatch.”
A woman caught the lead thread, began unwinding it. Then, attached it to something like a pulley. Another pulled out with a tweezers the dead pupas, wingless, eyeless moth embryos. One by one she cast them into a basket so that they’d become fertilizers for the mulberry.
“But I don’t like them killing those baby moths,” Amber told Iskender.
“They’re not born yet,” he reassured her while grabbing a basket full of pupa. “They haven’t yet captured their spirits. It’s the life cycle, unavoidable. Come, let’s go feed the peacocks now.”
Sitting under a mulberry tree waiting for the peacocks to come out of their roost, Amber asked him about the passageways again. How to enter those other worlds.
He read her a story about a girl named Alice who followed a white rabbit into his hole, finding herself in a strange, mysterious world. About this ca
terpillar who talked to Alice. Pictures in the book showed deformed creatures. A girl with a very long neck, an ugly man with an enormous top hat, a caterpillar sitting on a mushroom. “In the East, there’s a special breed of caterpillars that smoke hookahs.”
“Do caterpillars have dreams?” she asked.
“Certainly. The most amazing kind.”
“How do you know?”
“You have to be very, very old to understand that. Plants, animals, people, gods—all share the same dream.”
“What do you do when you go off with Uncle Iskender?” Camilla asked as she braided Amber’s hair before tucking her in at night. “Where do you go?”
“Nowhere. We wander around. Seeing things.”
“What things?”
“Silk houses. Moths and caterpillars and imago and pupa.” (The way she pronounced those words!)
“You should be playing with children your age. Your cousins, for example. Maybe you ought to go with Osman to shoot pheasant tomorrow. He offered to take you.”
“He’s creepy. And I don’t want to see dead birds. All you want me to do here is to see dead animals.”
“But you should leave Uncle Iskender alone. If you get too close to old people, you begin to smell like them, your skin shrivels. They feed off you. Besides, the mulberry groves are alive with black, deadly poisonous snakes. I don’t like you vanishing all day long. All right?”
Amber continued disappearing and every day after she returned, Camilla probed, “What else do you do? Where else do you go?”
“Sometimes to the hyacinth garden; we smell each and every hyacinth. Sometimes we sit all day long by a brook, watching everything that floats, the leaves, the bugs, the twigs, and things like acorns, like peach seeds, and stuff. I saw a chameleon that changed into the color of purple hyacinths. I even saw a camel being born.”
“My God! He made you watch it?”
“The baby camel came out in a milky sort of a cocoon. The mother licked it, immediately it stood up on four wobbly legs. It’s really cute, anne. Uncle Iskender said I can have it.”
Seven Houses Page 9