Seven Houses

by Alev Lytle Croutier

  “He’s lost his marbles,” Camilla said exasperated. “Senile old creature. He knows it’s ridiculous. He knows camels are not allowed in modern cities!”

  “He said he’d keep it here for me. I could play with it when we visit again.”

  “It’s all so weird. And look, your skin is getting parched like leather. You’re under too much sun. You’ll suffer sunstroke. Look at those dark circles under your eyes. From now on, you’re going to take a siesta every afternoon. Every afternoon. And castor oil three times a day. Understand? Tomorrow you’ll go off with Osman.”

  That night, after the grounds settled into a surfaceless silence, except for the occasional hooting of owls and the eerie symphony of singing frogs, Cadri and Camilla sat out in the East verandah in darkness, smoking an endless chain of cigarettes.

  “He took her to see a camel giving birth,” Camilla told Cadri in a whisper. “Can you believe it? She shouldn’t watch things like that; they will contaminate her mind with disturbing images. She’ll never forget such things.”

  “We made her watch the sacrifice.”

  “That’s different. It’s tradition. It has meaning.”

  “And you want her to go hunt pheasant with Osman?”

  “That’s a sport.”

  “He’s a bad kid. Troublesome.”

  “I think he is just neglected. Aida couldn’t bear losing her first child. He needs friends. He needs assurance.”

  Cadri took a long puff of his cigarette. Obviously, he did not want to waste time in contradicting Camilla.

  “I’m tired of this strange place. It gives me the creeps to be here with that weird uncle of yours. When are we returning to Izmir?” Camilla asked.

  “He wants us to stay till the colors turn.”

  “We can’t stay that long. I can’t stand it here. I don’t like what’s happening to Amber. I want to leave right now, Cadri. Yes. Tell him, I’m ill or something.”

  Amber spent interminable hours lying in bed, looking at her amber and the moth that had almost succeeded in escaping—but only almost. One-half was still inside the cocoon. She dreamed of the Stone Age shamans on the Black Sea coast, carving small, curious amber figurines with expressionless faces that Iskender had told her about. Or the Amber Room in the palace of Tsarskoye-Selo with walls covered entirely in a jigsaw puzzle of a hundred thousand intricately cut, perfectly matched pieces of amber. One day, all the amber had mysteriously disappeared never to be found again.

  The next morning, she resisted going hunting with Osman. She resisted as if some instinct was warning her of a sinister and mysterious intrusion. He scared her, poking around with his rifle like a bad soldier, pretending it was a bayonet.

  But there she was walking behind him as he slashed the gentle wheat grass, the wild hyacinths. Stamped on them. Shot at songbirds like nightingales and shot rabbits.

  Osman was a ruthless soldier. Once they had strayed away from the sight of the buildings, he led Amber into a silo where the extra cocoons were stored. He put the rifle down, his hands pushed her on the ground. She was wearing a yellow eyelet dress.

  “Take off your dress.” he ordered. “I want to see what you have underneath.”

  Who knows what kind of an impulse led Iskender to the silo that morning? A fateful twist. He had hurried all the way from his pavilion to the silo with the velocity and vigor of a young lad. He materialized like an old wizard, see all, know all. He was as fierce as the God who had ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son. He took the gun and shooed the boy with his stick—the one in which he had smuggled the silk eggs. And scooped the little girl off the ground, before she had known shame, with the tenderness of an archangel.

  “The ice lands of Kars is where the boy belongs. Bad eggs should not be allowed to hatch,” he mumbled, fuming. “I’ll keep him locked up for forty days and forty nights in the silo.”

  Amber had aged years in those few moments of terror. She felt gravity compress her body. Iskender was her only ally. She took his hand, together they walked to the reflection pond, her favorite place, watched the way the colors caught in the lacunae of the surface. Liquid hours passed drowning in each other’s eyes, each impulse drawing them closer to a world outside of this one, surrounded by an invisible shield that allowed no one else to perceive them. They uttered sounds, danced dances without the limitations of their bodies, sculpting perfect environments to nurture their play.

  The others wondered where the old man and the little girl went, why they never saw the two. It pleased them that the patriarch had found happiness once again but the bond between the two became an object of curious jealousy. In fact, Iskender and Amber often walked in everyone’s periphery but no one ever noticed. They had drifted into an invisible world of silk.

  “Let’s go to the house of colors today,” he told her gleefully. “It’ll cheer you up.”

  From sky-high rafters hung yards of white like snow, the red like the flames of the setting sun, the blue finer than the feathers of storks, the black like a fluttering raven. The living colors reflected their opposites like changent taffeta as the cloth moved, shifting hue with each quiver. Finely woven webs as brilliant as emeralds, silk brocades with flowers in seven colors, atlas blue and turquoise satins, shimmering fabrics woven with carnelian thread, embroideries of turquoise stones set in gold. Colors had awakened, spreading everywhere.

  “Many come from fruit rinds and tree insects,” Iskender explained, lost in their resonance. “The purple I get from crawfish, the red from sumac. Burgundy from madder. The orange from golden chanterelles. But in each, there’s a secret element. A secret only I own.”

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “Watch me,” he said.

  They steeped a sheet of crepe de chine in the bubbling pools of color. Amber soaked the raw silk in the yellow liquid. When she pulled it out, the color had turned into a bright canary. Iskender told her to dip it now into the blue pool.

  She watched it transform into a green like the tiles of the Emerald Mausoleum, like the center of a peacock’s feather. She submerged another sheet in the red and the blue pools, which made it purple as eggplant; red and yellow together turned orange. She asked him if this would happen every time she mixed colors.

  “You have to find out for yourself. Colors have their own secrets, you know?”

  That same afternoon, Cadri and Camilla sat by the fountain so that their voices would be muffled by the running water while a houseful of relatives wandered about the gardens.

  “Where do they go? What do they do? What does he want from Amber?” Camilla nagged Cadri.

  “Calm down, Camilla. He adores her. He’s an old man. Obviously, they have an unusual connection. Maybe she reminds him of my mother. Who knows? He never forgave himself for what happened to her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My mother had a lover. Uncle Iskender sent him away.”

  “I can’t believe it. Your mother seemed so . . . what happened to the lover?”

  “No one really knows. Most likely killed in the Liberation War. He never returned. It destroyed my mother. She had a child by him. She had to give her up, too. Mihriban and the Pasha pretended she was theirs to save face.”

  “Aida! God almighty. You never told me these things. Why did you never tell me?”

  “No one had ever told me either. But some things you just know. Everyone does, no one talks about.”

  “Things begin to make a little more sense now. Wish I’d known . . .”

  Only the water filled the long silence that followed as they inhaled their gold-tipped Sobranies, deep in thought.

  “He’s a selfish old man,” Camilla continued.

  “He’s my uncle.”

  “A lecher. Four wives. Selma was sixteen when he took her. Don’t forget that.”

  “That was a long time ago, Camilla, for heaven’s sake. People got married early in those days. My mother was fourteen when she married my father. And you know how old he was? Forty!”

>   “Perverts. Can’t you see the fire in his eyes when he looks at Amber. We have to separate them, Cadri. It’s unsavory.”

  “You’re misinterpreting the ways of the spirit.”

  Cadri stood up and went through the trellised garden gate and walked down a tidy path edged with pale hydrangeas, flat and tiny like a paper doll, already pudgy and slouching though he had not yet reached midlife. As always, even when he had been a little boy, he was impeccably dressed in a wrinkled linen suit, two-toned shoes, dark shades, and Panama hat. He paused for a minute to clean his wire-rimmed glasses with his handkerchief. Maybe it was best they left this place soon. Camilla’s anxiety was beginning to creep under his skin although it pleased him to no end to see the patriarch and the girl wallowing in such bliss.

  Amber was sitting in the “Silence” pavilion, drawing pictures of the buildings. She seemed to have an extraordinary sense of perspective and space, an uncanny ability to transform the ordinary lines into magic. She knew how to draw houses. Now she was putting color on all things.

  Cadri called out her name. He had a passion for panoramas, rather what they evoked. Time for the daily catechism before sunset, she knew. She ran down to join him. They walked hand in hand to the edge of the plateau. Cadri pointed at the domes, the minarets of Bursa in the distance, the toy city beyond the dust-covered valley.

  “See that green mosque with two minarets?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know what it’s called?”

  “No.”

  “The Emerald Mosque. See the green mausoleum next to it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know what it’s called?”

  “The Emerald Mouseleum?” Is that where they keep mice?

  “Excellent. Good sense of deduction. Now, see the green city stretching below us?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know what it’s called?”

  “The Emerald City?”

  “Nice simple logic. Bursa, the verdant city. Once the capital of the Ottoman Dynasty, the most illustrious empire of its time. Once the center of the world. Now, tell me who built the mosque?”

  “The Emerald Sultan?”

  “Good try. But no such person,” he laughed. “It was Sultan Mehmet I. And he was?”

  “A Padishah?”

  “Good. What number?”

  “Number seven” (she guessed).

  “He was the fifth padishah of the Ottoman Empire. He is buried right there in the Emerald Mausoleum with eight others—they say one was a mysterious Byzantine sultana. What are you holding in your hand?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on, let me see.”

  “There’s nothing.”

  “Let me see.” He pried her hand open and pulled out the amber egg. “Where did you find this?”

  Amber shrugged her shoulders. Cadri held it up to the light, then looked at it more carefully under his magnifying glass. He had a disturbed look on his face.

  “Do you know what this is?”

  “An amber egg with a moth inside but it isn’t the Bombyx.”

  “Who gave it to you?”

  “I found it,” she lied. “I found it there,” she pointed to the orchard.

  “Does anyone else know you have it? Have you shown it to anyone?”

  She shook her head.

  “You mustn’t tell anyone,” he warned her as he slipped it in his pocket. He seemed serious and contemplative.

  “Give it back. It’s mine. I found it,” Amber fought back. “Give it back to me. I’m not supposed to part with it.”

  “I’m your father. I’ll keep it for you. I can’t let you lose it. Besides . . .”

  “I found it. I won’t lose it. Give it back. Give it back to me, baba, give it back.”

  But when Cadri walked away from her, Amber realized she had lost her precious gift. Iskender had warned her. He had warned that it could be taken away from her. She walked away, crushed under a sense of betrayal she could not name. She bit her lips till she drew blood but did not cry.

  Cadri walked to the men’s quarters to see his uncle. As they took their meal alone, he told Iskender that this was their last supper together. They had to return to Izmir earlier than expected. Camilla was ailing. The mountain air disagreed with her. The altitude lowered her blood pressure, she was prone to fainting spells.

  “I can send for a doctor or a witch.”

  “I’m afraid she won’t see anyone but her own doctor. As for a witch, she’s repelled by them. Besides, I have a great deal of work to do.”

  “If you must, then you must. But leave the child here for a while longer. The mountain air agrees with her. She loves the silk. She’s happy here, Cadri. Let her and the maid come back to Izmir later.”

  “I can’t. Camilla couldn’t consider being separated from Amber. She doesn’t even like letting her out of her sight for a few minutes.”

  “You have a stubborn wife—unnecessarily possessive. This will only chase away the child. Don’t forget, dreams of a six-year-old are so vast they could encompass her whole future. They could determine her journey through life. Amber has deep imagination. I read her forehead, which makes me think she’s got the mana to be a matriarch someday. Once, I’d hoped the same of your mother, then of Aida, but they both disappointed me. I pray Amber will be different.”

  “It’s a great deal to expect from a small child.”

  “Surely, you too must sense it.”

  “Yes,” Cadri said. “I do.”

  Amber listened behind the latticed screen to the unfathomable murmurings, trying to make sense. What was mana? Something in her that would turn her into a matriarch. Into an old crone like Mihriban, into one of those wrinkled women, dried-up beings resigned from this world who sat on their chairs day and night, watching the doves mate, contemplating the death angel? And did they think she was an old ghost? She was possessed?

  Cadri returned to their quarters. Amber left her hiding place and went to Iskender’s room.

  “My amber egg is gone,” she told Iskender. “He took it from me.”

  “Who did?”

  “My father. I want it back.”

  “He did? Don’t worry. You’ll get it back. I’ll see to it.”

  After sundown, as she watched the goats wandering up the mountain, Amber noticed Cadri in the shadows talking to a man in rural clothes. The two men made angry gestures at one another, arms thrust violent slashes in the air, spit glistened, lizards poured out of their mouths. She recognized Murat, the caretaker, the one who had cut the sheep’s throat, the one who slashed the watermelons in her dream.

  Cadri threw his hands up in the air, began walking away but Murat followed him, cut in front. The hands violated the air again. Then Cadri shook his head for the longest time, paused for a moment before reaching inside his pocket. He pulled out something too small to see from such distance. Gave it to Murat. Murat held it in the light. They looked at each other for an excruciating moment without a word. Murat put the object in his pocket and walked toward the men’s quarters.

  That night Amber lay on her bed, pretending to be asleep until the common breathing of everyone confirmed they were no longer awake. Leaping over snoring Gonca, she slipped quietly out the side door, her knees weak. As she crossed the corridor, it felt as though invisible hands were reaching out of the walls. A black night; nothing in the sky. Though she could not see her way clearly, she kept walking, her heart about to leap out of her fragile chest.

  Iskender was waiting at the lemonier. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “Here give me your hand. You don’t need light to walk in the dark. Hush. Just listen to the night’s voice. Extend your arms when you take a step. Make sure you always check the three directions and know what’s behind you. Breathe calmly. Imagine in your mind what you want to see and you will.”

  “Where are we going?” Amber asked.

  “It’s a surprise. Follow me.”

  “I’m afraid. I can’t see anything. I don’t want to step on
a giant black snake or anything.”

  “No snakes here, child. That’s why we have so many birds.”

  “My mother said there were big black snakes.”

  “She was lying. Not one snake here. Nothing to be afraid of. Here, take this key. As you go, scratch your initials on trees if fear grabs you. Writing your name has the power to protect you.”

  So she did. ASI. ASI. ASI. Over and over and over.

  “You know what your initials mean? They mean a rebel. Asi. Are you a rebel, Amber?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think you are.”

  The night walk seemed interminable. Despite Iskender’s confidence, judging from the way they avoided obstacles, the pounding of Amber’s heart was strong enough to agitate the quiet night.

  Iskender stopped abruptly. “We’re standing at the edge of a cliff and you can now see them down below in the ravine,” he told her. “Look.”

  They began to materialize like stars in the early evening sky. One, at first. Two, five, a dozen, hundreds imperceptibly but unlike stars, they moved against the fatal background, flashing themselves, dancing around, disappearing and reappearing until they surrounded Iskender and Amber as if nibbling their shadows. Her dress was covered with hundreds of twinkling fireflies.

  “They’re beautiful,” Amber gasped. She caught one. “Can I keep it?”

  Iskender emptied the powder in his snuffbox and gave it to her. “If you like, but you might be disappointed in the morning.”

  Amber stuck it in the box.

  “But I have something for you that’s indestructible,” Iskender said. “Close your eyes and open your palm.”

  She did. But the unexpected happened at that moment. Iskender lost his balance and the object went flying off.

  “Oh, no!”

  They began searching the ground for the amber egg. They crawled and felt with their hands but the amber egg was nowhere to be found. Amber began to cry.

  Iskender conforted her. “Now, now, no tears. Don’t worry. Tomorrow when the sun comes out, we will find it. Please don’t worry.”

  He took her hand and they returned long past midnight.

  Gonca was at the gate, carrying a flashlight; she grabbed and shook Amber. “Where have you been, Amber?”