Seven Houses

by Alev Lytle Croutier

  The lights were on in Cadri and Camilla’s room. Camilla was lying on the bed, pale and limp, while Cadri was making her sniff a lemon. She jerked a couple of times, then opened her eyes, looked at Amber, her eyes swollen from crying. Dropped down again.

  Cadri was angry. “Where have you been?” he asked. “And what is it in your hand?”

  Amber opened the snuff box. Inside an ugly little bug like a mosquito was crawling, half dead. Twinkle gone. The light expired.

  Gonca gave Amber a tincture of valerian. All night, she was delirious. Spirits, jinns, öcüs, dead saints, ghosts danced around her, flashing themselves occasionally like holograms. When horror struck unexpectedly at every turn, she remained calm while Draculas in satin capes, werewolves, and Frankenstein monsters with flowers in their hands raised hell. Good fairies held her hand but the Silk Woman wanted to trap bad children inside enormous cocoons. Giant, monstrous caterpillars with horns spitting fire in the dark, like the vicious dragon in Mihriban’s tale that guarded the spring. She heard strange whispers, saw lights moving around in the fields. Shadows of unspeakable things danced behind the curtain that flapped wildly against the taunting wind rising up the mountain in uneven spirals. She saw all the unseen.

  The caretaker appeared again in her dream. This time climbing into her room through the window with a ladder. He carried an empty sack. “This is for you,” he said. “Climb in.” Then his face changed to her cousin Osman in the silo. He threw the amber egg on the marble floor and it shattered into thousands of pieces. A moth came flying out and threw itself into the fire.

  She woke up to see Murat actually in the same room. Her parents and Gonca were already up and dressed. It was almost dawn but still dark.

  “Come this way,” he ordered them. Follow me.

  The sound of tiptoeing feet, whispers, things moving around. Camilla was bundling Amber in something warm. Cadri lifted her up and belaboredly carried her downstairs. Camilla and Gonca followed.

  “Where are we going?” Amber asked.

  “On a secret adventure.”

  “Where?”

  “We’re going on a night journey. Do you know what happened to the Prophet when he went on a night journey? Angel Gabriel appeared with Elboraq, a silver mare who was half human, and they rode through the colors of the rainbow to Jerusalem.”

  “Why are we leaving?” she asked. “I want to stay.”

  Cadri talked in a restrained voice. “We sometimes have to make sacrifices,” he explained. “Like the sheep. This is one of those times. And now, we have to make another sacrifice. We must go home, my dear daughter.”

  As they went out the door, Amber felt the damp air on her skin. The caretaker led them through the endless pavilions. The iron gate clicked and on the other side, the snorting of a horse. Sound of hooves. The hiss in the air. Then came great silence.

  The Spinster’s Apartment

  (1959–1960)

  To those of moist temperament, and especially women, coffee is highly suited. They should drink a great deal of strong coffee. Excess of it will do them no harm, as long as they are not melancholic.

  KATIB ÇELEBI, The Balance of Truth (1650)

  Alas, Iskender Bey’s fortune melted like a candle. Too much of an old silkworm to make the adjustments to a chameleon world that had left him behind in an oasis of loneliness he, in turn, had abandoned the world that could not remember its past nor recognize its own reflection in the mirror.

  No one ever mentioned the fire that had killed Iskender Bey and devastated the plantation. So, I cannot say. Your guess is as good as mine. But being the oldest male relative, Cadri succeeded Iskender Bey as the patriarch. Familiar with the process of silk, which had encouraged his lepidopterist impulses as a child, but unlike his cousins Aida, Sibel, and Papatya, all women of silk, Cadri lacked the knack for its stuff.

  The three sisters trusted Cadri’s kindness and his scholarly gifts, less certain of the patriarchal ones. Nevertheless, they had little choice. As women, not allowed to participate in business, despite their husbands’ objections, they placed the family’s assets in Cadri’s hands, nicknaming him the “poetriarch,” first as a jest but in no time at all, everyone had almost forgotten his real name.

  Oblivious to their sudden changes of fortune, the family members continued their lives in the manner they were accustomed to, with their servants, multiple houses, and flamboyant ceremonies until an April day when Cadri gathered them in a vacant lot in Ankara, a dusty city in the arid Anatolian plains, the ancient Angora. (Better known as the domain of shaggy goats from whose fleece fuzzy sweaters are made, and snow-white long-haired cats with two different color eyes and fearless of water, and that swam in the rapids.) A nomadic inland rumbling with blood memories of human sacrifice for rain, a modern city reborn out of a need to find fulcrum for the revolution, a city of new beginnings that Atatürk had elevated overnight to the status of the new Turkish Republic’s capital.

  “I tried to conceal it from you as long as possible but the truth is, the family is badly in debt—worse than any of us could have feared,” Cadri disclosed to all the İpekçis. Besides the sisters and the families, there were cousins and aunts and uncles who were part of the clan. “So I had no other choice but to liquidate our assets. Almost everything—the summer yali in Moda, the fig orchards along the Aegean, the hunting lodge in the Belgrade forest, the villa in Pamukkale Hot Springs, the vineyards, the weekend house in the Prince Islands, our own respective houses—and even, even the silk plantation—what’s left of it after that wretched fire—now belongs to strangers. It broke my heart to pieces to lose those places. But we’ll never lose their memories. You must understand, it was the only way to pay our debts.”

  At first, no one seemed to grasp the gravity of the situation, no one could identify with the finality of Cadri’s words.

  “Luckily, a handful of remaining liras—just a little scrape off the top—will make it possible to build an apartment complex for all of us to share, right here where your feet are touching the ground, to start a new life here in Ankara where opportunities are greater, where better schools exist for children, and better jobs for men. Everything is new and modern in this city. Everything sanitary. Every sign of progress exists. I know, all this may seem tragic at first but believe me, it’s best for the family because we have no choice except to pool our resources together. Remember, my loves, disasters bond people.”

  “How we’ll lose face when everybody finds out,” Sibel yelped.

  “It’s up to us to regain it,” Cadri replied. “Simply, with our own intentions.”

  “They will laugh at our misery. They will get pleasure out of our loss. Somebody must have cast us the evil eye. It’s not fair.”

  So it was that I was built, one of several in a grand row, all more or less identical, cement colored, six stories each—mutant progenies of urban functionalism, ghostless and hollow inside. Low ceilings and tiny holes for windows to economize heat. Water hissing out of the radiators. Pragmatic like most of their postwar relatives elsewhere, built to last no more than ten or fifteen years, then self-destruct. Nomads resist the threat of permanence.

  Years later, when I was demolished and they excavated the foundation, the workers uncovered terra cotta artifacts—Neolithic pots and pitchers, the remnants of six thousand years ago, way back from the matriarchal cultures that existed even before the Hittites. The law required that antiquities be donated to the Museum of Ethnography but Cadri, convinced that the family would take better care of such things than the government and prevent thieves from smuggling them out of the county, concealed them in a vault in the boiler room chained to the foundation. (Years later when the building was demolished, they could neither remove nor destroy the vault. Of course, its contents had already disappeared.) Little did anyone know that underneath, less than twenty meters, a whole ancient city lay not yet uncovered. So, after all I was an old soul deep down. Despite the mask.

  A sunless winter afternoon, Cadri, h
is wife, and the girl stepped off the Citroen at the corner of Atatürk Boulevard, climbed up the Yüksel incline to Meşrutiyet (Constitution) Avenue, a cul-de-sac closed to traffic. They hurried up the narrow steps out of breath and arrived at the entrance just as a painter was finishing up the plaque above the entrance that read “Spinsters Apt,” aptly named, although obviously the family had buried their spinning impulses with the former patriarch.

  To distinguish us buildings from one another, people gave them names. The frilly one next door, for example, was called Boğa, or bull, which defined the business of the family who owned it. The tall one across the street was “Safran” (belonged to the family in the saffron trade). Or named after the people’s ancestral place during the Empire like Vardar, Özbek, Milas, Damascus, Caucuses, and Cyprus, etc. They were like palaces, in a way, of big nomadic tribes—Tartars, Mongolians, the Huns, the Semites, the Seljuks, names flaunting their own prestige.

  “We’ll plant some acacias and plum trees and put up some swings for the children,” Cadri reassured Amber who seemed distressed with the bleakness. “Meanwhile, you’ll have to make do with playing on the street, my sweet, or play at home. You’ll have lots of children to play with now. You’re no longer an only child.”

  Just then, a window opened on each story, faces filled its frame—faces of aunts, uncles, cousins, the matriarchs, the maids, singing, “Welcome, you sweet loves. Welcome to our midst. We’ll share with you our bread and hope you’ll do the same.”

  Through the stark courtyard leading up to the concrete stairway, wafted the scent of roasted eggplant and of lamb stew. Evil-eye charms adorned the hallway and the stairwell. In front of every doorway lay castaway carpets and kilims of extraordinary value, smelling of mold from having been exposed to the elements, that eventually ended up serving as bedding for vagabonds, beggars, and gypsies. The family had come to the conclusion that they had no use for them anymore. America had introduced wall-to-wall carpeting to the developing economy; synthetic pile of “Harvest Gold” and “Autumn Whisper” displaced the precious Shiraz and Isphahan, Hereke, and Isparta.

  Everyone settled in their respective units while America insinuated itself further into their lives, seducing the women with Frigidaire and Hoover. Also brought along the virus of Time and virus of time, the imaginary. The first item on time: a Miele washing machine for Camilla, with a pot belly and a revolving wringer to feed through.

  The day it arrived, the children eagerly returned early from school, just to see it delivered to the fourth story through the narrow stairway. After that, all the women spent months neglecting other tasks to use Camilla’s Miele, mesmerized by its rhapsodic churning, exhilarated by the joys of automatism. Then, the toilet paper arrived in rolls of mud color or dirty pink replacing the pieces of newspaper that had formerly served the same function (the old ladies still used their hands, of course, but they knew how), and Kleenex nose tissue followed, enticing them to give up their beautifully embroidered handkerchiefs of the softest, finest linen and silk in lieu of coarse paper crepe.

  Civilization also gifted every household with a modern bathroom of lavender, turquoise, or flamingo faience, chrome fixtures, à la Franca toilet, bidet (used for washing dirty socks and underwear since nobody ever quite figured out what it was for). Linoleum tiles. No tulips. No tree of life. No more communal bathing, the respiratory bliss.

  Camilla told Amber she was old enough now to learn to wash herself as she handed her a scouring mitten and a bar of pink Puro soap, shut the door, and left her alone to fend for herself. Amber felt insignificant, dwarfed, sitting inside the enormous coffin-shaped tub, sliding around its sleek, slippery base. Afraid of drowning. Afraid of the door getting stuck and not being able to get out. Afraid of getting sucked down into the drain. Missing the hands that preened and scrubbed and washed her. Missing the primate creature warmth. A moment in which bathing suddenly became the emblem of loneliness and desertion.

  Cousins, above and below, just a year or two apart. Real children to deal with after life with invisible playmates, apparitions, and animal spirits. Certainly an undesirable intrusion. She buried herself in drawings instead, but unlike the other little girls who drew princesses in pretty dresses, Amber drew houses, enchanted places with doors and windows and gables leading to other dimensions hidden behind ivy and vine, towers and cupolas and secret gardens. She drew every single room in the building, establishing her own fictional universe peopled with imaginary beings, imaginary dwellings, except for the paper dolls.

  She moved from room to room following the impulse of her hands as they searched for colors and brushes and empty surfaces, filling them with images as though a voice inside had freed her from the limitations of being a child. She mixed yellows with reds, and blues with reds, and blues with yellows, spinning the color wheel that Iskender Bey had made for her like a roulette. She discovered that opposites mixed nicely into oranges, greens, and purples. The complementaries created colors of inexplicable darkness—red with green, yellow with purple, blue and orange, all such murkiness.

  On Mondays, when all the women pilgrimaged to the great farmer’s market, she stayed home. Watercolors spilled everywhere, the carpet tinted with the dust of the pastels, charcoal smeared on the yellow walls, and the drapes in the salon dripped with turpentine, the kitchen slicked with linseed oil, even drippings of oil stained the runner in the anteroom.

  When Camilla returned into the chaos strewn with Amber’s creations, she began to yell at her and threatened to take away her paints if it ever, ever happened again.

  Cadri continued his peregrinations to the obscure silk provinces in Anatolia, being now simply an employee of the national silkworks. On these journeys, he visited factories and searched for solutions to ever-growing problems between labor and management. He returned debilitated and distraught, having been trapped in a life that did not seem to be of his own choosing. But he had convinced himself that family was inseparable, invulnerable, and permanent since nothing else seemed to be. Yet he could not account for the absence of his own brother Aladdin, who had been intended as the other pillar.

  “A fluke, an error of kismet,” he justified.

  “What if we all had kismets like that?” Camilla asked. “What if kismets traveled in clusters?”

  “Not very likely,” Cadri argued.

  But in retrospect, they were sitting in its shadow.

  Once, when Cadri was away, noticing the door to the pensatorio a crack open, Amber walked in on Camilla, struggling with a screwdriver, picking the lock of Cadri’s cabinet where he kept his private icons and harmless male secrets. Startled, Camilla stuck out her tongue like a lizard, snapped at her daughter.

  “Always knock on the door before you enter someone else’s room,” she scolded.

  “But this is not your room, mama,” Amber responded.

  “Don’t talk back to your mother. I’m not doing anything to either shame me or harm anyone else. If you want to see the movie stars, just shut up. Will you?”

  So Amber followed her mother into the sewing room and plopped herself next to Camilla on a divan. They cuddled together and leafed through the pages filled with stars fashioning Nazi haircuts, shoulderless dresses, slink and brilliantine in an atmosphere of ocean liners, tennis courts, and rooftop apartments overlooking illegible neon signs at Times Square or the Paramount Studios lot.

  Amber seemed fascinated by the pictures of a woman who had an uncanny resemblance to Camilla.

  “Oh yes, that’s Dolores Del Rio, your father’s favorite.”

  “She looks just like you.”

  “That’s probably why your father married me.”

  “Really? So, who is your favorite?” asked Amber, turning the pages full of men and women in various forms of posed embrace and silent posturing, trying to make sense of the mystery called attraction.

  As she flipped through the pages to the picture of a shirtless man, muscular but with hairless skin—unlike the Turkish men Amber had seen on the
beach, who had tufts sprouting off their chests, arms, and even their backs—Camilla’s face beamed. He was wearing a scarf and an earring like the gypsy men she’d seen around the Ankara citadel who pounded copper. In his hand flashed a sword freshly removed from its sheath, so shiny that a star twinkled out of its tip.

  “Cornell Wilde,” Camilla cooed. “He was my idol. Look at him. Look at his chiseled features, sensuous lips, look at his gorgeous mustache!” Another picture of Cornell hovering over Linda Darnell with moist lips, oozing with melancholic lust. “You know, I named you “Amber” because of the book Forever Amber. It was made into a wonderful movie with Cornell. What a man! (Ironically many years later, this virile idol of her mother’s youthful dreams would become Amber’s friend in real life, by then a sad, mummified old man, on the verge of leaving this world.) I’ve seen it ten times at least, sneaking out of the house while your grandmother Esma took her siesta—she didn’t like me going out by myself. Mothers-in-law like controlling their sons’ wives. I hope you never get one like that. So I’d sneak out while she snored—God bless her soul—meet up with my girlfriends to catch the matinee at the Alhambra Theater in Izmir.”

  Something about the image of Cornell had touched a yearning in Camilla’s heart, that place of desire despite its evident impossibility. She was not the only one—Papatya, Aida, even the sourpuss Sibel seemed under the spell of this matinee idol’s charisma, having harbored fantasies of Latin lovers in movies, whose songs came through His Master’s Voice.

  Like all collective dreamers, one of them would inevitably trespass the dream. But it was not Camilla.

  How Rodrigo entered the lives of the İpekçi family and became intricately entangled in their kismet seems almost scripted, a cliché. Even who he was, the way he dressed, how he had the fortuitous resemblance to the women’s idol. Perilous from the start to have someone so erotically inclined entering the inner sanctum. No question about it. But they say if you avoid peril, peril sneaks into your bed. And peril did.