Seven Houses

by Alev Lytle Croutier

  “Once again, görücü appeared at our threshold. Sibel, Papatya, and I came out to serve them the obligatory Turkish coffee, sherbets and all. The görücü’s eye locked on me and she oozed with satisfaction, assuming I was the bride-to-be. As it slowly dawned on them that Papatya was the one, the one with the chubby cheeks, mouse eyes, and muscular dancer’s legs—you know I love my sister but I’m not going to pretend she’s much to look at—their enthusiasm withered rapidly. But a promise was a promise and Papatya was soon betrothed to Tarik Bey. Of course, they’d never met before.

  “At last, Tarik saw the shutters open and his nightingale appear at her balcony; he was so disappointed that he turned away instantly and disappeared without even glancing back. Imagine, their first encounter. Imagine! Poor Papatya, she thought he’d never return, which probably would have been a blessing, but Tarik was an honorable man in his own way and he did return and married her.

  “Papatya and Tarik spent their lives under the same roof but in separate rooms, avoiding each other’s bodies, connecting only through songs she sang unseen. She made love to him through her voice but she herself was unfulfilled. They had no children. Some say Papatya was still a virgin after fifteen years of conjugal bliss. I prefer not to discuss it except to say she’s not the sort who’d complain.”

  Everything about Tarik was oily, his skin, his hair, even the texture of his clothes. His eyes were damp and slippery with a filmy surface. He even smelled like Marmara olives. He often traveled on business, selling olive oil to the provinces, and on the rare occasions he was home, impeccably dressed young men, in tight-fitting powder-blue and pink suits, Panama hats, pin mustaches, neat coifs bleached with peroxide and embalmed in Brilliantine lurked around the Blue Angel all hours of the day.

  “My mother says they’re sick men,” her cousin Maya told Amber. “They are perverts.”

  “But they always smile,” Amber said. “You can look into their eyes. They are soft. They return your gaze.”

  She did not tell Maya of the time she saw Tarik kissing one of his dandelion friends under the street lamp when she had sneaked out to the balcony after everyone had gone to sleep. They kissed just like in the movies; they sucked each other’s lips and put their hands in each other’s pockets. She had never seen anyone kiss like that before in real life.

  “Do people kiss on the lips in real life?” she asked Camilla.

  “Just the Americans. And only in the movies,” Camilla told her.

  Papatya’s face was a sulking wilderness when Tarik returned from his oil-selling trips but when he was away, she was sunny as a daisy, her namesake. (Papatya means Daisy.) Opening all the windows and all the doors, she chirped tremulous love songs with her dramatic soprano voice, which concealed the brittle heart. Sometimes she held recitals, inviting the most renowned musicians of the city, who spilled out during balmy summer evenings from her living room out to the balcony where she had pillows thrown around, and torches lit, chorusing in nostalgic melancholy. At those times, the whole street vibrated with energy.

  Unable to restrain her impulse any longer, Papatya wrote a note to Rodrigo, inviting him to sing at one of her recitals. He replied positively.

  That day is still vivid in everyone’s mind. The Blue Angel delivered confections and desserts with erotic and voluptuous names like Lady’s Thighs, Beauty’s Lips, Hanum’s Fingers, and Woman’s Navel. They brought sour-cherry and melon sherbets. Mont Blancs and Pyramids.

  In the afternoon, they dashed to Necati’s beauty parlor around the corner. Necati pranced around like a swashbuckler, playing their heads like the keys of a xylophone, bouncing from one woman to another, never for a moment neglecting or favoring any one above the others. He said he had brought back a new “do” from Paris, asymmetrical, one side clipped like a short bob, the other shoulder length and curled up like a caravel. Scissors flew in the air snipping wisps of hair; the stink of permanent chemicals blended with cigarettes and Turkish coffee.

  They came out several hours later, resembling a singing group in their identical “do’s” with a gold streak right in the center, frosted eyelashes, and false fingernails painted shocking pink—that season’s favorite color.

  He arrived exactly at seven, just after the sun had set but before it became dark altogether. A snug sharkskin suit in algae green with a shocking-pink carnation on his lapel. All the doors opened and the women with identical hair and inflated petticoats rushed out to meet him as though they were his backup girls.

  That night he sang like a bird in rapture. His smooth, sonorous voice and vast repertory of Latin songs—“Luna Rosa,” “Vaya con Dios”—dissolved into new arrangements. The acoustics were less than favorable, and the street noise interfered with the purity of his timber, still Rodrigo knew how to labialize with his voice and watch the women swoon.

  Papatya was at her best. She dimmed the lights, stood under the streetlamp, wearing a trenchcoat, opened her moist lips, and with deep melancholy sang “Lili Marlene.” At the end of each stanza the group repeated in unison, “Die eins Lili Marlene.”

  I don’t know what had happened to the husbands that night but they were elsewhere, repelled by the feminine quality of Papatya’s recitals. So Rodrigo had the women to himself. He wrenched his heart, he sang for them, and, at the end, invited Papatya for a duet. She resisted first; she played it coy but at the insistence of the guests, melted like butter from a cow.

  Their duet metamorphosed into Jeanette MacDonald–Nelson Eddy, singing from Rosemarie, as they dashed off arpeggios like confetti.

  “When I’m calling you-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo . . .”

  After that night, Rodrigo became family, popping up at all hours of the day—most opportunely around mealtimes. You’d find him in the kitchen making a strange concoction of a soup with octopus tentacles and mysterious entrails, flirting with Gonca’s sisters, who watched him in fascination, or across the street at the Blue Angel, sipping tea with the women, telling them of all the exotic places he had traveled to—Rio de Janeiro, Maracaibo, Casablanca, Vera Cruz, Shanghai, all of which sounded like the names of movies they had seen. No birthdays, circumcisions, and weddings occurred without the blessing of Rodrigo’s sweet voice. Even the New Year’s Eve saw him sliding through the chimney into Mihriban’s fireplace dressed as Noel Baba, singing “Jingle Bells,” crashing and breaking his neck, after which he had to wear one of those special collars, which, instead of making him look ludicrous, gave him even more of a regal demeanor and held his head in place while he sang, “When I fall in love-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo . . .”

  He won the women’s hearts first, moving all the way up the ladder, from the young ones to the matriarchs, the aging aunts, even the female servants he stopped in the dark during his nocturnal escapades for a purloined kiss.

  Gonca’s sister Gül told Camilla she didn’t really mind. “He knows how; doesn’t spit in your mouth like the others nor stick his tongue into your throat like a washrag—does not feel you up in your place of shame (that’s what they called a woman’s sex organ), like the other gentlemen in the family.”

  “What other gentlemen?”

  “All of them,” Gül answered. “Except Cadri Bey, of course.” They were not aware that Amber, lying awake in bed could still hear them, trying to deduce what feeling up meant. Up where? Not knowing yet those dark sensations but imagining.

  But despite his opportunistic flamboyance, Rodrigo had another kind of a heart for Papatya. Tender and clownish. In Tarik’s absence, he visited her often, skipping the steps as he ran up, carrying a bouquet of daisies, since Papatya meant daisy, and whistling. “Figaro. Figaro. Figaro.”

  Papatya welcomed him dressed in diaphanous caftans and Brunhilde wigs, painted and bejeweled like Turandot or Carmen. They would glide across the freshly installed linoleum singing a mad duet that crescendoed into a striptease with exotic pieces of clothing strewn in every room and ended up in her state-of-the-art, turquoise-tiled shower, reaching the catharsis of their duet
, aided by the spray of water.

  The tremulous songs rising out of Papatya’s flat mesmerized them all so much that the family ignored their ominous impropriety. Everyone knew. Yet everyone kept silent because their hearts were glad that Papatya had at last found something that gave her pleasure. They themselves were envious of the kind of love Rodrigo offered Papatya, courtship and play, not having known it with their husbands, but also not without disquiet.

  Once again buried in his paper empire, the poetriarch was lamenting the dwindling fortunes of the İpekçi family—especially since he possessed little talent for such management. He seemed more hunched, rapidly balding, dragging his nose around like a snout. The corners of his mouth turned down like the mask of Tragedy. Everytime he returned, the women immediately descended upon him with slippers, cool drinks, and eager ears. Camilla undressed him and drew him a bath. They stayed in the bathroom together for long hours, as she slowly washed him. Then, in their bedroom, all night long talking in muffled tones that sounded as though they were rolling hard candy in their mouths as they plotted a conspiracy.

  Since Esma’s death, Camilla had claimed her territory and guarded it with vengeance but this created a subservience of another sort, one that required constant maintenance. The women existed to serve their men since it was their only chance of acquiring a soul. They were not born with souls but by attaching themselves to a man, they could share theirs thus gaining an entry into the cennet, or paradise. But even in cennet, the celestial houris served the men. No other paradise existed for women.

  Rodrigo and Cadri began playing bezique, each having been initiated as a child into this ancient court game exclusive to the male sex. Something that Cadri and Rodrigo discovered they had in common though oceans apart. They played so intensely that they resembled the subjects of a Caillebotte painting.

  Cadri shuffled a heavy deck made up of four decks of only the higher arcana. Each picked a card. Rodrigo a queen, Cadri, an ace. Rodrigo cut and Cadri dealt nine cards, three sets of three. They arranged their fans with self-important intensity and Rodrigo led. He discarded a nine of clubs, Cadri gave him a nine of diamonds. Rodrigo took the trick. They picked cards from the deck. Rodrigo played a nine of hearts, Cadri took it with a ten of the same suit, and the wooden marqueuse clicked castanets. He marked fifty points, for pairing a queen of spades with a jack of diamonds. Two of each would make five hundred, three of each fifteen, and four of each three thousand, or bezique.

  Amber watched the game, idling from one to the other, scoring her father’s points on the marqueuse, peeking at both hands; they allowed her, not suspecting that she was calculating the rules, comprehending the moves until she started inside trading in her father’s favor.

  Rodrigo was annoyed. For a moment he forgot she was only a child, then became one himself. “You’re cheating,” he scolded her. “Besides, this is not for girls. Why don’t you play your own games? Go play with your paper dolls.”

  So, she did. The most satisfying of games. Out of cardboard, she had constructed charming little palaces like the ones in the puppet shows, with filigree and arabesque where she planned lavish parties for her paper dolls that her American aunt Sophie, her uncle Aladdin’s Irish-American wife, had sent her. A cast of thousands: Some of them were of real people like Lucy and Desi, Debbie and Eddie, Fred and Ginger, Esther Williams, and Marilyn Monroe. Then, there were the imaginary ones like Betty Boop and Howdy Doody. But in the paper doll universe, they all mingled. Amber dressed them all up in their best evening clothes for a grand ball she gave as in American movies depicting the South—Jezebel, The Little Foxes, Gone With the Wind—while talking her stories quietly to herself.

  Cadri seemed to be losing. He asked Camilla to make some more coffee. Camilla obligingly closed her Marie Claire magazine and unfolded her legs. Rodrigo said he wasn’t interested in any.

  “Come on, comrade. You’ll need coffee to stay awake so I can skunk you,” Cadri chuckled. “It’s choice coffee. I brought it myself from Antioch. Ethiopian. Not the stuff mixed with dried chickpeas they sell around here.”

  “Seriously, Cadri, I’m not drinking. Coffee is poison. You’re committing suicide consuming such copious amounts.”

  “Come on, Rodrigo,” Cadri exclaimed. “I’ve been drinking coffee since I was an infant. My mother always said I had a moist temperament, so she filled my baby bottle with coffee. She always said, excessive coffee will do no harm as long as a person is not a melancholic.”

  “What did they know about health in those days? Coffee ruins the liver, raises the blood pressure, and causes nervousness and hysteria. Even makes a man impotent and turns girls into nymphomaniacs. It’s not really the coffee itself but the poison in it called caffeine, C8H10N4O2. More than ninety percent of the population is addicted to caffeine, which slowly destroys what is inside you, like a rat slowly nibbling cheese, and then, one day, boom, you’re gone. (He feigned collapsing.) Governments know about this but nobody, nobody’s doing anything because too much profit is staked in coffee. Too much crime involved. But soon it’s all going to collapse because people who know the truth will speak up and nobody will ever drink coffee again because the evils of caffeine will be revealed to the entire world.”

  “I didn’t expect such an evangelical outburst,” Cadri laughed, meanwhile concentrating on his tricks as he put a king of spades next to the queen and gave himself another forty points. Click, click. Now it was a matter of completing the trump suit before the high points started rolling in.

  “I’m not going to beat around the bush,” Rodrigo said. “I have a proposition to make. Now, listen to this, Cadri. Carefully. Do you know what is in a coffee bean?” He cited the chemicals ending with the C word—caffeine. “There’s a way to get rid of caffeine but still maintain the fine taste of coffee.”

  “Yes, I read about it somewhere,” Cadri said. “They remove it out of the coffee with some chemicals.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about,” Rodrigo said. He put his cards face down and his hands dove into his pocket. He pulled out a small leather sack and slammed it on the table.

  Amber stopped playing with her paper dolls and ran up to see. Coffee beans, paler than the usual ones, almost a greenish white. Cadri was obviously waiting for the punch line.

  “It’s the beans,” Rodrigo continued. “Look, each one a golden nugget. See these? My family has been experimenting with them for decades, hybridizing, grafting, splicing, regenerating, and you know what the result of years and years of this labor has produced?”

  “What?”

  “Minimized the amount of caffeine until we produced this strain without any whatsoever. A mutant.”

  “Very interesting,” Cadri agreed, “but how do we know they are different?” He put down the jack, ten, and ace of spades and gave himself two hundred and fifty points. He was rolling while Rodrigo automatically played his hand, his avarice stranded elsewhere.

  Rodrigo asked Camilla if she would dump the coffee she was making and make another instead from his pale beans. Camilla did not like being ordered around. But it was her job.

  Cadri skeptically took a sip of Rodrigo’s coffee; then Camilla took a sip herself.

  “I don’t taste anything different,” she said. “Honestly. It tastes all the same to me.” Cadri shook his head in agreement.

  “Ahh,” Rodrigo growled, “it is because you both are addicted. Your sensitivity is blunted and you can’t even taste the difference, but for someone who is not an addict it’s simply a miracle. Besides it’s more the effect than the taste. Here, Amber, you try this coffee.”

  “I don’t like coffee.”

  “We need a virgin for the sacrifice,” Rodrigo said and laughed wickedly. “It’s just an experiment. Our life depends on your judgment, Amber sweetheart. We’re in your hands.”

  “What am I supposed to do?” she sulked.

  “Taste the coffee and tell us if you feel something buzzing, like a bee trapped inside your head or your heart bea
ts faster.”

  Amber took a reluctant sip, made a face, and said she felt no buzz and it tasted disgusting. Like sewer water.

  “You ever tasted sewer water? Give it a chance,” Rodrigo told her, “it takes a while, y’know? Go ahead, take another sip.”

  “But I hate it. I told you so.”

  “Come on, tonton (an affectionate phrase meaning my sweet, chubby one), just one more sip. I’ll give you a picture of Esther Williams in Million Dollar Mermaid.”

  “I want some sugar in it, then,” Amber negotiated.

  He put in a cube.

  “Four more,” Amber insisted.

  Rodrigo, who by now looked as though he were getting ready to twist the child’s neck, filled the cup with five cubes of sugar, stirred it. “Try this.”

  Amber took a sip and just as quickly told him she did not feel any different and went into the living room where Camilla was now tracing a pattern from Burda for matching sundresses for the two of them to wear for the Children’s Day parade. She liked dressing them the same. Amber dove back into her paper palaces with paper people.

  “See, she felt nothing. If there was caffeine in the beans, she’d be buzzing around now. Hyperactive. Look, what I am trying to tell you, Cadri, is that you could grow these beans here and manipulate the world market,” Rodrigo pursued. He fondled his coffee beans. “Nothing like this anywhere else. Do you realize that? Nowhere. Do you know what that means?”

  Cadri shook his head. “Oh no, Rodrigo,” he said. “Many have tried cultivating coffee since it was brought here from Yemen several hundred years ago but no one has succeeded. Coffee grows in hot arid climates and mountains that are cool between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. It wouldn’t stand a chance of survival here. The altitude is not high enough nor hot enough. No, sir.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” Rodrigo told him. “You’re confusing them with regular beans. We are talking something a great deal more special and capricious. Decaffeinated beans! They need different weather, soil, altitude, humidity. My family tried growing them in Campo Santo but no avail. The poor plants turned anemic, got scorched, and went hungry. These beans need much water. Much. They don’t like predictable climates; they get lazy. What they need is a subtropical climate, capricious like on your Mediterranean coast. That’s why I’m here. Don’t you think that I wouldn’t have tried it in my own country, with my own people, where I know how to get capital, with workers whose stomach I know, whose language I speak?”