Seven Houses

by Alev Lytle Croutier

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  “Ahh, my friend, because we are facing similar junctures in our lives and I know as surely as I know my own name, we are fated to combine our resources and create a major miracle. Don’t ask why. I just know. You don’t think I’m going to make my living as a canary for the rest of my life, do you? I am also aware your uncle died not that long ago and now, being the patriarch, you have the enormous responsibility of figuring out ways to take care of your family. It’s all on your shoulders. They are all looking up to you to regain their respect and fortune.”

  “If you know all that, you might also know that my uncle’s fortune melted like a candle,” Cadri told him wryly.

  “I know, I know, but you must have enough assets to plant a few seeds. You understand? Especially, if you can convince your women.”

  Rodrigo and Cadri stayed up late that night storming their brains about caffeinated and decaffeinated beans and mathematical abstractions as the room got hotter and more dense with smoke. Amber was all jazzed up from the coffee and cut out more and more paper palaces and filled them with more paper dolls until Camilla, no longer able to keep her eyes open, carried her off to bed and tucked her in.

  I’m not sure which came first after that, the thing with Papatya, or the betrayal. Most likely, everything happened at the same time. After all, how could the whole family trust a shadowy Latin singer with a dubious past? But they did. The human need to trust is invincible. Yet stranger things happen in life.

  So that night Rodrigo coaxed Cadri, and he in turn the whole family, into mortgaging me and buying some sort of a citrus plantation on the Mediterranean along the Taurus mountains (between Antalya and Alanya) to grow decaf coffee. The entire family agreed willingly, in fact dreamily—except for Tarik, who said that he’d rather put his cash in olive oil any day than bogus coffee beans.

  The whole coffee operation had to remain hush-hush outside the clan. They had known such secrecy in the silk trade.

  “It should be top secret to prevent anyone spying and stealing the decaf beans and creating competition,” Rodrigo emphasized. “Imperative to pretend it is an ordinary fruit operation. We’ll camouflage it carefully with banana and citrus trees.”

  Although the word seeped out and friends warned Cadri against the madness of growing coffee on the Mediterranean coast, he would not listen. Equally obsessed in the dream now as Rodrigo, his already fickle senses could not surrender. The two men went down to the Mediterranean coast frequently and brought pictures of themselves among groves of banana trees in the foothills of the Taurus Mountains. Rodrigo remained in charge of the operation while Cadri returned to Ankara with optimistic reports. The plants were growing well and a fine crop was expected. As soon as it was harvested, they’d flood the market. Of course, Cadri had no notice of how long it took for the coffee to mature.

  A sense of spaciousness filled the family members, adult or child, a glimmer that they could retrieve their past glory until that fated evening when Tarik returned unexpectedly from a business trip.

  Papatya was not home. Tarik went from door to door, asking for her but no one admitted to knowing Papatya’s whereabouts.

  “You know Papatya,” Camilla tried calming him. “Sometimes she goes to sing with her friends. They get carried away, they don’t know how time passes. No harm in it, is there?”

  “It’s past midnight,” Tarik objected. “What kind of friends are these anyway, singers, dancers, low-class scum?”

  Camilla and Cadri shook their heads and restrained the panic expected during such occasions.

  “I’ll go to the police,” Tarik told them.

  “I’ll find her,” Cadri interfered. “Don’t worry, I’ll find your wife. The family name should never be smeared on police records. What goes on behind our walls is no one else’s business. We must always stick together with our own. I’ll go find her myself.”

  He immediately departed on the night train.

  “It takes only one weed to smother a garden. It was his idea to bring the bastard into the family,” Sibel grumbled the following afternoon, as the women stirred their tea at the Blue Angel. “Cadri sweet-talked us into selling everything and buying the stupid decaf plantation. And look, just look what happened!”

  “Yok, yok. Get your perspective. Rodrigo was wagging his tail at everyone in the family, everyone, long before licking Cadri’s you know what,” Camilla defended him. “How can you deny your own enchantment with Rodrigo? You all fell for him from the beginning. Don’t turn Cadri into a scapegoat now, for God’s sake.”

  “She is right. Rodrigo had irresistible charm,” Aida swooned. “Let’s face it, I mean, he looked like Cornell. He knew how to treat ladies. He was charming. Talented. He danced beautifully. Sang beautifully. Can’t you just hear them singing together? When I’m calling you, ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo.”

  “The neighbor’s chicken always looks like a goose,” Camilla shrugged. “Admit it.”

  “Why, of all people, he had to pick Papatya I can’t understand,” Sibel bitched again, raising her big dark eyes like overboiled chestnuts. “May his shadow never rest. Crow, crow said gawk, gawk. / Climb this branch and look around. / I climbed the branch and looked around. / This crow’s just foolin’ ’round.”

  They were all dangling from the balconies, smoking cigarettes, when Cadri returned the next evening. He escorted Papatya out of the Citroën to her flat as if leading her to the inquisition and left her there.

  “What did Rodrigo have to say?” Camilla asked when they were alone.

  “He said he didn’t exactly invite her. Papatya is a big girl. She can think for herself. She came of her own choice.”

  “And why not?” said Camilla. “With a husband who disappears for several months at a time and chases after other kinds of ‘daisies’ . . .”

  Downstairs, murderous voices rose out of Papatya and Tarik. Sounds of things smashing. More things. A scene from Othello when he suspects Desdemona. Her shrieking pain went right through every heart in the building. Then, everything fell silent.

  “He’s beating her,” Camilla wept. “Cadri, you should go see. Oh, my God!”

  “Don’t get hysterical. One should not interfere with what goes on between a husband and a wife.”

  “How can you stand it. He’s going to kill her!”

  A few moments later, Papatya dragged herself out of her flat and limped across the hall, her face black and blue, blood trickling down her forehead, her dress tattered. She banged on Cadri and Camilla’s door.

  “He threw me out,” she told Camilla. “Please, let me sleep at your house tonight?”

  Cadri paced in the hallway. “I can’t even if I want to. It wouldn’t be right, Papatya,” he told her. “You should go back to your husband, beg his forgiveness. Things will return to normal in time.”

  “How can I? I can’t. Look at me. I have no place in his house.”

  “That’s your problem.”

  “But you are my family!”

  “It’s not right to come between a husband and a wife.”

  Papatya went from door to door begging her family to let her in. They hid behind their doors listening but no one opened a door except for Aida, who came out and embraced her sister before being pulled inside by the General. “Only God has the right to interfere with a husband and a wife.”

  Papatya ran up and down the floors banging at the doors, crying her heart out. On the other side, her sisters wiped their tears with Kleenex but no one dared step out. They shuddered somewhere between life and nightmare until dawn when they heard her voice.

  She sang. She stood in the courtyard and sang the dying song of Madama Butterfly and she hit a higher pitch than ever before, which would have put her among the immortals but instead she ran out the door and disappeared like a will-o’-the-wisp in her tattered white organdy gown with black polka dots. The wind quickly blew her out of sight.

  The days that followed are a blurred confusion since none
of the İpekçis wanted to think about or remember what had happened, until the night the telegram arrived. They were all asleep and Camilla was the first to wake up at a persistent knock on the door. Soon, everyone hovered over her shoulder to read the telegram.

  “RODRIGO. stop. ABANDON PLANTATION. stop. MONEY DISAPPEAR FROM ACCOUNT. stop. The Manager.”

  Cadri immediately dressed and left again for the plantation.

  “No doubt, Papatya returned to Rodrigo and together they’ve run off with the money to some exotic tropical place like Havana or Beirut,” Sibel projected. “Where else could she go?”

  Others were silent.

  “The General has good connections in the police department,” Aida reminded them. “We could . . . You know?”

  But to set the authorities after the lovers would be too mean and scandalous. “Cadri would never allow that,” Camilla confirmed. “The most important thing is not to lose any more face than we already have.”

  So, once again, grinding their teeth and restraining their feelings, the İpekçis stuck together in distress. But this one was to be their last before everything fell apart.

  When an expert from the Department of Agriculture was brought to the plantation to analyze the crops, he informed Cadri that nothing was special about the coffee beans. Just ordinary Yemen. As for the crops, no chance of surviving the winter. Even if they did, it would take at least five years for them to yield any coffee cherries. The best thing to do would be to recultivate the soil, and plant more bananas and citrus instead.

  The General’s connection in the Security Department revealed that Rodrigo was not really a Latin lover but an Egyptian crook named Rashid. He had left a few days earlier on a freighter to Cyprus. And he was traveling alone.

  So where had Papatya gone? Silence hovered over every part of the household for days and days. The first Friday of the month, the women gathered in the courtyard, made a circle, and began ululating. They stuck out their tongues long like snakes and trilled. They stopped being women and became sirens, birdlike creatures flapping their wings, desperately wailing. The men were away, of course. They always seemed to be away at such times of women’s wildness. The older women sat in their velvet chairs, counting worry beads, whispering the usual incantations while the children leaned against parapets, watching unseen.

  That evening while the little ones were shipped off to stay at Mihriban’s, the adults confined themselves to Cadri and Camilla’s flat and yelled at each other for hours. They pointed fingers that seemed to elongate with each accusation. They even spit on each other, their saliva turning into venom. Children and servants put their ears to the floor, hoping to hear something, but all had turned into a poisoned alphabet soup.

  They stayed there for interminable hours, retreating at last into their private quarters only to shut out the rest. After that, they coexisted with the impersonality of neighbors as in any city. The ones who occupied the upper floors deliberately walked heavily, tapped, and rolled things around to irritate the ones below. They vacuumed their floors in the middle of the night. Their kids were allowed to play loud music and even to roller-skate.

  No one mentioned Papatya or Rodrigo’s name. No more family gatherings, circumcision, or birthday parties. No more Bayram feasts. They had even stopped greeting each other except when their paths accidentally crossed in the hallways.

  The children took to the street from dawn till dusk to escape the static of mistrust and lose themselves instead in the distraction of play. They played ferociously, trying to pretend ignorance but already brainwashed by respective parents, their opinions stretching farther than words could travel.

  On the surface, their world seemed deceptively normal. The girls played “beauty and ugliness” or hopscotch, drawing continuous squares with colored chalk on the cracking concrete sidewalk winding around uneven city blocks, then skipping and sliding slippery stones through the squares, smooth as ice. They argued about where to draw the squares and whether the stones landed on the lines.

  The boys played war, pointing their pretend finger-guns at each other, making mechanical groans, incomprehensible to the girls, while slithering and squirming in the dust or the mud on their bellies. The older ones kicked the soccer ball around, their voices in awkward metamorphosis, their legs radically bowed from early hardening. Occasionally, the girls challenged them to a race around the block, all the way to the Officer’s Club, bargaining for goufrettes with the movie star cards, always winning since their feminine gravity had not yet arrived, their coltish legs infinitely faster and more agile in their prehormonal confusion.

  One day, one of the boys said he wasn’t playing any more. He had no money left for goufrettes or marbles. They were all poor now.

  “All your father’s fault,” Maya snapped at her cousin Amber in a tone that sounded as though she was inciting the rest for mutiny.

  “No, it’s not. He didn’t know they were fake. He didn’t.”

  “It was Uncle Poetriarch who talked everyone into a mad adventure,” Maya insisted—words that belonged to a grown-up mouth. The attitude as well.

  “Not his fault Papatya ran off with Rodrigo or he with our money.”

  “Shush. We’re not supposed to say their names. Uncle Poetriarch brought the family to ruin because he himself had a basic character flaw.”

  Amber ran upstairs; she could hear Cadri and Camilla, speaking at an argumentative pitch. “You must tell her,” Camilla begged, unaware of Amber’s presence. “The longer we wait, the worse it will become.”

  “What if she asks why we’re leaving her behind?”

  “Then, make up something. She can’t yet understand the complexity of things anyway.”

  Amber sensed that the “she” they were referring to was herself. She felt something horrible was about to happen. They were going to abandon her.

  She went into her room, took out all her paper dolls and lay them out for a big party. What were her parents talking about? What could she not understand? Were they really planning to abandon her?

  At dinner, as she served mutton chops with thyme and braised leeks, Camilla exchanged funereal glances with Cadri but neither uttered a word. Amber had witnessed this scene before, like every time her parents negotiated with each other which one of them would be the one to punish her. In between enormous bites, chewed and chomped loudly, Cadri cast furtive looks at his daughter as if he was about to say a word but belched instead. Then he began chewing toothpicks. Camilla left the room to get something from the kitchen. Finally, the air formed itself into words and released Cadri’s mouth.

  “We’re moving away,” he said.

  “Again?”

  “We have to sell the Spinster’s Apartment to pay our debts.”

  “Where?” Amber asked him. “Back to the house in Izmir?”

  Cadri explained then that he was going to America for a year, to a place called Ann Arbor—which sounded like a movie star’s name—to study labor relations, which sounded like something to do with making babies. (Did her father have a mistress? Named Ann Arbor?)

  “But why?” she asked him; this distant pursuit mystified her.

  “When I traveled from factory to factory, I saw terrible things. The workers live subhuman lives. They need protection of their rights. I’m going to learn ways to do that. Your mother will join me in a couple of weeks.”

  “What about me?” Amber asked, picturing herself a waifish orphan, missing teeth, dressed in rags like those abandoned kids in David Copperfield (or was it Oliver Twist?) “You are not taking me with you?”

  “No. You’ll go to stay in Karshiyaka with your mother’s parents for a little while.”

  “But I want to come with you and my mother.”

  “America is not a good place to travel with children. Your mother and I’ll be busy all day long, working very hard. We have no one to leave you with. You don’t know their language. You couldn’t attend school. You’d be miserable.”

  “I want to go with you anyway
,” she whimpered.

  “I told you, Amber, it’s out of the question. Besides you’d detest what they eat, what they drink. You hate milk. You don’t like carrots. Why, you don’t even eat onions; they make you sick. Did you know that all the children in America are required to consume kilos of onions everyday?”

  “I’ll force myself, then. I don’t care if they make me sick. I’ll eat onions, if I have to. I’ll get used to it,” she begged him. “I’ll promise anything.”

  He shook his head. “No Amber, no go. Stop begging. Stop being a pest.”

  “You don’t love me. You don’t love me.”

  “I’ve had enough.”

  “You don’t love me, besides it’s all your fault that Aunt Papatya ran away and our family is broken and poor now. All your fault!”

  Steel tears spilled out of his eyes. His bald pate turned crimson, his tongue freakish blue. His hand reached for his coffee cup; he lifted it and hurled it in Amber’s direction like a hand grenade.

  First, the thick paste of coffee grains dripped all over his nicely starched white shirt, making him lose his composure. Then, the cup flew right below Amber’s left eye, burning her cheek like a bee sting. Blood oozed out of her skin as the cup continued flying, flew right out the window, down the street, hitting a beggar over the head who just happened to be passing by, and exploded into thousands of pieces. From the impact, it became imbedded on the sidewalk and formed a mosaic in the shape of a moth.