Seven Houses

by Alev Lytle Croutier

  Even though the İpekçi family scattered all over the world to unrelated destinies by the end of spring and abandoned me and Ankara, there is still a city underneath this site waiting to be excavated. The imprint of the moth still remains on the sidewalk, a great curiosity for tourists who claim it’s the silk moth, Bombyx mori. Passersby make up stories about a family of spinsters who once lived here, except they imagine a different sort of spinsters, the kind who spin stories.

  The Turquoise House on Seven Whiskers Street

  (1961–1962)

  People separate for a reason. They tell you their reason. They give you a chance to reply. They do not run away like that. No, it is perfectly childish.

  MARCEL PROUST

  You entered me through an enormous carved door, so warped that to align the sides and close it was impossible. No one ever thought of locking it anyway; the upper shutters perpetually remained open inviting all sorts of flying things but mainly a pair of swallows that built a nest above the brass chandelier.

  They laid eggs, the swallows. Once Amber found a shelless one, a translucent membrane with a jelly-bean-like baby bird embryo ferned up inside. Eyeless things. When the eggs chirped, she stacked boxes on top of each other and climbed to peek at the baby birds—ugly beings they were with blind glares and needy beaks. A couple of them fell off the nest. Instantly one of the dozens of cats that trespassed devoured them like hors d’oeuvres. The rest of the chicks gobbled up the earthworms, spiders, and other creepy-crawlers that the frantic parent birds, darting in and out all day long, dropped into the begging beaks. Soon, they learned to fly from room to room, driving the cats to the precipice of madness while inspiring hilarious acrobatics. Then, one day, awkwardly plumed now like spiked-haired teenagers, they followed their parents out the window, instantly disappearing into the vast blueness of the sky, and were gone.

  The nest, now a permanent part of the ceiling ornamentation, remained empty until the lilacs bloomed, when the pair returned from their prolonged peregrination and resettled on the chandelier—at least everyone assumed they were the same couple. They repeated this cycle year after year but the summer Cadri and Camilla went to America, the nest remained empty even past the lilac time. The Taşpinars waited and waited in vain but the good-luck swallows had vanished into the realm of forgetfulness.

  But other creatures found their way into this household, sensing the open-hearted welcome, and became part of the family during their brief lives. Especially cats. Cats soaking in the fountain—tabby cats from the city of Van that loved to swim and paddled in the trough, out of which Dudu, the ornery goat, drank water. Angoras, conveying dual messages with their mysterious eyes, slyly slithered in the dark, leaving in the air a trace of unease. And grinning Cheshire cats sprawled out on tree branches, flashing their teeth. Cats stalked nightingales among the poppy fields. Hairless cats nervously scurried around, looking for a sunny patch to lick their pink-and-gray sunburned skin. Sometimes Amber rubbed snake oil on their poor flesh to ease the pain. Pretending they were her babies, she clothed them in doll’s clothes, little dresses and hats. She rocked them on the hammock, singing lullabies she remembered from the house in Smyrna across the bay, the house where she was born. Dandini, dandini, danali bebek. Elleri kollari, kinali bebek.

  Then there was the fox. Hamid Bey had trapped the fox one night when she had descended from Tantalus mountains to eat their chickens. Instead of killing her, Hamid Bey kept the fox captive, naming her Scheherazade and teasing her into domestic laws. Although not exactly fond of each other, the goat and the fox shared the chicken coop (which much later in life would become Malika’s nest). The chickens, though, kept out of sight because they did not trust the smell the fox exuded when she got excited even though they should have figured out by now that Scheherazade was never allowed to venture out by herself. Chickens are instinctively dumb, anyway.

  I am the home of Camilla’s parents, the Taşpinars, the fountainheads, Hamid Bey and Malika, or Maria, as she had been known a long time ago, long before the Great War.

  Like most backwater families of Cordelio, the Taşpinars spent most of their days outdoors in the garden under the shade of three prolific fig trees, a red, a green, and a yellow one. On the opposite side of the wall, a small alley of Kalamata olives lined up. The night-blooming jasmine entangled with pomegranate vines creeping up the stone wall all the way up the roof terrace populated with potted succulents, cascading into the garden like beaded curtains.

  When Camilla brought Amber to stay here, just before her departure to America to join Cadri, she warned her not to go near the stone well from where the water supply came. “Cats have fallen in. Snakes squirm at the bottom. Odjus live inside and when they see children staring at them, they open their mouths real wide and suck them in like marrow,” she told her, making a sucking and slurping sound.

  “I don’t believe in odjus anymore,” Amber responded but still Camilla’s warning endistanced her from the lichen-covered well with stones of chevron patterns, until the afternoon she witnessed a private moment of her grandmother.

  Malika was drawing water from the well. She stopped suddenly, looked around to make certain no one was watching her. She took something out of her pocket and threw it into the well. She listened to the splash as it hit the water, then closed her eyes; her lips moved as if she was in a trance, talking to someone, like a person in prayer. This, Amber discovered, was Malika’s daily ritual. And when she found herself alone by the well one day, she did the same.

  Malika was a sinuous woman of silence with flowing streams of white hair concealed in a bun. Never still, her tawny long arms always stirring, sweeping, washing, twisting. Sometimes, rising like a somnambulist in the middle of the night, Malika would descend down to the basement where earlier Hamid Bey and his Sufi friends had gathered to sing and dance until their feet left the ground and they floated like angels in their long white flowing robes and conical hats. Malika sat in candlelight communing with the unseen that the men had agitated, watching otherwise invisible visions from her forgotten past. Sometimes she recited things aloud or hummed in Italian or Greek. She needed the comfort of holy voices to ease out her ever-consuming grief.

  How do I know all these things? Because I too never slept. The silence of the night has no wings.

  A picture of Hamid Bey as a young man, dressed in a lavishly decorated uniform, hung on the wall across from the swallow’s nest. Regal, fierce, untouchable, he’d once been the mayor of Cordelio. Now a neglected notary public and a part-time watch repairer, he occupied a modest storefront in an arcade near the Cordelio boat landing. But when he walked down the street, old men still took off their hats and saluted him and old ladies still coyly giggled, remembering his yellow mustache—“baby chicken yellow” as Maria would say—his Young Turk fez. How handsome he was! And how stubborn.

  “Good day, Mr. Mayor. How are you today?” the locals saluted him.

  Hamid Bey straightened his gait, closed his eyes, bowed, and took his hat off with old-fashioned dignity as if he were still the mayor. But his chest sank when he remembered how he had lost it all.

  Before leaving for America, Camilla consoled Amber with new shoes, and dresses, mother-daughter fashions, matching polka dots, matching stripes, matching eyelet, silk, organdy. She styled their hair the same way, blazing a curling iron on the embers of Malika’s coal stove. She sizzled her own abundant curls, then Amber’s, Shirley Temple style. In fact, she fashioned her daughter after Shirley, the magical child star.

  Amber had already discovered vanity, wished to be beautiful like her mother or her aunt Aida, and she’d blossom when Cadri took their pictures with his newly acquired Kodak Brownie, a gift from his brother, Aladdin. But something changed that summer, just before America. The inextricable cord that bonded the child to the parents irrevocably snapped. In anticipation of the impending separation, Amber drifted into an inexplicable aloofness.

  It was the day they had won the Puro soap competition at the
International Fair held at the Culture Park in Izmir as the best-dressed mother and daughter and were photographed with the pehlivans, the champions of the Turkish wrestling team, Amber sandwiched between Celal Atik and Mersinli Ahmet holding on to their hands and Camilla smiling in the background. Afterward, they took the ferry across to Cordelio and strolled along the serpentine promenade, following the thin blue wafer of the bay, dragging bags full of pink Puro soap, their trophy.

  Camilla was beaming as they headed down Seven Whiskers Street through a row of brightly painted houses, eating licorice, holding hands with Amber. Mimosa burst like miniature firecrackers with yellow pollen carpeting the ground and powdering their hair as the tiny puffballs occasionally caught the wind, swirling in spirals. Amber sneezed uncontrollably because the pollen tickled her nose.

  “Bless you.”

  Just then, she noticed on the opposite side of the street a chocolate-colored girl with unusually pale pink lips, identical to Amber except for the color of eyes and skin. The girl was barefoot and had long frizzy braids that jetted out like barbed wire. The two girls’ eyes caught each other for a moment and wanted to explore but Camilla squeezed Amber’s hand and led her away.

  “Who’s that girl?” Amber asked.

  “She lives in that tin shanty behind my parents’ house. You know the enormous dark woman—steals copperware to support her children—her name is Sultan.

  “Is she a thief?”

  “No, silly. Stealing copperware means glazing it with silver, you know, to give it the reddish patina you see. An absurd name for a woman like that. Well, that little girl is Sultan’s daughter. I think they call her Nuria. Those poor kids, always going around shoeless, in rags, snot stretching down their noses to their waists. Gypsies. You know the kid who beats on copper pans every afternoon at five?”

  “The one who walks all over town peeping in windows, asking ladies for Nivea cream jars?”

  “Yes, that’s her older brother.”

  “What’s the matter with him?”

  “Terrible story. When he was little some bad kids lured him to the house up on the hill.”

  “The haunted one?”

  “That’s the one. It was May, the night of Hidrellez festival when strange whispers filled the air, and the light separated from the dark. Well, the bad boys locked the door and abandoned him in the vacant house. Poor kid, he kept banging and screaming for them to come back but instead, from the stairway, descended ugly ghosts, apparitions, phantasms. He was so terrified he swallowed his tongue. Since then, the poor soul only makes sounds, no words.”

  “Were they real?” Amber asked. “Those things?”

  “No, silly. There are no real ghosts and things like that. Just bad boys with sheets over their heads.”

  When they returned, Camilla asked Amber to stand up on the dining table with her hands sticking out like pokers on each side and began pinning the new yellow eyelet dress for the approaching Bayram. Amber fussed. Flies everywhere. The heat.

  “Stand still,” Camilla ordered, her mouth full of pins. “I don’t want to prick you and draw blood. Stand still. Don’t fuss, will you?”

  “I don’t want to,” Amber told her.

  “It’s almost over.”

  “I don’t want to,” she repeated. “Anne, I don’t want to wear this dress.”

  “What’s come over you? It’s çok güzel, very cute—you said so yourself. Just like the one I have.”

  “I don’t want to look like you, Anne. I want to look like myself.” Large tears splashed out of Amber’s eyes; she was splitting at the seams realizing the separation. “I don’t want to,” she repeated.

  Instead of taking her daughter into her arms, Camilla slowly rolled the fabric into a neat bundle, collected the pins scattered all over the floor, and left the room. She threw herself on her bed and wept. Her daughter had left her.

  The next morning, when Amber opened her steamer trunk, she found it empty. All her dresses, sweaters, even the shoes, gone.

  “What did you do with my clothes?”

  Camilla was packing. She ignored Amber.

  “Where are my clothes, Anne?”

  “You said you didn’t want to look like me.”

  “. . . but I liked my dresses.”

  “Well, they were just like mine and since you told me you didn’t want to look like me, I gave them away to the poor who have no cause to complain.”

  On this note, Camilla left for America on SS Independence. Amber and her grandparents stood on the quay waving at the ocean liner as it glided out of Izmir harbor all lit up. The child saw her future at that moment. Someday, she too would leave.

  It would be several days before Malika noticed that Amber never changed her clothes, even when she slept. She had been observing her grandaughter’s habits before imposing her own.

  “Why are you always wearing the same dress, Amber?” she finally asked one day.

  “It’s my favorite.”

  Another night she saw Amber washing the dress and hanging it up to dry. Malika left her alone, obviously the child’s security rag. She must be missing her parents. But the children in the neighborhood came around street corners in packs and pinched their noses at Amber and uttered a long pee-you. Then ran off in the opposite direction, giggling and chanting, “Stinky Amber fe-ell. Stinky Amber fe-ell. She fell into the cesspool.”

  Still, Amber was the privileged city girl in their midst, the only one without hennaed hands and pierced ears, without bare feet. The one who’d always worn a meticulously tied butterfly bow on top of her head. The one who read books and fumetti during her siesta and drew strange pictures of houses while the rest roasted pinion and scratched olives to help out with the family income.

  “Amber, you must tell me, what happened to the rest of your clothes?” Malika asked again days later, staring at the empty trunk. “I just don’t understand.”

  Amber shrugged her shoulders.

  “What did you do with them, child? Where did you hide them?”

  “I hid them nowhere.”

  “Then, where are they? Did you give them to someone else?”

  “No I didn’t. I didn’t.” She fell apart, on the verge of big tears. “My mummy did.”

  Malika uttered some incomprehensibles in Greek. “But why? What made her do such a thing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Your mother has always been a stubborn girl but this is going too far, my little Amber,” Malika whispered in her lispy accent. “I just wish I could make you a new dress but I can’t afford to buy cloth. Your grandfather doesn’t give me any money, you see. And I have none of my own left. But maybe I can take apart one of my old dresses and remake it for you.

  It was midsummer by then. Tamarisk trees danced, caught in the sea breeze. Pale asphodels waved like apparitions of flowers and anemones in superbright colors sprung along the cliffs. As Amber climbed up the rocks, she saw the same chocolate-colored girl she and Camilla had encountered the day of the contest. The girl was skipping stones, her rebellious hair sticking out every which way. But her face was as clean as if a milk cow had just licked it. She was wearing nice shoes and socks, also the yellow eyelet dress matching Camilla’s.

  Amber looked away, chewing her gum mastic and pretending not to see the girl but there was such little distance between them along the path that it was impossible to avoid her. Nuria turned around and began walking next to Amber, just an air space between them. They walked like this for a long time in competitive silence. When Amber quickened her steps, Nuria speeded hers as well and when she slowed down, so did Nuria.

  Finally, Amber stopped, gave her a nasty look, “What do you want?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Amber.”

  “Mine is Nuria.”

  “I know.”

  “Can I have some of your gum?”

  “No.”

  Nuria shrugged as if she was untouched. “Then, do you want to come and roast pinions?”

&nbs
p; Nuria led Amber toward the Promenade to case out the scrubby, gnarled trees, their short, stiff needles oozing with sap. Small nuggets the size of coffee beans burst out of their cones from the heat, yielding hard-shelled nuts that matured and reached full size in August. Most of them had already detached from the tree and fallen to the ground. The girls gathered the nuts scattered among the needles and dirt, competing with each other.

  Around sunset, Nuria took Amber to her gecekondu, “the birds that roost in the night,” one of those squatters’ shacks erected overnight. Three barnacle-like rooms were patched together with driftwood, panels of tin from old olive oil cans, and tarpaper, the windows of oilcloth. Amber was fascinated with this poverty.

  Sultan sat on a fig crate outside, surrounded by children, chickens, and laundry hanging to dry. Her pendulous breasts like water-filled balloons, each slung on the opposite shoulder like some sort of an exotic halter top.

  “You can’t make a purse out of a sow’s ear no matter how hard you try,” she scolded Nuria pointing at her dress, sticky and tarred now from the pinion dust. “Here take this mutton grease to clean the sap from your hands.”

  An enormous woman of gypsy descent, Sultan had four children. Yet all that remained from her husband was a skinny gold bracelet made from his teeth, which she protected valiantly. She sat under a grass pergola, spreading a small amount of nuts on a flat surface, then used a flat stone, breaking the hard shells with a gentle rubbing motion. The girls imitated while she boiled the nuts and mashed them into a paste that they spread on day-old bread that the baker had given them.

  In the evening, they tossed the cones into the bonfire and swiftly scooped them out with wire because roasting the nuts in their own shells enhances their rich flavor. The aroma strayed like a light feather and reached here.

  After that day, Amber and Nuria became glued to each other from the time they woke up until they were forced to go to bed. Amber became a regular at Sultan’s house, participating in their ways. Sometimes she even sat with them around a pot of flour paste, cutting and folding the newspapers Nuria’s younger siblings had been gathering and glued them into cone-shaped paper bags, which the children later sold to the shops along the Promenade. Sultan pickled the green pine cones just before they reached maturity and sold them to the pickle shops near the boat landing, which attracted customers from far away.