Her oldest son was named Umit, which meant “Hope,” but the kids called him Nivea. He floated, weightless and transparent, wandering from house to house, unexpectedly materializing at people’s windows with his beatific smile and asking the women for “Nivea.” These tender-hearted ladies had no trouble parting with their empty cream jars, uttering their blessings. Nivea’s face would glow, a halo around his head, as he disappeared into his corner of the shack, carrying an armful of blue glass jars.
“What do you do with them?” Amber asked but could never get an answer. Nivea smiled a toothless smile and offered her one of his jars like a precious seashell.
That summer, Nivea’s beard grew, covering his entire face, cheeks, forehead, even his nose—he had reached puberty—and in the mornings, Nuria shaved him with a razor while the neighborhood kids watched in fascination. But that was not his only change as other impulses stirred inside his body. During the full moon, Nivea marched to the middle of the field, raised his head toward the sky, and howled.
First the townspeople imagined him as the gray wolf of Ergenekon legends, the wolf of freedom, a sacred beast. But when this savage synchronization persisted, it startled them, who now suspected Nivea of being a werewolf. Especially when the entire canine population of Cordelio gathered around him in packs, honoring him as the alpha male, and howled in chorus. Neighbors with sticks and stones chased away the dogs, which they believed to be the children of the devil, but since their religion did not permit killing dogs, they exiled them instead to the Bitch Island, where the packs wandered day and night, howled, and ate one another.
“Nivea, Nivea, Nivea,” the boy sang. Nivea, Nivea, Nivea (to the tune of figaro, figaro, figaro . . .).
“Stop howling and attracting the goddamn dogs or else we’ll have to send you to the Bitch Island, too,” Hamid Bey scolded the boy. Nivea smiled and nodded.
After that, every full moon Sultan tied Nivea’s hands behind his back, kept him in the outhouse, which shook with tormented sounds until the sun rose. Then Nivea sat in front of the shack next to Sultan doing nothing but simply holding his blissful smile. When people looked at his face, their troubles melted; they had an enchanted day.
One day, when Amber went looking for Nuria, she found the shack empty. She tiptoed into Nuria’s room where she had never been invited before, looking for the dresses that Camilla had given to Nuria. Instead, she stumbled into the barnacle where Nivea lay fast asleep. Next to his bed was a pyramid of Nivea jars, mathematically precise and neatly balanced, a cerulean radiance on Nivea’s cherubic face. (As she piled up Campbell’s soup cans at Warhol’s studio many years later, Amber would remember this moment.)
She was still mesmerized watching him sleep when Nuria found her.
“What are you doing here?”
“I was looking for you.”
“Come on, then. I’ll take you to my secret place.”
Instead of their usual walk through the pinion forest, they turned inland where the density of settlements gradually subsided and the houses disappeared completely.
In the small meadow by the winter creek, the ruins of an ancient Roman temple greeted them. Arches and columns still mysteriously suspended in the air. Capitals and broken pieces lying scattered about. Parched grass and thistles sprouted between the stones and turtles wandered among them. Nuria pointed at a patch of honey-colored soil where water flowed. “There,” she said. “And I’m the only one who knows about it. Promise me, on your mother’s dead body, you’ll never tell anyone.”
“Why should I?”
“Have you ever ate dirt before?”
Amber shook her head.
“I’ll show you, then. We’ll make dirt soup. All right?”
Nuria dug the pale soil and scooped it into the olive oil can she was carrying. Then added a little water from another part of the creek, mixing it into a thin mud. She offered some to Amber, who refused.
“It looks like diarrhea.”
Nuria shrugged and dug in with her fingers; as if licking some scrumptious chocolate frosting, she made satisfied gurgles in her throat. “Try some,” she said. “Really. It’s delicious. I promise.”
To Amber, it tasted like sand but gradually she could taste the salt.
“Now we take our pants down and make kaka under the tree because, like earthworms, when we eat the dirt and then shit, it fertilizes the soil,” Nuria instructed Amber. “I return in the winter, gather it, and sell it for fuel.”
That’s how Nuria introduced Amber to geophagy—the practice of eating soil. Amber had read about it in Life magazine. People in Africa, especially pregnant women, did it because the dirt is what gave them minerals they couldn’t get from another source. But some slaves died from eating too much of it.
It was a difficult taste at first, like halvah or olives, but soon, Amber had developed such an intense craving for dirt soup that she’d often walk to the mound by herself without Nuria. Sometimes she rolled the dirt into marble-sized balls, brought the pellets back, and hid them in the old brick oven in the coop where Dudu and Scheherazade lived. But soon the mean goat, who had also developed a taste for dirt, managed to pry open the oven with its horns and devoured Amber’s coveted pellets.
In their secret place Nuria asked Amber about “wadding.”
“Do you want me to show you?”
“Alright.”
“Take off your panties, then.”
Amber reluctantly obeyed and watched Nuria do the same. She had often been curious when they peed together. Nuria kneeled down on the ground and stuck her head under Amber’s skirt.
“I’m going to give you butterfly kisses there,” Nuria said rolling her head between Amber’s legs.
Amber giggled, feeling funny shivers and goose bumps through her body. Suddenly, Nuria stopped, pulled out her head, and said, “Now your turn.”
Amber imitated, lifting Nuria’s skirt and inhaling a musky world of scents and steam. She blinked her eyelashes and Nuria pressed herself against Amber’s face.
“I’m not crazy about this,” Amber announced abruptly, pulling her face out of her friend’s skirt but Nuria smiled so sweetly that she couldn’t just walk away.
“OK, then lie down. I’ll show you something else.” She pulled her skirt up to her waist, soldered her lower body on Amber’s, glued her tiny sex to hers, and began to undulate vigorously. Amber sensed something forbidden with what they were doing but the pleasure she also felt was confusing.
“Where did you learn this?” she asked Nuria.
“The Grocer with Flies. He does it to me sometimes in the back of the shop and gives me free candy.”
“Yuck. What if someone comes through the trees and sees us like this?”
But she drifted into the rhythms of pleasure, little seeds bursting inside her. She wanted her friend to do it again. They had a real secret now.
The girls returned several times to their spot for wadding. But after a while, Amber retreated. She even stopped going to Sultan’s for pinion roasts or pickling. Nuria’s weakness for this was much greater than hers. The neediness scared Amber.
Nuria whined when Amber no longer wanted to play in their secret place.
“Just once more.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“ ’Cause . . .”
“Please!”
“Only if you give me back my dresses in return.”
Nuria made no objections. Her world was more immediate. She reimbursed Amber for each wadding. One by one, the empty steamer’s trunk filled with her old dresses—polka dots, stripes, eyelet, silk, and organdy. Others did not fail to notice. Malika asked where they came from.
“From the well, of course.”
Malika was startled, realizing that another being was part of her private world. How did this happen? Had the child seen her by the well?
The last time Nuria and Amber went to the mound, they took off their underwear and rolled on each other.
“I get my l
ast dress today.”
Nuria slapped Amber’s face. “You’re a stingy bitch.”
“You’re a slut.”
“You’re nothing. Zero. Your grandmother is a gavour. A Rum. A Greek. Her real name is not Malika. It’s Maria. Everyone knows so!”
Amber snapped her dress and began to run but stopped dead in her tracks. Behind the shrubbery a man was pointing his thing at them, huge and red like amanita mushrooms and prickly. His eyes were bulging and fixed. The girls rustled off, terrified of being followed, but the only thing that followed them was the horrible and unforgettable groans of the man that sounded like a donkey braying. Ahi, ahi, ahi.
After the day they had seen the man expose himself, the girls mysteriously stopped talking to each other. Such things happen. Because Amber had retrieved her last dress? Hard to say. Or Nuria’s sharp confessional.
Amber realized she was one-quarter Greek. A mongrel. A gavour. An infidel. A sense of separation from the familiar chilled her heart. It had never occurred to her to question why Malika spoke with an obvious lispy accent or she and Camilla spoke Greek to one another when they were alone. Children accepted such inexplicables. It was a no-no to ask questions that challenged adults. It wasn’t fair. Nothing was fair. Nothing.
In no time, Nuria found a new best friend and Amber began accompanying Hamid Bey to his storefront office near the Promenade.
She’d sit on an overstuffed green armchair, watching her grandfather assemble minuscule axles, dials, with miniature screwdrivers and pinchers, his loupe projecting out as if an extension of his eye. With the tiniest of tweezers he would pick up the tiniest of rubies, diamonds, and emeralds and stick them into the tiniest holes holding together the tiniest wheels while in the background hundreds of cuckoos leapt out of their windows simultaneously, creating such an insane cacophony that people came every hour on the hour to hear them—especially at noon—accompanied by the municipal brass. It was magic.
Sometimes, Amber sat at Hamid Bey’s desk and played with his sturdy Remington, quickly figuring out where the keys were, typing letters to her parents in America.
Dear anne and baba,
I learned to type. How are you? I’m fine. How is Ann Arbor? I miss you. When are you coming back? Do you love me?
Your faithful daughter,
Amber
PS. I got all my dresses back!
She became so adept at typing—not using only one finger as would be expected but all ten flying as if she had been trained in a secretarial course; in fact, every time she hit a key it seemed to play a musical note, creating uncanny songs. First the people of Cordelio watched the poor little rich girl at the keyboard but gradually, those who could not read or write came to her for letters. Ten kurush a page for normal letters. Fifteen for love letters and twenty-five for business letters—cheaper than all the other men with typewriters along the Promenade.
They told her the sentiments, the tears they shed, the hopes they had and Amber typed them into words in the same way that she had learned to write love letters for her nanny Gonca. Women preferred confiding in a little girl more than the men sitting with their portables along the quay.
Afterward, her grandfather notarized the letters with his golden seal. Hamid Bey’s business soared that summer. Even though he never said anything and never showed explicit affection, it was clear that he enjoyed Amber’s company. In the evening, after leaving the shop, they went to the waterfront and bought from the fisherman the catch freshly pulled in, still thrashing around in tin cans.
“Why does that fish have green blood?”
“Because it lived in the deep. The red turns green thirty meters below the sea,” he explained.
At dinner, Hamid Bey sat on a divan, one leg bent, the other crossed, raised his only arm in the air—the other lost in the war—like a conductor preparing to lead a symphony; he brought his knife down onto his plate with a swooping motion, seemingly manipulated by a force larger than himself. Then he entered it smoothly into the torso of the chipura fish, where it was slit. A rivulet of blood trickled out of its side. It was green.
He separated the two halves with small sawing motions, careful not to disturb the bone. Then, with sleight of hand, his knife turned into a fork, which he slid right under the spine and separated it from the bottom, in one swift slide.
The way Hamid Bey’s other empty sleeve sat in such silence, often stuck inside a vest pocket, had always brought on a sense of sorrow to Amber, while the fascination in wanting to see the place from where it had been severed continued to nag her.
The fish skeleton sprung out as perfect as in cartoons—freed from its flesh and all, the vertebrae, the tail, the head still attached. But before removing it to another plate, he probed into the cheek and pulled out a pinkish bead-like thing from right behind the eye.
“The pearl of the fish,” he told Amber. “Here, you eat it. You’ll have better vision. One of the most valuable things in life is to learn to eat fish properly. When you’re finished, nothing should be left except the bare bones and those, sculpturally intact.”
After dinner, Hamid Bey brought Scheherazade into the living room, closed all the doors and windows, and released the fox out of her cage. Scheherazade went slinking around the room, leaving her scent on every available surface. After the marking, Malika fed her a fresh mackerel and she curled up on a kilim next to Amber’s feet and let the girl run her fingers in the luxurious blue fur. Sometimes she stuck her nose in the door and tried pushing it open with her paw but it was effectively bolted. Still, Scheherazade never gave up, until she lost her eyes.
It is hard to know how it all started but one thing is for sure, Dudu the goat didn’t care much for Amber. She did not stop with eating the dirt soup pellets in the brick oven. She came charging after her aggressively, forging her head into the girl’s bottom. It hurt as she fell on the ground, knocking down a terra-cotta jug, which broke into thousands of fragments. Her face fell into the shards and was covered with lesions. She swore revenge.
The day Amber let Scheherazade out of the cage, knowing she wasn’t supposed to, Malika had gone to the market. Although the vixen was as docile as a tame puppy, her freedom would threaten Dudu. It freaked her all right. Dudu ran right out of the turquoise cottage, kicking and baaing, and scared the wits out of the chickens and the cats. Poor Scheherazade, bewildered by this pandemonium, began stalking one of the cats instead of going after Dudu. The cat bristled its back, mustering up all its viciousness, hissed, and snapped back, claws out all the way. An agonized howl and suddenly, Scheherazade’s left eye spilled like a soft-boiled egg and the right was hanging from its socket. The fox was growling now, ready to attack anything in sight.
The goat wandered off, smug and free of guilt. Amber backed away and quickly shut the door to the cottage and latched it. She was out of breath, already confronting a moral dilemma, since her intention had been to torment the goat, not the fox. Poor, poor Scheherazade.
When Hamid Bey returned early from a funeral that afternoon, he found Dudu chewing the arugula patch in the neighbor’s garden. “Stupid little girl,” he yelled at Amber. “What prompted you to let her out?”
He captured the goat and brought her into the shed, then quickly came out. “Amber, where are you?”
Amber came out, her heart leaping out of its place.
“Tell me what happened here.”
“I don’t know.”
“A blind fox is not worth its keep,” Hamid Bey told her. “You knew that.” With his single arm, he removed his pistol from the Liberation War mounted on the wall next to his picture and went back to the shed.
The gunshot was heard throughout Cordelio but people assumed it was coming from the vaudeville group who had just pitched their tent in the meadow behind Seven Whiskers Street, who must have been rehearsing an act.
Amber was grounded. In the morning, Malika served her breakfast inside. Amber sat alone at the table, putting feta and rose jam on her bread. Fat particles from th
e boiled milk floated to the surface, making the taste so nauseating that Amber squeezed a lemon into it. The milk curdled immediately and congealed.
“Look,” she told Malika. “It’s bad milk. I can’t drink it.”
“I don’t understand why,” Malika said in her lispy Greek accent of which Amber was now self-consciously aware. “I just milked Dudu early this morning. I don’t understand how it could have curdled so quickly. Not particularly a hot day.”
Amber was saved from drinking milk that day. The next day, she repeated the same. Malika sensed something was fishy; her granddaughter was capable of great mischief but Malika could not put her finger on it.
“It must be Dudu,” Amber insisted. “She’s a mean goat, capable of only producing curdled milk.”
“That’s rubbish,” Malika objected. “I’ve never had problems with her before. It wasn’t curdled when I milked her this morning. Who’s ever heard of a thing like that? A goat with curdled milk?”
But when the episode continued day after day, Malika began having her own doubts. She began scolding the goat while she expressed her udders. “Now you’re not going to give me curdled milk, are you?”
Dudu kicked her, knocked down the bucket, wasting the milk. That was the last straw.
The following week, when a peddler passed through, collecting mollusks for mother-of-pearl to decorate string instruments, he left with Dudu.
Malika drew some water from the well, undid her bun, and began washing her cascading white hair. She let Amber comb it afterward and pick up the fallen silver strands stuck on her austere dark-colored dress.
“What is your real name?” Amber blurted out.
“What do you mean?”
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