Seven Houses

by Alev Lytle Croutier

“I mean, you don’t have to hide it from me. I know you’re a Rum and your real name is Maria.”

  Malika, timid as a deer, became stiff. She wiped her hands on her apron and went inside.

  “You lied to me,” Amber shouted after her.

  When Amber came in later, she found Maria lying on a hammock in the verandah, her eyes shut but still racing rapidly under the lids.

  She walked up to the hammock and climbed next to Maria. She cuddled up to her and ran her hands on the old woman’s face. “I didn’t mean to upset you,” she said.

  Maria bit her lips and hung on to her emotions. “We wanted to protect you. In case hate returns someday, we didn’t want you to be vulnerable. We’ve been through things we don’t want to remember. Remembering brings them back to life. It’s best you don’t know certain things.”

  They lay together, their arms entwined, and eventually fell asleep. These secrets obviously belonged here, she could not carry them to Istanbul where her parents planned to settle after Ann Arbor. But she had not yet discovered the secret in her backyard.

  The vaudeville group had finished pitching their tent, suddenly transforming the meadow behind us into a festive carnival with dancing bears, cauldrons of boiled corn, pickle stands, cradle swings—ecstasy for children in the vicinity. People came from all over town seeking thrills in the clamoring crowd. The town perverts, too, lurked around every corner, brushing their vital parts on unsuspecting women as if by accident, seeking dark corners in crowded places to molest children.

  The girls had been alerted to the prospect of a stranger’s eager hands wandering into their place of shame down there. Their sacred am. Beware of those big bad hands. Never, ever let them creep into your secret parts. One of the kids said he’d seen a man rub himself against Nuria, then stick his hand under her skirt while watching the show in the fringes of the vaudeville tent, where the people stood who could not afford to pay.

  All the kids went the opening night but Hamid Bey would not allow Amber, who still had to pay penance for releasing Scheherazade. So she lay in bed listening to the music from the tent blasting over a loudspeaker, then spreading like an omnipotent cloud. She listened to two women’s voices in a duet:

  Neredesin kizim?

  Where are you, daughter?

  Buradayim anne.

  I’m here, mother.

  Napiyorsun kizim?

  What are you doing, daughter?

  Dans ediyorum, anne

  I’m dancing, mother.

  Kiminle kizim?

  With whom, my daughter?

  Bir Rusla, anne.

  With a Russian, mother.

  Then, the thumping began that shook me like an earthquake. Rapid thumping of feet. The beating of a tambourine. It was a humid summer night, Malika asleep on a floor bed, slipping on to the cool tiles, and Hamid Bey snored in rhythm on his regal brass bed.

  Rusun aski baska,

  A Russian’s love is fiery,

  Rusun aski baska,

  A Russian’s love is passionate,

  Hey kazaska.

  So, let’s dance the Cossacka.

  Hey kazaska

  Hey, Cossackska.

  Russians were bad people, troublemakers throughout history, Hamid Bey had told her. Now someone in there was dancing with a Russian? Was she a bad girl herself? She was a bad girl. All her fault.

  Scheherazade’s ghost haunted her dreams. Every night the fox wandered into the bedroom and sniffed her hair while she slept. She could hear Nivea’s howling in the distance. The thumping of feet intensified as if suddenly more of them were jumping around and kicking legs close to the ground. Thump, thump. Kick, kick. Thump, thump.

  Amber could no longer endure the oppression of humidity. She tiptoed outside, crossed the field, glaring with spotlights. People, tall people, had gathered all around the tent making it difficult to peek. So she sneaked to the backside, crawled under the bleachers.

  A fat man with a dark mustache, wearing a turban and two large hoop earrings, almost tripped over her. He darted into the center of the tent and boomed into his megaphone: “Now, ladies and gentlemen, here comes our most fabulous, most enchanting Dandy Girl, the magnificent Bobstil girl!”

  A drum began to beat suspensefully as a fleshy woman dressed in skimpy satin shorts and net stockings and held by a harness was lowered from the top of the tent.

  Bobstilim sendin

  You are my dandy,

  Yanima geldin

  You came to my side,

  Kalbimi deldin

  You punctured my heart,

  Akimi serdin

  And spread my love.

  How the mind rejects things out of context! She’d lost so much weight that Amber could not trust her eyes at first, but the voice, the voice was unmistakable. The voice of Lili Marlene. When I’m calling you ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo . . .

  Bobstilin apkasi

  The dandy’s hat

  Ayni vapur bacasi

  Is just like a ship’s chimney.

  Bobstilin kravati

  The dandy’s necktie

  O da vapur halati

  Is the ship’s rope.

  At one point the Bobstil girl’s eyes fixed in Amber’s direction, seemed to catch hers, lingered longer. How could she see anyone when the bright lights were shining right into her eyes, especially a small head poking in between people’s feet?

  Big applause. The Bobstil girl went backstage and the fat majordomo appeared again with a hatful of vulgar jokes to fill the time. Some sidekicks in sequined bathing suits came out and did a roll of cartwheels in the arena. Suddenly, a dramatic drumbeat. Cymbals. Clash, bam. The majordomo announced: “Ladies and gentleman, now Salome, the enchantress with seven veils. Here she comes.”

  Veiled in layers of diaphanous fabric, carrying a tray with a bearded man’s head covered with blood, a woman rushed into the center of the tent. Was the head real? Whose head? So tiny, shriveled like a coconut, like the ones in cannibal movies.

  Salome swirled and spun like a dervish, balancing the tray perfectly on her head, swirled and spun. Then placed it in front of the majordomo now sitting on a throne and began undulating. She swirled around, dancing slowly, very slowly, as if in a sufic trance that continued for what seemed like eternity. The veils unpeeled layer by layer. The colors of the rainbow floated in the air as the eager hands of the audience grabbed for them.

  Amber recalled the day when Iskender had pulled out the silk scarves, in rainbow colors. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.

  The dancer had achieved a sense of equilibrium that allowed effortless harmony. This was a dance of survival. A strip, a tease. Salome, a whore. Salome, the courageous, peeled off her defenses, making herself vulnerable to death.

  “She is mourning for her lover whose head she offers on a tray, a macabre nightmare of betrayal,” hissed the majordomo.

  As Amber watched the blur of rainbow colors, she felt dizzy. When Salome finally removed the last veil, the child’s suspicion was confirmed. Salome and the Bobstil girl were one and the same—none other than her wayward aunt Papatya.

  The intermission followed. Amber left immediately and began walking back, a blackbird in her chest. Even the ice-cream cart could not entice her. She passed through walls of familiar faces. In the dark, a voice pursued: “Amber, Amber, Amber.” Amber began to run but Papatya caught up with her and cuddled the girl in her arms. The flood lights came on. The field pulsated with an eerie brilliance.

  The neighborhood kids watched on the fringes. Amber wanted to pretend she did not know this woman but she could not free herself. Papatya squeezed and kissed her—her cheeks, her eyes, every part of her face.

  “What on earth are you doing here, sugar plum?” she asked, tears rolling down her cheeks.

  “My grandparents Taşpinar,” pointing at me. “They live there, at the turquoise house.”

  Papatya withdrew for a moment, her eyes sunk inside. “They mustn’t see me,” she said. “You won’t tell th
em, will you?”

  Amber shook her head.

  “Where are your parents?”

  “In America.”

  “In America? Why? Why didn’t they take you along?”

  “Onions,” Amber told her. “I told them I would eat them but they didn’t want to take a chance.”

  “Onions? That can’t be the real reason.”

  Amber began to whimper. Papatya rocked her in her arms. “Hush. Hush. Doesn’t make any sense,” she said, “but does anything? Don’t be sad, my little Amber. You have a long life ahead of you. Inşallah, you’ll find your way to America someday. Things have a way of coming a full circle. But hush now.”

  Amber began breathing normally and wiped her eyes. “How come you’re with the carnival?”

  “The only way I could dance,” Papatya said. “God put me on this earth to sing and to dance. I’m only doing his will.”

  “Are you coming back?”

  Long silence. “I don’t think so. I am a different person now. They won’t take me back. Besides, I wouldn’t fit in anymore.”

  “They sold the Spinsters Apartment,” Amber told her. “Everyone now scattered all over the place. My parents in America; Aida and the General moved to Istanbul. Aunt Mihriban and the matriarchs have gone back to whatever is left of the burnt plantation. Only Sibel’s family stayed in Ankara.”

  “Not our doing,” she said. “None of this. Kismet can’t be dismissed. It was meant to be this way. No one’s to blame.”

  “Everyone thought you ran off with Uncle Rodrigo.”

  “Oh, no. Wasn’t meant to be. He ran off to Egypt with his coffee beans for bigger and better dreams. The fish that gets away is always big.”

  “But he stole our money. Scattered us all.”

  “Who knows? Maybe it was our own doing. You see, one must never precede a wise man or follow a fool. Our fortune had already taken its turn. Nothing we could do but lose. We were tired of the burden. I think the family wanted to lose the wealth so they didn’t have to be responsible for it. Sometimes it’s a curse to have more than enough.”

  Someone called out, “Salome! Next act. Get back here.”

  Papatya quickly kissed Amber, disappeared into the tent. The neighborhood kids had been watching them from a distance, Nuria and all. She came prancing toward Amber. “What did she tell you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re so lucky,” she told Amber with admiration and envy in her voice. “Bobstil girl spoke to you. Why did she speak to you?”

  “She thought I was someone else. Another girl.”

  “She kissed you!”

  “I’m tired,” Amber said. “Leave me alone.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  Amber sneaked back, crawled in bed next to Malika. The old woman cradled her. Another duet wafted from the tent.

  Ah, kizim kizim,

  Ah, daughter daughter,

  Edali kizim

  Capricious daughter,

  Çekilmiyor nazin

  Can’t bear your whim,

  Seni de bir sarho istiyor

  A drunkard wants to marry you.

  Ne yapam kizim?

  What should I do?

  Amber was fast asleep before the final refrain.

  Ah, ana ana,

  Ah, mother mother,

  Gözleri yana

  Weeping eyes,

  Üzülmuyor sakin

  Don’t worry.

  Içer, içer sarhs olur

  He would only get drunk,

  Sarilir bana

  And make love to me.

  The first thing in the morning, Amber returned to the tent looking for Papatya to give her a basket of figs from the orchard. The majordomo, sitting on a bleacher, was sewing sequins on his costume. He looked so old, so ordinary in the daylight without his flashy costume and makeup.

  “I was looking for Salome.”

  “Salome is gone.”

  “Where?”

  “Where, I don’t know.”

  “Isn’t she coming back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  It was the end of summer. A letter awaited Amber from Ann Arbor. Cadri and Camilla were on their way back.

  II

  The Prodigal Daughter’s Return

  You navigated with raging soul far from the paternal home, passing beyond the seas’ double rocks and now you inhabit a foreign land.

  AESCHYLUS, Medea

  “So, how do they know a virgin?” she asked.

  “The hymen. If it doesn’t bleed, the girl’s been defiled.”

  On her wedding night, when Esma didn’t show blood, her husband had killed a rooster to save face, smeared the blood on their wedding sheets, and hung them up on the flag pole for all the neighborhood to see. She broke down, cried, told him she was innocent; she’d never been touched before. Deep down, he did not believe but, nevertheless, remained with her till his death. A rare thing. Set the tenor of their marriage. Maybe even his early departure.

  In her adolescence, Amber had recurrent nightmares of pain and hemorrhage caused by piercing of the hymen—that thin mucous membrane rumored to veil the orifice of a virgin’s vagina, the same way the veil itself protected a woman’s face. Coital caress a terrifying curse; the wedding night, a kind of mutilation a woman had to endure. Confusing since the god of marriage, a handsome youth carrying a torch, was also called Hymen.

  The fear of unbearable pain, not the morals, restrained her, so she laughed at Cadri’s resonant words as he saw her off to America. “Honor your virtue.” Honor virtue. Virtue. Honor your corner, and your partner, eight hands round we go.

  Merely hours after her departure, she had disobeyed him, flown the coop of captivity. No pain or blood but the unbearable knowing that she could never return to live in the old country again was the greater pain. She had become an exile.

  Twenty-five years passed before she first returned. And this last time, he had already passed away, a few months before.

  Essence of Honey Street

  (1997)

  Homesickness transforms the objects of our memories into poetic ideals whose fine qualities grow in our eyes, while their defects always soften with time and absence and are almost erased by our imagination.

  GEORGE SAND, Horace

  Once an easy street, quiet, with a row of pretty houses boasting fragrance gardens and ornate verandahs, where everyone knew everyone, over the years, Essence of Honey Street had become the nucleus of a bustling metropolis. Amber did not recognize it.

  At the terminal across from the mosque, the one with the incomplete minaret, Camilla was running toward them, astonishingly more diminutive than imprinted in Amber’s memory—a horizontal expansion that made her resemble some character out of Alice in Wonderland. She led a chorus of women, familiar faces with lost names, hands raised to the sky, singing the same lyrics. “Welcome home, sweet darling. Welcome home, at last.”

  With her two-packs-a-day voice, Camilla greeted them, as if time had done nothing to diminish intimacy. Who was she embracing? The eighteen-year-old voluptuary who had left on such a sweltering day as this twenty-five years ago or the forty-something woman of the world?

  Then, she fixed on Nellie. Squeezed the young girl’s cheek.

  “Love of my life you’re so skinny.”

  “But graceful as a pheasant,” Aida interjected, appearing behind Camilla, a brilliant debut as always, decked out in a metallic shantung coat with a matching turban. She drew Amber into her arms and felt the void of her aunt’s missing left breast.

  Amber had not recuperated from the arrogant welcome at the airport when the customs officials had confiscated the prosthesis, her gift for Aida. Not listed in the tariff. A hundred dollars would have remedied the situation but she refused to yield to corrupt afflictions of her countrymen that had once chased her away. Not a good welcome, face to face so soon with the reasons for her exile.

  The women quickly fell into a sobbing mass, flesh on flesh, stayed heaped to prolong the taste of
reunion. Sucking, licking, pinching.

  In her absence the city had grown more than ten times its former size. Lured by the legend of pavements made of gold, peasants from remote villages swarmed in like locusts. What they found were garbage hills instead and houses of tin and cow pies. Some fled to Germany where cheap labor was desirable; others filled their souls and lungs with methane. The ones that returned formed a new class. To accommodate their uncultivated needs, the elegant houses collapsed overnight, stacks of boxes replaced them.

  The Essence of Honey street, the refuge of Amber’s adolescence, had mutated into one of those nondescript roads, eclipsing the city’s glorious architectural past. Ancient arches, columns, soft-flowing arabesques clashed with straight-edged atrocities that spread across the skyline, haphazardly constructed out of the poorest supplies, attitude, and craftsmanship that made them serious earthquake hazards. Domes and cupolas of its former silhouette crumbled into the earth for future excavations. Precious tiles buried under concrete as people turned color blind, painting their city gray. The city was mourning, unaware, the passing of glory—Byzance, Constantinople, and Stamboul.

  That’s what Amber learned the day of her returning. Not much left to hold on to. Maybe the sea.

  She could not find her way home. How could she? To imagine that the charming villa of her youth, if I may say so, was replaced by a building of six, seven stories, surrounded by the same straight-angled high-rises with bland windows and sharp balconies, buildings that spread like gossip. Row after row.

  “If you only knew what a nightmare it was to build this place. No skilled workers left here,” Camilla complained as she led Amber and Nellie up the stairs. All gone to Germany, Switzerland—places in Europe to make better money. Lots better. So, we end up suffering the leftovers.”