Seven Houses

by Alev Lytle Croutier

  The potent blending of sewer and mothballs attacked Amber and Nellie instantly. The floors crackled with white crystals—Camilla had sprinkled naphthalene on everything produced on a loom with the same fervor she sprinkled salt on her cooking.

  Amber began to cough. The mothballs made her lungs burn, her skin itch, her eyes water. A heat rose inside of her. She went for the windows.

  “Don’t open them,” Camilla shouted, “the draft will kill me. I don’t need pneumonia, you know? Besides the sun would bleach the furniture.”

  What furniture, Amber wanted to say. Where are my grandma Esma’s gorgeous carpets? The Shiraz, the Isphahan, the Hereke? The furniture she once transported all the way from her home in Macedonia on muleback? The textiles Iskender Bey had brought back from his travels? The fabrics once woven at the İpekçi silkworks?

  “There is no draft. Even if there were, it wouldn’t be half as harmful as inhaling mothball dust,” she said instead. “It’s a hundred and fifteen degrees outside, mother. Not a whisper of a breeze.”

  Camilla led them to the bedroom that she and Cadri had shared. Amber recognized the twin beds her parents had custom ordered with “harvest gold” upholstery, after returning from America in the Fifties. His and hers. Just like in the movies of that time.

  “You and Nellie can sleep here.”

  Camilla went around shutting all the windows Amber had been opening. Close, open. Open, close. She rushed from room to room as if she’d swallowed a bottle of amphetamines, gathering things, speaking endlessly.

  Amber’s eyes were flooding, her throat scratchy. It was hopeless. She threw herself on the bed but bounced back instantly. The bedding, too, embalmed in a snow of mothballs that ground against her skin like particles of sand.

  “Why, mother, why on earth do you put poison on the sheets? Moths don’t eat cotton pillowcases, you know?”

  “These moths do. They’ll even eat the fuzz off your ear.”

  “I don’t want to lecture you, of course, but you’ve really overdone it with naphthalene. Why don’t you use cedar wood or something? It’s nontoxic; smells good.”

  “I loathe moths. They’re greedy; they eat everything. They always eat right in front where it shows—never sleeves and parts you can mend. I had a favorite green cashmere sweater; they ate it down to a piece of lace.”

  “Now instead, they will eat your lungs down to a piece of lace,” Amber mumbled.

  Camilla left abruptly and Amber shut the door to take some space so she wouldn’t explode. It had been a long journey. Nellie had already passed out on her bed. She had been nervous to take this trip with her daughter but Nellie seemed to be adjusting better than herself. She sprayed the room with Camilla’s eau de cologne, which only made the smell more noxious, sort of like a lemon-scented pesticide. She opened the balcony door to air out the bedding.

  The street noise boomed like thunder out of a loudspeaker, the narrow street below deeply groaning. The neglected roads crumbled for lack of maintenance. Mountains of debris blocked the streets, shades of gray and brown tinting the landscape like an old daguerreotype. This, once her city, now bewildered and detached.

  A group of pedestrians was waiting for the light to change, standing by a gargantuan statue of Atatürk, with his index finger pointing ahead at a peasant woman cuddling a bouquet of wheat and a young soldier charging ahead with his bayonet.

  A bevy of schoolgirls not much younger than Nellie, wearing head scarves, crossed the street. Atatürk stood in the background with the same intensity pointing his finger at them.

  “I wonder what he’d think of all this,” Amber told Camilla, who stuck her head out another window. “Girls wearing scarves. Women wearing long coats, their heads covered, moving about the streets like black bundles. It’s an effort to remember they are human beings with minds and souls and bodies. And all these bearded men wearing beanies. I can’t believe this reversal.”

  “You’ve seen nothing yet. They’re everywhere now,” Camilla pined. “How it breaks my heart to see such young girls covering themselves. Even at the University. Atatürk would stir in his grave if he knew what this country has come to after all his efforts to elevate women. But, what can we do? We’re a poor country.”

  “What does it have to do with being poor?”

  “Poor people need religion. Fundamentalism is an answer to industrialization.”

  “They need dreams.”

  Children in black uniforms with white piqué collars skipped, crossing the street, swinging their faux leather schoolbags as they ran through a red light. No one seemed to pay attention to the color of the light. Befuddled peasants struggled on foot, weighed down by enormous bundles containing their humble lives. Everything appeared in gradations of black, against the most emphatic surge of human movement, scintillating like capillary motion. The compulsive fatalism of the city screamed out in the confusion of horns, the intermittent voices of the drivers snarling at each other while honking like furious geese.

  Only one house remained untouched in the entire neighborhood, a double-storied stone and stucco with a striped awning above its balcony. Colorful items of laundry strung across like a charm bracelet. Overgrown with potted crawlers and fuchsia vines now cascading down each side of the facade into a wild garden of stones, driftwood, animal skeletons.

  Amber remembered the energetic old man who had built it, his daughter widowed seven times, and the plump Sultana figs from their orchard—now filled with a bunch of high-rises—he brought as a gift at early morning dew.

  “That house is so unkempt and hideous, full of all those dead things—skulls and shells,” Camilla complained. “Disgrace of the neighborhood. I wish they’d bulldoze it.”

  But a warm glow had filled Amber’s face from the first moment it had caught her eyes. Dwarfed among the giant dwellings. It had a voice. Its heart was still beating. On an impulse, she took its picture with Nellie’s camera (a ritual she’d continue to perform everyday after that, at different hours, in different lights, like Monet’s cathedrals). She needed to invent a small obsession to maintain her grounding.

  “Who lives there now?” she asked Camilla.

  Judging from the manner in which Camilla twisted her lips and shook her head, she obviously had opinions. “They say he’s an artist. No, an archaeologist or something. Rejects all offers to tear down the eyesore. His parents were immigrants to Germany. He was born there. Looks just like an Allemagne. Blond hair, blue eyes, tall. A gavour, if you ask me. Nobody really knows much about him. Except . . .”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  “I like it,” Amber told her. “The last survivor of the dreams of the Essence of Honey Street. Remember when all the other houses looked like that? Remember what this villa looked like?”

  “Don’t be so sentimental. Our villa was in shambles. I spent all my time trying to find repairmen. The time had come to tear it down. I’m too old to maintain such nonsense. Don’t you understand? At my age I need modern comforts. I need people to look after me.”

  Amber could sense it coming and she took a breath to avoid biting the bait.

  “Yes,” she said a bit distracted. “Don’t we all? But speaking of modern comforts, how do I light the chauffe bain for hot water?”

  “You wouldn’t know how. I’ll do it.”

  The gas smell from the burner mingled with mothballs and toilet water. Amber went around opening the windows again when they heard a small explosion.

  “Damn it,” Camilla shouted. “The pilot went out. We never get enough gas pressure here.”

  “Never mind. I’ll take a cold shower. In fact, I’d prefer it on a day like this. Much more refreshing.”

  “I don’t want you to catch cold. Besides, terrible for your menstrual. You’d get unbearable cramps.”

  “I’m used to cold showers; they make me feel alive. Great for circulation and all sorts of other things.”

  “Well, you can’t, anyway. Not enough water. Not on this
side of the Baghdad Boulevard. Our water supply is reserved for the nouveau riche. Or Arabs. They bought our country. You should see how they’ve infested our beautiful Tarabia; we call it Arabia now. You should see their fountains flowing while we can’t even flush our toilets.”

  So, instead, Camilla offered Amber the water in the bucket to wash her hair. She’d heat it over the stove. She gave her a monogrammed Turkish towel, crusted with mothballs, to dry her hair.

  Amber sat on a stool inside the lavender tub ladling the water, pouring it over her head, recycling it, pouring it and again as if lost in a distant trance. In the hollowness of her mother’s bathroom, she remembered the loneliness of the first time she took a bath by herself at the Spinsters Apartment.

  Sleep was playing hide and seek.

  Amber lay awake waiting for the curfew, for the streets and for her mother to hush. She lay on her father’s bed—Nellie on the matching twin—watching the hypnotic motion of a pair of not-too-distant searchlights cast from Leander’s lighthouse through the lace curtains.

  “What am I doing here?” she asked out loud.

  Nellie woke out of her jet lag stupor. “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I thought you wanted to see how she was surviving without your dad.”

  At midnight, a piercing siren resonated and the muezzin’s voice came out of a loudspeaker; then the city died. The streets quickly became deserted and hollow, all sounds ceased, except the occasional beating of horse hooves on the pavement, an ominous siren of a patrol car, or intermittent barking of dog packs traveling through the barren streets in search of food. It was a synthetic silence as if the streets were populated with other invisible predators.

  “This silence spooks me, Mom,” Nellie stirred in bed. “It’s too weird. I can’t get to sleep and I hate this Martial Law curfew stuff.”

  “Let’s get some air.”

  They tiptoed out to the balcony so as not to arouse Camilla. One by one the lights went off in the high-rise compounds across the way, except the little house of charm. The moon diffused through the clouds cast an artificial shadow like stage lighting, murky and jaundiced under the dim street lamps. Concrete monoliths, placed at obtuse angles, lurked above them like oversized constructivist robots—identical blocks, stacked-together Lego cities but in shades of gray. Two windows and a balcony. A canvas of muted and hard-edged half tones—the buildings, the sky, even the trees.

  “Something almost living about these buildings, Mom, like some mechanical Japanese robots; you can almost see them marching, can’t you? Marching to crush the city. It must have been tough to grow up here.”

  “It was different then, spacious and green. Practically countryside. Not that different than our place in California.”

  “How old were you?”

  “In my teens. We built the house after my parents returned from America. Early sixties, just when my hormones were going berserk, my breasts budding. I remember one summer, I bleached my hair with peroxide. Wore it like some bad imitation of Brigitte Bardot, fluffed and teased, preparing to cruise the streets arm in arm with girlfriends in ballerina shoes, looking for adventure.”

  “And your parents didn’t mind?”

  “Sure they did. When Camilla saw my brassy mane, she freaked, ‘Eyvah, what will the neighbors think? Cadri, you ought to have a talk with her.’ So, my father lunched in frowned silence, chewing his food so loud you could jump out of your skin, then, wiped his mouth menacingly with his napkin and asked me to follow him to his pensatorio.”

  “What’s that?”

  “His thinking room. He always had one. He closed the door. ‘You shamed us, Amber,’ he said. ‘How could you have done that to your hair!’ I said, all my friends are doing it. It’s in. Don’t you like it?

  “He snorted, trying to conceal what was inside him and had to admit, yes, it did make me look attractive somewhat but I shouldn’t have done it anyway because girls from nice families just don’t do things like that. ‘Makes them look like common trash. Do you understand?’ I told him that the matriarchs always put indigo on their hair. And Aida and Sibel dye theirs blond. ‘That’s different,’ he said. ‘They are women. You are a girl. They have it done professionally.’ ‘So next time I’ll go to the hairdresser?’ I’d gone too far. Well, he slapped me.”

  “He slapped you? How old were you?”

  “Maybe sixteen—the only time he ever did such a thing. Surely couldn’t have been just about my hair. Strangely, that was the moment I knew I’d leave, I’d go away, far away from here. The slap sent me much further than he could have imagined.”

  They each slipped into their silent worlds for a moment.

  “What did you do, I mean, how did you have fun in those days?”

  “Oh, we were just a bunch of teenagers like anywhere . . .”

  Amber almost went into a trance and recreated the world of her youth for her daughter. She told Nellie how they were overstimulated by the voices of Johnny Mathis, Domenico Modugno, Charles Aznavour, seeking role models in fan magazines and comic books and Hollywood musicals, of a world oceans away that existed in movies and pop songs. How they obsessively mimicked American teen trends, going broke on orlon twin sets, bobby sox, penny loafers, saddle shoes bought in the PX black market. How hot rods and hot dogs were as exotic to them as the harems and baklava elsewhere. How their mothers’ handknit sweaters were no longer good enough because they represented a world they desired to outgrow, instead flaunting Bermuda shorts—that exclusively hideous American bad taste. But they loved anything American because it was American.

  I still retain the memory of the languorous afternoons on Essence of Honey Street when Amber was an adolescent. While women snored in their siestas, while men played bezique in the club house, the young kids swooned with “Wild Is the Wind” and “Nada Per Me,” smoking Salems and Kents, cartons scored on a whole month’s allowance. But miraculously they managed somehow with a few phrases in English from rock ’n’ roll and comics, befriending the GI connections and all, cute blond boys with combat boots and guns, chewing Bazooka, thrown into a desolate Anatolian wilderness. Give me. I love you. Want a date? Take me to the prom. Let’s go to the hop. Jiminy Cricket. Holy macaroon. Hardy har har. See you later, alligator. After while, crocodile. I went digging ditches but now I dig it the most. While they pretended to be Bettys and Veronicas, seeking to pair off with Archies, Reggies, and Jugheads, their grandmothers, dressed in black babushkas and shabby dark clothes, sat on the terraces, carrying the sadness of all they’d ever lost as they counted their amber worry beads. Ah, what’s the world coming to?

  Romance entered their hearts through pirated True Love and Photoplay. They drooled over Ricky and Dave Nelson whom they knew only through secondhand fan magazines since TV had not yet arrived, chasing boys who resembled them—the summers on the beach bleached even the darkest mop of hair, especially with a little help from H2O2, hydrogen peroxide, the brassy sleaze. Girls and boys both.

  Siesta hours spent in front of mirrors instead of in bed, carefully painting faces, ironing nylon underwear. Arm in arm, the girls strolled down the Essence of Honey Street to the Baghdad Boulevard to promenade their tits and tans. Sometimes headed for Suadiye Beach, or to the club Circle d’Orient, sipping sour-cherry Fruko, meals charged to their fathers’ accounts. Their eyes searched for love, Frankie Laine’s “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” blending with Zeki Müren singing “My Beautiful Magnolia” over loudspeakers from here all the way over there to Bostanci, where the lights are.

  They giggled and checked out the boys promenading in their skimpy bathing suits as they became aroused and took fast dives into the water to conceal their tumescence. At sunset, they watched the beach people rinsing the sand off their bodies in outdoor showers. Or dark men in dark sunglasses dressed in white, pushing ashore in Chris Craft boats—assembled from kits their relatives had sent them from America—to pick up older girls in stylish bathing suits and drift off toward the Pri
nce Islands, shimmering like fish scales under the last rays of the sun.

  “Sounds just like American teens in fifties movies,” Nellie told Amber. “Totally weird.”

  “Totally. We even had discos.”

  How they’d sneak into the Atomic Discotheque, ordering Cinzano sodas—no age restriction—DJs hard breathing “You Mean Everything to Me” and “Wild Is the Wind,” dancing cheek to cheek with boys or doing the twist, later rubbing fig milk on their necks to conceal the hickeys.

  Just before dark, they returned arm in arm back to the Essence of Honey Street, tousled and sheltering secrets the others shared but could not betray. Blooming lindens formed a canopy of sweet pollen exuding a scent similar to sex, these same trees now reaching the edge of the balcony.

  This was all before we lost color. All the houses were painted in candy colors with green shutters and quaint gardens where tomatoes and roses grew intertwined. Single-family dwellings, you know? Housing nuclear families. Ozzie and Harriets of Turkey.

  But only on the surface. In their hearts the Turks were still nomads who’d lived in tribes for thousands of years, pitching their tents wherever the wind blew, sinking into the earth to sleep unconcerned about rooting. Home was a part of their body, an appendage ready to dismantle and abandon at a moment’s notice. Permanence of home was an incomprehensible notion. Home was transience. Home was the steppes, the desert, the caves, the mountains. Home was you. Your body.

  Their invasions stopped here—the farthest stretch to the west. The indestructible doors closed and they would forever be pounding on them, begging to be allowed in, desperately yearning to become part of the West while trying to destroy it. But in their obsession, they found themselves conquered by the need for sameness, imitating forms they did not understand, homes that did not belong to them. Their confidence gone, they became unfathomable. Like their houses and sacred spaces, they hid behind the emptiness in between the facades of a movie set or locked their women behind lattices, behind veils to cover their shame, which they couldn’t contain. They had lost their souls.