The back windows were effectively boarded up but one of the doors opening into the cellar gave way. Inside, the walls bulged, the floorboards broken, the windows shattered. Smelled of cat piss, a refuge for the neighborhood strays—skinny toms with enormous balls dangling from side to side, pregnant females rubbing their scent on the posts. A fresh litter of blind devilish black kittens shrieking.
“It’s odd,” Amber said. “This culture that once castrated men, that made eunuchs would not consider doing the same to their cats. All those litters of poor kittens we see at street corners, huddled together at busy intersections. Makes me so sad.”
They opened the doors to various storage rooms. “And here is the little dungeon where they’d send me when I didn’t eat my food, where parents’ will dominated children’s desires. There’s no such thing as an empty room, you know?”
They began climbing up the uneven steps but the door leading up was bolted shut. So they returned to the street.
Amber’s hands were unsteady like an old woman’s as she jutted down the phone number on the “For Sale” sign.
“When are we going back to San Francisco?” Nellie asked.
“When the time is right,” Amber replied. “Tomorrow, I want to come back with the realtor and look inside.”
“You’re not thinking what I’m afraid you’re thinking, are you?”
“Maybe I am. I don’t know what I’m going to do now that you’ll be off to college. I can’t continue living the same old life, trying to fill the missing gap. Anyway, did I ever tell you that my grandmother Esma had paid for this house with a twenty-five-carat sapphire?”
“You might be able to get it for a pair of Adidas now.”
“Come on. Be a good sport.”
That night is indescribable. The jinns came out of every crack, every crevice that still existed. The ghosts, the sirens, the imaginary people, all of them, even the Red Woman cracking her bones. Every broom and mop became alive. In a mad flurry they washed and scrubbed, dusted and polished, repaired and restored everything. Infused me with life juice, all was sparkling clean by sunrise.
They arrived at ten past ten, Amber, Nellie, and the last owner—a man named Firuzi. He unbolted the boards on the front entrance and led them in.
“Strange. It feels different than the way I remember leaving it,” he told them. “Maybe the jinns have been awake all night long, cleaning and tidying it up.” Demonic laughter.
“Looks different inside than the way I remember,” Amber told Nellie. “The house that appeared in my recurrent dreams was much smaller. Much paler.”
“You always said, a house is not a home until you’ve lived in it.”
Amber shuffled from room to room like an apparition. She was wearing a cracked-cotton dress, easy for traveling. Nellie followed her in long strides. She was a tall young woman, slim, with long blond hair. She did not resemble any of the other İpekçi women. Except for the trademark paisley eyes.
“The ceilings seem much lower; the rooms much smaller,” Amber continued. “Memory plays weird tricks. But I’ve been right about the light. Absolutely. Look at the way it funnels in between the tall facade and the obsidian, hitting those dented white marble slabs on the kitchen floor. As if it’s bouncing back shadows of memory.”
In the hamam, a pool of rain water had collected that leaked from the cracked skylight. For a fleeting moment Amber caught the reflection of Esma’s face in the puddle, which she recognized from the photographs she’d seen of her. When she blinked, the face was gone. She recalled the sensation the previous day that had compelled her to return. The nightingale singing the tune to the old lullaby.
“Are there ghosts in the house?” she asked the man.
“Nah. I lived here for years, and nothing. It’s a normal house.”
“It needs a lot of work. It hasn’t been maintained.”
“It’s an old house, lady. You can’t expect much. Here we don’t build houses to last more than a decade. This one’s been around more than a century. What does that tell you?”
“What happened to the fourth and fifth floors?” Amber asked.
“It has never had any more than three floors.”
How was it then that my parents had the fifth floor with a roof terrace from where I’d throw things on the street just to see where they would land? Amber wondered. She did not argue with the man. She did not want him to know her history.
A few hours later, it was a done deal. There were no real estate agents. No title companies, mortgage brokers. The balding man with the pot belly took the notarized papers. Amber counted ten billion liras in thousand-lira pieces—roughly seven thousand dollars—the amount she had won from the design competition. Heaps of banknotes delivered in a suitcase as in the movies. They shook hands. He left.
“You’re crazy, mom,” Nellie told her. “Think of all we could have done with so much money.”
“Cheap price, for a good story,” Amber smiled. “So many good stories here. It’s my past, Nellie. Don’t be disrespectful.”
When they were alone, she took out her cell phone and dialed a number. Camilla’s hello stretched like taffy on the other end, her unforgettable voice hardened with age and cigarettes.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Why haven’t you called me before!”
“We’ve been real busy.”
“You were supposed to come back yesterday.”
“I know but you’ll never guess what happened.”
“What? Is my mother all right?”
“She’s fine. It’s me. Well, I bought a house.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The house in Izmir, the one we lived in, where I was born. You know the one in Karataş. Well, I bought it with my award money.”
“You what?”
“I bought the house in Smyrna.”
Camilla drooled a chain of incomprehensible nuggets. “Are you an imbecile? If you want to have a place in this country buy a nice new condo, not a ruin. God knows, we have plenty of those. You should come to your senses before it’s too late, Amber.”
“It is too late. I’ve already paid for it, signed the papers. I don’t want a nice new condo. I want the house I was born in. In time, I’ll restore it. After all, I didn’t become an architect for nothing.”
“You want a headache? You got one. It will collapse and crush you between its floors. You’ll become a corpse in its cistern. Not to mention the ghosts . . .”
“What ghosts? There are no ghosts, you always told me when I was a child, when I saw things. I thought you didn’t believe in the invisibles.”
“Maybe I didn’t but strange things in that house. Everyone said there were ghosts.”
“I’m dying to meet them, then.”
A long silence followed, then Camilla asked, “Did you talk to my mother about the eviction?”
“She’s miserable but she’s agreed to come and live with you.”
“She talked to you?”
“Yes, she talks just fine.”
“I can’t believe it! She never said a word to me for more than a whole year!”
“Well, you said it would take a miracle. I guess it did. I didn’t even have to tell her the truth after all. She decided on her own to come and live with you.”
Camilla was sobbing at the other end.
“It’s all right, mother. I’m sure she’ll talk to you now.”
“That’s not why I’m crying. Something else. Something terrible, Amber.”
“What? What happened?”
“Aida.”
“What? Tell me.”
“We’re telling everyone that she had a heart attack but she really threw herself off her balcony. Seven stories.”
“Oh my God. She jumped?”
“She jumped. She fell on the neon sign above the boutique and was electrocuted.”
They were silent for a long time. Outside, perched on the Adonis tree, the nightingale was singing a mourning song.
&nb
sp; “Was she sober?” Amber asked.
“We don’t know. Maybe something in her medication pushed her over the edge. They found all kinds of pills at her bedside. She was preparing for it, no doubt. Notes all over her house about what to do in the event of her death, what to do with her things, who should get what. Obvious, she’d been plotting for some time, unable to cope with the agony of aging. She couldn’t endure ugliness. Not Aida. No, she didn’t die of the fall. She died of chagrin d’amour. Like your grandma Esma.”
“I don’t think so. That’s not the way she’d choose to go. Not Aida. They’re sure there was no foul play or anything?”
“Positive. A horrible mess though. She was unrecognizable.”
“The Aida I know would have taken sugar-coated pink pills or drunk hemlock tea. She’d dress in something sexy and lay herself down pretty on a bed with flowers and other lovely things. Not smash her cartilage on a ton of concrete.”
“That was before she lost her face. You know how she hated the way she looked. You know that. You know that better than anyone else. You saw her and you told me yourself. In fact, she hated her face so much, she must have poured vitriol on it before jumping off. Her face was already gone when they found her. It’s a blessing they don’t display the dead here like you do in America. No beautician could put her back together.”
Camilla continued sobbing. Amber felt a soothing touch on her shoulder. She couldn’t cry. No tears came. “When is her funeral?” she asked.
“We buried her yesterday,” Camilla sighed. “The head of the armed forces sent an enormous wreath of gladiolas. And all the other big generals. The prime minister. Foreign military attachés. They all came. I’ve never seen so many wreaths. You’d think royalty had died or something. We buried her in the new cemetery, all by herself. You know, the General is buried in the old one, the one where your father is, in the family plot but Aida was mugged there once when she went to visit him. She said, if they mug a live person think of what they can do to the dead. I won’t allow them to dig me out to steal my teeth. So she bought a new lot at the new cemetery in a nice, clean part of the city, where the lawn is like astroturf, forever green. There are always guards looking after people, watering the flowers, and lots of room between the graves.”
“Has anyone told Teoman?”
“No, he’d gone to Aphrodisias for an archaeological dig. We couldn’t get hold of him.”
“I have to find him. He’ll be devastated. Why didn’t you call me right away? When it happened?”
“What’s the point? We bury our dead immediately, as you may remember. Besides, I didn’t want to spoil your trip. You had enough problems dealing with my mother. Anyway, you’re in Aida’s will. She left you seven billion liras and some belongings.”
A week later, as Amber and Nellie lay exhausted from cleaning and scrubbing, Aida’s goods had arrived in a large crate. It took four men to carry it into the room that had once belonged to Esma and later had become Amber’s nursery.
Inside the crate was Süleyman’s wardrobe—once again finding its way back to this room. It was loaded with shoe boxes, the contents carefully marked. One contained a long hairpiece. Another, Esma’s medallion with Süleyman’s picture; then Iskender’s ivory cane in which he had smuggled the Bombyx mori, the silk moth; the butterfly tray the General had brought back from Korea. One was marked for Nellie; inside, Aida’s crepe d’amour dress with the famous stain.
Amber sorted through the contents, reliving the history of her family. Pictures of Cadri and Aladdin during circumcision, gorgeous Aida in her famous costumes—most in the municipal museum now—always posing. The days of the İpekçi family’s glory came alive with a fine cast of characters. Pictures of their many homes—the plantation on Mount Olympus. The house in Moda. The Spinster’s Apartment. Country outings with servants, mules, camels, water buffaloes. Hunting parties. Lambs on spits. Dancing bears. Engagements, weddings, circumcisions. Fragments.
One of the shoe boxes contained pictures of Aida and the General. Another was marked Atatürk. His monogrammed handkerchief—the one he had given Aida to wipe her tears of excitement—kept in a silk sachet. Photos of the beauty contest, the crowning. The wand and the coronet. The finalists with Atatürk. Aida in an astrakhan coat, sitting on the hood of the Daimler. Aida in a riding outfit next to Atatürk’s racehorse. A little girl giving a bouquet of flowers to Aida while Atatürk stands behind her. Aida and Atatürk dancing. A buxom, plump, luscious Aida, with flawless skin and apple face, encased in a slinky satin gown, sleeveless, droopy shoulders, narrow hips, a flared skirt, just like the kind Jean Harlow would wear, which suggested a peach color although the photograph was black and white. His hair was slicked back, his classic profile focused singularly on Aida, who was beaming at the camera. (Barely discernible in the background, the lieutenant, the barber’s son, his already bushy eyebrows pointed like number eight of the Arabic alphabet, behind a veil of cigarette smoke—obsessed with the woman and forever loyal to his general.)
Many faces of Aida flashed in Amber’s memory—laughing and flirting coquettishly. Her voice flowing like a brook. But most vividly, the way she looked the last time Amber saw her on Essence of Honey Street. Camilla had said that you only remember people’s dead faces. Not the way before, not the way they looked when they were young and attractive. It’s best not to look at dead people.
The sweet kiss of Azrael had landed on Aida’s Y-shaped vein. No matter what, the end of an iris is not pretty.
Amber opened another envelope. Her heart raced at a speed her body could not withstand. She tried breathing slowly.
Nellie found her distressed like that. “What’s the matter? All you all right, Mom?”
“Nellie,” she said, “draw me a bath. Please.”
“There’s no hot water.”
“I’ll take a cold bath. In fact that’s exactly what I need. To chill out.”
What Amber had discovered inside the box was a stack of letters on fine vellum, now slightly gone to seed, carrying an important signature—the handwriting of the man who had saved the country. The hero of heroes. The handsome man with the blond mustache. Letters no one knew existed. National treasures.
She looked out the window, seeing her first vision. The Aegean alive with history. The Adonis tree with her initials carved on it. ASI. She reached inside her pocket and pulled out the amber egg. A hand came out of the rock, holding a golden cocoon. The silk moth. Bombyx mori. She wondered whether the same ghosts still haunted the place, existing in another dimension still as children or, like herself, grown into maturity. She wondered if babies were still hidden in stork’s nests. She heard the nightingale chirping the same old lullaby. Dandini, dandini, danali bebek.
She looked at the sea and recalled her first memory of its ebb and flow and how, after that, she could not exist unless she found the same motion again. The importance of the color blue in healing the soul and vastness of the blue. She thought how strange it was that she was sitting here, in her first room. The room where Esma and Süleyman had made love. Where babies were conceived. Where Esma had died. Where Cadri and Camilla cajoled with her. Ayşe and Gonca. The room that had been her nursery. Right here, with the faded and torn wallpaper with camellias on a teal background, so old that it was impossible anymore to identify the flowers.
The doors opened on the walls, blank canvases with no pictures, only faces of invisible people, whispering, laughing, cursing, reflecting dreams within dreams within dreams. Apparitions, sirenic lullabies, characters out of books and movies seemed to joust. In the dim hallways, the cellar, the attic, an endless shadow play parading from room to room, mingling and materializing everywhere. Her senses were full of this populus and all she had to do was to reach; she could touch them.
Why had she bought me? What was she going to do with me as an architect? She had to have a vision in her head. She had to have plans. Would she tear me down and replace me? Would she remodel the interior in a modern style? Or try to restore
me to the way I was when I was first built? Could she become part of my life once again? I didn’t yet know any of these things. But felt a strange sense of fate. Maybe it was written on her forehead, as they say here.
“No matter how hard we try, we cannot escape when change calls on us,” Amber muttered to herself. Everything seemed to be changing now to accommodate her destiny. She decided to leap, not knowing whether she could fly.
“I own the house I was born in,” she said out loud as if that would make it more real. “A dilapidated mess that could not be saved but I’ll try to restore it anyway. I wonder what would happen to my life if I stayed here? I mean the life it took me more than twenty years to conjure up in another country. The stories I made up. All my other houses, friends, lovers. My curriculum vitae. My drawings—the tangible evidence of my existence. The language?
“What would it feel like to abandon one’s existence, one’s place, and go into another—in the middle of things, like this, not by mitigating circumstances but by one’s own choice? I remember once, going through a dark night of the soul when Süleyman had talked to me of transubstantiation. He described it as completely leaving this life behind, waking up in another one. It seemed like a good solution until he told me that the only catch was, you had no recollection of the life you came from. You started over in total oblivion.”
Of course, Nellie would be a reminder as she had always been. She’d accompanied Amber all the way back, kept her company, reminding her of her identity, the one that had taken years to forge, preventing her straying off. She felt grounded now, had her bearings. The past of her own choosing. Nellie could leave now if she wanted to, Amber could manage on her own.
“I’d always love your company but it may be time for your own walkabout. Besides, my real home is also in California now. This is just my spiritual home.”
And Camilla, after what happened to Aida, Camilla would never want to leave Essence of Honey Street.
“My plants, my plants,” she’d say. “I just cannot leave them behind. You understand, don’t you, Amber?”
Seven Houses Page 26