Seven Houses

by Alev Lytle Croutier

  When they arrived here, clustering in cloistered neighborhoods, they still coveted the country life. All they knew. Each settlement grew into a village with no center but itself—a nomadic European city where people sat on their verandahs and balconies, where everyone knew everyone. When drought threatened, the women gathered around fountains to fill their olive-oil cans with water and gossip. The men sat in cafés all day long, sipping nargilehs. They couldn’t walk down the street without stopping at each house to make a connection.

  But as the wild folk kept invading the city, looking for gold, it had to expand upward. Closer to God, they said, but closer to Satan as well. The houses disappeared. The boxes rose vertically and multiplied. People above, people below, and people on each side. Strangers from different tribes crossing. Look at us now.

  Trees ruled while all of us houses disappeared one by one but finding themselves in our shadow, they too began losing their force, their branches. Cypresses kept company to the dead like willowy widows in mourning. Plane trees sprouted in the middle of a boulevard on small islands while cars raced full speed around them. The love of trees made it a taboo to cut them—especially the ancient ones. Here, trees are untouchables, sacred, ancestors to be worshipped, not cut down. Planting a tree is as sacred as a year’s worship, their Prophet said. The earth was for digging to make dwellings but the trees were the dwellings of the spirits of ancestors, their abuse punishable by death. But in history, the heathen hordes riding through, not recognizing the tree spirits, set them afire. The forests blazed in the night, filled with the agony of the burning souls. Deserts formed.

  Amber still seemed edgy and undone as she reminisced about her own past. “I’m sorry, I’ve gone off like that,” she told Nellie. “Just that it stirs up so much in me to be here again.”

  “It’s cool, Mom.”

  She continued looking at this landscape of gray sarcophagi, which had at first brought drought to her soul; an unexpected kindness overwhelmed her. As if her exposition had purged her of some pain. A tender reprieve. Her face opened, then turned dark.

  “We mustn’t stay here long,” she told Nellie. “It’s like quicksand. I feel this place devouring me already.”

  “Anytime you say then.” Nellie kissed her goodnight, and returned to bed.

  Amber lingered at the balcony until a pink faintness tinted the sky, highlighting the receding necropolis. A distant calling from the belly of the beast rose, the lips of the electronic muezzin welcomed the new dawn. Allahuakbar.

  As soon as the sun appeared behind the unfinished minaret, the screeching of carts began as usual. The sonorous incantations of the peddlers, honking of the horns, megaphones advertising domestic movies playing at outdoor cinemas, political campaigns with horrendously addictive jingles. Essence of Honey Street once again became the main artery of their loud declarations, alarming the sleeper, with no forewarning into the syncopated whirlwind of a bustling survival.

  The street was pulsating. Nellie jumped to her feet and ran under the doorway as if suspecting an earthquake, an instinct acquired from living in San Francisco but aware of the same vulnerability here. Then, peeking out the balcony window, she smirked as she struggled to close the crack between the curtains.

  “I’ve been awake almost all night with that creepy silence. Now this. What is going on, Mom?”

  “Just people peddling their stuff—yogurt, watermelons, and spices. That’s the way things are advertised.”

  “Do they have to bawl so loud?”

  “It’s a way of creating camaraderie and competition. Through their songs.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  A green John Deere tractor approached between the row of haphazard trees; a father and son, perched on a pile of stacked leeks and onions, stopped in front. At the same moment someone tapped at the bedroom door; without waiting for a reply, Camilla walked in.

  “Damn it,” she said. “I knew this noise would wake you up. I knew it. Go back to sleep. Here, try these. One pair for you, the other for Nellie.” She stuffed Amber’s ears with a set of plugs made of wax. “You can’t get this kind here, the very best. Molds into any shape you want. Now you know why I ask you to send me these every Christmas.” Camilla looked out the window before she left the room. “I better run down and get a basket. And you get some more sleep.”

  “Remember, I’m allergic to onions,” Amber reminded her.

  “I’m getting them for myself.”

  “We go through this battle of onions every time I return,” Amber complained to Nellie rolling her eyes.

  “How can anyone cook without onions?” Camilla continued. “It’s impossible.”

  “Look, I don’t like being allergic myself. A real drag. Every time I eat out, I have to make a scene. But dammit, I’m allergic. And that’s that.”

  “Psychosomatic.”

  “Whatever.”

  “You can’t cook without onions. It’s unheard of.”

  “Well, I’ve learned to.”

  From the fourth-floor balcony, Camilla lowered the basket. The son weighed them and filled the basket with leeks and onions. Camilla pulled it back up.

  The morning air was cool when they got up. Amber slipped on a cardigan.

  “Your sweater is reversed,” Camilla laughed. “You know, if you put on your clothes inside out, then your whole day will turn inside out.”

  “It already is.”

  Later, the three of them sat on the balcony, at a table with a checkered plastic tablecloth. Camilla had slaved the entire week preparing food for their arrival. A colorful array of dolmas—stuffed peppers, eggplant, tomatoes, squash.

  “No onions,” she said. “Really. No onions in the dolmas.”

  Amber took a bite, rolling the food slowly in her mouth, felt the unmistakable crunchy texture. With great drama and ceremony, she spat her food on her fork and smeared it on the edge of her plate. Camilla and Nellie ate in silence. She, then, proceeded to pick at the stuffing, sorting out every morsel that had the potential of being an onion. She stared at Camilla, who didn’t utter a word. Her mouth became tight and twisted. In turn Amber’s did, as well. Camilla took a deep breath, looked undeservedly hurt. She stood up and began clearing the table.

  “You were mean,” Nellie told her mother when Camilla left the room.

  “She knows I’m allergic. She’s known all my life. I’m not going to eat onions and get sick just to please her.”

  “You’re a guest in her house.”

  “I’m not sure now who is the mother and who is the child.”

  “Neither am I.”

  The next day Camilla served meatballs and boerek for lunch.

  “Without onions,” she said.

  This time she was telling the truth.

  Another peddler went by.

  There are beans,

  There are peaches,

  There are grapes,

  Tomatoes,

  Hot peppers,

  Eggplant.

  The following night Amber was visited by a dream. It was so vivid that if it were possible to watch her while she slept, you could see the dream itself as if played on a movie screen.

  Dressed in a sequined outfit with baggy harem pants and a veil over her face, she’s flying on a magic carpet over the city constructed in Disney studios until a wind machine starts blowing with great intensity. She tumbles down, corkscrew fashion, landing inside bubbling lava. She burns all over but is still alive. She decides to peel her burned skin and shed it like a snake crawling out of its own. She emerges raw and jelly-like, painfully vulnerable, like the bird embryos at her grandparents’ Turquoise house. The phone rings.

  Camilla was nudging Amber, handing her the receiver on a long chord. “For you.”

  “It’s me, Amber my love. Can you come here please?” Aida’s raspy voice uttered with a sense of emergency.

  “What’s the matter?

  “Nothing,” she said, “nothing. Just come here.” And hung up.

  Camill
a raised the glass of night water by Amber’s bedside, shook her head disapprovingly.

  “You haven’t covered your glass. That’s what the doilies are for, the ones you make fun of. You never know what may fall into it when you’re asleep. Moths, fleas, spiders. You know what I found one morning in your father’s glass? A dead cockroach. But the worst, the worst thing happened to Gonca—God bless her soul.”

  Amber had heard this story many times before but she’d persevere for another round. She had just arrived. She was testing her ability to maintain her cool as long as possible. She was a grown woman. No intention of falling into an old pattern.

  “Gonca always used to take water to bed and never bothered to cover it,” Camilla continued. “So, one night, splash. A lizard fell into her glass.”

  “How did the lizard come into the house?” Nellie asked.

  “Oh, her children must have brought them in from the sewers or something. And poor, poor Gonca, she drank it in her sleep, swallowed the lizard, and the lizard ate her from the inside.”

  “I was told she died of liver cancer.”

  “Yeah, well, it spread to her liver, too.”

  Amber did not like being reminded of Gonca’s death. Camilla was grossly exaggerating the way it had happened. She had an uncanny way of dramatizing the way people died though she had not yet told Amber about Cadri’s.

  The TV was already chirping in the living room. Camilla kept it on all hours of the day to fill her silence, even at night when she slept, for the warmth of human voices, to see people talking, touching each other. She talked back to the screen when she was alone and received answers. Her interactive toy.

  A documentary showed a torrent of rain. A hill destroyed by erosion. Peasants in colorful clothes marched up the hill, kneeled on the ground as though they were performing namaz, going through the gestures of prayer while planting. The reporter held a handful of seeds. “From this you grow a tree, and from a tree a whole forest,” while time-lapse photography showed the seedlings slowly curling into full-grown trees within seconds. “Trees are your friends. Planting one counts more than a year’s prayer, sevap,” he continued and offered free seedlings to anyone who wanted to plant a tree and gave a toll-free number to call. Right after that, a young Turkish man in a fancy suit who looked like he had stepped out of Emporio Armani, carrying a briefcase, went into Istanbul Hilton and flashed a card. The closeup read, “The Blue Card. Makes dreams a reality.” And showed a montage of a high-rise apartment, the latest model domestic Renault, a microwave manufactured by Arcos, Turkey’s very own GE.

  “Your old flame Erol is now the president of Arcos. If you’d only stayed,” Camilla never neglected to lament, “you could have had some of the richest men in Turkey. So many good families tell me they wanted you for their sons. You could have had any one of them. You could have lived like a queen.”

  “Yeah? And become a society bimbo with a leather tan, gold jewelry, and a bunch of dysfunctional children?”

  “Musa Kurtman wanted you so badly. They say, he’s going to be the next president.”

  “I hear he’s gone Fundamentalist.”

  “It’s true. Maybe it’s a good thing you didn’t. He and his men pray five times a day, all have beards. But he’s so successful. We see them on TV all the time. Then there’s your classmate Tansu, the corrupt prime minister. What a bad egg she turned out to be. You could’ve been, you could’ve had everything you ever wanted, Amber. You could’ve been a star.”

  “But instead. Instead a struggling architect. At your age, still working,” Amber imitated her voice sarcastically. “Kismet.” She went for a cigarette. Her first in twenty years.

  “I should never have allowed you to go to America.”

  “It wasn’t your choice. I was eighteen.”

  Camilla lit a cigarette and escaped into the kitchen. She boiled the milk for Amber’s coffee. Starbuck’s, from California. The princess.

  “The milk is already pasteurized, mother. You don’t need to boil it.”

  “Pasteurized, fasterized. All the same. Who knows what microbes are floating in it. You don’t understand those things. You’re too American now.”

  Amber poured the coffee. “Would you like some?”

  “No thanks.”

  “I’ve brought some decaf coffee, too.”

  Camilla clicked her tongue. “No, I prefer Nescafé.”

  Perhaps the sight of coffee beans evoked a bitterness in her, Amber thought. Perhaps, it brought back memories of the decaf plantation. Of Papatya and Rodrigo. Loss of their charmed lives. All the unexpected compromises. Strange, how the inhabitants of Spinsters Apartment were all gone now—except Camilla and Aida. The older generation dead, the children scattered all over the world under different names. They’d married foreigners—German, Spanish, Swedish, American, Australian, Argentine. Uncanny that the only ones who carried the family name had no sons of their own. No one to pass on the name. The İpekçis were about to expire.

  “I wish you’d bought a bottle of whiskey at the Duty Free store,” Camilla complained.

  “Whiskey? You drink whiskey? That’s new.”

  “Nice to have it around when company comes. I like serving it to my lady friends, other volunteers for the Red Crescent and the Cancer Society.”

  “I asked if you wanted me to bring anything and you said, earplugs, vitamins, and denture cleanser. That’s all. It’s not fair that you want me to second guess and get upset if I don’t.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  Camilla returned to her TV. Amber paced up and down the hall, sipping her coffee.

  “What did Aida want?”

  “I don’t know. Sounded like she’d had a bad night. She asked me to come over.”

  “You’ve just arrived here, Amber. Don’t get sucked into it. She always wags her tail like a bitch to get what she wants—the old coquotte. Unbelievable.”

  “What’s a coquotte?”

  “A coquette. Ah, she makes me so mad. She looks like a sausage oozing out of its sack, the way her boobs—what’s left of them, mind you—spill out of her cleavage. And her hair hennaed that blazing harlot red. Not to mention those false eyelashes, always partly unglued, drooping down her lids. Or her silver lamé ankle straps with dainty Louis Quinze heels, she’s not ashamed to wear even in the daytime. I can go on and on. A woman should behave her age. Who does she think she is, still the ingénue at the beauty pageant or what? Is that why she takes pleasure in seducing young boys less than half her age to remember what she has lost?”

  “What boys?” Amber asked. “That sounds interesting.”

  “I will not gossip.”

  “Not fair. You started it. You made me curious. Talk now, will you?”

  “Well, promise over my dead body, you won’t tell her or anyone else, especially her. Promise?”

  “Touch my heart.”

  “Well, she took up with a neighbor a few months ago, the one who lives in that hideous old house you like so much, the one with the bones and things—the one you keep taking pictures of.”

  “Really? Who is he? What do you know of him?”

  “People say his parents went to Germany as workers and made a lot of money manufacturing shish-kebab skewers, cezves, samovars, coffee mills, that sort of thing. When they returned, bought that house from the old man’s daughter, and became respectable.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “Ah, such an awful story. They were driving to Ankara when a truck full of nitroglycerin crashed into them. They melted like candles immediately, both husband and wife disappeared into thin air. Not even a trace of their skeletons,” Camilla told with the authority of someone who had been there. “God rest their soul. Then, Teoman, that’s the boy’s name, came back from Germany—he was learning archaeology or ornithology or something—and moved into that house. He had many offers to turn it into an apartment building like we all did but he refused to conform. He said he liked it the way it was when he lived there with his
parents. Imbecile. What progress would there ever be if everyone thought like that? Stubborn as a goat, too. Not a drop of Turkishness left in him—a gavour like you. Blue eyes, tall—must have Albanian blood, maybe Macedonian—even speaks with a phony accent.”

  “You seem to know quite a lot about him. How did he hook up with Aida?”

  “Aida is shameless. Almost old enough to be his grandmother but people saw them walking down the Baghdad Boulevard, holding hands and sharing a peach melba at the Divan Café. Would you believe? And the neighbors—you know the old-maid sisters—they say he goes into her house at night. This kind of thing just doesn’t happen here. Shame. Çok ayip. Çok. Çok.”

  “Come on, mother. She’s a widow. She’s lonely,” Amber told her as she discreetly squeezed a bit of lemon into the milk—the old trick. “She just had a mastectomy. Can a little companionship hurt? If it makes her feel good, why shouldn’t she have some fun? Life is short.”

  “We’re all widows,” Camilla snapped. “But we’re naked without our customs.”

  “So?”

  “It’s not the done thing.”

  The boiled milk had curdled from the lemon. Amber poured herself a new cup of coffee and the fresh pasteurized milk. She retired to the bathroom for solitude, the singular place to retreat, the only place she’d be allowed to close the door, be alone to get to herself.

  Aida’s apartment faces the east corner of the Essence of Honey Street, like a Siamese twin. When she opened the door, she looked frog-eyed as if she’d been up all night wrestling with aimless insomnia, her eyebrows not yet penciled, her lashes not yet glued, her face unformed like some kind of an alien creature, her chest lopsided—not yet given her new breast—the one for which Amber would begrudgingly have to bribe a Turkish customs official in the end.

  In her quilted fuchsia robe, she struggled across the hall into the bedroom, threw herself on the bed, flashing the pose of an exhausted odalisque past her prime.

  “Have you ever been in love, Amber?” she asked.

  “You woke me up at seven in the morning to ask me this?”