Seven Houses

by Alev Lytle Croutier

  This is my mother, she had to remind herself, the woman who gave birth to me, who brought me up. The woman who opened her legs and pushed me out. The young bride who battled the Red Woman. Whose breasts I sucked. Her skin has lost its flex irrevocably, and her teeth, all made of plastic and movable. She smells like an old woman despite the eau de cologne—maybe because of the cologne. Lemon blossoms, always. Looking at Camilla’s miniature figure, her squished-up face with the same characteristics as mine, I see my own cronehood in the mirror. I forgive her everything. Even her endless chatter. I forgive.

  The burden had suddenly been lifted and Amber felt the relief of holding nothing, no gravity, no inertia, alive again. Distilled.

  The Turquoise Cottage

  (1997)

  “When I was a child, my grandmother had an altar in the attic decorated with icons of Jesus, Mary, and other saints, and I played with them because I had no dolls,” Camilla told Amber as they sat on a divan drinking caravan tea. “My father lived in a trunk near the saints. Once in a while, I opened the trunk, took out the picture of the man dressed in a royal aide’s uniform with jeweled epaulets and a fancy fez, so dashingly handsome, so infinitely much more charismatic than any of the soldiers marching down the streets of Bornova in their rhythmic swish of soles and clump of heels. Swish, clump, swish, clump. Swish, clump. Day and night.

  “When other children talked of their fathers and asked about mine, I’d just lead them to the attic, open the trunk, and pull out the photograph with certain pride. In my lonelier moments I’d talk to him. Kiss him. I’d imagine a warmth other than the women’s, the only kind I’d ever known so far.”

  Nellie returned with some raisin cake Camilla had baked that morning and joined them. Until now Camilla had never made a reference to her childhood. But that morning, as if she had intuited her daughter’s softening and forgiveness, she revealed her secret in a matter-of-fact voice.

  “I was merely a baby when my father disappeared into the Liberation War, leaving nothing to his wife except a gold watch. My mother, Maria, who’d changed her name to Malika and converted from Greek Orthodoxy to Islam to please her husband, sought refuge at her mother’s in Bornova, the lovely tree-lined suburb of Smyrna, an oasis for the European aristocracy—Girauds, Whitalls, Pattersons, La Fontaines, Bealhommes, de Hochpieds, Burkards, Grimanis—all the wealthy Rums.”

  The lore of silk and spice, brought on caravans of camels through the silk road to the port of Smyrna, had lured these expatriates to Bornova since the sixteenth century. Some settled there to build the Smyrna railroad, a thin, umbilicus of Europe. (Train stations in the area are still reminiscent of the Victorian country stations in England.) Europeans owned the tracks, the cars, the bulking bins full of figs, raisins, currants, licorice, olive oil, and later carpets and minerals. They insulated their possessions with a colony of Christians at every station. Bornova became a refuge for every persecuted European aristocrat, even exiles from the French revolution. No wonder they had named the central avenue shaded by ancient plane trees Champs des Exilées. The boulevard of exiles.

  It rained profusely in Bornova, cascading madly down from Lake Tantalus, breaking through its banks, sending torrential red waters and giant boulders through the village. Behind it, the Tantalus mountains displayed their wooded slopes and the snowy peaks of the Nymph Mountain hovered across the Smyrna plain.

  The people of Bornova lived in a kind of enchanted microcosm surrounded by manicured gardens, cultivated mainly by the British and French gardeners, where water poured from the mouths of ancient Byzantine and Roman lions, where Grecian urns and terra-cotta pots lined stone walkways, where lemon trees and Basra palms shaded the gazebos. From the ornate balconies with crumbling balustrades, reminiscent of Provence, bowers of Banksian roses tumbled down and among groves of Smilax officinalis, Asian roses bloomed. Wisteria climbed the pergolas and the walls of the houses; plumbago trailed along wooden balconies and crimson sage and thyme scattered on the gravel walks. Everywhere, fountains played into the pools of spring water while Venetian blackamoors contemplated the ponds full of ancient carp.

  The Grimani coat of arms carved in an oval over the white garden gate showed an olive branch, a testament to the source of the family’s prosperity whose olive trees spread in great silver waves along the Aegean.

  “We weren’t Greeks. We were Rums, Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire. All the Rums adopted Greek as their language but my grandparents were Venetians, Grimani or Armani, that’s what they were called.”

  “Armani! There is a very famous fashion designer by that name,” Nellie exclaimed, finding a point of reference to her own world. “You think we’re related?”

  “Maybe,” Camilla shrugged. “Who knows? We’ve got relatives in every crevice of the world. Anyway. The war was at its peak. We’d lost our country to the Allies who were dissecting it as if it were some laboratory animal, dividing up the sections, devouring us. So Atatürk and the rebels had begun a war against them, you know, the Liberation War, Gallipoli and all that? That’s when my mother and I had to flee from Izmir to Bornova where she had been disowned.

  “My grandmother was a widow with two unmarried daughters. Her two sons were off fighting in the war. No men around. She had not talked to my mother since her marriage to a Turk but there we were, no other place to go, and she accepted us with open arms. It was the first time she had seen me. She called me Lulu.

  “Day and night, all you could hear was the creaking of the carriages, the sounds of horse hooves. I was always curious. Once, through the garden gate, I caught a glimpse of a convoy of carriages full of men in Greek uniform, piled on top of each other, bleeding and bandaged, filthy and fatigued, driving listlessly toward the Champs des Exilées. I ran inside, afraid of being kidnapped—not uncommon for little girls to disappear in those times—and threw myself in my mother’s arms.

  “The next morning, we woke up to the gunshots and cannons exploding. The heyday for the deserters and looters as the defeated Greek army wedged its way toward the Aegean. They tramped boldly through the streets, firing rifles in the air as they shattered shop windows. By late afternoon, they had advanced toward the residential section.

  “ ‘They’re here,’ I heard my grandmother scream. My aunt Anna and my mother quickly bundled me up, we hurried to the French hospital trying to dodge the flying bullets. On the way, in a puddle of blood, lay a dead horse with its mouth and eyes open like that horrid Picasso mural Guernica. Another horse was on fire as it flew, raging through the streets like a nightmare. These images permanently tattooed on my vision.

  “The garden of the French hospital was full of wailing people, dead, injured, molested, robbed. The gunshots persisted all night long. In the morning, a lead silence. They were gone.

  “We returned home only to discover the doors, the windows of the beautiful house shattered; the whole estate robbed and vandalized. Everything inside smashed. Defecated. An odious smell in the air. Smell of hatred. The sounds of humans wailing to recover from this inhuman assault. A chorus of tears.

  “Our English neighbors, the Whithalls, sheltered us. The diplomatic corps would hang their flags in front of their houses that gave them immunity. But we were not the only ones with damaged homes and souls. Though their hearts were big, it wasn’t easy to feed so many people in those times, you know? But they were good, generous people even though the British were the enemy.

  “We huddled together in a large salon sharing a cauldron of bulgur until an enormous cloud of crimson and black smoke appeared beyond the snowy peaks of the rugged Nymph mountain. Someone said, ‘Look! Smyrna is burning.’ Over the garden, through a sea of olive trees I saw three lofty pinnacles of smoke rising, flecked with bursts of orange flame, tilting like banners in the wind, melting and distending into the slopes. That’s how I saw the great Smyrna conflagration. The Greeks’ revenge, they told us, although the Greeks claimed the Turks had burnt the Armenian and Rum segments of their own city. They had poured g
asoline into the Bay, set all the boats on fire, in the process destroying most of the fish and the dolphins. The four-thousand-year-old city lost just like that. Above and below.”

  Camilla seemed exhausted by the story she was telling but her eyes were intense. She didn’t appear ready to quit. Amber and Nellie were all ears.

  “After we were convinced that the soldiers and the looters had evacuated Bornova, we returned to our house; the women went to work with hammer, nail, and saw, carpentry a trade they knew nothing of, pampered women with pampered hands. But they all had the instinct for making a nest and we were able to move back into the house.

  “Things quieted down for a while. One day, I was playing alone in the garden when I became aware of a man, dressed in a dirty khaki uniform, watching me through the gate. A man with sunken cheeks, worn-out eyes, and a missing arm. When he met my eyes, he opened the latch and came through.

  “ ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

  “Afraid he’d hurt me if I didn’t respond, ‘Lulu,’ I told him timidly. That’s what they called me then. Lulu was my real name.”

  “Why did they change it?”

  “Because they didn’t want me to have problems. He grabbed me with his only arm; I screamed. He said, ‘I’m your father, Lulu. Don’t be afraid.’ I looked at his empty sleeve. I told him that my father lived in a trunk, he has no beard, he has nice clothes, and two arms.

  “Hearing my scream, my mother had come out running and saw the man. ‘Hamid Bey!’ she shouted, turned away, and wiped her eyes. Couples didn’t embrace each other in public in those days, you know? So they stood away from each other with great restraint, while the rest of the family gathered around this man masquerading as my father.

  “After cleaning up, he wanted me to sit on his lap. I ran away. ‘Come back, my little girl, I’m your father,’ he yelled out. I ran up to the attic, pulled my father’s picture out of the trunk, and flaunted it. ‘You are a liar,’ I said. ‘This is my father. This handsome man. Not a bum like you. Go away and leave us alone.’

  “He shaved and put on an elegant house robe. When I saw his face, I did see the resemblance to the picture but for months I still couldn’t let him near me. I felt betrayed by everyone and only found comfort in escaping to talk to my father in the trunk. But I was curious about the one-armed stranger, so accustomed to sleeping in the rugged hills, that the sense of a soft bed only brought pain. For months, he slept directly on the hardwood floor, with merely his army coat covering him. The war had hardened him, everyone said.

  “It took more than a year to warm up to my father, to call him baba. I watched him at dawn, watched him walk out to the patio and turn East as the sun rose. I saw him bend down and touch the Earth with his forehead. Before long, without knowing what it was, I was doing the same. Only this way could I make a connection to him. But afterward, still sneaking up to the attic to play with my Mary and Jesus icons.

  “Both of my mother’s brothers were killed in the war but because the family were Rums, her two unmarried sisters, Anna and Elpida, were among those deported to Greece. Ethnic exchange, they called it. My grandmother soon died of grief. They left all their property, land, a fleet of phaeton carriages, everything to my mother but my father wouldn’t have anything to do with all that. ‘Bad money,’ he said, ‘we cannot profit from another’s misfortune.’

  “My mother and I took care packages to the dock in Smyrna. Meatballs, hard-boiled eggs, börek, things like that. I could still see Aunt Anna and Aunt Elpida waving, my mother choking with emotion. They must have been in their late teens then. Never heard from them after that. Who knows what happened? The letters never got through I suppose. I wonder how they survived. For all I know, we must have relatives in Greece. There, I told you everything. Are you satisfied now?”

  “I don’t understand why you kept all this inside yourself for so many years,” Amber replied. “It’s such a devastating story. I don’t understand why you never wanted to tell me, wanted me to know. It would have given me so much insight into things.”

  “Because we could not endure living through it all over again. Don’t you see? We wanted to hide our ethnicity in case of another crisis. Every time there’s hostility in Cyprus, every time the Greeks and Turks started posturing, they’d turn against the Rums. Besides, I didn’t want to expose you to meanness at school, discrimination and all that. I didn’t want to disgrace your father’s family. If you didn’t know the truth, you wouldn’t have to lie. You understand?”

  “You can’t stop protecting me,” Amber said.

  “I try. I’m your mother.”

  “You think it’s better that I live in a world of denial?”

  “Don’t be ungrateful.”

  “I just want to make my own decisions about how I feel.”

  Camilla pursed her lips and walked out of the room. Amber rolled her eyes.

  “You’ve hurt her feelings. Right after she told you that sad story. You always tell me to be compassionate yet you were . . . it wasn’t cool,” Nellie scolded her. “Do you smell something burning?”

  They ran into the kitchen.

  “The mousakka is done. Go sit down at the table. What would you like to drink, Coca-Cola or beer?” Camilla had switched to the practical mood as if nothing had happened. Amber and Nellie exchanged glances.

  Camilla heaped the eggplant on their plates. “You’ve got my stubborn streak in you, Amber,” she whispered, trying to hold back her tears. “Just like my mother. Runs in our blood, I guess. But it catches up with you later. You’ll see.” She reached inside her apron pocket, handed Amber an official-looking letter. “You asked to know the truth. Here is the truth.”

  The letter in Turkish was full of legal jargon Amber did not comprehend but she understood this much: the government was going to tear down Maria’s house in Cordelio to widen the street. They were repossessing her property and evicting her.

  “The compensation wouldn’t even feed a family of gypsies for a week,” Camilla said.

  “Can they just do that?”

  “The government can do whatever it wants. But my poor mother, she has nothing left except her tiny cottage. Where she used to keep the chickens. Remember? Nowhere else to go.”

  “She’s a hundred years old, for God’s sake! Shouldn’t she be living with someone anyway?”

  “There’s no one. All dead. My father. My brothers. No one to share the responsibility of taking care of her except me. She’ll have to come and live with me now. She won’t want to do that. We tried before but she and your father, God bless his soul, didn’t get along. Besides, she’s too attached to her home. She won’t let go. It will break her heart.”

  “What will you do then?”

  “I can’t do anything. I can’t get myself to give her the news. It’s the only thing she has left. A tiny shack. As if it weren’t torture enough that they took away her house to build that wretched power station. Our family is unlucky, I tell you. How will I take care of her? I’m an old woman myself.”

  “Can’t you put her into a nursing home or something. Don’t they have places like that here?”

  “Sure, we have a few houses of repose. We have them. But they won’t accept anyone that old. Even if they are healthy.”

  “What about getting a girl from a village? A caregiver.”

  “Yok. That’s a thing of the past. No such girls anymore. Not the way it used to be with Gonca, her sisters, all the others we had. They were family. Nowadays village girls are floozies. They flirt with boys on the streets. You even see them sitting on park benches and kissing in public. They won’t take on work like that. Besides, you know, I can’t stand having strangers in the house. They snoop in your drawers. They eavesdrop behind closed doors. They steal things and whoosh, they’re gone. You know how I’ve always disliked having servants. Thank you very much, my daughter, but no thank you.”

  “There must be something you can do,” Amber insisted. “What do others do who are incapable of taking car
e of their old?”

  “Nothing I can do,” Camilla said. “I’ve thought of everything. I’ve taken care of people all my life, now just as I am about to take a breath . . . I can’t leave her now. It’s my lottery. You’re not here to help me out. No one is. I’m all alone.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I want you to visit your grandmother and break the news. She’ll listen to you more than she’d ever listen to me, I don’t know why. I’ve always been a good daughter. Besides, you may never see her again. Who knows when you’ll come back—if ever . . .”

  “When I wanted to visit her before, you told me she wouldn’t even recognize me.”

  “I take it back. Her memory is better than yours and mine put together. She remembers everything that happened in the past. Maybe even too much.”

  “You told me she couldn’t talk.”

  “True.”

  “What was that all about? What do you mean she can’t talk? Is she incapable of speech or she just refuses to?”

  “Well, one day, she just stopped talking. We’d gone to the bostan, the local farm, to get some eggplants and hot peppers. Suddenly I saw her heading toward the well that the government was going to close because, they said, there was malaria in it, but the bostanci wouldn’t let them because he believed a spirit lived inside and needed the sun. If you ask me, adders and other snakes were what lived in that well. Millions of them, still sacred to the Great Mother in those parts so they don’t kill them.

  “They let him put some mesh covering on the well but all the neighbors condemned it just the same. Nobody dared go near it anymore. Nobody. So, I see her walking up to the well and I shout, ‘Stop mother, where are you going?’ She charges ahead as if she doesn’t hear me. Nothing’s wrong with her hearing, you know? She even hears things far away, faint whispers in other people’s rooms. But she doesn’t hear me and keeps going up to the well. I say stop again, that well is condemned, but she pays no attention. So, I drop the sack of eggplants, run after her, and grab her arm. She looks at me and she doesn’t say anything but there’s this kind of wild eyes on her face. I say, ‘What’s the matter, mother? Why are you scowling like that?’ She still doesn’t say anything, like she’s got her tongue paralyzed.