“Maybe she wants to go back with you?”
“I didn’t say that. I said she was lonely. She’d like you to come live with her in Istanbul. She’s not used to being alone. You’re her only blood left.”
“She’d go back with you if it wasn’t for me. I know.”
“She wouldn’t leave you, Anne-Anne. She wouldn’t think of it. She wants to stay in her house. She wants you to come live with her.”
“I did that once already.”
“That was before my father died. It’s different now. Just the two of you, mother and daughter . . .”
Maria sank into her chair. Some darkness curtained her eyes. “I’m an old woman,” she said. “This is my home. (Bless her soul.) I’m not going anywhere. I won’t leave even if they give me my weight in gold. Even if they build me a seraglio. Never mind me. Camilla can go back with you if that’s what she wants.”
“That’s unfair. She’d never do that.”
“Camilla always does what she wants. She’s a stubborn mule. A chatterbox.”
“She’s not going to leave you!”
Maria covered the sour cherries with sugar, which released a sanguine syrup. “Camilla could go back with you if she wants. I don’t care. Tell her, tell her I said that. I can’t leave! I can’t leave this place. How can I? Just think, who would feed him if I left?”
“You can bring the cat along if you want.”
“No, not the cat,” Maria continued in frustration, “but Hamid Bey.
“I knew it was him!” Nellie said. “That’s who I saw last night.”
“Yes, he comes out in the night, when everyone’s asleep. He comes out, eats the food I leave for him, then puts a hundred-kuru piece next to the gardenia bowl, and disappears. Every night this happens. I wonder where he gets the money—I never thought ghosts would use currency—but for sure he seems to care that I have enough to live on. I’ve never really seen him, you know? Well, except for once. Even then I can’t say I saw him but I smelled him—barn hay smell, the way he smelled when he first came back from the war.
“It was pouring the day the Greeks came. A cyclone appeared in the Smyrna Bay. If it wasn’t for the cyclone, they would have killed more people. But the cyclone destroyed many of their ships. They came with the cyclone, left with the fire.
“When he wouldn’t cooperate, they arrested Hamid Bey and tortured him because he was working for the Intelligence. They kept him in a dark basement and starved him for weeks. He lived on cockroaches and ants, drinking his own blood to satisfy his thirst. But somehow he managed to escape one day just long enough to see me and Camilla for a few minutes, to give me his only remaining possession—his gold pocket watch which he had hidden between the rafters.
“He went on to Anatolia, leaving me alone in an infernal city. They’d taken everything from him; his hat, even his shoes. He had to travel through a long chain of Anatolian towns. First he went to Alaşehir and Salihli, weaving through mountains full of gangs, some of which were Nationalists, and other rebels. He joined the Liberation War as a civilian, continuing to work for the secret service to support Atatürk’s national campaign. For three years, he walked barefoot through Nazilli, Mula, Antalya, Adana, and Mersin, which earned him a purple medal of distinction. Big sacrifice for a lousy piece of metal.
“Camilla was a baby, barely a year old. The Turks kicked us out of our home because I was a Rum. We couldn’t go out on the street. The Greeks walked around with rifles and bayonets ready to attack any moment. We had nothing, except his watch I had to pawn.
“So Camilla and I had to move in with my family in Bornova—my two sisters, Anna and Elpida, my mother trying to raise the children all by herself. My father was deceased. They’d drafted my two teenage brothers, Stefano only fourteen. Giorgio, sixteen. With no one left to manage the family business, I began taking work as a seamstress to help support the family, sewing for people who had formerly been family friends, even ones who had worked for us. But, because Hamid Bey was in the Intelligence, I was under constant surveillance, which made it difficult to get work. We couldn’t even correspond with each other. I had to hide his photograph in a trunk.
“The way he smelled when he came back wasn’t at all the way he’d smelled before. He was full of earth, blood, and hay. The smell he kept till the very end. The same smell rising from the well. That’s how I knew. First that, then a phantom hovering over the well. I watched, standing still at the threshold, wanting so much to go outside to see him like he was, touch him to see if he was real, to ask if he could talk, but I knew somehow that this sort of thing would upset him and he’d punish me. So, I restrained myself. I stood still until he lowered himself into the well and disappeared out of sight.
“The next morning, I looked inside the well. I looked when the sun was brightest and you could see into the water clearly. Nothing, not even a speck of dust. The water still as a mirror. I knew the well was much deeper than you could see below the surface but if he went down that deep he was not human, otherwise his weight would make him float. Nothing was floating above that water, not even a mosquito.
“So, I look for him every night since. When the moon is brightest I don’t sleep. I sit under the grape arbor, waiting for him to come back but you know, he never comes when I wait. I sit in the dark, warding off sleep with all my will but it always sneaks up on me. When I can no longer keep my head balanced on my neck I shuffle back into the cottage and fall on the mattress. Once or twice I even drifted away sitting on this bench and felt like a twisted roll of Easter bread when I opened my eyes but it was already dawn and he was gone. Sometimes, I think, I must have dreamed I saw him. I must have been seeing things. It was the shadow of a tree or something enlarged because the moon hit from a strange angle and I dreamed the rest. But I could swear I was awake. Still, I don’t tell anyone about this, not even Camilla, because they may think I’m seeing things and I’m too old to take care of myself and they’d send me away somewhere, with crazy old people incapable of putting a spoon in their mouths. I’m happy living here by myself.”
“Did you tell this to anyone?”
“Yes, I couldn’t contain it any longer, so one day, I told Gülistan Hanum. You know, my next-door neighbor—the one with the stuttering son? Well, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. She said, nothing strange about it, her mother also had a spirit inside her well. Every night, she’d leave food for the spirit man while everyone slept. In the night, the spirit came and ate the food. Suddenly, everything in her mother’s garden began to grow so big that the people from the newspaper came and took pictures of her vegetables and fruit. She had apples as large as watermelons. Tomatoes as enormous as pumpkins. Forget-me-nots like peonies.
“So, I left some food for him that night. Next to the magnolia bowl, so no other creatures could steal. I lay awake but did not stir. I did not want him to sense that I was waiting for him to come. The next morning, the food was gone but there was something else in the bowl—a hundred-kuru coin. I did the same again that night, left food for him, and in the morning found another hundred-kurush.
“He never misses a day now, and neither do I. I take the hundred-kuru to the grocer and buy Hamid Bey things to eat. He likes chocolate but he likes roasted chickpeas with white raisins even better, and dried fat Smyrna figs. Sultana grapes. And Kalamatas, too. Sometimes, I split the figs open, put hazelnuts inside, and he loves that. He also makes my garden grow. Look, look at that jasmine bush, look at the bougainvillea. Remember, they used to be nothing but spindly weeds when we lived in the big house. Look at them now! Tell me the truth, do you see them like this anywhere else? No, child. I’m not going to leave my home and go live with my daughter.”
Maria grabbed the bowl of sour cherries and left the room in a hurry, making sure her Singapore Airlines bag was still slung on her shoulder. She went back to the well and reclaimed her silence like the day before. Amber hoped she’d forget, that she could return to her place inside the well that gave her dreams.
She took Nellie for a walk looking for clues of the past. The meadow behind where the vaudeville had once pitched their tent, where she had last seen her unfortunate Aunt Papatya. Nobody had ever heard from her again.
It was now crowded with midincome housing, the shack where Nuria’s family lived long gone. Still, the pinion trees thrived, lining both sides of the street leading to the Cordone, the nuts scattered about everywhere, unpicked. Amber showed Nellie how to crack them and eat the nuts.
“Have you ever eaten dirt?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean when you were little, taste the earth.”
“Why would I want to?”
“Never mind.”
In the afternoon, they left for Izmir, “for sightseeing,” they told Maria. As Amber hugged Maria good-bye, the old woman was vacant, a grayness emanating out of her body, the color of resignation. She smelled of decay. Amber held her, trying to pay back some vitality, but the old woman had withdrawn, unable to receive.
The clouds obscured the sky as if it were going to rain. From a distance Maria looked like a cadaver now, the crone in a Munch painting, in her long black dress and scarf. A terra-cotta water jug in her hand. As is the custom, she poured the water after her guests, divining a smooth journey, fluid as a stream without any impediments. But the water meandered along the cracks of the cobbles, forming tiny rivulets, and evaporated with a hiss almost instantly.
Maria waved her head and arms like a puppet on a string. Amber and Nellie turned the corner toward the ferry landing. They walked a little, then stopped to wet their handkerchiefs at an old street fountain, dripping with sweat.
“Did you hear that?” Amber asked Nellie.
“Yeah, sounded like her, all right.”
“I’m going back. It’s not right to hold off any longer. I have to tell her.”
Maria was still standing where they had left her.
“She’ll leave me anyway,” Maria said. “I know. If she doesn’t go with you, she’ll put me in one of those places with decrepit old folks.”
“You’re imagining things.”
“I don’t want to be left behind.”
“You don’t have to worry about that Anne-Anne.”
“It’s all dirt at the end, anyway. What does it matter? No. I don’t want to be left behind. Tell her, tell Camilla, I’ll come live with her. He can find me there if he wants to. If he’s a spirit, he can go anywhere. My life is spent waiting for him.”
So Amber and Nellie stayed on a few more days to help her pack. One of the things Maria said she wanted to do before leaving was to dress the well. She’d never done it but she knew how from watching her mother and the other women in Bornova many times at midsummer.
“We must pick every petal from every flowering plant in the garden. The jasmine, the magnolia, the pomegranates, every single blossom of bougainvillea. Pick all the blossoms until all colors disappeared but green. Pick all and mix them so that you can’t tell the scent of gardenia from rose. Jasmine from honeysuckle. Pick them and press them together so their shapes are homogenized and you couldn’t tell iris from carnation. This way we make a picture of an offering.”
They worked all day long. Longest when the sun was at its zenith. Maria wanted them to pick with their hands instead of clipping with scissors. “That way, they’d break naturally.” Some plants disconnected easily but others resisted tearing from their branches, leaving them no choice but to twist and pull, mangling the break. It was violent. Each time, they could hear the flowers cry, they could sense the breaking of their own heart. They tore everything, until all disappeared but the green, and put it in the Singapore Airlines bag for pressing.
“The garden’s never been this empty,” Maria exclaimed. “Even when I was ill and could no longer tend to the plants that grew wild. Even the last time I picked the flowers, I still left a few so that something would remain for the birds and the bees to make more flowers. Seeds need colors to sprout. Without colors, we die.”
“I know.”
By late afternoon, they could already smell the fermentation of the blossoms, a sweet vinegar. At sundown, hummingbirds came flocking in, darting into the bougainvillea, not drawn by the magenta blossoms, but from force of habit. They twittered, buzzed, and hummed in the vine, seeking with their sensors the source of honey, which had fed generations of their species. They dared dive blindly into nonexistent floral orifices. They cried out like angry mice first, the whole flock, crescendoing into a lamentful symphony. They were sensing that the plant would no longer bear flowers, and nothing else of sweetness was left in the garden. They were sensing that they had lost their fountain of life and could never return. Their livelihood was gone. By dusk, all the birds were dead from exhaustion.
The House in Izmir
(1997)
Wherever the changes of my life may lead me in the future, it will remain my spiritual home until I die, a house to which one returns not with the certainty of welcoming human beings, nor familiarity in which every lichen-covered rock and rowan tree show known and reassuring faces.
GAVIN MAXWELL, A Ring of Bright Water
In a sad state of dilapidation and disrepair, the wooden facade rotten with age, the delicate gingerbread pitifully bug-eaten, I had been on my deathbed for a long, long time. Pallid and peeling, worn out by the elements. The latticed balcony dangled in the air at a dangerous incline from the main facade and the rust had eaten the gutters. Some windows were broken; others boarded up just as it had been during the Great War. Without attention and respect for so long, fragile and brittle, not much hope to be resurrected.
The government official who came to inspect a few months ago declared me unsafe and condemned, but the latest owner, a sleazeball in the black-market trade, bribed him into keeping his mouth shut so that he could sell me and cash in.
The afternoon that the FOR SALE sign was plastered all over me, pedestrians shook their heads in disbelief or laughed at my condition. But then the unexpected wand of change. Once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing. As vivid as the day Esma had first arrived here.
Two women stood across the street and stared at me for a long time—one was fortyish, I’d say, the other less than half her age. Something seemed familiar about the older one, something about the way she tilted her head slightly to the right and those strange paisley eyes. If it weren’t for her modern clothes and short hair, she was the spitting image of Esma about the time when she passed on.
They stood there, gazing at me, squinting their eyes, in deep contemplation. I could read their lips.
“That’s the house, Nellie. Can you believe it, I was born there,” she told the younger one, which made me almost jump out of my skin. I’m older than a century but during all these years and numerous occupations, only one child was born inside me—odd since so many women of child-rearing age had passed through. Amber was her name. Intense little girl. This would explain the uncanny resemblance. But why had she come back?
“How sad,” Nellie replied. “It looks so unloved now.”
“The poor thing. It looks totally abandoned. I don’t think anyone’s lived here for a long time.”
They walked around to the side, passed through the wobbly gate, followed the small path leading to the water landing.
“I was only five when we left but I still dream about this house,” Amber explained.
“I can relate to that. I still dream about the house where we lived in Vermont.”
Suddenly, inside me, an anxious stirring and something parting the jalousie shutters upstairs, peering out.
The Adonis tree still stood firm. Amber had told Nellie about the old legend. They saw the nightingale perched on the branches, singing a cheerful, welcoming song. It was a tender day.
They sat at the dock all afternoon, looking out at the promenade across the Bay in Cordelio, watching the water traffic. For hours neither of them uttered a word. They watched the last sliver of the sun sink into the Aegean when Nellie reached out and touc
hed her mother’s shoulder. “We must go,” she said. “It’s getting dark. Your grandmother will worry.”
Amber stood up and followed Nellie through the side portal but she had that sense of not wanting to part. They crossed the street, heading in the direction of the boat landing.
The nightingale thrashed around in the garden, jumping from branch to branch, singing a beckoning song. Come back. Come back, the heart of my delight. Of course, no one could understand the words other than me, except maybe the jinns who themselves were beginning to stir with restrained curiosity.
The nightingale leapt out of the Adonis tree and flew across the street—a taboo since the fuses of spirits are connected to their domicile where a strict treaty exists on the boundaries of their territories. Dangerous to cross, dangerous for the house spirits and the outdoor spirits to mingle. War among the spirits, the worst hazard.
She landed on Amber’s shoulder.
“What a sweet bird,” Nellie said enchanted. “Look, it’s as if it’s trying to communicate with us.”
Then, the bird flew back and perched on the portico and began to sing.
“Sounds just like an old lullaby I used to hear when we lived here. Dandini, dandini, danali bebek,” she began humming.
“It’s totally weird.”
With instant determination, Amber ran across the street. She stopped in front of the sign on the front door.
“Where are you going, mother?” Nellie called back. She caught up with her mother. “What does it say? Condemned?”
“It says, FOR SALE.”
Nellie, in a flicker, read her mother’s mind. “God,” she said, “who’d ever want to buy a dump like this?”
“I’d like to see what shape it’s in. The frame looks strong and beautiful.”
They sneaked in through the side door, which hung by a single hinge, as the people on the street peered at them suspiciously but refrained from eye contact, making no effort to acknowledge their presence, as if a ghostly secret had veiled their sight.
Seven Houses Page 25
