The Flea Palace

by Elif Shafak

  It is all because of this house. It has been two months and five days since I moved in here. I have come to realize that for all its abstractness and vastness the terms in which time is measurable are no more concrete and no less petite than mere driblets. I count up every day that has passed, every drop of it. By now I should have fully settled down and established some sort of an order in this house. Yet not only have I failed to settle down, I live as if I might pack up and leave any moment. As if to make moving out easier, the flat is still not much different from the way it was the day I moved in, with boxes piled up on top of one another, some opened but most only roughly so: a perfunctory, transitory dwelling amidst parcels yet to be opened…the fleeting order as evaporative as room sprays…a ‘Lego-home’ constructed of parts and pieces to be dissembled at any moment… When single, one lives amidst ‘belongings-in-a-house’; one’s past, trajectory, personal worth all contained in possessions that bear symbolic value. Upon getting married, one starts to live in ‘a-house-of-belongings’, established more on a future than a past, more on expectations than memories; a house where it is doubtful how much one personally possesses. As for divorce, depending on whether one is the person leaving or the person staying behind, it is like camping out all over again, only this time one either stays behind in a ‘house-with-belongings-gone’ or departs, carrying ‘belongings-without-a-house’.

  My situation is both, because of this house and because of ‘Ethel the Cunt’. The day I had to move in here, no matter how hard I tried, I could not convince her to stay out of it and not mess things up by helping. When I had finally perched myself in the front seat of the truck belonging to the moving company that had agreed to transport the books, clothes and knick-knacks I had deliberately refused to let go from the tastefully decorated home of my marriage (as well as some cheap and simple furniture I had recently bought for the dingy apartment that would be the base for my post-marriage era); there right next to me was none other than Ethel. As if her presence was not alarming enough, she teamed up with the dim-witted driver, utterly stunning the man with the premium quality cigars she offered, preposterous questions she asked and the absurd topics of conversation she came up with – which included making a list of the most difficult neighbourhoods in Istanbul to move in and out of. When we had finally reached Bonbon Palace, Ethel meddled with the porters, running around excitedly in that hard-to-believe skirt of hers, which was no bigger than the size of a beggar’s handkerchief, on that huge, hideous ass she so much enjoys exhibiting.

  Shooting orders left and right, she instructed the porters where to put each box, how to arrange the book parcels and where to stack the common, slipshod packages of shelves of what was supposed to turn into a self-made library, which she herself had forced me to purchase from one of those huge stores in which families paid homage at the weekends. The porters were wise enough to know that it is the woman who has the last word in these matters and in their wisdom unashamedly ignored me, the real owner. All day long I do not remember them even once paying attention to what I said, except when the time came to pay them. It was only then that they favoured me over Ethel. Even when they accidentally banged the cardboard box packed with all kinds of glasses, cups, and goblets, the authority they addressed and the person they apologized to was not me, trying to mildly dismiss the incident, but Ethel who gave them hell about the probable damage they might have caused.

  All day long, I had to stand at a corner and be content with watching what was considered appropriate for me. My exclusion reached its peak during the installation of the 180 × 200 cms, golden bow, system-orthopedic king size bed – one of the two hearty spoils I had wrested from my former house. When, after six tries, it had become only too evident that the bed would not fit the shapeless space of a room that Ethel had decided to make into my bedroom, an argument broke out among them. Ethel wanted the bed to be put in sideways and would sacrifice the showy headboard, if necessary. As for the porters, they were all for locating the bed head-on, even though there would then be no space left to move around. Meanwhile, no one asked my opinion and if someone had, I would not know what to say anyhow. When they finally agreed to put the bed in sideways, still leaving no room to move, I did not object. That bed was too big for me at any rate. Accordingly, I have not slept on it once since I moved here. I am pretty much consistent in sleeping on this narrow couch that torments my posture and tortures my back. In the past, during her lengthy Masnawi season, Ethel had once lectured me about how Rumi had to reckon with his body. Though not in such a mystical manner, in these last two months I too have probably shown little gratitude to my frame. Still, like a desperate lover ever more attached to his oppressor or a despicable apprentice inured to scorn, I too cannot break away from this cruelly uncomfortable sofa. Before the end of the term, I should assign ‘The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude’ to the Thursday section.

  The television opposite is, no doubt, the main reason for my preferring this couch. These days, having given up regular sleeping hours, I seek refuge in television and can only sleep with it turned on. Likewise last night, back home so late and high, I must have turned on the television. Now on the screen some madcap of a young girl with a short, multihued shirt with tropical birds, a crimson rosebud tattoo almost as big as a fist on her bare plump belly and orange-coloured hair tied-up in handfuls with phosphorescent green ribbons, chirps with a glee not many people are bestowed with this early in the morning. Though the girl does not move her body around that much and talks with simple hand gestures, her breasts keep wobbling in that way particular to women scurrying to catch a bus at the last minute. This is not to my taste though. I have always gone for contrasts; I like them either as small as the palm in a big frame, or huge in a petite body.

  Ten days later, when Ethel came to inspect the house and saw everything was as she had left it, she kept her comments to herself. Nothing had changed by the third week. Still not even a single package had been unwrapped, not even a single shelf mounted. When she stopped by one month five days later, I wished she would keep silent once again. However, with a disagreeable smile on her face and whilst clicking her long, brightly polished fingernails together, she blurted out in that particular manner of hers intended to stress the importance of whatever she was going to say, ‘Look, sugar-plum! It’s none of my business but you’d better stop treating your new house like you’ve treated your ex-wife. You neglect your house assuming it’s all yours and will never go anywhere, but God forbid it too might be taken away from you, just like your wife was.’ I did not respond. I have always hated long, polished fingernails.

  Ethel uses her tongue the way a frog catches a fly. Whatever comes to her mind she blurts out and before the victim has even had a chance to get the message, catches with her harsh pink tongue the momentary bewilderment on the latter’s face and then gulps it down with great pleasure, without even bothering to swallow. Although following the divorce I had barely hesitated in ending numerous friendships in my life, I do not know, and frankly do not want to know, why I am still friends with her. Not that I make any special efforts to see her, but I do not take any steps to stop seeing her either. The issue is not that I do not like her any longer, for I have never liked her more or less than I do now. If a bond has kept us together all this time, I do not think it is one of love, companionship or trust. Ethel and I are as compatible as each single wing of two different butterflies positioned side by side under a collector’s magnifying glass. We are very much alike in our incompleteness and yet it is two different halves, with utterly distinct designs and colours that we eventually pine for. As we waft along with the wind, we have been coming together, even sticking together, but never in such as way as to complete one another. If I don’t see her for a month, I barely miss her and am sometimes hardly even aware of her absence; yet, when we meet after a month, I do not feel the slightest distress next to her or ever think about cutting short the time we spend together. Ethel is Ethel, just as some things simply are what they are
. In spite of this, or maybe precisely because of this, I see her more frequently and share more things with her than with anyone else. That is how it has been for many years. This loose relationship of ours may persevere as such or brusquely unravel one day like the nail of a haemorrhaged finger. At times I wonder, if such a thing happens, which one of us will be the first to realize and how long after the fingernail has fallen?

  As I was getting up from the couch, my foot got caught on the phone cable. The receiver emerged from under my pillow, as if I had tried to squeeze the life out of the phone last night. It is so annoying, all the data at hand indicates that I was not able to resist calling her last night before I passed out.

  Nobody would object to the fact that it is dangerous for drunks to drive. Making phone-calls whilst drunk, however, could produce even more deadly results than driving whilst drunk, and yet there are no legal procedures for dealing with this particular danger. Drunk drivers hit random targets, like an unfortunate tree that suddenly appears in front of them or an unrelated vehicle moving on its way…in these accidents there is neither purpose nor intent. Yet those who use the phone when drunk always go and hit the ones they love.

  It is enough of a torment to realize that you’ve called your loved one when drunk, but it is even worse not to remember whether you called and, as you force yourself to remember, to try to convince yourself to the contrary. Since my divorce, this scene kept repeating itself at almost regular intervals but I had not yet called Ayshin on her new number. She probably does not even know that I managed to get this number. That is, of course, if we did not talk last night… I had to be certain. I pushed the redial button. One, two, three…it was answered on the sixth ring. There she was herself! In the morning, her voice always sounded as if it had come from the bottom of a deep well. She likes to sleep. Highly unattractive upon waking up, she cannot possibly come to her senses before having her filtered coffee. No sugar, no milk. Her second ‘hellooo’ sounded even more furious than her first. I hung up.

  I tried to collect my thoughts. In spite of everything, there was still some hope. The fact that I called her did not mean that we actually talked. Maybe the phone was not answered. If Ayshin had answered the phone last night and said a few good or bad things, I would have at least remembered bits and pieces of what had been said. As I did not recall a single word, probably nothing worth remembering had occurred, but there was no way I could find solace on the bosom of this slim chance. The most plausible explanation for Ayshin’s not answering the phone last night was that she was not home at the time. At that time, outside… Outside, at that time…

  On the bathroom floor lie two dead cockroaches half a metre apart. This must be two of my accomplishments last night but I cannot, in the doubtful records of my memory, come across any explanation regarding this matter. I take my shirt off. It is suffused with a sharp smell: an unbearable smell jointly produced by the smells of the deep-fried turbot, lots of side dishes, the rakι I drank and the premium quality cigars I smoked, all mixed up then totally dredged and made unrecognizable by my stomach acid. The washing machine is a divorce gift from Ethel. She has always been a practical woman, handy and generous. I throw my navy-blue linen pants into the machine as well. I have learned by now that for linens one uses the 40° temperature and the second short cycle, but even if I succeed in purifying myself from the unpleasant sediments of last night, it is amply evident that I will not be able to free myself from the disgusting garbage smell engulfing this apartment building. I am extremely regretful about acting so hastily during the divorce process in my search for a house. For the same amount of money I could have been living in a much more decent place if I had not, with the intent of getting away as soon as possible, attempted to land the first relatively cheap and adequately distant flat. I miss the comfort of my old house. The issue does not solely consist of my yearning for the lost comfort and the lost heaven from which I personally arranged my own downfall. The house actually belonged to Ayshin or, to put it more correctly, to Ayshin’s family, but after a three and a half year long residency, I had thought the house was mine too until that unfortunate moment after gathering my underwear, books, lecture notes and razor blades when I went back for a last look to check if I had left anything behind. Such a puny little word: ‘too!’ Like a child enthusiastically expecting that what his brother has received will be given to him too:‘Me too, me too!’Yet it seems that in marriage, just as in sibling relations, one side gets more than the other, while people’s traces can be removed from the places they lived, or sometimes even thought they owned, as easily as the string off of a string bean. What I find hard to take, what thrusts pains into my stomach, is exactly the part about the string. It upsets me to think that now Ayshin has a great time by herself in the house that was once mine too. One should of course be always grateful, for there is worse than the worse imaginable: she could be having a great time not all alone…

  I took stock in the bathroom, freezing at times or getting scalded at others under the shower that either heated up so much that it then suddenly turned icy, or turned cold and then became boiling hot, managing never to end up lukewarm. Even though it was unclear how I had found my way home last night imbibed, it was certain that I had called Ayshin with my drunken jellyfish-head. Okay, what then? If we had talked, a memory, a moment should have been left behind. A sentence… As I soaped my face, the headquarters of my brain sent the news that a sentence fitting the description of the sought suspect had been observed wandering around and been arrested: ‘Don’t you see that I will totally cease to care about you if you keep calling like this? Before we lose our respect for each other…’ I did not see anything. Even though I tried to open my soapy eyes for a moment, I again shut them when they started stinging from the soap. No, the information proved to be groundless. This was not the sentence I was searching for. I remembered. I had not heard this one last night, but earlier, sometime before Ayshin had tried to change her phone number.

  I stepped out when the manic depressive shower started to push my endurance. The pain in my stomach was unbearable. The kitchen was not too small, but became rather narrow after the installment, right in the middle, of an impressive burly refrigerator more or less the size of the cottages that low-income holiday-makers perch along sea shores and fill up with their families. Rather than insisting on taking from my old house this American bullock, designed to satiate the tribal appetites of consumer society’s nuclear families with their hangar-like homes, I should have gone and bought myself one of those box-like, knee-high refrigerators used in either hotel rooms or flats in Tokyo. I probably would have done so if Ayshin had not objected by stating ‘It’s too big for you.’ I had heard this remark twice in a row: firstly, for the king-size bed and secondly, for the refrigerator. It was only then, upon realizing that what was too big for me was not that big for Ayshin, had I been able to surmise that there was another man in her life and my place would be shortly filled up. So even though I did not cause any difficulties on any matter and was more compliant and docile than necessary so as to hurry along the divorce process, no one, Ethel included, could make out my uncompromising stubbornness concerning the bed and the refrigerator.

  My loot might have been substantial but it was totally hollow. It looked pathetic empty like that. Large refrigerators are distant relatives of those old locomotives who gobble-up coal all along the way; they are, just like them, never full and as they get filled, constantly want to be filled some more. Forget sacks of coal, mine is bereft even of a shovel full of coal dust. On the top shelf there was a box of opened cream cheese coated with a thin layer of mould, inside the door are five cans of beer and half a large bottle of rakι, in the vegetable container sat three tomatoes and wilted leaves of lettuce. That was all. Then, on the bottom shelf there was the mushroom pizza slice sent by that elderly woman neighbour. I had seen many who send puddings and the like, but had never before encountered one who made pizza and distributed it slice by slice. I was going to throw
it away but forgot. Now, however, as the alcohol particles left over from the night slowly gnawed on the membrane of my stomach, I reached for the pizza slice with gratitude. It took three minutes to heat it up in the microwave oven and approximately thirty seconds to get it down my stomach. It was a bit stale but so what: it was great considering the conditions! Having thus appeased my stomach, just a tad, I embarked on preparing my medicine. This included a pot of skimmed milk with two heaped spoonfuls of Turkish coffee, one spoonful of pine honey, a generous quantity of cinnamon and a little cognac. This is my miracle medicine for hangovers, its curing power proven through experience. It may not suit every constitution. Actually every constitution should, through trial and error, develop its own cure. That is how I found mine. That day I made the proportions more generous than usual, as I needed to sober up as soon as possible. It was Thursday and since the beginning of the term, every Thursday afternoon I have taught the course I love the most to the class I love the most.

  While waiting for the milk to boil, I looked through the brochures Ethel had thrust into my hand. Another private university was being founded in Istanbul. I had been aware of some of the details for a long time, like the long preparation process for example. What I did not know was that Ethel the Cunt was involved as well; she was actually at the very centre of it all and told me more than I ever wanted to learn at dinner. Only two minutes after we had met, she introduced the topic with a ‘plop’ and talked of almost nothing else until the end of the night when, under the weary looks of the skinny Kurdish waiter who could barely keep his long black eyelashes open, we wobblingly departed from the restaurant that had no other customers left except us. She kept talking continuously about how this university was not a financial investment but a moral one; how she had not so wholeheartedly believed in a project for quite a long time; she personally knew the founders and that she herself was actually one of the eight investors behind the scenes; she had enjoyed life much more since she got involved in this and that she was sure when she looked back in her old age this would be the job she would be most proud of in her life; about how they would educate a group of youth much more conscious and knowledgeable than their generation within five years at the most; how the size of this group of youths would increase from year to year and how they would altogether affect the fate of our haggard country. As she kept speaking, I kept on drinking. If I had drunk less, or more slowly, the summary of the night would have been something like this: Ethel talked, I laughed; Ethel got angry, I burst out; Ethel shouted, we fought. So in order not to cause a scene, not to muddy the waters for no good reason, and not to spoil the night, Ethel talked and I drank.