The Flea Palace

by Elif Shafak

  ‘I don’t know how to be satisfied with what I have,’ she had solemnly confessed to herself, ‘because I’m not able to show gratitude.’ Surprisingly, rather than causing offence this confession had relieved her. She had been suffering from the malady of those who, while still children, realized how extraordinarily beautiful their childhood is; the malady of those who started life with the bar set high… Thereafter, all the people she met were destined to remain in the shadow of her dede while even the most pleasing things in her life would embody a harrowing sense of absence. Such incompleteness, however, was utterly unbeknownst to others, and therein resided the problem: the absolute wholeness of good. Those who unreservedly believed in their own goodness and the superiority of their morality were doomed to failure far more than the bad for they were so smug in their completeness. There were no leaky roofs in the edifices of their personalities, no crumbling floorboards, neither a hole to be filled, nor a notch to be fixed. The Blue Mistress had found them incomplete in their gorged fullness but being unable to express this, she had gradually recoiled from the good, distancing herself step by step from their learned codes and credo of goodness. It was thus that she had started to suspect somewhere in her innermost soul she was inclined to depravity and immorality. Before long, she had entirely cut her ties with all three religious orders. Be that as it may, moving away from the believers had not once shaken up her beliefs. Faith for her was not living in accordance with the unchangeable rules of a commanding God or joining the ranks of a conscientious community, but rather a sunny, dulcet childhood memory. And as her childhood memories with her dede were the best moments of her life, she had steadfastly, doggedly remained a devout believer. Even when not as full of faith as she had been in her childhood, her faith had still retained a childish side.

  Yet there was neither a house she wanted to return to and nor did she have enough money to continue on her way. It was during those days that she had started to get used to the attention of men as old as her father and managed to not remain indifferent to the attention she had got used to. These men who thought they had everything, discovered at one point the incompleteness embeded in their lives and thereafter became eagerly attracted to her as if she and only she could right that wrong. In any case, being a mistress was a good start in terms of getting away from the humdrum wholeness of the good. She was first blue, then a mistress, but there were also periods when she was thrown around in between the two. When the olive oil merchant rented Flat Number 8 of Bonbon Palace, she had finally stopped fluctuating between being blue and a mistress to become both. As soon as the man provided her with a house, his manner had drastically changed, becoming visibly coarser. For he was that type. He was an LTCM of the SDEM section and the WCWL sub-section, and he naturally acted in accordance with that.

  There lives on earth another type of creature whose world is as crowded as that of humans and that is at least as complex: bugs. They have succeeded in spreading everywhere and stay alive in spite of everything. They display a magnificent variation, even a particular type of bug can come in ten further varieties, sometimes even reaching thousands. It is assumed that the sum of all bug types is more than one million at present. In spite of this harrowing complexity, the scientific world does not stop classifying them. It divides them into their upper categories, classes, lower classes; upper sections, sections and lower sections. A tree worm, for instance, belongs to the bug category, ‘changeling sub-class, sheath-winged upper-section, different-stomached section, plant-eater sub-section’. The overwhelming majority of the disappointments women experience in their relationships with men originate in their unwillingness to accept that, like bugs, humans too come in types and therefore the men they are with also belong to a type – with only one difference: a bug cannot leave its type and make the transition into another type. A horsefly, for instance, cannot at any stage of its life turn into a praying mantis. It stays the same. However, Adam’s sons and Eve’s daughters can indeed accomplish this transformation. The trademark of a human is the faculty to deviate from what it was originally, to betray its own type. Accordingly, the table of modern human types is less complex but much more convoluted than that of the primitive bug. Nevertheless, making the transition between categories is not easy. After all, in order to preserve their stability and maintain their existence, not only do all types make, without exception, their members exactly like each other but they fix them in that guise as well. The olive oil merchant belonged to upper category of the men’s type, ‘Long Term Complainers about Marriage’, was on the ‘Can’t Quite End Marriage’ team and also in the ‘Want Change Without Loss’ subsection: a harmful type whichever way you looked at it.

  ‘You are my betrothed,’ he had said as they silently drunk at the rakι table they had, on their first night in this house, set together. He liked to drink and often drank at night. He was not one of those who made do with a fistful of appetizers, half a mould of cheese and a slice of melon. Instead he always insisted on having a table filled to the brim. It couldn’t be ready-made either, everything had to be prepared at home from scratch. Chicken with ground walnuts was his favourite dish. That night, whilst using a piece of bread to wipe off the last crumbs of chicken with ground walnuts from his plate, he had remarked: ‘Our religion permits it as well. As long as you are fair enough, you can have up to four women.’ The Blue Mistress had tittered, a bristly, edgy snigger. He had grimaced. She had left the table: unlike the olive oil merchant, she did know the mentioned verse of the Qur’an in its entirety.

  Choosing a gauzy green dress from the wardrobe, she dressed in no time, then ran back to the kitchen to open the packages from the grocery store. First she placed the hummus in a bowl, decorating it with mint leaves. Next, she arranged the other appetizers on plates: dried bean stew, eggplant purée, green beans in olive oil, liver with stewed onions… She lined up the cheese pastry on one side, planning to fry it when he arrived. There was also the Russian salad Madam Auntie had sent yesterday with the janitor’s son. This she actually had found rather odd. The Blue Mistress had never before seen a housewife sending Russian salad to neighbours and the like, but she guessed that the olive oil merchant might enjoy it on the rakι table. She could place it on the table as if she had prepared it herself. After inspecting the plates for the last time, she crumpled up the packaging paper into a ball and threw it in the garbage; then tied up the garbage bag and took it outside. It was then that she recalled the conversation at the hairdresser. She had not mentioned this to anyone but her garbage had also been stolen a couple of times from her front doorstep. Inspecting the garbage bag suspiciously, warily, she took it inside again to put it out later when Meryem was due to come to collect them.

  The delicacies she had prepared the Blue Mistress then carried to the table with the azure tablecloth. She set the napkins that matched the tablecloth in colour, then the plates and the glasses. She took out from the refrigerator the rakι she had seasoned with ground mastic and poured it into the crystal water pitcher with the turquoise handle. Finally, she poured into a maroon bowl a small amount of the heavy-smelling olive oil the merchant had brought and sprinkled it with red pepper, sweet basil and thyme. Though it was still early, she could not resist lighting up the lily-shaped candle that floated on a glass bowl half-filled with water. With a soft, satisfied smile, she scrutinized the table and then everything around. She liked her house. If only this horrendous smell of the apartment building could be gotten rid of…

  She lit a green apple-scented incense stick and placed it in the middle of the living room. As the smoke delicately dissipated in the air, she sprayed, first on herself and then at all the corners of the house, half a bottle of perfume. Recently she had started to spend a considerable amount of her money on perfume. As the smell of garbage circumnavigating the apartment building had augmented, so had her perfume expenditure. She frequently stopped by the stylish store at the end of the avenue, always buying her bottles of perfume from the same place even though she k
new too well that she did not have the same standards of living as the women shopping there. She liked fruit smells the most: mixtures of peach, watermelon and papaya. She had no clue what papaya was but found the name cute.

  The perfume she bought lasted at most ten days. She poured the different scents everywhere; on her clothes, onto the pillows and sheets, the curtains and the armchairs, her toys of all sizes and types, and on the evil eyes she hung all around the house. Instead, she could have saved up this money, or she could have bought long-lasting things for herself. The merchant must have realized the wastefulness of his little mistress for he had reduced the amount of pocket money he gave her. Yet the Blue Mistress kept on doing things as she pleased. She did not know and did not try to understand why she behaved like this. The only thing she knew was that if the money she received were five times what it was now, she would purchase five times as many bottles of perfume.

  The table looked fine, tasteful and refined. She sent a message from her cell phone asking him when he was going to come. While waiting for the response, she pushed on the remote and randomly turned on a channel. On the screen appeared two women throwing resentful looks at each other. One of them, the one with the fashionable lavender suit and four strands of pearls, crossed her hands on her chest and snorted: ‘Admit it Loretta, I’m the one he loves.’ The long haired brunette wearing a dress that reminded one of a field of daisies with one such specimen also placed on her hair, opened wide her green eyes, pronouncing syllable by syllable: ‘But you do not love him.’ Pulling on her necklace almost to its breaking point, the other one replied: ‘That doesn’t concern you Loretta, it doesn’t concern you at all.’

  ‘May stones as big as Loretta rain on your heads,’ grumbled the Blue Mistress. Even though ‘Loretta’ was as of the same type of word as ‘papaya’, it did not sound as cute at all.

  As she reached for the remote, her cell phone beeped, delivering only a single word: ‘Night.’ Such a long, abstruse slice of time. She heaved a sigh, changing the channel. A middle-aged woman with a wide forehead and a chubby face, who either had not considered or did not much care about removing that moustache of hers, was listing the ingredients for cooking spinach au gratin.

  Flat Number 7: Me

  I went out to the balcony and lit a cigarette. The balcony is the only place I enjoy in this house. It is almost detached from the house inside; whatever attachment it has to the flat seems fortuitous, as if it doesn’t really belong here. I notice a brick-coloured bug wandering on the iron grills. My presence annoys it and its presence annoys me. There are bugs everywhere. They spread out from the kitchen cabinets, under the refrigerator, the cracks on the tiles…

  For a fleeting moment I ponder calling Ethel to ask her help to find out whether I had talked to Ayshin or not the night before but I soon decide against it. Since I already had had more than my fair share of the Cunt’s whims, to ask her for Ayshin’s new phone number, asking once again for help, would be of no use other than further inflating her already over-inflated ego. I can’t stand hearing her grouse one more time: ‘I’m going to lose my best girlfriend because of you sugar-plum!’ If it were up to me I am sure I’d have done both a great favour by putting an end to that gangrenous relationship of theirs but why bother?

  This twosome, the closest of buddies in high school, used to meet without fail once every two weeks to dine, always at the same type of restaurants. After our engagement, it hadn’t taken Ayshin long to convince first herself, then me, that I’d better join this uninviting routine. In order not to upset the balance, Ethel too had started to bring her partners to our meals. Before long, these partners were gracing our table one after another, with no apparent consistency or similarity among them, like the winning numbers in a lottery. Before we found the chance to get acquainted with one number, another one would have already replaced him. During that period, Ethel’s love affairs were so slapdash and so fugacious that we did not feel the need to hide our amazement when a lover succeeded in attending three dates in a row. Such exceptional partners we would inspect all throughout the meal with an admiration mixed with awe. During that three and a half year long parade of lovers, Ethel introduced us to partners of all kinds and sizes. If there was one thing all these men had in common, it should have been their incapability to bring to a close what they had started. All were allergic to anything conventional, obsessed with being original by doing things never done before and had ambitious projects which they had abandoned halfway through for one reason or another. They happened to be enormously enthusiastic about a myriad of projects, the only problem being that they could not flesh them out any further than the beginning phase. Like mussels in their shells, they had gotten stuck in their half-developed projects, waiting for someone to pull them out by their hands to continue on. It was precisely at this stage that Ethel the Cunt appeared, plunging in and randomly pulling them out with her long fingernails painted in harsh colours. What she did not like she threw back in the water; after all, Istanbul was a huge mussel field and she was an accomplished mussel-hunter.

  There was an edgy young scriptwriter, for instance, who must have been at least ten years younger than Ethel. He was working on a script he assured us must be sent to European producers as he resolutely believed those in Turkey were not worthy of him. The scenario was definitely ready, he claimed, if only he could decide on how to end the film. We dined with him once. While Ayshin grumbled and Ethel giggled, the two of us put our heads together and – as we downed rakι with ice, proceeded from cold to warm appetizers, from warm appetizers to the main dish, and from there to dessert and coffee – came up with a total of four different endings to his film, all of which we were particularly proud of. Then there were the other lovers: a photographer who nursed amazing grudges against the managers, workers and even the readers of all the journals he worked for; a haughty advertiser who saw no harm in claiming that everyone who kept a television at home was an idiot; an amateur actor who did not find any play staged in Turkey successful and therefore went from door to door seeking a sponsor to establish his own theatre company; a foul-mouthed satirist who had a reputation for leaving everything he started halfway through and thereby speeding up the bankruptcy of all journals he became mixed up with; an alcoholic psychiatrist who had as his patients all the intellectuals of the city, who kept going to him even though everyone knew he could not hold his tongue when he got drunk and happily divulged his patients’ innermost secrets…At times, I could not help thinking that Ethel brought these men to eat with us just to upset Ayshin. If that were the case, she certainly succeeded. Even though Ayshin never thought of ending their friendship because of this, she always had a grisly opinion about the life Ethel led. She knew I did not approve of Ethel’s ways either. What my wife did not know, however, was that disapproving of a woman’s habits was no obstacle to sleeping with her.

  Ethel was actually a threat to all her partners. She would help them out, pouring money on them, all the while flaring up that spark of ‘I wouldn’t be the man I am if only my circumstances were different’ ready to char the wooden cottages of their characters. As soon as these men – who for one reason or another had repetitively failed to accomplish their goal but accepted both themselves and their fate as given – bumped into Ethel at an unexpected turn of their lives and were pumped-up with money and flattery, they would abandon their life-long projects to go after far more avaricious ones. Shortly after that Ethel would abandon them without notice, just as she had done years ago to her guests in the temple-house. As she did not love herself, she did not love the men she turned her lovers into either. However, there was one among them who did not fit this pattern and whom Ethel cherished like no other…

  He was a ney player. In the days when the principal Mawlawi order had bifurcated over the debate, ‘Is it permissible for male and female dervishes to whirl together?’ he had taken issue with both sides and retreated into his shell, ever since that moment devoting half his day to seeking refuge in sleep
and the other half to escaping from his dreams. How exactly and on which part of the day Ethel had met him I had no clue. The only thing I do know for sure is that she had once again plunged her hands into the water to pull out yet another mussel and, as soon as she parted the shell to look inside, had encountered what she least expected: a shy pearl! For a while she gave to him what she had given to others: financial help, excessive attention, suffocating love…but unlike all the others, there was no visible change in the nature of this heavy-eyed, big-nosed, absentminded Mawlawi. In the guy’s calendar of life, the longest time period was one day. Whenever Ethel tried to plan something, say go on a trip in a week’s time or get married in the spring, the only response she got from her lover was ‘Let’s see what that day looks like when it comes.’ From his perspective, one could not reach days, let alone land up on them; rather days came to people and, when they did, always brought something along. He was the most unambitious, uncalculating, un-future-oriented man and the only anti-tarikat tarikat master I ever knew. He would no doubt have replaced my place on the throne in Ethel’s harem had he not taken off from us so suddenly.

  ‘You and I are standing by the seashore. We dangle our feet into the water, Ethel. You are saying, “Come on let’s swim together out to the fifty-fifth wave. Look how appealing that wave is!” And I ask you “Which one?” Before I can even finish my question, the wave you had pointed out changes place. Look, it’s no longer where you said it was! Now it isn’t the fifty-fifth but perhaps the thirty-fifth one. It keeps coming closer. That is, it moves toward us by itself, and as it draws near, it brings many things along with it. The sea being what it is, you are left with only two options Ethel. You can either forget about the waves and dive into the sea to become a drop within or sit by the shore and simply wait. Watch the waves get smashed as they hit the shore, each turning into a drop in front of your eyes. Life is lived in one of two ways, if it’s to merit the name. You either render yourself invisible within life or render life invisible within you.’