The Flea Palace

by Elif Shafak

  Depending on the day, my mother would either walk around the house grumbling, curl-up crying next to my sister and sleep there that night or, if all was fine and dandy, wash the dishes in the kitchen humming a cheery song. However, whatever she chose to do, she’d never return to the table, delegating to me the task of keeping my father company until the very end of the third phase. Yet this was the longest part, the longest and indisputably the most gruelling. The ice in the bucket would have now turned into a lukewarm, cloudy water afloat with cigarette ash and breadcrumbs, the meatballs at the plate would be cold and congealed, the fine-chopped onions in the salad a smelly squander, the ashtray filled to the brim; the leftover appetizers would have lost their delicacy, the sliced melons their freshness and my father his grandeur.

  When I think about it after all these years, it seems bizarre that even though I was the only one among the three siblings who witnessed our father’s most disgraceful moments, it was again I who took over his bad habits. My younger brother drinks and smokes once in a while, only when he has to mingle with drinkers. As for my younger sister, she ended up becoming one of those women who never frequent smoke-filled locales, who sulk when someone smokes around them, regard a drunk with dismay, an alcoholic with disgust, and a hobo by changing their route; deeming in the final analysis every drunk an alcoholic and every alcoholic a vagabond. To top it all she transferred these festering habits to her little daughter in their entirety. Whenever I attempt to light a cigarette in their house, my little niece reacts like a tiny robot whose buttons are being pushed, and, wrinkling her nose in visible repulsion as if she had just seen a dead rat, starts to deliver a memorized speech about the dangers of smoking. It boils my blood to see people, especially kids, embrace with such rehearsed passion a statement that is not even their own. At their house there isn’t a single ashtray I could use. Inside the ostentatious walnut cupboard in their living room, in addition to all sorts of hefty drinks with different glasses for each type of drink, there are dozens of porcelain, marble, crystal, silver, gold-coated, steel, bronze, wood, beaded, miniature painted, marbled, statue-like, toy-like, kitschy or far too classy ashtrays bearing the emblems of the resorts and foreign cities they have visited as a family; but when it comes to flicking the ash of my cigarette, there is not a single ashtray in use. I wonder, from among her three children, did my mother keep me away from my siblings and close to my father at nights because among her children it was only I who resembled him? Or, on the contrary, did I, among the three children end up resembling our father because she kept me away from my siblings and close to him at nights? Put differently, is this my father’s curse for the day I left him prone and alone at the table during yet another ‘third phase’ wherein I could no longer stand his offhanded and uncouth words? Or is it because ultimately he and I are simply the hoops of the same genetic chain where numerous, industrious genes in tidy strips march on ad infinitum in accordance with pre-determined codes?

  I must have been twelve or thirteen. When my brother had the mumps, we shut ourselves in the house for days, forever stuffing ourselves with oleaster, watching TV glued to our seats and only ever getting up to go to the bathroom. In one of the old Turkish movies we watched back then, the leading actress, who was secretly in love with the man her sister was about to marry, vomited blood onto snow-white needlepoint bordered handkerchiefs and was diagnosed with tuberculosis. During the scene where the physician told her she would die soon, my brother and I had burst into laughter spewing out oleaster dust. The film was outrageously ridiculous and just as surreal; it belonged to a stale age and was miles away from credibility. It was no more possible to believe in the death from tuberculosis of the actress on the screen with a face paled with make-up, hair whitened with flour and eyes sloppily empurpled, than it was to believe in the death from cirrhosis six months previous of our father.

  Toward the end of the film, my mother came back from the market with my sister. Since neither had had mumps, they were supposed to stay away from my brother. Still, my mother sat right in between us with a doting smile. Holding our hands in between her palms, she muttered in a hesitant yet composed voice that she was about to remarry. On screen the actress with the tuberculosis stumbled down as she tried to descend the stairs to join the crowd celebrating the marriage of the man she loved and her sister. She collapsed coughing. My brother and I bent double in laughter, my mother laughed too. Still standing by the door my sister stared at my mother with astonishment soon replaced by tears. We chuckled again, but this time my mother did not join in. Tilting her crumpled face, she blew her nose into her needlepoint bordered snow-white handkerchief. Perhaps there was no handkerchief after all but it has been seared as such in my memory because that was the way I wanted to remember it. All the oleaster dust we had been spewing out lifted off with a sudden gale and swirled and swirled in the middle of the room like a gauzy snowstorm escalating in anger until no one could see one another anymore; it then drizzled down, forming a canopy over us all, delicate and yellow. Like everything, everything was surreal.

  When someone in the family dies unexpectedly, his belongings render surreal not only death or the God who deems that death befitting but also the lives of the ones left behind. Since my siblings had spent less time with my father and had not seen him surrounded by his belongings in his nest as much as I had, they probably did not experience this alteration as much as my mother and I. When night fell and the table was set, my mother would involuntarily start cooking her usual appetizers and I would take the same place always at the same hour, with a stale sense of duty. It was then that my father’s belongings prevented us from acknowledging that the emptiness which sat on the chair across from us was death, and death was real. It was not only his emerald-green spiral striped rakι pitcher, his leather wallet embroidered with a horse’s head or his chiselled lighter, that always flickered unevenly even when its gas had been refilled and its flint changed, that prevented this. Nor was it his snuffbox embossed on the lid with a purple-bodied and russet-winged owl, whose mistakenly connected eyes made it appear neither ill-omened nor wise but bewildered at most. As long as the living room and the house stayed put and we were unable to leave, there always would be a surreal side to my father’s death. Eventually, when it became only too apparent that just as we couldn’t move into another house, neither could we fend off this confusion, my mother and I ended up in a tacit partnership that involved our dressing up the ghost of my father and making it sit down at the table with us at night. Yet this secret collaboration which could have brought us closer, in the end, irretrievably separated our paths.

  For what she did next was nothing other than being a complete spoilsport. As she served my father’s ghost at the table, she increasingly depicted him not as he had been but as she had always wanted him to be. Being the good housewife that she was, she aspired to sweep away from our collective memory all the traits of her dead husband she had never liked in the first place. When she had finished with her sweeping, sitting at the table with us was this facsimile of a man as colourless and lustreless as a droning elegy – a man who had always worked for the good of his family, had no other luxury than sitting down with his wife at night to down a glass or two, kept whatever venom he might have to himself, never faltered, never complained; it was if he hadn’t been made of flesh and nerves. My mother so loved this bogus apparition, and so wholeheartedly believed in it that when she decided to remarry six months later, the man she chose as husband for herself was exactly the same as the ghost at the table.

  All through this period, every crumb of information she swept outside her memory I collected one by one, less because of my devotion to my father than because of my fury towards my mother. In the end, however, the alternative ghost I had tailored did not turn out to be any closer to truth than the one she had created. All in all, my father was neither as distinguished as my mother later convinced herself, nor as ignominious as I claimed in contrast. Still, both of us tenaciously embraced our respectiv
e delusion. In point of fact, it cannot be considered total deception since we were merely covering up each other’s partial unfairness with our own partial righteousness. It was as if the same cadaver lay in two different graves: buried in one grave were my father’s mornings, and in the other, his nights. Whenever we wanted to recall his memory, my mother visited one grave and I the other.

  Years later, when Ayshin had conducted with a British colleague a survey in three Istanbul neighbourhoods on how popular Islam shaped everyday life, she had mentioned in surprise seeing two graves for the same saint, a fact that none amongst her sample groups found odd. I did not either.

  It was at around this time that I finally surrendered to the unremitting requests of both Ayshin and my mother to meet one another. On our way back from a visit to my mother, Ayshin – apparently unable to identify the ‘father’ she had heard about from me with the ‘first husband’ she had heard about all day long from my mother – had already reached the conclusion (as always happens in such situations) that one of us was lying and that this lie was addressed especially to her. After a brief hesitation wherein she tried to track down the real personality of the deceased, she drew the conclusion that I was the one who lied and did so solely to justify ‘my condition.’

  What was meant by my ‘condition’ was my escalating alcohol consumption. What Ayshin did not know then was that I did not have such a problem until we got married. Not that I blamed her or our marriage. I cannot determine a starting point anyhow. The only thing I do know is that after a while, my life drew a circle of allusion returning to the beginning and I found myself on the chair my father once sat on. However, there were significant differences. Ayshin was not like my mother. She did not set lavish tables for me and neither did she remain passive. She pretended to take ‘my condition’ lightly and then was offended; she approached me compassionately and then was offended; she got upset and then was offended; she threatened me and then was offended; she belittled me and then was offended; she supported me and then was offended; she abandoned me and then was offended; she returned to me and then was offended… She tried hard in every way she could think of to fight my drinking, with frequent intervals of being offended. I too tried hard to please her. I guess I felt grateful to her, especially at the beginning. Her interventions verified the fact that unlike my mother, she didn’t enjoy seeing her husband stumble and nor was our marriage like that of my parents. With genuine gratitude I struggled and everything went well for about five months. I managed to cut down the drinking. Yet before long, this most praiseworthy progress turned me into my own rival. At first when I overdid it, then when I drank a bit too much, and finally whenever I drank, she rebuked and sarcastically scolded me for my inability to repeat my earlier success. ‘We know you can do better than this,’ said Ayshin, ‘We know it, don’t we?’

  There is something in this ‘we’ that is like the sour core of a sweetly sucked candy…a dulcet magma…a scorching, burning, conquest-obsessed lava sprouting from a single source to spread to every corner, taking everything in its way under its coattails until there is no being left outside itself… God talks like this in the holy books; addresses as ‘we’ when narrating all the acts of creation, destruction, punishment and reward. Mothers too talk in the same format with their children. ‘Are we hungry?’ they ask, or conclude, ‘Though we have been naughty today, actually we are well-behaved.’ Despite the fact that the decision reached and the choice made belongs solely and entirely to them, they annex into the borders of their own existence that of the other as if there were not two separate personalities out there. The ‘we’ formula employed by God in the Qur’an, by mothers when addressing their children, and by Ayshin when referring to my drinking problem is not ‘(We = I + You)’, but ‘(We = I + I)’. To remain outside of such a sweeping ‘we’ is simply impossible.

  I could not remain outside either. Consecutively, repeatedly I stopped drinking numerous times in rapid succession, first with enthusiasm and perhaps a bit of success, subsequently with a somewhat slackened interest, then with weakened effort, and towards the end, with no hope. Each time we prepared new calendars together: calendars where days, rather than years constituted the turning points, where time was measured by promises that could not be kept. In neat squares we would draw monthly calendars box by box. Whenever I deviated from the plan, I would convince Ayshin with great difficulty not to indicate it on paper like a stain but rather prepare a new one from scratch. To my calendars, each trivial event presented an appropriate opportunity, every special day a genesis. Thus when I received my doctorate, on New Years’ Eve, on my thirty-third birthday, on the first snow of the year, when we survived in one piece the traffic accident that totalled the front of our car, on our wedding anniversary, on Ayshin’s thirty-first birthday, when I learned my thesis director had lung cancer, on the night when my sister and I brawled raucously at long last spilling our guts out, on the day when I received the news about my stepfather’s death, on all sorts of gatherings acknowledging the value of life, on the pretext of Ayshin and I going out of Istanbul for the weekend, on roads, parties, hotels, shores… I ga-ve up, ga-ve up, ga-ve up drinking, each time zealously supported by my wife…

  I achieved success but not enough. Since I had once managed not to put a drop in my mouth for weeks, every glass I had thereafter inevitably meant a move backward. I myself was the role model I craved to be; the ideal which slid out of my palms like a slippery soap, whom I kept chasing after but could not seize even when I caught it by the trouser leg was me. After a while, Ayshin too started to confuse what was ‘insufficient’ with what was a ‘fiasco’. From that point on, the reason for her interventions tended to be blurry. Her worrying about my health was no longer the reason for her to force me to compete against myself. Words and actions lost their primary meanings; through convoluted ways, everything became the indication of something else. My calendars were each a barometer now. Ayshin measured how much I loved her by the number of days I spent without imbibing. Yet when love is the issue, numbers and proportions only cause trouble. ‘Very’ became such a feeble adjective whenever ‘more’ was do-able. I loved Ayshin very much but we both knew I could do better than that. Somewhere along the way there had been a misunderstanding, leading Ayshin to believe that it was necessary for me not to reduce drinking but to stop cold, and that I could only reach this goal with the help of love, her love. If I could ever accomplish this it would be ‘for her sake.’ I was trapped. She had initially wanted me to reduce drinking for the sake of my health, then for the sake of our relationship and next, before I knew it my drinking had become not my problem but hers.

  On one of those days, I drew a huge crimson ‘X’ on my calendar. This latest re-birth which had by chance fallen on the 22nd of the second month was in two ways different from the previous ones. First, while hitherto I had honestly stopped drinking, now I was stopping drinking honestly. Second, unlike my previous oaths, I remained true to this one till the end. From 22/2/2001 to 22/2/2002 when the court divorced us in one hearing, I did not put a drop of alcohol into my mouth in Ayshin’s presence.

  She watched for a while this brisk, definite development with a contentment marred by incredulity. Still she did not go any further, playing the detective to uncover the truth. Even though she constantly kept me under surveillance while I was with her, she did not once pry into what I was getting up to in the shady zone outside her field of vision. I wonder if the saint with two graves had ever crossed Ayshin’s mind during those days, for at this juncture my circle had rotated once again and, just like my father, I had assumed two separate personalities in two separate parts of the day. There was a clear difference between the two of us however. My father was teetotal during the days and drunk at nights. With me, it was the opposite, as necessitated by my circumstances: I was sober during the nights and drunk during the days.

  The human body shelters within it a clock that works not only from right to left, but also the other way round. It all depend
s on how you set it up. I had become fully adapted to the new system within at most two weeks. Not having regular work hours at the university was a blessing. During daytime I did not miss any opportunity that came my way and went around constantly drunk, but at night as soon as I went home I sobered up as if hit on the face with a pail full of ice water. I stayed sober during the nights and right after Ayshin left for work in the morning, started drinking at breakfast. In the last analysis, day or night did not make much of a difference: to properly manage one, I needed to mess the other one up. Contrary to what I had feared, this particular arrangement did not weigh heavily either on my stomach or my conscience. Perhaps one gets used to anything as long as he knows there is no alternative on the horizon.