The Flea Palace

by Elif Shafak

  ‘And you better be cautious about the “Black Congolos” too, the most merciless of them all… She disguises herself as an aged woman, wandering on the streets, waiting for her prey at street corners. She asks questions to the passers-by: “Where are you coming from?” and “Where are you going to?” she inquires. “Which family do you descend from?” she further asks. If you stumble upon “Black Congolos”, you have no other choice than to respond to her questions by using the word “black” each time. Say, for instance, “I am from the black ones” or “I come from the black town”. Only then will she leave you in peace. Every so often she asks for an address. If you don’t know the address, I pity you. She takes out her cane, whacks you on the head and beats you so bad that…’

  His words were ripped apart by the ringing of the phone. The seven and a half year old reached for the receiver with no hurry. Yes, they had finished their breakfasts. No, they were not being naughty. Yes, they were watching television. No, grandpa was not telling tales. No, they were not turning the gas on. No, they were not messing up the house. No, they did not hang off the balcony. No, they did not play with fire. No, they did not go into the bedroom. Really, grandpa was not telling a tale.

  However, that day his mother must have been in need of confirmation for she insisted: ‘If your grandpa is telling tales simply say, “The weather is cold,” and I’ll understand.’

  The seven and a half year old hesitated for a moment. A nocturnal gleam slid from his moss green eyes. There followed a prickly silence. When the gleam had disappeared, he had already changed his mind. Without feeling the need to lower his voice or take his eyes off his grandfather, he answered in an indifferent voice: ‘No, mom, the weather is not cold. However, grandpa does keep telling us creepy stories.’

  Flat Number 7: Me

  ‘You seem to be in good spirits today, Professor,’ Ece sitting at the front row twittered in the most glib voice she could manage. She was dressed in pitch black from top to toe, as usual: black lipstick, black nail polish, black eyes made to stand out with black eye pencil. I took out the copy of ‘Sickness Unto Death’ from my briefcase and placed it on her desk.

  ‘I have indeed come to class in good spirits, but whether I’ll still be in this state when we are done depends on you. Let’s see if the articles have been read,’ I said, proceeding with a typical introduction to a typical Thursday lecture.

  ‘We have read from, “In Praise of Folly”, by Erasmus. The part where he mentions Fortuna we compared to Machiavelli’s Fortuna. Entirely read, analyzed and memorized!’ Ece spoke up.

  ‘Fine, then can somebody please tell me what sort of a thing this Fortuna is?’ I asked, taking pains to address not Ece but the whole class.

  ‘For sure, a female,’ Ece raised an answer, apparently pleased with trampling whatever prudence I maintain. ‘In both Machiavelli and Erasmus, Fortuna is personified and feminized and because she’s a female, it’s no big surprise that they don’t find her reliable. The church fathers shared the same opinion – and we Turks are no different. We say destiny is either blind or a slut. If blind, she can’t see what she distributes to whom, so can’t be expected to be fair. If a slut, she’ll have nothing to do with fairness anyhow. At times there’s a wheel in her hand. At other times she herself forms a wheel by swirling her skirts. Hence the expression ‘Wheel of Fortune’! There is no way of knowing when or where she’ll stop, bringing who-knows-what to whom. According to Machiavelli, Fortuna controls half of our lives and there’s nothing we can do about that part. However, it is possible, even if only partially, to make Fortuna obey our demands. Since each and every one of the fountainheads of political philosophy happen to be male, it looks like in the persona of Fortuna they are unanimously searching for ways with which to bring women to their knees.’

  ‘Huh? So this Fortuna you are talking about is our good old Kader?’ Cem blurted out, apparently having not the slightest problem in revealing his ignorance on the assigned articles.

  In the ensuing fifteen minutes or so, constantly interrupting each other’s sentences, they talked about our good old Kader.

  ‘I think it’s really cheap to criticize Machiavelli from the standpoint of contemporary feminist paradigms,’ said the curly-haired girl with the glasses whose name always escaped me, and who I knew did not like Ece one wee bit but for some reason always sat behind her. ‘The issue is, do you think you’re living a life that’s been drawn up for you ahead of time? Has your life been determined a priori? That is the question we need to ask. In struggling against Kader, the man’s clearly coming to terms with religion. Neither Enlightenment nor progress would’ve been possible without breaking away from Fortuna, or bringing her to her knees, if you will.’

  Ece stretched tautly as she crossed her legs. She does this repeatedly, knowing too well the beauty of her legs. So far, I have not seen any colleague suffer serious academic damage for getting mixed up in some sort of a love affair with a student. If someone is hunted down for this reason, it is because he would have been hunted down in any case. At any rate, I do not reciprocate Ece’s interest in me. Not because I am worried it would reach my colleagues’ ears. What really matters is not what the academics pretend not to know, but what the students pretend to know, for female students always talk. They can never hold their tongues. Each one has a close friend to confide in, each confidant another one of her own, and so it goes. Complete disenchantment! All of a sudden you are not the ‘esteemed, unknown’ professor you once were, always watched by prying eyes from a distance, but an ordinary mortal whose weaknesses, lunacies, baloneys and fixations are paraded in front of all. To be with a young girl could indeed provide a pleasant boost to self-esteem for middle-aged men, but that comes at a cost: it is a shaky status bound to shatter any time. It might easily capsize at the very first flick. Then, all the letters you have written, the confessions you have made and the secrets you let slip will altogether vex you. Your sexual performance will be the talk of town and before you it, know you’ll have become the butt of all jokes. It is not worth it. I never considered any female student of mine to be worth all this. Not even Ece.

  ‘Why don’t we just simply confess that we can’t control our lives? I may be held responsible for what I do but I can’t be blamed for what I spark off,’ Ece said, watching my every move all the while. ‘I’m from birth the daughter of this or that person. I can choose neither my father nor my nation and certainly not my religion or language. If they’d asked my opinion, I’d have preferred to have been born in another environment; if refused the alternative, I’d rather not have been born at all. It’s that simple. If you had been born somewhere else, rather than a scarf on your head you would have had a cross on your neck,’ she poured out. Though she had turned back, it was not clear as to which one of the three headscarfed girls she had addressed her words.

  ‘I too believe in destiny’, answered Seda, always sitting in the middle of the always together headscarfed threesome.

  ‘But that’s not at all what I’m talking about,’ grumbled Ece the blabbermouth. ‘You believe in a divine justice. Things are what they are at the moment but you think some day everyone will be held accountable for what they did in life. The debauched will be punished in hell, the gullible rewarded in heaven and so on. You retain a notion of justice in your mind. Otherwise your faith will smash to smithereens. Fortuna is exactly the opposite. She has nothing to do with the other world, so solidly mundane!’

  ‘Frankly guys, I have a hard time understanding why you got so hooked up on this Fortuna,’ interjected Cem, bringing his chair closer to the wall as if getting ready to flee through the window. ‘The real question is not Fortuna or anything similar but concerns the very difference between a line and a circle. If you believe this life you are living is a line, you might just as well presume you’ll triumph over the past, reach the future. However, if it is a circle which your life resembles, rest assured that there is no such thing as “progress”. Are you at peace with recurren
ce or not? That’s the fundamental issue. A man like Machiavelli can’t be at peace with recurrence because that requires acceptance of the sullen fact that the life you live now, you’ll live again and again, that tomorrow won’t be any different than today – exactly the same question as Nietzsche asked of Rousseau. When you’re alone, at the loneliest hour of your life, say, if all of a sudden a teensy weensy devil descends all the way from hell and exclaims, “Have no fear, I guarantee you, there is no such thing as death, if anything, there is only recurrence. Every single thing you’ve lived until this very moment, you’ll live all over again. Then again and again. Forever…” How would you feel then? How many of us can tolerate living our lives over and over again? Those who can put up with Fortuna’s whims will never go mad. It’s that simple. To endure life, a man like Machiavelli has to cut the circle somewhere and transform it into a line. Only then can the idea of progress surface, and along with it, the notion of individualism.’

  I looked at my watch; five minutes left to the end of the second hour. ‘Once again you manage to surprise me with your ability to deviate from the subject matter,’ I muttered as I took out my pack of cigarettes, indicating a break. ‘Next week you’ll have completed all the readings and we’ll only talk about what you’ve read. No one will blabber without proof.’

  During the third hour, I lectured and they listened without a comment. While everyone else took notes, Cem looked out the window and Ece munched half a pack of bitter chocolate. A speck of chocolate, almost black, stuck there on the side of her lip like a naughty mole.

  Flat Number 5: The Daughter-in-Law and Her Children

  ‘Mom, why are you taking us with you?’ whined the five and a half year old.

  ‘Come on, isn’t this great? Don’t you want to see where your mother works?’ the Daughter-in-Law said, as she held more tightly onto the hands of the two children forcing them to adjust to the speed of her footsteps. How on earth she was going to restrain the kids at the box office all day long she hadn’t quite yet worked out, besides which she was afraid of angering her boss, but she was too high-strung to think rationally after the fight with her father-in-law. As they neared the end of Cabal Street, she slowed down and looked back over her shoulder. The seven and a half year old was two metres behind them. Despite the inquisitive looks of some passers-by, he seemed remarkably happy now that he had stepped outside Bonbon Palace after two years.

  Soon the lump of anguish the Daughter-in-Law was used to savouring whenever she watched her older son chased away the wisps of worries pullulating from her mind. Though she knew too well that her oldest child would be the shortest to live with her, among all her children it was he that she was most deeply attached to. Children born with a lethal illness, unlike their peers and siblings, belong only to their mothers and always stay as such.

  At the corner of the Cabal Street, just when she motioned her older son to hurry up, a swarthy, skinny hand slowly tapped the Daughter-in-Law’s shoulder.

  ‘My child, how can I get to this address?’ It was an old hunchbacked woman, bent double inside a beige-coloured raincoat worn to shreds. In her callused hands she held out a wrinkled piece of paper. She looked lost.

  Taking no notice of the horror on the faces of her two children, the Daughter-in-Law let go of their hands and concentrated on the address on the paper. Unable to decipher the scrawl, she returned it to the old woman, shaking her head.

  ‘Mom, you couldn’t answer the question!’ the five and a half year old squeaked. Teardrops pitter-pattered down her cheeks. The six and a half year old was no better. Simultaneously sucking the thumbs of both hands, he persistently repeated the same words: ‘How can you not know, how can you not know?’

  ‘She could not,’ roared the seven and a half year old as he approached from behind, quick to grasp the situation. The instant he reached the end of his words, the other two started wailing.

  ‘What on earth are you talking about? What is it that I didn’t know?’ the Daughter-in-Law stuttered bamboozled, staring first at her children, then at the old woman walking off. But instead of a response what she got from her children was some more sobs and the squishy sounds of a frantically sucked thumb.

  Flat Number 7: Me

  It was hard to find a table at the bar, with the usual Friday night throng. When a table finally did become free somewhere in the middle, I grabbed it, ordering a double right away. I took it easy with the second rakι. Only after the third double, did the Cunt show up at the door, with an ear-to-ear grin. There had been a traffic jam, she said. However, this information was offered less as an explanation for her delay than as some useful detail in her account of the soccer game she and the cab driver – fortuitously fans of the same team – had listened to as they inched through the traffic on the way here. Though 2-0 behind in the second half of the game, they had finally won 3-2. Failing to see the slightest indication that Ethel minded being fifty minutes late for her appointment with me, I did not say anything either. In point of fact, I cannot deny how impressed I am with her soccer knowledge (the depth of which had been tested by experts many times over), her endless yakety-yak with cab drivers and her getting to know at each restaurant we dine the names, family trees and topmost worries of all the waiters serving us within the first ten minutes, to then convert every order into an opportunity for a chat…just as I am impressed by her refutation of womanhood on all occasions with an in-your-face attitude… She had always been like this. The high school friendship of Ayshin and Ethel was, to all intents and purposes, thesis-antithesis rapport, and this vivacious essence revealed itself when I came between them. I doubt Ethel’s love for soccer would have reached such sky-scraping levels if Ayshin had enjoyed soccer the least bit or supported a team just for the sake of it.

  ‘I’ve come up with the ultimate solution to the garbage problem of Bonbon Palace,’ I muttered as I filled her glass. Then, slowly and assuredly, I told her about the writing I had written on the garden wall. She can’t have been expecting to hear such nonsense from me, for at first she looked dumbfounded, if only for a few seconds, and then she made me tell the whole story all over again, as she tossed out hearty laughs. The more I narrated, the more hilarious I too found the story. Goading me to describe myself as I stood there at the crack of dawn in front of the garden wall with paint and brush in hand, she burst into laughter. She had either got drunk quicker than usual tonight or had come to the appointment already high. We left toward one o’clock. Ethel shook hands with all the waiters one by one and said her farewells. Nor did she neglect, in accordance with the information she had acquired from them, to send her regards to their families, concluding with comforting speeches about their respective worries. When we had finally reached the street and somewhat sobered up with the night breeze, she insisted that I show her the writing on the wall.

  We jumped into a cab. Ethel’s convulsive laughter, which had rolled out back in the restaurant and shot up a notch while we were walking on the sidewalk, turned utterly hysterical in the cab. Giggling non-stop, she launched attack upon attack, all the while attempting to undo the buttons of my trousers while my hands struggled in vain to shove hers away. I soon stopped resisting. As her fingers wiggled to fondle me, I kept under surveillance the driver who looked barely of driving age. The man’s beardless face being devoid of any expression whatsoever, there was no way of telling whether he could see what was going on in the back or not. In the meantime, Ethel had reached her target, having enough of an opening to insert one hand once the third button was undone. I was just about to cover with my jacket what her hand was up to when a hoarse yelp escaped my mouth. How I hate those razor-sharp fingernails of hers. At the same instant, a crooked smile dawned on the driver’s face, revealing his awareness of what was going on. Brusquely grabbing Ethel’s hand, I freed myself from the Cunt’s claws. She flinched, grumbling and grimacing, and instantly lit a cigarette. The driver, who now seemed to be a close observer of all the attraction and repulsion going on at the bac
k, intervened with perfect timing and asked us where on earth we were heading. Blowing a circle of smoke from her jasmine chibouk, Ethel cheerily exclaimed:

  ‘We are going to pay a visit to Bonbon Dede! The holy saint of the broken-hearted, of all those separated from their beloved and notorious for screwing everything up!’

  The driver, whose youthful appearance I realized stemmed more from a lack of facial hair than age, shot both Ethel and me a nervy glance as if weighing-up how grave things could get. However, Ethel would not leave the man alone. Offering him a cigarette, she catapulted questions at him, asking where he came from, if he believed in saints or not, if he was married or not, if at some time in the future he had a daughter whether he would educate her, whether he would renounce his son if the latter ever turned out to be homosexual, and finally, asking which soccer team he supported. As luck would have it, they supported the same team.

  ‘Once I picked up a couple, no less nuts than you two,’ the driver said the moment he found a lull amidst the deluge of questions. Ethel released another chain of guffaws, accompanied by wheezing coughs as if she had a fish bone stuck somewhere in her throat.

  ‘Back then I was new to nightshifts and wasn’t yet familiar with the night-time customers. So these two get in, quarrelling non-stop. The woman keeps yelling and hurling insults. The man doesn’t do zilch to appease her. Instead he too slurs back, and they utter such slanders, I’d better not repeat those now! Still, it is obvious they are in love. It turns out the man is going abroad to work. The woman doesn’t believe he’ll ever come back. “If you go you won’t ever return!” she says, weeping hard. Then, before I know what’s happening, she starts punching him. Dead drunk no doubt. Anyway, we head to the address they gave. The plan is to first drop the woman off and then the man. So we go to her house but she doesn’t budge, she doesn’t want to get out of the car. “Come on,” she shrieks all of a sudden, “Let’s go visit Telli Baba!” Glued onto the seat, “I am not going anywhere before I see Telli Baba!” she insists. In the end the man gives in, as for me I am already convinced. Telli Baba is a long way out from there, but does she care? Back in those days I used to say, “No way, I’ll never work at night.” So you see how one changes his mind in the fullness of time. Anyhow, they didn’t want to take another cab, instead they offered me twice as much as the normal fare. So we sped off in the middle of the night. Once there we pulled over, the woman got out, opened her purse, groped for something and then got lost in the dark. The man and I, we’re waiting in the cab. After ten minutes or so, the woman comes back crying, says to the guy, “Bend your head!” The guy obeys and she pulls out a handful of hair. The guy hollers, in pain, they then have another fight. Thank goodness the woman leaves again, finds a piece of cloth from godknowswhere, ties the man’s hair to the tree, prays, sits down, prays, gets up. So we let her do whatever she wants. In the end she calms down a tad. “Next time I’ll come to Telli Baba with my wedding veil,” she murmurs. The man softens. They embrace. They ask for my name and phone number to invite me to their wedding.’