The Flea Palace

by Elif Shafak

  To acquire items so as to use them for awhile and then throw them in the garbage, is a habit germane to those who believe themselves to be in possession of these items. Yet objects have no possessors. If anything they have their stories, and at times it is these stories that have possession of the people who have meddled with them…

  Flat Number 7: Me

  Following the lecture, Ethel came to pick me up in a honey-coloured Cherokee. We left my car at the faculty parking lot and continued on our way in this new toy of hers. She did not seem in the mood for chatting at first but then, as we got stuck in the traffic jam her tongue loosened. I would have rather she had just paid attention to the traffic. Her driving gets worse by the day. As she started to chatter about the last phase they had reached in the university project, I noticed she had lost her initial enthusiasm. Either this business is going totally down the tubes or Ethel has decided to part ways with it. I refrained from asking which. She will eventually, if not today, tomorrow, report to me everything anyhow.

  ‘Hey, tell me, how are things going at the apartment building of the wacky?’ was the first thing she said when, after struggling in traffic for fifty minutes, we had finally reached our reserved table at the restaurant; just as I wanted, all the way down, by the window… I chose to turn my back and Ethel her face to other diners. She apparently wants to keep an eye on other people. What do I care?

  ‘Don’t ask! Bugs all over the place.’

  ‘So bugs too are coming for entertainment. What a blessed bastard you are! You’ve ended up dwelling in a most hilarious place. Rather than an apartment building it resembles an insane asylum.’

  ‘I know it’s hard for you but try not to exaggerate,’ I groaned. ‘God knows, the apartment building I formerly lived in was probably no different, but back then I didn’t have a clue. The only difference now is that I’m not indifferent to the neighbours at Bonbon Palace.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, I can see that. You’re particularly interested in one among those,’ she snorted as she placed the first cigarette of the night onto her jasmine-wood cigarette holder and sent in my direction three smoke rings, one after the other.

  I pretended not to have heard that last comment, having no intentions of quarrelling with her tonight, but my deafness seemed to provoke her even more.

  ‘You can’t make it with that woman, sugar-plum. You know why? Not because of a moral reason or anything, but simply because of keeping up images! At present there are no problems. You stay indoors, screw as you like, all is fine and dandy, but what will happen afterwards? Could you go out into the public with her? Could you take the arm of your twenty-two year old high school dropout, deeply religious but just as immoral and decisively-indecisive lover, to promenade and hang around together? Do you really believe an academic with such a clear-cut intellect can ever make it with that walking confusion of an ignorant petite missie?’

  I could not come back with a response. Instead I laughed away whatever she said. Before long, she got fed up with pestering me. Neither of us were in good spirits. As we waited for the mixed fruit plate, we made guesses about the people at adjacent tables, thus keeping the damage we could have inflicted on each other to a minimum, but it turned out Ethel had saved her real surprise to the end.

  ‘Listen sugar-plum, I didn’t want to be the one to tell you this, but, maybe it’s better that you hear it from me. Who else but me do you have to pour out your poison? Anyway, let’s save the conjectural comments till the end. First the actual data! Here’s the astounding news: Ayshin is getting married, oops, re-married!’

  Timing was the gravest error the moon-faced albino waiter committed when at that instant he reached out to change my plate. Not that I am one of those people who constantly cause trouble at restaurants, shouting reprimands left and right, but I do hate to have my plate changed without my asking for it. Waiters generally do not want to even consider this as a possibility but there are people in this city who relish the pleasure of munching on their leftovers. I cannot stand seeing the remains of my food being instantly removed as if it were something disgraceful. If it were up to me, I would not part with my plate until the very moment I leave the table. I could mix the remnants of the cold appetizers with the hot ones and keep nibbling for a whole night. Not only do I not feel the slightest discomfort at having the fruit slices smeared with the oil, sauce, salt and spice of the hot appetizers, I sometimes sit down and make sweet and sour compositions with these. If I like this final fusion, I eat it: if I do not, I ruin it. Ethel knows this habit of mine. She does not meddle. The waiters do not know it. They meddle.

  ‘Please excuse him. It’s just that he’s going through a tough phase, just got divorced from his wife,’ croaked Ethel to the waiter now standing beside me with a scratched white plate utterly unable to comprehend why he had been snapped at. The man intuited the mockery in these words and curled his pale lips into a smile, but at the same moment he must have felt the need to be cautious just in case, for he suppressed his lip movement, thereby lingering behind me with a face like a mask; one half smiling, the other half sad.

  ‘Please, go ahead, you can change my plate. I’m perfectly normal,’ Ethel smirked. The waiter, defeated by this proposal to share a confidence, grinned with her while removing the dirty plate in front of her.

  ‘If you ask me, the guy is a total pushover,’ Ethel said shrugging, when we were once again left alone. It took me an additional minute to fathom it was not the waiter she was talking about but Ayshin’s husband-to-be. ‘He’s a well-intentioned pushover – meek and almost gullible – but a pushover nonetheless. Docile, compliant, and of course, domesticated. His limits are only too evident, corners on each side. Whichever way he faces you run into a wall. In order to find just a spark of vigour in the guy, you have to dig at least seven layers deep down into his past. I wonder if he ever experienced any exuberance, probably once in his childhood. Even then, don’t expect much, only a few drops. Now you’ll be curious about his appearance!’ she conjectured, holding my hand. ‘Let me put it this way: next to you, he would look like a senile badger.’

  So that’s it. Ayshin is going to get married to a senile badger. I place a slice of melon onto the corner of my plate where a thick garlic and walnut sauce had spread out.

  ‘The buck-toothed one, was that a badger or a mole?’ Ethel mumbled as she removed her hand, leaving on my wrist traces of her nails painted a glittery indigo. ‘Anyway sugar-plum, one thing I know for sure is this guy is really, really ugly. Basically, I’d say, Ayshin is using the trial and error technique. Once bitten, twice shy, she shuns handsome young academics.’

  When we left, I sat next to her with more confidence, knowing that compared to when she is sober, she drives more carefully when drunk. She brought me all the way to Bonbon Palace without any trouble. Then she took off in the gloomy street radiating a corona of honey in the dark.

  Once on the third floor, I stopped to eavesdrop at the door of the flat across from me. No sound came from within. Though I had not been planning to see her tonight, I rang the doorbell without really thinking. She had forbidden me to come unannounced but I could violate the ban that night. The olive oil merchant would not probably spend the night in his mistress’s bed right after a heart attack.

  Soft, almost fluffy footsteps approached. The golden light seeping through the peephole darkened. We stayed just like that on either side of the door for a long minute. The door opened with an annoying tardiness. Her chestnut eyes looked at me with no radiance, love or feeling. Without uttering a single word, good or bad, she turned her back and staggered into the living room dragging her feet. I did not care. However weird her movements were, my drunkenness was just as good. I parked myself on the couch, turned on the TV. We started to watch without a sound. A singer of classical music, having smeared gold glitter on all parts of her body under her transparent, stone studded, lilac costume, was telling the microphone what she had been through. She had broken her leg during a skiing trip, but beca
use she could not bear to cancel the concert tickets and upset her dear fans, she had made the heroic decision to appear on stage in crutches. Standing next to her was her physician, who occasionally intervened to answer the questions the journalists spurted backstage.

  ‘Dead,’ croaked the Blue Mistress.

  I looked at her face in perplexity, unable to figure out who on earth she was talking about. My eyes slid of their own accord in the direction of the television screen. The singer looked alive but perhaps paler now. She blew a kiss toward the camera. I turned off the TV. Not knowing what to say, I sat next to the Blue Mistress. I held her hand. She did not hold my hand. She went to sleep. So calm… Too calm…

  I sat alone in the living room trying to collect my thoughts. I hadn’t realized how much I had drunk tonight. A bulky lethargy swathed my movements. I could not think fast, act agile. Not only did I not know how to comfort my little lover, I did not feel a wee bit of sadness. The only thing I wanted to do was to go home and pass out.

  Still however, I headed not towards the door, but to her bedroom. In the darkness, I laid next to her, pricking my ears up to all sounds to try and work out whether she was asleep or not. She was awake. ‘He couldn’t get over the attack,’ she whispered. ‘He died at three in the morning.’ I touched her cheeks: dry. She was not crying. I snuck closer to her. She neither pushed me away nor responded to my touch. She kept lying down like an empty sack. The bed was warm. We embraced. I fell asleep.

  I woke up during the night burning up with thirst. Glugging down all the water in the glass on the table, I shuffled to the bathroom. As I peed, I gazed groggily at the perfumed soaps in a glass stilt, the papaya shampoos lined up at the corner of the sink, the delicate perfume bottles shining in front of the mirror, the turquoise bath sponges, body lotions and minutely detailed middle-aged supplies. I flushed the toilet. Amidst all these knick-knacks I caught sight of two razors. One had fallen on the ground and the other in the sink.

  This was enough to sober me up. I dashed to the bedroom. I turned the light on, drew the bedspread away from her. As she tried to sit up from her sleep, I pulled up her aquamarine nightgown extending down to her knees. There was nothing on her left leg, nothing new, but the top part of her right leg was wrapped up with a towel covered with wide, brick red stains. This loose wrap was so bulgy I could not understand how I had previously failed to notice it. As I hurried to untie the thin, long towel, she simply, patiently waited without resistance.

  Five scarlet cuts emerged from under the towel, each one almost the length of a hand span. Three of them did not seem that deep. It was as if they were opened accidentally or reluctantly, as if they were the rehearsal for the other two. For those were awful. I ran back to the bathroom. Unable to find anything useful in the cupboards, I scampered to my house. As I ran from one end of Bonbon Palace to the other with hydrogen peroxide and cotton balls, the entire effect of all the alcohol I had consumed tonight evaporated.

  She watched me mutely, as I cleaned and wrapped up her wounds. Then, thanking me, half-bashful, half-glum, she pulled over her the aquamarine nightgown that had somehow not been stained during this period of time, and once again curled up as round as a ball. I turned off the light. I waited for her to cry, blab, snuggle, seek shelter. In the dark, when she curled up into herself leaving me alone by her side, I had to admit to myself that I did not know her at all. It is such an inexcusable gullibility to think that by cracking open the vaginas of women we make love to we can see through their body and, upon entering them, reach into their depths…

  Flat Number 10: Madam Auntie and the Garbage

  The first garbage trucks and garbage company in Istanbul started work in 1868. Before them, the same job was incumbent upon the Guild of Seekers working under the control of the Litter Superintendent. Just like today’s garbage men, the seekers of old times were in charge of getting rid – even if only partially – of what the inhabitants of Istanbul wanted to get rid of entirely, eternally. However, when the issue came to how they did so, there was a grinding difference between the contemporary garbage men and their predecessors. The foremost purpose of the Guild of Seekers in gathering what was to be thrown away was to find among the gathered what should be saved from being thrown away. Before they discarded the waste, muck and debris they had collected into dumps, they would carry it all to the seashore in their haversacks and there they would sort, rinse and rummage through this pile over and over. There were times when they encountered copper plates, steel rods, nails that could be reused, clothes not yet threadbare, non-oxidized silver or gifts that had been unappreciated. If lucky enough, they could even hit upon lost jewellery.

  The Guild of Seekers visited the sites of fire frequently. Whenever a house turned into ashes in Istanbul, the city of fires, they carried away the wreckage. Just like from the garbage, from the ashes too, they collected items. The seekers would gather to sift through. Yet the garbage men collected to throw away. For the city to modernize the order of things had to be capsized. Once what was thrown away on all sides was gathered in one place by the seashore, now what was gathered on all sides was thrown away in one place by the Garbage Hills.

  As for Madam Auntie, being a seeker she didn’t belong to this age. Just like the bygone members of the Guild, she too was rummaging around in the garbage for objects that should not have been thrown away. To this day she had never failed to find them.

  Flat Number 8: The Blue Mistress and Me

  In spite of sleeping only in dribs and drabs, I woke up early this morning. As I tucked the hair stuck on her sweaty forehead behind her ear, the Blue Mistress stirred slightly. I let her sleep. Lighting a cigarette I headed to the kitchen. She had crammed the refrigerator with food, as usual. All of the things the olive merchant would have liked. In our happier days with Ayshin, I had become used to getting up late during the weekends to have lengthy, lazy breakfasts. Now she is probably breaking that old badger in to her own rhythm. If the man is as Ethel describes, I have to meet him. Not that I expect to change anything, but I still want him to see me. I could trigger the fuse of the inferiority complex in him. I may even succeed in embedding in his mind the tiniest louse of suspicion. Let him then struggle with sifting through the sourness of the possibility that the woman he is about to marry might go back to her old husband one day.

  I must have awakened the Blue Mistress with my clatter. As she stood by the kitchen door wrapped up in her speckled shawl, she looked much better than the night before even though her face was still pale and her eyes miserably baggy.

  ‘I hope you are not blaming yourself anymore,’ I said, as I filled up her teacup.

  She does…and I blame her too…I blame her and everyone who acts as if they are the god of their squat universe. There is no way I can comprehend those who first pray with all their heart that harm be given to someone they cannot reach otherwise and then, when fortuitously their wishes happen to come true, simply breakdown in guilt and shame. I cannot stand those who, on the one side, delegate all the problems they cannot handle and don’t even lift a finger to resolve, to some otherworldliness purportedly purified of all evil and, on the other side, yearn for receiving a slice of otherworldly evil to purify their most mundane problems. It enrages me to see what people are capable of doing to themselves when they fail to distinguish their limits. Not because they overestimate themselves way too much but because they underestimate evil way too much. The world is full of people who watch from afar for a chance to hurt someone and, when by chance that happens, do not hold Fortuna responsible but the thoughts and wishes that had once crossed their minds. I did not want the Blue Mistress to join their ranks. I did not want to lose her in this way and instead hoped to spare this lovely naive creature who believed that this God of hers who created the universe by pronouncing ‘BE!’ could likewise destroy with the pronouncement of ‘DIE!’.* So I decided to explain what I had done.

  ‘Will you please get this saint’s tale out of your mind? There’s no truth to it,
’ I said, as I slid onto her plate half of the best omelet I had made in a long while. ‘The holy saint Meryem talked to you about most likely emerged from the writing on the garden wall but it was I who wrote that.’

  If I could only have grasped what she was thinking right at that instant. If I could only be sure that I was doing the right thing by disclosing this.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry about the olive oil merchant – and don’t get mad at me for referring to him as the ‘olive oil merchant’. I hope you’re aware of the fact that even if there were a saint lying under the garden wall with his bones crumbled to dust, the outcome would not have been any different. Sim-ply-be-ca-use-my-litt-le-one-your-guy-pass-ed-a-way-not-be-ca-use-you-wan-ted-to-get-rid-of-him-but-be-ca-use-he-had-a-he-art-at-tack.’

  There it was again. Her looks became cast in shadow. Once again in my life, I witnessed that dusky phase wherein I started to awaken hatred in a woman whose loving eyes I had been accustomed to.

  ‘Basically my sweet, if you are going to blame yourself for every calamity and keep slicing up your body, there is no way I can stop you, but if you intend to give this habit up, I’ll do everything to help. Now, if you’ll see me not as your enemy but as your friend, let’s sit down together and talk about what’s going to happen from now on. After all your life won’t be like it used to be. But maybe, why not, it can be more beautiful.’

  ‘Why did you lie?’ she maundered.

  ‘If you mean the saint business, I don’t consider myself as having lied. The only thing I wanted was to get the apartment building rid of this awful smell. I just wanted to make those who dump their garbage here feel uncomfortable. It didn’t even cross my mind that anyone would take that silly writing seriously.’