The Flea Palace

by Elif Shafak

  Unlike his wife, General Pavel Pavlovich Antipov did not pay any particular attention to Istanbul, either that day or at any later point. He happened to be a man whose survival depended on his assuming responsibility for others – one of those who either loved weak women or ended up weakening the women they love. Hence that day as they alighted, he embraced Agripina with the warmest consideration. His grip held not only her but also their soon-to-be-born baby and the entire wealth they had been able to smuggle out of Russia.

  The pieces of jewellery Agripina had hidden at the back of her body corset would, however, soon be sold one by one and for much less than their true worth. Thousands of White Russians fleeing from their homeland after the Bolshevik Revolution had so far crammed into Istanbul and it was rumoured that thousands more were on their way. When the jewellery was being auctioned off, there were hardly enough buyers even for medals of honor, family heirlooms and decorations of nobility. And after two months, nothing remained from the wealth that the couple had initially hoped would enable them to live comfortably for at least two years.

  One morning at the dormitory converted from a decrepit detention centre provided by the French Red Cross wherein they slept with fifty people on stained, shallow mattresses, Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova vindictively pulled the silvery head of her husband who was thirty years her senior toward her and forced him to listen to the baby in her swollen belly. Pavel Pavlovich Antipov knew too well what this gesture meant. He had two options: to find a job as soon as possible or to write a letter to his disgraceful brother in France asking for help. Since even the thought of the second option was more than enough to wreck his nerves, he chose the first.

  Yet just as the military fails to provide one with a profession, neither does the rank of general constitute a job experience you can rely on when seeking employment. Pavel Pavlovich Antipov then realized two things about himself: he did not know what to do and he could not do what he did know. While everything that had ever happened to him up till now had fallen into place as arranged, the revolution had caught up with him just as he had been promoted to the rank of general, shattering the authority he had acquired and the life he had erected year by year. Yet even back in those days of pestilence, he had not had to face, as he did today, the malady termed ‘ambiguity’. In order to defeat ambiguity, he first had to know where to find it. Neither taking up a defensive position anywhere, nor acting in accordance with a particular strategy, it could attack from anywhere at any time, changing weapons all the while as it pleased. If this were an ongoing war, it had no battleground, no rules, no morals. If not a war, the situation would have been even worse as Pavel Pavlovich Antipov did not possess the knowledge to earn a living any other way. Until now, he had lost many things one after another, his property as well as goods, influence, privileges, esteem, friends, relatives, orderlies, the army he belonged to, the cities where his past was, the country where he had presumed his future would be… However, deep inside he assumed he was still what he had always been: a loyal soldier.

  Conversely, thousands of soldiers of all ranks from the Czar’s army had long been scattered into the least expected and most excruciating jobs at hotels, concert halls, cabarets, gambling houses, restaurants, bars, café chantants, movie theatres, beaches, nightclubs and streets. They washed dishes and carried trays in restaurants, worked as croupiers in gambling houses jam-packed with lies, peddled dolls at street corners, provided piano accompaniment to cabaret dancers in boisterous entertainment halls. Every corner was appropriated and each job filled. Amidst this chaos, Count General Pavel Pavlovich Antipov tried to find his way with steps as shaky as those of a new born foal learning to walk on its trembling legs. After looking around for weeks on end, the only job he could finally find was that of a checkroom attendant in a café chantant – a place frequented by arrogant French and English officers out with their delicate, sable-coated, cherry-lipsticked lovers; by sybarite Italian painters carving Eastern gravures with women always portrayed as being pasty and plump and streets as shady and snaky; by glum Jewish bankers in need of pumping loans to the palace so that they could get back the ones previously provided; by profligate Turkish young men satiated with the wealth inherited but insatiable in spending it; by spies not letting anything slip away even when blind drunk; by bohemians, dandies and all those lost souls in search of lust or adventure.

  The bald, flabby-cheeked, multiple-chinned, constantly gesticulating Levantine owner of the café chantant had been looking to hire someone ever since the previous checkroom attendant – whose sort he had not approved of from the start – got involved in a fight ending with his face smashed up. Observing the imposing appearance and majestic posture of Pavel Pavlovich Antipov, he did not hesitate even for a moment before offering him the job. Yet when the new checkroom attendant put on the red coat with shiny tasseled epaulets on the shoulders and diagonal yellow cords hanging in front, his admiration was replaced by disparagement:

  ‘Life is so strange, isn’t it Monsieur Antipov? We’re both witnesses to the demise of two glorious empires. You’ve started to Westernize at least a century before us. Peter the Great! It’s rumoured he would have those who didn’t learn Western etiquette whipped – is that true? He inspected women’s underwear and men’s beards, is that so? Peter’s city must be really pretty: a palace rising from the swamps. Take a look at Istanbul in comparison: open on all four sides, exposed to every breeze blowing from each direction. A rudderless, out of joint city! Did you know that until a decade ago, young and courageous intellectuals escaping from your mighty empire sat side by side at the same Parisian cafés with young and courageous intellectuals escaping from our mighty empire: plunging into zealous discussions to draw godknowswhat sort of short-sighted conclusions. The French waiters serving them would eavesdrop first at one table then the other. Imagine the contradictory things they must have heard! Those who fled from your empire would rave about destroying their state at all costs. Those who fled from ours would instead rave about saving their state from destruction at all costs. Within a decade, yours succeeded and ours failed. I don’t know which one to lament more? Life is so strange, isn’t it Monsieur Antipov? You escaped from a collapsed empire to seek refuge in one about to collapse. Could it be that your running away from the uniformed Reds to find yourself in a red uniform here is yet another one of Fortuna’s tricks?’

  That night, as Pavel Pavlovich Antipov held up the customers’ coats, he heard nothing other than the daunting echo of the things his boss had said. Only for three more accursed days could he stand that terribly ridiculous uniform. After that, he stopped working, stopped doing everything he would normally do, to instead just stand still as if rooted to the spot, as if there was no job to be sought, no life to build and no purpose to wear oneself out for. At the end of that week, Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova carefully inspected her husband as if trying to determine his true colour. Only then was she forced to accept that he was too rigidly fixed in his ways to ever change. He was so because of his age (too old; having always advanced a couple of steps ahead of his age, he had now stopped and was waiting for his age to catch up with him); because of his title (too elevated; having always focused on rising even further up, he had suddenly become aware there was not much space left to rise to and froze in his tracks); and lastly, because of his frame (too imposing; he had a frame that was so unbendable and inflexible that he chose not to go through the doors that required his bending down). Pavel Pavlovich Antipov was a man who in essence was weak and fully aware of it, who clung to his power with all his might less to avoid being like others than to avoid being himself. A man who knew too well what he craved and worked all his life to achieve it, struggling bit by bit, climbing step by step, to reach success in the end. The last type of person to accommodate drastic changes!

  Being so young and inexperienced, having never had to work or even accomplish anything, and in utter harmony with her advancing pregnancy, Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova was one immense, round zero.
As such she could remain forever anchored in whatever inertia she was entangled. Yet just as easily, she could be sent rolling ahead with a strong gust. She possessed that sheer boldness peculiar to the ignorant and that virginal expectation that things would turn out well, an expectation nurtured by the very fact that she had never acquired anything in life by herself alone. Everything she did attain had been bestowed upon her and all she had lost would one day just as easily be somehow returned to her. She still spent most of her life preparing long lists about what she would do once she returned to Russia. However, just as easily she could spend this time working until that day arrived. Hence she gave up expecting help from her husband and decided to do something she had never done before: to look for a job herself.

  Fortune was on her side because fortune loves to test those emerging with such a challenge, so she found a job as a waitress in one of the most stylish pastry shops in Beyoglu. In that mirrored pastry shop decorated with elegantly stained glass, all day long she went back and forth between customers dressed to the nines and the kitchen that smelt of cinnamon and whipped cream. From all the cacophonous languages spoken there, each sounding to her just as unmelodious as the other, she acquired fragments of words sufficient to understand the orders that were more or less the same and never tried to learn more than that. Actually, she never opened her mouth unless she had to. In spite of the high workload and low pay, no one had ever seen her frown or complain. Though the boss had ordered every employee to smile continuously when serving the customers, others grimaced the moment they left the field of vision of either the boss or the customer, but Agripina’s smile stayed on her face throughout the day as if it had been nailed on. While all the other women tried to avoid work whenever they could or kept searching for a rich middle-aged man to rescue them from this torment, she alone did nothing but work continually. It was more a dedication to suffering than an effort to leave behind these insufferable days that kept her going. It was almost as if she was secretly proud of her suffering, as if embitterment purified her and giving herself up to God’s mortals brought her closer to Him. The more insurmountable the difficulties she encountered, the more insufferable the dangers she had to overcome, and the more vulgar the people she served, the more she felt God became indebted to her. She would sooner or later receive what was her due. ‘This is a test,’ she assured herself with a smile. ‘The more arduous it is, the more exalted the outcome will be.’

  ‘Why is there that grin on your face! How dare you laugh at our faces?’

  Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova looked in surprise at the Muslim woman yelling at her but her bewilderment only made the latter even more furious. The woman was a member of the Contemporary Women’s Association which advocated the deportation of all White Russian women; whom they believed were ripping out Muslim men’s reason from their minds and money from their pockets. Prioritized among the agenda items of the association were the following:

  To determine and record one by one incidents of immoral behavior performed by White Russians with soft and silky blond hair, fair complexion, shameless looks and aristocratic pretensions

  To wear out the gates of the upper echelons of state administration in order to gather support for their cause

  To ensure the closing down of all the dens of thieves and nightclubs capable of drawing the wrath of Sodom and Gomorrah onto Istanbul

  To ‘shoo’ away all the prostitutes who had descended from Kiev and Odessa to bed down on the quarters of Galata

  To constantly and ceaselessly warn the innocent, inexperienced Muslim youth about the danger awaiting them

  Until the authorities took the necessary precautions, to pursue by their own means a policy of intimidation by mistreating all White Russian women they encountered.

  Overcoming her initial confusion, Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova reached her neck and squeezed the silver pendant bearing the picture of Saint Seraphim. The strength she thus drew enabled her to smile at the woman whom she regarded as a recent incarnation of the torment-filled ‘divine test’ she had for such a long time been going through. ‘What you just did was not right but I can still be tolerant and even forgive you. For that would be the right thing to do.’

  That night, only cursorily did she mention this event to her husband. He never asked her anything anyhow. Not only did he not want to learn a single thing about the world outside, but he also envied her for managing to survive in that insane world which had roughly shaken him up and tossed him aside. Rarely did he leave the dump they considered home ever since their departure from the dormitory provided by the French Red Cross, passing his days in front of the window as he penned never-to-be-posted letters to his brother in France, got lost in thoughts, looked outside at the Muslims passing by and watched the streets as if waiting for someone. Almost as if arriving to put an end to this monotonous wait, their baby was born in seven months.

  Yet Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova could not welcome her daughter with the same excitement as her husband. Her early and painstakingly onerous childbirth may have contributed another life to this world, but that life had been stolen from her. She had felt far more important and so very different during her pregnancy compared to how she felt now. She had convinced herself all along that God had chosen her from among many and had subsequently considered every calamity yet another crucial phase in the strenuous test that was being put to her. Never having lost her faith in God or herself, she had wholeheartedly believed herself to be the heroine of a cautionary tale of damnation the people around her could never understand. In order to save from the claws of this idle world both her husband and herself, she had struggled for them both but always on her own, awaiting, like a pearl rolled into mud, that day when she would be cleansed to shine once again. Yet now she started to imagine she had been mistaken all along, that God did not look after her but the baby in her womb and, for that reason, abandoned her to her fate as soon as the baby was born. However hard she tried, she could not get rid of this feeling of diminution and abandonment. Not one fleck of glitter remained on her face from that arrogant luminescence; her body had shrunk and withered as if pails of water had been drained from it. Only her breasts, they alone were still large and full. Now and then they leaked milk like blood oozing away from a bleeding lip. She ran home in the afternoons to breastfeed the baby only to encounter time and time again a cruelly poignant scene. She found her husband and the baby on top of the sofa by the window, either in play or fast asleep in each other’s embrace with infinite happiness and unmatched innocence under the daylight that sprayed golden glitter upon them, as if it was emanating not from the sun but from seventh heaven. Every time a pang of sadness seized her as she realized how the spirit she had once carried within and believed to be a part of had now excluded her.

  So, she thought, a roily river of muddy waters this city was. The very reason for her thrashing about all this time amidst the water was simply because she had been entrusted with delivering her baby from the bank of the river it was on to her husband on the other. That was precisely what pregnancy had been to her: sailing to the other shore within the body of a boat you were swollen into, to get the baby wrapped in an angelic bliss, and to then carry her safe and sound across to the other bank. Upon the occurrence of the birth and the deliverance of the baby to the other shore, she had all of a sudden become worthless, as if pushed back into the water and abandoned to the tide. It was useless to struggle. Far away from the bank she was kept by the waters she belonged to and the current she was caught in. It seemed as if even the baby was aware of this situation. The moment she was picked up from her father’s arms, she would turn bright red in a fit of fury; while being breastfed, she would crumple her face as if to prove she was doing this solely out of need and, as soon as she was full, would let go of the nipple and cry to be released also. The general would then take the baby in his arms and tenderly calm her down while Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova escaped from the house so as not to witness this scene that hurt her more every passing
day.

  Back at work, she would have to endure, along with the emptiness swelling within, this other feeling of suffering a terrible injustice. Every day she hated her body even more. Her body lived for one cause only; every bite she took, every drop she drank, every ray of sunlight she received, every particle of air she breathed; all were moulded and converted into milk for the baby. The more robust the baby grew, the more strength Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova lost, with every passing moment swaying further and further from the vim and vigour of life.

  Impossible as it might sound to those who believe that every woman is by nature maternal and that motherhood is as sacred and pure as the rivers in heaven, Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova did not love ‘the thing’ she had given birth to. Upon coming face to face with the child she had carried within her for so long, the child she had considered a part of her without knowing what it would look like or bring about, she became scared of this being that was so tiny in size but enormous in need. She became scared of the impossibility of reversing time to go back to being a young woman again, of being given no other choice than to love unconditionally. One thing she knew for sure, she wanted to get rid of the baby. Inconceivable as this might seem to those who believe every woman by nature maternal and motherhood as sacred and pure as the rivers in heaven, Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova was no exception. It is not only nationhoods that coin official histories of their own, so do motherhoods. Mothers often create a maternal historiography written retrospectively and gracefully, dating back to the very first day, picking out the weeds and furnishing the stepping stones along the way. For love does not always come without effort but sometimes flourishes belatedly and grows gradually, drop by drop, under the tutelage of time. The care of those around them, a poignant instance, a fleeting moment of affection and myriad sediments of tenderness, these may coalesce in the mind of a new mother to chase away, like an industrious fan with a harsh yet invigorating breeze, all inappropriate thoughts and unpleasant feelings. As long as the fan is kept on, a young mother might manage to increasingly love her baby, the maternal halo embracing them both. In fact, she might in time come to love the baby so much that she would succeed in believing she had loved her with the same intensity right from the very first day. That she might not have done so, is so unspeakably appalling that it could not be confessed to anyone. Not to the husband, for instance, saying: ‘I at first felt miserable for having given birth to your baby but then recovered.’ Not to the child: ‘I really did not love you at first but gradually developed warmer feelings.’ Not to herself: ‘How could I fail to love my own child?’ So the official history of motherhood necessitates a meticulous cleansing of the secluded corners of memory. Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova’s misfortune was that before she had a chance to start loving the baby, that is, to love her year by year, degree by degree, to eventually arrive at such a depth in love so as to have no difficulty in convincing herself she had always loved her so, she lost her.