The Flea Palace

by Elif Shafak

  That afternoon, back home at the usual time to breastfeed, she encountered her husband and the baby on top of the sofa by the window fast asleep in each other’s embrace under the daylight that sprayed upon them golden glitter as if it was emanating not from the sun but seventh heaven. Everything was cloaked in shades of yellow. The beams curving through the curtains were a hue of amber, the general’s face alabaster, the fabric of the sofa apricot, the baby’s swaddling layette vivid saffron and the tiny ball on top of it an aureate vermiculated with purple. Blinking her eyes dazzled by the sun, Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova walked towards this peculiar ball with an uneasy curiosity. She stood there, though she unconsciously knew only too well what she was looking at.

  She was right about colours. Just as cities and places came in colours and hues so did moments and situations; including deaths. Death too acquired a new hue in every person and each ending. In a newborn baby, it must be an aureate vermiculated with purple.

  After a while Pavel Pavlovich Antipov woke up. Standing up carefully so as not to disturb the baby in his lap, he stretched a bit, yawned indolently and looked out the window, still unaware of his wife’s presence. Down in the street, a ragged street-seller, with a small screened kitchen cupboard filled with livers mounted on a horse on the brink of death, was haggling ferociously with two old Muslim women each more quarrelsome than the other. While talking back to the women on the one side, the liver-seller also tried to chase the clingy flies drawing circles-within-circles around the cupboards while his horse, looking like it might give up living any moment, accompanied him with a swing of his tail. The weariness was scattered around by the wind that had been continuously blowing warm air since the early hours of the morning, penetrating everyone and everything so deeply that even the commotion of the liver-seller and his customers could not disturb the lethargic silence that prevailed on the streets. Pavel Pavlovich Antipov absentmindedly closed the windows, leant back and looked at the baby. He looked and at first did not comprehend a thing. The baby’s mouth was slightly ajar, her eyes open and her eyebrows crossed as if she were trapped inside a dream, dejected. Hair-thin, striped, purplish veins had covered her entire face. She resembled a porcelain bowl that managed not to break even after a rough fall to the ground, but had instead acquired multiple cracks across its entire width and length. Pavel Pavlovich Antipov cupped this round, cold and purplish yellow head in his hands like a crystal ball within which he hoped to see his future. And like all people who having not cried for years have totally forgotten how, in order to cry he too had to first howl.

  The liver-seller, putting the livers he could not sell to the cranky old women back into the screened cupboard, instantly sensed the ill-omen behind the scream and sauntered away, tugging at the halter of the drowsy horse, dragging behind him regiments of flies and divisions of cats.

  After the funeral, Pavel Pavlovich Antipov wrote a letter to his youngest brother whom he had not seen for a long time as the latter had settled in Europe long before the revolution: a brother whom he had secretly looked down upon for choosing trade over the family profession of the military thereby serving money rather than the Czar, and whose offers of help he had constantly turned down because of the pride that prevented him from taking shelter with him. In a letter to him Pavel asked whether they might be able to join him in France and, unlike the previous letters, he did send it this time.

  During the long years they spent in France not once did the general and his wife talk about that inauspicious Istanbul morning; they became more and more estranged from one another, as well as from any spiritual rapport they once had. However fast and easy arrival in this new country might have been, they were only too ready to risk everything just to escape Istanbul’s wickedness. After the baby’s death, Pavel Pavlovich Antipov had fully realized one thing right: they had to leave this city of mourning as soon as possible. Either Istanbul had not been good to them or they not good enough for Istanbul. To them the city’s gates of good fortune were shut, or perhaps had never been open. The same end awaited those whose family trees did not take root to branch out in this city, but whose paths led here at one stage of their lives: Istanbul, initially a port of escape enabling people to run away from everything, would herself become a reason for escape.

  When Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova reached Paris in the spring of 1922, she carried a pregnant worry in her soul. As she looked at the war worn city with indifferent eyes, discovering its colour did not even cross her mind. She had contracted a strange eye disease on her last day in Istanbul and had thereby lost all contact with the world of colours. Now everything she saw, the streets and buildings, the people and the reflections in the mirrors…all were in black and white. It was as if the world was cross at her and had closed down all its curtains, windows and shutters. She cared not. Not only did she not care, she found the world’s behaviour ridiculously childish. She simply did not want to struggle with the world and all of its endless burdens. Her only true desire was to see God, to see what colour God was, if any. Until she saw that straight out – and along with it, God’s intention in taking her baby away – she did not care at all to see the colours of this world of illusions. To her husband’s continuous insinuations about having a second baby so as to start life anew and to his consolation about time healing all wounds she reacted with revulsion. Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova had realized that babies who died before their first birthdays and cities abandoned before their first year of settlement ominously resembled one another. No baby arriving after a dead one could fully detach its existence from the absence of the dead sibling, just like no new city reached would fully welcome those exiled by the previous one.

  Pavel Pavlovich Antipov did not pay any attention to Paris either that day or later. The helping hand his disgraced younger brother extended with a pleasure he did not feel the need to contain, Antipov accepted with a displeasure he felt he had to suppress – and did not let go until he had taken and learnt everything he could from him. He gradually started to think that trade was no different than the military, and once he had believed in that, he fully dedicated himself to it. He had the unprincipled resolve of all those who, at a certain stage of their lives, suddenly plunge full force into an option they had once turned their nose up at. He was reckless and impatient, as if to make up for the time he had lost.

  However, it was only much later, with the start of another World War that his luck fully took a turn for the better. From black-marketeering during the war, he acquired a considerable fortune and an abscessed standing in society. Like a rubber ball he succeeded in bouncing his way through the ruins of war, at times even conducting business with the Germans. It did not matter to him at all. The war that raged on was not his. He no longer believed in the victory of states or of causes but only in the victory of individuals. And the face of victory, however attained, was always turned to the past. Triumph in life did not mean reaching step by step a future too good to pine for, but rather restoring an unfulfilled past to its former freshness.

  That is what he did. He acquired a new woman instead of the one who no longer fulfilled her wifely functions, a new baby for the one he had lost and a new authority to replace the one wrested away from him. All, yet none of them were new. When he held in his arms the baby the young Frenchwoman he lived with had born him, he was exactly fifty-nine years old. Like his first baby, this too was a girl with ash-coloured eyes. He hid this from Agripina for years. Had he not done so, however, it was unlikely that she would have minded, let alone have been jealous. If one went by what was written by the chief physician who treated her, she was utterly indifferent to everything around her. Exhibiting no sign of recovery she passed her entire time painting black and white watercolours of the peasants whom she watched at work in the vineyards on the northern slope of the clinic’s grounds. Pavel Pavlovich Antipov read these letters with great care, concern and sorrow to then forget about them once they were stored in his drawer. Content with his new relationship he seemed determi
ned to bestow upon his second baby all the love he could not give the first one. Still, never did he attempt to get divorced from his wife. Though long ago having given up visiting her, he was always careful to keep Agripina within easy reach. His wife had at first been his little lover, most steadfast admirer, then the victim of his weaknesses and infirmities, and eventually the only mirror that reflected all that he had lost on route to where he had arrived; she had been the closest witness of his personal history. Neither a partner, nor a friend, but perhaps a logbook… And just as a logbook would not know what was written inside, Agripina too was unaware of what it was exactly that she had been a witness of. Pavel Pavlovich Antipov decided to keep this precious memento in a safe place until it was time to go and pick it up.

  Yet when that time came, Pavel Pavlovich Antipov had lived so long and had become so old that he had started to carry his age like a dilapidated outfit worn over and over throughout the years, so comfortable that it could still be worn again and again were it not for the embarrassment of being seen in it by other people. All his goals he had actualized one by one, he had recovered all he had lost and lived as long as he had hoped. Yet still, even though life was done with him, it did not come to an end. There was not a single person around him who had lived that long. As all those people so much younger than him that he had loved, protected, fought or hated, departed one by one, his torment at the death of each was deposited on his chest layer upon layer, throbbing at night with a sharp, piercing pain. He could not help suspecting that the relatives of the deceased, even his own woman and daughter, blamed him deep down, that everyone hated him for living so long in such a damned age when not only life but even death had lost its enchantment. Though ninety-four years old, not only had he not aged, let alone become senile, he had barely even grown old. There was nothing he could do about it. The only way he could make up for his fault was through death but one did not die on demand and he did not demand to die either.

  At times, he blamed himself through the persona of the flabby-chinned Levantine who had been his boss for a total of three days, but whose castrated voice he still, after all these years, could not forget: ‘How old are you Monsieur Antipov? So almost a century! Within this century, states fell like a house of cards, people were wiped out like flies, the Trumpet of Israfil* grated on our ears not only once, but at least a dozen times. But what about you, did you erroneously go through the gates opening up to a time beyond time or did you knowingly make a pact with the devil? How much longer do you intend to live Monsieur Antipov? Could it be that you leaving your country to escape death’s clutches, to now wait here in this country of others for death to come and take you, is another one of Fortuna’s tricks?’

  Just when the agony brought by his incurable fault had started to make Pavel Pavlovich Antipov grow more and more distant from people, he received a letter from the chief physician: Agripina had suddenly taken a turn for the worse. One morning, under the startled looks of the patients, nurses and physicians, she had suddenly ran screaming outside and tried to talk one by one to the peasants at the vineyard but, upon realizing that none of them understood a word she said, had suffered a nervous breakdown. When brought back inside and having been somewhat calmed down with the help of tranquilizers, she had spilled out her unintelligible words to those at the clinic. Noticing how scared the other patients were, she had become scared herself and had withdrawn. The head physician wanted Monsieur Antipov to come at once to see his wife because as far as he could tell, the foreign language that his most silent and most easygoing patient had started to speak after all these years – without the presence of a single event that would have triggered such a transformation – was Russian.

  When Agripina Fyodorovna Antipov saw Pavel Pavlovich Antipov, she embraced him with a contentment brought on less by seeing her husband after all these years, than by finding someone who could understand her. Then she started to talk. Her words had neither meaning nor coherence. She blubbered about the songs the peasants at the vineyards sang at sunset. Then she complained about the childish jealousies of the elderly patients at the clinic and also about God’s callousness. She did not stop. That day in a monotonous voice, neither raised nor lowered but eventually hoarse, without the slightest indication of happiness or sorrow, she kept switching topics all the while mentioning a kitchen with smells of cinnamon and whipped cream. As the night drew closer and her exceedingly patient audience-of-one got ready to leave, she asked him with a hurt smile when he would come again, but sunk without awaiting his response into the sticky, obligatory slumber of medication.

  The taciturn visitor returned the following day; this time with a single rose in his hand and a box under his arm. Agripina did not pay any attention to the rose, but upon taking the fancy wrapping off the box, she greeted with exuberant happiness the bonbons glittering on the round varnished tray. This lovely tray that Pavel Pavlovich Antipov had bought from a canny antique dealer included a study by Vishniakov. It depicted the scene of a boyar abducting the woman he loved from her father’s house. The boyar had stopped just before going down the last few steps of the wooden ladder, using one arm to hold with superhuman strength his loved one on his lap, and grabbing onto the ladder with the other, while gazing at the half-shady half-green forest they were about to disappear into. Pavel Pavlovich Antipov withdrew to the side to watch the reaction this tray would create on his wife. One of the physicians he had consulted on his way over had stated that memory occasionally played vindictive tricks; the brain rewound when the body was nearing the end. Many patients, upon reaching a particular, often the very last stage of their lives, returned to their childhoods and to their mother tongue. Even a single object or a dream was sufficient to trigger such a transformation. Watching his wife Pavel Pavlovich Antipov wondered if the logbook was now turning the pages backwards to erase line by line all that was written within.

  Yet Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova looked much more interested in the bonbons than the Vishniakov tray. Unaware of her husband’s worries, she randomly picked one, held it out with a grateful smile and asked what flavour it was. ‘Since it is pink, it must be strawberry,’ was the response she got. Pink! It had been so long since she had last seen pink. She took the wrapper off and threw the candy into her mouth. The colour pink had a nice smell and a syrupy flavour.

  As the bonbon melted in her mouth, first the anxiety-stricken lips of the beautiful lover in the boyar’s lap, then everything around that was coloured in pink started to come to life. Agripina immediately reached for the other bonbons asking her husband the flavour each time. The yellow ones were lemon, reds cinnamon; greens were mint, oranges tangerine; browns caramel and the beige ones vanilla. Then she tasted them. Yellow was a sour colour, red sharp; green scorched, orange tangy; brown was astringent and beige puckered. With each new bonbon she tasted, the colours Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova had left in Istanbul returned to her. She watched as her bed against the wall, the chair and desk in front of the window, the cherry tree side table with all sorts of medicine on top, the Virgin Mary icon and the august face of Saint Seraphim swinging from her necklace revealed themselves. She ran to the windows in bewilderment only to be taken aback by the scenery that greeted her. All the colours were in place. Burnt was the colour of the vineyards extending from the slope of the hill into the horizon, tar the dresses of the peasant women singing as they filled their large baskets with thick skinned grapes, sharp the trees that sheltered shrill swallows and sour the sun in the sky. Colours were everywhere, but not as many were inside as outside. An idea occurred to her just then. She went back and collected the myriad of wrappers of the bonbons she had eaten. Through these spectacles she looked at the clinic where so many years of her life had been spent. As she put down one wrapper and picked up another, the dreary whiteness of the cold stone building’s halls, the walls of the rooms, physicians’ uniforms, the pale faces of the nurses adorned with reserved smiles, the pills she had to swallow twice a day, the bed sheets changed by the maids
every other day and those tasteless soups placed in front of her; all of these things were suddenly dyed in their own colours – as was the man standing across from her. The only thing that did not change was the fretful look on his face.