The Flea Palace

by Elif Shafak

  Still Celal could not get angry at him. Like many who believe their younger sibling’s childhood to have been more difficult than theirs, Celal nurtured a tender love toward his three and a half minutes younger brother. The twins had been separated when they were children. Celal had stayed in the village with his mother; in a suffocating yet affectionate, limited yet protected womb, always where he belonged, with and within his own roots. Cemal, on the other had, had gone to Australia with his father; uninhibited yet unshielded, in a boundless but entirely solitary universe, communicating with an estranged language, always half-settled, half-nomadic. Upon Cemal’s unexpected return to Turkey, their harshly parted paths had crossed once again after a youth spent apart. Their relatives had all presumed that the reason behind this sudden return could be nothing but ‘homesickness’ and had therefore forgiven Cemal for not coming back years ago to attend his mother’s funeral. The truth is, the state of affairs in a country always tinkers with the perceptions of its citizens. The natives of less developed countries love to love those who, after spending years in a developed country and despite having the option to remain there, come instead to live with them. As soon as he had returned to Istanbul, Cemal too had benefited from that distinctive love reserved for those such as Christians who convert to Islam, foreigners who settle in Turkey, tourists who spend their vacations here every year and above all, Western brides married to Turks who are willing to bestow Turkish names to their children.

  Be that as it may, Cemal actually considered Australia his country and did not much like either Turkey or the Turks, especially Turkish women! With their narrow shoulders, generous hips and frames they let carelessly widen from top to toe, each one was a small, unkempt pear. Besides which, they were so conservative about their hair! Always the same colours, the same cuts. He had not yet met a Turkish woman who would ask for her hair to be cut as short as a man’s. It was so strange for those who could not tolerate the presence of even a single hair on their bodies to not be able to come in to have their hair cut short. Oh, no, Cemal was not happy to be here. The only reason he did not pack up and leave this very moment was because he knew too well that his twin was effectively nailed down in Turkey. Indeed, Cemal was in Turkey for the sake of his remaining half, the person whose name he had been separated from by a single letter of the alphabet, the resolute breach in his highly irresolute soul. If only he could tear him away from this country, Cemal thought he would surely take his twin to Australia. However, as he could sense deep down that Celal would not come with him, and even if he did, could not survive anywhere other than his own country, Cemal had no other alternative than to gather all his belongings and savings and after all these years come to settle in Istanbul.

  As for Celal, though he would never be able to confess this to anyone, a deep distress had enveloped him the moment he had been re-united with his twin. Standing at the international airport terminal, he had stared, first with astonishment and then embarrassment, at the curly-haired, large-nosed, big-bellied man running to him with open arms and cries of ecstasy. His outfit was completely bizarre – a T-shirt adorned with kangaroos, a legume-green pair of shorts and those leather sandals that thrust his pink, hairy, ugly feet into plain sight – and his movements hugely vivacious. He made dozens of gestures just to say a single word, forever running into people and knocking things over. That he was so garrulous himself was hardly surprising. He made whopping promises that they would never again be parted, squealing with tears in his eyes about ridiculous plans and, damn it, never shutting up. If one took the things he said seriously, it seemed as if he wanted to use the money he had brought along as capital in a joint endeavor. Amidst the bear hugs and gluey kisses, he had waved his arms left and right like an inexperienced tightrope acrobat trying to regain his balance to stay on the rope, yelling in the middle of the airport, ‘Here are the magnificent twins! It doesn’t really matter what we do. So long as we don’t part again. If we make it, we’ll do so together, if we perish, we perish together!’

  Speaking of perishing, Celal in his embarrassment had felt like he had already started the process and silently wished that, if disappearing from the airport was not a feasible option, he could disappear from the face of the earth. Instead, all he could do was to watch with deep astonishment and even deeper distress this utterly unfamiliar and stranger-than-a-stranger, exact replica of his.

  Though Celal was far from being the type to plunge into risky businesses, his twin’s excitement must have softened his heart for he could not put up much resistance. When it was time to figure out what common job they could find, a startling fact awaited them: during the time they had been apart and entirely unaware of what the other was doing, they had, albeit for different reasons and through separate venues, undertaken the same profession. Celal was a hairdresser and Cemal had also spent years in a unisex haircutting salon. The coincidence had instantly doubled Cemal’s unrestrained exuberance. ‘Twin hairdressers!’ he had shouted with pride, and then, as if stating something different, had echoed himself with even bigger excitement: ‘Hairdresser twins!’ Looking at the contentment on his face one imagined that each and every item on his wish list had been granted. While his sluggish brother kept calculating the ‘pluses’ and ‘minuses’ of opening a beauty parlour, Cemal had already taken the plunge and started to look for a place. That he did not have a clue what sort of a city Istanbul was did not seem to trouble him at all as he rushed to find a place by himself, and before the week was over he had already rented a flat, paying one year’s rent in advance. It was an apartment in one of the many illegally constructed buildings on the steep plains overlooking the Bosphorus, with a wonderful view of the river. However, the moment Celal saw the flat, he struggled in vain to explain to his twin that the panoramic view, which he could tell was the main reason his twin had rented the place, would mean nothing to their future customers.

  Still they moved in and had no customers for months. Then heavy downpours started and the main room got flooded, four times with water and once by creatures which they guessed, from the traces left behind, were street cats. At the end of the fifth month, they finally scavenged, along with the money left over from Cemal’s hasty investment, whatever soaked and cat-hair-covered furniture they could salvage and decided to try once again – only this time Celal was to choose the place. After searching for a long time and carefully weighing all the choices under the present conditions, his choice was the flat on the garden floor of an ashen, fairly old and unkempt but obviously once grandiose apartment building, located in a rather lively neighbourhood on a well-trodden street that opened up to a busy avenue.

  ‘It’s so odd, isn’t it?’ said Cemal on their first work day here. ‘I’m an incessant chatterer but I went and found a place in a lifeless neighbourhood. You’re always quiet, yet you chose such a noisy place. So we’re opposites not only of each other but of ourselves as well!’

  Just the same, their opposing characters were not reflected in the fifty by sixty centimetre photograph, enlarged and framed right across the entrance upon Cemal’s insistence, taken at the Marmara Region 19th Annual Hairdressers’ Competition that they had entered three years ago. On that day, despite the fact that Cemal had worn a T-shirt with carroty-parrots on it and Celal a matte olive-green shirt, both had ended up competing with the same hair model and getting eliminated before the finals. The hairstyle they both liked the most involved a strand of copper red hair from the nape of the neck being curled, thickly braided and loosely fastened into a bun. The similarity between the photographs of the two of them creating the same bun on different models at different times was startling. The customers loved to keep looking at the two photographs to try to locate the differences between them, one by one and over and over. Repetition is, after all, an intrinsic part of beauty parlours, there everything and everyone relentlessly keeps repeating themselves. Time, hurriedly chasing its own tail outside, gets chubby in here as it slows down; like dirty gum stuck to the bottom of your shoe,
time here lengthens when pulled, lengthens when pulled, lengthens… The best thing about repetition is familiarity. When surrounded by repetition, one feels safe and secure as if in a well-known place amidst old buddies. Women’s hairdressers owe their languor, a quality not usually welcome in any other workplace, to the constant turn of their wheel of repetition. Everything the customers do in here, not only have they certainly done many times before, but are also able to repeat infinite times in the future. Though all the beauty parlour catalogues are identical, each and every one still gets looked through again and again. The women’s journals being passed around are never read until the end, they are just desolately thumbed instead. No one feels there is any harm in going back to the same sections again and again. The women in front of the mirror keep scrutinizing each other; keeping at it even though there is barely a change in the other person’s appearance from one glance to the next. Newspapers are read not page by page but instead endlessly scanned; the tea they serve always remains half drunk, gets cold, is replenished, stays in the half-full cup, gets cold once again; the continuing chats get cut here and there, topics keep changing, the same things are talked about repeatedly, the same music videos appearing on television are watched in bits and pieces; the same singers and songs are subjected to scrutiny over and over again, to the same comments…nothing has to be completed. Life is a series of perpetual repetitions with no beginning or ending. Though the world may have a bottom to reach and the Judgement Day a cut-off date, you can be sure that Israfil will not blow his sur while you are sitting in the beauty parlour. An earthquake can happen in Istanbul at any moment, any second, but definitely not while you are at the beauty parlour. Not in there.

  Distinguishing the differences between the two photographs on the wall was a recurring delight for the women customers. The female gaze has, after all, a predilection to identify differences before similarities. For three seconds show a man the picture of five beautiful, young models in blue bathing suits and ponytails lined up by a pool. What he sees would probably be this: a ponytailed, young and highly good-looking model in a bathing suit x5. Then show the same picture to a woman. What she in turn sees would probably be: x5 models by the pool, some with good postures, some not; some carrying the ponytail well, others not; the blue bathing suit fitting the figures of some well, others not; some are more good-looking than others.

  Be that as it may, when it came to the photographs of Celal and Cemal taken at the Marmara Region’s 19th Traditional Hairdresser’s Contest, even the female gaze would have a hard time detecting the nuances. Leaving aside their clothes and Cemal’s silver accessories, they were identical, right up to their facial expressions. From the way they leaned their heads sideways to the angle with which they bent over the models whose hair they fixed, from the way they crossed their eyebrows to emphasize how seriously they took what they were doing to how they bent their fingers… Still, there was a small difference that did not escape the eye: Cemal lightly bit his lower lip – perhaps because he knew he was not as good a hairdresser as his brother, or he was not as enamoured with the thickly braided buns with the curled strand of copper red hair from the nape of the neck as he had thought. Alternatively, perhaps all he could think of at that moment was finishing up what he was doing so he could go and get something to eat. How Cemal, with his infatuation with food and his non-stop consumption of all sorts of pastries since returning to Turkey, managed to maintain exactly the same figure as Celal, who ate as little as a bird and basically survived on soup, was a mystery even the regular customers of the beauty parlour did not think they could ever solve.

  Yet the similarities between the twins came to an end when you considered the style with which each executed the many tasks that their jobs involved. It was due to this that Cemal’s customers differed from those of Celal. Of course, it did happen that on certain days, a particular customer preferred one twin to their usual choice of the other. Even those who loved to shoot the breeze with Cemal made sure at certain times that Celal fixed their hair. When it came to significant days like engagements, weddings, celebrations and other important appointments, the preference of all customers was for Celal. In addition to the special occasions, he was also the unerring choice for emergency situations. Those who had messed around with their hair at home and ended up with it scruffily cut, looking lightning-struck due to a cheap perm, turned into a bird’s nest, dyed the colour of corn tassel when attempting to lighten with bleach or dried out for following word-of-mouth folk remedies…hair done in the morning, hated at night, sacrificed to the careless experiments of novice hairdressers…all of these disasters were delegated to Celal’s adroit hands. In such difficult situations his even temperament that was not at all like his brother’s went into effect, enabling him to calm down even the most distressed of customers. It was unanimously agreed that there couldn’t be any hair in so calamitous condition that he could not save it. There was never a problem between the brothers concerning which of them should look after which customers. An unspoken agreement reigned here as well; no one took offense as long as the accepted distribution of roles remained intact. Most of the time they would understand what a woman’s concern was within the first two minutes after she had entered through the door and they would greet her accordingly. If the arriving customer blundered in roughly enough to make the chimes on the door jangle and with a hopeless look on her face, Celal would greet her, gauging the size of the problem awaiting him all the while. Whereas it would be Cemal’s turn to welcome in customers whose situations were less of an emergency. He would stop the conversation he would most probably be having and bend down to greet the customer with levels of politeness which he could never get right; never forgetting, if the person was an acquaintance, to throw in a few reproachful words about how long it had been since they last saw her. If it were up to Cemal, he would require every woman to spend at least an hour every day at the beauty parlour.

  Yet there was one person who had from the very beginning had her hair done exclusively by Celal – someone who relished the silence that had just descended in the salon as much as he did: Madame Auntie. This tiny, elderly woman living alone on the top floor of Bonbon Palace at Flat Number 10 came once every two weeks without fail to have her thin, sparse hair trimmed and, once a month, coloured platinum yellow. That specific colour, however, had become a source of worry to the hearts and a balm to the tongues of the regular customers of the beauty parlour. They thought she was too old for platinum yellow or else platinum yellow was too much for her age. She was seventy-eight years old, certainly an inappropriate age to be a blonde. Given that she still chose to be blonde, it was considered that she should at least wipe off that serious look, not be so grave or such a model of dignity. If she was instead a witty, at least a little goofy, garrulous and cheerful old woman with eyes twinkling the traces of the bohemian life she had once led, paying no heed to moral prohibitions or to what anyone said, then her hair would have been appropriate. Yet here she was, as far removed from being ‘a slacker’ as a proper granny, as straight as if she had been drawn by a ruler, as heavy as cast metal, and, to top it all, platinum blonde. That was simply too much for the regular customers of the beauty parlour.

  It was too much because, in the coded world of colours and hair colours, the rules are clear-cut. Yellow has little to do with respectability. A blonde woman can pierce through this rule on only one condition: if she is a genuine blonde! Originality is a problem peculiar to blondes. The brunettes, red heads and albinos can have their hair coloured as often as they like and in as many different shades as they please and yet never have to encounter fifty times a day the question as to whether this is indeed their natural colour. The desire to be blonde makes women predisposed to be sly and forces them to lie. Yet their attempts at fraud are foiled very quickly. While they are busy convincing people, truth insidiously grins from their roots. Blondness makes the enthusiast dishonest and the genuine anti-social.

  Yet neither her hair colour nor her w
earing make-up at this age weakened the respect Madame Auntie awakened in those around her. It was evident from the first day that she, with her solemnity and taciturn nature, would be Celal’s customer and always remain so. If judged by the gleam in their eyes upon seeing each other, they got along fabulously yet, given they rarely opened their mouths to utter a few words, it was hard to figure out how they had bonded. If it were up to them, words should have been rationed to people every month. Everyone should have known that words uttered are like drinking water and tilled soil, a scarce resource, and whenever one spoke, they depleted their limited share.

  However, this afternoon the tranquility of this silence-loving pair could only last four minutes. Suddenly, the door was pushed, the bell jolted. In accompaniment to the watermelon vendor’s mechanical voice, which made him sound as if he was firing orders, a young woman entered the beauty parlour with quick yet unhurried steps. Three indolent women, all Cemal’s customers, all with leopard-patterned plastic smocks tied to their necks and lined up next to one another on the swivelling chairs in front of the wall-length mirror, turned their heads with all the rollers, hairpins, hair caps and aluminum folios to give the newcomer a once over, looking from top to bottom. Upon realizing who she was, with a deeper curiosity, they eyed her up again, this time looking from bottom to top. This was a historic moment, for up until now the Blue Mistress had never set foot in the beauty parlour.