The Flea Palace

by Elif Shafak

  The plump brunette must have felt the same for she could not resist; she backed the manicurist in a collective attempt to convince the old woman: ‘They say Hygiene Tijen was no different as a young girl but definitely got worse after getting married. She’s a hygiene-freak.’

  ‘Come on, is that so bad? She’s just a fastidious woman,’ objected Madam Auntie making an effort to put the matter behind them.

  ‘Auntie, this isn’t fastidiousness, it’s an illness,’ shouted the manicurist with the courage pumped into her from the reinforcements. ‘Maybe even worse. When you’re ill, you know it. You go to the physician and get treated, right? There’s no cure for hygiene-freaks! If there was one, Misses Tijen wouldn’t put it in her mouth, she’d find it too filthy!’

  ‘What a shame! Her child suffers the most,’ said the blond with the one eye cast.

  ‘Don’t say that,’ muttered Madam Auntie. ‘Tijen dotes on her daughter. How can a mother possibly want any harm to come to her child?’

  ‘Fine, Madam Auntie, but what kind of a love can we understand from it? Look, she threw down all of the poor kid’s clothes,’ yelled the manicurist.

  ‘Really?’ uttered Madam Auntie in astonishment.

  The manicurist exclaimed with the thrill of having finally said something the old woman could not object to: ‘Of course, all those clothes raining upon our heads belong to that poor kid. See that she doesn’t throw out her own clothes. The woman is nutty but not insane. She’s perfectly sane when it suits her interests!’

  The old woman puckered her thin lips with suspicion. ‘Really, so she threw out the child’s clothes. Why, I wonder?’

  ‘Why do you think, because she’s nutty…’

  Madam Auntie’s face darkened. Realizing she had gone too far the manicurist hushed, nonetheless pleased that she had said all she wanted to say.

  ‘Oh, what’s it to us? If she’s nutty, so be it!’ roared Cemal. Though enjoying the gossip, he was worried the manicurist’s idle talk would bother the old woman and so anger Celal. ‘Are we to bother with the troubles of every nutter? Is there anything more in Istanbul other than nutters? Here we see lots of them, as many as bulgur. If we talk about each one of them, we’ll do so until the end of our lives. Sonny, what happened to the coffees? Bring them here, we’re parched.’

  In an attempt to change the topic, Celal intervened. ‘This garbage smell has increased again. We complained to the municipality so many times. It didn’t help at all.’

  ‘What did they say? They said they’ve turned the garbage collection business over to a private company,’ added Cemal instantly, always fond of completing the half-uttered sentences of his twin. ‘Then we found the company’s phone number. They too are boors. They send the truck out right in the middle of rush hour when people are on their way back from work, as if out of spite.’

  ‘They do come and collect the garbage regularly, though at the wrong hour. Alas however, we still haven’t been able to get rid of this smell,’ summed up Celal.

  ‘Of course we can’t get rid of it. With so much bulgur around, we can be rid of neither garbage nor cultural backwardness.’ Cemal said heatedly. ‘Now can you believe it, Madam Auntie? We spend our days scolding the people who leave their garbage by this wall. All the ignorant illiterate women in this neighbourhood leave their garbage by our garden wall and always the same types – so pig headed. I’m tired of repeating it! There’s one in particular you especially don’t want to know about. The woman’s house is right at the end of the street. She doesn’t mind, she walks three hundred metres every day to dump her garbage here. I long pondered why on earth someone would do such a thing. I finally came up with an explanation: there was probably a field here long before this apartment building was constructed. Back then, this woman’s grandmother would dump her garbage here. Eventually, that woman had a daughter and when that one was grown up, she too would always dump her garbage at the same place. Then she too had a daughter. That’s the bulgur I have a row with every one of God’s days. Their interest in garbage is hereditary, passes from mother to daughter. A type of family tradition! Mind you, what could she do, she’s just continuing whatever she has seen. But unlike her ancestors, she doesn’t pour it out of a pail, she puts it in a plastic bag first. A modern bulgur!’

  While the others laughed and Cemal grumbled, Madam Auntie shook her head deep in thought. ‘But Cemal,’ she said, ‘this place wasn’t a field in the past. Underneath this entire neighbourhood are graveyards…’

  Not at all prepared for such an objection, Cemal swallowed back all the words that were getting ready to leave his tongue. As he looked around him in distress as if for help, he was waylaid by a teeny-tiny, constantly moving shadow at the bottom of the counter in front of the mirror. It was a cockroach. It had climbed the basket of rollers, moving his antenna as if listening to the chat. Good thing it had not yet attracted anyone’s attention. However, if it decided to get out of the basket and walk along the counter, it would shortly be parading in front of each and every customer. Cemal grabbed the large bristle hairbrush and approached sideways in a crab-walk, at the same time talking even more excitedly so as not to let on.

  ‘ “Look here, woman!” I say, “Do I come and dump my garbage on your carpet? With what right can you leave your garbage on someone else’s wall? Wait for the garbage truck to come at night, then you can take it outside your own door and the garbage men would pick it up.” No, she doesn’t understand at all – because of that bulgur I tell you!’

  ‘What bulgur?’ asked the Blue Mistress, popping her head up from the third page news where she was hiding from the constant looks of the apprentice with the pimples.

  ‘Oh, don’t you know my bulgur theory? Let me tell you right away,’ said Cemal without taking his eyes off the cockroach. ‘It’s actually very simple. Now, is there population planning in Turkey? No! Oh God gives them to you, so keep giving birth and let them loose onto the streets. Okay, let’s say you let them loose, but how are you going to feed so many kids? One person you feed with meat, five people with meat and bulgur, ten with only bulgur. OK, is this bulgur beneficial to human intelligence? No! You can then keep on telling the woman as many times as you want. “Come on sister, don’t dump your garbage in my garden!” I keep on hollering. She stupidly stares at my face. Then the following day at the same time she comes again and dumps again as if wound up like a watch. She doesn’t understand, how could she, with the brains of bulgur?’

  Celal coughed clumsily. Cemal had received the message, but preferring the interest of the Blue Mistress over the political correctness of his twin, he did not back down.

  ‘Just this past month I personally confronted this woman. It was an afternoon like this one; late, we were fixing a bride’s hair. The bride was on one side, the relatives of the bride on the other; the bun of one was finished and the other one had just been started. We’d been up all day long, totally beat. I looked outside and saw this woman coming again wobbling with garbage bags in her hand. I opened the windows, stuck my head out, waiting. “Maybe she’ll be embarrassed when she sees me and go back,” I thought. No way! This creature of God came looking right into my eyes and still threw down her garbage. Oh, if I could only understand! Who declared our garden wall a dump? Who told these people, “Come throw your garbage in front of your neighbour’s house?” The apprentices could barely hold me back. I was going to tear the woman to pieces. I lost it, I was hollering, hurling insults. You’d think a person would be a little embarrassed and at least feel reluctant in front of all the people, right? Guess again! She stares at my face with a stupid naivety. I swear to God she didn’t even understand why I was angry. She must’ve thought I’d escaped from a mental institution. “Even if she doesn’t understand, she’d probably be afraid to come again,” I said to myself. Yet didn’t she come again at the same time with the garbage in her hand? There she was, eyes wide open, fixed in an idiotic stare to see what I was going to do. She’ll make a murderer out of me. Oh
my beautiful God, one doesn’t meddle in your business but why on earth do you create such people? Now what do we have to do to these bulgur, I don’t know? Because of them, the apartment building is thick with the smell of garbage. The way things are going, no one will come in here. We’ll lose our jobs, our daily bread. Child, spray a bit, okay?’

  The sweet sugary perfume of the spray, with the picture of a deserted shore shadowed by palm trees and a turquoise sea, rained in particles on all corners of the shop and mixed with all the various smells. Cemal stole a glance at the cockroach in the hope that it would be poisoned by the room spray. However, not only was it not at all affected by the particles landing on it, it had even succeeded in climbing up to the top of the pile of rollers and was now getting ready to move onto the Brilliantine box next to it.

  ‘God knows you’re right, all your customers would run away,’ the high-strung brunette jumped in, as she watched the Number 113 burgundy nail polish that had already dried on her toes now being put on her fingers. ‘Of course you’ve grown accustomed to the smell because you’re here all day long. Sometimes when I enter this apartment building, I feel suffocated by it.’

  ‘The windows are wide open all day long, the breeze blows pleasantly and still the smell does not go away. They say it increases as you go up to the higher floors. Is that so Madam Auntie?’ shouted the manicurist causing the nail polish to overflow.

  ‘And the bulgurs across from us claim we take their garbage. Now look here, are you crazy? What would I do with your disgusting garbage?’ Cemal intervened and looked sharply at the manicurist so she would understand his discomfort about her asking questions of the old woman at every opportunity.

  ‘How so? What does that mean?’ asked the Blue Mistress taking a break from bemoaning her new image that had just started to appear on the mirror. Like many other women who witness even just the trimming of their hair they had tried so hard to grow long, she too had already started to feel remorse even before getting up from the swivel chair.

  ‘Oh, don’t you know we’re in dispute with the nutters at Number 4? And I thought there wasn’t a person left who hadn’t heard about it.’ Cemal said. ‘One day these people came and “Welcome!” I said, for why else does someone come to the beauty parlour? I thought they’d come to have their hair done, but apparently that wasn’t their intention. This crazy woman in front, her stark raving mad husband behind her, their old maid older daughter next to them and the other old maid younger daughter behind them, all four of them were standing in front of me, out on a family campaign. First I didn’t understand a thing from what they said. It turned out they’d tied up their garbage bags and placed them in front of their door and when they looked five minutes later, their garbage wasn’t there! “Where’s our garbage?” they said. “Meryem might’ve picked it up,” I suggested. “No sir, the janitors had gone to their village that day.” “The garbage men might have picked it up,” I said. “What sort of a garbage man would enter the apartment building?” they retorted. “How would I know where your garbage is?” They obstinately maintained, “You took it, give our garbage back.” What luck! Of all the places in Istanbul, we opened up a beauty parlour in an apartment building full of nutters!’

  Absorbed in talking, Cemal suddenly realized he had moved away from his prey. Though he turned around scrutinizing the situation warily, the cockroach was nowhere to be found.

  ‘For goodness sake, whoever took the garbage bag, took it. What’s the big deal?’ muttered the high-strung brunette, lighting a new cigarette.

  ‘Hey, the incident isn’t as frivolous as you think,’ stated Cemal as he looked under, around and in the vicinity of the basket of rollers. ‘The man’s a paranoiac. His wife is even worse. Who knows what scenarios they invented in their heads? Something like the CIA took the garbage bags or the terrorists kidnapped them, this was on the tip of my tongue but I swallowed it, “Now look here, who do you think you are to imagine you might have your garbage stolen?” How sad! Being a poor bulgur but thinking yourself a blessing like beans.’

  The pimpled apprentice started to collect the teacups accumulated on the counter, each stained by different coloured lipsticks. As Cemal stared fixedly at each teacup fearing the cockroach would emerge from under one of the saucers, his apprentice looked at the nipples of the Blue Mistress with a gaze just as fixed.

  Since the Blue Mistress, finally rid of the plastic smock, was busy inspecting her new hair model, she was not aware of either the apprentice’s looks or Cemal’s anxiety. If only she could muster enough courage to one day have her hair cut very short…but the olive oil merchant would most certainly not approve of such a change. Far too many times he had said he liked hair long in a woman. God knows he was going to complain a lot at her trimming her hair even this much. She looked at her watch. She was late, very late. She still had a lot of errands to run. Cemal was standing right behind her with a bristle brush in his hand, she thought the anxiety on his face was due to her not liking the haircut, and because she wanted to please him and had also decided she should say her ‘goodbye’ in the same way she had been greeted, she fervently shook his hand, violating the customer departure custom of a women’s hairdresser.

  The Blue Mistress’s hand had still not left Cemal’s when the outside door opened harshly once again. As the bell shook mightily, with the yell of the watermelon vendor at the corner, who now seemed determined to suppress his competitor with the loudspeaker, a woman plunged in dripping with agitation all over. All heads in the beauty parlour once again turned to the door to see the new addition to their ranks. They looked and were left dumbstruck, as if frozen stiff by a new command. The door closed and the last remaining echo of the bell stopped by itself as it reached the rest with a puny sound. The new customer was none other than Hygiene Tijen.

  Flat Number 1: Musa, Meryem, Muhammet

  ‘No way, I won’t go!’ shouted Muhammet from where he had squeezed into. He then pounded his fist, as if it were responsible for all this, on the closest of the velvet sofas whose colour had first been egg yolk yellow, next sour cherry burgundy and then aquamarine, but now was ultimately a total mystery under these flowery covers. He would have preferred his kicks over fists, having lately made a habit of kicking everything he came across, but right at this instant the scrawny frame of his six years had been so tightly squeezed between the wall and the sofas that he was not even able to move his legs properly. Unable to free his body, he instead unleashed two of the longest barrages of swearwords he knew, tying one onto the tail of the other. Upon hearing him swear again, Meryem* pushed with her feet all of the three sofas that were lined-up and pinned her blasphemous son to the wall, in the meantime guarding her swollen belly with two hands. Now literally cornered, Muhammet turned red with anger and opened his mouth to swear anew but did not dare go that far. As surrendering to his mother without resistance was a wound to his pride, he angrily bit the side of the sofa that had started to hurt his waist. The flowery cover protected the chair from all such outside pressures but maybe he could leave teeth marks if he bit hard enough…

  The history of this scuffle that was repeated every weekday morning went back exactly five months and one week to the enrollment of Muhammet into the 1-G section of the only elementary school in the neighbourhood. All he could remember from the first day of school was the anxious mothers’, distressed children’s and sulky teachers’ faces. With time, the mothers’ anxieties, the children’s distress and even the teachers’ sulkiness had abated bit by bit, yet all these bits, instead of scattering away to eventually disappear, had altogether been transferred to Muhammet. Hence after five months, one week to the day, Muhammet was an anxious, distressed, sulky child who still did not want to go to school.

  His starting school had coincided with his mother’s sofa obsession. Around that time, Meryem had somehow heard that her cousin’s son who resided in an Aegean town by the coast and made a living by repairing boats like his father and grandfather before him, had decided
out of the blue to settle in Istanbul and go into the furniture trade. Within thirty-six hours of hearing this news, Meryem had arrived at her cousin’s workshop and placed an order for some furniture, the colour and style of which she had not discussed with anyone else. The agreement was as follows: the cousin’s son, who had not yet received his first order, was going to give her a family discount and Meryem was going to hand over her old sofas and a minimal payment. The thing neither side knew at the time was that Meryem was three weeks pregnant. This bit of knowledge was not as irrelevant to the situation as it might seem at first glance. For as it had been observed when she was with Muhammet, pregnancy made Meryem rather stubborn, quite apprehensive and a little ‘bizarre.’ When the cousin’s son had finished the sofa set, Meryem’s pregnancy had progressed two months and was going strong.

  When the time came, she went to the workshop to see the finished work, looked at the colour of the sofas and threw up. Egg yolk yellow! When even the thought of egg yolks was sufficient to make her feel like vomiting, it was out of question that the sofas she was going to put in the living room be egg yolk yellow. When the cousin’s son tried to contain the situation by reminding her that it was she who had chosen this colour, Meryem could not help throwing up again. She threw up so many times before noon that finally she got her way. The new agreement was as follows: the cousin’s son who had still not received his first order was going to change the colour of the upholstery and in return, Meryem would give both her old sofas and more money than they had initially discussed.