The Flea Palace

by Elif Shafak

  Meryem’s pregnancy had reached its third month when the cousin’s son notified her that the sour cherry burgundy sofa set was ready. In the meantime her morning sicknesses had considerably diminished. Now she instead suffered from schmaltziness. When the time came she went to the workshop to see the completed work, looked at the colour of the sofas and started to weep. Sour cherry burgundy! When even the image of a single sour cherry fallen from its tree was enough to remind her of untimely death, the possibility of the sofas in her living room being sour cherry burgundy could not be even brought up. When the cousin’s son tried to defend himself and reminded her that she herself had chosen this colour, Meryem could not help weeping again. That afternoon she cried so much that she finally got her way. The new agreement was as follows: the cousin’s son who had not yet received his first order was going to change the colour of the upholstery and in return, Meryem would give both her old sofas and twice the money they had initially agreed upon. Only this time the most innocuous of all colours was going to be selected to guarantee customer satisfaction: aquamarine!

  It worked. Two weeks later, when Meryem saw the aquamarine sofas she neither vomited nor wept. That night the cousin’s son slept peacefully for the first time in days. The following day, he threw the aquamarine sofa set in a pickup truck and brought it to Flat Number 1, Bonbon Palace, with two skinny porters he hired at the last minute as his big and burly apprentice had suddenly been taken ill. Meryem had been waiting for them excitedly since early morning with her ear on the doorbell and her hand on her not yet too swollen belly.

  In the fully crowded living room that was already small and had become almost impossible to walk around, with the arrival of the new sofas, the porters and the cousin’s son jumped over the coffee tables and perched on whatever they could find to drink a cup of coffee to take away their tiredness. Then it was time to leave. The cousin’s son put in his pocket the agreed fee, and made each porter take a large piece of the old melon pink sofa set on their back, thus heading toward the door in a convoy. Unfortunately, they then had to stop abruptly before they could take even a single step. Such instances happen every so often on the road as well. You see the vehicle in front of you come to a sudden stop and know instantly that the road is jammed, but being unable to see what had happened ahead, you have no idea what the problem is and are forced to a standstill. The cousin’s son and the porters, who were now doubled under the loads on their backs, were slightly more fortunate. Even though they did not know the ‘whys and wherefores’ of the jam, they could see the immediate cause. Meryem stood at the threshold with ill-omened glitters in her eyes, her heavy frame and large belly, which seemed to have grown even more in the last few minutes, blocking the exit and not letting them pass.

  Her husband Musa was the first to grasp what Meryem’s problem was. He drew to the side with silent resignation and started to fathom the course of events. Musa had an ulcer of the stomach. Whenever he became irritated, his stomach started to burn sourly. So he had found the road to a serene life in accepting his wife as she was. He was particularly determined to avoid conflicts with her during her pregnancy. Yet, since he felt pity for the porters, he deemed they should at least be provided with some sort of explanation for the situation they were in. He began by saying simply, ‘She cannot give up her old sofas. She cannot, I know.’

  In point of fact, this last ‘I know’ was some sort of a forewarning. It was like suggesting ‘Why don’t you simply give up while you are ahead of the game!’ Yet neither the cousin’s son nor the porters could get the message. Accordingly, they put the sofas down and started to argue forcefully. Their steadily swelling anger, however, did not do anything other than make Meryem embrace her cause even more fiercely. The melon pink sofas were indeed worn out but they had a common past with the family. The set had been bought when Meryem and Musa had finally moved out to their own house after spending five miserable years with the latter’s mother and father. Muhammet’s babyhood had been spent on them. The tiny pitch black hole at the corner of the double chair was a memento from the cigarette ash of a relative who had come to see the baby. That relative was no longer alive. Occasionally his scratchy voice smoked from the cigarette burn he had left behind. That is what the past was, that which you could not get rid of. The past did not resemble the crumbs spilled over a rug. You could not shake them out from open windows.

  ‘Well, in that case, we’re taking these new ones back,’ said the cousin’s son as he shouldered one of the aquamarine sofas. Taking his lead, the porters immediately reached for the other pieces of the set. Meryem looked at them with eyes filled with sheer sorrow like a small child witnessing the lamb she had lovingly fed for days now being taken away to be slaughtered. For the following hour, the cousin’s son and the porters tried to persuade her in vain, the former furiously, the latter desperately, having now realized that they might not be paid in the end. Since it could not be decided which sofas were to go and which to stay, all throughout the steadfastly flaring dispute, everyone (except Musa) was left standing, which made them all (except Musa) even more likely to explode. Many times Meryem’s eyes filled with tears, many times she felt nauseous. Considering her nausea, if not her tears, to be a message sent by the baby in her womb, ‘See?’ she asked, joining her hands on top of her belly, ‘Even this unborn innocent’s heart is not willing to let go of the sofas.’ Joining her two skills to maximize power, she both cried and threw up so much that afternoon that by the end of the day the victory was Meryem’s. The cousin’s son was furious at himself for violating the oldest rule of trade history, ‘Never conduct business with relatives,’ and he and the porters, who were equally furious at him for his obvious failure, all left Flat Number 1, Bonbon Palace.

  Even though indubitably victorious, an unexpected problem awaited Meryem. How they were going to place two separate sofa sets and their coffee tables simultaneously inside the already narrow janitor’s flat with its low ceiling, was a challenge to the mind as well as being an eyesore but Meryem would not give up. Making use of every square centimetre available, she managed to make two three-seated, two double-seated and six single-seated sofas fit into the twenty-metre-squared living room by lining them up like a wagon with the coffee tables placed in between. Hence the largest mistake Muhammet had committed this morning when declaring to his mother his intention to not go to school was to take refuge behind one of these furniture wagons.

  ‘You’ll go whether you want to or not,’ Meryem said as she continued to push the sofas with one foot and started preparing her son’s lunch.

  Once again she had made a toasted-cheese sandwich with a slice of white cheese, a slice of tomato and three sprigs of parsley in between. Depending on the day, she also put in a single fruit and just enough money, no more no less, to buy one bottle of buttermilk drink which Muhammet bought from the school canteen. Toasted-cheese sandwiches were prepared at the school canteen too and they were definitely much better and warmer than the home-made version, but even though he had told his mother over and over again not to prepare a toasted-cheese sandwich, not once had he been able to make her listen to him. If only she could be prevented from putting the tomato in and, if not that, at least the parsley, as he could not understand what that was doing there anyway. However, whenever Meryem had her mind set on something, oblivious to all stimuli pointing in the opposite direction, she would simply hide like a sea-creature in the deaf silence of a cave, refusing to come out until the other side had totally given up. It was simply impossible for her to veer-off from these things she had learned at who-knows-what stage of her life: that toasted-cheese sandwiches, for example, were to be prepared with a slice of tomato and three sprigs of parsley. That is what she had been doing every morning for the last five months and one week, and today was no exception. Muhammet, however, felt as if it was not only this tomato and parsley that he carried to school every day, but also his mother’s eye and ear. Should he ever not eat his sandwich or commit the much worse crime of skip
ping school, he somehow felt sure that this red eye of the tomato and green ear of the parsley would immediately break the news to his mother.

  Until school started, it was not with fear but with love that he took pieces of bread into his hands. In those days, the two noses of the breakfast bread belonged to him. As Meryem gave the noses to her son, she did not neglect to take off the small piece of paper attached to either one or the other of the noses. She told Muhammet that this notched piece of paper was a letter from the baker’s daughter. The letter would be made to wait on the side until he had finished off his breakfast. Only then would Muhammet have gained the right to learn what was written in it. To that end, he would eat without any fuss. Even though he was forced to finish one boiled egg every morning, for the sake of reading the letter, he would complete his breakfast without a peep. And when the time came, Meryem took mischievous pleasure in clearing the table as slowly as possible to increase her son’s curiosity, then poured herself a cup of tea and started to read, dissolving the words slowly in her mouth like a lump of sugar.

  The baker’s daughter was a lonely child; she had no friends or siblings. While her father baked bread at night, she would sit alone in between the flour sacks and secretly write a letter to Muhammet. Her mother had died while she was still a baby and her father had remarried. The step-mother constantly tormented this tiny orphan because she had a stone instead of a heart. The poor girl escaped from the house at every opportunity to spend time at the bakery with her dear father. Sweet-smelling soft breads were prepared at the bakery, also crisp simits. As Meryem kept reading these, it never occurred to Muhammet to wonder how so much information fitted onto a piece of paper that was only one times three centimetres-squared. In the universe of nought-to-one years, bread was sacred and every piece of paper with writing on it remained an absolute mystery; as the abstruse magic of the two met on the nose of the bread, the baker’s daughter would shimmer under a halo of sheer enchantment.

  Muhammet wanted to learn everything about her: what the bakery looked like, what she did there, if she liked to sleep in the morning and be up at night when all children her age had to go to bed early, the games she played and, most of all, whether she was beautiful or not… Meryem described the girl as ‘blonde and as delicate as a water lily that blooms in the water.’ She kept her hair long. It reached her waist on each side in two braids. Muhammet, too, had long hair then. Those who saw him on the street thought he was a girl.

  In her letters, the baker’s daughter mostly talked about the people who stopped by the bakery all day long. Old people came, leaning on their canes; they dipped the hard biscuits they bought in their teas and dissolved them noisily in their toothless mouths. There were also the simit sellers, who came early every morning with round wooden trays on their heads. The baker’s daughter wanted to be friends with them but some behaved rudely toward her and said impolite things. Still, there were some among them with hearts of gold. For instance, there was a freckled boy who could hop on one foot while whirling in each hand simits put onto two thin sticks. Muhammet was offended at the baker’s daughter talking so frequently about the talents of this boy but wouldn’t object. Then there were the pastry-sellers who stopped by with their hand carts. There were also women who came by to have pita-bread made at the bakery. They treated the baker’s daughter well. They would always give her a pita before carrying their heavy trays back home. The baker’s daughter would write these things at length, Meryem would read them one by one, time would flow by at a snail’s pace. This halcyon innocence was going to be, however, roughly smashed to pieces in the fall when Muhammet was registered to the 1-G section of the neighbourhood’s only elementary school. First his hair was cut. Now nobody could say he looked like a girl. Then the breakfasts got shorter, and after some time, he learned how to read and write. It was then that he had discovered those tiny papers stuck on each bread were actually the labels of the bakeries and there were no letters coming from the baker’s blonde daughter. Since then, there were no more letters left to be read, nor that moon-faced girl to love. To learn to read was to lose forever the mystery of writing.

  ‘No way, I won’t go!’ Muhammet yelled shrilly, unable to take his eyes off the lunch bag, but his voice was much weaker this time and within a couple of minutes, when Meryem heard a crushed moan like that of a puppy, she knew her son had given up and stopped pushing the sofa. As he emerged from his corner crestfallen, Muhammet threw his mother a vinegary glance.

  Next to the huge frame of his mother, he was tiny like one of the dots on the letter ‘Ö’. When his sibling was born, s/he would be the other dot. Even though Muhammet was only six years old and knew all kids his age were smaller than their mothers, unlike other kids, he had long known and accepted that he would always be smaller than his mother no matter how much he grew up, whatever age he reached, whichever unattainable future he accomplished. His mother, with her wide forehead that wrinkled up when angry, her round face with rosy cheeks amassed, her huge hazel eyes that grew wide when stubborn, her breasts swollen like balloons, her dimpled arms, her chubby flesh bulging from her thighs, her feet as big as a child’s grave and her endless superstitious beliefs and unbelievable energy were all so big as to totally crush every obstacle into dust…and would always remain so…

  Hence he put his toasted sandwich with parsley into his lunch bag, stepped on the flattened corpse of the cockroach he had crushed just this morning at the corner of the aquamarine double chair and, dragging his feet, set out on his way to school.

  Flat Number 4: The Firenaturedsons

  Upon entering Bonbon Palace, the inhabitants of the flat on the right, like all family residences on the ground floor, complained about being in front of people’s eyes too much. All day long, the residents of the building and their guests of all kinds, as well as the door-to-door salesmen who always failed to read the written sign strictly forbidding their presence, could not help stealing a glance through the living room windows of Flat Number 4. With the snooping customers of the beauty parlour across from them added to all these people, the glances aimed at infiltrating the living room via its windows increased ten fold as did the anxiety of those inside.

  Some of the families living on the ground floor might eventually get used to such traffic. There are even several among them who made the most of the situation of being continuously watched from the outside by continuously watching the outside in return – some sort of ‘an eye for an eye’ policy! Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the most well-informed peeping-toms of apartment buildings usually reside in flats at the entrance level…but the Firenaturedsons were not of this type. They could neither tolerate being seen by those coming to the apartment nor intended to spy on them. In their view, the world outside their house was a boundless terrain of everlasting trepidation. In point of fact, when the ‘surname law’ was promulgated in Turkey, if rather than letting each family make the choice, their characteristics were taken into account, the doorbell of Flat Number 4 would have read ‘Everlastingtrepidationsons’ rather than ‘Firenaturedsons’.

  All day long the wide windows of the flat were tightly covered with different yet similarly impenetrable armour – first with cambric, then a sunshade of white cotton calico when the sun was up. Once it started to get dark outside, the thick velvet curtains of the same ashen-colour as the apartment building were drawn all the way across. It was then that the living room windows of Flat Number 4 hid from and guarded against the eyes of the outside world, like a vigilant animal camouflaging itself in the colour of the surrounding soil to avoid being noticed by its enemies. Still, even when all three drapes of cambric, sunshade and velvet curtains were fully drawn, there remained a sliver of light on the right. There at that corner sat fifty-six year old Ziya Firenaturedsons, who had planted himself at that spot ever since the day he was dismissed from the State Water Works for taking bribes. While reading the papers and watching television, drinking coffee and eating pumpkin dessert, he would occasionally peep from t
his sliver with great caution and case the surroundings with anxious and suspicious eyes, without quite knowing what to look for or why. At those rare moments when Ziya Firenaturedsons got up from his sofa, the retired, organic-chemistry teacher, fifty-five year old Zeren Firenaturedsons would replace him. She too would look out from the opening once in a while, but did so less to look outside than to check on the canary in its cage next to the window. The fact that this canary, unlike the preceding one, hadn’t chirped even once, was a burning concern for Zeren Firenaturedsons. She kept saying she had to open the window for the canary to chirp but never found the courage to do so. The memory of that cursed morning when she found her first canary in its cage covered with blood was still too fresh in her mind. Though the criminals behind that deed had vanished when the wretched man called the ‘Cat Prophet’ had moved away from Bonbon Palace (taking all his stuff and entire tribe of cats with him) given all the street cats that roamed around wagging their tails, she worried to this day about the odds that her new canary would meet a similar end. She was particularly suspicious of that tar-coloured, grim-faced giant of a cat, with fur so fluffy it seemed it had skinned and donned the furs of at least four cats.

  Actually Zeren Firenaturedsons did not have the slightest interest in either canaries or any other bird of breed until Zekeriya Firenaturedsons (thirty-three years old) broke his nose for the fourth time. A long time ago, when her son’s nose was a pleasant protrusion on a soft cartilage that had not yet found its form, life was so nice and uncomplicated. Then, as he stepped into adolescence, the gentle curves of his baby face were totally wiped away and his nose somehow underwent an unexpected change, first insolently growing longer and then curving down. All the meanwhile Zeren Firenaturedsons had anxiously watched this transformation as if following the approach of a menacing stranger. She was very content with her own delicate nose; her husband’s, though it might not be regarded as beautiful, was at least well-shaped. Given these facts, Zeren Firenaturedsons felt the need to climb further up the family tree as she firmly believed that all types of flaws in the world stemmed from the genes. In this vein, when she painfully realized that her son’s nose had completed its transformation and would never again be as before, she started to search with a gene-map in her hand to at least find out the person responsible for this mishap. Going back systematically step by step, concentrating more on her husband’s lineage than hers, she first reviewed the relatives she knew and when that did not turn anything up, combed through the old albums one at a time, only to return from her countless trips to the genemap empty handed. With time, she gave up the search.