The Flea Palace

by Elif Shafak

  Then Zekeriya turned fourteen and smashed his nose to pieces when he took wings with the speed of puberty and flew down a hill on his bicycle. Upon receiving the news, Zeren Firenaturedsons felt a relief she could not confess to anyone. Despite her hopes that this unfortunate accident would be a new beginning, setting straight not only her son’s nose but also his behaviour, everything had got worse afterward. With surgery, the cursory performance of which was quickly revealed, the nose that was already rather ugly achieved a hopeless crookedness and stayed this way. Curiously, Zekeriya’s turn toward bent-and-twisted ways occurred around the same time. In the ensuing years, Zekeriya Firenaturedsons would part at every opportunity from the straight and narrow road his mother had placed him on, plunging one by one into all the turns he could find and continuously losing his way until he finally emerged a total source of embarrassment and torment. The year he broke his nose, he started to steal money from his parents; at age fifteen to dedicate his spare time to masturbation, at sixteen to see school as an arena where he could trample on the weak, at seventeen to smoke two packs of cigarettes a day and at eighteen decided to ‘make it’ in the quickest way possible, thereby sticking the nose that increasingly irritated his mother into every kind of filth that he could sniff out. When the outcome of his second nose operation was even worse than the first, Zeren Firenaturedsons’ worries about her son peaked to the highest point while her expectations plunged.

  With the strength Zekeriya collected during convalescence, at twenty-two he got mixed up with various parking-lot mafia, at twenty-three he became infatuated with a divorced bank clerk with two kids, at twenty-four he stabbed the bank security officer his former lover had sent after him and got arrested, at twenty-six he took a nasty revenge against life by breaking the nose of the president of the Association to Beautify Kuzguncuk (who had started to organize the neighbourhood inhabitants into a protest group against the construction of a parking lot in the back garden of an Ottoman mansion), at twenty-seven he went into hiding from his family, then, at twenty-eight, after the discovery of his hiding place, he was hurriedly married off to a relative’s daughter the family elders had found suitable and produced a child that same year. Yet, according to the account of his willowy wife who often came round to the Firenaturedsons’ flat to complain in tears, marriage had not straightened out his habits one little bit. Not that he wandered around outside day and night like before, but he had turned instead into a highly irritable nervous wreck. At the end of one of these nervous breakdowns, he had ‘roughed up’ an inexperienced woman driver who had bumped into his car at an orange traffic light, and after a terrible beating from the brawny husband the following day, had his nose rearranged once again.

  During this time, Zeren Firenaturedsons had eagerly awaited the baby her daughter-in-law was pregnant with. For babies who are conceived when a conjugal relationship stumbles – coming to term while the marriage is still unable to get up from where it had fallen flat on its face – are like cement sacs: tiny cement sacs that plaster the visible cracks, keep the columns of the nest bound and fortify those marriages which are on the brink of collapse. When Zekeriya’s baby was born, like every cement sac, it too had a mission, a double one: to prevent the destruction of first his father’s nose and then his marriage.

  It worked, at least for a while. Exactly one year and five and a half months passed without any incidents. Then came the shocking news which shocked no one. While carrying the baby carriage around in the house, Zekeriya had fallen down the landing of the stairs. Fully prepared to encounter the same scene for the fourth time, each more annoying but much less moving, Zeren Firenaturedsons went to the hospital her daughter-in-law had named on the phone in between sobs. She angrily stormed into the room and looked in bewilderment at her son who stood in front of her in excellent condition. A nose had indeed been broken in the accident at the house, only this time not Zekeriya’s but that of the little one sleeping in the carriage sent down the landing. Upon detecting the bandages she had grown accustomed to seeing for years, right in the middle of her son’s face, which she every time interpreted as a rebel flag waved against her rule, now being transferred to her grandchild’s face, Zeren Firenaturedsons was convinced that there had been a grave genetic transfer somewhere and this defect would never be corrected. There and then she gave up all hope about her son and his bloodline.

  The first thing she did when she returned to Bonbon Palace in hopelessness, was to shut herself in her bedroom and reorganize the drawer of the chestnut wardrobe in which she had kept her son’s baby belongings. After all, whenever we decide to no longer love someone, we must first work out what to do with the belongings we have of theirs. Yet since Zeren Firenaturedsons could never and would not ever discard anything related to her family, the most severe course of action she could manifest was emptying out all her son’s belongings to thoroughly examine each and every item before putting it away once again. As she went through the entire chestnut wardrobe, the culprit gene she had sought for years suddenly appeared inside an old etiquette book jammed behind one of the bottom drawers. A photograph had been wedged, who knows when and by whom, in the ‘How does one talk to an unfamiliar lady in a train compartment?’ section of the book that had an illustration on every page. The answer Zeren Firenaturedsons was dying to find out was hidden in this faded photograph. For the fourth male brother of her husband’s grandfather – the effeminate, coquettish, worthless one who had constantly relayed gossip from one person to another and been primarily responsible for so many family fights so as to be remembered by all as ‘Hoopoe’ – also had a nose exactly like Zekeriya’s. In the photograph taken in his later years, HoopoeHamdi, with a fedora on his head, a rather long cigarette holder in his hand, and smoking a cigarette while gazing dreamily into the distance over the shoulders of the family members, had given his profile to the camera as if to better highlight the ugliness of his nose. Zeren Firenaturedsons was not interested in the fact that the family dictionary had made a basic mistake, in that the bird called Hoopoe had never relayed gossip to anyone except when taking news from the prophet Suleiman to Belkis. The only thing that interested her was the man carrying this nickname. It was a terrible injustice that her one and only son, her firstborn, had seized, rather than those of his own father and mother, the nose of a senile elderly man whom he had not once met in his life and who possessed the most despicable genes in the whole family. What was even more terrible was the link of her one and a half year old grandchild to the same genetic chain.

  With a sudden impulse, she upped and threw this ugly document and the etiquette book into the garbage. And in spite of the many complaints of the apartment administrator Hadji Hadji concerning the putting out of trash at inappropriate times and thus rendering the apartment’s entrance an eyesore, she put the yellow garbage bag outside her front door.

  Five, ten, thirteen…exactly seventeen minutes later, Zeren Firenaturedsons felt a deep remorse. Within a minute, it occurred to her that having until today carefully collected everything she had concerning her family, she should certainly have saved this old photograph regardless of its unpleasantness. When she reopened the door, however, the garbage bag had vanished. A story she had once heard from her mother suddenly came to mind. Her father and mother had placed the cat they had kept at home for years but no longer wanted into a sack, and had driven out as far as they could to leave this sack in some desolate field outside the city. Upon returning home at night, they had found the cat in front of the house indolently waiting for them. Now, as she looked at the empty space left by the garbage bag, Zeren Firenaturedsons caught the cold shudder her own mother had felt upon seeing that tabby in front of her. For the disappointment of seeing how something we thought we had gotten rid of has stuck to us, and the disappointment in observing how something we suppose we could get back anytime has slid away from our hands, are actually reminiscent of one another.

  Similar things had happened in this apartment building; garbage bags wer
e mysteriously taken away from doors before Meryem had a chance to collect them. Yet since those bags had been of little concern to Zeren Firenaturedsons, the riddle of who took them and with what purpose had never intrigued her. Now she wanted her garbage back. Suddenly in her mind’s eye the lost garbage bag turned into a sealed letter – one that was so personal it should never be seen by strangers. Our garbage is private as long as it is still in front of our door: it belongs to us, is about us. The moment it ends up in the garbage can, it becomes anonymous. Those who make a living from garbage can stick their fingers into the cans in the middle of the street or in the garbage piles that rise up at certain corners or in the dumps near the city, but only when they dare to open or even worse kidnap the garbage in front of our door, is it considered an invasion of privacy.

  In the following hour, Zeren ran up and down Bonbon Palace looking everywhere she could think of, getting suspicious of everyone. At one point, guessing that the garbage bags in front of each door could all end up in the same place like streams that all flow into the same river, she went outside and rummaged through the garbage pile accumulating by the garden wall; but the ground had split open and the yellow garbage bag tied with a bow had slid within. Since the janitors were away visiting their village, only one possibility remained: the beauty parlour across from them! Yet she returned from her exploratory visit there with her husband and daughters empty handed and with shot nerves. As if it was not enough for the garbage bag to vanish with the photograph of Hoopoe Hamdi, she had received on top of it a bunch of insults from that shrew of a hairdresser Cemal.

  It was some time after that incident that Zeren Firenaturedsons purchased a canary. Before the canary however, there had been fish of all colours and sorts…

  Actually, Zeren Firenaturedsons hadn’t the slightest interest in fish until the day when she finally accepted after many denials that her older daughter had neuropathy. She loved her older daughter; at one time she had loved her more than anything else. In the days when her son started to follow that crooked nose of his, she in turn had started to pour all her attention and love onto her older daughter. Back then, just as today, Zeynep Firenaturedsons (now thirty-one) was far more active and outgoing than either of her siblings. At age eleven, she wanted to be the principal at the school her mother worked at, a firefighter to spray all the water of the State Water Works where her father worked, bum-around like her brother, crochet lace like her younger sister and become an actor like the father of her best friend at school – all at the same time. Little had changed at age twenty-one. She still wanted to be more than the sum of everyone around her. Pulling the day apart into chunks of time and squeezing a separate occupation into each chunk, she had divided herself into many pieces, doing first one thing then another and, strangely enough, succeeding in most of them. Her intelligence was sharp enough to flatter her mother’s genetic pride. Yet, she was just as unhappy. Whatever she possessed was far from being sufficient, in fact, nothing was sufficient. There was not a single thing in life that was complete; to her ‘completeness’ was just a hollow word in dictionaries. There was no sea, for instance; even within one sea, there were an infinite number of seas each one trying to flow in another direction. The height and frequency of the waves we saw reaching the shore was what remained of inter-sea wars. They arrived only to be decimated bubble by bubble, particle by particle. Likewise, there was no Istanbul. There were tens, hundreds, thousands, millions of groups, communities and societies. The ‘pluses’ took away the ‘minuses’, opposite winds prevented each other’s drift and because no one group was strong enough to dominate another, the city managed in the end to preserve itself though it could not help being constantly diminished in the process. Just like the waves, Istanbul was what remained from the total: from what the rats nibbled on, the seagulls picked to shreds, the inhabitants shed, the cars wore out, the boats carried, the very first air breathed in by all, godknowshowmany babies born every hour…the remnants scattered and shattered, always lacking, never to be completed… Zeynep Firenaturedsons was twenty-two when she had her first breakdown.

  Zeren Firenaturedsons was not at all affected by what the physician said as she took neither the physician nor his words seriously. There was no leaf on any branch of the family tree where one would come across such a disease. The mind of even the darkest blot, Hoopoe Hamdi was in excellent condition. That aside, her older daughter was the smartest, brightest one among her three children. The crisis she went through could be nothing more than late puberty despair.

  Zeynep Firenaturedsons’ quick recovery convinced her mother further that she had been right. Yet, as it soon became evident, this recovery was not permanent but temporary. From then on life for the older daughter of the Firenaturedsons would be divided into two seasons: when she was sick, it was as if she would never recover from her illness, yet when she was well, it seemed as if she would never be ill again. There was no middle ground. No one could tell when she would make the transition from one state to the other. The most evident difference between the two states was her reaction to bad news. When sick, she would only be interested in certain items of news, like a colour blind person only notices certain colours, and she would read the newspapers for this type of news. Street children who got high on paint-thinners, honour crimes, suicides, women forced into prostitution, suicide bombers, babies kidnapped from hospitals, youths taking overdoses, all sorts of tragic occurrences… In addition to the papers, she also carefully searched through the community news: uncovered sewer pits, burst water pipes, uncollected garbage, closed roads, ferocious pickpockets, pastry shops sealed up for filth, butchers selling horse meat, grocers marketing contraband detergent, parking lot gangs, old wooden houses mysteriously destroyed by fire, gas explosions, gas leaks… Unsatisfied with simply following this maddening news, Zeynep Firenaturedsons loved to relate in fullest detail each and every item to whomever she came across. Since she did not come across many people, as she spent most of her time at home with her mother, she recounted the same stories over and over to the latter. When she was well, however, she skipped the amply illustrated news of doom. She was, subsequently, the only one among the Firenaturedsons who read the newspapers consistently.

  Whenever the excited voice of her older daughter talking about catastrophes grated on her nerves, Zeren Firenaturedsons listened to the peaceful bubbling sound of the aquarium she had filled with colourful fish and phosphorescent accessories. Before the fish, however, there had been decorative plants of all kinds…

  At twenty-three, Zelish Firenaturedsons was neither a bum like her brother, nor as intelligent as her sister. Actually, just as one could not say that since childhood she had looked like the other members of her family, neither could it be said that she was like them in type or disposition – and this difference became most striking when compared to her sister. Like a bulky, plump mushroom somehow grown next to a wild, rough plant with flowers that soothe the eye, and inured to the plant so as to suck all its sun and water, Zelish had attached herself to her sister perching on a corner of her life. She was mediocre and hesitant, lazy and inadequate. It was as if seeing her sister incessantly swing between two poles, intelligent and attractive at times, nutty and weepy at others, had confused her so badly that she had decided instead to stop somewhere in between, at a secure threshold. While her brother craved ‘to be something’, her sister ‘to be everything’, she for years had only wanted ‘not to be’.

  Among the Firenaturedsons, Zelish was the one least resistant to anxiety. For other family members, anxiety consisted of a menace coming from the outside. Even though its causes varied, the address remained constant and the world remained outside the thick, velvet, ashen curtains. Where that world was involved, each had their own concerns. Ziya Firenaturedsons was most apprehensive that the bribery trial would reopen to lead to his imprisonment, followed by his appearing in all the newspapers and becoming the talk of the town. The major anxiety of Zeren Firenaturedsons was her children, and after tha
t came, in the following order: the growth of Islamic fundamentalism, being attacked by pickpockets on the streets and another earthquake in Istanbul. For his part, Zekeriya Firenaturedsons mostly feared failing in bed, being powerless in life, the people to whom he had gambling debts and, finally, fear itself. As for Zeynep Firenaturedsons, she was a pendulum that carelessly swung between fountains of apprehensiveness-anxiety-fear and fearless-carefree-untroubled seas.

  Yet for Zelish Firenaturedsons, anxiety was something abstract. It was everywhere like air and almost as intangible: with causes far harder to identify than the reopening of a bribery case, being nailed because of a gambling debt or the coming to power of fundamentalists. To start with, anxiety was not external to a person but rather the very fauna in which s/he lived. For fear and anxiety and worry are nourished by ‘the horror of the probability that everything could turn out to be different.’ (Here are your house, friends, body, family…These are yours, but unfortunately they could all be taken away from you one day!) As for apprehension, that is fed by ‘the horror of the probability that nothing could be any other way.’ (Here are your house, friends, body, family… These are yours, and unfortunately could always remain the same!) When she was in middle school Zelish had been to her friends’ houses a few times. These visits, which gave her the opportunity to see up-close mothers, fathers and families not at all like her own, were a turning point for her, as until then she had thought ‘mother’, ‘father’ and ‘family’ meant basically a carbon copy of the ones she had. The embarrassment she felt about her family grew over the years in folds like the interest rate of a slyly increasing fine.