The Flea Palace

by Elif Shafak

  The hesitant syllables of the stuttering physicist in the schoolroom rang in the ears of Zelish Firenaturedsons: ‘Lll-let us aaa-ttach two cups that bbb-both have equal amounts of lll-liquid with the sss-same density and at the sss-same level. Lll-let us www-wait for lll-liquid to transfer from one ttt-to the other.’ Having said this he then added: ‘Aaa-ctually let us not wait in vain. Ddd-don’t forget kids, aaa-always from high to low and more to less… Otherwise, nnn-no transfer occurs between things that are at the sss-same level.’ If that be the case, Zelish thought, the apprehension levels of both her house and the world outside of Bonbon Palace were one and the same. This made it impossible for her to muster the courage to escape from Flat Number 4 never to return. She had made numerous plans until now. However, since these had been plans to leave rather than to escape, she still had no idea about where to go and what to do if and when she left the house.

  Anyhow, Zeren Firenaturedsons expected little from her younger daughter, whose only distinctive characteristic as far as she could determine was to faint on the spot when she saw blood or anything that reminded her of it. She compensated for the lack of the daughter she would like to have with decorative plants. The only problem was that they demanded far more sun than the rays that barely penetrated the curtains could provide.

  As the curtains of Flat Number 4 blocked off the sun’s rays, these decorative plants withered away one by one just like the glances of strangers. The fish in the aquarium also suffered huge losses over time. The canary was massacred by the tribe of the Prophet of Cats. Although there was a new canary in the same cage now, for some inexplicable reason, it had not chirped even once.

  Flat Number 3: Hairdressers Cemal and Celal

  Upon seeing their all time favourite subject of gossip walk in, the people in the beauty parlour had plunged into the uneasy silence that is typical of those caught in the act. Encountering right in front of your eyes the person you were ruthlessly gossiping about a minute previously might lead you to suspect something mysterious is going on. Likewise, it seemed to the people inside as if Hygiene Tijen had heard the mention of her name from the spirit world. Still the reason for the nervousness they felt in front of her, did not solely stem from their inability to figure out how to straighten the facial expressions they had so carelessly slackened while gossiping. They were equally bewildered at seeing a person who had not stepped out of her house for months now, visiting a place that was probably one of the last locations on her ‘list of potential places to stop by if and when the time is ripe enough to step out one day.’

  The first to shake off this immobility was Cemal. He headed towards the door, saying in an almost merry voice, ‘Welcome, come on in, Misses Tijen!’ without even noticing how impolite it was for him to address by name someone he had not once before met. Such are the side effects of gossip addiction: if you wag your tongue too much and too often about someone, you might may well start to believe that you have known them personally for quite some time. Had Cemal’s intimacy been reciprocated even the tiniest bit, he might have gotten so carried away with this delusion that he could have even reproached Hygiene Tijen, as he did to his regular customers, for not coming more often…but that did not happen. Giving him a once over from top to toe with a coldness that revealed she was not at all thrilled with this greeting, the woman facing him turned her head without saying anything and started to scrutinize everything. Her eyes got stuck one by one on the shorn hair on the ground waiting to be swept away, the threadbare towels that had lost their colour from frequent washing, the stains on the leopard-patterned plastic smocks tied to the necks of the customers, the thin crack on the wall-to-wall mirror, the dead mosquitoes lying around the edge of the counter adjacent to the mirror, the dust on the shelf lined up with boxes of the same brand hair gel, hair foam and brilliantine, hair-balls jammed in the hair brushes, the filling that was sticking out of the tears on the chairs, the shabbiness of the furniture and the bubbly water with doubtful contents on the three-layered manicure cart. The dissatisfaction she felt at what she saw was so deep and her desire to immediately leave the premises so evident, that Cemal, who felt both the place he worked in and himself demeaned, swallowed back all the cries of greeting that were on the tip of his tongue and was reduced to silence.

  However, Hygiene Tijen did not, as Cemal had feared, turn her back and run away. After standing stock-still for a few seconds unable to move as if nailed to the spot, she cut her scrutiny halfway along so as not have to witness any further the hideous and slovenly world surrounding her and slid her looks outside the open window. There she saw her cleaning lady who had come down to the garden to collect the clothes. The woman, whose displeasure at being forced to collect so many clothes so meaninglessly thrown down could be read from her bleary eyes, had seen her at the same moment. Her nerves shot from cleaning all day long, she was so tired that she did not even have the energy to wonder what Tijen was doing down here. Leaving the laundry basket heaped up with clothes on the ground and with her elfin body remaining out in the garden, she slipped her head covered with a mildewed lemon headscarf inside the window of the beauty parlour and murmured in a dead beat voice: ‘I’m going Misses Tijen, I’ve got a family to look after.’ But even she had trouble making a connection between the situation and the words that had left her mouth, for she felt the need to add some sort of an explanation: ‘This is the last basket, I gathered them all. I’ll take it up right now and leave it in the house. I’ve already been up and down five times. Don’t wait for me on Thursday. This neighbourhood is out of the way for me anyhow.’

  Slightly crossing her eyebrows, Tijen gave a silent nod of approval. Even though her turbid facial expression did not reveal what she was thinking, the distress she felt at being here among people she did not know was too evident. She remained standing like that until Celal, eager to save her from this torture, drew near to mend the bridge his twin had tried to build but had smashed-up instead, and asked in a reassuring voice what she wanted done to her hair. It was then that Tijen turned to Celal, redirecting her glance from the space now vacated by the cleaning lady and muttered: ‘Not me, my daughter.’ Next, as if to make her point clear, she slowly drew aside.

  Only then did those in the beauty parlour notice the little girl with curly, ebony hair and exceptionally white skin in contrast, with large eyes tinged with no other colour but black. Her hair was wet, with drops that flowed down from the zigzags of her hair to leave shallow puddles at shoulder level, she looked as if she had been caught on the way over in one of those drizzly summer showers.

  While Celal was busy taking his young customer to the seat in front of the mirror, Cemal, resignedly enduring the treatment he had been subjected to by the child’s mother, invited her to one of the sofas on the side. Hygiene Tijen did not sit down right away. For a few seconds she remained standing, stuck in her uneasiness. She then gave up and halfheartedly perched on the closest sofa she had been directed to. When the manicurist, whose habit it was to ask every customer if they wanted a manicure within thirty seconds of their entering the parlour, suddenly appeared at her side, Tijen was sitting still, her gaze fixed on a stain on the floor, her mind floating elsewhere. The moment she heard the question directed at her, however, she withdrew her hands in disgust, as if touched by an invisible rat, and hid them behind her. Utterly unprepared for such a brusque reaction, the manicurist returned to her seat flabbergasted but as soon as she sat down, a gnawing suspicion crossed her mind. Could she have called her ‘Misses Hygiene’ instead of ‘Misses Tijen’? Could that be why the woman’s face had soured all of a sudden? Thinking in this vein, it would not take the manicurist long to be convinced of having made a blunder. After all, the mind has a proclivity to pessimism. Whenever it wavers between two contradictory options, it tends toward the negative one. For a moment the manicurist thought she should go back and apologize, but the only thing she ended up doing was cowering uneasily behind the manicure cart and secretly glancing around to figure out if
anyone else had heard her blunder.

  In the meanwhile, Su, placed by Celal in front of the mirror right next to the old woman, kept rotating her chair to observe her surroundings with a genuine curiosity brought about by being at the beauty parlour for the first time. Unfortunately, she had to cut her study short since wherever she turned she would encounter female eyes staring at her and rouged lips talking about her. The only person in this strange place who did not inspect her with such a sticky stare, thought Su, was the old woman sitting by her side. She knew her. She was their next door neighbour whom she ran into from time to time and who was always so nice to her. Now, with her tiny, overly made-up face sticking out of the plastic smock covering her entire upper body all the way to her neck, the old woman looked like a bust placed askew on its base, impishly painted in all colours.

  Noticing the girl’s gaze on her, Madam Auntie turned aside and gave her a smile. It seemed as if she was on the verge of saying something but Celal appeared right at that instant with a rectangular wooden plank. Whenever a child came to the beauty parlour, the twins placed this plank on top of the arms of the chairs to extend the height of the small customer. However, as soon as Su had fathomed Celal’s intention, she fervently shook her head from side to side, glancing all the while at the old woman. ‘But I am taller than her!’ she finally protested in a piercing voice. ‘Why doesn’t she sit on the plank too?’

  The objection was more than enough to leave Celal, who had never been much of a speechmaker anyway, speechless. On seeing that in response to the girl’s outrageous remark, Madame Auntie was so far from being offended that she was actually laughing, he handed the plank back to the apprentice without pimples. Right afterward, however, as if having sensed a secret wisdom in the child’s words, he carefully observed through the mirror the reflections of his two unusual customers. Sitting there side by side in front of the wide and long mirror with leopard-patterned smocks around their necks, they were startlingly alike. In point of fact they stood on two opposite poles of time – one was eleven, the other seventy-eight, and yet both existed somewhere on the borderland of the human life-span. Su was mistaken. She was no taller than the old woman. Actually they were exactly the same height and maybe even the same weight. Uncanny as it was, that the frame an old person kept shrinking into would equal the frame a child had been growing into, they were like two elevators having fleetingly stopped at the same level while one was on the way up and the other down. After a second, an hour, a month… one of them would inevitably grow taller than they were at the moment, while the other would move correspondingly in the other direction, and no longer would they be alike. It was extraordinary that they had found each other, thought Celal, at this point of ephemeral equality.

  Once he had found a resemblance between the old woman and the girl, it would not take Celal long to duplicate his love for the former by carving out a similar affection for the latter. That is precisely why he personally undertook not only the preparation of the girl’s hair for trimming but also the trimming itself. He let loose the thick, curly, ebony hair tied up haphazardly by a resin ribbon and brushed with care the strands that still had water dripping off them. In the meantime, he had not neglected to ask the child her name, for whenever adults embark on a communication with a child, the very first thing that occurs to them is to ask their name and then immediately afterward to praise it. ‘What a beautiful name you’ve got!’ Celal beamed but Su paid hardly any attention to his comment, having now plunged into an ad-filled woman’s journal with wild hairstyles on every page. She would have remained glued to the journal for quite some time had it not been for her mother’s bloodcurdling scream.

  Just as dogs approach those most scared of them or as the hair falls in the soup of the one person at a dining table who will be most disgusted by it, so the cockroach Cemal had long lost track of had decided to enter none other than Hygiene Tijen’s field of vision. The apprentice without pimples, determined to grovel to the bosses, immediately intervened. The bug was transformed under his shoe into a compressed residue of revulsion.

  ‘These bugs have taken over everywhere,’ Celal stammered, not knowing quite what to say next. Recently, he had been seeing creepy bugs around that he could not recognize at all. It was as if the variety of different breeds had increased along with their numbers. Some left a nasty smell when crushed. The apprentice ran to get the room spray.

  ‘You need not wait, Misses Tijen,’ wheedled Madam Auntie, detecting the horror that had appeared on the latter’s face. ‘Don’t worry about your daughter. We’ll come upstairs together.’

  Hygiene Tijen was so desperate that she did not even wait for the offer to be repeated. In two seconds flat, she jumped over the corpse of the cockroach, left the price of the haircut on the register and reached the door. Before going out, she stopped for a brief moment to wave at the old woman with appreciation and at her daughter with affection.

  As soon as she left, the manicurist, having sat stiff as a poker for longer than she could tolerate, jumped to her feet. ‘The lady couldn’t stand it!’ she bellowed twisting her face into a sour expression. ‘I bet she couldn’t drink the coffee because she found it dirty. She must have disliked not smelling any bleach in it.’

  The plump ginger-head and the blonde with the cast eye jumped into the tittle-tattle, Cemal turned up the volume of the TV when he saw the video clip he had been awaiting for days finally being broadcast, another round of tea was served to all customers, cigarettes were lit one by one and with amazing speed the beauty parlour became immersed in its usual languor. Having now gotten rid of the guilt of being obligated to look the woman who was an all-time-favourite topic of gossip in the eye, they had no difficulty in going back to where they had left off. This can be called the ‘Full-speed, full-throttle return of the repressed’. Just as nature detests emptiness, so too does the gossip-machine crave the completion of the missing pieces. The fact that there was now a child among them did not stop the gossipmongers in the beauty parlour, nor did the fact that the child belonged to the person they were lavishly criticizing behind her back. For when women start gossiping, not for the simple sake of chewing the fat, but authentically, unreservedly and with all their heart, they tend to deem either their voices inaudible or their children deaf.

  As for Su, it was hard to tell if she was aware of the innuendos revolving around her mother’s persona since she kept hiding behind that gaudy journal. On the page in front of her eyes stood the picture of a woman of mixed-race, who was naked from waist up and with her very short hair spiked and coloured in different phosphorescent hues.

  ‘Do you like it?’ asked Celal, upset about the talks and worried about the child. ‘We can do your hair like that if you want. It would be a great hit at school.’

  ‘No!’ griped Su sullen-faced. ‘My hair has to be shorter than that.’

  ‘Come on, you don’t have to have it so short. Let it grow a bit!’ Celal objected.

  Finally lifting her head from the journal, Su gave him an appraising look. An infinitesimal light furtively flickered and then faded inside the dark well of her eyes.

  ‘No! Then my lice won’t go away,’ she protested, almost shouting.

  The jittery brunette, all her permanent-wave rollers just removed, raised an eyebrow at the blonde with the cast eye. However, realizing she had an audience only goaded Su to increase her voice.

  ‘The teacher called me at school. She had written a slip. “Take this, make sure your mother reads it,” she said. Then they sent me home. My mother was very upset when she read it. She said I had lice. We went into the bathroom and washed it with medicine. We went through two shampoos. “You stay here,” she said, I sat in the tub. Then she took off my clothes from the closet. She threw all of them out the window. She threw the sheets too, and my backpack, she threw that as well.’

  ‘We didn’t see a backpack,’ the manicurist broodingly grumbled, with the discontent of someone who right after leaving the movie theatre learns that s
he has missed the most significant scene of the film.

  ‘You probably picked them up at school. It happens all the time,’ Celal said, trying to dismiss the matter lightly.

  ‘I didn’t pick them up at school,’ Su shrugged her shoulders. ‘Besides, there’s no one at school with lice except me.’

  The women looked at one another with meaningful smiles. It was scarcely news to them that Hygiene Tijen had adamantly sent her daughter to a high-priced school no one else could afford and, by spending all their money to this purpose, had totally wrecked not only her husband’s nerves but also the foundations of her marriage.

  ‘No one in the classroom has lice but me. Now it’ll spread from my head to the whole school,’ giggled the girl. There was a shadowy, blemished tinge to her laughter. It was blemished because it was a laughter oblivious to the reactions of the people around her, originating in her alone to then flow once again back to her, not knowing where and when to stop, and perhaps only indicating a starvation for entertainment. It was shadowed because it was a laughter accelerating at full speed as Su egged herself on, getting out of control as it gained momentum, bordering silently on pain. Her laughter was inconsistent and maladjusted, totally detached from the contents of her talk. It was too unwieldy, too heavy, too much for a child her age.