The Flea Palace

by Elif Shafak

  Around these hours of the afternoon, time in Flat Number 5 gradually slowed down. The same things were always repeated every day in the same order. Early in the morning their mother went to work and their father to look for work. When left alone with their grandfather, every weekday morning without fail, an argument broke out among them regarding the television. Hadji Hadji would rather not have the children watch much television but, if they did, preferred it to be one of those insipid children’s programmes or even better, the cartoons that were simultaneously broadcast on a couple of channels. The kids however had a different choice, insisting on watching the morning programme hosted by a chatty and flirtatious person who wore outfits that, depending on the day, either left bare the red rosebud tattoo on her belly or the cleavage of her breasts. When their request was not granted, they either took out the battle-axe and went on the attack or became fussy and refused to talk to their grandfather. Hadji Hadji’s reaction also varied daily. Now and then he put up with the situation and while the children watched the programme, he kept reading one of the four books he owned – a number which had remained the same over the years. At times he got hold of the remote control and, in spite of all the objections buzzing around him, fixed the screen on the first cartoon he could find. On other occasions, he tried to draw his grandchildren’s attention away from the screen and wore out his imagination by concocting various games, each more strained than the other. Whatever he did, however, he could not wrest power away from them, especially not from his oldest grandchild, until noon. After that things got worse for the old man for they would, just like they had been doing every weekday for the last two months, pile up all the sheets, pillows and covers in the middle of the living room and start to create ‘Osman’.

  Two months previously, Hadji Hadji had read to his grandchildren the first three chapters of one of his four books entitled, ‘How Was a Magnificent Empire Born and Why Did it Decline?’ When he took a break, he got, as usual, three dissimilar reactions from his three grandchildren. The seven and a half year old had listened austerely, attentively and was now ready to voice a couple of issues of great interest to him: ‘Grandpa, how many tents did the Turks have when they arrived in Anatolia?’ ‘A thousand!’ Hadji Hadji hastily made up. Yet that response did little to satisfy the child’s curiosity. ‘About how many people in all were there in these thousand tents?’ ‘Ten thousand!’ Hadji Hadji roared. The anger dripping from his response only provoked his oldest grandchild even more. ‘When the Turks came with their tents, weren’t there already other people in Anatolia?’ ‘No, there weren’t, this land was empty, whoever was there had run away,’ grumbled Hadji Hadji. ‘Okay, did the Turks settle in the houses of those who had run away? Or did they continue to live as nomads for some time? Did they build their first cities out of tents? In that case would that be a tent-metropolis? How could one draw on a map a city that was peripatetic? How…?’

  ‘Shut up!’ Hadji Hadji had replied losing control.

  The child had indeed shut up but all the questions that had accumulated on his tongue circulated in his mouth, moved up through the passages of his nose and climbed up from there to trickle into his teardrop ducts, so in his moss green pupils curious, insistent, accusing sparks of questions continued to light up and fade away like fireflies flitting about on summer nights.

  In order not to keep looking at him, the old man had turned with a weak expectation to the six and a half year old, but judging from the indifferent expression on his face the only thing he registered from the story was that there were many concubines in the harem and it was not a good thing to be born as the brother of a sultan. With a final crumb of hope, Hadji Hadji turned to his youngest grandchild, the five and a half year old. It was then that the little girl, her face bright with excitement, jumped on her grandfather’s lap, nudged him with her pinkish-white elbows and with the cutesy manner she assumed whenever she wanted anything from grownups, cooed: ‘Come on, grandpa, let’s build a tent too!’

  Had Hadji Hadji not been so distressed with the apathy of his male grandchildren, he probably would have hesitated before jumping at this idea, but since with a sleight of his hand he had transferred all of his love to the youngest grandchild in order to punish the other two, he soon found himself among piles of sheets and pillows busily building a tent in the middle of the living room. They too would have a tent just like the dynasty of Osman.

  Compared to the tents they later built, the first one was rather primordial. The grandfather and the child had produced a small, covered area by throwing a few sheets over the four chairs arranged in a square and then filling this area with pillows. Yet the tent, even in this simple form, had succeeded in drawing the attention of the other two who had not participated in the game and had, until then, suspiciously watched everything from the side. After a while, they could not resist and, dying to see this hidden, compressed world constructed in the middle of the living room, had parted the sheet intended to be the door and joined their grandfather who was sitting cross-legged on the pillows. Surprisingly Hadji Hadji felt swelling within him the type of pure pride he had yearned for so long. It was this pride or the possibility of it that had led the old man to wholeheartedly embrace this game. Yet how wretchedly shaky the foundations were, and how fragile the domination he had by chance established in the house, would become evident in no more than a day.

  Around the same time the next day, the five and a half year old had placed herself in his lap in exactly the same manner: ‘Come on, grandpa, let’s make Osman!’ When the old man heard the name ‘Osman’, his hair stood up as he had not yet been able to get rid of the fatigue the previous tent-exercise had produced on his out of shape legs and stiff back. Alas, neither his dulcet warnings nor his seething anger had been of much help in teaching the girl that the tent was not supposed to be called ‘Osman’. Such was the girl’s nature. Once she coupled one word with another, no authority in the world could sever this linguistic connection in her mind. Just as ghosts, spirits, ogres, hellhounds and the deceased were altogether lumped in the category of ‘JINN’, so too was the tent called ‘OSMAN’.

  After that Osman became an essential part of their lives. Now every day around the same time the children started to get antsy like drunkards awaiting their drinking time. Within half an hour, all the sheets, bedspreads, mattresses and pillows were piled in the middle of the living room. Even though Hadji Hadji hoped in vain that, with their record of getting bored with all the games they played, his flighty grandchildren would also get their fill of Osman, this was not to be. On the contrary, they gradually expanded the boundaries of the tent adding new rooms, sections and cavities, leading a blissfully nomadic life in an area of five and ten square metres. Osman was rebuilt at noon every day, stayed in the middle of the living room until late in the afternoon, and then when it started to get dark outside, was taken down in a flash minutes before the parents were due back from work.

  There were a number of other incidents repeated daily without exception. For instance, the phone rang around the same time, around 11:45 a.m., after the last minute theatregoers had settled in their seats for the noon show. Each time it was the oldest kid who answered the phone. He reported what they had done since morning, always giving the same responses to the same questions: yes, they had finished their breakfasts…no, they weren’t being naughty…yes, they were watching television…no, grandfather wasn’t telling a story…no, they hadn’t turned on the gas…no, they didn’t mess the house up…no, they didn’t hang out of the balcony…no, they didn’t play with fire…no, they didn’t enter the bedroom…Allah was his witness that grandfather didn’t tell a story…’ and so forth…

  Even though deep down the Daughter-in-Law was suspicious of her older son’s honesty, never willing to call her father-in-law to the phone, she had to be satisfied with what she heard. Meanwhile, as the seven and a half year old held the phone in his hand and recited his usual responses with a suggestion of slyness in his voice, not even fo
r a second did he take his eyes off his grandfather. He was more than aware of the continuous tension between the two adults and had long since discovered that he could bolster his power by favouring, as the occasion dictated, one adult over the other.

  Not only did they have their meals inside Osman, but they listened to their bed-time stories there as well. Every day after lunch before their nap, new personalities joined them: coldhearted stepmothers, ill-fated orphans, hellhounds escaping from the bowels of the earth, bandits waylaying people, female jinns seducing men, bloodied fighters, certified madmen, poisonous rattlesnakes, spiteful hags with sagging flesh, malicious skeletal demons and ogres with protruding eyes…all crammed into the tent. Once they arrived, they never wanted to leave. As the concluding sentences of the fairytale still smoked in the air weariness descended upon them. Everyone curled up in their place. Hadji Hadji was the one to fall asleep the fastest and the easiest, followed by the five and a half year old and then the six and a half year old. As his grandfather’s snores and his siblings’ puffs filled the tent, the seven and a half year old got up quietly. First he stopped by his grandfather and watched him. He watched as if examining a creature he did not know, a tropical fruit he had not tasted or a clam filled with surprises, Hadji Hadji’s round, greying beard rising and falling with each intake of breath, the amber prayer bead that had slid from his fingers, the greying hair creeping from his chest to his neck, his cracked lips, the deep wrinkles that had cut paths across his forehead… He had started to examine his grandfather two and a half years ago and was soon about to complete his discovery.

  That mild, fragrant day when he had met his grandfather for the first time had been a turning point for the child, as it also happened to be the last day he was able to walk around outside. Then his illness had advanced so rapidly and had become so visible that he had never been out onto the streets ever again.

  In the fading residues of that distant past, when he was still considered or at least looked looked like a normal child, when his father and mother had to go to the airport to pick up his grandfather, they had taken him along as well. Until that day, he had not heard much about the old man. All he knew was that his name was Hadji, he lived with his wife in a far away city, they had had a traffic accident when travelling to Istanbul to see their grandchildren for the first time and the grandmother had died in the accident. After losing his wife, grandfather Hadji had cried a lot, been hospitalized for a while and gone on the pilgrimage to Mecca as soon as he was discharged. Having now completed the pilgrimage he was coming back. This was all the seven and a half year old who had then been five knew about him. On the way to the airport, he had also acquired another piece of noteworthy information: from now on, grandfather Hadji was going to live in Istanbul with them.

  The part of the airport reserved for the passengers’ relatives was jammed. After descending from the plane and completing a whole bunch of bureaucratic procedures the passengers passed through the automatic door swishing open to be reunited with their awaiting relatives. As the kid waited in the crowd holding tightly onto his mother’s and father’s hands, he carefully looked at every person passing by. All these old men back from their pilgrimage were surprisingly like carbon copies of each other and the reason for this similarity was not only that they were all dressed in the same colour, were of the same age and height and possessed the same round, greyish beard. They also unerringly repeated, as soon as they went through the door, the same motions in the same sequence. When the door opened, they all narrowed their eyes as if suddenly encountering a beam of light, looked at the crowd, took a few steps in this state, then saw someone and dashed in that direction, put down the suitcases and exuberantly embraced the acquaintances who scurried toward them. In making their entrance, the elderly copied one another exactly, it was as if, rather than a plane load of different people, the same man kept walking in through the automatic doors again and again.

  Then the door swished open one more time and through it entered a man whom he guessed, from his mother’s and father’s reactions, was his grandfather. This man, though dressed just like the other pilgrims, still looked like a stranger who had mistakenly become mixed up among them. It was as if he was not even old but was rather a successful imitator who had plunged into the changing room at the last minute to don the clothes of one of the others. He almost looked like them but was nevertheless an imitator because something was obviously missing. Blinking his moss green eyes, the kid looked once again and only then he grasped where the deficiency originated: this old man did not have a beard! Where there had to be a beard shone a dazzling white crescent curving up – the area within the crescent having amply received its share from the sun, the north of his face was pitch dark as night while the south as pallid as a cloudless morning.

  The man with the ‘unfinished face’ had longingly embraced the grandchild he was seeing for the first time. Then he had sequentially embraced his son, again his grandson, the Daughter-in-Law, again his grandson, again his son, and then again and again his grandson. Meanwhile, soon everyone around them was embracing one another, the airport waiting area filled-up entirely with clusters of humans who cried, kissed, embraced and bumped into one another. When the elderly men returning from the pilgrimage had somewhat satisfied their yearning for one another, they became deeply occupied with introducing each other to their own families which this time around led to handshakes, hugs and embraces across the clusters. In that uproar, the kid passed around from one lap to another had registered another observation in his memory book: those ‘Mehmets’ returning from the pilgrimage were called ‘Hadji Mehmet,’ and the ‘Ahmets’ were called ‘Hadji Ahmet.’ On the way back, he had asked his father the question that had preoccupied him, ‘If one had to go to the pilgrimage to deserve the name Hadji, how was it that his grandfather’s name had become Hadji by birth, before going to the pilgrimage or indeed anything? And since his name was already Hadji, why on earth had he gone to the pilgrimage?’ While his face was incomplete, it was as if his name was overly complete. ‘You rascal!’ his father had scolded him. As that was far from being a satisfying answer, it only helped to serve the kid’s conviction that his grandfather was unlike any other grandfather. Ever since then he thought his grandfather was somewhat ‘eccentric.’ That the old man had been obliged to cut his beard because of a bad rash a day before his return from Mecca and had quickly grown it afterwards, thus after a short while looking like all other grandfathers at the airport, had little effect in convincing the boy to the contrary.

  Now after all these years, even though he still studied his grandfather, he had begun to cut his examinations shorter with every passing day, mainly because he did not find him as interesting as he had in the past. Once bored of watching the old man, he got out of Osman without a sound and started to tiptoe around the house. To be up when everyone else was asleep was a terrific privilege. The house would then resemble the castle in ‘Sleeping Beauty’. For, unlike his siblings, the seven and a half year old did remember the fairytales his mother used to tell them in the mornings long before she had started working at the cinema of a shopping mall. He recalled those fairytales and discerned the difference between those and the ones told by his grandfather.

  While the others slept, he would go into the kitchen, light the oven, play with matches, leaf through the four books of his grandfather, the total number of which had stayed constant through the years, snack on junk food, go into his parents’ bedroom and poke around the wardrobes, dump his mother’s jewellery on the bed, count the money his father hid at the corner of the wardrobe…he made the most of doing everything that was forbidden. Then, when the others’ waking up time approached, tiptoeing back into the tent, he lay down in a corner and patiently waited. He did not have to wait too long. Every day the garbage truck entered Cabal Street around 5:30 p.m. The voices of the garbage collectors, the clatter of the emptied cans and the grumble of the engine rose up from below. There were cars parked on each side of the road, so
the garbage truck could not manoeuvre easily and the traffic would be jammed for sure. As soon as the honks of the car horns reached Flat Number 5 of Bonbon Palace, Hadji Hadji was jolted out of his sleep, almost screaming. In point of fact, Bonbon Palace was one of the last places where this old man, who carried in the wrinkles of his forehead, his face and in his heart the traces of the traffic accident he had been through, could comfortably take a snooze.

  The children also awoke with Hadji Hadji’s scream. First the five and a half year old woke up, muttering fussily. Then the six and a half year old got up, lazily yawning. As for the seven and a half year old, he would not immediately get up from the place where he had laid down only a couple of minutes previously, but instead counted silently to twenty to give the others enough time to fully wake up. Then, standing up groggily he would rub his moss green eyes and, hiding the sharp glint within them, approach the open window and stretch his neck to look at the doors of the outside world filled with secrets which he deeply sensed could be much more horrifying than all the fairytales he had heard.

  Flat Number 7: Me

  Strange as it was, I woke up without the help of an alarm clock this morning. As if that was not astonishing enough, when I woke up, I found myself already awake. My eyes were open as if they had awoken by themselves and having once done that, had taken to wandering around the ceiling. For a fleeting moment I thought I was looking at myself from the ceiling. I cannot say I liked what I saw.

  Whenever I fall asleep here, my legs spill over from the couch but this time I seem to have forgotten to take off my shoes to boot. My head had slipped from the pillow, my neck was sore. In the dent extending from the side of my mouth to my ear, I detected a bubbly, pasty spittle – befitting a dog gone rabid or a baby regurgitating the food just consumed. My shirt had wrinkled up on me, the pain of lying down lopsided had hit my back and my mouth was parched. I had also thrown up on the corner of the rug. At least I had thought of taking off my trousers, but as ‘Ethel the Cunt’ likes to articulate in yet another aphorism of hers: ‘To be without pants while in socks and shoes can make a man only as attractive as a candied apple with the exposed parts all rotten…’ or something like that. When viewed from this angle, perhaps I should consider myself lucky for waking up alone this morning, just like I had done for the last sixty-six days.