The Flea Palace

by Elif Shafak

  As for me, I was the exception. From the beginning till the end, I was the only constant visitor of the temple-house; a type of honorary member. I was ambitious, more than was necessary according to some. My report card was filled with ‘As’ for a couple of solid reasons. For one thing, I was tall (three stars), then wide-shouldered (three stars). I will not be as modest as to say I was ‘considered handsome’ for I was always the most handsome in the places I frequented (four stars) and I was extremely impatient and ‘difficult’ (five stars). Unlike the others, I had choices. I certainly enjoyed being here but could have left at any moment. I could have gone and not returned. Ethel was too well aware of this. That is why I was so dear to her. The seed of discord in the middle of heaven. My presence enchanted Ethel and disquieted her guests. Little did I care. Being considered a threat by other males was old news to me. If I had cared about these types of looks, I would have done so much earlier: back when walking the distressed corridor of an eleven year old. With a plate filled with wedding cake in one hand and only underwear on my wiry body, I had almost collided by the kitchen door with my stepfather, I was so relaxed and hungry with the warmth of the wedding night. Until that moment, the poor man had always seen me as the older son of the woman he was going to marry, a boy who had problems but was in essence hungry for love and needy of compassion. I should not do him wrong, he wanted to be a father to me: a talented sonny bestowed by God to a childless, fifty year old man. Yet on the morning of his wedding night when we unexpectedly met in the hall, with my facial features inherited from my father, my half-nakedness that revealed I was about to leave childhood and my tremendous appetite revealed by my filling up my plate (signalling also that I would be getting bigger very quickly), I must have seemed far from being the ‘sonny’ he envisioned. An apprehensive gleam flickered and faded in his pupils. The bad thing was that my mother also realized this, and did so without losing any time. It was as if she had found the remnants of that look when she swept the floors the following day. This did not bode well for anyone because my mother was one of those women who took the tensions that ricocheted among the men in her family, established fickle and knotty alliances and always turned them to her advantage until the last drop; one of those whom, without knowing his name, made Bismarck’s soul rejoice… She turned her older son against her younger one, the younger one against her late husband, her late husband against her new husband and her new husband against her two sons…

  Hence I was rather used to unvoiced maliciousness. I did not care about the looks of others. I was Ethel’s favourite and Ayshin’s lover. I was fond of hanging around the temple-house but that was all. I had other alternatives and more important things to do. As I said, I was ambitious, very ambitious. Not wasting a moment after graduation, I started the doctorate in England and finished it here in Istanbul, in a field that signified nothing to my family: political philosophy. Ayshin too had passed, on her second try, the sociology assistantship examination. We looked good together. Ethel barely caught up with us. When she finally managed to graduate, she made brazen oaths about never entering through the gates of the university ever again and then burnt her diploma with a ceremony at a party she threw in her temple-house. Then, while Ayshin and I gradually built a decent life for ourselves, Ethel destroyed hers with startling speed. First she stopped living as a clan. Then she left that villa and moved into a penthouse that, when compared to its predecessor, was very spacious and cute but was undistinguished. She no longer gathered everyone in her house, spent most of her time not by drawing attention in large crowds but instead by putting up with the whims of her lovers in crowds of two, and though she devoted all her money, love and energy to them, was still not loved the way she wanted. We heard that her congregation was not happy with her behavior, but Ethel was not happy with them either. She grumbled behind their backs at every opportunity even though she knew it would eventually reach their ears.

  ‘Since you have read more books than I did and chose to become social scientists, could you please solve this little puzzle for me? If you observe a wide range of countries all around the world, from the most democratic to the most oppressive, you’ll find in all of them quite a number of writers, painters and the like among the Jews. It’s as if whatever the circumstances, they somehow find a way to develop their brains. With the exception of one country! In Africa, the Middle East, the United States, Europe, Russia…just keep on counting…in all these countries… Only in Turkey something went wrong with the Jews. For whatever reason, in Turkey they didn’t feel the need to use their brains as much.’

  ‘You’re mistaken,’ objected Ayshin frowning. ‘Many of my friends are Jews.’

  Ethel giggled ruthlessly. She never forgave such mistakes. I however was split in two. One part of me had relished the naivety Ayshin had displayed in defending Jews in front of her Jewish friend – this must be the part of me in love with her. My other half had looked at Ayshin with the anger I felt toward those who tried to roll up the qualities they acquired thanks to their family trees, the exceptional family structures they were born into, the elite schools they attended and the things life had bestowed upon them which they then tried to pass as merits they themselves had developed – this must be the part that made her fall in love with me.

  Yet Ayshin must not have been aware of either Ethel’s solid reaction or my bifurcated one, for she plunged into her assertion full force: ‘They all entered good university departments. Many of them received very wonderful grants and they’ve now risen to quite good positions.’

  ‘And I tell you this,’ Ethel had said, clicking her fingernails again. ‘You talk about occupation, I, talent. You mention career, I genius. Economists, academics, lawyers, surgeons…I beg you, please put these aside and move on. I’m talking about something else. Why don’t the bohemian, bibulous poets or hedonists, the perverse or even better gory film producers and such emerge from among them? Why don’t my people make music? And on those rare occasions that they do, why is that that they always sweetly sing the syrupy traditional songs of our Sephardim grandmothers and can’t come up with something totally wicked, like a protest song?’

  ‘My people’ was the final stage: against Ayshin’s insignificant defense, Ethel’s regal attack. Whenever the location of a group is debated between someone belonging to that group and someone not, the patent right always comes smack onto the agenda: the end of the road, the dry well of all debates, the last curtain…when everyone withdraws to where they ultimately belong, the married to their family-homes, the peasants to their village-homes… At that point I lit a cigarette, having drawn both of them into my own vicinity, and sat back. It did not make a difference to me. Both of them were, at the same time, my women.

  Men committing adultery find quality significant: they enjoy receiving from another woman love that is in essence different from what they receive from their wives. Yet women committing adultery find quantity significant: they enjoy receiving from another man love that is more than that which they receive from their husbands. Cheating on Ayshin with Ethel flattered my vanity. Those days, I very much enjoyed observing their differences. As to whether Ayshin cheated on me or not, I never attempted to find out.

  ‘Okay, but these are so for a reason,’ Ayshin had spoken up, by no means intending to give up. Then she had gotten down to business and commenced with a detailed explanation. Trying to employ objective expressions, she had talked about the shaky psychology of being a minority, the constant insecurity generated by the crisis of belonging and the domination nurtured not by concrete threats but by abstract tenets. She did so neither to be a smart aleck, nor to display her interest in talking big. She talked like that because this was the only language of debate she knew. Yet debating in an academic language is like going to bed with a woman who does not put a drop of drink into her mouth. You can rest assured that she will remain standing until the end of the night, never go overboard and never lose it. Yet you have to accept upfront that you would not be able to r
elax around her, let out wild yells, hit bottom, pass out in each others arms; in short, that you would not have any fun whatsoever.

  ‘What you say is nice but totally useless,’ Ethel had remarked, girding up the swords she had just sharpened. ‘If gloomy writers, slovenly producers or socially undesirable painters had emerged from among the Jews in Turkey, do you know what explanation the generations succeeding us, say fifty or a hundred years later, would’ve given? Exactly the same ones you used just now. They would’ve said, “Yes, so and so was a great artist or thinker. What made him so great, what separated him from all the rest?” Then they would’ve started to count the reasons you gave: the psychology of being a minority, alienation from the language, insecurity, being unprotected and so on. Thus everything you now see as an obstacle would have become a cause for difference, for privilege even. This is how these things operate. If a lame man can’t dance, we say, “Of course he can’t dance, he’s lame!” but if the same man is an expert dancer, then we say, “Of course he has to be better than others, for he’s lame!” ’

  Ayshin had flinched, as if avoiding a pushy salesman, shaking to one side then the other both her head and hands. I knew that motion too well. It meant, ‘Thanks, but I’m not buying that nonsense.’ During our three and a half years of marriage, she would conclude almost all our arguments with the same gesture.

  Flat Number 8: The Blue Mistress

  Shooting up the stairs, the Blue Mistress unlocked the door of Flat Number 8 panting. She was very late. As if it weren’t annoying enough that the visit to the beauty parlour had taken so long, she had also spent too much time afterwards shopping. Once inside the flat, she emptied the contents of the shopping bags onto the kitchen counter. The food could wait, her appearance could not. She dashed into the bathroom. While brushing her teeth, she scrutinized the waves in her hair with discontent. This new style had seemed much nicer in the mirror down at the hairdresser than here in her bathroom. Being one of those women who sometimes envied curly hair and sometimes straight, but in each case only ever on others, her hair had all this time been oscillating, unable to lean in either direction. Now that chatterbox of a hairdresser had upset this delicate balance, making it far curlier and trimming it far shorter than she had asked for. She stole another glance at the full-length mirror while taking her clothes off in the bedroom. Though her hips had somewhat widened lately, she was still fond of the way she looked. If only those cuts were not so visible… She applied a handful of foundation cream, the same colour as her skin, managing to conceal the scars once again.

  The drawers opened one by one and she paused for a fleeting moment but did not have to ponder for long over which underwear to pick since it seemed to make no difference to the olive oil merchant. That had not been the case in the beginning. Back in those days, he wanted her to wear the naughtiest underwear possible, buying it personally as a ‘present’ to her. He always chose the same colour: a lucid, brilliant, infinite sky blue. The Blue Mistress liked this colour, she really did, except in panties or bras. When it came to the underwear in her gift packages, she felt uneasy about the incongruity between the docility of their colour and the licentiousness of the intention behind. A garter could be as desire-inducing a colour as cherry, as carnal as black or as deceptive as white; even violet in its flirtatiousness or pinkish in its hypocrisy…but it could not be a lucid, brilliant, infinite sky blue. Fusing that specific hue with those specific intentions was pretty much like diluting milk with water, or even worse, adding milk to rakι. Not that it wasn’t possible for a man to enjoy both, just as long as he refrained from drinking them simultaneously. Of lambs turning into wolves or wolves into lambs, she had seen plenty, but it was the ones trying to be both lamb and wolf at the same time who spawned the worst monstrosities while believing themselves to be innocuous in the meantime.

  It was the half-lamb/half-wolf who had harmed her the most – even more than those who liked to remind her of the unsurpassable border between women-to-marry and women-to-bed. Such men lusted after what they vilified and vilified what they lusted after. The Blue Mistress had once seen a hoodwinker on the street tricking the passers-by with three tin cups on a cardboard box. As he changed the places of the cups, the bead hidden in one of them was displaced too. At the onset it was in the first cup: ‘Be ashamed of your desires!’ In a flash it moved into the second cup: ‘Be ashamed of the woman you desire!’ Then, in one move, there was the bead again, now under the third cup: ‘Desire the woman who brings you shame!’ That, in turn, meant that sooner or later these men would start to scorn the women they slept with.

  In order not to repeat this vicious pattern, the olive oil merchant kept seasoning their affair with spices that would outweigh both the zest of desire and the tartness of shame. Always a prolific diary-keeper, the Blue Mistress had written down when she had first met him: ‘If someone awakens in us a desire we’d rather not have, we try not to like that person. However, if that fails, we then seek something likeable in him, something good enough to make the desire for him less bothersome, more endurable.’ It was akin to wearing a celestial glove, of lucid, brilliant, infinite sky blue, so as not to have to touch muck or mess while enjoying rummaging through the debris.

  In the spice basket of the olive oil merchant there wasn’t the slightest trace of lust. All sorts of other things were present there but for some reason during the past few years he had always fished out the same spice: compassion. He felt compassion toward the Blue Mistress: she was not the type of girl to live a life like this. Then there were times when he felt compassion toward himself: he was not the type of man to live a life like this. Too often he talked about Kader as if she were a wicked whore. As for the Blue Mistress, she regarded this lust covered with compassion like a dirtied, mud-covered slice of jellied bread lying on the ground. She had no appetite for it. At times like this, she likened her position to her hair. On the one side was the wife of the olive oil merchant, smooth and even like straight hair, on the other was this whore called Kader, bumpy and imbalanced like hair with permanent wave. Then there she was, in the middle of the two, swaying toward either end…semi-wife, semi-whore…both blue and a mistress…

  She knew how heartbreaking it had been for her parents when she had left home for good but still could not help but suspect they had also been relieved deep down. They were both nice people but the nets they repetitively threw into the sea of parenthood rarely turned up anything decent. Though never at ease with their love and hardly able to bear their attention, this ingratitude of hers was hard for even her to handle. She could have gotten a better education if she had so wanted, could have at least graduated from high school, but after that ‘incident’, she had felt barely any desire to return to school. Before she knew it, the scar on her face had drawn a hair-thin boundary, first between her and her peers, then between her and the age that she lived in. She had to leave that house. If given a choice, the only place she would like to go was, undoubtedly, the universe that her grandfather inhabited…a grandfather whom she loved dearly, lost too early…After losing her dede, tracing the jumbled footprints of people from all walks of life in Istanbul, she had tried to track down those that belonged to the dervishes.

  Hard as it was she had managed to find them – scattered here and there on the two sides of the city and gathered, like moths attracted to light, around their own dedes. She had joined them. For two years, she had participated every week without fail in the sermons of three separate religious orders in Istanbul, seeking solace in the resemblance between the words she heard from their sermons and those she had heard back in her childhood from her own dede, but it had not worked. It wasn’t that the words were not reminiscent of those of her grandfather’s, for they were. Nor was it that the people who uttered them were not sincere, for they were. Still, for some reason it just did not sound the same. Little by little she came to realize that in these meetings it wasn’t the talks that she was really interested in but the chants that followed. She would sit si
de by side with the other disciples while the dede talked, but rather than be all ears like the rest, she would withdraw behind a solid deafness. Only when the chant started would she reopen the sealed gates of her ears. How profoundly she loved that moment, that true and total desertion of the body, again and again, sealed in the infiniteness of repetition. It wasn’t the words articulated there but instead the beat of the drums and the notes of the underlying melody that took her away. However, no matter how far she swerved she could never quite shake that old feeling of incompleteness. After a while she had started to feel like a hypocrite. Why had she insisted on being one with those she felt so apart from? Every chant attended left her yet another mile away from the other disciples. Just as she had been unsuccessful in reciprocating the love of her parents, neither had she found peace next to those who constantly preached peace.