The Flea Palace

by Elif Shafak

  It was a pure coincidence that had made HisWifeNadia aware of Loretta’s voice three months ago. On the morning of that ill-starred day, she was in the kitchen once again to cook ashure. Even though she had considerably improved her culinary skills since her arrival in Turkey, her ashure was still not as good as she – Metin Chetinceviz more precisely – wanted it to be. Countless experiments had all ended up in flop. There was either too much or too little sugar or some ingredient missing altogether, and if not these, even when everything was mixed in properly, something would go wrong in the cooking phase. When cooked for an adequate amount of time, she would remove the ashure from the stove and dole it out into frosty pink cups. Desperate to have made it right this time, she would take great pains to garnish each and every cup with pomegranate seeds. In the beginning there was a time when she used to overdo this, dissatisfied with the hackneyed decorations of Turkish housewives. Longing for novelty, instead of a dash of grated coconuts, roasted hazelnuts or powdered sugar, she would sprinkle a few drops of cognac or place sour cherries fermented in rum. Back then she was interested more in the legend of the ashure than in how the Turks consumed it.

  The ashure in the legend was the epitome of a triumph deemed unachievable. All the creatures boarding Noah’s ship in pairs to escape doomsday had cooked it together at a time when they could no longer endure the journey, when they were surrounded on four sides with water and were in danger of extinction given an empty pantry and with a long way still to go. Each animal had handed over its leftovers and hence this amazing concoction had emerged by mixing things that would otherwise never match. Though there was not much doubt as to what modern-day ashure was composed of, still the components of this dessert weren’t entirely evident, and extra ingredients things could be added into it any time. It was precisely this lack of a fixed recipe that made ashure so unlike other desserts. Neither the ingredients were restricted nor the measurements fixed. As such, it ultimately resembled a cosmopolitan city where foreigners would not be excluded and latecomers could swiftly mix with the natives. Ashure was limitlessness generated by limited options, affluence born from scarcity and vast assortment burgeoning out of extinction.

  About all these HisWifeNadia wrote at length to her aunt – an elderly spinster with legs covered with purplish varicose veins and hair as red as hell. In her letters HisWifeNadia wrote extensively about how drastically she had changed since her arrival in Turkey, how much time she now set aside to cook and also how she had come to acknowledge her aunt’s analogies between meals and the verses in the sacred book. Her aunt was highly pious and just as good a cook. She resolutely, if not condescendingly, believed these two attributes of hers amounted to the same thing since ‘The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened’ (Matthew 4:33). The meals she cooked for her family, she placed upon God’s table and watching her children gobble them down she felt blissful as if it were He who had been fed.

  ‘There exists a command of God in every meal we consume,’ the aunt was fond of claiming. ‘Needless to say, that is with the exception of the slapdash meals invented by those messy women who apparently have no time to cook and mistake freedom with neglecting their homes, preferring the praise of their bosses to the gratitude of their children!’

  Now in her letters to this aunt, HisWifeNadia wrote that among all the food of the world, if any were to be likened to the Tower of Babel in the Holy Bible, it had to be this ashure. Just like in the Tower of Babel, in the pudding cauldron too, miscellaneous types that would otherwise never come together managed to mingle without fusing into one another. Just as the workers at the Tower had failed to comprehend each other’s language, so too did each ingredient in the cauldron retain its distinctiveness within that common zest. The fig in the ashure, for instance, though subjected to so many processes and boiled for so long, still preserved its own flavour. As they boiled there on the stove, all the ingredients prattled on in unison but each in its own language.

  Hence supplementary ingredients could be incessantly added to this totality. If there was room in ashure for garbanzo beans, why not add corn as well? Where there was fig, there could be plum too, or why not peach alongside apricot, pasta in the company of rice…? In her first few months at Bonbon Palace, HisWifeNadia had for a reason still unknown to her fervently busied herself with such experiments. Yet, ramming each time into Metin Chetinceviz’s fierce retorts, she had in next to no time exhausted her daring to experiment with further combinations. Whatever the legend of Noah’s Arc and the adventure behind it, when it came to putting the teachings into practice, ashure turned out to be a highly unadventurous food. It did not welcome innovations. Her aunt, though never in her life having cooked ashure, must have arrived at the same conclusion for she had felt the need to caution in her letters that just as one could not modify the verses of the Bible as one pleased, it was better not to play with ingredients freely either. Eventually HisWifeNadia had given up, starting to cook the ashure in line with the routine. Be that as it may, perhaps because deep inside she still pined for a boundless variation and had never been able to make do with the ingredients in hand, the end product had failed to meet her expectations all this time.

  Nonetheless, there was one occasion, that ill-starred day, when she had inexplicably been satisfied with her ashure. Having finished the cooking, as usual, she had put the cauldron aside to cool off, prepared the frosty pinky cups and started waiting eagerly for her husband to come home. Now that she had accomplished the outcome she had craved for so long, she expected to finally receive Metin Chetinceviz’s appreciation. Yet, she had soon noticed that stinking amber briefcase of his was not in its place. That could only mean one thing: Metin Chetinceviz was going to head to his second job this evening, from which he would probably return around midnight. Her achievement at ashure had excited HisWifeNadia so much that she couldn’t possibly wait that long. Hence she decided to do something that had never crossed her mind before: to pay a visit to Metin Chetinceviz’s workplace with a cup of ashure.

  Though it had been four years since she had arrived in this city, Istanbul remained a colossal mystery to her. She had seen so little of the city so far that she had no sense of the direction in which its streets lay nor any sense of its structure in her mind. Her ensuing audacity might therefore be attributed to nothing but ignorance. In such a state she headed to the studio on the Asian Side. Though crossing the Bosphorus Bridge had cost her two hours, finding the address turned out to be unexpectedly easy. She left her identification card at the entrance, received information from the receptionist, got in the elevator, went up to the fifth floor, walked to Room 505, peeped inside and stood petrified. Metin Chetinceviz was there sitting knee-to-knee with a woman; he had placed one hand on the knobby, peach-puff kneecap of the latter which puckered like a blemish too timid to come to light. As for his other hand, he employed that to rotate a tiny coffee cup, as he told the woman her fortune. It must have been good news, for a dimpled smile had blossomed on the latter’s face. Fixated with her husband, HisWifeNadia was not able to eye-up the woman as much as she would like to. It wasn’t so much the fact that she’d been cheated on which rendered her speechless, rather the affectionate expression on Metin Chetinceviz’s face. Neither the woman in the room, nor the hand caressing her knee seemed a sight as horrid as the affectionate expression upon her husband’s face, so dulcet and tender, so unlike her husband.

  Up until now, HisWifeNadia had forgiven each and every one of Metin Chetinceviz’s wrongs and in her jaded way endured his never-ending jealousies, callousness, even slaps, believing that he did it all involuntarily, almost against his own will. Yes, her husband treated her in an awful way occasionally – that is, frequently – that is, constantly – but this was because he did not know any better. To sustain a flawed marriage requires, in essence, rather than an obstinate faith in marriage a faith in obduracy as such. We can endure being treated brutally by the pers
on we love, if and only if, and as long as, we can convince ourselves that he knows no better and is unable to act in any other way.

  ‘Love is nothing but neurochemical machinery,’ Professor Kandinsky used to contend. ‘And the most faithful lovers are simply bird-brained. If you meet a woman who’s been married for years, still head-over-heels in love with her husband, be assured that her memory works like that of a titmouse.’

  According to Professor Kandinsky, for love to be immortal, memory needed to be mortal. In point of fact memory had to be fully capable of incessantly dying and reviving just like day and night, spring and fall, or like the neurons in the hypothalamus of those teeny-weeny titmice. These birds with their simple brains and with bodies just as frail had to remember each year a bulk of indispensable information, including where they had hidden their eggs, how to survive the winter chill, where to find food. As their memories were not large enough to shelter so many crumbs of information, rather than trying to stockpile every experience by heaping up all items of knowledge on top of one another, every fall they performed a seasonal cleansing in the cavities of their brains. Hence they owed their ability to survive under such convoluted conditions, not to adamantly clinging on to one fixed memory, but rather to destroying their former memories to create fresh new ones. As for matrimony, there too, just like in nature, being able to do the same things for years on end was only possible if one retained the ability to forget having being doing the same things for years on end. That’s why, while those with weak memories and messy records were able to bandage much more easily the wounds inflicted throughout the history of their affair, those who constantly and fixedly thought about the good old days and yearned for the wo/men they married were bound to have a tough time in coming to grips with the fact that ‘today’ would not be like ‘yesterday’. The miraculous formula of love was to have a mortal memory, one that dithered and wavered incessantly.

  Yet, that day standing by the door with two cups of ashure in her hands, HisWifeNadia had not been able to thwart a particular scrap of information long forgotten in its return to her consciousness. She had remembered. As she stood there watching her husband flirt with another woman, she had recalled how doting he had once been toward her as well, that is, what a different man he once was. Even worse than remembering this, was the observation that his tenderness was in fact not a thing of the past and that he could still behave courteously. He was perfectly capable of acting, if not becoming, altered. If Professor Kandinsky were here, he would have probably found the incident too preposterous to bother with. The aptitude to renew memory by erasing previously stored knowledge was a merit germane to the tiny titmice, not to unhappily married women.

  HisWifeNadia had then taken a step inside, her gaze irresolutely wandering, if only for a minute, over the lovers still unaware of her, still reading fortune in a coffee cup giggling and cooing. As she gaped, first at both of them and then the woman alone, she had found herself immersed in a scientifically dubious contention which was once of profound concern to her: ‘If and when you look attentively at someone unable to see you, unaware of your presence, be assured that she will soon feel uneasy and abruptly turn around to see her seer.’

  However, before the other woman had a chance to do so, it was Metin Chetinceviz who would notice HisWifeNadia standing there. With visible panic he had jumped to his feet. Struggling hard to adjust his gleefully relaxed body to this brusque shift, he had hobbled a few steps only to make it as far as the centre of the room, where he had come to a full stop. In an attempt to make his body a portiere drawn in between the two women, he had stood there wriggling for a moment, not knowing which side to turn to. Not only his mind but his face too had bifurcated as he struggled to simultaneously give a cajoling smile to his lover, whom he had always treated gently, and frown at his wife, whom he was used to treating coarsely. Unable to cling on to this dual mission any longer, he had grabbed his stinking amber briefcase, along with his wife’s hand and hustled both outside. Their quarrel that night had been no shoddier than the ones before, except that it had lasted longer. HisWifeNadia had hitherto been afraid at various instances that her husband might kill her, but now for the first time she had felt she too could kill him. Oddly enough, this gruesome feeling had not seemed that gruesome at all.

  What was truly gruesome for HisWifeNadia was to know nothing about this other woman. Since she had no acquaintances among Metin Chetinceviz’s colleagues, getting this precious information would be more arduous than she thought. Startlingly, she could not even describe her to anyone for however hard she tried, the woman’s face remained hazy in her memory. Still not giving up, she had made oodles of plans each more complex than the previous one, and kept calling the studio with new excuses under different names each time. When unable to attain anything like that, she had started going to the studio every day, wasting four hours on the road, just to patrol around the building. She sure knew that her husband would break her legs if he ever spotted her around here but even this dire peril had not urged her to give up.

  ‘The gravest damage psychopharmacology has wrought on humanity is its obsession with cleansing the brain from its quirks.’

  According to Professor Kandinsky, the human brain functioned like a possessive housewife priding herself on her fastidiousness. Whatever stepped inside its house, it instantly seized, remarkably vigilant of preserving her order. That, however, was no easy task since, like many such possessive housewives, so too did the brain have several unruly, cranky kids, each of whom were baptized under the name of a distinct mental defect. Whenever any one of these kids started to crawl around, sprinkling crumbs and creating a mess all over the house, the brain would crack up with apprehension, worrying about the disruption of her order. It was precisely at this point that psychopharmacology stepped into the stage. To solve the quandary it tried to stop the toddling child and, when that failed, it took the child by the ear and dragged him outside: ‘If you wish to control uncontrollable movements, stop movement altogether! In order to prevent the damage thoughts might generate, bring your patient to a state where he won’t think anymore.’ Hundreds of drugs and dozens of practices aimed repetitively at this result. The world of medicine, notorious for deeming the physician who invented lobotomy worthy of a Nobel, muffled ear-piercing screams into an absolute silence, and favoured death over life by taking from the brain’s hands the boisterous children whom she indeed found troublesome but held dear nevertheless. According to Professor Kandinsky, there was infinite gain in acknowledging straight out that one could never entirely get rid of his obsessions and all attempts to the contrary were bound to cause far more damage than good. There was nothing wrong in entering into the brain’s home and playing according to her rules, as long as the movement inside was not curbed and what was hers was not appropriated from her.

  True, the brain could not tolerate seeing her order being upset. Nonetheless, since there was more than one room in her house and more than one memory within her memory, she could certainly confuse what she put where. The interior was like a multi-drawered nightstand. In the top drawer were the undergarments, in the drawer below the folded towels and the laundered bed sheets under that. In this scheme, wherein the place of every obsession and each mania was pre-determined, one should not strive to fully get rid of a fixation somehow acquired. One could, with the aid of science or deliberate absentmindedness, take something out of its drawer and place it in the one above. After all, the fastidious housewife the brain was, it would certainly search for a towel in the fourth drawer, and not in the fifth one where the undergarments were. ‘Carefully fold the towels you took out from the front lobe and then leave them in the subcortical centre. Do not ever attempt to wipe out your obsessions for it is not possible. Rather, suffice to put them at a place where you cannot find them. Let them stay in the wrong drawer. You will soon forget. Until your brain accidentally finds them again one day while searching something else…’

  Though she was well aware of making
her professor’s bones shudder in his grave, HisWifeNadia had still refused to take her obsession from its corresponding drawer and put it somewhere else. In the following days, she had made frequent calls to the studio her husband worked in, keeping it under surveillance for hours on end. Finally, one day a voice she had not heard before but recognized instantly, intuitively, answered the phone. It was her. ‘Hello, how can I help you?’ she had asked graciously. ‘Who is this?!’ HisWifeNadia had exclaimed in a voice devoid of fury but blatantly shrill. So harshly and snappily had the question been posed that the other, taken unaware, had immediately told her name. Often, identity resembles a reflex – becoming some sort of an involuntary reaction to a stimulus. That must be why, when asked to identify themselves, quite a number of people end up involuntarily introducing themselves rather than asking back, ‘Who the hell are you?’

  Upon hearing the name pronounced, HisWifeNadia had hung up on her. Once having learned the name and workplace of her competitor, it had been painless to discover the rest. Before long she was holding two bunches of information about the woman whose details she now had in her possession. First of all, just like Metin Chetinceviz, she did voiceovers on TV. Secondly, she currently did the voiceover for the leading character in a soap opera titled ‘The Oleander of Passion’.