The Flea Palace

by Elif Shafak

  On the following day, before the news was broadcast, HisWifeNadia had sat down in the divan with burgundy patterns on a mauve background – the reupholstering of which she constantly put off – and watched in complete calmness an episode of ‘The Oleander of Passion’. When it was over, she decided that she simply loathed it. The plot was so absurd and the dialogues so jumbled that even the actors seemed to be suffering. Nonetheless, the next day and at the same time, there she was once again in front of the TV. Ever since then, with every passing day and every concluding episode, her commitment, if not immersion, had escalated. Academics researching housewives’ addiction to soap operas tend to overlook this, but there can be a variety of reasons for becoming a viewer, some of which are not at all palpable. Before she knew it, HisWifeNadia had become a regular viewer of ‘The Oleander of Passion’. Soon the soap opera occupied such a prominent place in her daily life that she could barely endure the weekends when it was not broadcast. She hardly questioned her fixation and barely attempted to overcome it. She solely and simply watched, just like that…and months later, as she sat there watching the eighty-seventh episode, she could not help the voice and image of Loretta jumble in her brain.

  Though ‘satisfactory failure’ was an oxymoron, there could still be unsatisfactory successes in life. Professor Kandinsky was fond of saying he was both ‘unsatisfied’ and ‘successful’; which was better off than many others, he would add, especially those who were both satisfied and successful: for that specific condition was germane to either the dim-witted or the exceptionally lucky. As excess luck ultimately stupefied, the end result was the same. Nevertheless, toward the end of his life, the professor too had tasted a breakdown. Both the dissatisfaction and the failure grabbing him stemmed from the same cause: ‘The Theory of the Threshold Skipping Species,’ a project he had been working on for four years.

  Even when wiped out by a catastrophe, bugs still retained an amazing immunity to anything that threatened them with utter extinction. Around 1946 they seemed to have been resilient to only two types of insecticides, whereas by the end of the century they had developed resistance to more than a hundred kinds of insecticides. The species that managed to triumph over a chemical formula skipped a threshold. Not only were they unaffected by the poisons that had destroyed their predecessors, but they ended up, in the long run, producing new species. The crucial issue, Professor Kandinsky maintained, was not as much to discover how on earth bugs acquired this particular knowledge as to discover knowledge in its entirety. According to him, those premonitions that were a long source of disappointment for the Enlightenment thinkers, who regarded the social and the natural sciences as one totality, would be realised in the century that was just arriving, along with its catastrophes. Humans too were sooner or later bound to skip a threshold. Not because they were God’s beloved servants, as the pious believed, not because they possessed the adequate mental capacity, as the rationalists assumed, but mainly because they too were condemned to the same ‘Circle of Knowledge’ as God and bugs. The societal nature of bugs’ lives and the intuitive nature of human civilizations had been attached to each other with and within the same durable chain: sociobiology. Consequently, just as artists weren’t as inventive as supposed, nor was nature aloof from craftsmanship. To stay alive, whenever they could, cockroaches and writers drew water from the same pool of knowledge and intuition.

  ‘I doubt if they have read even the first page,’ Professor Kandinsky had roared when the news of his report being rejected had reached him. It was a week before his death. They had sat side by side on the steps of the little used exit door of the laboratory where they worked together – a colossal building where Russia’s gifted biologists worked systematically for thirteen hours a day. Yet from a distance, it was hard to tell how huge it was for it had been built three floors under the ground. Since the feeling of being among the chosen brings people closer to each other, everyone inside was highly polite to one another. Only Professor Kandinsky was unaffected by the molecules of graciousness circulating in the air. Not only did he decline to smile at others but also sealed his lips except when forced to utter a few words. He had little tolerance for people, the only exception being Nadia Onissimovna who had been his assistant for nine years and who had won his confidence with her submissiveness as much as her industriousness. Professor Kandinsky was as cantankerous and reticent as he was glum and impatient. Deep down, Nadia Onissimovna suspected he was not as grumpy as he seemed, and even if he was, he had probably turned into a wreck of nerves only as a result of conducting electrically charged experiments day and night for years. Even back in those days she couldn’t help but seek plausible excuses for the coarse behaviour of those she loved.

  ‘They don’t know what they’re doing to me! Failure isn’t a virus I’m acquainted with! I have no resistance to it.’

  Two security guards were smoking further down by the grey walls surrounding the wide field of the laboratory. The gale was blowing so hard that their smoke could not hover in the air for even a second.

  ‘Some nights I hear the bugs laughing at me, Nadia, but I cannot see them. In my dreams I meander into the empty pantries of empty houses. The bugs manage to escape just before the strike of lightning or the start of an earthquake. They migrate in marching armies. Right now, even as we speak, they are here somewhere near. They never stop.’

  A week later, he was found dead in his house: an electrical leakage, a unfussy end… Nadia Onissimovna always reckoned he had died at the most appropriate moment. Fortunately he would never learn what had happened to his laboratory. First, the experiments had been stopped due to financial restrictions and then numerous people were fired. Nadia Onissimovna also received her share of this turmoil. When she met Metin Chetinceviz, she had been unemployed for eight months.

  Metin Chetinceviz was a total nuisance, one of the last types a woman would like to fall in love with. Unfortunately, Nadia Onissimovna was so inexperienced with men that even after spending hours with him, she had still not realized she was with one of the last types a woman would like to fall in love with. Anyhow that night, she had been dazed by the incomprehensible enormity, the bold crowds and the ceaseless booming noise of the discotheque she had stepped into for the first time, had thrown up all the drinks she had and was therefore in no condition to realize anything. She was there by chance; having been dragged by one of her girlfriends, from whom she hoped to borrow money by the end of the night. Metin Chetinceviz was among a group of businessmen coming from Istanbul. By the tenth minute of their encounter, before Nadia Onissimovna could comprehend what was going on, the tables were joined, women she was not acquainted with were added to these men she did not know, and a deluge of drinks was ordered. While the rest of the table rejoiced in laughing at everything, she had shrunk into one corner and drank as never before in her life. A little later, when everyone else scampered onto the dance floor in pairs, she saw a swarthy man sitting still, distressed and lonely just like her. She smiled. So did he. Encouraged by these smiles they exchanged a few words. Both spoke English terribly. Yet English is the only language in the world capable of giving the impression that it might be spoken with a little push, even when one has barely any knowledge of it. Thus in the following hours, rolling their eyes as if hoping for the words they sought to descend from the ceiling, snapping their fingers and drawing imaginary pictures in the air with their hands; doodling on napkins, sketching symbols on each other’s palms, giggling whenever they paused; opening up whenever they giggled and continuously nodding their heads up and down; Nadia Onissimovna and Metin Chetinceviz plunged into one long, deep conversation.

  ‘Rather than marry a Turk, I’d lick a crammed-full ashtray on an empty stomach every morning.’

  ‘You can lick whatever you want,’ Nadia Onissimovna had replied impishly. ‘ “Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.” ’

  ‘Do not recklessly scatter in my kitche
n the teachings of Jesus as if they were epigrams of that untrustworthy professor of yours,’ her aunt had bellowed, as she blew on the ladle she had been stirring for the last fifteen minutes in a greenish soup.

  ‘You know nothing about him,’ Nadia Onissimovna had muttered shrugging her shoulders. ‘Only prejudice…’

  ‘I can assure you that I do know what I need to know, honey,’ her aunt had pontificated sprinkling salt in concentric circles onto the pot. ‘And if you had not wasted your most beautiful years chasing ants with a good-for-nothing nutter, you too would know what I know.’ She pulled a stool by the oven and, jangling her bracelets, kept stirring the soup. Due to varicose veins, she could not stand up for more than ten minutes. ‘At least you must know that Turks don’t drink wine,’ she said with a distraught expression, but it was hard to determine what distressed her more, the subject matter or the soup’s still refusing to boil.

  Desperate to object, Nadia Onissimovna had started to recount, though with a dash of exaggeration, the whiskies, beers and vodkas her future husband had consumed at the discotheque, refraining from mentioning how he had mixed them all and the outcome.

  ‘Whisky is another story. Do they drink wine? Tell me about that. No, they don’t! If they did, they wouldn’t have destroyed the fountain of Leon the Sage when they captured Zavegorod. The fountain gushing wine for three hundred years was raised to the ground when the Turks got hold of it. Why did they destroy that gorgeous fountain? Because it gushed wine instead of water! The Turks tore down its wall with axes. Idiots! They thought they would unearth a cellar crammed with barrels of wine somewhere down there but you know what they found instead? A bunch of grapes! Hear me well, Nadia, I say a bunch of grapes! And only three among them had been squeezed. Apparently with only one grape, wine flowed out of the fountain for a century. What did the Turks do when they saw this miracle? Did they appreciate it? No way! They demolished the walls, broke the fountain and even destroyed the grape bunches. They don’t honour wine, don’t honour things sacred and don’t honour the Sage.’ Still grumbling she had shaken the ladle toward her niece. ‘They don’t honour women anyhow!’

  When coming to Istanbul, Nadia Onissimovna had not fantasized at all about the milieu that would be awaiting her. In spite of this, she couldn’t help feeling disappointed when she saw Bonbon Palace for the first time. Not that the apartment building she was going to live in from now on was more dilapidated than the ones she had lived in so far. If anything, it was more or less the same. That was the issue anyhow, this sameness. For moving somewhere brand new only to encounter there a pale replica of your old life is a good reason to be disappointed. To top it all, there was neither a sandy beach nearby, nor a job for an entomologist, but the gravest problem was Metin Chetinceviz himself. For one thing, he had lied. He did not even have a proper job. He made a living by doing minor voiceovers at irregular intervals for various TV channels. In addition, he occasionally went to weddings, circumcision ceremonies or birthday parties of affluent families to perform the shadow theatre Karagoz. He kept his reeking leather puppets in his amber coloured briefcase, but lately Bonbon Palace had started to stink so awfully that the smell of the leather puppets was nothing compared to the smell of garbage surrounding the apartment building.

  To cap it all, His WifeNadia soon realized how badly mistaken her aunt had been. Metin Chetinceviz glugged down low-price low-quality wine at a rate even the miraculous grapes of Leon the Sage could not compensate for. When drunk he lost not only his temper but also the ability to work. If doing a voiceover, he forgot the text; if performing with the shadow theatre, he stirred up a ruckus by making his puppets talk gobbledygook, peppered with slang and slander. At the weddings he attended, as he played the puppets, behind the shadow screen he gobbled down every drink in his reach, causing a disgrace by the end of the day. Once he had been kicked out for hurling from the mouth of the puppet named ‘Hacivat’, lascivious jokes and loutish insinuations about the groom in front of the guests. Since those witnessing his scandals never gave him work again, he incessantly had to set up new job contacts.

  Still Nadia Onissimovna did not go back. She stayed here at Bonbon Palace. Even she herself could not fathom when and how she had internalized the role of a housewife she had started performing temporarily, with the idea that this would only be until she found an appropriate job. One day the writing on a wedding invitation captivated her attention: ‘We wish Metin Chetinceviz and His Wife Nadia to join us on our happiest day.’ She stared at the letter blankly, there and then realizing that she was not ‘Nadia Onissimovna’ anymore, not ‘Nadia Chetinceviz’ either, but ‘HisWifeNadia’. Though shaken by this discovery, she still did not attempt to make any significant changes in her life. The days had for so long been impossible to tell apart, as if they were all photocopies of a particular day now long gone. She cooked, cleaned the house, watched TV, looked at old photographs, and when bored, she made something other housewives might not know much about: potato lamps that lit up without being plugged in. Both Professor Kandinsky and his ‘threshold skipping species’ had remained behind in another life.

  ‘Why can’t I remember my past? I wish I knew who I was. Why can’t I remember, why?’ moaned Loretta spinning in her hands the daisy which was in her hair a minute ago.

  ‘You’re searching for it in the wrong drawer, honey! Look at the one below, the one below!’ yelled HisWifeNadia, without noticing that she repeated the gesture on the screen, spinning in her hands the latest potato lamp she had fabricated.

  It was precisely then that she heard a sound by the door. He was coming. Earlier than usual today. He would probably munch a bit, take a nap and then go out again in the evening, taking his smelly briefcase with him. You could never tell when would he come or leave, but no matter what hour of the day it was, he never cared to ring the doorbell.

  As the key wiggled in the lock, HisWifeNadia grabbed the remote and switched the channel. When Metin Chetinceviz appeared at the door, Loretta had already been replaced by a cooking programme. A woman with a wide forehead, round face and a remarkable moustache was busy tasting the spinach au gratin she had just removed from the oven.

  Flat Number 1: Musa, Meryem, Muhammet

  Keeping an eye on the door for Muhammet’s return, Meryem embraced her swollen belly with her dimpled arms and heaved a deep sigh. That day, she had again had success in sending her son to school but God knows what he would look like when he returned home. In the beginning Muhammet used to tell her in great detail everything that happened in school, be it good or bad. Yet he had sunk into arrant silence over time. What her son did not put into words, Meryem heard anyhow from his troubled eyes, or the split seams and ripped out buttons of his school outfit, or the bruises on his arms. As she listened her worries soared. The thought that somebody might be hitting her son, be it a child or a grownup, killed her; his own father had not yet given him a flick. Only Meryem, she alone had slapped him a few times, may Allah forgive her, and occasionally pinched him too but that was different. As a matter of fact, ever since she had discovered that others had been ‘roughing-up’ her son, Meryem had refrained from even this minimal disciplining. When in her mind’s eye she saw children raining blows on her son, her blood boiled. There was a time when she thought it was nothing other than a simple scuffle among children and yet weeks and months had passed without any change for good. What infuriated Meryem the most was not so much her son’s being smacked by his peers as seeing how he gradually became indifferent to torment.

  As to why her son was relentlessly bullied she had a hard time unravelling. Was it because he was a janitor’s son? But she had sounded out the neighbourhood kinfolk who held the same job and found out that their children faced no such calamity at school. What else then? Muhammet was neither fatter nor uglier nor more dim-witted than the other kids so why couldn’t he struggle against the wicked? In despair she eyed her swollen belly. The answer, she knew too well, was right under her nose: it was because of Musa. Bloo
d takes after blood, they said. Muhammet was his father’s son, brazenly compliant and docile. Even a wee bit of his mother’s splendid bulk had not been bequeathed to him; he was so tiny, so short and wiry. For years she had force-fed the boy five times a day, making him eat a soft-boiled egg every morning, but to no avail. Not only had he not put on weight or grown taller, he still looked at least two years younger than his peers. True, Muhammet had always been petite, but his frame had shrunk visibly since he had started elementary school and thereafter to butt into the barricade of his peers’ scorn.

  When Muhammet put on the school outfit that was tailored a size larger so that he could still wear it in the years to follow, and shouldered that huge knapsack of his, so noticeably did he dwindle that everyone who saw him in that state scolded Meryem for not waiting another year before sending him to school. When next to his peers Muhammet’s runtiness became all the more striking as if he was held under a magnifying glass. He was the smallest child in his class and, of course, in the entire school. Had this been the only problem, Meryem would not have made such an issue of it. She would have simply patched over her yearning for a son as robust as a pine tree and awe-inspiring as a sultan’s skiff; one who could squeeze the water out of a stone and make whomever he frowned at shake in their shoes, yet at the same time possessed a heart so soft to take care of his by then senile mother. Despite Meryem’s visions, not only had Muhammet proved to be his father’s son in terms of physical frame, he had started to acquire the latter’s habits as well. Oddly enough, even though from cradle to school he had been glued to his mother and had an at-all-times-asleep-or-sleepy man for a father, as soon as released from his mother’s wings, the person Muhammet ended up taking after was none other than his father. That was what troubled Meryem the most. After all, she firmly believed that if Musa had a roof over his head and a job to keep him fed, it was all thanks to her. Musa had hitherto been able to stand on his feet precisely because he had handed himself over to his wife. What if his son was not so lucky? What if life did not present Muhammet with another Meryem? Then there was no way could he survive in Istanbul. This city would give him a beating worse than the one he now got from his peers.