The Flea Palace

by Elif Shafak

  Lost in her thoughts, Meryem started to grind her teeth. This she did rarely now, only when truly distraught or confused. Yet as a child she used to grind her teeth so much at nights that she would wake up everyone in the household. Her great grandmother was alive then; alive and so old that her emaciated body had been entirely cleansed of the dual malady of angst and haste. One day she had sat Meryem down to warn her that only when she learned to be patient could she ever leave her teeth alone, otherwise she would be of no use in life, and just as she robbed people of their sleep today, she would rob them of their peace of mind tomorrow. The way to learn to be patient was through learning how to fill up a ‘patience sack.’ This required an empty sack, which should be left somewhere high, tied sidewise to the end of a stick like a banner. Meryem, who was no older than Muhammet at that time, had listened to this counsel attentively and fast as a rabbit climbed up the roof of the coal cellar in the garden, where she hang an empty sack to a broom with great difficulty. As the wind blew, the empty sack would accumulate various things inside, filling up bit by bit in time. As such, the only thing Meryem was expected to do was wait without doing anything and as she waited, to make sure she did not forget what she was waiting for. This was what they called ‘patience.’

  Yet even at that age Meryem was impulsive, not to mention alarmingly impatient. Whenever faced with a challenge, she would do everything in her power to beat it. Filling up the ‘patience sack’ had been no exception. In the days to follow, she would check the sack first thing in the morning only to come down the ladder disappointed each time. The burden of not doing anything was so unbearable that each night in her sleep she would carry buckets of soil to fill sack upon sack. As this dream labour had made her teeth grating even worse than before, the nights had turned into a nightmare for the entire household. Her great grandmother was despondent, her grandmother baffled and her mother infuriated. All three women kept talking about a prophet named Eyup.

  ‘OK, I’ll wait, but tell me for how long?’ Meryem wanted to know. ‘Until the sack fills up by itself,’ suggested her great grandmother; ‘Until you are ready,’ snarled her grandmother; ‘Until the sack is filled and you are ready,’ concluded her mother. In the meanwhile, her father, sick and tired of the four generations of women at the house and this sack business of theirs which was getting nowhere, had already brought down the wooden ladder. ‘Waiting without doing anything’ counting for nothing in her book, Meryem had only been able to endure two weeks without climbing to look inside the sack. After two weeks, when no one was at home, she had carried the kitchen table out to the garden, placed a chair on top, hopped onto the roof of the coal cellar and stuck her head inside this sack of patience. Then and there she had seen the outcome of what they called patience: dry leaves, thorny shrubs, broken branches and two dead butterflies…such were the rewards of those who endured: either a handful of dry twigs or the lethal wounds of the prophet Eyup…

  That was it. After that day, she had stopped peeping into the sack and had never given it a second thought. Waiting leniently was not meant for her. Had that not been the case, Meryem would not have married Musa but waited instead for Isa, her favourite among her other suitors, to return from Istanbul. However, instead of waiting for Isa to come back ‘godknowswhen’, she had decided to come to Istanbul herself and to this end married Musa, dragging him along. Unfortunately, once they were back in the city things had not gone at all as she had expected. Realizing Musa wasn’t going to be able to cope with Istanbul, Meryem had found herself remembering after all these years her great grandmother’s Patience Sack. There was no way she was going to sit back and wait for the wind to fill up the sack, Musa to mature and life to bring them a few dead butterflies or dry twigs. Instead she would take charge of their destiny. As for Musa, his wife’s industriousness, enterprising skill and willpower would leave a chilling effect on his nerves, rendering him more and more weak-kneed, sluggish and pessimistic. Subsequently, once in Istanbul, Musa and Meryem had turned into two opposite tides, just like the waters of the Bosphorus. This contrast in their dispositions was further reflected in their appearance. In the years to follow, while Meryem, tall and big boned to start with, gained day by day more and more weight, Musa shrunk like a hand-knitted sweater laundered in the wrong cycle.

  Not that Meryem expected anything from her husband, having by now resigned herself to the man he had become. At night, half an hour before the arrival of the garbage truck, she collected the bagged trash from the flats of the Flea Palace and distributed in the morning their bread and newspaper. The latter she finished early in the morning so there would be time left for her scuffle with Muhammet, as well as for fortune-telling. She lingered before work while having her coffee, but once she got going, did not easily stop. Five days a week she went to five different flats for housecleaning. Though by now in the fifth month of her pregnancy, the sum total of her activities had not lessened a bit. Perhaps she now went up the stairs more slowly but that was all. Her energy resembled her weight; however much she ran around it didn’t decrease a bit. Similarly, her fortitude resembled her energy; like a machine in perpetual motion she kept turning her own wheel.

  Every so often it occurred to her she would actually be better off without Musa. Had she received the news that Musa was dead hit by a car, she would of course have been distraught with sorrow but her life would not go astray; in point of fact, it would not even change. Yet if she were the one hit, Musa would be smashed to smithereens as if the car had hit not his wife’s body but the mainspring of his own life and livelihood. Though Meryem struggled hard not to think such inauspicious things, she couldn’t help doing so…and the more her pregnancy moved ahead, the more fixated she became on the ghastly thoughts parading full force in her mind.

  Lately she had been more and more scared of outlandish apprehensions, having nightmares upon nightmares, waking up every morning her heart pummelling, agonized by the thought that something ominous might happen at any moment. Given her score in the Patience Sack episode, how could she be expected to wait passively for evil to come her way? Thus she took precautions. If researchers conducting ethnological analyses on the birth customs and beliefs in Turkey had, instead of surveying each and every village and town, simply come across Meryem, they would indeed have obtained the same data with much less expense and effort.

  Meryem’s package of precautions concerning birth came under three clusters:

  Never do those things that should never be done.

  Be careful in doing those things that need caution.

  Do those things that are felicitous as much as possible.

  Those ‘things that should never be done’ had no explanation and no justification for their categorisation. Just as one should not clip nails at night, one should not interpret dreams then either. As the mysteries of dreams are barely comprehensible even in plain daylight, how could one possibly interpret them in the darkness of the night? Meryem never left her nail clippings around, always throwing them into the toilet to make sure no one else would get hold of them. Likewise she frequently checked and collected the hairs on hairbrushes and then burnt them. If a single strand of her hair accidentally fell some place outside her house, she would immediately pick it up and put it in her bosom. She was particularly sensitive about hair and nails, holding the belief that these were the only two things in the human body which continued to live for sometime, even after the body they belonged to passed away. According to Meryem you shouldn’t take a knife from anyone’s hand, leave a pair of scissors open, bring to the tip of your tongue the name of the living while passing by a cemetery, speak of animals in a room where the Qur’an was kept, mumble a song and if possible, you shouldn’t even open your mouth when waking up to go to the bathroom where the jinni gather at night, or kill spiders… The list of the things you should avoid doing extended interminably and births were accorded a special place on this list. Women had to be watched both during pregnancy and for forty days after the birth and th
e placenta of the baby needed to be buried deep under earth. Though Meryem had not been able to convince that spectacled, cold fish of a physician to dig a hole for Muhammet’s placenta in the garden of the hospital where she had given birth, thanks to the goofy nurse she had eventually emerged triumphant. Deaths, too, were as sensitive as births. When visiting someone on their deathbed, Meryem addressed the patient by different names one after another to bamboozle the Angel of Death. If she still could not fool Azrael and the patient died, she would give away every single item of the deceased’s clothing to a peddler of old clothes whom the former had never met. If the peddler committed the mistake of uttering a few words of courtesy about the departed one, she would instantly take the clothes away from him to give them to another.

  After all, anonymity lay at the essence of the profession of peddlerhood. On a peddler’s cart one should never know which goods were left by whom, in point of fact, one should not even think that they once upon a time belonged to someone. The noble task of delivering familiar clothes to unfamiliar people was incumbent upon the peddler. Ultimately, while those who gave away these clothes needed to get rid of their past, those who purchased them didn’t want to know anything about that past. In between the two groups of people crisscrossed the peddlers, cleansing personal items of all the memories they had gone through and the poignant ends they had met, so that they could start life anew. That’s the way it had to be so that the old could yield the new and death engender life. Actually, if asked to name the most consecrated professions on earth, Meryem would name the peddler before the teacher or the physician. Not that she wanted Muhammet to become a packman but she sure felt deep affection for these men carting away the remnants of a dispersed home or a departed acquaintance, to then bring from afar others’ goods, and thus steadily, spontaneously mixing up bits and pieces of Istanbul’s seven hills and motley communities.

  As for the ‘things-that-required-care’, it was better not to do them at all but if you had to you should at least take precautions. One should refrain from sewing a cloth on a person, for instance. Alternatively, one should bring an object that could counterbalance any misfortune the needle might bring. That’s why whenever Meryem sewed a cloth on someone’s body, she would put a wooden spoon in her mouth. If she accidentally broke a mirror, she would instantly go and buy another one, and since fire could be fought with fire, smash that mirror into pieces as well. Nonetheless she would rather have as little contact as possible with mirrors, each being a silvered sealed gate to the unknown. Since she deemed it inauspicious to see one’s image repeatedly, the only mirror in their house always faced the wall. As for normal doors, she paid great care when passing through them. Even cemeteries did not scare her as much as thresholds. When passing through a door, she would never ever step on the threshold, opening her legs to the widest step possible and always with the right foot first. Differentiating her right from her left was a constant concern for her anyhow. When at the table, she would place a piece of bread to her right side to feed the eyes of those who coveted the bounty of their table. Reserving her left hand for the dirtiest jobs, she took great care to turn from her right when someone called her name on the street, hung up her clothing from right to left as if writing in Arabic and always made sure she got up from the right side of the bed. Though this inevitably meant that Musa would have to get up from the left side, he did not seem to care about this as long as his sleep was uninterrupted.

  All day long, Meryem collected premonitions and read signs. It was good portent if her right eye twitched but she instantly got wary if her left eye did so. A ringing in her right ear was good news but she would start to worry about her fate when the ringing was in the left one. Itchy feet was a sign of a journey on the way, itchy palms meant money and an itchy throat suggested a tight spot. If she got goose bumps, Meryem suspected that jinn were nearby. As for tea leaves…if an unexpected tealeaf escaped the sieve and appeared in her tea, Meryem would expect a visitor that same day. From the leaf’s shape, she would try to surmise the identity of the guest and from its colour their intention. If a dog howled after midnight she forlornly concluded someone would soon be dead. Yet she was no longer as resolute about this matter as she used to be since a dopey, skin-and-bones medical student had moved into the flat across from hers with his ogre of a dog.

  Meryem resorted to the coffee cup in order to find out the calamities beyond her grasp. Morning coffee was reserved for fortune telling and night coffee for the simple pleasure of drinking it. Recently she had formed the habit of topping-up her night coffee with three thimblefuls of banana liqueur. It was that Blue Mistress in Flat 8 who had introduced her to this liqueur business. There were all types of liqueur there, lined up with olive oil bottles of all sizes. She had made Meryem taste each and every one. The raspberry was scrumptious and the mint left a pleasant freshness in one’s mouth, but it was the banana liqueur that Meryem had relished the most and could have drunk in heaps if only she weren’t concerned about harming the baby. Mistaking Meryem’s hesitation for fear of sin the Mistress had chuckled: ‘Who says a liqueur is an alcoholic drink?!’ Meryem had instantly grabbed on to this explanation: a liqueur was not an alcoholic drink after all. ‘If you like them so much, go ahead and take the banana liqueurs with you,’ the mistress had urged. Her man brought new ones anyhow. Meryem had seen him a couple of times: old enough to be her father and married on top of it. She had made no comment on the matter, however, for she considered private matters truly private.

  Yet there were other things she could hardly stay away from no matter how much she tried. The evil eye, for instance; it was like an echo. Just as one could not detect the original voice behind an echo, one could not track down the source of the evil eye either. Fearing an attack from four different directions in forty different ways, Meryem had equipped every corner of the house with preventive measures. On the walls, she hung evil eye beads, prayer placards, horseshoes; she sprinkled and scattered holy water from Mecca, salt lumps or blessed black cumin seeds under the pillows, behind doors and especially in Muhammet’s pockets; she kept tortoise shells, crab legs and horse chestnuts over the thresholds, and had charms written on almonds, dates, copper plates, all types of paper and animal skins. By now both Musa and Muhammet had become accustomed to living with this ever expanding hodgepodge concoction of items, most of which constantly changed location. Still, none of these precautions could ease Meryem’s fear of the evil eye even a wee bit. At different times during the day, when a sudden sorrow settled in her heart, she instantly broke a plate inside the kitchen sink. If hot water cracked a glass cup, she concluded the curse of the evil eye was on her family and spun salt over fire. When she bumped into someone whose eyes looked menacingly blue, she surreptitiously covered Muhammet’s face with her hands and if Muhammet happened to be away, closed her own eyes thinking of him. The thought that the curse of the evil eye might touch upon her son terrified her. Thus ever since he was a baby, Muhammet lived his life going around with amulets pinned to his undershirt and blessed black cumin seeds in his pockets; finding papers covered with Meryem’s scrawl under his pillow; getting under a sheet once every ten days, its four corners held by four women while melted lead in cold water was poured over his head to break a spell. Muhammet would readily endure all of these things as long as he was not forced to eat eggs.

  Having spent the interval between six months and six years being spoon-fed a soft-boiled egg every damn morning, Muhammet had a small problem with eggs. What he found even worse than their taste was their shells being used as complaint petitions. Every morning, once the egg was eaten and the shell was sparklingly clean inside, Meryem had penned on the shell whatever complaint had been left over from the day before: ‘Yesterday Muhammet lied to his mother, but he will never ever do so again,’ ‘Yesterday he did not want to eat his egg, but he will never ever do so again,’ ‘Yesterday Muhammet cursed the auntie who poured the lead, but he will never ever do so again…’. These empty egg shells were each
time thrown to the birds so that they could take these complaints to the two angel clerks recording on their celestial registers all the sins and good deeds committed on earth. Until the day he started elementary school, every morning before breakfast Muhammet would peek out of the window to see his winged informants. Yet each time he did this, the only species of birds he could spy were either the screeching sparrows perched upon the branches of the rose acacia in the garden or the ugly crows recklessly hunting the streets. There was also the caged canary inside the window of Flat Number 4 but that bird could not even flap its wings, let alone fly.

  It was the seagulls Muhammet was suspicious of. He spotted them as they dug into the garbage bags accumulating by the side of the garden wall. In the damp breath of lodos, they drew circles as they descended onto the trash piles and it seemed to Muhammet that each time they chanced upon a precious piece of information they would then glide into the sky squawking with pleasure. At nights, they gathered together on the roofs to watch the sins committed in the apartment buildings of Istanbul. Unlike his father, seagulls never went to sleep.

  Flat Number 2: Sidar and Gaba

  He opened the door with a grim look on his face. It was not screwing up the anatomy exam that upset him so much, but the fact that he had taken the anatomy exam in the first place, knowing only too well he would screw it up. He now profoundly regretted that when waking this morning, on realizing the alarm clock had again failed to go off, rather than hitting the pillow he had scurried out of the house and paid for a cab to boot. He even more profoundly regretted that after the exam he had joined his friends, who were clustered like pigeons flocking to wheat, to learn how each had answered every single question, to then complain unanimously about the instructor and then the whole university structure. To top it all off, once having joined them, he had ended up spending the entire day in cafés amidst non-stop chatter. Now he regretted all the energy he had so lavishly squandered. Energy, Sidar reckoned, was a finite commodity, like an eye lotion in a tiny dropper. Accordingly, he spent no more than two drops a day, one to wake up in the morning and the other to go to sleep at night.