The Flea Palace

by Elif Shafak

  Closing the outside door behind him without turning on the hall light, he found himself engulfed in darkness. He must have forgotten to draw the curtains back when he left hurriedly in the morning. Not that it would have made much difference, as its miniature windows were at ground level, this squat, narrow basement floor could get only a morsel of light. Cursing the dim-wit who had placed the switch two metres further in from the entrance, Sidar wobbled in. He could not get far, however, as his passage was blocked by the hefty silhouette emerging behind him. As the two bumped into one another, Sidar lost his balance, lurched forward hitting his head against the thick pipe passing right through the middle of the living room. Scared out of his mind, he reached the switch…and frowned at Gaba…Having got what he wanted, Gaba, on the other hand, was happily chewing on the simit he had snatched from his pocket.

  Rubbing his head Sidar reclined on the sofa. Since the dirty, dusty pipe passed right through the middle of the living room – which also served as his bedroom, dining room and study – just at his ear level, he kept banging his head at the same spot. Just this morning, while rushing to leave the house he had bumped his head again, and if it went on like this he would soon have a bump there. Fortunately, as soon as he stretched out on the sofa, his grumpiness faded out. He so much enjoyed being at home. Here he could stay away from the turmoil that plagued every corner in Istanbul; as long as he was home, contrary to the world outside he could remain entirely still and utterly calm, just like Gaba did when his hunger was fully satiated.

  It was particularly during late afternoon periods that the insularity reigning in Flat 2 became all the more blatant. Around this time every day, an excruciating mayhem swallowed Bonbon Palace. As the immediate surroundings assumed the hullabaloo of a fairground – synchronized by the brazen honks of the cars caught in traffic, the howls of the children playing at the park and the yells of the street peddlers – the mélange of sounds seeped in through the cracks and crevices of Bonbon Palace, getting hold of each and every flat except this one. It wasn’t only the clamour that failed to penetrate Flat 2; the heat waves could not break through either. Getting almost no sunlight, the house was cool as a cellar during the summer when all other flats burned up. Likewise, the sour smell of garbage tormenting all the other residents was least detectable down here.

  The truth is that when Bonbon Palace was built, Flat 2 had been designed not as a residence but a storage area, and had been used as such for many years. However, after the death of the owner, when the control of the apartment building had passed onto his daughter who had preferred to take care of everything from afar, this place too had received its share in the changes that occurred, each more problematic than the former. During the disarray that had prevailed, such huge fights had erupted when each and every neighbour attempted to pile their unused personal belongings up in this narrow space, that no one had the good fortune to use it for a long time. In the end, upon the instructions received from France, this stumpy, narrow, single-room basement floor was rented out at half the amount of rent of the other flats. From then on, a myriad of people had taken shelter here: people blatantly different from one another but with poverty and bachelorhood in common. Among these were, in the following order: a local radio news announcer living on chicken sandwiches three times a day; a depressed accountant whose best friend had snatched away his entire bank account along with his wife of eight years; an army deserter who turned the TV on full blast during Ramadan making everyone listen to sermons and hymns; a fishy fellow whose job no one had been able to guess at or dared ask about and a droll artist who used the place as an art studio painting the legs, ankles and shoes he watched from the window. Among all the tenants Flat 2 had seen thus far, the Cat Prophet, who had moved in next, was the one who had left behind the most in terms of traces and smell.

  After the Cat Prophet, Sidar had appeared with his St. Bernard breed dog. As he, unlike the previous tenants, barely had any belongings, though it had for so long been accustomed to being chock-full, Flat 2 was now going through the most barren phase in its saga.

  Gaba was such a bizarre dog, a walking contrast when compared with his breed, famous for their ability to go for days without water and food, to sense impending danger and make life safer for their owners, trace narcotics stashed away in secluded corners, rescue the victims trapped under debris and keep faithful company to the children, the blind and all those in need of aid. If there was one thing in the world Gaba could not possibly stand, it was hunger. His was a bottomless stomach and a never-to-be-satiated appetite. If left without food for a couple of hours, let alone a day, he would create havoc by chewing on whatever came to his paws, be it an anatomy book, a wooden chair or a plastic pail… He would pull all sorts of tricks just to get an additional morsel. Once having filled his stomach, however, he would lay in the corner, huge, fuzzy and dead still as a stuffed bear, with no trace left of the ‘oomph’ from a moment ago. Perhaps because he withheld even a dab of enthusiasm for food from all other spheres of daily life, there was no activity he enjoyed, not even being taken out for walks. Sidar might have suspected Gaba was going deaf with age if it weren’t for the fact that he did not seem to experience any difficulty in hearing sounds that were of significance to him, such as the rattle of the dog food poured into a bowl, the crackle of a tin can being opened or the footsteps of Meryem bringing bread in the morning.

  Deep down Sidar felt guilty. Having shoved this majestic dog of the Jura Mountains into a dingy basement in a dilapidated apartment building in one of the most jam-packed neighbourhoods in Istanbul, how could he expect him to behave normally? If the truth be told, part of this guilt stemmed from his guess that all the pastries with opium poppy and cakes with hashish he had made Gaba eat – at first simply for the fun of it and then because he had become addicted – might have a role in the dog’s lassitude, not to mention the impact of the second-hand smoke all throughout these years. Such were the brief contours of the pangs of conscience that gnawed Sidar deep inside.

  Gaba was matchless in the eyes of Sidar, ‘the one and only’. Actually there was only one of everything in this house: one Gaba, one Sidar, one computer, one sofa, one chair, one armchair, one table, one lamp, one pot, one sheet, one pencil… When an item was worn out, the book had been read or the CD had become tedious; only then was a second item acquired and the old would be either immediately thrown away or chewed to smithereens by Gaba.

  Yet the plainness of the place came to an abrupt end at the ceiling as if cut off by a knife. Onto the surface of the ceiling Sidar had posted, nailed, taped or pinned on top of one another black-and-white pictures clipped from various journals. These included: some of his parents’ letters, Nazim Hikmet’s ‘My Funeral Procession’, fanzines he had gathered from here and there, fanzines he had made himself, strips from Art Spiegelman’s ‘Maus’, a gigantic Dead Kennedys poster, the picture of a ship trying to make its way through fog (taken from an old photograph and used as a menu cover at a restaurant he had dined in a couple of times upon his arrival in Istanbul never to visit again after getting used to the price difference between Istanbul and Switzerland and realizing how expensive it was), pages torn from the ‘Batman: Dark Night’ series, a black T-shirt with the ‘Receipt for Hate tour of Bad Religion’ printed in front, an anti-drug campaign poster with letters made with pills writing ‘Ma Vie Peut Etre Differente’, photographs of Gaba as a puppy, the enlarged photocopy of Goya’s ‘Boogeyman Is Coming’, collage with quotations plucked from Cioran’s essay on Meister Eckhart, sketch of the health goddess Hygieia with her rounded breasts, soft belly and the big snake she wound around her necklines from Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Kaddish’, a sign that instructed: ‘A civilized person does not spit on the ground. You should not either!’ (a placard he had painstakingly removed one night when stoned), Wittgenstein’s photograph taken right before his death, a faded picture of Otto Weininger, a poster of Spiderman squatting down to watch the city from the top of one of the towers of the World Tr
ade Centre, right next to it a photograph of the moment of explosion when the second plane dove into the towers on September 2001, words from a song of the band This Mortal Coil, self-portrait of the Turkish philosopher Neyzen Tevfik with a tag saying ‘Nothing’ hanging on his neck, newspaper clips about Robbie Fowler, midterm exam with ‘COME AND SEE ME IMMEDIATELY’ written on it with red ink, a faded computer print-out of Leonara Carrington’s ‘Zoroaster Meets His Image in the Garden’, collages made with all sorts of prescriptions and Xanax boxes, an advertisement with the writing, ‘Do not fool around with your son’s future. Circumcision requires sensitivity. Sensitive is our middle name. Leave us all your circumcision business,’ as well as a passport picture of a bushy-moustache, beetle-browed Scientific Circumciser (a poster he had chanced upon while wandering around the streets of Fatih and, being unable to remove it from the wall, had to go and personally procure it from the address written on it), cassette covers of Kino recordings he had once made, photograph of the ash-bone-tar train wreck which became the collective grave to four hundred people in Egypt on February 2002, notes of Walter Benjamin from the ‘Moscow Diary’, reproductions of William Blake’s drafts of ‘Songs of Innocence’, cartoons of Selcuk clipped from ‘Maniere de Voir’, one of Freud’s later photographs wherein he did not stare into the camera, engravings from the Lisbon earthquake/Istanbul postcards, a family picture taken exactly thirteen years ago at the Haydarpasa train station before leaving Turkey, notes with phone numbers or messages and last but not least, the silver necklace with a black-stripped transparent stone which was a souvenir from Nathalie whom he was tired of loving though whose love he had not tired of.

  When Sidar had moved in, like all other urbanites he had the habit of decorating his walls with cherished pictures and posters. Before long, however, Gaba had rendered this impossible. On the way from Switzerland to Istanbul the dog had passed out in the train compartment in which he had been leashed, let out a terrible howl as if his flesh was being torn out and refused to calm down, even though food was placed in front of him every ten minutes. By the time his paws touched the Istanbul soil, his nerves were so shot that he was too confused to know where to look or who to bark at. Finally, when stuck in this tiny flat, he had developed the habit of attacking the walls and started to chew any kind of paper he could find, due to hunger or irritability induced by love of his homeland. In desperation, Sidar had then begun to move his pictures and posters a bit higher. Yet ‘a bit higher’ could not be high enough for Gaba whose height, when standing up, was taller than the Turkish national average. Bit by bit, all pictures and posters escaping Gaba’s sharp teeth, like refugees heading for the hills to flee from the warfare in their country, kept constantly climbing north to finally transcend the boundary of the wall, rushing altogether into the lands of the ceiling. Sidar had enjoyed this unexpected innovation so much that he had expanded the business over time and filled his topmost part with all types of visual and written material he held dear. Lately, this daily increasing bedlam had, like a vigorous vine, started to branch out into the kitchen ceiling on the one side and the bathroom ceiling on the other.

  When stretched out on his back onto the only sofa in the living room with a rolled cigarette in hand, Sidar would fix his eyes on this ceiling for hours. While the smoke circulated in his blood full speed, the ceiling would acquire an astounding vivacity. At such times, Wittgenstein’s black and white picture reddened, as the philosopher’s face blushed; the miniature figures in the cartoons of Selcuk hopped and jumped around the ceiling; Spiderman dangled from a thread climbing up and down; the coronas in Blake’s drafts started to blink as if relaying messages in code; Carrington’s hairless magician melted into his own image and disappeared; Goya’s bogeyman all of a sudden took the white sheet off to reveal his face; a cruel smile appeared on the Scientific Circumciser’s face; Hygieia’s breasts heaved with excitement; the figures on the photograph at the Haydarpasa train station one by one withered away. Before long, Sidar would feel the blood in his veins, as well as the two droplets of energy he possessed withdraw from his body, and he’d abandon himself in a woozy, puffy sea of ecstasy. When Gaba too came along and curled under his legs, the Flat 2 and its two inhabitants swimming in composure would form one flawless whole.

  There existed only one thing that Sidar enjoyed ruminating: death. He did not do so consciously; in fact, consciousness was not at all the issue here, for he didn’t invite the thoughts, rather they flocked to his mind on their own. His obsession with death was not a choice; he had been like this since childhood. He found death neither scary enough to grieve, nor grievous enough to be scared of. All he wanted was to understand it fully, truly. Whenever he met new people, before anything else, it was their attitudes towards death that would arouse his curiosity: whether they were scared of death or not, had lost someone close, had someone die before their eyes, had ever felt they could kill someone, did they believe in the afterlife… There were so many questions he had to ask, but seldom could. He had long before succumbed to the convention that he must hold his tongue on this particular subject. However, whether he could fall in love with a woman or not, feel comfortable at someone’s house, liked a character in a film, how he regarded the author of a book he read, what he thought of the singers he listened to…it all depended on their relation with death. He could appreciate some bastard solely because he had died beautifully or just as well turn up his nose at a dignified person if he had met an ordinary end. Since his interest kept whipping up his knowledge and his knowledge his interest, Sidar possessed a magnificent archive of death in his mind. He never forgot where and how book characters, film stars, national heroes, philosophers, scientists, poets and especially murderers had died. This curiosity of his had cost him dearly at high school wherein all his history teachers hated him: ‘Alexander the Great, oh yeah, he met his end with such a debauched illness: he either burst or, after a two day long feast thrown in his honour, got diarrhoea.’ His interventions in the philosophy class were no different: ‘But in his letters to Voltaire, the same Rousseau had mentioned with gratitude the Lisbon earthquake that killed hundreds of people. Such occasional cleanings, he thought, were necessary in terms of population quantity and quality.’

  The nuggets of knowledge Sidar thus scattered would wreak havoc at each lesson. Upon learning Alexander had breathed his last due to diarrhoea, his greatness tended to wane and his reputation dwindled considerably. In the student’s minds, Rousseau turned into a modern age terrorist while his philosophy fell on deaf ears. When confronted by death, the credibility of a religious scholar notorious for advising his disciples constant abstinence who himself could not make it to the morning after a night of gorging, the respectability of a well-esteemed elderly politician taking his last breath in the nuptial bed the same night he took a new wife half his age, the command of an Ottoman sultan who raided taverns hunting and hanging all those who drank even a drop of wine only to meet his own end through cirrhosis, and the esteem of a scientist squished like a bug while trying to cross a street without looking…all perished drastically… The deaths of the East were at least as preposterous as those of the West. In fact, death itself was preposterous.

  ‘Since you seem to be paying no attention to my third and final warning, could you please step outside the classroom?’

  His teachers never shared his views. Each time he would be thrown out of the classroom but unlike all the other male students who were ejected from the classroom, he would never become a hero in the eyes of the female students. Probably because girls, just like the teachers, did not find death preposterous.

  Sidar had expected things to be different in Turkey. After all, dying was easier here; deaths occurred in larger numbers and life was shorter. Alas! Hard as he tried, his remarks on death were largely dismissed. At first he suspected it was because of his Turkish, perhaps he could not properly express himself. However, due to the dogged efforts of his mother — who had worked as a Turkish teacher until the day they wer
e forced to escape out of the country and who had been worried her son would become alienated from his native tongue through being carried away not only by the French but also the Kurdish his father had tried incompetently to teach him – the long years Sidar spent away from Turkey had caused his Turkish to regress only a couple of steps. The issue was not how he expressed himself but what he expressed. Sidar had detected a number of differences between Switzerland and Turkey on the subject of death, and each point was written on a tiny piece of paper among the bedlam on the ceiling:

  People in Turkey did not like death to be brought up as a subject (just like in Switzerland)

  Whenever people in Turkey brought up death, they talked about the actual dead rather than the insubstantial idea of death (somewhat different from Switzerland)

  People in Turkey were not able to distinguish death as something abstract (quite different from Switzerland).

  Yet Istanbul, unlike its inhabitants, was not a bit bothered about the allusions to death. On no account did she shun this subject. At one of the lessons he had not been thrown out of, Sidar had listened attentively to how in the West the fools were put on ships and sent away from the cities. He likened the cemeteries in Switzerland to those ships with unwanted passengers, albeit with one difference, they had cast anchor, unable to drift away. All the same they were just as much insulated from city life. One could go visit the cemeteries at any time but the graves themselves often disembarked to become a part of the city. However, Istanbul had either forgotten to assign its ships to the graves, or the graves had escaped from their ships to disperse into the streets with turbans on their heads and marble stones on their arms. They were everywhere. Scattered all over the city like pollen strewn by the wind. At the corners where local markets were set up every week, in the midst of shopping malls, in swarming streets, on roads off the beaten track, in fields where the children played, on slopes overlooking the sea, in courtyards of dervish lodges; next to walls, hills, hedges, far and wide they popped up in front of the people in the shape of a tombstone, vault or numerous graves squeezed in between apartment buildings. Pedestrians passed them by as they strolled, scurried, promenaded, shopped… In this city, the dead resided side by side with the living.