The Flea Palace

by Elif Shafak

  Hence after a thirteen year interval, Sidar had spent his first year in Istanbul discovering graves and cemeteries. Sometimes he would consciously stroll around desolate neighbourhoods for this purpose alone, at some other times he would accidentally come across a cemetery and wander off into it. Walking around non-Muslim cemeteries had proved to be far more difficult than the Muslim ones since almost all of the former were surrounded by towering walls and were closed except on certain days. Once when in the garden of a Greek church he had asked what the relief of strewn pomegranate seeds on a tombstone meant and what the writing under it was, the custodian had hopelessly bobbed his head from side to side. He could not read a single word of Greek. Anyhow, he was not Greek but a Gregorian Armenian; for years he had worked at this church during the week and went for religious service to his own church on weekends. Since that encounter, Sidar had stopped presuming that all the people he saw in the Greek cemeteries in Istanbul were Greek, the ones in the Jewish cemeteries Jewish, or the Assyrian ones all Assyrians…

  With their low walls and permanently open gates, the Muslim cemeteries were easier to roam. Most of these were badly neglected; it was as if it was not the lives of Muslims that were mortal but rather their cemeteries. Especially the more recent ones gave the impression that they might at any moment get up and migrate somewhere else. Sidar had until now met all sorts of people while walking around these places. Coarse guards, men who read the Qur’an for money by the graves, slovenly kids with pitchers in their hand who followed the visitors to fork out some money, those who came with all their family and filled baskets as if for a picnic, those who arrived alone and were for hours lost in thought, drunks who imbibed nearby at night, pickpockets who mushroomed wherever there was a crowd, clairvoyants with young, old, urban and rural women as followers… Over time he had learned to differentiate them. The habitual visitors of the Muslim cemeteries fell in two groups: those who came to leave a trace and those who came to follow some sort of lead. The former visited their relatives at regular intervals and then departed leaving behind their prayers, tears, pitchers full of water and flowers. These were harmless, self-contained people when compared to the latter. Those who came to follow some lead or another were rather sinister. They came to steal goods, milk people out of their money, cast a spell, gather signs… That is, they came to get something from the cemeteries and did not leave until they got what they had come for. Those who acquired a profession, wealth, status or a past from the cemeteries were included in this group, as were all soothsayers, the insane, thieves…and also Canadian gynaecologists.

  He had met the Canadian gynaecologist and his charming wife, who did not seem to have any knowledge whatsoever about either Turkey or the Turks, at one of the Muslim cemeteries while they were searching the grave of the man’s Turkish grandmother. The young couple had gone around for hours with a cemetery guard eager to help, and as they were on their way out to try their luck at another graveyard, Sidar had not been able to resist asking why they had undertaken such an endeavour. ‘So that I have a family tree to give to my future children,’ the young man had said, his eyes shining. Meanwhile his wife, as if holding the thing called the family tree in their hands, had softly crossed her fingers on her breast and smiled as she lifted her hands up like branches.

  Sidar had remembered the brass picture frame in the shape of a tree at their house, one of the few pieces they had taken with them when they escaped from Turkey. It could fit a total of ten photographs, in round frames big as plums, hung from five separate branches, two on each one. His mother had somehow decided to hang here the pictures of all the family members, starting with her own mother and father. As filling out all the frames had become a problem, as they were unable to reach ten in this manner, they instead exceeded this number by leaps and bounds upon the inclusion of distant relatives. To solve the issue the photographs of the two cousins they loved the most were included. As the frames were too small, each photograph had to be carefully cropped, leaving only a tiny head behind. The heads of the family members had swung on that brass frame for years like the fruits of the mythical Vakvak tree with fruit shaped like humans that, upon being plucked, rotted away in screams.

  I do not share the same blood as you. My birth into your family is just a coincidence. I am one of those children who are given life to rock to sleep the fear of mortality. I am one of those children you abandon to produce yet another one upon realizing you still could not escape death. I scatter my semen to the ground. I do not want to fertilize anyone…and, that being the only way not to end by chance lives started by chance, I bless not you, but suicide…

  His interest in death had incited further rebukes from Istanbulites. The people he consulted instead of giving him an answer almost always counselled him to recite the opening chapter of the Qur’an. This he did not do, as he did not know how to recite anyhow and not only did he not know much about Islam, he did not intend to learn anything either. He did not think that any religion had the right to expect obedience from him as long as it continued to ban suicide.

  Still he was not as ignorant about Islam as he thought. Every now and then he realized he knew things he didn’t even know he had learned. For memory is like a cyclist going downhill fast against the wind: all sorts of knowledge carried by the wind hangs onto you, gets inside your mouth or into your hair and sticks to your skin… Bits and pieces of prayers, the pillars of Islam, sections from the prophet’s life; he knew all these, though rather feebly. They say that any language learnt as a child will never be forgotten. Sidar was not so sure about that but he could easily defend the claim that the religion learnt as a child will never be forgotten.

  When he walked around the cemeteries, he was forced to leave Gaba at the gates. Upon his return, he found him either snoring away or eating a simit off the guard’s hand. As he was penniless and also because the bus, minibus or cab drivers were largely unwilling to let Gaba in, they often returned home on foot. Neither did they pay anyone a visit, nor did anyone visit them – with one exception. Only once had they entertained a guest in their house and a female to boot…

  Sidar had met her at one of the bars on Istiklal Street. She was the friend of a friend of a friend he had recently met. Other than her coppery hair, the girl had two instantly noticeable characteristics: her eyes and a talent to imbibe beer like a sponge. When the bar had closed down late at night, on her own she had followed Sidar to Bonbon Palace. Once inside, she had scrutinized the flat in a vain attempt to find an item that could be a rapport between the guest and the host. There was no object to talk about. Thank goodness there was Gaba.

  Spotting the hazelnut wafer the girl offered him out of her purse, Gaba had sprinted toward her rolling like a ball of fur. Like all burly creatures, he was unaware of more refined techniques of expressing his love. The two of them had tumbled around the floor together in some sort of a game invented there and then. Meanwhile Sidar had watched them from aside, scowling at Gaba’s unexpected vigour and ogling at the girl’s belly appearing every time her T-shirt slid up a bit. Then suddenly, like the men in the ‘Tales of a Thousand and One Nights,’ who go mad with anger when the woman they had their eyes on is interested not in them but in an animal, he had interrupted the game, chased Gaba away and drawn the girl to himself. Just like her belly, her breasts too were milky white. They shivered when kissed.

  Shut in the bathroom Gaba had stumbled headfirst from the crest of glee he had climbed just a moment ago. After a while, his bewildered barks had turned first into angry growls and finally into an endless howl. As the girl had shared his sorrow, Sidar had the most spoiled sex ever, coming in castrated ecstasy.

  When the door opened, Gaba had refused to move an inch, lying there down by the toilet, indifferent and immobile, as if hadn’t been him scratching the door and making all that noise all this time. There he stayed that day, the following day and the day after that. Desperate to win his heart Sidar had bought his favourite foods, sacrificing part of the money put
aside for the electricity bill. Gaba had reluctantly smelt the meat, cheese and sausages placed in front of him and remained glued to his spot by the toilet, all the while shooting daggers with his eyes. Only three days later, upon sniffing the roasted rabbit that had cost the rest of the money Sidar had put aside for the electricity bill, had Gaba finally returned to his old self. Sidar listened to his dog’s slurping and munching with a grin on his face as if listening to enchanting compliments. The fear of losing Gaba had been so unnerving that he had decided never again to bring another guest into this house.

  He had remained true to his word. Meddling in love affairs did not match the life he led anyway. One needed a decent life for such things; it required time, money and energy. He had no money. His energy was limited. As for time, it was becoming short. To dodge his fixation with death, the year 2002 seemed an appropriate time, through its completing a circle – by moving from the nothingness of zero to the amplitude of two only to follow the same path back – and the earthquake ridden Istanbul, which smelt as rankly of death as 18th century Lisbon, seemed the most appropriate place. Inside his head, just at the spot where he kept banging on the dirty, dusty pipe crossing the living room, Sidar carried his rage like a malignant tumour fattening day by day, making plans to die soon.

  Flat Number 9: Hygiene Tijen and Su

  House cleaning sessions fall into two types: those that stem from yesterday and proceed into tomorrow and those that have neither a yesterday nor a tomorrow. So utterly different they are from each other in terms of both causes and consequences that where there is one not even the name of the other comes up. Accordingly, women who do house cleaning also fall into two types: the traditionalists, with a strong awareness of yesterday and tomorrow, and the radicals, with no notion of either.

  When the traditionalists clean their houses, they know too well that this will be neither the first time nor the last. The cleaning done at the moment is an important and yet ordinary hoop of an extended chain that advances at regular intervals. The last house-cleaning stint has usually been done only a week (or fifteen days) previously and will be repeated within a week (or fifteen days). Hence every cleaning-day is part of a solid routine and more or less the same as the one before. It always commences and ends in the same way: first the windows are cleaned and the rugs shaken out, then the floors are swept, starting always with the same room and proceeding in order. The furnishings are dusted without altering priorities, the kitchen always receives great attention, tea and meal breaks are taken at approximately the same hours and finally, in the last phase, the cleaning is completed when the bathroom is given a once over. Since the traditionalists have such firm ties with the past and their confidence in the future is just as strong, there is no harm in leaving the unfinished parts until the next cleaning episode.

  The cleaning of traditionalists is not a bustle performed in the name of keeping the house in order, but the very mark of order itself.

  As for the radicals, in the eyes of these who are less in number and more scatterbrained, every cleaning operation is unique and absolute. It does not matter one single bit if they have done cleaning fifteen days, a week or even a day ago. Since there is not, in the map of their lives, even a single suspension bridge connecting the two separate cleaning days, the cleaning of the past remains there. Thus they always go through their houses as if they had never gone through it before. They set on the task as if held responsible for cleaning it for the first and the last time, as if making a damp den, long uninhabited by anyone except the genies, liveable. It is hard to predict when and where they are going to commence cleaning since any impetus at any moment can incite them into action: be it a melon seed stuck on the switch, soot on the curtains, lime traces in the sink, oil drops on the table cloth, forgotten liquid at the bottom of a glass that has turned mouldy, a bit of mud on the floor…the tiniest detail can suddenly provoke the radicals to launch an all-out cleaning stint. As such, all cleaning activities are different from one another as no one, including themselves, knows where to start and how to proceed. Actually at the outset they might not even be conscious of embarking on yet another cleaning mission. They could find themselves cleaning the whole kitchen when they are supposed to be simply washing a glass, the whole bathroom when scrubbing the sink or the whole house when wiping the switch. Their cleaning has neither a ‘before’ nor an ‘after’. For the traditionalists housecleaning is one of many such bouts of activity, for the radicals it is the one and only.

  Rather than bringing order, the cleaning done by radicals is the very reason behind the chaos in the house.

  Hygiene Tijen was one of the radicals. Perhaps she had always been so, but her radicalism had reached in the last three years a level that was worrisome to those around her. Not only was she capable either by herself or with the help of a cleaning woman of turning the house upside down at any time, she could also devote her entire day at other times to scraping off the burnt oil deposits wedged in the handle of a single pan. Stain or rust, dust or soot, crumb or residue, mildew or dirt; she couldn’t stand to see any of these. When she deemed an object could not be cleaned enough, she had lately acquired the habit of opening the window and throwing it out. Staunchly believing that filthiness was an invasion by microbes, what she really wanted to get rid of at such impulsive moments was not the objects she threw down, but the microbes emanating from them. The tiniest amount of dirt would never stay still but would generate microbes that every minute increased three, even five fold. So she immediately threw this hive of microbes out of the house. Not only the residents of Bonbon Palace but also quite a number of pedestrians happening to plough the street at the wrong time had been witness to Hygiene Tijen’s catapulting of items. First she had thrown a burnt-out pot out of the window, upon failing to cope with the feeling that she would never ever be able to remove the tarry marks that betrayed the snow white rice. Then, she had hurled out an old rug after whisking it for hours upon becoming anxious that she could not at all get rid of the dust in the tassels. Yet just like her cleaning, her way of throwing out items also lacked consistency. When she hurled an object, sometimes she would utterly forget about it, abandoning it in the garden to its fate, whereas some other times she would instantly regret her actions and ask for it to be returned. Then, it fell either upon her daughter, husband or the cleaning lady on duty to go down to pick the item, since she hadn’t stepped out of Flat Number 9 for about four months.

  There was only one person who could keep up with her pace: Meryem. Their relationship was a perpetual ebb-and-flow. With her constant bagging and caprices Hygiene Tijen too often offended Meryem who, though not at all irked by the amount of work piled in front of her, was extremely sensitive about how she was treated. When Meryem quit, Tijen would hire other daily cleaning women in rapid succession, ending up woefully yearning to get Meryem back and eventually managing to do so with pleas and a wage increase. These days Meryem had again signed an armistice. Though they were at peace now, Hygiene Tijen was worried about the advancing pregnancy of her most trustworthy sanitary soldier. She would evidently have to stop working before long, at most in a couple of weeks.

  However, the sour smell of garbage engulfing Bonbon Palace worried Hygiene Tijen even more than the thought of being left without Meryem. She could not stand this smell. Like never before, nowadays she regretted marrying her husband heedless of her parents’ advice and thus having to forego a considerable inheritance, as well as the prosperity she once used to live in. Along with the garbage smell, her misery also escalated day by day. Every morning as she opened her eyes into this smell, she felt like throwing up and slammed open all the windows, without realizing that in so doing she scared everyone below into thinking that a new set of items would start to rain down. Before long, unable to judge if the open windows decreased the smell inside or not, she would close them all again and repeat this pattern at least ten times a day.

  Hygiene Tijen’s nerves, which were already strained to their limits by the gar
bage smell, had entirely snapped the moment she read the letter sent by the school administration. The teacher writing the letter requested that as a favour to the other children Su should not be sent to school until it was ascertained that she was rid of her lice. Since that day, the washing machine worked non-stop. Su’s clothes were all kept in bleach and a feverish cleaning routine reigned in the house. Hygiene’s soldiers were fighting a war at dozens of fronts against an enemy immensely fecund and invisible to the naked eye. Yet the cleaning militia, too, were everywhere. Each had taken up a position at a separate location. There were cleaning fluids, some in spray form, some liquid and still others you left to dry (with separate ones for the windows, metals, wood, marble and tiles); brushes, a different one for the sink, toilet and the tub; lime removers, rust removers, stain removers; floor wax, silver polish, sink drainer, toilet pump; a vacuum cleaner (with different hose accessories for liquids, dust, curtains, armchairs, rugs, corners, air filters), carpet-sweeper, mop, duster, pail, brush, sponges and coated sponges (separate for smooth or rough surfaces); detergents with cider, lemon, lilac and pacific islands smells; throat searing disinfectants; cloths for the floors, walls and dusting; moth balls, lavender pouches, garment bags, soap pieces…all had been mobilized and, along with special shampoos from the pharmacy, were defending Flat Number 9 of Bonbon Palace against lice shoulder to shoulder at every possible corner.