The Flea Palace

by Elif Shafak

  Flat Number 5: Hadji Hadji and His Son, Daughter-in-law and Grandchildren

  ‘Please grandpa, pleease…’ repeated the seven and a half year old while looking sideways at his siblings.

  The other two children were glued to the TV. Though the programme they watched had ended about ten minutes ago, they had not yet been able to detach themselves from the vacuum left by the coquettish announcer with the rose bud tattoo. Still, Hadji Hadji considered the demand of his older grandson the joint wish of all children. ‘Well, okay, let me tell you the tale of the fisherman Suleyman then,’ he said, as he put aside his four books – the number of which had not changed in years – the second one entitled, ‘Interpretations of Dreams with Explanations.’

  ‘During the old days in the Ottoman Empire, there lived in a cottage a fisherman named Suleyman. He was so poor his hands had not touched money even in his dreams, but he had a golden heart. He lived alone without getting mixed up in anything, not hurting even an ant. Those were the most wretched days for the Ottomans. It was the period of ‘The Rule of Women’, a time when the country had hit the bottom. The concubines in the palace pulled a thousand tricks every day. So many innocent souls were strangled because of them. The bodies of the victims were thrown into the sea from the palace windows. The corpses would bloat in the water for days, sometimes getting caught in fishermen’s nets.’

  The six and a half year old, unable to adjust to the spirit of his grandfather’s tale after the vivacious morning programme he had just watched on TV, swallowed hard as if to get rid of a bad taste. The little girl right next to him had bent her head down, thrust out her lower lip and sat still, almost petrified.

  ‘One night, Suleyman went out fishing. Luckily, oodles of fish were caught in his net, but he was such a soft-hearted fellow that he was unable to kill any and instead returned them one by one to the water.’

  ‘What kind of a fisherman is that?’ croaked the seven and a half year old.

  ‘So Suleyman was going back to his cottage empty handed,’ continued Hadji Hadji, having no intention to quarrel with him this morning. ‘But all of a sudden he noticed a white protrusion on the water. Though it was dark, there was a shadowy moonlight. He paddled in the direction of this shape and when he was close enough, saw a corpse floating on the water. Had he been some other fisherman he would have just let it float there, feeding the fish, but being the good man that he was Suleyman could not do so. After some struggle, he pulled the corpse into the boat with the help of his oar and uncovered it. What did he see but a young and very beautiful woman! There was a dagger thrust right between her two breasts, and yet, if you looked at her face, you would think she was alive! She smiled sweetly, as if not at all angry at her murderers. Her lips were like cherries, her eyelashes arrows, her nose an inkstand; as for her hair, it curled all the way down to her heels. Our fisherman Suleyman could not take his eyes off this beauty.’

  The ringing of the phone ripped the story apart. The seven and a half year old grabbed the receiver with hands that were becoming more contorted and inward curling by the day. Yes, they had finished their breakfast. No, they were not being naughty. Yes, they watched television. No, grandpa was not telling them one of his tales. No, they had not turned on the gas. No, they did not mess up the house. No, they did not swing from the balcony. No, they did not play with fire. No, they did not go into the bedroom. He swore it was true that grandpa was not telling a tale. His mother must have had a gnawing suspicion that day since she insisted: ‘If your grandpa is telling you kids a tale, just say: “It is warm today.” I’ll understand.’

  The seven and a half year old turned and intently looked at the old man who was looking intently at him. Without taking his eyes off the old man, the child murmured distinctly: ‘No, mom, it isn’t warm today.’

  He placed the receiver back. Waiting for a couple of seconds to pass so that he could enjoy this game he played every day, he tilted back his large head the growth of which could not be stopped and urged with an indistinct smile, ‘Come on grandpa, continue!’ Only this time, his voice sounded not as if he were making a request but rather as if he were giving his approval.

  ‘Fisherman Suleyman could not possibly leave the corpse of this mysterious beauty back in the water,’ continued Hadji Hadji, trying hard to beat the distress of taking refuge in his grandson’s compassion. ‘He took her to his cottage and watched her all night long, heartsick with sorrow. At dawn, he dug up a deep grave in his garden. He did not at all want to part with her, but nothing could be done about it. The dead are under the earth and those alive over it. This is how it will be until the Day of Judgment when we will all gather together.’

  ‘Couldn’t he just not bury her?’ blubbered the five and a half year old.

  ‘No!’ jumped in the seven and a half year old. ‘If you don’t bury a corpse, it’ll stink. It’ll smell so awful you can’t stand it.’

  ‘But it smells awful here too,’ whined the other one, thrusting her lower lip out even further.

  ‘Maybe there’s a corpse in here too. Did you ever open the closet and look inside?’

  ‘There’s no corpse here,’ roared Hadji Hadji seeing daggers in front of his older grandson. ‘It just smells of garbage. No wonder it stinks when the entire neighbourhood dumps its garbage in our garden! Yet, as the building administrator, I’ll certainly find a solution to this problem. Don’t worry.’ He sat the little girl on his lap. ‘And listen, the beautiful woman in the tale had not died anyhow. Before burying her in the soil, fisherman Suleyman said, “Let me remove the dagger on her breast.” The moment he took out the dagger, the woman moaned. She had not died after all. The dagger had reached the bone but not the heart.’

  Trying to find solace in this unexpected explanation the five and a half year old gave a crooked smile. She cowered on her grandpa’s lap, and certainly would have felt a lot more comfortable had she not felt her older brother’s gaze upon her.

  ‘Our death is written on our foreheads. Even if they thrust a dagger to your heart, you won’t die if it is not so written on your forehead. When the poor woman came back to life, she asked fisherman Suleyman for a cup of water. Then she started to talk. Apparently she was a concubine at the palace. The sultan liked her the most. The other concubines were so green with envy and their hearts were so tainted with evil, they had decided to kill this innocuous soul. Buying off the harem eunuchs, they had made them stab the beautiful concubine’s white chest. She told this story in tears and then said: “If you take me back to the palace, our master the sultan will surely reward you with heaps of gold.” Upon hearing all this, our fisherman Suleyman became lost in thought. He didn’t want gold or anything. He had fallen in love. That night this beautiful concubine slept in his bed in the cottage but fisherman Suleyman slept outside in his boat. Some time in the middle of the night the devil approached him. “Don’t take the woman back,” he hissed, “How could one take such an attractive woman back? Let her be yours. She could stay here, wash your clothes, cook for you and be your wife.” That’s exactly what the devil whispered.’

  Hadji Hadji silently studied his grandchildren as if expecting them to put themselves in the hero’s shoes. Yet, that pertinacious smile on the face of the six and a half year old hinted his mind was not on the moral dilemma of the tale but on the parts that promised sexuality. As for the five and a half year old, she was busy adding another word, ‘concubine’, into her wallet of words newly learned. Once again, the seven and a half year old was the only one left. When his grandfather’s eyes turned to him, he slurred sarcastically, ‘Of course he didn’t take her back.’

  ‘Of course he took her back!’ thundered Hadji Hadji. ‘He personally delivered her to the palace. The sultan was delighted. “You can ask for anything from me,” he declared, but fisherman Suleyman asked for nothing. He left the palace gates as poor as he had entered them.’

  There ensued a prickly silence. Finally convinced that the tale was over, the six and a half year old
hollered: ‘I’m so hungry!’ The five and a half year old, closing the wallet in her mind, jumped off her grandfather’s lap: ‘Osman first, Osman first!’ While the pot warmed up on the stove, they set upon building their tent, piling sheets, pillows and bedspreads in the middle of the living room. Only the seven and a half year old, he alone kept sitting where he was, maintaining his composure. He had picked up an illustrated novel and pretended to be reading it with interest, but his moss green eyes, that looked contracted as they failed to keep up with the growth in his head, were fixated on his grandfather and siblings. Every passing day, he detested them more.

  Flat Number 7: Me

  Ants raided my balcony today – or perhaps it was just today that I noticed ants had raided my balcony. They never remain still. In step with commands that only they can hear, in orderly russet strips they now march back and forth between the dark fissure at the wall and the hot dog I had forgotten on the coffee table. I cannot figure out where they came from and how on earth they made it to the third floor. This apartment building is teeming with all types of bugs. At nights they keep me company whilst I down a few drinks.

  My father’s curse, I guess. Either his curse or his genes. Back in those days when I assumed my drinking had nothing to do with his, I thought my father’s greatest problem in life was not to know how to drink. Ever since I realized how badly my drinking habits resembled his, I started believing instead the problem was not his drinking but his not knowing when to stop. He couldn’t break it off, it was that simple. At the outset, he couldn’t possibly foresee where to stop and once he arrived at that point, he would have gone too astray to care about stopping. After he had polished off a few, it didn’t take him long to pick up the pace. Before long his bloodshot eyes searched for a road sign. A clear sign, a concrete warning: ‘Slow down, fine gravel at ten metres!’ or ‘Slippery surface! Sharp turn! Graded road!’ It was at those times that he needed most someone to come forth and tell him how he looked from the outside. Only we could do that, being closest to him, but we never really tried. Both my mother and I would take our place at the table with him, fill our plates with appetizers, peel apples, dice oranges, make lanterns out of orange peels and simply wait for what was going to happen to happen. My mother had convinced first herself, then me, that my father should not be disturbed while drinking. She was so diffident when she was around him, and perhaps rightly so, but even at that age I knew this was not the only reason for her behaviour. Though it certainly pained her to witness my father’s collapse, I couldn’t help but think that she also secretly, unknowingly enjoyed it. Observing him squander every night the grandeur he would not even momentarily be bereaved of during the day gave her pleasure. That is why she set those rakι tables lavishly garnished with appetizers and mezes each more delicious than the other every night… Every night for twelve years…

  After all, my father was too much of everything. He was too handsome, too dexterous, too pedantic, too intricate, too egotistical, too unflappable, too frivolous…too much for me and my mother; too much for the housing complex we lived in, the army he served at, the towns he was appointed to, the animals he failed to heal…too much for the life he led…I cannot tell for sure if there ever was a time when I loved him, but I do remember being proud of him once. As a kid I was proud of him because he was tall and handsome, far too much. Back in those days, oodles of stories circulated about children being kidnapped and raised by the gypsies and I remember thinking of my father being one of the kidnapped kids thereafter accidentally mixed in with us. He was so unlike everyone else. We all had similar features, brownish hair, average height and the same laughter. When annoyed we averted any eye-contact, even our stormiest moments looked composed, so patient, ordinary and meek we were, men and women all the same. However, amidst us there he was, with a height that did not fit through doors, a head of hair that turned burning blonde under the rays of the sun, piercing hazel eyes that darkened when sad and always looked you directly in the eye as if to get you to account for your actions, a temperament that swayed between opposite poles and a checkered record of outbursts, flaws and failures piling up day by day along with his sins.

  If my father had not been so handsome, robust and self-assured, my mother would have probably been more at ease. That malicious angst furtively gnawed at her bliss and cast shadows in her eyes – shadows that could be deciphered even in her engagement photos where she stood fretfully smiling on his arm, wearing an aquamarine engagement dress with a huge synthetic magnolia attached to her collar. She must have abhorred the hypocrisy of time. First having me, next my brother, then two miscarriages one after another, and finally the daughter she so much wanted, raised spoilt and turned in the end into a replica of herself… I have always found pitiable the way in which middle-aged women who were once beautiful vent half-coyly, half-superciliously, how beautiful they were in their youth, showing every one, each and every time the same old photographs to make their claim credible. Even more pitiable than that is when their children, especially their sons, show the same photographs of ‘my-ma-was-so-beautiful-when-young’ in a rather coy, but mostly supercilious manner to their own acquaintances, especially to the women they fall in love with. As for us, because of my father, or maybe I should say thanks to him, neither my mother could play this game, nor my brother and myself.

  If my father were, could ever have been, any different, my mother would have probably found it easier to come to terms with the evanescence of youth – just like all those housewives around her with their two or three children, middle income, middling life and the poison of their many compunctions seeping out from either their tongue or their gaze. Those women and their husbands were normal. What was far from being normal was my father’s condition. They were married; their lives, children, money, home, frustrations and past were all identical, but the passing years had treated my mother and my father very differently. While my mother had soon become worn-out, my father would even decades later still look as young and robust as he had been in their engagement photos. I can’t blame ma for failing to bow to the ephemerality of her youth when next to her was a youth that never faded. There was nothing she could do, and in the fullness of time the lenses through which she viewed herself became more and more hazy. Since the photographs she could have otherwise exhibited to prove how beautiful she had once been were bound to disclose not only the drastic change in her but also the complete lack of change in my father, unlike the other housewives with two or three children, middle income, middling life and the poison of their many compunctions seeping out either from their tongue or their gaze, my mother kept no photo albums in our guest room.

  Being too busy priding in and imitating my father, for a long time I must have failed to notice my mother’s fretful nature. From every new branch of age I perched on over the years, I watched my father with admiration. When he put on his uniform, his face acquired a deliberate toughness, just like those of all the other soldiers. Yet, unlike them, his was a deliberation that could dissipate and a toughness that could thaw at any moment. The clues of this transformation were already there during the day. That stern stare of his – which glazed over as if he needed to prove that he took care of animals not because he was fond of them but simply because it was his job to do so – would soften, if even for a moment, when he healed a colt, relieved the pain of a cat whose jaw had melted in the acid-filled hole it had tumbled into or gave a weasel attacked by dogs the final peace it yearned for. At any one of those moments, I could perceive how bored he was from incessantly taking off and putting on two contradictory faces. A contradiction reflected in the two professions he carried out simultaneously: veterinarian and soldier.

  As he ran around all day long hurling orders left and right with that impressive air of his, he awakened among women an admiration tainted with envy and among men envy tainted with admiration. Yet inside the uniform he wore he kept another personality, as if carrying around a baby porcupine he could not heal: someone who purported to liv
e beyond sorrow and pleasure, was scared silly of death, could not bear to afflict or be afflicted by pain, could not easily recuperate when confronted with injustice, someone who knew, not rationally but intuitively, that he was doomed to screw up sometime somewhere; someone unsteady and tender, troubled and untrustworthy, pessimistic and enraged, aggressive and alcoholic… As long as the sun was up in the sky and he was doing his job, he could indeed hide the baby porcupine. He was so captivating and striking at such times that even my mother liked to grab one of us three to stop by his workplace with any old excuse. Both my siblings and I were thrilled to be next to him during the day. Alas, these were the times when we saw him the least. Then night would come along and, as his aura would lose its sparkle and his face its appeal, my father would metamorphose.

  My mother had made a division of labour the rationale of which I could never grasp. According to her scheme, while my father drank each one of us had certain tasks to perform and roles to play. My brother and sister were to quietly watch television and go to bed early, whereas my mother and I were to stay at the table and act as witnesses. Since my father hated to be alone at the rakι table, we watched him in shifts. First it was my turn. As soon as he sat down at the table, I took my place across from him. My mother would then be busy deep-frying the pastry, mixing the sauce of the meatballs or carrying out to the table the appetizers each prepared in a more burdensome fashion than the other. Meanwhile, I would remain at the table and answer my father’s questions. He always asked the same questions, which were all about school, and always cut short my answers to tell his, which were all about life. That wouldn’t offend me at all. As a matter of fact, this first phase of the evening was the most enjoyable time of my father’s soliloquy. When halfway through the first glass, he would be so cheery and chatty that, even though I knew to the letter what was going to happen soon, I couldn’t help but feel blessed to be there with him. Then my mother would come and sit next to my father with an expression that barely revealed her thoughts, and as they started chatting about the events of the day in a muttering, monotonous voice, I would go to my room to do my homework. Two or three hours later when I returned to the table, time would have elapsed, my mother’s eyes would have drooped with sleep and the chat would have long come to an end. Thus begun the third and final phase of the evening – the phase when everything gorgeous rapidly rotted…the phase wherein the baby porcupine scuttled over the table and I, upon touching its quills, got offended…