The Flea Palace

by Elif Shafak

  Since the very beginning of school, every day without exception, Muhammet had dreamed about running away. Yet as he gritted his teeth in pain now it was not fleeing the place that he pined for but to perish altogether. If only a disaster would happen right at that moment, a real bad earthquake for instance, so that the earth would split open, leaving not a single stone upon stone or a head on a body, smashing to smithereens the grades in the teacher’s notebook, the gold stars of the girl at the board and the limbs of his bench mate, along with his elbows, slaps, insults…if only they would scatter on all sides never to unite again…

  While Muhammet had closed his eyes and was dreaming about the worst possible disaster imaginable, a siren ripped the air apart. There was some scurrying and dash outside in the hallway, doors were banged. They all stood still as the teacher stared at the students and the students stared back. In next to no time the door was harshly shoved and in walked a dainty woman with piercing glances behind her pince-nez. She smiled first at the teacher, then at the students and, with a courtesy filtered through a fine sieve, ‘Dear teacher, beloved students…’ she bayed as if delivering joyful tidings, ‘This is an earthquake drill.’

  As soon as the dainty woman finished her sentence, three men looking startlingly alike, all stout and with droopy moustaches, dashed into the room. They had chick-yellow helmets and T-shirts with ‘Negligence kills, not earthquakes’ written on them. Remarkably agile, they took out one by one the various tools they had brought in their bags and hung posters of all sizes on the board hooks. Curtains were drawn shut and a slide machine started to light up the wall. Muhammet caught his breath as he followed with excitement the slides brought to life one by one with the dusty beam of light slashing through the darkness.

  After the last slide was shown and the curtains pulled open, the dainty woman clapped her hands to announce how the drill was to take place. There would be two phases. During the first phase, the students were required to cower under the benches and, pretending everything around them was shaking violently, wait there calmly and courageously with their heads in between their arms. As for the second phase, that was meant to teach them how to evacuate a building in the shortest possible time. So the siren pealed, and all thirty-two of the thirty-two students went under the wooden benches giggling non-stop.

  Muhammet rolled up into a ball to squeeze inside the morsel of space left from his bench-mate. Minutes later, he too got out from under the bench with the others to line up in pairs to evacuate the classroom. Yet since his bench-mate did not care to hold his hand as bench mates were supposed to, Muhammet could not join the chain of children. The two kids standing up at the corner away from the others must have drawn the attention of the dainty woman for she suddenly blundered out in a voice bubbling with delight, ‘Will you two please come this way? We were looking for two brave boys.’

  While all the other kids flowed out into the hallway streaming in perfect order, Muhammet looked longingly after them, his eyes brimming with anxiety. When the classroom totally emptied out, he realized the dainty woman and the teacher had departed too. Before he could find something to kick at, to diffuse the resentment of being left out of the game, and alone with the bully of a bench-mate to boot, the three moustached men snapped into action. One picked up a stretcher, the other took out a longish rope and the third unfolded a blanket. They then laid the children down on the stretcher side by side, enveloped them in the blanket and tied them up tightly. Of the four separate ropes, two were fastened onto hooks and dangled down from the window, while the other two were tied to the doorknob of the classroom.

  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ rasped one of the men and then let his voice dwindle as if letting slip a secret: ‘We are going to lower you down from the window.’

  Five minutes later, when Muhammet had finally mustered-up enough courage to open his eyes, he found himself sixteen metres above ground on top of a stretcher with his arms and legs tightly tied up inside a smelly blanket side by side with the boy he liked the very least in this world. All the children had gathered in the garden, watching them from below, cheering in unison. The sky was a clear blue; a lumpy cloud swayed lazily above. As the ropes were loosened from above, the stretcher came down in jolts, but no matter how much it was lowered, it never seemed to get closer to the ground.

  ‘I bet you must be shitting in your pants,’ his bench-mate croaked. So close was the boy’s beet-red face that Muhammet inhaled the smell of his breath. He opened his mouth to declare that he was not afraid at all, but before finding a chance to say anything, spit rolled into his mouth. The other boy burst out laughing. Wriggling to get rid of the spit in his mouth Muhammet managed to spew out, only not to his right into the open space, but to the left onto the face of his foe.

  This was not something the other boy had expected at all. Once he had got over the initial confusion, he counterattacked by replacing the spit gun with a spit machine gun. Though they had meanwhile dropped closer to the ground, none of those clustered below seemed to be aware of what was going on up here, three and a half metres above ground, ‘Now watch what’s coming,’ the beet-face snarled. ‘You’ll descend in the middle of everyone with green sputum on your face!’ Muhammet hurried to avert his head but was too late. He felt a globule stick onto the middle of his forehead, stay still for a second or two, slowly ooze down, and then start sliding toward his nose. He almost threw up. The stretcher went down another half a metre. Now one could clearly see the faces of those down below. The children were gleefully cheering-on their heroes sent from the sky. Struggling in vain to free himself from the straps, Muhammet felt like crying. Though he tried hard to convince himself that the liquid on his nose could not be sputum and that the beet-face had bluffed, little did he succeed. The stretcher slid down another half a metre, the cloud wafted and Muhammet made a wish: that if the earth ever had a post, it had better collapse now and bring on the end of the world… Before he could complete his wish, however, both children were brusquely hurled, as if to fling them out of their places, first to the front, then back and then again to the front. Screams rose from below, Muhammet closed his eyes, the rope on the left side broke off and the stretcher turned upside down, nose-diving to the ground from a height of two and a half metres. The beet-face let out a wail.

  ‘Are they dead? Are they dead?’ shrieked the classroom teacher with the pinkish fingernails, the veins swelling up on her neck.

  As the earthquake officials tried to rein in the children who flocked around the victims like chicken running to feed, one of those with the droopy moustaches turned the stretcher over carefully only to meet two pairs of eyes opened wide as saucers, one with pain, the other with fear.

  ‘Is there sputum on my face?’ asked Muhammet when he succeeded in breathing out a sound.

  The official, ashen with worry, gazed at the child’s face distractedly, almost dreamily, and shook his head. It was then that Muhammet felt a surge of vigour inside. It had been a bluff after all! Once the ropes were untied and the smelly blanket lifted, he sat up on the stretcher with pride. While the beet-face whose leg had been broken was carried off to the hospital with the same stretcher, Muhammet was enjoying the sweet syrupy taste of bravery for the first time in his life.

  Flat Number 3: Hairdressers Cemal and Celal

  ‘Oh, I’m dying to learn about the man who put up the saint writing on the wall. Is he pulling one over us, or has he lost his mind, if only I could tell! I swear to God, I can’t wait to see what’s going to happen next. Last night, my good old bulgur didn’t appear. I have been waiting for her. I guess I’ve gotten so used to her dumping garbage into our mouths, I’ll miss the woman if she doesn’t show up anymore. Could it be, I wonder, that she has taken that writing on the wall seriously? Not that it’s impossible. This place is Turkey! The West long finished exploring the moon; they are now busily dividing Mars up into parcels and will soon clone humans. What about us, what have we been doing in the meantime? Finding holy saints in our backyards! Bless
him, but is he a saint or some sort of a flower that sprouted from the soil? After that we ask in vain why on earth the European Union does not take us in? What would they want us for? Only when they are running short of saints will the Europeans ask us to join.’

  A few flimsy giggles followed but Cemal did not seem to be offended at all with such limited backing from his audience.

  ‘I swear to God, it wouldn’t come as a surprise if one of these days we had a red alarm meeting at Bonbon Palace: an emergency meeting with a special ‘holy saint agenda’, in the house of our building manager Mr. Hadji Hadji! Sonny, why don’t you spray a little!’

  The pungent smell of the bug spray they had amply used last night all over the place had still not dispersed. In the morning, they had encountered dozens of dead bugs on the floor. All were swept away and dumped into the garbage can, before the first customers showed up.

  ‘So here we are in the flat of Mr. Hadji Hadji, sitting around the table side by side,’ Cemal voiced his vision as he emptied the wicker basket for rollers and turned it upside down. ‘We are all there, nice and neat, in full gear. I tell you, even Hygiene Tijen has managed to make it out of her haven, perched at the corner of a chair, ready to explode at any moment.’ Cemal took a hairspray with gilded trim and placed it on one end of the basket. ‘And here is that penniless student in the basement, next to him that overgrown dog of his. Not that they care about the saint, these two are there to fill up their stomachs gratis.’

  He stuck a fine-toothed comb through a hole in the basket and right next to that, to represent Gaba he placed a chunky, carroty, notched hair-roller.

  ‘Oh, what is being served?’ marvelled the blonde with a cast eye who came to have her hair dyed once a week, never convinced that she need not have it done so often. She was now inspecting the wicker basket curiously, as if waiting for a thumb-sized child to spring out of it to entertain her.

  ‘You seem to have confused this meeting with a tea-party, honey,’ snapped Cemal. ‘We are talking about a serious apartment meeting here.’

  ‘But if you’re making up a story, we would like to hear the details too,’ protested the Blue Mistress from the corner where she sat.

  ‘All right, all right,’ Cemal thundered, feeling no need to hide his pleasure in managing to attract the Blue Mistress’s attention. ‘So be it. Mr. Hadji Hadji’s daughter-in-law has baked us a spinach börek and they serve a samovar of tea with it. Are you satisfied now?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ nodded the women, chuckling, but no sooner had they given their consent that an objection was voiced: ‘No, it’s not okay!’ It was the clerk of the Criminal Court, whom everyone deemed the most informed woman of the neighbourhood, making money out of putting down on paper the most criminal features of people’s most private lives. Once a month she dropped by to have her hair coloured dark chestnut. When certain of being the centre of attention, she leaned back and superciliously recited the data in hand: ‘For one thing, the daughter-in-law works at the box office of a movie theatre from early morning till late evening five days a week. She has no time to roll the dough into pastry. Even if she did have the time, though, let me assure you she still wouldn’t do so. That woman must have more affection for her sins than for her father-in-law. She wouldn’t even lift a finger for him.’

  Cemal frowned at this over-informed customer of his. ‘If that is the case, there is no pastry at the table. Just pure, plain hot tea. Okay? Can I now please continue onto the main subject?’

  ‘But it doesn’t make sense,’ said the Blue Mistress with her sauciest smile, determined to force the limits of Cemal’s fondness for her. ‘Then there would be a logical flaw in the story. You had claimed that the student in the basement and the huge doggie were there to gorge themselves. Now you’ll have to oust them.’

  Cemal stared crossly at the chunky, carroty, notched hair-roller and the thin, long fine-toothed comb as if deciding upon their fate. ‘OK, I surrender,’ he bumbled, giving a wink at the Blue Mistress. Running to the kitchen he returned with half of the simit he had bought in the morning and placed it on top of the roller basket. ‘For this special meeting, our respected manager Mr. Hadji Hadji has picked up a box each of sweet and salty canapés from the patisserie. He has also lined up sesame sticks into oval plates. Is this pleasing enough? Now are you all satisfied?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ chortled the women, looking at each other and then at the Criminal Court clerk for a final approval.

  ‘Frankly I would never believe, not in this life, that that stingy man would go to this much expense but let’s assume he did, for the sake of the story,’ decreed the woman, lifting up an eyebrow plucked dreadfully thin.

  Now that he had full permission, Cemal excitedly plunged into the game, lining up all the remaining neighbours. The no-alcohol, extra-volume hair foam with nourishing vitamin B was the university professor at Flat Number 7; the hair dryer was Madam Auntie at Flat Number 10; the electrical hair-curler was the Russian housewife in Flat Number 6; the colouring brush and the pair of scissors were the husband and wife heading-up the Firenaturedsons family across from them and the manicure file was their young, despondent daughter.

  After a brief pause, Cemal found the brush with the bone handle to be suitable for the manager. Lastly, he fetched the transparent, glittery container with bright blue gel inside: ‘And this one here is the graceful young lady in Flat Number 8,’ he cooed. As the Blue Mistress responded to the compliment with a composed smile, all the other women stirred nervously in their chairs.

  ‘Oh, I shouldn’t forget to place Celal and me. We of course have to be the same.’

  From the haircare set on the shelf, Cemal picked two multivitamin sachets of hair repair with keratin, locating them side by side. ‘Yes, this is exactly how we’ve lined up. Mr. Hadji Hadji explains why we’re having this special meeting,’ he grabbed the brush with the bone handle and coughed pretentiously to silence his audience. ‘In case some of you have not seen it yet let me inform you all a saint’s tomb has been found in our garden. Given this situation, we urgently have to make new arrangements.’

  ‘Hmm…but sir, can a holy saint sprout from earth like a flower?’ spoke up one of the multi-vitamin hair repairers with keratin. Turning to his customers over his shoulder, Cemal footnoted with a whisper: ‘That’s me!’

  ‘Yeah, we guessed so,’ chorused the women.

  ‘You, as individuals, are free to believe or disbelieve. We are not obliged to convince you of the saints existence either. However, if you want democracy to flourish in this country, you are bound to show some respect to other people’s beliefs,’ decreed the brush with the bone handle. ‘If we are all of the same opinion on this matter, there are specific agenda items we have to settle without further ado. The very first item on our agenda is the following question: whose holy saint is the one lying in our garden? You can’t just call it such and be done with it. Every saint helps a certain segment of the populace in our country. Some are the saints of the sailors at sea; others care for the soldiers on land. Several saints heal women who cannot become pregnant, several others help the lepers. One should always go to a saint relevant to his particular problem. If the old maid mistakenly pays a visit to the Saint of the Bedridden, the most she can obtain will be an extra hop and a jump.’

  ‘Someone should record all this in the minutes,’ piped-up the clerk of the Criminal Court, lifting up her other eyebrow.

  ‘All right,’ said Cemal, and after brief consideration, appointed the manicure file for the job. ‘Write this down missie, the first item on the agenda is to find out whose father this honourable saint is.’

  ‘How do we know that? Maybe the saint is a woman,’ objected the Blue Mistress.

  ‘Nonsense,’ roared the brush with the bone handle.

  ‘Why? Couldn’t a woman be a saint?’ the Blue Mistress asked obstinately, without taking her eyes off the gel container that represented her. And since she had the floor to herself, she delivered a speech there and then
: ‘Plenty of pious people have emerged from among women. Let’s first count the exalted Ayse and Fatma. Then there is Rabia, for instance. Of course, Mother Kadιncιk is also notable, as is Karyagdι Hatun. There is Huma Hatun, the mother of Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror. Mevlana’s mother, Mümine Hatun, is another example…not to mention the “Seven Filles”.’

  The women lined up in front of the mirror turned to the Blue Mistress in bewilderment. She had too much knowledge on religious matters, way too much for a mistress. Cemal seemed to be the one who was most impressed. He gaped at her with adoration, as if the matchless concubine Canayakιn who had stunned everyone in the audience of Caliph Harun al-Rashid with not only her beauty but also her wisdom, had been reborn in – of all the places in Istanbul in the year 2002 – Bonbon Palace.

  ‘Then jot down this, missie,’ proclaimed the brush with the bone handle to the manicure file. ‘Our first agenda item is to find out whose father or mother this holy saint is. In order to carry out the necessary research, we hope our honoured university professor will not withhold his valuable help from us.’ The extra-volume, no-alcohol hair foam with nourishing vitamin B, kind of stirred. He seemed pleased with the esteem bestowed upon him.

  ‘Now let’s proceed onto the second agenda item. Ladies and gentlemen, now that there is a saint in our garden, we have to confer extra care on our everyday manners. With this purpose in mind, I myself have prepared a list, a list of things we must strictly refrain from doing. With your permission, I’m reading aloud: