The Flea Palace

by Elif Shafak

  ‘You’re now going to repeat after me, ok?’ she asked, so easily and swiftly shifting from the formal speech form we normally used to a far more casual one. I nodded meekly. She stood across from me, staring at me directly in the eye.

  ‘I’m a big man.’

  ‘I’m a big man.’

  ‘But if I tell our secret to anyone else…’

  ‘But if I tell our secret to anyone else…’ I said, as I narrowed my eyes and added a furtive tinge to my voice. Yet she no longer smiled. In the darkness of her eyes, two slender, pitch black water snakes slithered in silvery sparkles.

  ‘May God turn me into a louse! The biggest louse ever!’ Su hollered, pompously stressing each word.

  ‘May God turn me into a louse!’ I hollered, pompously stressing each word. ‘The biggest louse ever!’

  I jumped to my feet, assuming as fearsome an expression as possible, crossing my eyes, pushing my front teeth onto my lower lip like a vampire, jutting my jaw forward, making my hair stand up, my forehead all wrinkled, opening my nostrils wide and moving my eyebrows up and down. I had never attempted to imitate a louse before. I’d never realized how tough it could be! I did not have the foggiest idea what the faces of lice looked like. In point of fact, I could not even tell whether lice had faces or not. One of the few things I knew about lice was that they could be identified from afar, only from afar, as no one could tell what they looked like up close. Another thing: I also knew lice were petite enough not to be seen by the naked eye and evil enough not to display their eyes.

  Mulling it over together we came up with further assumptions. Perhaps what rendered a louse so base and bad was its unique ability to become one with its victim. As such, a louse was not some sort of a foe lying in ambush outside, waiting for an occasion to assail, but rather an affliction that gnaws surreptitiously from within. The mosquito sucks our blood as well, for instance, but it leaves its victim alone once it finishes its job and has gotten what it hankered after. A mosquito, even at the instant it finds our vein, continues to be a part of the outside, never a part of us. So apparent is this detachment that even when we squish a mosquito that has just stung us, we are disgusted by the blood in our palms as if it was not ours but the mosquito’s. Nevertheless when it comes to lice exactly the reverse is true. The louse belongs not to the exterior but the interior, distinctively to us in person.

  To picture it, I too tore a page from the lily-bedecked notebook. Since we could not figure out whether a louse had a face and, if it indeed had one, what it would look like, and since our only hint was that it stood out as the worst of the worse, we could capture its monstrosity by borrowing a bit from each bad creature on earth and then bestowing upon it the imaginary body we had thus formulated. When I was done, what emerged was a real freak. Since it had borrowed each part of its body from a different creature, it resembled many life forms but did not look like any particular one of them. The eyes, one borrowed from a frog and the other an owl, appeared so strange together that it was as if it had been hit on the head with a sledgehammer. Below the page, I wrote, ‘Dazed Drunk Louse’ in small letters.

  Su started to giggle as soon as she saw the picture. ‘Excellent! That’s exactly it. If you don’t keep your mouth shut, God will turn you into Dazed Drunk Louse!’ I tried to act as if I was scared but could not help laughing midway. She tried to act as if she was offended but could not help laughing midway.

  Then abruptly, apprehensively, she stopped talking as if scolded by an invisible authority in the room. The vulnerability of someone who had just realized they had revealed things that could never be taken back cast a shadow over her juvenile face. It was only then that I had a sneaking suspicion that what she had told me could actually be true.

  Flat Number 6: Metin Chetinceviz and His WifeNadia

  ‘I told you not to give up hope in God, Loretta. My daughter, you should be grateful now that you have recovered your memory. You so much deserve to be happy,’ cooed the nurse to the woman who was about to be discharged.

  ‘It’s so strange,’ the other one smiled, opening wide the green eyes which she had made more dramatic with loads of even greener eye shadow. ‘What I most desired thus far was to remember my past, but now I want to escape from it. I’m going to start a new life nurse, and will never leave you from now on.’

  ‘See? Loretta will never leave us from now on,’ snorted His Wife Nadia to the bug struggling in the empty jelly jar she kept rotating in her palms. ‘Unlike you, Blatella Germanica, you were going to abandon us, weren’t you?’

  Toward the end of last the century, on a dreary, hazy day in the middle of a dirty, muddy street, a scientist excitedly reported witnessing the en masse migration of a cockroach breed named Blatella Germanica. Of the migrating flock almost all were female and when Dr. Howard encountered them, they were in the process of leaving the restaurant they used to reside in, getting ready to cross the street. The migration of the bugs took approximately three hours, at which point they reached the place they would hereafter dwell in. When Dr. Howard started to question why these cockroaches had left the restaurant in the first place, he could not come up with a satisfactory answer. As much as one could observe, nothing extraordinary had happened at the restaurant on that day; neither large-scale cleaning nor fumigating. There remained only one other factor that might have triggered the migration: overcrowding! For these female bugs to risk abandoning both their males and domicile even though no catastrophe had fallen upon them, it must have been crammed pretty tight back at that restaurant. Since hundreds had taken to the streets, there must be thousands left behind.

  His Wife Nadia pensively pouted at the jar. How could so many Blatella Germanica – notorious for their deep dislike of daylight – keep appearing in the middle of the day at different corners of the house and particularly in the wardrobe where she kept her potato lamps? More significantly, did this obscured migration of flocks of cockroaches up and down the apartment building mean there could be hundreds or perhaps even thousands more someplace nearby?

  Flat Number 7: Me and the Blue Mistress

  As I was heating up the leftover pasta from the day before, the doorbell rang piercingly and persistently. I opened the door. I had never seen her like this.

  ‘I sure deserved this,’ she moaned. Swollen bags as red as raw meat had gathered under her eyes; the gleam of her young face had vanished along with the brilliance of her eyes and the lustre of her skin. The sides of her nose were so irritated from the constant wiping that they were peeling off. This was a strange face and since the Blue Mistress existed and subsisted with and within her face, she too was a strange woman now. Still waiting for the pasta to heat up, I held out my rakι to her. She refused to sip from my drink but waited patiently for me to swig half a glass before starting to speak.

  ‘He was going to come tonight,’ she sighed, ‘having sent me a message on the mobile phone. I made puréed eggplants. I was actually going to prepare chicken with ground walnuts but didn’t feel like it this time. I guess I was a bit offended. You know he hadn’t stopped by for ten days. That’s why I prepared the puréed eggplants. He likes that dish too, but not as much as the chicken with ground walnuts. All day long, I grilled eggplants.’

  Stern as I stared at her, she did not even notice how uninterested I was in all these details. Hurrying full blast, as if someone might any minute declare her time was up, she sliced to shreds dozens of details each more meaningless than the one before and piled them all up in front of me. I did not intervene anymore.

  ‘He’s had a heart attack. Can you imagine? He had a heart attack on the way here,’ she cried out when she had finally finished with the dinner details. ‘They called from the hospital. I guess since mine was the last number on his mobile phone, they thought I was his wife or family.’

  ‘I’m sorry…’

  As soon as she heard me, she started to choke and sob as if I had disclosed a long awaited decision in the negative. Perhaps she doubted the sincerity behi
nd my words. Not that she would be wrong. The olive oil merchant, whom I had not met face to face and whom I passed judgement upon though I had seen him twice at most and only from a distance, was no more than a typecast for me: a hairy, greasy pitiable excuse of a rival with his belly hanging over his pants. I was sorry for my little lover more than him…and also somewhat surprised. Up until now I had not considered the possibility that she could have been so attached to that coarse figure of a man. That she loved to rat on him, did not object to and even enjoyed hearing me insulting him, was no indication that she was not attached to the man. Indeed she was more committed to him than I had ever suspected. I raked my fingers through her hair. Yet she harshly pushed away my hand.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she snorted her disapproval. ‘It’s my fault. If the poor thing can’t make it through to the morning, it’s all because of me.’ She swallowed stiffly, as if trying to get rid of an acidic taste in her mouth. ‘I paid a visit to the saint.’

  ‘What did you do? What did you do?’

  ‘Well, you can’t actually call it paying a visit. Meryem put the idea into my head. There were a few bottles of banana liquor left in the house. I gave them to her a few days ago. I don’t drink the liquor and she likes them a lot. We were talking about whether it would be harmful to the baby and that kind of chit-chat. Thank goodness this time around her pregnancy is not as difficult. Meryem told me she lost three male babies before Muhammet, two were stillborn, one died when six months old. So when Muhammet was born, she let his hair grow long like a girl. The kid went around like a girl until he started school, in order to trick Azrael.’

  I am curious, do women have special machinery or something chemical in their brains that prevents them from expressing themselves straight out. So many details, so many introductory statements, so many stories whirling circles within circles that never get to the point… I refreshed my rakι but found no soda left on the empty shelves of my huge refrigerator. I needed to go out and get some.

  ‘Anyway, the kid survived but he was then constantly beaten-up at school. Yet, Meryem said recently he had changed so much. That fainthearted boy was replaced by someone utterly different and is no longer beaten up by his friends. It’s like a miracle.’

  I wondered whether the Islamist grocer across the street had closed yet. Though he did not sell gin, he carried tonic. Though he did not sell liquor, he stocked chocolate with liquor. In a similar vein, he does not sell rakι but indeed sells soda to mix with rakι.

  ‘We were talking about how it could be possible for this child to change so drastically. Meryem then confided to me that she had made a vow to the saint. “Which saint?” I asked. “Don’t ask!” she replied puzzlingly. “If you have a long awaiting wish, you too should go for it. If it ever comes true, only then will I tell you which saint I visited.” So she asked me for a clean scarf. I wrote my wish inside, then folded it up like a Hidrellez request and gave it to her.’

  I gave up. By the time this story was over, the Islamist grocer would have long closed the store and gone home. Given my preferences, I decided to make do with water.

  ‘She said, “If your wish comes true, so much the better. It would be my gift to you. You gave me so many banana liquors. If it doesn’t come true, no one will know. All we would have done is try.” That’s what she said. Well, maybe that’s not exactly what she said but it was something like that. I can’t remember right now.’

  The rakι tasted awful! That damn drink is no good with water.

  ‘So I folded it like a Hidrellez letter, as she’d instructed me. “Let me be freed of this state!” I wrote. Or perhaps I wrote, “Let me be freed of this man!”… If I could only remember! Everything got mixed up. What did I write? God, what did the saint understand? The man is dying there because of me.’

  What I had just heard was so enormously, astoundingly and fantastically ridiculous. I could not even consider it likely that she could really have believed this claptrap. Even if she did, I couldn’t place much significance on the pain she would suffer because of it. After all, that is how things are. In order for us to truly share a person’s pain, they first have to share the same reality with us. When we calm down a child who is crying because a part of her rickety toy is broken; when we swear to the anorexic who looks skeletal but still imagines herself obese that she really is not a fatso; when we put up with the absurd talk of our best buddy, mad at life having been cheated on by a worthless woman he’s only been with for a total of two weeks; when we strive to distract until the arrival of his psychiatrist the mentally ill man who suspects his soul has been stolen by a pigeon and thereby chases all the pigeons out in the square to search inside the beaks of each and every one; in all of these cases we stand by these people but look at their pain from way yonder. The child shedding tears for such a simple thing, the anorexic who camps so far away from reality, the miserable buddy who cannot see it is not worth getting upset by such a worthless woman, the nut incapable of comprehending that the poor pigeons flock around real concrete for wheat kernels instead of intangible elusive souls; all might plausibly expect from us some degree of attention and compassion, soothing or solidarity. They’ll most likely get it too. We could indeed fulfill the role of comforter without much hesitation. Upon seeing how they talk nonsense because of their suffering and how they suffer because of their nonsensical talk, the chances are we might even feel emotionally close to them deep down…but that is the very limit. They might require and possibly receive our kindheartedness at one of those moments but they cannot convince us to enter their reality. We can pity or even love them, provided they do not expect us to sincerely share in their suffering.

  Flat Number 10: Madam Auntie

  At room temperature of 27° C and a humidity rate of 65%, the early stages of a housefly’s lifecycle involve one to two days as eggs, eight to ten days as larvae and nine to ten days as pupa. In laboratory research conducted under the same conditions, it has been observed that 50% of the male flies die within the first fourteen days and 50% of the female flies die within the first twenty-four days.

  At a room temperature of 27° C and a humidity rate of 36–40%, cockroaches prove to be far more resistant than flies. Under such circumstances, they can survive without any food intake for twenty days. With only water, they can stay alive for thirty-five days. The eggs laid under the same temperature and humidity levels hatch between twenty-seven to thirty days. The hatched offspring change skin between five and ten times to become adults. Adults can live for approximately six to twelve months. Then they too die. They rot and decompose, break apart and scatter, are no longer themselves and are muddled up into different things.

  Just like flies and cockroaches, food too has a lifecycle. In a cool and dry place, pasteurized milk stays fresh for one year, halva with pistachios, two years, diet biscuit with cinnamon, two years, granulated coffee, two years, raspberry chewing gum, ten to twelve months, chocolate with rice crackers, one year, a can of tuna, four years, a can of coke, six months and corn nut with cheese flavour, six months. If left in a refrigerator sliced whiting stays fresh for one and a half weeks, yoghurt drink for seven days, mozzarella one and a half months, packaged chicken twelve to fourteen days. At the end of this period, these things also start to die. They rot and decompose, break apart and scatter, are no longer themselves and get muddled up with different things. Once tea or tobacco, wheat or cheese expires, these things start to produce lice, bugs or larvae in the cavities of the cups where they are kept. Clothes engender moths, furniture becomes infested with worms and grain gets raided by beetles. Cockroaches too arrive at such places. Cockroaches are everywhere anyhow.

  Just like flies and cockroaches and food, objects also have a lifecycle. On average, overalls worn as a baby last one to two months, a battery powered train acquired as a child lasts one hour and one year, diaries kept at puberty thirty to sixty days, the sweater given as a gift by a relative with no fashion taste ten seconds, the pipe bought with the desire to stop
smoking only to discover afterward how difficult it is to clean, two to six puffs, a printer cartridge fifteen days and three months, a train ticket one to twenty hours, the gaudy ornament lovingly acquired when drunk only to seem not that nice when sober, one long night. Then they too die. They die and are thrown away, either to one side or to the garbage.

  From the moment they wake up till they go to bed the denizens of Istanbul pass their days incessantly, unconsciously throwing things away. When calculated in terms of weeks, months, and years, a considerable garbage heap accumulates behind each and every person and just like flies and cockroaches and food and objects, humans too have an expiration date. The average life expectancy is sixty five years for males and seventy years for females. Then the inevitable end comes and they too die. They rot and decompose, break apart and scatter, are no longer themselves and get muddled up with different things.

  When, after losing her husband in an accident twenty-five years ago, Madam Auntie had moved alone into Flat Number 10 of Bonbon Palace, she had encountered there objects belonging to the former residents: a hundred and eighty-one ownerless and out-of-date objects. Even though the letter from the building’s new owner in France had openly stated that she could dispense with these objects in any manner she chose, she hadn’t felt like throwing away even a single one of them. When she read the letter from Pavel Antipov’s daughter in France, she had not been infuriated. Yet there were times in the past she had been infuriated at the ease with which people dispensed with the objects of others. Yes, she had been infuriated before…and even before… When she had been a young woman, her mother had thrown away her novels and diaries and years later, when she had suddenly lost her husband, her brother had dispersed all photographs she had of him to friends and relatives. Perhaps she had not been able to reclaim her belongings in the past, but from now on she was going to look after the belongings of others as a steadfast safe-keeper.