The Flea Palace Read online

  ELIF SHAFAK

  The Flea Palace

  Translated from the Turkish

  by Müge Göçek

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Before…

  Even Before…

  And Today…

  Next…

  About the Author and Translator

  Elif Shafak is one of Turkey’s most acclaimed and outspoken novelists. She was born in 1971 and is the author of six novels, including The Forty Rules of Love, The Bastard of Istanbul, The Gaze, The Saint of Incipient Insanities and The Flea Palace, and one work of non-fiction. She teaches at the University of Arizona and divides her time between the US and Istanbul.

  Müge Göçek is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan. She studied at Bosphorus University in Istanbul before gaining an MA and a PhD at Princeton University.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE FLEA PALACE

  ‘Shafak can switch from a picaresque tale of a father and son’s broken noses to astute observations of how strangely despair and love manifest themselves without pausing’

  Guardian

  ‘A multi-populated and enchanting work … wonderful’

  Sarah Broadhurst, Bookseller

  ‘Her literary success and journalism mark her out as a figurehead of a new generation of writers, who use literature to reconfigure Turkish identity, and its relationship to the country’s history’

  Independent

  ‘Ms Shafak is well set to challenge Mr Pamuk as Turkey’s foremost contemporary novelist’

  Economist

  ‘A hyper-active, hilarious trip with farce, passion, mystery and many sidelights on Turkey’s past’

  Independent

  Residents of Bonbon Palace

  Flat 1 Musa, Meryem and Muhammet

  Flat 2 Sidar and Gaba

  Flat 3 Hairdressers Cemal and Celal

  Flat 4 The Firenaturedsons

  Flat 5 Hadji Hadji, His Son, Daughter and Grandchildren

  Flat 6 Metin Chetinceviz and His WifeNadia

  Flat 7 Me

  Flat 8 The Blue Mistress

  Flat 9 Hygiene Tijen and Su

  Flat 10 Madam Auntie

  PEOPLE SAY I HAVE A FANCIFUL MIND – probably the most tactful way ever invented of saying ‘You’re talking nonsense!’ They might be right. Whenever I get anxious and mess up what I have to say, am scared of people’s stares and pretend not to be so, introduce myself to strangers and feign ignorance about how estranged I am from myself, feel hurt by the past and find it hard to admit the future won’t be any better, or fail to come to terms with either where or who I am; at any one of these all too frequently recurring moments, I know I don’t make much sense. But nonsense is just as far removed from deception as truth. Deception turns truth inside out. As for nonsense, it solders deception and truth one to the other so much so as to make them indistinguishable. Though this might seem complicated, it’s actually very simple. So simple that it can be expressed by a single line.

  Let’s presume truth is a horizontal line.

  Then, what we call deception becomes a vertical one.

  As for nonsense, here’s what it looks like:

  With neither an end nor a beginning to its trajectory, the circle recognizes no horizontal or vertical axis.

  You can plunge into the circle from anywhere you want, as long as you do not confuse that point with a beginning. No start points, no thresholds, no endings. No matter at which instant or with what particular incident I make the first move, there will always be a time preceding that start of mine – always a past ahead of every past and hence never a veritable outset.

  I never saw it myself but heard from someone wise enough, that back in the old days, when the garbage cans on the streets of Istanbul had round lids of greyish aluminum, there was a game that local boys and girls played together. A certain number of people had to join in; few enough not to crowd, large enough to entertain, just the right amount and always an even number.

  First in the ‘Garbage Game’ came the question ‘When?’. For an answer, four different segments would be chalked on the round lid with a separate word corresponding to each direction: ‘Right Now–Tomorrow–Soon–Never.’ The lid would then be spun from its handle in the middle as swiftly as possible and before it found a chance to slow down, the person in line would stop it with the touch of a finger. The same would then be repeated one by one for all the participants of the game, so that each one could fathom which time frame he or she stood closest to. In the second round, four separate responses would be written down as possible answers to the question ‘To Whom?’: ‘To Me–To The One I Love–To My Best Friend–To All of Us.’ Once again the lid would be given a spin and once again the players would reach out to stop its delirious circumvolution. The third round was intended to find an answer to the question ‘What?’ Four auspicious and four ominous words were marked on the remaining eight spaces, always equal in number, to add a dash of fairness to the whims of fate: ‘Love–Marriage–Happiness–Wealth–Sickness–Separation–Accident–Death.’ The lid would turn once again with the answers now building up so the players could finally reach the long awaited response to the question, ‘What will happen to whom and when?’: ‘To Me–Wealth–Soon,’ ‘To The One I Love–Happiness–Tomorrow,’ ‘To My Best Friend-Marriage–Right Away,’ or ‘To All of Us–Separation–Never’…

  Starting the ball of narration rolling is not hard. I too can employ the logic of the Garbage Game with some minor adjustments here and there. First of all, one needs to find the time frame of the narration: ‘Yesterday–Today–Tomorrow–Infinity.’ Then, the places should be designated: ‘Where I Came From–Where I Stand Now–Where I Am Headed–Nowhere’. Next, it would be the player’s turn to assign the subject of the act: ‘I–One Among Us–All of Us-None of Us.’ Finally, without upsetting the four-to-four balance, one needs to line up the possible outcomes. In this manner, if I spin an imaginary garbage lid four times in a row, I should be able to construct a decent sentence. What more than a sentence does one need to start off a story that has no start to it anyway?

  ‘In the spring of 2002, in Istanbul, one among us died before the time was up and the line closed into a complete circle.’

  On Wednesday May 1st 2002, at 12:20 p.m., a white van – in need of a wash and decorated with the picture of a huge rat with needle-sharp teeth on one side, a hairy humongous spider on the other – failing to take notice of the barriers ahead found itself in the middle of a crowd of two thousand two hundred people. Among these, about five hundred were there to commemorate Workers’ May Day, one thousand three hundred were policemen ordered to prevent the latter from doing so, a number of others were state officials there to celebrate the day as a Spring Holiday by wreathing Ataturk’s statue, and all the rest were elementary school children made to fill up the empty spaces, waving the Turkish flags handed out. By now, these children had almost broken into hives from standing under the sun for hours on end listening to the humming of dreary speeches. Incidentally, a good number of these had learnt only recently how to read and write, and with that impetus kept shouting out the syllables of every single written word they spotted around. When the ratty, spidery van ploughed into the crowd, these kids were the ones who yelled out in unison: ‘RAIN-BOW PEST RE-MOV-AL SERVICE: Call-Us-And-We-Will-Re-move-Them-For-You’.

  The driver of the van, a ginger-haired, flap-eared, funny-looking, baby-faced man with features so exaggerated that he hardly looked real, lost his cool when faced with this onslaught. On steering the van in the opposite direction to escape the wrath of the children, he found himself in the middle of a highly agitated circle of demonstrators surrounded by an outer circle of even more agitated po
licemen. During the few minutes when the driver was paralyzed into inaction, he was alternately either ‘booed’ with glee or stoned in anger by demonstrators sharing the same ideology yet apparently interpreting it differently. Steering his van toward the other half of the circle in a desperate move only helped the driver get held up once again, this time by the police. He would have most probably been arrested at once – and things would have conceivably taken a worse turn for the others as well – had the police not darted, at exactly the same moment, toward a tiny, impetuous group determined to start the march right away. The van driver was drenched in sweat when he finally succeeded in getting out of the tumultuous square. His name was Injustice Pureturk. He had been in the pest removal business for almost thirty-three years and had never hated his job as fervently as he did that day.

  In order not to get himself into trouble once again, he shunned the shortcuts and made his way through the winding roads, only to arrive a full hour and forty-five minutes late for his appointment at the apartment building he had been searching. Shaking off his trauma bit by bit, he parked along the sidewalk while staring suspiciously at the cluster of people blocking the entrance of the building. Having no idea why they had gathered there, but nevertheless convinced they would do him no harm, he managed to calm down and again checked the address his chatty secretary had handed to him that very morning: ‘Cabal Street, Number 88 (Bonbon Palace).’ His chatterbox of a secretary had also included a note: ‘The apartment building with the rose acacia tree in the garden.’ Wiping away the large beads of sweat on his forehead, Injustice Pureturk stared at the tree in the garden that was in bloom with mauve, reddish pink flowers. This, he thought, must be what they called ‘rose acacia’.

  Still, since he did not at all trust his secretary whom he intended to replace at the next possible instance, he personally wanted to see the building’s signpost with his own shortsighted eyes. Parking the van askew, he jumped down. No sooner had he taken a step, however, than a small girl among a group of three children standing in the crowd screamed in horror: ‘The genie is here! Grandpaaa, grandpa, look, the genie is here!’ The round, greying, bearded elderly man the girl was tugging turned around and inspected first the van and then the van’s driver, each time with an equally disappointed look. Evidently dissatisfied with what he saw, he screwed up his face so that it looked even more sour and drew the three children closer to him.

  Injustice was done to Injustice Pureturk. He was not a genie or anything, but just an ordinary man who possessed a disproportionate face with somewhat mammoth ears and unfortunately coloured hair. He also happened to be short. Indeed very short: one metre and forty-three centimetres in all. Even though he had been previously taken for a dwarf, this was the first time he was accused of being a genie. Trying not to mind, he doggedly pushed his way through the group toward the ashen apartment building. He donned the thin-framed thick-lensed glasses he habitually carried, not on his nose as the doctor had recommended but inside the pocket of his work overalls. Despite the help of the glasses he still could not make out what the messy protrusion at the front of the building was until it was an inch away: a relief of a peacock with the feathers darkened with dirt. Had it been cleaned up, it might have looked appealing to the eye. Underneath the relief it read: ‘Bonbon Palace Number 88.’ He was at the right place.

  A business card squeezed in-between the lined-up buzzers next to the door drew his attention. It belonged to a rival firm that had two months previously started to work in the same neighbourhood. Since the people around no longer seemed to be paying any attention to him, he took the opportunity to remove the business card and put one of his own in its stead.

  RAINBOW PEST REMOVAL SERVICE

  Do not do injustice to yourself

  Call Us and Let Us Clean on Your Behalf Experienced and specialized staff with electrical and mechanical pumps against

  Lice • Roaches • Fleas • Bedbugs • Ants • Spiders • Scorpions • Flies

  Spraying done with or without odour, manually or mechanically employing an electrical pulverizer/atomizer and/or misting devices appropriate to both open and enclosed spaces

  Phone: (0212)25824242

  Upon having these business cards printed, he had hired a university student to distribute them all around the neighbourhood, but it had not taken him long to fire the young man without pay, for doing a lousy job. That was typical of Injustice Pureturk: he never trusted anyone.

  To unload the pesticide sprays he walked back to his van. Yet, the moment he had shut his door, a blond woman with a hairdresser’s smock tied around her neck reached in through the half-open window and gawked at him cross-eyed:

  ‘Is this van all you’ve got? Won’t be enough, I tell you,’ she hooted knitting her well-plucked eyebrows. ‘They’d promised at least two trucks. There’s so much trash, even two trucks would have a hard time.’

  ‘I’m not here to pick up your garbage,’ Injustice Pureturk frowned. ‘I’m here for the insects… the cockroaches…’

  ‘Oh,’ the woman flinched, ‘Even then, I tell you, what you’ve got won’t be enough.’

  Before Injustice Pureturk could fathom what she was talking about and what exactly these people had been waiting for, two red trucks ploughed onto Cabal Street as if they had heard the call. The crowd stirred upon noticing a van from a television channel right behind the trucks. Injustice Pureturk, utterly unaware of the excitement around him, was trying at that moment to find a better spot to park. However, finding himself amidst chaos upon chaos against his will must have somewhat tattered his nerves by now, for the vein on the right side of his forehead started to thump at a crazy pace. The single movement he made to press down on the vein was more than enough to make him lose control of the steering wheel. Trying to back up in a panic, he rammed into the piles of bags slung next to the garden wall separating the apartment building from the street. All the garbage inside the bags was scattered onto the sidewalk.

  If truth be told, Bonbon Palace was used to garbage, having struggled with it for quite some time now. From early February to mid April – the period following the bankruptcy of the private company collecting the garbage in the area and preceding the resumption of service by a new one – a considerable garbage hill had collected here, bringing along with it an increasingly putrid smell. Things had not much improved with the new company either. In spite of the regular nightly collection, both the Cabal Street residents and passers-by kept throwing garbage next to the garden wall, thereby managing to collectively raise a garbage hill up anew every day.

  If interested you can go there even today to see with your own eyes how, along the wall separating the apartment’s garden from the street, the garbage hill levelled by dusk rises anew the following day with no ultimate loss to its mass. Garbage bags are thrown away, garbage bags are then picked up, but despite the continual rise and fall, it is as if the garbage hill keeps perpetuating its presence. The hill comes with its own hill people – seekers who show up daily to collect pieces of tin, cardboard, leftover food and the like, as well as an army of cats and crows and seagulls. Then, of course, there are bugs; for wherever there is garbage, there are also bugs. Lice, too, have taken over in Bonbon Palace…and trust me on this, lice are the very worst…

  In order to observe this one needs to spend some time there. If you have no time, however, you’ll have to make do with my version of the story. Yet I can only speak for myself. Not that I’ll foist my own views onto what transpires but I might, here and there, solder the horizontal line of truth to the vertical line of deception in order to escape the wearisome humdrum reality of where I am anchored right now. After all, I am bored stiff here. If someone brought me the good news that my life would be less dreary tomorrow, I might feel less bored today. Yet, I know too well that tomorrow will be just the same and so will all the days to follow. Nevertheless, with my fondness for circles I should not give you the impression that it is only my life that persistently repeats itself. In the final in
stance, the vertical is just as faithful to its recurrence as the horizontal. Contrary to what many presume, that which is called ‘Eternal Recurrence’ is germane not only to circles but also to lines and linear arrangements.

  From the monotony of lines there deviates only one path: drawing circles within circles, spiralling in and in. Such deviation resembles, in a way, being a spoilsport in the Garbage Game: not abiding by what comes up when you spin the round lid of greyish aluminum, spoiling the game by not waiting for your turn, craving to spin again and again; messing around with subjects, objects, verbs and coincidences while comforting yourself throughout: ‘In Istanbul in the spring of 2002, the death of one among us was caused by Herself–Me–Us All–None of Us.’

  On Wednesday May 1st 2002, Injustice Pureturk applied pesticide dust to one of the flats of Bonbon Palace. Fifteen days later, upon returning for the baby cockroaches born from their dead mothers’ eggs, he found the door of that particular flat deadlocked. However, it is too soon to talk about these things right now. For there had been another time preceding this moment and, of course, one before that as well.

  Before…

  THERE WERE ONCE TWO ANCIENT CEMETERIES in this neighbourhood, one small, almost rectangular and well-kept, the other huge, semi-lunar and visibly neglected. Surrounded by ivy-covered fences and shadowy hills, leaning onto the same dishevelled wall, they had spread out over a wide terrain, jointly and continuously. Both were crowded to the brim yet deserted to the extreme. The small one belonged to the Armenians and the large one to the Muslims. On the six foot wall separating the two cemeteries, rusty nails, jagged fragments of glass and, in spite of the fear of bad luck, broken mirror pieces had been scattered upright to prevent people trespassing from one to the other. As for the two-panelled, iron-grilled, gargantuan doors of each cemetery, they were located exactly on opposite ends, one facing north and the other south so that if a visitor perchance harboured any inclination to cross from one to the other, he would be discouraged by the length of the road he would have to walk. Just the same, no one actually had to put up with such an inconvenience since there had never been a visitor with a relative buried in one cemetery who wished, once there, to pay a visit to the other cemetery as well. Be that as it may, there was many a being that hopped and jumped from one cemetery to the other as they pleased, be it night or day: the wind and thieves, for instance, or the cats and lizards. They had all mastered the many ways of going through, over and under the barrier separating the two cemeteries.