The Flea Palace

Translated from the Turkish
by Müge Göçek

Before…

Even Before…

And Today…

Next…

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

‘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

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 policemen. 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.