The Flea Palace (27 page)

‘They don’t know what they’re doing to me! Failure isn’t a virus I’m acquainted with! I have no resistance to it.’

Two security guards were smoking further down by the grey walls surrounding the wide field of the laboratory. The gale was blowing so hard that their smoke could not hover in the air for even a second.

‘Some nights I hear the bugs laughing at me, Nadia, but I cannot see them. In my dreams I meander into the empty pantries of empty houses. The bugs manage to escape just before the strike of lightning or the start of an earthquake. They migrate in marching armies. Right now, even as we speak, they are here somewhere near. They never stop.’

A week later, he was found dead in his house: an electrical leakage, a unfussy end… Nadia Onissimovna always reckoned he had died at the most appropriate moment. Fortunately he would never learn what had happened to his laboratory. First, the experiments had been stopped due to financial restrictions and then numerous people were fired. Nadia Onissimovna also received her share of this turmoil. When she met Metin
Chetinceviz, she had been unemployed for eight months.

Metin Chetinceviz was a total nuisance, one of the last types a woman would like to fall in love with. Unfortunately, Nadia Onissimovna was so inexperienced with men that even after spending hours with him, she had still not realized she was with one of the last types a woman would like to fall in love with. Anyhow that night, she had been dazed by the incomprehensible enormity, the bold crowds and the ceaseless booming noise of the discotheque she had stepped into for the first time, had thrown up all the drinks she had and was therefore in no condition to realize anything. She was there by chance; having been dragged by one of her girlfriends, from whom she hoped to borrow money by the end of the night. Metin Chetinceviz was among a group of businessmen coming from Istanbul. By the tenth minute of their encounter, before Nadia Onissimovna could comprehend what was going on, the tables were joined, women she was not acquainted with were added to these men she did not know, and a deluge of drinks was ordered. While the rest of the table rejoiced in laughing at everything, she had shrunk into one corner and drank as never before in her life. A little later, when everyone else scampered onto the dance floor in pairs, she saw a swarthy man sitting still, distressed and lonely just like her. She smiled. So did he. Encouraged by these smiles they exchanged a few words. Both spoke English terribly. Yet English is the only language in the world capable of giving the impression that it might be spoken with a little push, even when one has barely any knowledge of it. Thus in the following hours, rolling their eyes as if hoping for the words they sought to descend from the ceiling, snapping their fingers and drawing imaginary pictures in the air with their hands; doodling on napkins, sketching symbols on each other’s palms, giggling whenever they paused; opening up whenever they giggled and continuously nodding their heads up and down; Nadia Onissimovna and Metin Chetinceviz plunged into one long, deep conversation.

‘Rather than marry a Turk, I’d lick a crammed-full ashtray on an empty stomach every morning.’

‘You can lick whatever you want,’ Nadia Onissimovna had replied impishly. ‘ “Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.” ’

‘Do not recklessly scatter in my kitchen the teachings of Jesus as if they were epigrams of that untrustworthy professor of yours,’ her aunt had bellowed, as she blew on the ladle she had been stirring for the last fifteen minutes in a greenish soup.

‘You know nothing about him,’ Nadia Onissimovna had muttered shrugging her shoulders. ‘Only prejudice…’

‘I can assure you that I do know what I need to know, honey,’ her aunt had pontificated sprinkling salt in concentric circles onto the pot. ‘And if you had not wasted your most beautiful years chasing ants with a good-for-nothing nutter, you too would know what I know.’ She pulled a stool by the oven and, jangling her bracelets, kept stirring the soup. Due to varicose veins, she could not stand up for more than ten minutes. ‘At least you must know that Turks don’t drink wine,’ she said with a distraught expression, but it was hard to determine what distressed her more, the subject matter or the soup’s still refusing to boil.

Desperate to object, Nadia Onissimovna had started to recount, though with a dash of exaggeration, the whiskies, beers and vodkas her future husband had consumed at the discotheque, refraining from mentioning how he had mixed them all and the outcome.

‘Whisky is another story. Do they drink
wine
? Tell me about that. No, they don’t! If they did, they wouldn’t have destroyed the fountain of Leon the Sage when they captured Zavegorod. The fountain gushing wine for three hundred years was raised to the ground when the Turks got hold of it. Why did they
destroy that gorgeous fountain? Because it gushed wine instead of water! The Turks tore down its wall with axes. Idiots! They thought they would unearth a cellar crammed with barrels of wine somewhere down there but you know what they found instead? A bunch of grapes! Hear me well, Nadia, I say a bunch of grapes! And only three among them had been squeezed. Apparently with only one grape, wine flowed out of the fountain for a century. What did the Turks do when they saw this miracle? Did they appreciate it? No way! They demolished the walls, broke the fountain and even destroyed the grape bunches. They don’t honour wine, don’t honour things sacred and don’t honour the Sage.’ Still grumbling she had shaken the ladle toward her niece. ‘They don’t honour women anyhow!’

When coming to Istanbul, Nadia Onissimovna had not fantasized at all about the milieu that would be awaiting her. In spite of this, she couldn’t help feeling disappointed when she saw Bonbon Palace for the first time. Not that the apartment building she was going to live in from now on was more dilapidated than the ones she had lived in so far. If anything, it was more or less the same. That was the issue anyhow, this
sameness
. For moving somewhere brand new only to encounter there a pale replica of your old life is a good reason to be disappointed. To top it all, there was neither a sandy beach nearby, nor a job for an entomologist, but the gravest problem was Metin Chetinceviz himself. For one thing, he had lied. He did not even have a proper job. He made a living by doing minor voiceovers at irregular intervals for various TV channels. In addition, he occasionally went to weddings, circumcision ceremonies or birthday parties of affluent families to perform the shadow theatre Karagoz. He kept his reeking leather
puppets in his amber coloured briefcase, but lately Bonbon Palace had started to stink so awfully that the smell of the leather puppets was nothing compared to the smell of garbage surrounding the apartment building.

To cap it all, His WifeNadia soon realized how badly mistaken her aunt had been. Metin Chetinceviz glugged down low-price low-quality wine at a rate even the miraculous grapes of Leon the Sage could not compensate for. When drunk he lost not only his temper but also the ability to work. If doing a voiceover, he forgot the text; if performing with the shadow theatre, he stirred up a ruckus by making his puppets talk gobbledygook, peppered with slang and slander. At the weddings he attended, as he played the puppets, behind the shadow screen he gobbled down every drink in his reach, causing a disgrace by the end of the day. Once he had been kicked out for hurling from the mouth of the puppet named ‘Hacivat’, lascivious jokes and loutish insinuations about the groom in front of the guests. Since those witnessing his scandals never gave him work again, he incessantly had to set up new job contacts.

Still Nadia Onissimovna did not go back. She stayed here at Bonbon Palace. Even she herself could not fathom when and how she had internalized the role of a housewife she had started performing temporarily, with the idea that this would only be until she found an appropriate job. One day the writing on a wedding invitation captivated her attention: ‘We wish Metin Chetinceviz and His Wife Nadia to join us on our happiest day.’ She stared at the letter blankly, there and then realizing that she was not ‘Nadia Onissimovna’ anymore, not ‘Nadia Chetinceviz’ either, but ‘HisWifeNadia’. Though shaken by this discovery, she still did not attempt to make any significant changes in her life. The days had for so long been impossible to tell apart, as if they were all photocopies of a particular day now long gone. She cooked, cleaned the house, watched TV, looked at old photographs, and when bored, she made something other housewives might not know much about: potato lamps that lit up without being plugged in. Both Professor Kandinsky and his ‘threshold skipping species’ had remained behind in another life.

‘Why can’t I remember my past? I wish I knew who I was. Why can’t I remember, why?’ moaned Loretta spinning in her hands the daisy which was in her hair a minute ago.

‘You’re searching for it in the wrong drawer, honey! Look at the one below, the one below!’ yelled HisWifeNadia, without noticing that she repeated the gesture on the screen, spinning in her hands the latest potato lamp she had fabricated.

It was precisely then that she heard a sound by the door. He was coming. Earlier than usual today. He would probably munch a bit, take a nap and then go out again in the evening, taking his smelly briefcase with him. You could never tell when would he come or leave, but no matter what hour of the day it was, he never cared to ring the doorbell.

As the key wiggled in the lock, HisWifeNadia grabbed the remote and switched the channel. When Metin Chetinceviz appeared at the door, Loretta had already been replaced by a cooking programme. A woman with a wide forehead, round face and a remarkable moustache was busy tasting the
spinach au gratin
she had just removed from the oven.

Keeping an eye on the door for Muhammet’s return, Meryem embraced her swollen belly with her dimpled arms and heaved a deep sigh. That day, she had again had success in sending her son to school but God knows what he would look like when he returned home. In the beginning Muhammet used to tell her in great detail everything that happened in school, be it good or bad. Yet he had sunk into arrant silence over time. What her son did not put into words, Meryem heard anyhow from his troubled eyes, or the split seams and ripped out buttons of his school outfit, or the bruises on his arms. As she listened her worries soared. The thought that somebody might be hitting her son, be it a child or a grownup, killed her; his own father had not yet given him a flick. Only Meryem, she alone had slapped him a few times, may Allah forgive her, and occasionally pinched him too but that was different. As a matter of fact, ever since she had discovered that others had been ‘roughing-up’ her son, Meryem had refrained from even this minimal disciplining. When in her mind’s eye she saw children raining blows on her son, her blood boiled. There was a time when she thought it was nothing other than a simple scuffle among children and yet weeks and months had passed without any change for good. What infuriated Meryem the most was not so much her son’s being smacked by his peers as seeing how he gradually became indifferent to torment.

As to why her son was relentlessly bullied she had a hard time unravelling. Was it because he was a janitor’s son? But she
had sounded out the neighbourhood kinfolk who held the same job and found out that their children faced no such calamity at school. What else then? Muhammet was neither fatter nor uglier nor more dim-witted than the other kids so why couldn’t he struggle against the wicked? In despair she eyed her swollen belly. The answer, she knew too well, was right under her nose: it was because of Musa. Blood takes after blood, they said. Muhammet was his father’s son, brazenly compliant and docile. Even a wee bit of his mother’s splendid bulk had not been bequeathed to him; he was so tiny, so short and wiry. For years she had force-fed the boy five times a day, making him eat a soft-boiled egg every morning, but to no avail. Not only had he not put on weight or grown taller, he still looked at least two years younger than his peers. True, Muhammet had always been petite, but his frame had shrunk visibly since he had started elementary school and thereafter to butt into the barricade of his peers’ scorn.

When Muhammet put on the school outfit that was tailored a size larger so that he could still wear it in the years to follow, and shouldered that huge knapsack of his, so noticeably did he dwindle that everyone who saw him in that state scolded Meryem for not waiting another year before sending him to school. When next to his peers Muhammet’s runtiness became all the more striking as if he was held under a magnifying glass. He was the smallest child in his class and, of course, in the entire school. Had this been the only problem, Meryem would not have made such an issue of it. She would have simply patched over her yearning for a son as robust as a pine tree and awe-inspiring as a sultan’s skiff; one who could squeeze the water out of a stone and make whomever he frowned at shake in their shoes, yet at the same time possessed a heart so soft to take care of his by then senile mother. Despite Meryem’s visions, not only had Muhammet proved to be his father’s son in terms of physical frame, he had started to acquire the latter’s habits as well. Oddly enough, even though from cradle to school he had been glued to his mother and had an at-all-times-asleep-or-sleepy
man for a father, as soon as released from his mother’s wings, the person Muhammet ended up taking after was none other than his father. That was what troubled Meryem the most. After all, she firmly believed that if Musa had a roof over his head and a job to keep him fed, it was all thanks to her. Musa had hitherto been able to stand on his feet precisely because he had handed himself over to his wife. What if his son was not so lucky? What if life did not present Muhammet with another Meryem? Then there was no way could he survive in Istanbul. This city would give him a beating worse than the one he now got from his peers.

Lost in her thoughts, Meryem started to grind her teeth. This she did rarely now, only when truly distraught or confused. Yet as a child she used to grind her teeth so much at nights that she would wake up everyone in the household. Her great grandmother was alive then; alive and so old that her emaciated body had been entirely cleansed of the dual malady of angst and haste. One day she had sat Meryem down to warn her that only when she learned to be patient could she ever leave her teeth alone, otherwise she would be of no use in life, and just as she robbed people of their sleep today, she would rob them of their peace of mind tomorrow. The way to learn to be patient was through learning how to fill up a ‘patience sack.’ This required an empty sack, which should be left somewhere high, tied sidewise to the end of a stick like a banner. Meryem, who was no older than Muhammet at that time, had listened to this counsel attentively and fast as a rabbit climbed up the roof of the coal cellar in the garden, where she hang an empty sack to a broom with great difficulty. As the wind blew, the empty sack would accumulate various things inside, filling up bit by bit in time. As such, the only thing Meryem was expected to do was wait without doing anything and as she waited, to make sure she did not forget what she was waiting for. This was what they called ‘patience.’