The Flea Palace (29 page)

Having spent the interval between six months and six years being spoon-fed a soft-boiled egg every damn morning, Muhammet had a small problem with eggs. What he found even worse than their taste was their shells being used as complaint petitions. Every morning, once the egg was eaten and the shell was sparklingly clean inside, Meryem had penned on the shell whatever complaint had been left over from the day before: ‘Yesterday Muhammet lied to his mother, but he will never ever do so again,’ ‘Yesterday he did not want to eat his egg, but he will never ever do so again,’ ‘Yesterday Muhammet cursed the auntie who poured the lead, but he will never ever do so again…’. These empty egg shells were each time thrown to the birds so that they could take these complaints to the two angel clerks recording on their celestial registers all the sins and good deeds committed on earth. Until the day he started elementary school, every morning before breakfast Muhammet would peek out of the window to see his winged informants. Yet each time he did this, the only species of birds he could spy were either the screeching sparrows perched upon the branches of the rose acacia in the garden or the ugly crows recklessly hunting the streets. There was also the caged canary inside the window of Flat Number 4 but that bird could not even flap its wings, let alone fly.

It was the seagulls Muhammet was suspicious of. He spotted them as they dug into the garbage bags accumulating by the side of the garden wall. In the damp breath of
lodos
, they drew circles as they descended onto the trash piles and it seemed to
Muhammet that each time they chanced upon a precious piece of information they would then glide into the sky squawking with pleasure. At nights, they gathered together on the roofs to watch the sins committed in the apartment buildings of Istanbul. Unlike his father, seagulls never went to sleep.

He opened the door with a grim look on his face. It was not screwing up the anatomy exam that upset him so much, but the fact that he had taken the anatomy exam in the first place, knowing only too well he would screw it up. He now profoundly regretted that when waking this morning, on realizing the alarm clock had again failed to go off, rather than hitting the pillow he had scurried out of the house and paid for a cab to boot. He even more profoundly regretted that after the exam he had joined his friends, who were clustered like pigeons flocking to wheat, to learn how each had answered every single question, to then complain unanimously about the instructor and then the whole university structure. To top it all off, once having joined them, he had ended up spending the entire day in cafés amidst non-stop chatter. Now he regretted all the energy he had so lavishly squandered. Energy, Sidar reckoned, was a finite commodity, like an eye lotion in a tiny dropper. Accordingly, he spent no more than two drops a day, one to wake up in the morning and the other to go to sleep at night.

Closing the outside door behind him without turning on the hall light, he found himself engulfed in darkness. He must have forgotten to draw the curtains back when he left hurriedly in the morning. Not that it would have made much difference, as its miniature windows were at ground level, this squat, narrow basement floor could get only a morsel of light. Cursing the dim-wit who had placed the switch two metres further in from the entrance, Sidar wobbled in. He could not
get far, however, as his passage was blocked by the hefty silhouette emerging behind him. As the two bumped into one another, Sidar lost his balance, lurched forward hitting his head against the thick pipe passing right through the middle of the living room. Scared out of his mind, he reached the switch…and frowned at Gaba…Having got what he wanted, Gaba, on the other hand, was happily chewing on the
simit
he had snatched from his pocket.

Rubbing his head Sidar reclined on the sofa. Since the dirty, dusty pipe passed right through the middle of the living room – which also served as his bedroom, dining room and study – just at his ear level, he kept banging his head at the same spot. Just this morning, while rushing to leave the house he had bumped his head again, and if it went on like this he would soon have a bump there. Fortunately, as soon as he stretched out on the sofa, his grumpiness faded out. He so much enjoyed being at home. Here he could stay away from the turmoil that plagued every corner in Istanbul; as long as he was home, contrary to the world outside he could remain entirely still and utterly calm, just like Gaba did when his hunger was fully satiated.

It was particularly during late afternoon periods that the insularity reigning in Flat 2 became all the more blatant. Around this time every day, an excruciating mayhem swallowed Bonbon Palace. As the immediate surroundings assumed the hullabaloo of a fairground – synchronized by the brazen honks of the cars caught in traffic, the howls of the children playing at the park and the yells of the street peddlers – the mélange of sounds seeped in through the cracks and crevices of Bonbon Palace, getting hold of each and every flat except this one. It wasn’t only the clamour that failed to penetrate Flat 2; the heat waves could not break through either. Getting almost no sunlight, the house was cool as a cellar during the summer when all other flats burned up. Likewise, the sour smell of garbage tormenting all the other residents was least detectable down here.

The truth is that when Bonbon Palace was built, Flat 2 had been designed not as a residence but a storage area, and had been used as such for many years. However, after the death of the owner, when the control of the apartment building had passed onto his daughter who had preferred to take care of everything from afar, this place too had received its share in the changes that occurred, each more problematic than the former. During the disarray that had prevailed, such huge fights had erupted when each and every neighbour attempted to pile their unused personal belongings up in this narrow space, that no one had the good fortune to use it for a long time. In the end, upon the instructions received from France, this stumpy, narrow, single-room basement floor was rented out at half the amount of rent of the other flats. From then on, a myriad of people had taken shelter here: people blatantly different from one another but with poverty and bachelorhood in common. Among these were, in the following order: a local radio news announcer living on chicken sandwiches three times a day; a depressed accountant whose best friend had snatched away his entire bank account along with his wife of eight years; an army deserter who turned the TV on full blast during Ramadan making everyone listen to sermons and hymns; a fishy fellow whose job no one had been able to guess at or dared ask about and a droll artist who used the place as an art studio painting the legs, ankles and shoes he watched from the window. Among all the tenants Flat 2 had seen thus far, the Cat Prophet, who had moved in next, was the one who had left behind the most in terms of traces and smell.

After the Cat Prophet, Sidar had appeared with his St. Bernard breed dog. As he, unlike the previous tenants, barely had any belongings, though it had for so long been accustomed to being chock-full, Flat 2 was now going through the most barren phase in its saga.

Gaba was such a bizarre dog, a walking contrast when compared with his breed, famous for their ability to go for days without water and food, to sense impending danger and make
life safer for their owners, trace narcotics stashed away in secluded corners, rescue the victims trapped under debris and keep faithful company to the children, the blind and all those in need of aid. If there was one thing in the world Gaba could not possibly stand, it was hunger. His was a bottomless stomach and a never-to-be-satiated appetite. If left without food for a couple of hours, let alone a day, he would create havoc by chewing on whatever came to his paws, be it an anatomy book, a wooden chair or a plastic pail… He would pull all sorts of tricks just to get an additional morsel. Once having filled his stomach, however, he would lay in the corner, huge, fuzzy and dead still as a stuffed bear, with no trace left of the ‘oomph’ from a moment ago. Perhaps because he withheld even a dab of enthusiasm for food from all other spheres of daily life, there was no activity he enjoyed, not even being taken out for walks. Sidar might have suspected Gaba was going deaf with age if it weren’t for the fact that he did not seem to experience any difficulty in hearing sounds that were of significance to him, such as the rattle of the dog food poured into a bowl, the crackle of a tin can being opened or the footsteps of Meryem bringing bread in the morning.

Deep down Sidar felt guilty. Having shoved this majestic dog of the Jura Mountains into a dingy basement in a dilapidated apartment building in one of the most jam-packed neighbourhoods in Istanbul, how could he expect him to behave normally? If the truth be told, part of this guilt stemmed from his guess that all the pastries with opium poppy and cakes with hashish he had made Gaba eat – at first simply for the fun of it and then because he had become addicted – might have a role in the dog’s lassitude, not to mention the impact of the second-hand smoke all throughout these years. Such were the brief contours of the pangs of conscience that gnawed Sidar deep inside.

Gaba was matchless in the eyes of Sidar, ‘the one and only’. Actually there was only one of everything in this house: one Gaba, one Sidar, one computer, one sofa, one chair, one
armchair, one table, one lamp, one pot, one sheet, one pencil… When an item was worn out, the book had been read or the CD had become tedious; only then was a second item acquired and the old would be either immediately thrown away or chewed to smithereens by Gaba.

Yet the plainness of the place came to an abrupt end at the ceiling as if cut off by a knife. Onto the surface of the ceiling Sidar had posted, nailed, taped or pinned on top of one another black-and-white pictures clipped from various journals. These included: some of his parents’ letters, Nazim Hikmet’s ‘My Funeral Procession’, fanzines he had gathered from here and there, fanzines he had made himself, strips from Art Spiegelman’s ‘Maus’, a gigantic Dead Kennedys poster, the picture of a ship trying to make its way through fog (taken from an old photograph and used as a menu cover at a restaurant he had dined in a couple of times upon his arrival in Istanbul never to visit again after getting used to the price difference between Istanbul and Switzerland and realizing how expensive it was), pages torn from the ‘Batman: Dark Night’ series, a black T-shirt with the ‘Receipt for Hate tour of Bad Religion’ printed in front, an anti-drug campaign poster with letters made with pills writing ‘
Ma Vie Peut Etre Differente
’, photographs of Gaba as a puppy, the enlarged photocopy of Goya’s ‘Boogeyman Is Coming’, collage with quotations plucked from Cioran’s essay on Meister Eckhart, sketch of the health goddess Hygieia with her rounded breasts, soft belly and the big snake she wound around her necklines from Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Kaddish’, a sign that instructed: ‘A civilized person does not spit on the ground. You should not either!’ (a placard he had painstakingly removed one night when stoned), Wittgenstein’s photograph taken right before his death, a faded picture of Otto Weininger, a poster of Spiderman squatting down to watch the city from the top of one of the towers of the World Trade Centre, right next to it a photograph of the moment of explosion when the second plane dove into the towers on September 2001, words from a song of the band
This Mortal Coil, self-portrait of the Turkish philosopher Neyzen Tevfik with a tag saying ‘Nothing’ hanging on his neck, newspaper clips about Robbie Fowler, midterm exam with ‘COME AND SEE ME IMMEDIATELY’ written on it with red ink, a faded computer print-out of Leonara Carrington’s ‘Zoroaster Meets His Image in the Garden’, collages made with all sorts of prescriptions and Xanax boxes, an advertisement with the writing, ‘Do not fool around with your son’s future. Circumcision requires sensitivity. Sensitive is our middle name. Leave us all your circumcision business,’ as well as a passport picture of a bushy-moustache, beetle-browed Scientific Circumciser (a poster he had chanced upon while wandering around the streets of Fatih and, being unable to remove it from the wall, had to go and personally procure it from the address written on it), cassette covers of Kino recordings he had once made, photograph of the ash-bone-tar train wreck which became the collective grave to four hundred people in Egypt on February 2002, notes of Walter Benjamin from the ‘Moscow Diary’, reproductions of William Blake’s drafts of ‘Songs of Innocence’, cartoons of Selcuk clipped from ‘
Maniere de Voir
’, one of Freud’s later photographs wherein he did not stare into the camera, engravings from the Lisbon earthquake/Istanbul postcards, a family picture taken exactly thirteen years ago at the Haydarpasa train station before leaving Turkey, notes with phone numbers or messages and last but not least, the silver necklace with a black-stripped transparent stone which was a souvenir from Nathalie whom he was tired of loving though whose love he had not tired of.

When Sidar had moved in, like all other urbanites he had the habit of decorating his walls with cherished pictures and posters. Before long, however, Gaba had rendered this impossible. On the way from Switzerland to Istanbul the dog had passed out in the train compartment in which he had been leashed, let out a terrible howl as if his flesh was being torn out and refused to calm down, even though food was placed in front of him every ten minutes. By the time his paws touched
the Istanbul soil, his nerves were so shot that he was too confused to know where to look or who to bark at. Finally, when stuck in this tiny flat, he had developed the habit of attacking the walls and started to chew any kind of paper he could find, due to hunger or irritability induced by love of his homeland. In desperation, Sidar had then begun to move his pictures and posters a bit higher. Yet ‘a bit higher’ could not be high enough for Gaba whose height, when standing up, was taller than the Turkish national average. Bit by bit, all pictures and posters escaping Gaba’s sharp teeth, like refugees heading for the hills to flee from the warfare in their country, kept constantly climbing north to finally transcend the boundary of the wall, rushing altogether into the lands of the ceiling. Sidar had enjoyed this unexpected innovation so much that he had expanded the business over time and filled his topmost part with all types of visual and written material he held dear. Lately, this daily increasing bedlam had, like a vigorous vine, started to branch out into the kitchen ceiling on the one side and the bathroom ceiling on the other.