The Flea Palace (40 page)

Being a passenger of the earliest train, Meryem’s faith was not only far less calculated than that of others but also less ‘by the book’. It’s hard to tell, if she would have done the same
thing had she not been pregnant at the time when the writing appeared on the wall. Since pregnancy rendered her a bit bizarre, early that morning she went out into the garden with an empty jar in hand to collect from the soil of the nameless saint. Not that she really believed there was a genuine saint buried in the garden, but as that university professor had stated, given the fact that under all these Istanbul sidewalks rested ancient graves, one could not predict what would emerge from where. If the writing turned out to be bogus, she would be left with just a jarful of soil, that was all. However, if there really was a saint under the rose acacia in the garden of Bonbon Palace, then there was only one request she would like to make to him: to infuse Muhammet with courage, even if it were only a morsel.

When the doorbell rang, Sidar scurried to answer it, hoping that Muhammet had once again brought them something to eat. However, when he opened the door, there in front of him stood not the little emissary of Madam Auntie but the nutty girl with the coppery hair. Either the girl had drastically changed since they had last seen one another or Sidar’s memory of her had gone awry, but her eyes were just like he remembered, so beautifully solemn. She barged in with a bewildering smile and without waiting to be invited. As if tired she tottered unsteadily towards the couch and asked her host, still standing fixed on the spot, for something to drink. Sidar shuffled to the kitchen scratching his head. He opened up the only bag of coffee in the cupboard and poured the water heated up with the only pot in the house into the only mug on the shelf.

‘Aren’t you going to have one too?’

‘Later,’ Sidar shrugged. ‘There is only one mug in the house anyhow.’

Three hazelnut wafers emerged from the girl’s backpack, immediately arousing Gaba’s interest. Still, however, he refused to move an inch.

‘What was the dog’s name?’

‘Gaba,’ Sidar grumbled, suspicious of having already told her this in their previous meeting.

‘What does it mean?’

‘Gaba is the abbreviation for gamma-amino-butiric acid – which
is an inhibitor nerve transmitter, something to do with the anxiety centre of the brain. Anti-convulsants, anti-anxiety pills and of course alcohol slows the Gaba receptor down. Consequently, you feel less anxious.’

‘Cool! So you can speak German like your mother tongue, right? How long did you stay abroad?’ the girl enthused before lying back on the couch. Upon seeing the ceiling, she fluttered her eyelashes in astonishment; then not knowing what to say, she fluttered her eyelashes some more.

‘French,’ Sidar corrected her tensely. Apparently the girl did not remember a word he had told her before. If she didn’t care for the answers why on earth did she ask these questions? Besides she looked too sleepy to grasp a word. Her eyes were on the verge of closing while listening to the second, at most the third response. For what reason did she pose one question after another when it was all too obvious that the answers would remain incomplete, and that even if she learned the most that she could in the least time possible, she would have only attained straggly parts and smoggy pieces, not even the dimmest silhouette of the entirety of his life. The simple desire to get to know a person is a hollow pledge and a life-size burden! It requires that a person listen and observe, poke and sense, unwrap and amass for nights, weeks, years; to be able to peel off scabs and endure seeing the blood ooze from underneath. If a person is unable to put up with all this, it is much better, and certainly more honest, to throw in the towel straight off.

Not that I am a hitherto unappreciated treasure, locked in a chest awaiting exposure to sunlight. The answers to all the questions you ask about me are more or less already hidden inside you. I do not want you to desire to discover me or to even think you can do so. We do not have to know one another when we know so little of ourselves. Collecting information about others is like gathering food from garbage. What’s the use of rotting the supplies in our brains if we are not to savour them in time?

A clipped snore interrupted the course of Sidar’s thoughts. The girl had fallen asleep with her mouth agape. Taking a last puff from the cigarette he had rolled up at noon, Sidar curved up next to his guest. Watching them fretfully from where he had crouched down Gaba must have been finally convinced that nobody was out to get him for he hobbled closer. In a single breath, he wolfed down the hazelnut wafers, then, still licking away, he too came and curled up on the couch. As the headlights of the cars outside penetrated the petite windows spurring shadows on the wall, all three of them drifted off into three separate dreams.

Tired of criss-crossing a path between the kitchen and the living room, the Blue Mistress threw a last look at the table. Everything seemed ready. She lit the lily-shaped candle floating in the water-filled glass bowl and placed blue napkins next to the blue plates. They had agreed to meet at seven. The doorbell rang at ten to seven.

‘Welcome,’ she chirped. Though she was already wearing high heels, she instinctively felt the need to rise up on her toes. ‘Do you always arrive early like this?’

‘I tried hard not to, but it turns out that it takes three and a half steps to get from my flat to yours,’ I said smiling.

‘Of course, your legs are so long,’ she cackled, blushing at the end of her sentence, as if she had made an erotic remark.

We stood up by the entrance in a daze germane to people who, after long desiring each other, come to a sudden halt the moment they notice how close they actually are to obtaining what they have so badly craved. Though the intensity and frequency of our acquaintance had been limited to running into each other now and then, and chatting about this and that, I had long been aware of how deeply attracted she was to me. Hers is a face that cannot mask secrets. Still however, I hadn’t been expecting this ‘thing’ between us to run its course so speedily, so effortlessly…

Taking her face between my palms, I caressed that tiny, azure
hizma
. ‘I’ve made chicken with ground walnuts,’ she breathed when she drew back, trying to urge me to continue not from
where we left off kissing, but where we had been reservedly conversing. ‘I hope you’ll like it.’

Oblivious to her forged reticence, oblivious to the dinner table, I steered her inside into the bedroom. To my surprise, she was at ease. So was I. Couples wise enough not to harbour future expectations from one another keep little back when making love. Nevertheless, late at night when we sat down at the table, it felt as if, though devoid of a common future, we might have shared a common past, as if we had been living together for a long time, sharing the same house…and it seemed to me we both enjoyed this illusion deep down… For regardless of where you stand on the matter, a man abandoned by his wife and a mistress unhappy with the husband of another have a communal need in the worst way; to be assured that their constant disappointment with the marital institution does not stem from their failures, and that they could make it work with another person.

There were seventeen steps on the stairs at the entrance gate of the school. Upon reaching the sixteenth, counting out loud, Muhammet turned back with a wee bit of hope…but once again the miracle he ached for failed to happen. His mother did not disappear. Instead there she was waiting tenaciously at the same spot, leaning against the bolted garden gate with her swollen belly and all her weight, looking after him with the touching melancholy of someone at the dock saying farewell to her beloved on the parting boat. The moment she saw Muhammet looking at her, Meryem’s face lit up with a smile compounded from a third each of compassion, pride and tenderness. She flapped both arms simultaneously, gesticulating with some sort of a peculiar athletic motion. Seeing that much of an effort there one would think she were trying to grab her son’s attention from amidst an immense crowd. Yet, since the last weeks of the second semester, she was the only mother among all mothers of the eight hundred and forty-eight kids in the elementary school who insisted on bringing her child to school in the mornings and waiting at the gate until the bell rang – a policy she had been pursuing since receiving the news that Muhammet played truant. This, in turn, meant there would from now on be a twenty-five minute delay in the distribution of newspaper and bread to Bonbon Palace. So far nobody had complained. Madam Auntie did not buy bread anyhow, she seemed to nibble like a bird. As for Hygiene Tijen, every morning from her window she lowered a basket into which the
grocer’s apprentice left one of those breads that came wrapped-up, touched by no one. The Blue Mistress did not eat bread, so as not to gain weight, and the bachelor professor at Number 7 did not seem to be expecting consistent service since even he himself did not seem to know when he would come in or go out. Sidar, because he had no money, and the hairdressers, because they had set up their own system, would not mind this delay. That left only two flats and Meryem was definitely not going to risk her son’s education for the sake of those two.

Shrivelling more and more with every wave of his mother, as if he was being hammered on the head, Muhammet finally reached the seventeenth step and billowed through the pitch black door of the primary school. The lunch bag in his hand got heavy, his backpack even more so. He looked around in vain for something to kick. As the ring echoed in the hall for the last time, he entered into his classroom to take his place among the thirty-two students.

Contrary to his fears, the first class passed without a single incident. The bully of a bench-mate in front had turned his back at him, fully concentrating on the writing on the blackboard, looking utterly unruffled; as if it wasn’t him who had made a habit of slapping Muhammet at least twice a day. Muhammet eyed gratefully this back that was twice the size of his. He just wished it could always stay like this. If only he could be bench-mates not with this overgrown child but with his back instead. Dropping his shoulders, he crouched behind the sturdy back and, with the comfort of knowing he would not be spotted from this angle, surveyed his surroundings. The windows of the classroom were painted grey halfway up to prevent the students from looking outside but from the fissures and flakes on the painting one could still spot the blue sky. Then he turned his gaze to the puffy ribbons of the girl at the board and the sharp, pinkish fingernails of the teacher whose veins would swell up whenever she yelled. He thought that the girl at the board and the teacher matched well. After all, if the girl failed to give the right answer and the teacher yet again
stuck one of those long fingernails of hers into the unsuccessful student’s earlobe, there would be no big difference: the girl’s ears were pierced anyhow. In spite of this, the ones whose ears were pulled the most happened to be boys. Until now, Muhammet’s ears were pulled a-plenty, and each time he cared less about the pain than ending up with his ears pierced against his will. Having lived the first six years of his life on earth long-haired like a girl, he did not want to spend the rest of his life with his ears pierced like a girl. Hoisting his fears up the flagpole, he inadvertently flinched and it was precisely then that whatever happened happened. The back next to him abruptly turned around, now transforming into a chubby, beet-red, sulky face. Grinning insolently, his bench mate bulldozed Muhammet.

Since the very beginning of school, every day without exception, Muhammet had dreamed about running away. Yet as he gritted his teeth in pain now it was not fleeing the place that he pined for but to perish altogether. If only a disaster would happen right at that moment, a real bad earthquake for instance, so that the earth would split open, leaving not a single stone upon stone or a head on a body, smashing to smithereens the grades in the teacher’s notebook, the gold stars of the girl at the board and the limbs of his bench mate, along with his elbows, slaps, insults…if only they would scatter on all sides never to unite again…

While Muhammet had closed his eyes and was dreaming about the worst possible disaster imaginable, a siren ripped the air apart. There was some scurrying and dash outside in the hallway, doors were banged. They all stood still as the teacher stared at the students and the students stared back. In next to no time the door was harshly shoved and in walked a dainty woman with piercing glances behind her pince-nez. She smiled first at the teacher, then at the students and, with a courtesy filtered through a fine sieve, ‘Dear teacher, beloved students…’ she bayed as if delivering joyful tidings, ‘This is an earthquake drill.’

As soon as the dainty woman finished her sentence, three men looking startlingly alike, all stout and with droopy moustaches, dashed into the room. They had chick-yellow helmets and T-shirts with ‘Negligence kills, not earthquakes’ written on them. Remarkably agile, they took out one by one the various tools they had brought in their bags and hung posters of all sizes on the board hooks. Curtains were drawn shut and a slide machine started to light up the wall. Muhammet caught his breath as he followed with excitement the slides brought to life one by one with the dusty beam of light slashing through the darkness.

After the last slide was shown and the curtains pulled open, the dainty woman clapped her hands to announce how the drill was to take place. There would be two phases. During the first phase, the students were required to cower under the benches and, pretending everything around them was shaking violently, wait there calmly and courageously with their heads in between their arms. As for the second phase, that was meant to teach them how to evacuate a building in the shortest possible time. So the siren pealed, and all thirty-two of the thirty-two students went under the wooden benches giggling non-stop.

Muhammet rolled up into a ball to squeeze inside the morsel of space left from his bench-mate. Minutes later, he too got out from under the bench with the others to line up in pairs to evacuate the classroom. Yet since his bench-mate did not care to hold his hand as bench mates were supposed to, Muhammet could not join the chain of children. The two kids standing up at the corner away from the others must have drawn the attention of the dainty woman for she suddenly blundered out in a voice bubbling with delight, ‘Will you two please come this way? We were looking for two brave boys.’