The Flea Palace (53 page)

Authors: Elif Shafak

Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Contemporary, #Literary, #Contemporary Fiction

Truth is a horizontal line. Be it a hotel corridor, hospital ward, rehabilitation centre or train compartment; all are horizontal. In such places, all your neighbours are lined up next to you on a horizontal plane, for a fleeting moment. You cannot grow
roots at these places. Horizontality is the haven of evanescence. I too have been living on a horizontal line for sixty-six days – in the seventh of the ten cells lined up next to each other here.

Lies are a vertical line. An apartment building, for instance, erected with flats on top of one another with two layers of cemeteries underneath and seven planes of skies above. Here you can spread roots and grow branches as you please. Verticality is the shelter of permanence, a tribute to immortality.

Bonbon Palace is an apartment building constructed on an area of cemeteries. A vertical line that ascends floor by floor. It is my lie. For I am narrating these stories not from a flat there, but from the prison.

When on the 1st of May a group of revolutionaries impatiently decided to break through the police barricade, I was among them. When we were all detained and thrust in a police bus, I chanced to sit beside a ginger-haired, flap-eared, funny-faced man who did not at all show his age. I am grateful to him as that day on that bus, seeing the fear in his widely opened eyes enabled me to forget my own. While we were taken to the police headquarters, he kept whining, whimpering and wailing that he had no interest in politics, that all he did in life was to fumigate bugs. That man was telling the truth. He was indeed a bug fumigator and had probably never hated his job as much as he had done then. His name was not Injustice; that I made up myself. The name is not entirely bogus, however, for he looked like someone who had seen plenty of injustice in life; besides, his surname is true. He was released the same day anyhow. They released him, but arrested me.

Ever since I came here, I have not spent a single day without thinking of Injustice Pureturk. It’s all because of these bugs. I happen to be a radical with a deep fear of insects. Unfortunately there are too many of them here, especially cockroaches. I hear them in the toilets, air vents and even the dents and crevices in the walls. They keep scurrying around and encouraged by darkness, incessantly multiply…but I can assure you that the louse is the very worst…

No doubt, in order to observe all of these creatures better, you should come visit me and spend some time here. If you have no time, however, you ought to be content with my version of the story. Yet I too, ultimately speak only in my own voice. 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 only too well that tomorrow will be just the same and so will the succeeding days. Nevertheless, I should not give you the impression with my fondness of circles that it is only my life that persistently repeats itself. In the final instance, 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 less to circles than to lines and linear arrangements.

I cooked up this story basically to overcome my bug phobia. Dreaming of a surreptitiously garbage-collecting old widow in some vertical world helped me to survive better the horizontal line here of cells next to one another. Still, I cannot be regarded as having entirely lied. If anything, I can be accused of merging the truth with lies. Of returning to the beginning rather than reaching a decisive end.

As for me, I will not be staying in this prison too long. The sentence they deemed fit for me is one year and two months. Sixty-six
days of that sentence are already over. Of these sixty-six days, I passed the first week by getting used to my place and fearing the bugs, and passed the rest trying to forget my fear by way of making up the story you read. Now that the circle of the greyish tin lid of garbage has stopped turning, I frankly do not know how I am going to spend the remaining three hundred and sixty days here.

However, as soon as I am released, the very first thing I want to do is pay a visit to Injustice Pureturk. The first bug fumigator in Turkey taken into custody for being a revolutionary. Life is absurd, at its core lies nonsense, and if you ask me, Fortuna must be long fed up with tackling the possible answers to the impossible question: ‘What will happen to whom when?’

Glossary

*Ashure*	A turkish dessert made of fruits, nuts and rice

*Azrael*	The angel of death

*Baqiya hawas*	A common stone inscription meaning, ‘God is strength, all else is folly.’

*Bihruz*	A fictive character that symbolizes the over-westernized dandy

*Börek*	A stuffed pastry or pie containing spinach or feta cheese

*Bulgur*	Cracked wheat

*Chibouk*	Cigarette holder

*Cintemani*	An Ottoman ornamental design

*Dede*	This word has two meanings in Turkish: grandfather and a senior religious person, usually in a tarikat

*Halva*	A traditional Turkish sweet made from nuts and honey

*Hidrellez*	Turkish festival symbolizing spring and new life, during which women write down their wishes on paper and tie them to red roses

*Hizma*	Decorative nose stud

*Houris of heaven*	The virgins in heaven

*Jinni/jinn*	An Islamic term meaning invisible spirit, mentioned in the Qur’an and believed by Muslims to inhabit the earth, influencing mankind by appearing in the form of humans or animals

*Kader*	Fortune

*Katzenjammer*	Loud noise from various sources; from the German word, meaning anxiety or jitters following intoxication

*Lodos*	The famous wind in Istanbul that blows in from the sea and is said to cause dizziness

*Mezes*	A variety of small dishes served instead of a main course

*Ney*	A reed flute played especially in Mawlawi music

*Oleaster*	One of several shrubs of the genus Elaegnus with yellow flowers followed by olive-like fruits containing a powdery dust

*Rakι*	Turkish spirit of aniseed flavour

*Simit*	A pastry baked in the shape of a circle with a hole in the centre

*Tarikat*	Mystical sisterhoods / brotherhoods of Muslims that were historically separate from the mainstream

*Zurna*	A shrill Turkish pipe used to accompany drums

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