The Flea Palace (6 page)

Overcoming her initial confusion, Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova reached her neck and squeezed the silver pendant bearing the picture of Saint Seraphim. The strength she thus drew enabled her to smile at the woman whom she regarded as a recent incarnation of the torment-filled ‘divine test’ she had for such a long time been going through. ‘What you just did was not right but I can still be tolerant and even forgive you. For that would be the right thing to do.’

That night, only cursorily did she mention this event to her husband. He never asked her anything anyhow. Not only did he not want to learn a single thing about the world outside,
but he also envied her for managing to survive in that insane world which had roughly shaken him up and tossed him aside. Rarely did he leave the dump they considered home ever since their departure from the dormitory provided by the French Red Cross, passing his days in front of the window as he penned never-to-be-posted letters to his brother in France, got lost in thoughts, looked outside at the Muslims passing by and watched the streets as if waiting for someone. Almost as if arriving to put an end to this monotonous wait, their baby was born in seven months.

Yet Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova could not welcome her daughter with the same excitement as her husband. Her early and painstakingly onerous childbirth may have contributed another life to this world, but that life had been stolen from her. She had felt far more important and so very different during her pregnancy compared to how she felt now. She had convinced herself all along that God had chosen her from among many and had subsequently considered every calamity yet another crucial phase in the strenuous test that was being put to her. Never having lost her faith in God or herself, she had wholeheartedly believed herself to be the heroine of a cautionary tale of damnation the people around her could never understand. In order to save from the claws of this idle world both her husband and herself, she had struggled for them both but always on her own, awaiting, like a pearl rolled into mud, that day when she would be cleansed to shine once again. Yet now she started to imagine she had been mistaken all along, that God did not look after her but the baby in her womb and, for that reason, abandoned her to her fate as soon as the baby was born. However hard she tried, she could not get rid of this feeling of diminution and abandonment. Not one fleck of glitter remained on her face from that arrogant luminescence; her body had shrunk and withered as if pails of water had been drained from it. Only her breasts, they alone were still large and full. Now and then they leaked milk like blood oozing away from a bleeding lip. She ran home in the
afternoons to breastfeed the baby only to encounter time and time again a cruelly poignant scene. She found her husband and the baby on top of the sofa by the window, either in play or fast asleep in each other’s embrace with infinite happiness and unmatched innocence under the daylight that sprayed golden glitter upon them, as if it was emanating not from the sun but from seventh heaven. Every time a pang of sadness seized her as she realized how the spirit she had once carried within and believed to be a part of had now excluded her.

So, she thought, a roily river of muddy waters this city was. The very reason for her thrashing about all this time amidst the water was simply because she had been entrusted with delivering her baby from the bank of the river it was on to her husband on the other. That was precisely what pregnancy had been to her: sailing to the other shore within the body of a boat you were swollen into, to get the baby wrapped in an angelic bliss, and to then carry her safe and sound across to the other bank. Upon the occurrence of the birth and the deliverance of the baby to the other shore, she had all of a sudden become worthless, as if pushed back into the water and abandoned to the tide. It was useless to struggle. Far away from the bank she was kept by the waters she belonged to and the current she was caught in. It seemed as if even the baby was aware of this situation. The moment she was picked up from her father’s arms, she would turn bright red in a fit of fury; while being breastfed, she would crumple her face as if to prove she was doing this solely out of need and, as soon as she was full, would let go of the nipple and cry to be released also. The general would then take the baby in his arms and tenderly calm her down while Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova escaped from the house so as not to witness this scene that hurt her more every passing day.

Back at work, she would have to endure, along with the emptiness swelling within, this other feeling of suffering a terrible injustice. Every day she hated her body even more. Her body lived for one cause only; every bite she took, every
drop she drank, every ray of sunlight she received, every particle of air she breathed; all were moulded and converted into milk for the baby. The more robust the baby grew, the more strength Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova lost, with every passing moment swaying further and further from the vim and vigour of life.

Impossible as it might sound to those who believe that every woman is by nature maternal and that motherhood is as sacred and pure as the rivers in heaven, Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova did not love ‘the thing’ she had given birth to. Upon coming face to face with the child she had carried within her for so long, the child she had considered a part of her without knowing what it would look like or bring about, she became scared of this being that was so tiny in size but enormous in need. She became scared of the impossibility of reversing time to go back to being a young woman again, of being given no other choice than to love unconditionally. One thing she knew for sure, she wanted to get rid of the baby. Inconceivable as this might seem to those who believe every woman by nature maternal and motherhood as sacred and pure as the rivers in heaven, Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova was no exception. It is not only nationhoods that coin official histories of their own, so do motherhoods. Mothers often create a maternal historiography written retrospectively and gracefully, dating back to the very first day, picking out the weeds and furnishing the stepping stones along the way. For love does not always come without effort but sometimes flourishes belatedly and grows gradually, drop by drop, under the tutelage of time. The care of those around them, a poignant instance, a fleeting moment of affection and myriad sediments of tenderness, these may coalesce in the mind of a new mother to chase away, like an industrious fan with a harsh yet invigorating breeze, all inappropriate thoughts and unpleasant feelings. As long as the fan is kept on, a young mother might manage to increasingly love her baby, the maternal halo embracing them both. In fact, she might in time come to love the baby so much that she
would succeed in believing she had loved her with the same intensity right from the very first day. That she might not have done so, is so unspeakably appalling that it could not be confessed to anyone. Not to the husband, for instance, saying: ‘I at first felt miserable for having given birth to your baby but then recovered.’ Not to the child: ‘I really did not love you at first but gradually developed warmer feelings.’ Not to herself: ‘How could I fail to love my own child?’ So the official history of motherhood necessitates a meticulous cleansing of the secluded corners of memory. Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova’s misfortune was that before she had a chance to start loving the baby, that is, to love her year by year, degree by degree, to eventually arrive at such a depth in love so as to have no difficulty in convincing herself she had always loved her so, she lost her.

That afternoon, back home at the usual time to breastfeed, she encountered her husband and the baby on top of the sofa by the window fast asleep in each other’s embrace under the daylight that sprayed upon them golden glitter as if it was emanating not from the sun but seventh heaven. Everything was cloaked in shades of yellow. The beams curving through the curtains were a hue of amber, the general’s face alabaster, the fabric of the sofa apricot, the baby’s swaddling layette vivid saffron and the tiny ball on top of it an aureate vermiculated with purple. Blinking her eyes dazzled by the sun, Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova walked towards this peculiar ball with an uneasy curiosity. She stood there, though she unconsciously knew only too well what she was looking at.

She was right about colours. Just as cities and places came in colours and hues so did moments and situations; including deaths. Death too acquired a new hue in every person and each ending. In a newborn baby, it must be an aureate vermiculated with purple.

After a while Pavel Pavlovich Antipov woke up. Standing up carefully so as not to disturb the baby in his lap, he stretched a bit, yawned indolently and looked out the window, still unaware of his wife’s presence. Down in the street, a ragged
street-seller, with a small screened kitchen cupboard filled with livers mounted on a horse on the brink of death, was haggling ferociously with two old Muslim women each more quarrelsome than the other. While talking back to the women on the one side, the liver-seller also tried to chase the clingy flies drawing circles-within-circles around the cupboards while his horse, looking like it might give up living any moment, accompanied him with a swing of his tail. The weariness was scattered around by the wind that had been continuously blowing warm air since the early hours of the morning, penetrating everyone and everything so deeply that even the commotion of the liver-seller and his customers could not disturb the lethargic silence that prevailed on the streets. Pavel Pavlovich Antipov absentmindedly closed the windows, leant back and looked at the baby. He looked and at first did not comprehend a thing. The baby’s mouth was slightly ajar, her eyes open and her eyebrows crossed as if she were trapped inside a dream, dejected. Hair-thin, striped, purplish veins had covered her entire face. She resembled a porcelain bowl that managed not to break even after a rough fall to the ground, but had instead acquired multiple cracks across its entire width and length. Pavel Pavlovich Antipov cupped this round, cold and purplish yellow head in his hands like a crystal ball within which he hoped to see his future. And like all people who having not cried for years have totally forgotten how, in order to cry he too had to first howl.

The liver-seller, putting the livers he could not sell to the cranky old women back into the screened cupboard, instantly sensed the ill-omen behind the scream and sauntered away, tugging at the halter of the drowsy horse, dragging behind him regiments of flies and divisions of cats.

After the funeral, Pavel Pavlovich Antipov wrote a letter to his youngest brother whom he had not seen for a long time as the
latter had settled in Europe long before the revolution: a brother whom he had secretly looked down upon for choosing trade over the family profession of the military thereby serving money rather than the Czar, and whose offers of help he had constantly turned down because of the pride that prevented him from taking shelter with him. In a letter to him Pavel asked whether they might be able to join him in France and, unlike the previous letters, he did send it this time.

During the long years they spent in France not once did the general and his wife talk about that inauspicious Istanbul morning; they became more and more estranged from one another, as well as from any spiritual rapport they once had. However fast and easy arrival in this new country might have been, they were only too ready to risk everything just to escape Istanbul’s wickedness. After the baby’s death, Pavel Pavlovich Antipov had fully realized one thing right: they had to leave this city of mourning as soon as possible. Either Istanbul had not been good to them or they not good enough for Istanbul. To them the city’s gates of good fortune were shut, or perhaps had never been open. The same end awaited those whose family trees did not take root to branch out in this city, but whose paths led here at one stage of their lives: Istanbul, initially a port of escape enabling people to run away from everything, would herself become a reason for escape.

When Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova reached Paris in the spring of 1922, she carried a pregnant worry in her soul. As she looked at the war worn city with indifferent eyes, discovering its colour did not even cross her mind. She had contracted a strange eye disease on her last day in Istanbul and had thereby lost all contact with the world of colours. Now everything she saw, the streets and buildings, the people and the reflections in the mirrors…all were in black and white. It was as if the world was cross at her and had closed down all its curtains, windows
and shutters. She cared not. Not only did she not care, she found the world’s behaviour ridiculously childish. She simply did not want to struggle with the world and all of its endless burdens. Her only true desire was to see God, to see what colour God was, if any. Until she saw that straight out – and along with it, God’s intention in taking her baby away – she did not care at all to see the colours of this world of illusions. To her husband’s continuous insinuations about having a second baby so as to start life anew and to his consolation about time healing all wounds she reacted with revulsion. Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova had realized that babies who died before their first birthdays and cities abandoned before their first year of settlement ominously resembled one another. No baby arriving after a dead one could fully detach its existence from the absence of the dead sibling, just like no new city reached would fully welcome those exiled by the previous one.

Pavel Pavlovich Antipov did not pay any attention to Paris either that day or later. The helping hand his disgraced younger brother extended with a pleasure he did not feel the need to contain, Antipov accepted with a displeasure he felt he had to suppress – and did not let go until he had taken and learnt everything he could from him. He gradually started to think that trade was no different than the military, and once he had believed in that, he fully dedicated himself to it. He had the unprincipled resolve of all those who, at a certain stage of their lives, suddenly plunge full force into an option they had once turned their nose up at. He was reckless and impatient, as if to make up for the time he had lost.