The Flea Palace (15 page)

Zeren Firenaturedsons was not at all affected by what the physician said as she took neither the physician nor his words seriously. There was no leaf on any branch of the family tree where one would come across such a disease. The mind of even the darkest blot, Hoopoe Hamdi was in excellent condition. That aside, her older daughter was the smartest, brightest one among her three children. The crisis she went through could be nothing more than late puberty despair.

Zeynep Firenaturedsons’ quick recovery convinced her mother further that she had been right. Yet, as it soon became evident, this recovery was not permanent but temporary. From then on life for the older daughter of the Firenaturedsons would be divided into two seasons: when she was sick, it was as if she would never recover from her illness, yet when she was well, it seemed as if she would never be ill again. There was no middle ground. No one could tell when she would make the transition from one state to the other. The most evident difference between the two states was her reaction to bad news. When sick, she would only be interested in certain items of news, like a colour blind person only notices certain colours, and she would read the newspapers for this type of news. Street children who got high on paint-thinners, honour crimes, suicides, women forced into prostitution, suicide bombers, babies kidnapped from hospitals, youths taking overdoses, all sorts of tragic occurrences… In addition to the papers, she also carefully searched through the community news: uncovered sewer pits, burst water pipes, uncollected garbage, closed roads, ferocious pickpockets, pastry shops sealed up for filth, butchers selling horse meat, grocers marketing contraband detergent, parking lot gangs, old wooden houses mysteriously destroyed by fire, gas explosions, gas leaks… Unsatisfied with simply following this maddening news,
Zeynep Firenaturedsons loved to relate in fullest detail each and every item to whomever she came across. Since she did not come across many people, as she spent most of her time at home with her mother, she recounted the same stories over and over to the latter. When she was well, however, she skipped the amply illustrated news of doom. She was, subsequently, the only one among the Firenaturedsons who read the newspapers consistently.

Whenever the excited voice of her older daughter talking about catastrophes grated on her nerves, Zeren Firenaturedsons listened to the peaceful bubbling sound of the aquarium she had filled with colourful fish and phosphorescent accessories. Before the fish, however, there had been decorative plants of all kinds…

At twenty-three, Zelish Firenaturedsons was neither a bum like her brother, nor as intelligent as her sister. Actually, just as one could not say that since childhood she had looked like the other members of her family, neither could it be said that she was like them in type or disposition – and this difference became most striking when compared to her sister. Like a bulky, plump mushroom somehow grown next to a wild, rough plant with flowers that soothe the eye, and inured to the plant so as to suck all its sun and water, Zelish had attached herself to her sister perching on a corner of her life. She was mediocre and hesitant, lazy and inadequate. It was as if seeing her sister incessantly swing between two poles, intelligent and attractive at times, nutty and weepy at others, had confused her so badly that she had decided instead to stop somewhere in between, at a secure threshold. While her brother craved ‘to be something’, her sister ‘to be everything’, she for years had only wanted ‘not to be’.

Among the Firenaturedsons, Zelish was the one least resistant to anxiety. For other family members, anxiety consisted of a menace coming from the outside. Even though its causes varied, the address remained constant and the world remained outside the thick, velvet, ashen curtains. Where that
world was involved, each had their own concerns. Ziya Firenaturedsons was most apprehensive that the bribery trial would reopen to lead to his imprisonment, followed by his appearing in all the newspapers and becoming the talk of the town. The major anxiety of Zeren Firenaturedsons was her children, and after that came, in the following order: the growth of Islamic fundamentalism, being attacked by pickpockets on the streets and another earthquake in Istanbul. For his part, Zekeriya Firenaturedsons mostly feared failing in bed, being powerless in life, the people to whom he had gambling debts and, finally, fear itself. As for Zeynep Firenaturedsons, she was a pendulum that carelessly swung between fountains of apprehensiveness-anxiety-fear and fearless-carefree-untroubled seas.

Yet for Zelish Firenaturedsons, anxiety was something abstract. It was everywhere like air and almost as intangible: with causes far harder to identify than the reopening of a bribery case, being nailed because of a gambling debt or the coming to power of fundamentalists. To start with, anxiety was not external to a person but rather the very fauna in which s/he lived. For fear and anxiety and worry are nourished by ‘the horror of the probability that everything could turn out to be different.’ (Here are your house, friends, body, family…These are yours, but unfortunately they could all be taken away from you one day!) As for apprehension, that is fed by ‘the horror of the probability that nothing could be any other way.’ (Here are your house, friends, body, family… These are yours, and unfortunately could always remain the same!) When she was in middle school Zelish had been to her friends’ houses a few times. These visits, which gave her the opportunity to see up-close mothers, fathers and families not at all like her own, were a turning point for her, as until then she had thought ‘mother’, ‘father’ and ‘family’ meant basically a carbon copy of the ones she had. The embarrassment she felt about her family grew over the years in folds like the interest rate of a slyly increasing fine.

The hesitant syllables of the stuttering physicist in the
schoolroom rang in the ears of Zelish Firenaturedsons: ‘Lll-let us aaa-ttach two cups that bbb-both have equal amounts of lll-liquid with the sss-same density and at the sss-same level. Lll-let us www-wait for lll-liquid to transfer from one ttt-to the other.’ Having said this he then added: ‘Aaa-ctually let us not wait in vain. Ddd-don’t forget kids, aaa-always from high to low and more to less… Otherwise, nnn-no transfer occurs between things that are at the sss-same level.’ If that be the case, Zelish thought, the apprehension levels of both her house and the world outside of Bonbon Palace were one and the same. This made it impossible for her to muster the courage to escape from Flat Number 4 never to return. She had made numerous plans until now. However, since these had been plans to leave rather than to escape, she still had no idea about where to go and what to do if and when she left the house.

Anyhow, Zeren Firenaturedsons expected little from her younger daughter, whose only distinctive characteristic as far as she could determine was to faint on the spot when she saw blood or anything that reminded her of it. She compensated for the lack of the daughter she would like to have with decorative plants. The only problem was that they demanded far more sun than the rays that barely penetrated the curtains could provide.

As the curtains of Flat Number 4 blocked off the sun’s rays, these decorative plants withered away one by one just like the glances of strangers. The fish in the aquarium also suffered huge losses over time. The canary was massacred by the tribe of the Prophet of Cats. Although there was a new canary in the same cage now, for some inexplicable reason, it had not chirped even once.

Upon seeing their all time favourite subject of gossip walk in, the people in the beauty parlour had plunged into the uneasy silence that is typical of those caught in the act. Encountering right in front of your eyes the person you were ruthlessly gossiping about a minute previously might lead you to suspect something mysterious is going on. Likewise, it seemed to the people inside as if Hygiene Tijen had heard the mention of her name from the spirit world. Still the reason for the nervousness they felt in front of her, did not solely stem from their inability to figure out how to straighten the facial expressions they had so carelessly slackened while gossiping. They were equally bewildered at seeing a person who had not stepped out of her house for months now, visiting a place that was probably one of the last locations on her ‘list of potential places to stop by if and when the time is ripe enough to step out one day.’

The first to shake off this immobility was Cemal. He headed towards the door, saying in an almost merry voice, ‘Welcome, come on in, Misses Tijen!’ without even noticing how impolite it was for him to address by name someone he had not once before met. Such are the side effects of gossip addiction: if you wag your tongue too much and too often about someone, you might may well start to believe that you have known them personally for quite some time. Had Cemal’s intimacy been reciprocated even the tiniest bit, he might have gotten so carried away with this delusion that he could have even reproached Hygiene Tijen, as he did to his regular customers,
for not coming more often…but that did not happen. Giving him a once over from top to toe with a coldness that revealed she was not at all thrilled with this greeting, the woman facing him turned her head without saying anything and started to scrutinize everything. Her eyes got stuck one by one on the shorn hair on the ground waiting to be swept away, the threadbare towels that had lost their colour from frequent washing, the stains on the leopard-patterned plastic smocks tied to the necks of the customers, the thin crack on the wall-to-wall mirror, the dead mosquitoes lying around the edge of the counter adjacent to the mirror, the dust on the shelf lined up with boxes of the same brand hair gel, hair foam and brilliantine, hair-balls jammed in the hair brushes, the filling that was sticking out of the tears on the chairs, the shabbiness of the furniture and the bubbly water with doubtful contents on the three-layered manicure cart. The dissatisfaction she felt at what she saw was so deep and her desire to immediately leave the premises so evident, that Cemal, who felt both the place he worked in and himself demeaned, swallowed back all the cries of greeting that were on the tip of his tongue and was reduced to silence.

However, Hygiene Tijen did not, as Cemal had feared, turn her back and run away. After standing stock-still for a few seconds unable to move as if nailed to the spot, she cut her scrutiny halfway along so as not have to witness any further the hideous and slovenly world surrounding her and slid her looks outside the open window. There she saw her cleaning lady who had come down to the garden to collect the clothes. The woman, whose displeasure at being forced to collect so many clothes so meaninglessly thrown down could be read from her bleary eyes, had seen her at the same moment. Her nerves shot from cleaning all day long, she was so tired that she did not even have the energy to wonder what Tijen was doing down here. Leaving the laundry basket heaped up with clothes on the ground and with her elfin body remaining out in the garden, she slipped her head covered with a mildewed lemon headscarf
inside the window of the beauty parlour and murmured in a dead beat voice: ‘I’m going Misses Tijen, I’ve got a family to look after.’ But even she had trouble making a connection between the situation and the words that had left her mouth, for she felt the need to add some sort of an explanation: ‘This is the last basket, I gathered them all. I’ll take it up right now and leave it in the house. I’ve already been up and down five times. Don’t wait for me on Thursday. This neighbourhood is out of the way for me anyhow.’

Slightly crossing her eyebrows, Tijen gave a silent nod of approval. Even though her turbid facial expression did not reveal what she was thinking, the distress she felt at being here among people she did not know was too evident. She remained standing like that until Celal, eager to save her from this torture, drew near to mend the bridge his twin had tried to build but had smashed-up instead, and asked in a reassuring voice what she wanted done to her hair. It was then that Tijen turned to Celal, redirecting her glance from the space now vacated by the cleaning lady and muttered: ‘Not me, my daughter.’ Next, as if to make her point clear, she slowly drew aside.

Only then did those in the beauty parlour notice the little girl with curly, ebony hair and exceptionally white skin in contrast, with large eyes tinged with no other colour but black. Her hair was wet, with drops that flowed down from the zigzags of her hair to leave shallow puddles at shoulder level, she looked as if she had been caught on the way over in one of those drizzly summer showers.

While Celal was busy taking his young customer to the seat in front of the mirror, Cemal, resignedly enduring the treatment he had been subjected to by the child’s mother, invited her to one of the sofas on the side. Hygiene Tijen did not sit down right away. For a few seconds she remained standing, stuck in her uneasiness. She then gave up and halfheartedly perched on the closest sofa she had been directed to. When the manicurist, whose habit it was to ask every
customer if they wanted a manicure within thirty seconds of their entering the parlour, suddenly appeared at her side, Tijen was sitting still, her gaze fixed on a stain on the floor, her mind floating elsewhere. The moment she heard the question directed at her, however, she withdrew her hands in disgust, as if touched by an invisible rat, and hid them behind her. Utterly unprepared for such a brusque reaction, the manicurist returned to her seat flabbergasted but as soon as she sat down, a gnawing suspicion crossed her mind. Could she have called her ‘Misses Hygiene’ instead of ‘Misses Tijen’? Could that be why the woman’s face had soured all of a sudden? Thinking in this vein, it would not take the manicurist long to be convinced of having made a blunder. After all, the mind has a proclivity to pessimism. Whenever it wavers between two contradictory options, it tends toward the negative one. For a moment the manicurist thought she should go back and apologize, but the only thing she ended up doing was cowering uneasily behind the manicure cart and secretly glancing around to figure out if anyone else had heard her blunder.